It’s now a status symbol for a startup to be born in cloud. Established enterprises feel they must shift applications to cloud computing to catch up and modernize. But the maturation of cloud-native tech is teaching us that on-premises data centers aren’t prisons, so we can cool down and pick our battles.

We’ve seen a slew of public-cloud-on-premises announcements, and cloud-native seems to be leaning in the same direction. More companies are blending cloud-native and legacy tech together, according to Corey Quinn, guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

“It’s strange to think that, in terms of the software itself, it is absolutely cloud-native, but it’s not at all clear that the companies that are working with this are themselves,” he said.

Quinn spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona. They discussed cloud-native maturation and the realities of cloud transformation in the enterprise (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

The great Kubernetes debate

As an example of this balancing act, there are containers, a virtualized method for running distributed applications, and the open-source container-orchestration platform Kubernetes. Some argue that container technology is basically by cloud, for cloud, and to get the juice out of it, companies should go cloud-native or go home.

That hasn’t stopped tons of vendors from bringing out enterprise-ready Kubernetes-on-prem products and claiming it’s the panacea for hybrid-cloud mobility. In the center of this debate, companies are weighing options and deciding for themselves what’s practical and worth the toll of transformation.

Kubernetes is great for some things but is probably being oversold, Quinn pointed out. “I don’t think it’s a panacea, and I don’t think that it is going to necessarily be the right fit for every workload,” he said.

Nor is multicloud a good strategy to adopt without sound business reasons, he added.

The whole notion of “lifting and shifting” workloads to cloud makes the whole business seem simpler and more fruitful than it really is, according to Miniman. “There’s too many times that I would hear a customer say, ‘I did this, and I hadn’t fully planned out how I was doing it, and then I clawed it back because it was neither cheap nor easy. I swiped that credit card, and it wasn’t what I expected,'” he said.

Still, there are legacy companies successfully transforming and going all-in on public cloud. “It runs on money, and it takes a lot more time and effort than anyone thinks it’s going to,” Quinn said. “But as long as you have the right incentives and the right reason to do things, it absolutely becomes possible.”

Here’s the full video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. (* Disclosure: This segment is unsponsored. Red Hat Inc. is the headline sponsor for theCUBE’s live broadcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Red Hat nor any other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Cloud Native Computing Foundation