How to Define Cloud-Native?
Cloud-native is a system designed to change the way you think about application building.
These systems are designed in a manner to embrace rapid changes in technologies, large scale development, and resilience.
With datasets exploding & consumers wanting more every single day, the businesses are looking out for scalable options helping them in satisfying both demands in the most economic way. The solution is with cloud-native apps, starting from the ground level you leverage microservices, containers, orchestration, and automation.
Heard the crowd say ‘cloud’ out loud? Think Cloud-Native!
Cloud-native applications are developed for the cloud to take fair advantage of its uniqueness for scaling options, as per the enterprise requirements. You get flexible data accessibility through storage, APIs, and streams helping you edge of elasticity, scalability, and the resilience of cloud computing.
Cloud-native applications utilize cloud computing technologies to increase the speed, flexibility, and innovation in the development phase while providing predictable alterations towards creating fresh digital user experiences. With being born and raised in a Cloud environment as against their on-premise counterparts, they reap full advantages of all available cloud computing services.
The basic idea behind cloud-native applications is to replace the capital investment & man-power required to run Enterprise data-centres with limitless on-demand computing services provided by Cloud. With the changing market conditions, one can gain an extra edge and competitive advantage by quickly bringing ideas to market using the cost-effective cloud-native approach.
Cloud-native applications development services are focused on how new-age technologies are packaged, built, and distributed, no matter where they are created and stored. When you are creating these cloud-native applications, you gain complete control over the development process.
How to build Cloud-Native Applications?
Every development agency has a unique development process. Their development process will depend on their experts’ capabilities and skills. But, make sure to add these characteristics during the development process.
Updations: Ensure that your application is always available & is fairly updated to maintain the latest trends.
Downtime: Try to minimize the downtime of your applications. It is crucial for any development agency to have a disaster recovery plan in place, as it will help you in dealing and combating with downtime.
Languages: You can use these different languages like CSS, Node.js, Python, HTML, and Java for developing cloud-native app codes. But make sure not to use C, C++, or C# for creating your applications.
Automation: Ensure that your application is fully automated as this will enhance the speed of your application, improving its reliability amongst the users.
Modularity: Ensure that your application has several modules as Microservices are going to run the functions of your application. This will help you in shutting them down whenever you want, helping you update your app easily. If you are not dividing your application into modules, then you may need to shut down your app for making any changes, which will create disturbance in creating a smooth user experience.
Statelessness: Cloud-native applications are free-flowing, generally not tied by anything. Be sure that the app will automatically store the data in the database.
Multitenancy: We ensure that your application can work fully in a virtual space, which means it needs to share the computing resources with other apps.
Why use Cloud-Native Applications for your Business?
The cloud-native application not only brings a fresh mindset in creating the user journey but also helps your target audience in having secured and scalable solutions. Here are some benefits of cloud-native applications which might change the way you want to develop your next App Idea:
1. Faster Release Pace
Time-to-market has become the key differentiator between the most progressive organizations and their lagging competitors.
The faster an organization can conceptualize, build, and release more value to its target audience, the more likely it is to succeed and avoid disruption in today’s rapidly changing markets.
Modern DevOps methodology involves the automation process across all the software delivery phases. Whether it’s about building automation, test automation, or deployment automation, the software delivery pipeline has to undergo a transformation that makes it faster and more predictable.
A cloud-native application supports DevOps processes, enabling automation and collaboration which was not possible in the local application development with limited server-based software delivery processes.
2. Superior Customer Experiences
Building a great customer experience requires you to ship new features faster and keep iterating continuously. It also means you need to take a mobile-first approach to application development and follow human-centred design practices including design thinking.
Today, there is a keen focus on liberating enterprise data by building engaging customer and employee experiences. API-based integration is the predominant way to connect mammoth-sized enterprise data stores with nimble front-end apps.
This gives enterprises the benefit of not having to abandon their decades of investment in legacy platforms, and instead breathe new life into those systems by extending their usage with mobile and web applications.
Indeed, enterprises need to prioritize this in a world where their traditional business models are being threatened and disrupted by smaller, more agile start-ups. Cloud-native applications allow you to improve your customer experiences.
3. Ease of Management
Cloud-native applications also have many options to make their infrastructure management seamless and effortless. It began with PaaS platforms like Heroku, Rackspace, and App Engine about a decade ago and has amplified to serverless platforms like Azure Functions, azure storage, and AWS Lambda, etc.
Serverless computing platforms let you upload code in the form of functions and the platform runs those functions for you so you don’t have to worry about provisioning cloud instances, configuring networking, or allocating sufficient storage. Serverless takes care of it all.
4. Reduction in Costs through Containerization & Cloud Standards
Containers make it easy to manage and secure applications independently of the infrastructure that supports them. The industry now revolves around Kubernetes for managing these containers with scalability.
As an open-source platform, Kubernetes has the industry support and is the main standard for managing resources in the cloud. Cloud-native applications gain full benefits from containerization.
Alongside Kubernetes, there’s a host of powerful cloud-native tools, which allows organizations to build, deploy, and operate software applications more frequently, predictably, and reliably. Which means that there is the standardization of infrastructure and tooling. This helps in cutting down the development costs along with the open-source platforms. Enhanced cloud-native capabilities such as Serverless let you have flexibility in pricing by running dynamic workloads.
5. Build More Reliable Systems
Accessed downtime used to be accepted as normal and achieving bugs shootings used to be very hard and expensive. With modern cloud-native approaches like microservices architecture and Kubernetes in the cloud, you can easily build cloud applications that turn out to be bugs and fault-tolerant with resiliency and self-healing built-in, helps you achieve higher uptime and thus further improve the user experience.
6. Avoid Vendor Lock-in
Gone are those days when legacy vendors used to issue three years of locked-in licensing for proprietary hardware. Today, with the multiplication and amplification of open source and cloud technologies, hybrid- and multi-cloud is becoming the new norm.
Enterprises today use a combination of an on-premise data centre and at least one public cloud platform. Even among cloud platforms, the conversation has graduated to enabling portability across clouds so you’re never locked into one single vendor anymore.
Concluding…
After walking through this guide to cloud-native applications, it's pretty much obvious that planning a shift to cloud by re-architecting or rebuilding your applications as a cloud-native app can be a better approach to utilize its full capacity to your company’s advantage.
You can initiate your app modernization journey by partnering with a cloud-native application development company, that can initiate your application modernization assessment followed by a pilot project which can help you become familiar with the cloud-native environment, before building your cloud adoption further. You’ll have to choose a partner that’s truly an expert in cloud-native computing and can help you define and execute your vision seamlessly.
