| Author: Ashish Kumar | Published: 15-Dec-2025 |
Every business today is moving toward digital transformation, whether it’s to improve customer experience, modernize internal operations, or stay competitive in a fast-changing market. Cloud adoption has become a major part of this shift, but many organizations still begin with a simple lift-and-shift cloud migration, moving applications to the cloud without redesigning them.
While this approach seems quick, it often creates new challenges: applications don’t scale well, performance drops under load, and costs increase instead of going down.
This is where cloud-native development and DevOps practices make a real difference.
Cloud-native DevOps gives businesses a modern way to build and run applications using the full power of the cloud, from automation and scalability to continuous delivery and faster releases. It helps teams work more efficiently, improves reliability, and ensures applications are designed for the future, not just moved from the past.
For businesses aiming to accelerate their digital transformation, cloud-native DevOps offers a smarter, more sustainable path, one that supports long-term growth, agility, and user experience.
Cloud-Native DevOps brings together two powerful ideas, building applications with the cloud-native way and managing them using DevOps practices. Together, they create a modern approach that helps businesses deliver faster, scale efficiently, and operate with greater reliability.
Cloud-native is a way of designing and running applications specifically for the cloud environment.
Instead of relying on traditional, monolithic systems, cloud-native applications are:
This approach ensures that applications can grow with the business and stay responsive even during peak usage.
DevOps refers to a culture and set of practices designed to improve collaboration between development and operations teams.
With DevOps, businesses adopt:
The result is software that moves from idea to production quickly, securely, and with fewer errors.
When cloud-native architecture and DevOps practices come together, businesses get the best of both worlds:
This combination helps organizations reduce time-to-market, improve customer experience, and support long-term digital transformation goals more effectively than traditional methods.
Cloud-Native DevOps is not just a technology shift; it’s a smarter operational model that helps teams innovate with confidence and build systems ready for future growth.
Many organizations begin their cloud journey with a simple lift-and-shift migration, moving applications to the cloud “as-is” without redesigning or modernizing them. While it seems quick and cost-effective initially, this approach often leads to bigger challenges once the application starts running in a real cloud environment.
In many cases, organizations find that cloud costs can exceed initial expectations, with enterprises spending 25–35% more than planned in TCO in the first year after migration, because lift‑and‑shift approaches often carry over inefficiencies instead of optimizing workloads for the cloud.
Below are the key reasons why traditional lift-and-shift doesn’t deliver long-term value.
Legacy applications were designed for on-premises servers, not for the dynamic nature of the cloud.
When these applications are lifted to the cloud without modernization:
As a result, businesses miss out on one of the biggest cloud benefits, on-demand scalability.
The cloud follows an OPEX model where you pay only for what you use.
But lift-and-shift often leads to:
Instead of reducing expenses, it usually increases operational costs.
Applications designed for hardware environments don’t always adapt well to cloud environments.
This can lead to:
Cloud performance depends heavily on architecture, and legacy designs simply aren’t built for it.
Moving to the cloud doesn’t automatically fix operational issues.
Lift-and-shift often brings the same old challenges into a new environment:
This makes it harder for teams to support continuous delivery or innovate quickly.
A lift-and-shift migration may be good for short-term cloud adoption, but it’s not a sustainable digital transformation strategy. To truly benefit from the cloud, scalability, reliability, automation, and cost efficiency, businesses need a cloud-native DevOps approach instead.
Adopting cloud-native DevOps transforms the way businesses build, deploy, and manage applications. By combining cloud-native architecture with DevOps practices, organizations can achieve faster delivery, better scalability, cost efficiency, and improved reliability.
Below are the key advantages:
Cloud-native DevOps accelerates development cycles through automation, CI/CD pipelines, and agile practices. Teams can:
This leads to shorter time-to-market and continuous innovation.
Applications designed for the cloud can scale automatically based on demand. Benefits include:
Cloud-native design with containers and microservices enables seamless scaling across regions and devices.
Unlike traditional on-premises infrastructure, cloud-native DevOps allows businesses to:
The result is lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and higher ROI.
By contrast, lift-and-shift approaches often waste up to 28% – 35% of cloud spend due to inefficient provisioning and underutilized resources. Cloud-native DevOps eliminates this waste through automation, optimization, and continuous monitoring.
Automation is at the heart of DevOps. With cloud-native practices, teams can:
This ensures fewer outages, faster recovery, and more predictable operations.
Cloud-native DevOps integrates security and governance from the start (DevSecOps), helping businesses to:
This creates a secure, transparent, and well-governed environment for digital transformation.
Cloud-native DevOps is built on a set of architectural and operational foundations that enable speed, scalability, and resilience. These pillars ensure that applications are not only cloud-ready but also optimized for continuous delivery and long-term growth.
Below are the five essential pillars that power a successful cloud-native DevOps strategy:
Microservices break large, monolithic applications into independent, modular services. Each service has its own functionality, lifecycle, and deployment pipeline.
Microservices give businesses the flexibility to evolve applications continuously without major disruptions.
Containers package an application and all its dependencies into a lightweight, portable unit. This ensures consistent behaviour across environments, development, testing, and production.
Tools like Docker and Kubernetes have become the backbone of modern cloud-native deployments due to their agility and scalability.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines automate the entire software delivery lifecycle.
CI/CD is the engine that drives cloud-native DevOps, ensuring development and operations stay closely aligned.
Infrastructure as Code allows teams to manage and provision infrastructure using configuration files instead of manual processes.
Tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure ARM templates help businesses deploy cloud environments with speed and accuracy.
Observability provides real-time visibility into how applications and infrastructure perform. It’s a crucial pillar for maintaining high availability and quick resolution of issues.
With observability, teams can detect issues early, troubleshoot faster, and ensure a consistently reliable user experience.
| Pillar | Business Impact |
| Microservices | Faster innovation, independent scaling |
| Containers | Portability and consistent deployments |
| CI/CD Pipelines | Faster releases, reduced errors |
| Infrastructure as Code | Repeatable, reliable environments |
| Observability | Proactive monitoring and faster issue resolution |
Digital transformation is not just about adopting new technology, it’s about changing how businesses operate, innovate, and deliver value. Cloud-native DevOps plays a critical role in this transformation by enabling organizations to move faster, respond smarter, and scale with confidence.
Here’s how cloud-native DevOps directly supports digital transformation:
Cloud-native DevOps enables rapid development through automation, CI/CD pipelines, and microservices-based architecture. Teams can experiment, test, and release new features quickly without waiting for long deployment cycles.
This allows businesses to:
With automated testing and deployment, releases become more frequent and predictable. Instead of large, risky updates, businesses can deliver smaller, continuous improvements.
Benefits include:
This shift supports continuous improvement, a key pillar of digital transformation.
Cloud-native applications are designed for high availability, performance, and scalability, ensuring users receive a consistent experience even during peak demand.
As a result, businesses can:
A reliable digital experience builds trust and long-term customer loyalty.
Modern cloud-native platforms enable continuous monitoring, logging, and analytics. This allows businesses to gather real-time insights into application performance and user behaviour.
With these insights, organizations can:
Feedback loops turn operational data into actionable business intelligence.
Cloud-native DevOps connects technology, people, and processes, making digital transformation faster, more measurable, and more sustainable.
Moving to cloud-native DevOps can deliver significant benefits, but success depends on how well an organization prepares for the change. This transition affects not only technology, but also people, processes, and governance models.
Below are the key areas businesses must plan for before adopting cloud-native DevOps.
Cloud-native DevOps requires cross-functional collaboration between development, operations, security, and business teams. Organizations must ensure teams are ready to:
Without team alignment, even the best tools and platforms can fail to deliver results.
