A modern approach to technical debt reduction

While it may have been conceived as an elegant way to host microservices, containerisation is seeping into mainstream enterprise IT. When asked about their IT strategy, IT leaders will often say they have an ambition to move to a more modern IT architecture. A cloud-native architecture is simply the next rotation of the wheel steering IT toward more manageable software infrastructure as complexity increases.

Forty years ago, client-server computing was considered the best approach to deliver enterprise applications. This evolved to the three-tier architecture and as enterprise IT moved into the 21st century, there was a concerted effort to provide a consistent and standard way for different enterprise applications to talk to one another, leading to SOA, the service oriented architecture. In many ways, an IT architecture built on containerised microservices is simply a more granular version of a SOA.

Alongside these architectural shifts, there has also been changes in hardware infrastructure. IT managers used to purchase servers to run one specific application, but thanks to the introduction of VMware, multiple applications were able to run on a single machine, leading to server consolidation and a mass migration from physical servers to server virtualisation.

As the popularity of VMware increased, its platform became the de facto standard for running virtualised enterprise applications. And, in spite of the cloud-native alternative approach, the status quo would have remained unchanged had it not been for Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and its software licensing strategy, which has seen costs for many VMware customers increase dramatically.

Analyst Gartner estimates that by 2028, 15% of on-premises production workloads will run in containers, which is an increase from fewer than 5% in 2022. There are multiple drivers: part of it is concerns over VMware costs; there is also a growing realisation amongst IT chiefs that their organisation should really be modernising its legacy applications. And then there is the furore over artificial intelligence (AI), AI inference and agentic AI.

A big spring clean of all the IT architectural approaches that have come and gone but still remain as technical debt, is an aspiration few CIOs will successfully achieve during their tenure at the organisation they work for. But this should not be a barrier stopping IT leaders from migrating at least a proportion of their enterprise IT to a cloud-native architecture.

However, one issue that enterprise architects do have to consider is what happens to storage.

There has been plenty of work going on in the open source community to build out persistent storage in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Some of these projects seem quite leading edge and very new to IT departments. But with growing interest in the containerisation of enterprise applications, IT decision-makers cannot ignore these projects.