They say, “forget about the infrastructure”, but is that even possible? It sounds almost like a dream, especially for a small company developing a new application that can conquer the market. However, the ideal is within reach, to be achieved thanks to the cloud-native approach.
The hitherto monolithic development and deployment model doesn’t work well in many projects nowadays. Businesses challenge their approach and look for new solutions to optimise processes and savings – not only in money but also in time. It turns out that the best ideas come from the bottom up, from agile, cloud-native startups.
The definition of cloud-native
Following CNCF’s definition, the term “cloud native” refers to the concept of developing applications to take advantage of the distributed computing offered by the cloud model. Cloud-native apps are designed to benefit from the scalability, resilience and flexibility a cloud can offer.
Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation seeks to drive adoption of this paradigm by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. We democratize state-of-the-art patterns to make these innovations accessible for everyone.
About CNCF – the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. It was established in 2015 in response to the growing number of companies wanting to leverage cloud solutions. The organisation’s mission is to make cloud-native computing ubiquitous. It co-creates the open source community, evaluates which technologies should be added to fill the vision of cloud-native applications, and makes sure they are available to everyone interested.
Cloud-native architecture – well-designed can handle even an infrastructure malfunction
The idea behind cloud native is that the application remains available even if the infrastructure is down. The second important aspect is to create an architecture that will take full advantage of the cloud opportunities such as scalability, automation capabilities and rolling updates, or budget optimisation.
Cloud-native applications differ from “standard” apps primarily in how they are built; instead of a monolith, they are composed of independent container-based components. Containers should be put in several cloud services on servers in different locations. It’s also important to take care of data redundancy, i.e., not assigning files to a single physical machine but an abstraction layer spanning multiple devices. Thanks to that, the application can remain resilient to hardware failure and be able to automatically re-map IP addresses in the event of infrastructure malfunction.
See also:
- Containerisation – what are containers, and why are they so popular?
- What is microservice architecture, and why it’s worth implementing?
- Disaster Recovery Plan – how to keep applications available when a failure strikes
Benefits of a cloud-native approach
- Rapid development and deployment. Thanks to the ease of running environments in the cloud, the application can theoretically be created, tested and deployed on the same day.
- No need to update the entire application. The creation and administration of cloud-native applications are much simpler, more efficient and more intuitive than traditional monolithic solutions. With container orchestration services (such as Kubernetes), it is possible to make rolling updates without stopping the whole app.
- Portability and no vendor lock-in. Containerised applications can be easily packaged and transferred to another infrastructure solution. Also, cloud-native apps are often based on open-source technologies, reducing the need to be tied to a specific service provider.
- Cost-effective scalability. Cloud-native architecture provides horizontal scaling of services, computing power or storage, avoiding unnecessary hardware purchases and load-balancing plans. The cloud pay-as-you-use billing model lets the company pay only for the resources it consumes.
- Automation and continuous delivery. Cloud-native applications benefit from DevOps automation features that enable the continuous integration and continuous delivery of regularly published software changes. In addition, developers can use methods such as “blue green” or “canary” deployments to introduce patches without disrupting the user environment.
Want to become a cloud native?
Contact us if you are wondering whether going cloud native is a good strategy for your organisation. FOTC certified specialists will help you assess the potential of the investment, select a solution and plan a strategy preceded by a detailed analysis. We’ll support you in the migration process and subsequent operation of the cloud services.
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