“Cloud computing” is transforming businesses across the globe as we speak.So, being an entrepreneur, if you plan to embark on your digital transformation journey with the cloud, it is critical to investigate the potential benefits of cloud for your business.
In this article, we give you a run down of cloud-native and all its elements to make you more aware of this emerging tech trend.
#1. What Is Cloud-Native?
Cloud-native architecture is an approach to designing, constructing, and operating workloads in the cloud. The cloud-native is all about speed and agility. A cloud-native app consists of discrete and reusable components, which are known as microservices. They are especially designed to integrate into any cloud environment.
Why Cloud-Native Is Important?
According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), cloud-native technologies empower businesses to build and run scalable apps. It is a way to increase the velocity of businesses and a way to structure the teams in order to take full advantage of automation and scalability.
It also enables developers to make great impact and changes frequently with minimal effort. Here’re some of the critical characteristics of cloud-native apps:
- Cloud-native apps offer high flexibility and agility. They provide outstanding performance, security, and excellent customer experience.
- With cloud-native apps, it is easier to apply changes, customize the apps, and add new features.
- They embrace reusable and discrete components, which are called microservices. They are designed to integrate into every kind of cloud environment.
#2. What Does Cloud Native Architecture Look Like?
Monolithic vs. Microservices Architecture
The former Netflix Cloud Architect, Adrian Cockcroft, describes how they shifted their complete architecture from a monolith to microservices. The challenge with monolithic architecture is that when new features are developed, it takes a lot of effort to deploy the changes into production.
- The development team could use not more than two languages.
- Deploying features at once required upfront integration and functional testing.
- Several teams needed to coordinate their changes in coding.
When Netflix switched to microservices architecture, then the team was able to overcome all the demerits of a monolithic architecture and build a robust and reliable software.
Microservices & Containers
In the microservices architecture, a single app is composed of several smaller, loosely coupled, and independent deployable components or services. Since microservices can be deployed and redeployed independently without impacting the end-user experience, it is an ideal match for automated, iterative delivery methodologies such as CI/CD or DevOps. Microservices has its own tech stack, including database, data model, REST APIs, event streaming, and message brokers. According to the survey, 87% of microservices users said that the adoption of microservices is worthy.
Containers
Generally, developers deploy microservices inside containers. Containers are lightweight, executable components which blend app source code. In short, containers are de facto compute units of modern cloud-native apps. They enhance the benefits of microservices by enabling consistent deployment across different cloud deployment models. Most companies using containerized microservices also use a container orchestration platform, such as Kubernetes, to automate scale deployment and management.
#3. Benefits Of The Cloud-Native Approach
- Lower costs: Since cloud-native technology is based on a pay-per-use model, it means that companies need to pay only for the resources they use. An open-source system and tools that adopt a pay-per-use model greatly reduce costs. The cloud-native applications embrace all the solutions which are designed to function on the cloud. It results in reducing costs on backup, maintenance, development, and usage of resources.
- Excellent customer experience: When it comes to traditional apps, software updates need a dedicated team for each stack for a longer period of time. On the other hand, the cloud-native approach provides an excellent customer experience by offering continuous delivery and enables engineers to update software and apps in shorter cycles.
- Enhanced scalability & reliability: Cloud bursting provides unlimited scaling of computing, storage, and other resources. As per a survey report, 75% of respondents admit that they enjoy improved flexibility in order to make improvements in real-time by using a cloud-native model. The cloud-native approach provides businesses more chances to tap into and satisfy their customer’s evolving demands.
- Reduced time to market: The cloud-native approach helps businesses to bring new features online in lesser time. According to the IBM survey report, 73% of development executives and developers said this model resulted in faster development and roll-out. Since this approach provides efficiency and flexibility, it encourages business’ growth. Companies can scale resources to handle user demand and reach out to even more people more quickly.
- Reduced vendor lock-in: The businesses who choose the cloud can easily shift to a different support vendor in order to get their cloud-native services and solutions. On top of that, they are free to use other community software, which allows for the desired integrations.
#4. Cloud-native apps Development Principles
Whether to develop a new cloud-native app or modernize an existing one, developers need to follow a consistent set of principles, which are as follows:
- Adopt the agile method: It speeds up the creation and process of improvements. Based on the feedback, developers can easily and quickly roll out updates. It simply allows them to match the users’ expectations during cloud-native application development services.
- Use containers for maximum scalability & flexibility: Containers enable software to run anywhere since all its code and dependencies are placed in one place. So, it allows maximum flexibility and portability in a multi-cloud environment. In simple words, containers allow fast scaling up & down with Kubernetes orchestration policies, which are defined by the users.
- Follow the microservices architectural approach: Microservices are loosely coupled but still work independently. This approach allows incremental, automated, and continuous improvement of an app without causing downtime.
#5. Cloud-Native Technologies
Cloud-native technologies help speed up the rate at which businesses move new ideas to the market. Also, they enable companies to develop scalable apps at a faster rate than their traditional deployment methods. Here’re some of the commonly-used cloud-native technologies:
- Kubernetes: An open-source container orchestration system, Kubernetes is a platform for managing containerized workloads and services. It facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. With a large and rapidly growing ecosystem, Kubernetes enables users to control the containers, ensuring no downtime. It also takes care of scaling an application and provides several benefits, such as storage orchestration, service discovery & load balancing, automatic bin packing, etc.
- Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and altering toolkit for containers and microservices. It collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e., metrics information is stored with the timestamp.
- Istio is a service mesh, also considered a modernized service networking layer. It is a popular solution for managing different microservices, which make up a cloud-native application.
- CoreDNS is a flexible & extensible DNS server, which is used in a multitude of environments because of its flexibility.
- gRPC is a cross-platform open-source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework, which has been used as a single general-purpose RPC infrastructure. It uses Protocol Buffers to encode data.
Conclusion
The cloud-native is an effective model to modernize IT and make business innovations through its outstanding features and functionalities. It has also been predicted to be the future of software development in the upcoming years. Suppose you are planning to implement a cloud migration strategy to improve operational efficiencies, the essential things mentioned above can add value to your business and cloud-native apps.