Cloud Native is an approach to designing, building and operating cloud native applications. Cloud native applications are distributed, dynamically managed, and can achieve unprecedented levels of scale with high availability. These characteristics enable us to re-imagine the way modern applications are developed.
But what does Cloud Native mean? There are three core principles that define a Cloud Native application:
1. Cloud Native applications are distributed - powered by microservices, implemented using containers.
2. Cloud native applications are dynamically managed - both the platform and the application running on it are automatically orchestrated to provide availability, scale, fault tolerance and elasticity for all resources in a datacenter.
3. Cloud native applications are designed for failure - they support resiliency by design, which enables them to recover from failures with no impact or lost data.
Cloud Native is an architectural approach that requires the application of new ways of thinking and doing. It changes how applications are built, adopted and operated. The end goal is not just another way of doing things but a fundamentally different approach to building modern applications. Cloud Native is not a single technology or product, it’s an approach to designing, building and operating cloud native applications. Cloud Native applications are distributed, dynamically managed, and can achieve unprecedented levels of scale with high availability. These characteristics enable us to re-imagine the way modern applications are developed. Cloud Native applications don’t ever stop running. They provide intelligent load balancing and scaling of resources on demand, which ensures they always stay on top of the workloads they process and deliver exceptional performance and availability for both on-premises and cloud deployments. This makes them resilient to failure and very easy to manage and operate at scale.
Cloud Native applications are built with microservices, which provide a different way of thinking about decomposing an application into its parts. The microservice architectural style promotes smaller, more loosely coupled services that do one thing really well, rather than large monolithic applications that attempt to solve every problem on its own. This in turn enables flexible and agile development and the continuous delivery and deployment of features, in a way that represents business value.
The industry has seen an evolution in how applications are designed, developed and operated over time. The modern approach to building applications is primarily focused on creating cloud services using microservices architectures. Applications based on microservices architecture consist of many small, independently versioned services operating in concert to provide the desired functionality. These services communicate with each other over well-defined APIs so they can evolve and scale independently while still providing value for customers.
How can one get started with cloud native application development?
1. It starts with understanding the need for cloud native applications.
2. Once the need is understood, start building Cloud Native Microservices using open source frameworks like WildFly Swarm, WildFly-Swarm Extension, Spring Boot to name a few.
3. Experiment with tools and platforms that provide dynamic runtime infrastructure in support of deploying and managing cloud native applications.
4. Deploy your Microservices on different public & private cloud platforms to prove the concept of Cloud Native application development.
Cloud Native is a new approach to developing modern apps that can achieve unprecedented levels of scale, availability and resiliency with high-performance. It enables any type of application – digital business, IoT, mobile – to be continuously available and resilient with minimal code changes. This approach is built on an open source, cloud-native stack that includes Linux containers with Kubernetes at the core of cluster management for dynamic scheduling and service discovery across multiple hosts. With OpenShift you can build your own private PaaS managed by Kubernetes. Cloud Native is a way of developing software using container technology, microservices architecture and dynamic infrastructure so that applications can be easily deployed in open cloud environments.
In this age of digital transformation, traditional application architectures must evolve to provide the necessary capabilities to drive innovation and support business growth. The Cloud Native approach enables a new generation of applications. It is a cloud-scale pattern that harnesses the rapid pace of innovation and competitive differentiators of open source technologies to bring speed, flexibility and scale to modern application development. The Cloud Native approach enables a new generation of applications. These are natively designed for continuous delivery, distributed systems, microservices architecture, and dynamic infrastructures.
Benefits of Cloud Native Application Development:
On-premise or cloud deployments with full life-cycle management across multiple clouds.
Simple programming model for microservices architecture, use any language Java/Javascript etc…
Great portability across public & private clouds with full life cycle management on a single platform.
Great DevOps/CI/CD capabilities, automated build and continuous delivery of Microservices applications with full life cycle management across multiple cloud environments.
Security built into application from ground up by default as containers isolate process from each other.
Self-healing containerized workloads that can automatically recover from failures.
Frictionless deployment between staging and production environments to deliver new releases faster with full life-cycle management on a single platform.
The difference between cloud native apps and Traditional Enterprise Apps:
Cloud native apps are written for the cloud and so they must be easily portable. They work best on container technology or bare metal environments because developers can achieve increased speed by taking advantage of local resources rather than depending on an off-site resource pool.
Cloud native apps are built using dockerized microservices, which is a more modern way to deploy applications. Traditional apps are typically monolithic in design, tightly coupled with the hosting environment and have dependencies on specific versions of host software such as databases and operating systems.
Conclusion:
If you are keen on finding the benefits of modern application architecture, then cloud native will help your software team to come up with awesome applications faster and more efficiently.