Becoming Cloud Native

The traditional model of business is undergoing radical change in an endeavor to employ digital technologies better to suit multiple purposes across a variety of sectors, and cloud-native is one of the key drivers that re-architects cloud environments with the intent of adapting the means for how to deliver services. cloud-native is a modern and advanced software development approach; which is why it is becoming of high importance to many companies. 

Digital Transformation Risks

But moving to a new software development approach is not easy, and organizations can be slow to adopt a radical change in the interests of safeguarding their market, output, and business. So, to mitigate risk, organizations can take a step-by-step approach to become cloud-native in several phases, where they can first replicate the new approach on a smaller scale inside a department/team/project architecture to test the results. 

If positive, it is then possible to scale the approach organization-wide continuously till the whole enterprise cloud architecture becomes cloud-native. If implemented correctly, the cloud-native approach supports organizations to improve speed, agility, and resilience in the app development and management process. 

What Is ‘Cloud Native’?

Cloud-native is an approach for building and running applications that fully exploit the power of cloud computing, which offers on-demand, limitless computing power, whether on public or private cloud hosting platforms.

Cloud-native is a relatively new term, which encompasses a number of concepts that take full advantage of all cloud service principles. The approach represents a paradigm shift in how we architect and develop software, so it includes utilization of native cloud services, a package functionality that you can take from the cloud provider and combines that with agile principles and modern microservices architectures. 

Microservices architecture helps decompose the overall architecture into a number of services that can run independently to deliver the promise of the cloud, which is full tolerance and adaptive scaling.

Why Become Cloud Native?

We now move in a tech world where a new feature release inside of an application development pipeline does not happen a mere once a week; instead, the new norm is that code releases happen every day and sometimes every few minutes. Netflix engineers deploy code 1000 times per day, AWS engineers deploy code every 11.7 seconds on average, Facebook engineers commit code to its version control system up to 500 times a day, recording changes in some 3,000 files. 

This rapid application development methodology warrants the need for a better approach like cloud-native development to cope with the pace affecting user experience. When organizations work with advanced microservices architecture on the cloud, they are able to develop new and innovative features without impacting the end-user. So, the adoption of the cloud-native development approach supports innovation and improvement where such rapid change was not possible in the traditional process.

What Is Cloud Native Architecture?

Cloud-native architecture is formed of microservices. cloud-native apps adopt a microservices architecture where all the applications are a group of small services that you can operate independently from each other. Individual development teams manage and maintain microservices that work on their own schedules to develop, deploy, scale, and upgrade the whole infrastructure. 

You can also package cloud-native apps inside containers. Containers provide isolation contexts for microservices. They are highly accessible, scalable, easily portable from one environment to another. You can create or teardown applications immediately, making the cloud-native approach ideal for building and running applications composed of microservices. 

Cloud-native apps run on a continuous delivery model. Developers and IT operations teams collaborate to build, test, and release any update inside the software as soon as they are ready without affecting end-users or developers in other teams. Such a continuous development model encourages the adoption of  DevOps principles, which establishes collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams and promotes culture and practice where building, testing, and releasing software happens frequently and more consistently.

Benefits of Becoming Cloud Native

• Successful adoption of a cloud-native approach enables organizations to bring innovations to the market faster, accelerating modern enterprises’ digital transformation.
• Cloud-native applications can automatically scale up or scale down as quickly as needed, meeting the exact customer demands. 
• The approach simplifies operations and increases developer productivity. It allows you to push any new application features or services to live applications for customer use whenever they are ready. There is no need to worry about other teams’ work and this approach has minimal impact on the end-user experiences. 
• While optimizing resource usage, containerized cloud-native apps are also easily portable across different environments for added agility and flexibility. 
• Cloud-native apps are built with greater resilience inside the application to better handle churn quickly, replacing failed components and recovering from unexpected events and failures, minimizing or eliminating any service downtime. 
• Becoming cloud-native offers a competitive advantage that allows organizations to become more agile. With CI-CD capability, you can try out new features and validate them and iterate multiple times before launching them on a broader network.
• The approach offers flexibility in terms of being able to be deployed in any kind of infrastructure, whether it is a public or a hybrid cloud. The cloud-native apps provide excellent elasticity to scale the application as per the needs of the network, thus increasing resource utilization and power consumption.

How Does Cloud Native Relate to DevOps?

Embracing cloud-native principles leads you synergistically to adopting the DevOps technical and cultural approach to automation and continuous feedback loops for improvement. Where you automate everything from software development to code deployment between dev and ops teams. And as the DevOps approach advocates containerization and microservices architecture at a huge scale, the Methodology naturally complements cloud-native architecture. 

Organizations understand that by using the cloud-native software development approach, agility increases by continuous development which is one of the main principles of DevOps. DevOps also facilitates continuous development and deployment of cloud-native applications by adopting infrastructure as code and developing a collaborative culture between development and operation teams.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is driving the increased adoption of the cloud-native approach. By leveraging cloud-native principles and architecture, businesses can dynamically manage applications to adapt, change and improve according to business intelligence from the market. Such apps are often built and run on modern cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes, which offer hardware decoupling, which helps automate deployment, scaling, and management of cloud-native applications.