Cloud-Native – Empowering Modern Application Development
Today enterprises need software that helps them drive innovation, meet market demands, and keep business operations agile. Though they have adopted cloud strategies and migrated applications to the cloud, businesses are finding it challenging to get high computing power services for developers and generate suitable ROI.
They are now looking to adopt a cloud-native approach with applications that are explicitly designed to operate on the cloud. Companies can use these applications to work remotely accessing the same content and features from multiple devices when user bases are in the millions and dispersed around the globe.
The Cloud-Native application allows businesses to capitalize on the full power of the cloud, and increase scalability, improve flexibility, decrease time to market, deliver better customer satisfaction, and reduce overall costs.
Understanding Cloud-Native Applications
Cloud-Native Applications are applications developed using cloud-based technology, hosted and managed in the cloud throughout the entire lifecycle. They are designed to deliver business value including better security, top performance, and improved customer experience. They help accelerate new application processes, optimize the existing one, and connect them all to keep pace with business needs.
Cloud-native applications are not limited to a particular public cloud infrastructure. They are specifically designed to supply a stable development and automatic management experience across private, public, and hybrid clouds. The development and delivery of Cloud Native applications are multidimensional, affecting culture, process, architecture, and technology.
The essentials of Cloud-Native Applications – Development and Deployment
Cloud-native application development is about designing and running applications that take full advantage of the cloud computing model. These models are based on the following-
Service-Based Architecture
Service-based architecture, such as microservices, is at the core of the cloud-native application architecture. Each microservice accomplishes a different function, like implementing, communicating, or running a particular process. They mainly operate without any assistance and hence are called loosely coupled.
With the help of microservices, the developers can make changes without having to update or affect the whole application. This service-based design helps organizations increase application development speed without increasing complexity. Microservices are packed into containers that further assist a developer’s ability to change only a particular group of microservices.
API-Based Communication
All businesses engage in extensive internal and external communication. API-based communication help businesses create new capabilities and opportunities, reduce complexity and overhead deployment.
The API-based design allows communication through service interface calls over the network, reducing the risk of direct linking, shared memory models, or direct reads of another team’s datastore. All the communication APIs can be integrated into a single existing solution cost-effectively. This design extends the reach of applications and services to different devices and forms, improving productivity, streamlined workflows, and enhanced collaboration.
Container-Based Infrastructure
Cloud-native applications rely on containers performing a well-defined task, for a standard operational model across technology environments. They include all the software settings, libraries, and other dependencies needed to run them.
Containers help accelerate the development and deployment process across different environments and infrastructures, including public, private, and hybrid. It uses operating system virtualization capabilities for dividing the computing resources among multiple applications while ensuring that the applications stay secure and isolated from each other.
Cloud-Native applications are highly scalable and can add on more capacity through automation within the container infrastructure. It allows them to be environment-agnostic as they can be hosted inside the same virtual machine or physical server. They eliminate application conflicts between developers and operations teams, enabling greater collaboration between developers and testers.
DevOps Processes
DevOps processes for Cloud-Native approaches follow agile methods with continuous delivery to increase the velocity of the business. The goal of DevOps is to align everyone with the same tools and a standard set of priorities. It focuses on building and delivering applications collaboratively by development, quality assurance, security, IT operations, and other teams involved.
The path to Cloud-Native Application Journey
- Regardless of the industry or size, the cloud-native approach requires the development and IT operations team to evolve in many different ways to build and deploy applications faster and more efficiently.
- Many organizations find it hard to replace their legacy applications as they are crucial to the business operations and drive revenue generation. While integrating such legacy systems with cloud-native applications, it’s better to move the existing monolithic architecture to a more modular, service-based architecture and API-based communication.
- In order to speed up software development, reusable components such as caching service, workflow engine, integration connectors, data virtualization service, serverless framework, etc. must be optimized and integrated into the underlying cloud-native infrastructure.
- Cloud-native development requires determining the right tool for the right task, i.e., the right blend of frameworks, languages, and architecture to support the specific development requirement and update in line with technological changes.
- Providing self-service allows developers to access the infrastructure they need, and whenever they need it. But it requires control and visibility by the IT operation team to turn out as a useful model.
- IT or infrastructure automation can be integrated to eliminate manual tasks and accelerate the delivery of cloud-native applications. It can be easily integrated into and component right from network and infrastructure provisioning to application deployment and configuration management.
Why build Cloud Native applications with iLink Digital?
No matter what industry, businesses are more and more reliant on technology at the center of their business strategy. This requires the development of new applications to deliver higher quality customer service. iLink understands this need for improvements across architecture, infrastructure, and processes. We help organizations explore the cloud-native journey and drive innovation and speed within the enterprise.
