The cloud is not a magic place where problems go away. It is a place where some of the traditional challenges go away; however, new challenges will come up. Legacy enterprise companies have been making the switch from waterfall project management to agile for a while now. That is good news for a company intending to be cloud native, since iteration, failing fast, and innovation are critical to long-term success, and agile projects allow for that type of project delivery. A large part of the reason this methodology is popular with cloud native companies is the fast pace of innovation that cloud vendors are going through. For example, AWS launched 1,430 new services and features in 2017, which is almost four per day, and it is set to eclipse that again in 2018. With this level of innovation happening, cloud services are changing, and using an agile methodology to manage cloud native projects will enable companies to take advantage of these as they come out.

DevOps (or the merging of development teams and operations teams) is a new IT operating model that helps bridge the gap between how code is developed and how it is operated once deployed to production. Making a single team accountable for the code logic, testing, deployment artifacts, and the operations of the system will ensure that nothing is lost in the life cycle of a code development process. This model fits well with the cloud and microservices, since it enables a small team to own the full service, write in whatever code they are most suited to, deploy to the cloud platform chosen by the company, and then operate that application and be in the best position to resolve any issues the application might have once it's in production.

Together, agile methodologies and DevOps are a critical change needed by companies that are considering the move to becoming a cloud native organization.