Startups advertise themselves as cloud-native, because the term translates to agility and scalability in sync with the new cloud infrastructure enterprises are moving toward. This leaves non-cloud-native companies at a disadvantage, according to Mazda Marvasti, chief executive officer of appLariat Corp.

“They’re able to hire these software artisans who can handcraft an application,” Marvasti said of the small, nimble startups cropping up. Existing companies cannot compete without completely re-architecting their applications, he added.

“The cost of doing that is tremendous,” as is hiring top developer talent to do so, Marvasti told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during an interview at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio. (*Disclosure below.)

“Many of the existing businesses are not prepared to make yet another bet on which technology, because it changes so fast; a year from now it could be something else,” Marvasti stated.

VMware’s recent deal with Amazon AWS, which features a new hybrid cloud service called VMware Cloud on AWS, may at first look like a solution, but once Virtual Machines are moved to AWS cloud, they are still the same VMs — they don’t magically become cloud-native, according to Marvasti. “You just purely lifted and shifted,” he added.

Instead, what businesses need is a way to actually make their applications act cloud-native without having to re-architect them, he explained.

Cloud-native copycat

The appLariat containerization solution achieves this, Marvasti said. Orchestrating the applications with technology like Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications, can make “your whole internal [VMware] vSphere environment behave like a container cloud,” he said.

Immediate benefits of cloud-native copycat applications include mobility, scalability, high availability, resiliency and service-level agreement cost reduction, Marvasti said.

This can go some of the way toward bridging the gaps between cloud-native and non-native companies. “There’s a knowledge gap, there’s a personnel gap, there’s a technological gap and there’s a business gap,” he stated.

Watch the full video interview below. (*Disclosure: This segment’s sponsor, appLariat, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE