Interview with Lingque Cloud CTO Chen Kai on Cloud Native Trends, Challenges, and Best Practices

Cloud native has become a hot technology trend, but most enterprises are still in the exploration stage of practical implementation; this InfoQ interview with Lingque Cloud CTO Chen Kai shares his views on the current state and future direction of cloud native technologies.

While the concepts of cloud native are widely understood, the real difficulty lies in landing them in production. Chen notes that containerization on Kubernetes is relatively straightforward, and the core of Kubernetes has matured, leading developers to describe it as becoming "boring"—a sign of stability and clear boundaries.

Kubernetes’ core community now focuses on improving stability, usability, and extensibility, integrating more technologies into the cloud native stack, and extending the stack to broader scenarios, including managing virtual machines and serverless workloads.

However, DevOps and microservice transformations remain challenging due to cultural, organizational, and technical complexities; microservices increase operational complexity, requiring careful governance beyond just Service Mesh or Spring Cloud.

Microservice governance has shifted to the post‑Kubernetes era, with Service Mesh emerging as the best practice for managing service‑to‑service communication, while Envoy has become a de‑facto standard at the data layer and Istio the primary control‑plane solution.

Serverless standardization is still lacking. Most serverless workloads run on public‑cloud Lambda services, creating barriers for on‑premise adoption, though interest in private‑cloud serverless is growing.

From a technical perspective, Kubernetes can orchestrate containers, virtual machines, and functions; Docker can package both applications and functions, making Kubernetes a natural runtime for serverless workloads.

Regarding cloud native adoption strategy, Chen suggests a pragmatic approach: identify suitable applications for cloud native transformation, start with larger‑grain services, and only split into microservices when genuine agility needs arise.

He emphasizes four practical principles: (1) not every application requires microservice decomposition; (2) embrace cloud native to manage the added operational complexity; (3) expose core capabilities via APIs even without microservice refactoring; and (4) implement API governance through layered API gateways.

Lingque Cloud’s recent release of Alauda Container Platform (ACP) 2.0 fully embraces a Kubernetes‑native architecture, integrating DevOps and Service Mesh capabilities, and plans to introduce more Operators and an enterprise‑grade API Management platform (AMP) to further automate deployment and governance.

Overall, Chen views cloud native as an open‑source movement within the cloud computing ecosystem that, when applied thoughtfully, can accelerate digital transformation by improving software delivery speed, scalability, and operational efficiency.