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Embracing the Power of Cloud-native Applications

Large companies can build and deploy easily scalable, more resilient software for a fraction of the cost by leveraging the power of cloud computing. Cloud services that are cloud-native themselves lead the way by providing cost-effective cloud native architectures and services.

This allows companies to concentrate more on developing apps that have improved user experiences. These include Amazon web services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle, and RedHat.

What is a Cloud-native Service? 

A cloud native application is made up of microservices, which are self-contained building blocks that can be easily integrated into a cloud environment. Each microservice is self-contained in its own software container.

Cloud native, which is more of an approach than a declaration about where the application resides, provides flexibility that enables orchestration of improvements such as scaling up, adding new functionality, or introducing quality improvement without impacting or requiring the entire system to be changed.

Cloud-native Application Architecture

Cloud native architecture is a design methodology that uses cloud services like EC2, S3, Lambda from AWS, and others to allow dynamic and agile application development techniques that use a suite of cloud-based microservices rather than a monolithic application infrastructure to install, run, and update applications.

Where operations teams would manage the infrastructure resource allocations to traditional applications manually, cloud-native applications are deployed on infrastructure that abstracts the underlying compute, storage and networking primitives.

Using a platform that supports cloud native development, enterprises can build applications that run on any public or private cloud. 

Microservices and containerisation help cloud native apps be more agile and dynamic. It allows them to transfer between cloud providers or deploy services independently in different languages or frameworks without causing conflict or downtime.

Since DevOps teams may work independently on various components of an application at the same time or add new functionality without compromising reliability, incorporating a microservices architecture into application development promotes collaboration, performance, and productivity.

Cloud-native architecture appeals to companies that prioritise a DevOps philosophy because of its fluidity, resiliency, and scalability.

Read other enterprise-related articles such as the Ultimate Robotic Process Automation Guide.

Cloud-native architecture and benefits mindmap
Cloud-native mindmap by Shahir Daya: Medium.com

Cloud-native Application Best Practices

Several standardisations of technologies, programs, and resources make up the perfect cloud-native landscape. Now let’s take a look at the best practices that are taken into account for good cloud-native application integration.

Packaged as lightweight containers: Cloud-native applications are a range of self-contained, self-contained services that are lightweight containers and easy to package. Containers, unlike virtual machines, can scale up and down quickly. Infrastructure utilisation is optimised when the unit of scaling transitions to containers.

Developed with best-of-breed languages and frameworks: A cloud-native application’s services are written in the language and framework that best suits the functionality. Services use a number of languages, runtimes, and frameworks in cloud-native applications.

Designed as loosely coupled micro-services: The application runtime allows services from the same application to discover each other. They operate in isolation from other services. When properly implemented, elastic infrastructure and application architectures can be scaled out with efficiency and high performance.

Centered around APIs for interaction and collaboration: Lightweight APIs based on protocols like representational state transfer (REST), Google’s open-source remote procedure call (RPC), or NATS are used by cloud-native services. To expose APIs over the hypertext transfer protocol, REST is used as the lowest common denominator (HTTP). GRPC is commonly used for internal communication among services in terms of efficiency. NATS has publish-subscribe capabilities that allow for asynchronous communication within the app.

Architected with a clean separation of stateless and stateful services: Persistent and durable services follow a different trend, ensuring greater availability and resiliency. Independent of stateful programs, stateless services operate. There’s a connection here between how storage affects container use. Persistence is becoming more important in relation to the economy, statelessness, and micro-storage environments.

Isolated from the server and operating system dependencies: Cloud-native apps don’t care about the operating system or the computer they’re running on. They function at a higher level of abstraction. Only when a micro-service requires specific capabilities, such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), that are only available on a subset of machines, is this exception made.

Deployed on self-service, elastic, cloud infrastructure: Digital, shared, and elastic networks are used to build cloud-native applications. They should work in tandem with the underlying infrastructure to dynamically expand and shrink in response to changing loads.

Managed through agile DevOps processes: A cloud-native application’s services each have their own life cycle, which is handled by an agile DevOps process. To deploy and maintain a cloud-native framework, multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines can be used in tandem.

Automated capabilities: Cloud-native systems have the potential to be extremely automated. They work well with the infrastructure-as-code model. To handle these broad and complex applications, a certain degree of automation is necessary.

Defined, policy-driven resource allocation: Cloud-native systems adhere to a collection of policies that describe the governance model. They follow policies such as CPU and storage limits, as well as network policies that assign resources to different services.

What is the Market Size?

The mass adoption of cloud services can be clearly seen in the IDG Cloud Computing Study 2020 report, with 92 percent of organisations surveyed saying their IT environment is now at least somewhat in the cloud – public, private or hybrid.

Yugabyte, makers of the cloud-native, open-source YugabyteDB database, is seeing a rise in demand for its products, especially with large enterprise customers. Recently, the company announced a $48 million financing round to help build on that momentum.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, recently announced the expansion of its open hybrid cloud technology portfolio with new managed cloud services. These services enhance customer experiences on open hybrid cloud computing, helping to reduce complexity and maximise IT investments. 

In the past several years, we’ve seen a pioneering group of B2B standouts — Twilio, Shopify, Atlassian, Okta, Coupa*, MongoDB and Zscaler, for example — approach or exceed the $1 billion revenue mark and see their market capitalisations surge 10 times or more from their IPOs to the present day (as of March 31), according to CapIQ data.

Ensuring Security among Cloud-native Apps

Cloud native protection necessitates a refocus on security that works in tandem with an organisation’s overall cloud native strategy. Cloud native applications must be protected in the sense of the application, and the solution must consider the changes in the teams, processes, and infrastructure model that create and run cloud native apps.

As a result, cloud native application protection – ensuring that vulnerabilities are detected and remedied during development – should be a major focus of cloud native security. Protection should be baked in during the software development life cycle, and the solution must be holistic.

Cloud native applications offer agility and resilience that traditional monolithic applications can’t offer. Make sure that your organisation benefits. Contact Appello today.

 

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