End users and businesses alike are feeling the financial pinch. And it’s hitting IT budgets hard. We’ve spent years talking about the cloud’s promise of reduced overhead and infinite scalability, yet many companies find themselves staring at monthly invoices that climb higher while performance remains stagnant. In fact, when 40% of cloud initiatives fail to deliver the expected value, buyer’s remorse is fast becoming a standard industry feeling.
But how have so many organisations found themselves in the trough of disillusionment? Mainly, it can be attributed to a misunderstanding of what the cloud actually is. Moving to the cloud is not a destination; it is a shift in architecture. To actually reduce cloud costs and boost reliability, leaders must stop just running on the cloud and start embracing cloud native principles.
Cloud native is not just “running on the cloud”
There is a common misconception that “lifting and shifting” virtual machines (VMs) into AWS, Azure, or GCP makes a company cloud native. In reality, this is often just moving technical debt to a more expensive data centre.
Cloud native architecture is an approach to building and running applications that maximises the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Unlike traditional monolithic designs, cloud native design focuses on how applications are created and deployed, not just where they live.
True cloud native practices increase performance and scalability by using technologies like containers, microservices, and serverless functions. By designing for the cloud from the ground up, businesses can achieve cloud cost optimisation that is impossible with legacy architectures.
Cloud native principles
Principle 1: Autoscaling for elasticity & cost control
Autoscaling is your best weapon for balancing performance with a tight budget. In a traditional environment, you over-provision hardware to handle peak traffic, meaning you pay for idle resources 90% of the time.
- Go horizontal, not vertical: While vertical scaling (adding more power to a single node) has its limits, horizontal scaling (adding more nodes) allows for near-infinite elasticity
- Provision for reality: By scaling based on real-time demand rather than pre-provisioned capacity, you ensure that you only pay for what you use
- Maintaining SLOs: During sudden traffic spikes, autoscaling maintains Service Level Objectives (SLOs) without manual intervention
Pro-tip: Don’t just set it and forget it. Use predictive autoscaling to stay ahead of known traffic patterns and pair it with “rightsizing” so your base nodes aren’t unnecessarily bloated
Principle 2: Containerisation & Kubernetes orchestration
If cloud native infrastructure had a backbone, it would be containerisation. Containers provide a consistent runtime environment, ensuring that “it works on my machine” translates to “it works in production.”
Software engineering and development teams leverage Kubernetes (K8s) to manage these containers at scale, providing:
- Self-healing: Automatically restarting failed containers
- Bin-packing: Intelligently placing containers on compute nodes to ensure maximum resource utilisation
- Automated rollouts: Reducing the risk of downtime during updates
In one such scenario, BBD helped a leading provider of treasury and foreign exchange solutions move from a rigid, monolithic architecture to a cloud-native environment. By leveraging Kubernetes and containerisation, they were able to ensure consistency across environments while significantly improving their ability to scale during high-volume trading periods.
Principle 3: Serverless Patterns for Scalability
For intermittent workloads, serverless is the ultimate pay-as-you-go model that allows you to replace the pay-per-hour model – which can lead to a massive win for your budget.
Serverless excels in event-driven functions (like processing an image upload or triggering a notification). It accelerates engineering because there is zero infrastructure to manage. However, for the sake of full disclosure, ‘cold starts’ can impact latency-sensitive apps as the cloud provider takes a moment to initialise the environment for an inactive function. Without proper governance, ‘function sprawl’ (a scenario where hundreds of disconnected, micro-targeted functions become nearly impossible to monitor, secure, or manage as a cohesive system), can also make your cloud-native architecture difficult to track.
Principle 4: Observability: The foundation of efficiency
You can’t optimise what you can’t see. In a cloud native design, observability is a core enabler, not an afterthought. It consists of the metrics, logs, and traces.
Modern observability allows teams to:
- Kill bottlenecks: Identify exactly which microservice is slowing down a transaction
- Spot bills early: Catch a runaway function or an oversized cluster before it blows the monthly budget
- FinOps integration: By linking observability with real-time cost dashboards, businesses can calculate unit cost metrics which can provide details on how much a single API call costs the company
Principle 5: Don’t build what you can buy
One of the most effective cloud native practices is knowing when not to build something yourself. Managed services for databases, queues, and caching layers (like Amazon RDS or Azure SQL) are often cheaper and more reliable than bespoke installations.
Ultimately, being cloud native is an architectural mindset. It requires designing stateless applications that can be killed and restarted at any moment, decoupling services via events and queues, and treating cost as a non-functional requirement just as important as security or speed.
Cloud native done right pays for itself
When implemented correctly, cloud native creates a resilient foundation that responds to market changes in real-time. If your cloud bill is rising faster than your customer base, it’s time to evaluate your cloud maturity.
Want to see where your technical estate is leaking cash? BBD offers health checks to get you started on identifying where and how you can optimise, or you can get in touch with a BBD cloud expert to find out how we can migrate, modernise or manage your cloud environment. Let’s chat!
