For he success of a product company, products must evolve with time. As the deployment models change companies selling appliances and virtual appliances need to move to container based architecture and may have to sell SaaS. As workloads move from hardware servers and VMs to cloud VMs and containers, products have to support newer integrations.
For compete success of the company changing only product is not enough. All the teams need to understand the difference and adopt themselves to the new model. Sooner it is understood and done, more success company can get.
The list of differences here is an example for companies in networking space because this area is affected the most from the change.
What is different in cloud-native market?
- Lingo
- In traditional market it is ADC, in Public cloud it is a LB and in K8s it is a proxy
- Server Vs VM Vs Node
- Geographies & Data Centers Vs Region & Availability Zone Vs Clusters and Namespaces
- DC FW Vs Security Group at VPC & Node
- Target Audience
- In traditional market target is SysAdmin & Ops folks
- Focus more on functionality
- Service assurance is main use case
- In cloud-native market target is AppAdmins & Dev folks
- Focus more on ease of use and automation
- Service quality enhancement is main use case [service assurance is assumed]
- Deployments
- Traditional
- Has access to physical network infra
- Elements are Pets [Try to cure and do not kill]
- LB operates more on L4 - requires more of sNAT, dNAT etc. features
- Infra as instances
- Cloud Native
- Works on top of underlying network infra
- Elements are Cattles [Kill and bring new instead of trying to cure]
- LB operates more on L7 HTTP/S – requires more of content switching, micro-segmentation etc. features
- Infra as code
- Sales
- Traditional
- High touch model
- Network centric
- Requires sales person with networking background and fluent in the relevant lingo
- Requires relationship with networking group in the target company
- Requires access to partners in networking space
- Cloud-native
- Low touch model
- Application centric
- Requires sales person with application & cloud background and fluent in the relevant lingo
- Requires relationship with application group in the target company
- Requires access to partners in cloud service space
- Partners
- Network Centric
- Primarily work in reseller model focus on commission
- Coordinate with vendors for assembling the solution
- Cloud Centric
- Primarily work on value addition model and focus on revenue from added value
- Provide implementation, integration, automation services to the end customer
- Marketing (everything is different because of different target audience and persona)
- Analysts, Influencers
- Publications
- Conferences, Events