DevOps is as much a cultural transformation as it is a technical one. Traditional siloed teams and rigid approval processes can slow down cloud adoption.
A successful DevOps culture promotes:
Leadership support plays a critical role in driving this mindset shift.
Cloud-native DevOps introduces new tools and technologies such as containers, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and observability platforms. Businesses should assess:
Bridging skill gaps early helps avoid delays, misconfigurations, and security risks later.
As cloud environments scale, governance becomes critical. Organizations need clear policies for:
Strong governance ensures flexibility without sacrificing control or compliance.
Cloud-native environments are highly scalable, but without proper planning, costs can grow quickly. Businesses should focus on:
Effective planning helps organizations maximize ROI while maintaining long-term sustainability.
This preparation phase lays the foundation for a successful cloud-native DevOps transformation, reducing risk and ensuring measurable business outcomes.
Adopting cloud-native DevOps requires the right strategy, technical expertise, and ongoing operational support. Teleglobal helps organizations navigate this transformation by aligning cloud technologies with business objectives and long-term growth plans.
Teleglobal works across leading cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, enabling businesses to choose the right environment based on performance, compliance, and cost requirements.
From application modernization to microservices-based architecture, Teleglobal designs scalable, resilient, and secure cloud-native solutions tailored to business needs.
Teleglobal helps implement CI/CD pipelines, automation frameworks, and DevOps best practices to accelerate software delivery, improve release reliability, and reduce operational effort.
Legacy applications are assessed and modernized using containers, microservices, and cloud-native services, enabling better scalability, performance, and maintainability.
Security is embedded across the DevOps lifecycle through policy-driven governance, access control, and compliance alignment, ensuring cloud environments remain secure and audit-ready.
Beyond implementation, Teleglobal provides continuous monitoring, optimization, and managed services, helping businesses maintain performance, control costs, and adapt as requirements evolve.
This approach enables organizations to move beyond basic cloud adoption and achieve sustainable, cloud-native digital transformation.
Digital transformation is no longer just about moving applications to the cloud. Real transformation happens when organizations modernize how applications are built, deployed, and operated. Traditional lift-and-shift approaches may offer a quick entry into the cloud, but they often fall short in delivering scalability, performance, and long-term cost efficiency.
Cloud-native DevOps provides a more sustainable path forward. By combining cloud-native architectures with DevOps practices, businesses can release software faster, scale with confidence, improve reliability, and respond quickly to changing customer and market demands.
However, success depends on more than technology alone. It requires the right skills, culture, governance, and a clear roadmap aligned with business goals.
With the right strategy and expert guidance, organizations can fully unlock the value of the cloud and turn DevOps into a true driver of innovation and growth. Businesses looking to modernize their applications and operations can benefit from a structured, cloud-native DevOps approach designed for today’s digital-first world.
Cloud-native is a modern approach to building applications specifically for cloud environments to achieve scalability, resilience, and flexibility.
DevOps is a collaborative way of aligning development and operations teams through automate software delivery to improve speed, reliability, and quality.
Cloud-native provides scalable architecture, while DevOps enables automation and continuous delivery. Together, they help teams build, deploy, and scale applications faster and more reliably and reduce operational risk.
Lift-and-shift is a cloud migration approach. It is process of moving applications to the cloud without redesigning or modernizing them, often leading to higher cloud costs, limited scalability, and performance challenges, because applications are not optimized for cloud environments.
The key pillars are microservices, containers, Continuous integration/ Continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation, infrastructure as code, and observability for performance and reliability.
Organizations should assess team readiness, cultural alignment, cloud and DevOps skill gaps, governance and security requirements, and cost-efficient architecture planning to ensure a smooth and successful transition.
It enables faster time-to-market, improved customer experience, cost optimization, and the ability to adapt quickly to changing business demands.
close
Hi there! At TeleGlobal, we turn your cloud vision into AI-accelerated reality. What challenge can we help you solve?
Powered by 
teleBot