Why Cloud-Native Applications?

In today’s world, every organization is geared toward building their applications or APIs to enable faster time to market, scale, resiliency, adaptability, reusability, scalability, and most important cloud portability.

Now, what can be done to do this? The easy answer is to develop the applications or APIs using Cloud Native technologies. Building and managing Cloud-Native applications automate and uses the concepts of DevOps, Continuous Deployment, Microservices, and deploying Microservices in containers that be shipped in any cloud environment.

As defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds. Features such as containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative application programming interfaces (APIs) best illustrate this approach.

Typical tool stack for Cloud-Native Application:

Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine for the deployment and management of applications in the containers

Grafana is a visualization tool to provide application alerts, metrics, etc

Isitio enables interservice communication using Service Mesh

AWS, Google Cloud provides cloud services to manage the applications

Prometheus is used to enable observability by recording real-time metrics in a time series database with flexible queries and real-time alerting

Fluentd is used for logging. It collects and shares log data and sends to log aggregations tools such as AWS CloudWatch.

ELK Stack is a full-text search and analysis engine that provides a complete monitoring solution

Please note — You can use any tool of your choice (recommended or agreed upon by your organization) to design the Cloud Native Application eco-system

Credit: www.xenonstack.com

What are the key benefits of Cloud-Native Applications over Traditional Applications?

1. Cloud-Native Applications are deployed at OS abstraction layers as Cloud providers manage the OS layer vs in Traditional Applications are OS-dependent
2. Cloud-Native Applications are predictable as they follow 12-factor principles and know the complete lifecycle while Traditional Applications are unpredictable (for example- Monolithic applications)
3. Cloud-Native Applications are deployed with “Right Size Capacity” and it is easy to scale up/ down based on the requirements. On the other hand, traditional applications are typically deployed with an oversize capacity
4. Cloud-Native Applications follow DevOps for quick deployment and can easily support Agile while Traditional Applications follow a long release cycle and waterfall model
5. Cloud-Native Applications support automated scaling but manual scaling is required for traditional Applications
6. Additionally, Cloud-Native Applications are fault-tolerant and have rapid recovery if impacted by any outage whereas traditional applications have slow recovery

Other than the benefits mentioned above, one of the biggest benefits I see from Cloud Native applications is — it provides the ability to deploy your applications in hybrid cloud environments which reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.

Challenges in the adoption of Cloud Native-

1. In the last 2 decades, large organizations have developed many large monolithic or legacy systems. It is not possible to take the advantage of cloud-native unless they recreate the solutions using Cloud Native technologies.
2. Learning curve — Cloud-Native using Container technologies with multiple tools set
3. Organizations need to adopt new ways of thinking like Minimal Viable Product based delivery, Domain-Driven Design for building APIs or Applications iteratively instead of relying on Waterfall and Agile methodologies only

Conclusion — While developers have always options to build their application in any technology or infrastructure of their choice but looking at the rapidly changing technological world, cloud-native architecture is not optional anymore-it is a necessity.