A Cloud-Native application refers to an application that is born and raised in the cloud and not on-premises, making full use of the innovations of the Cloud Computing revolution. With Cloud-based services, the capital investment and the manpower necessary for managing enterprise data centers is replaced with unlimited computing, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go solutions.
Cloud-native technologies can be used to quickly bring ideas to market using cost-effective processes to gain a competitive advantage in the changing market dynamics. To achieve maximum benefits from the Cloud, one needs to make sure that the application has been designed with the decoupling of the physical infrastructure and should be separated into services and tiers that may be developed and run independently without the help of the other.
Well, in this article, we will walk you through everything you need to know about cloud-native app development with a step-by-step guide.
So, let’s get started with the basics!
Cloud-native applications are programs designed to work in a cloud computing environment. They operate in the cloud and are designed to exploit cloud computing's inherent advantages as a software delivery model. A native app is a software designed for use on a particular platform or device. Cloud-native applications make use of microservice architecture.
It is an efficient way to allocate resources that allows the application to be flexible and adaptable to a cloud environment. Cloud-native applications are designed, developed, and delivered differently than traditional cloud-based monoliths, used by DevOps practitioners to promote business agility. Cloud-native applications are highly manageable and resilient and come with shorter application lifecycles.
Benefits of cloud-native applications
Cloud-native applications are specially designed to take advantage of the performance and efficiency of the cloud. Following are some of the top benefits of cloud-native apps, including below:
Cost-effectiveness
It is easier to scale up computing services and storage resources based on requirements. Thus, there is no need for load balancing and overprovisioning of hardware. Virtual servers can be added easily for testing, and cloud-native applications can be up and running fast. Containers help to improve the number of microservices running on a host, which saves time, resources, and money.
Independently scalable
Each microservice is logically isolated and can be scaled up independently. So if you change one microservice to scale up, it will affect the others. Therefore, you may need to update a few components of an application significantly faster compared to others, where a cloud-native architecture comes into play.
Portability
Cloud-native applications are vendor-neutral and use containers to port microservices between different vendor infrastructures, helping avoid vendor lock-in.
Easy to manage
Cloud-native applications use automation to deploy app features and updates. Developers can track all microservices and components as they are being updated more frequently. Since applications are divided into smaller services, one engineering team can focus on a specific microservice and doesn't have to worry about how it will interact with other microservices.
Reliability
As containers are used for these cloud-based applications, a failure in one microservice does not affect other microservices.
Visibility
Since a microservice architecture isolates services, it makes it easier for engineering teams to study applications and learn how they function together.
Why You Need to Build Cloud-Native Applications?
AWS Lambda and Azure Function allow infrastructure management to become effortless thanks to their serverless platforms, users no longer have to worry about configuring networks, allocating storage, provisioning cloud infrastructure, etc. The main objective of building cloud-native applications is to deliver higher-quality applications with greater agility and scalability without any hassle. The cloud-native application can be the best choice for the following reasons:
- Offers high performance and availability of the application even when there are overloads and lots of user requests.
- Get a faster time to market with faster application development and update
- Best Known for high-end security, scalability, and profitability
- Pay-as-you-go model for all cloud services and resources
- Low development cost with cloud services
Cloud-Native vs Traditional Enterprise Apps
Traditional applications are those applications developed in the past 10 to 20 years and are run on a mainframe or client/server environment. Many of us in the IT field consider these applications "outdated". Traditional apps are grubbers that are still running and have not been stopped yet. These apps are found to be more tedious to expand or promote based on traditional technologies. You may need to spend more money on several additional hardware to upgrade or upscale these applications to the next level when it comes to data storage and support services.
On the other hand, cloud computing has become more popular in recent years, no matter if you are in the IT field or working somewhere else. Traditional applications have been outdated, inactive, and sluggish, but today, we have evolved into a world that is more active, versatile, and fast-moving. It has been about ten years since Cloud-Native Applications started making a great impression due to significant changes in the process and ideas. Thus, creating a huge difference between Traditional and Cloud-Native Applications.
Therefore, traditional applications have helped people to transform the way they have been running their businesses over the years. While cloud-native architecture deeply focuses on enhancing the infrastructure and making use of the full potential of business to achieve greater scalability and reliability. That’s the reason why cloud-native apps are most preferred over traditional enterprise applications due to their superior performance and scalability.
