The most challenging thing for companies is finding a balanced framework that ensures a certain level of service is provided and also allows for experimentation and testing of new approaches. To get cloud native development right we must figure out the proper abstractions for our infrastructure, applications, and architectures. What makes sense for us to measure or observe? What standards and interfaces make sense for our projects? Often, the trap that teams can fall into is prioritizing a tool or specific practice above the implementation itself, which leads to churn and can hurt adoption. Making sure to focus on our workflow and the connection points between our workflows helps with adoption and acts as a feedback loop to confirm we’re making the right choices.
Essential to rising to the challenge of cloud native is having a culture of psychological safety. Our teams need to feel comfortable learning. If mistakes can be transformed into a lesson learned or a process improved, the entire organization can profit from an accident or error. With the increasing number of new practices that arise each week (let alone each month, quarter, or year), generating hypotheses and testing those is the only way we can validate our approaches.
For both, finding a balanced framework that allows for experimentation and maintains a level of SLOs and for building a culture of safety, I highly recommend investing in a top tier developer experience team that can build the guardrails and policies for the organization.