Have you ever heard about the cloud native application but you still don’t know what it is?
Nowadays, every digital company is looking for being at the leading edge of technology and one way to achieve it is by changing the way they design and use applications; hence the importance of getting immersed in the cloud native application’s theme.
On this blog, you will learn what is exactly a cloud native application and also, we are going to review 4 of its habits, which are a paramount aspect for enterprises.
Table of contents
Let’s start!
Cloud Native Application
In a nutshell, cloud native is the combination of multiple modern and agile methodologies, including, microservices, serverless, SaaS, PaaS, CI/CD, and DevOps practices.
Habits of a Cloud Native Application
1. Cloud modernization
Fundamentally, it consists of the adoption of the 12-factor methodology, which is a methodology to build modern, scalable, and resilient SaaS applications for any programming language.
Some of the components are dependency isolation, portability, CI/CD, source control versioning, parity or environment parity, and more bits.
2. Cloud – API
Essentially Cloud API has the ability to communicate across different cloud environments utilizing the same API protocol in order to share information and data coming from the customer or going to the customer, like Open banking, which its core premise is to incorporate secure API across different financial service providers.
Or even for Kubernetes, that its main premise as well, is to build an API in front of the cluster on all the Kubernetes platform.
Another component from this section is to utilize SaaS or fully managed services like Amazon RDS, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Amazon SES, MongoDB Atlas, or any other service that help you develop faster.
Please don’t reinvent the wheel and always integrate different fully managed services.
3. Cloud native
In brief, is the adoption of microservices, light, and portable containers, loosely coupled architectures with Docker and how to manage microservices and containers. In this case, would be Kubernetes, AWS ECS, or even Fargate.
Alternatively, you could adopt the serverless ecosystem, which is the highest abstraction level in the Cloud.
4. Cloud DevOps
Fundamentally, you need to automate any repetitive tasks, utilizing Infrastructure as Code, this infrastructure business logic needs to live in the source control version system like Git or Bitbucket.
Another relevant point is that the infrastructure should be immutable, meaning that your infrastructure shouldn’t change after getting deploy if it needs some modification, needs to be done before the deployment or provisioning the infrastructure from images, scripting, templates or from anything else. But in you need to change something on the fly, you need to follow a process, that brings a lot of consistency, portability and is good for disaster recovery.
And finally, a key tenet, is that your application should be stateless, this is a modern approach where your application shouldn’t save data locally, in your container or hard drive or even in your virtual machine, instead, you should save the data in cloud storages, in backed services like databases, caching systems or even in cloud storage like Amazon S3.
In this context, you can still implement real-time application crash monitoring so that problems can be identified, analyzed, and rectified rapidly. The latest tools allow for automation to be applied to this process, regardless of whether your app data is stored locally or on the cloud. This is an especially impactful habit to adopt if uptime is a priority.
To sum up
Now that you know the 4 habits of a cloud native application, it is time to adopt them!
This way, you will join the continuous transformation journey that is needed to disrupt and modernize your digital products, otherwise, they won’t reach your clients.
Did I miss any other cloud native habit?
Leave your comments, we would love to hear from you!
FAQs
Cloud-native is considered an innovative software development approach specially designed to leverage the cloud computing model fully. It allows organizations to build applications using microservices architecture and run them on dynamically orchestrated platforms.
Cloud modernization is one factor where the components are dependency isolation, portability, CI/CD, source control versioning, and the adoption of microservices. Applications built on the cloud-native architecture are reliable, deliver scale and performance, and offer faster time to market.
Cloud-native combines multiple modern and agile methodologies, including microservices, serverless, SaaS, PaaS, CI/CD, and DevOps practices. Here are the critical cloud-native architecture patterns for cloud architecture;
-Resources are centrally hosted and delivered over the internet via a pay-per-use or pay-as-you-go model.
-Managed Services allows you to leverage cloud-managed services to address the cloud infrastructure efficiently.
-Globally distributed architecture is another component of the cloud-native architecture that allows you to install and manage software across the infrastructure.
-Autoscaling is a powerful feature of a cloud-native architecture that lets you automatically adjust resources to maintain applications at optimal levels.
-Organizations can manage the infrastructure via configuration files by implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by applying software engineering practices to automate resource provisioning.
-Optimized costs
-Auto provisioning
-Faster release
-Simplifies IT management
-DevOps culture
-High scalability
-Superior customer experience
DevOps complements the cloud-native architecture by providing a success-driven software delivery approach that combines speed, agility, and control. AWS augments this approach by providing the required tools. Such as:
-Docker and Microservices Architecture make it easy to automate and control building, deploying, and managing containers using simple commands and APIs.
-Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a powerful container orchestration tool to manage a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.
-Amazon Kubernetes Service (EKS) uses the open-source, which means you gain more extensibility to manage container environments.
