Modern companies rely on advanced IT tools and techniques to build scalable, flexible, and user-friendly applications to upgrade their cloud infrastructure. Web or mobile applications have become core in the current digital landscape. We all understand the concept of web applications and mobile applications, but cloud-native is a recent addition.
So today, we shall try to make you understand the concept of cloud-native technologies.
Cloud-native technologies are the way of the future and offer several benefits to companies that adopt them. They allow for fast and frequent changes to applications without impacting service delivery. That means companies can innovate and stay ahead of the competition, which is essential in today’s fast-paced business environment. Cloud-native technologies are worth considering to gain a competitive edge.
Defining Cloud-native Technologies
Cloud-native technologies refer to a set of practices, methodologies, and tools designed to harness the full potential of cloud computing environments. These technologies are optimized to take advantage of the dynamic and scalable nature of cloud platforms, enabling organizations to develop, deploy, and manage applications more efficiently. The term “cloud-native” emphasizes building applications not just hosted on the cloud but are also built with the cloud’s architecture and principles in mind.
What are Cloud-native Applications?
Cloud-native applications are software applications designed and built specifically to take full advantage of cloud computing environments. These applications are not just lifted and shifted from traditional on-premises infrastructure to the cloud but are architected from the ground up to leverage the unique characteristics and capabilities of cloud platforms. Cloud-native applications are responsible for agility, scalability, resilience, and rapid development and deployment.
Given below are the top 10 features and characteristics of cloud-native applications:
- Microservices Architecture: Cloud-native applications are organized into small, loosely coupled services called microservices. Each microservice handles a specific business function and has been developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This architecture promotes modularity, easier maintenance, and faster development.
- Containerization: Cloud-native applications are packaged into containers using technologies like Docker. Containers encapsulate the application code, runtime, libraries, and dependencies, ensuring consistency and portability across different environments.
- Orchestration: Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes automate tasks deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. These platforms handle load balancing, scaling, self-healing, and rolling updates.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Cloud-native development involves defining infrastructure using code, allowing for automated provisioning and configuration. Infrastructure changes can be version-controlled, tested, and deployed using Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
- DevOps and CI/CD: Cloud-native applications embrace DevOps practices, where development and operations teams collaborate closely to automate processes. Continuous integration and Continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines ensure rapid and reliable software delivery.
- Resilience and High Availability: Cloud-native applications are resilient to failures as they use redundancy, failover mechanisms, and distributed architectures to ensure high availability and minimize downtime.
- Statelessness: Cloud-native applications typically follow a stateless design pattern, meaning they do not rely on storing session or application state on individual servers. It allows for easier scaling and fault tolerance.
- API-First Design: Cloud-native applications expose well-defined APIs that enable communication and integration with other services and promote modularity by building composite applications.
- Observability and Monitoring: Cloud-native applications incorporate robust monitoring, logging, and observability practices to gain insights into application behaviour and performance. It helps identify issues and optimize performance.
- Automated Infrastructure Management: Cloud-native applications automate various aspects of infrastructure management, including scaling, updates, and recovery. It reduces manual intervention and ensures consistency.
Conclusion
You can get cloud-native applications engineered for your business to harness the benefits of cloud computing. Our IT team ensures the development, deployment, and management of your specific software more efficiently, responsively, and resiliently in dynamic cloud environments.
Contact us today.
