The data-governance debacle and the cloud-native solution

The shift toward cloud-native infrastructure has advantages in software application flexibility, providing businesses particular value when it comes to data governance. But technical challenges have inhibited enterprise adoption, notably in getting an application to run in multiple environments with varied underlying infrastructures.

To address these tech challenges, stateful applications that save session data for future client requests are being written with cloud-native infrastructure in mind, because they include the orchestration of infrastructure as part of the core architecture.

“I think that there’s been a tremendous mind shift, as well as an ecosystem shift, where we see this blurring of lines between applications and infrastructures. So one of the unique insights we saw ourselves was that to approach this problem, we need to come at it from a developer-first point of view and application-first point of view,” said Niraj Tolia (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer at Kasten Inc., a cloud-native data management company, has taken a unique approach to helping companies move their stateful applications completely into the cloud.

Tolia spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the status of stateful applications and cloud-native infrastructure.

The benefits of migrating an application completely into the cloud are becoming more pronounced with the rise of regulations around data governance and geography-based ownership. Cloud-native technology stacks and applications have the ability to run the same application from multiple cloud providers and easily migrate data without thinking about the infrastructure, according to Tolia.

“You get the advantage of being able to take these applications and port them across multiple places, because these primitives that are provided by underlying container orchestration layer make it so much easier to do so,” Tolia said.

Until recently, application mobility was only partially enabled with virtual networking and computing with solutions like Kubernetes, but it was missing the data management component, Tolia pointed out.

“Initially, we saw the compute part handled and more advanced scheduling orchestration that you saw on top of the multiple frameworks with Kubernetes.