TABLE OF CONTENTS
reading time: 10 min
Navigate through the article!
Find the topic you are interested in and proceed to it directly from the table of contents!
Time of hardware and accustomed servers has gone, a new era of cloud computing came and brought new standards to application development and its running.
About 6-7 years ago people realized they needed sufficient changes in the approach to development of the app infrastructure if they want to go to cloud smoothly and not to stumble over each hindrance during migration. Thus, development of cloud native applications became the most spoken about topic in the IT industry.
Cloud-native applications help companies succeed in fast-developing software-driven markets, respond to customer needs faster, and, hence, stay far ahead of the competitors.
Find out our introduction article about cloud native app development where we uncover all main points of cloudware, tools, use cases and best practices of application refactoring.
Cloud native is a method of application development, running, and optimization, based on the best practices of cloud computing. This method enables developers to utilize the cloud computing resources at full capacity and integrate new technologies like serverless, Kubernetes or microservices faster.
Ashesh Badani, VP and GM of Cloud Solutions at Red Hat, explained in short in this video how he understands the application built in a cloud fashion.
Yes. Applications hosted in cloud are not always cloud-native. The most distinguishing signs of such stowaways are:
Essentially, cloud-native means that absolutely every operation is made within the cloud environment - from coding, testing, deploying, up to further running and optimization.
What are the characteristics of cloud native application distinguishing it from simple monolith hosted in the cloud?
Okay, we figured out what is cloud-native app and it's time now to understand how your company will benefit from it.
There are key advantages of cloud application development:
Resilience and greater fault tolerance
Cloud native development a priori deals with contemporary approaches like, e.g. microservices, kubernetes in cloud etc. It means that the application itself owns such properties like self-healing in case of downtime: if a container stops operating, another container will be up immediately. Or another example: if there is a sudden failure of a service within so-called "microservices net", it will not impact the operation of the full infrastructure, as it could happen to monoliths. In this case, you just isolate the issue and fix it, without need to stop the entire system. Thus, uptime of almost 99% is achieved!
Security
Security is an integral part of any application, even if it is marginally native to cloud. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure take over the responsibility for secure data storage and its utilization.
Beyond this, it becomes possible to set up automated quality checks to enable strict code supervision. So, each time when developers commit any changes to the code, all main vulnerabilities are defined before deployment to production.
No-vendor lock-in
Hype around cloud native development results in growth of open-source tools which liberated companies from N-years-long licenses and enterprise-level fees. It means you can switch the tools even more easily if you are not satisfied with services provided or prices and so forth.
As for hosting, there is no need to choose only one public cloud provider for this. As the recent statistics have shown, multi- and hybrid cloud solutions are gaining more and more popularity among companies:
Multi-cloud and hybrid solutions allow squeezing all benefits out of each provider and make the infrastructure yet more tailor-made. So, even enterprises with their heavy applications and on-premise data centers use at least one private cloud. The evidence of this is the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report:
Integration with modern technologies
Cloud-native encompasses contemporary methods of architecture design like serverless, containerization, microservices, etc. Consequently, companies get extremely responsive infrastructure, which is always ready for scaling up and down!
Reduced cost of infrastructure maintenance
You probably have already seen thousands of articles uncovering the question of cost reduction by using modern IT solutions. Anyway, let's consider main reasons why cloud-native apps entail reduced cost of infrastructure maintenance:
Faster time-to-market delivery
As it has been already mentioned above, cloud-native applications are built in such a manner, that reduces the efforts to maintain and provision the infrastructure. Consequently, the IT team focuses more on features release rather than on infrastructure maintenance.
Beyond this, strict and standardized business processes inside each company enable code, build, deploy continuously, without compromising product quality.
Cloud architecture design involves tens tools helping to run them and provision. You can schematically divide these tools into 6 logical groups:
Application development:
Orchestration and management:
Running:
Provisioning:
Infrastructure: AWS (Amazon Web Services), GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean
Log management, monitoring, tracing: NewRelic, Datadog, Sysdig, Weave, Signal FX, Prometheus, Splunk >, ELK stack, Opentrace, Zipkin.
It's impossible to give a decent piece of advice because proper refactoring depends on what state your infrastructure has and what you are ready to implement now. Indeed not everyone is ready to turn everything upside and start from the beginning. Anyway, we can provide some multi-use recommendations (they are not step-by-step refactoring plans(!)).
Cloud-native development brings organizations to the next level, allowing them to deliver more quality products and services faster. Besides this evident feature, cloud native architecture obtains superior performance and flexibility - add new tools or services, more resources or functionality and scale down them easily when the need fades away.
Indeed, as stated in Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, even enterprises with their huge legacy applications consider hybrid solutions to be the most winning and not rocky way to modernization. Preference of hybrid cloud solution demonstrates the fact that enterprises have refactored only a part of the application and migrated it to the cloud.
The most challenging parts of refactoring process of a legacy workload into modern cloud indigenous system are
If you are a startup or a mid-sized company, revamping (full or partly) or cloud native development from scratch will not be so thorny and painful for you. It will still require time, budget and changes but not so global. So advantages obviously prevail over disadvantages and refactoring will bring its fruits.
Just fill the form below and we will contaсt you via email to arrange a free call to discuss your project and estimates.
