In the race to rapidly turn ideas into customer experiences, businesses are rightly turning to cloud-native technology. This digital transformation seeks to deliver better, richer customer experiences faster, all to accelerate growth. But at what cost?
Yes, cloud-native empowers organizations to be more agile and more competitive. But developing for the cloud is a fundamental change in software development that presents its own complexity and risks.
Table of contents:
- The Surprising Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Building Cloud-Native Infrastructure In-House
- What to Include in a TCO Analysis
- How High-Performance Low-Code Helps Organizations Contain Cloud-Native Development Costs
The Surprising Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Building Cloud-Native Infrastructure In-House
IT leaders must consider several challenges to implementing a cloud-native infrastructure when building it from the ground up, including retraining teams on microservices architecture and retooling DevOps processes for the rapid cadence of cloud-native development.
These challenges combine to exponentially increase complexity. And the inevitable byproduct is cost.
But how much are we talking about?
That’s what we wanted to find out in our new report on the Total Cost of Ownership of Cloud-Native Application Development, which you can now download.
For the calculations, we used a mid-large organization with global operations and its IT based in the US, that will modernize a mid-complexity back-end, front-end, and mobile companion.
Here are the main takeaways:
- Costs for building and configuring the infrastructure environment from the ground up = $2.7 million.
- Application development costs = $2.9 million
And that’s assuming all goes according to plan.
These costs can quickly go up due to unexpected (but common) circumstances — such as delays and lack of cloud-native expertise that can cause over-provisioning of the infrastructure, leading to skyrocketing costs.
What to Include in a TCO Analysis
How did we arrive at these results? Well, there are a few costs you must consider when implementing a cloud-native infrastructure in-house with traditional coding:
- Hiring and onboarding a new team with specific expertise in cloud-native tech
- Building and configuring the infrastructure environment
- Maintaining and scaling the infrastructure
- Developing applications using traditional coding
In the TCO report, which is based on actual companies that have been through the process of cloud-native development from the ground up, we crunch the numbers.
The results were surprising… but not to those who have been through the process.
Every IT leader we asked to vet the numbers indicated that the report represented an optimistic timeline and budget — in other words, a best-case scenario.
One senior VP even told us:
“Our original timeline and budget looked pretty similar, and it ended up taking at least twice as long. And it was twice as expensive.”
Unfortunately, only a few organizations can afford to spend millions of dollars just in the implementation stage of a cloud-native infrastructure. So, what can you do?
How High-Performance Low-Code Helps Organizations Contain Cloud-Native Development Costs
High-performance low-code platforms for building cloud-native applications offer all the benefits — enterprise-grade apps that are scalable, secure, and available — without the exorbitantly high costs, complexity, and long development cycles of building from scratch.
For example, a company like the one depicted in the TCO report saves around $2.7 million with a platform like OutSystems and can immediately start modernizing its apps.
So, instead of spending months or even years and millions of dollars architecting and configuring a cloud infrastructure and integrating dozens of cloud services, with high-performance low-code you can start building mission-critical apps from day one!
Take a deeper look at the cost breakdown of cloud-native application development from the ground up and with traditional coding, and take a sneak peek at how high-performance low-code can help reduce your costs. Read the full report.