Development Time
Cloud-native platforms offer complete flexibility for developers to build and launch applications in no time. On the other hand, traditional apps require a lot of time from developers and are often developed and released as one big package.
Cost-Effective
The cloud platform offers greater flexibility and lets you pay without downtime for work process execution. All you have to do is create and set up the data storage in traditional enterprise apps.
Delivery Approach
Cloud-native allows organizations to deliver individual software releases quickly and better respond to client needs thanks to a continuous feedback loop. As a result of waterfall development, the software is released every few weeks or months, even if parts of the software have already been completed, which delays customer response time.
Security
Cloud-native apps can be accessed from anywhere across the globe while making them convenient to use. In traditional apps, the data can only be accessed by the person with server access.
OS Dependency
The goal of using cloud-native platforms is to abstract away the dependencies whereas traditional platforms come with a dependency between the OS and the application, which in turn are complex to migrate or scale.
How to Build Cloud-Native Applications?
While building and operating apps, organizations must rethink their approach to suit application delivery and be aligned with specific architecture requirements as outlined below;
DevOps: This is the approach where collaboration is made between software developers and IT operations to automate the process of application delivery and infrastructure changes process.
Continuous Delivery: It allows software applications to be released quickly and more efficiently without any risk.
Micro-services: This refers to an architectural approach to creating an app as a group of small independent services running on their own and communicating over HTTP APIs.
Containers: It offers extremely lightweight virtualization by separating a single server into one or more isolated containers more dynamically. Containers are best known for greater efficiency and performance than standard Virtual Machines (VMs). Often, they abstract away the OS and the cloud platform underlying the application, allowing them to migrate and manage the application and its dependencies.
Automation: It has a key role within the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and in Agile and DevOps development methodology, automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. You can allow your software development team to focus on addressing unique business needs, code quality, and robust security by implementing CI/CD in DevOps. Continuous Delivery automates software release processes to deliver incremental updates more frequently while reducing risk. It can even facilitate faster feedback.
Cloud-native security: It provides the best ways to minimize the risks in the enterprise by fixing bugs and vulnerabilities in the software application.
Languages & Tools Used
The development of cloud-native apps can be made using any web programming language. Even though your cloud provider may not support all of them, it would depend on your needs. Reactive programming, concurrency, parallel algorithms, composability, and asynchronous behavior are important factors when considering microservices architecture. Top programming languages like .NET, Python, Node.js, Java, and Golang have been widely supported by all cloud providers.
Tools used to manage cloud-native applications include:
Prometheus: Records time-series data for overspread Microservices by the monitoring tool.
Grafana: An open-source analytics visualization tool for creating charts, graphs, and alerts for the web while integrated with supported data sources
Kubernetes: The ability of container orchestration for managing and deploying containers.
Istio: Recognized for universal traffic management, security, and telemetry for complex deployments
ELK Stack: Provides complete monitoring of the entire development process.
Fluentd: Sending out log aggregations to tools like AWS CloudWatch by gathering and sharing log data.
Things to Consider While Building Cloud-Native Applications
Cloud-native applications have a native architecture that empowers IT operations teams to automate and streamline processes to deliver successful results to customers. Considering the following things will help you get the most from your development process:
Classification for Improvements
It’s not always necessary for each application to be a cloud-native one. Software developers and business professionals should prioritize legacy and Greenfield workloads to determine the best strategies, ROI, and technical feasibility for each project they’re working on.
Choosing between self-paced and immersion skills development
Agile development practices like continuous delivery, based on immersive learning, give teams a solid grasp of agile development methodologies.
Code to a Contract
Developers must practice a 12-factor principle to administer platforms and services. Developers may wish to consider using different technologies and patterns for their apps. It would be wise to identify the platform limitations and look for innovative ways to overcome them rather than creating a new one for each app every time.
Building and Buying a platform selection
Some IT professionals make use of both open-source automation and container technologies to create a platform from scratch. A DIY platform, however, will require continuous maintenance since component selection, deployment, and integration can potentially snag the development process.
Closing Line
Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular among businesses worldwide due to its limitless potential. Therefore, building cloud-native applications includes the best practices such as multi-cloud implementation, external configuration, platform selection, health and metrics monitoring, service registry, service discovery, and dynamic scheduling. If you are a business planning to invest in the cloud, building a cloud-native app can be profitable for you and your business in 2024.