Evolution to Cloud-Native Platform
In digital transformation, two terms have been making waves in recent years: cloud computing and cloud-native technology.
The Term Cloud Native seemed to be first appeared around 10 years ago in 2013 AWS Re: Invent.
While they may sound similar, they represent distinct paradigms in the ever-evolving landscape of technology. In this blog post, we will delve into the essence of cloud-native technology, exploring its nuances and differentiating it from conventional cloud computing.
Understanding Cloud Computing: A Foundation
Before we decipher cloud-native technology, it’s crucial to grasp the fundamentals of cloud computing. At its core, cloud computing refers to delivering computing services — such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence — over the internet to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. Cloud computing has undeniably revolutionized the way businesses operate, providing on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources.
The Evolution to Cloud-Native: Embracing Agility and Scalability
Cloud-native technology, on the other hand, represents a paradigm shift in software development and IT operations. It is not merely about where applications are hosted; it is a methodology, an approach that leverages cloud computing to build and run scalable and resilient applications in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
Containerization:
One of the key components of cloud-native technology is containerization. Containers encapsulate an application and its dependencies, ensuring consistency across various environments. Docker, for instance, allows developers to create, deploy, and run applications in containers, enabling seamless portability and scalability.
Microservices Architecture:
Cloud-native applications are typically designed as a collection of small, loosely coupled services known as microservices. Each microservice performs a specific business function and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This architecture enhances agility, allowing organizations to update, scale, and maintain different application parts without affecting the entire system.
DevOps Practices:
Cloud-native development emphasizes collaboration and communication between software development and IT operations teams. DevOps practices automate the software delivery process, ensuring continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring. This automation accelerates development cycles and enhances the overall efficiency of the development pipeline.
Cloud-Native Promises
Cloud-native promises increased agility to ship new features quickly without compromising availability, making it quicker to respond to changing customer demands.
Any application running in the cloud can't be considered a cloud-native application, to make it cloud-native there are at least 4 pillars that should be considered.
1. Microservices:
These services are designed to be small allowing teams to take ownership of their services and deploy and scale them independently on their timeline. These are loosely coupled they communicate with each other via well-defined APIs.
For Example:
In Consumer applications for e-commerce order service on completion of an order submitted event internally talks to payment service and inventory services.
This can be achieved using popular message queue services like Kafka and payment service will consume the event and proceed with the payment workflow and the inventory service will consume the messages and work on inventory updates.
2. Containers and Orchestration
Cloud-native applications are packaged in containers, containers are lightweight components that contain everything needed to run a microservice in any environment.
Container Orchestration is an essential component for large cloud-native applications. As the number of microservices grows, container orchestration manages a large number of containers so all the microservices can run smoothly as a single unified application.
A popular container orchestration platform is Kubernetes. it oversees and controls where containers run, detects and repairs failures, and balances load between microservices.
3. DevOps
Cloud-native applications are built using a microservice architecture. different services are developed, deployed, and scaled independently of each other. this required high-level collaboration between the development team and operations teams, as well as a significant investment in automation for the development and deployment process. This is where DevOps comes into play.
DevOps is a development practice that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and automation between the development and operations teams to deliver cloud-native applications quickly and reliably.
A Critical component of DevOps is CI/CD. It enables teams to automate the software development and deployment process, making it faster and more reliable.
The continuous integration part of CI/CD refers to the practice of regularly merging code changes into a shared repository and running automated tests to ensure that the code is working as expected.
Continuous Delivery part of CI/CD refers to the practice of automating the deployment of the software to production enviroments, often through the use of automated deployment pipelines.
4. Could Native Open Standards
As the Cloud Native ecosystem matures, critical components become standardized, and best practices become widely available. Being cloud-native means leveraging these standardized components as building blocks and following these best practices as they become available.
Well knows standards:
Modern Design, Containers, Backing Services, Automation, and Microservices.
Kubernetes is a widely known orchestration project.
Distributed Tracing is an essential component of observability, it tracks requests as they propagate through a maze of microservices.
Service Mesh is a core infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication between microservices.
Distinguishing Cloud-Native from Cloud Computing:
Focus on Methodology:
Cloud computing primarily deals with the delivery of IT resources, while cloud-native technology is more concerned with how applications are built and deployed. Cloud-native development emphasizes principles like agility, scalability, and resilience.
Container Orchestration:
Cloud-native applications often leverage container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. These platforms automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, ensuring seamless orchestration in dynamic environments. While cloud computing can use containers, cloud-native technology relies heavily on them for its flexibility and efficiency.
Continuous Delivery and DevOps:
Cloud-native development embraces the culture of continuous delivery and DevOps practices, promoting collaboration and automation throughout the software development lifecycle. These practices are intrinsic to the cloud-native approach but are not necessarily exclusive to cloud computing in general.
In essence, cloud-native technology represents the next phase in the evolution of application development and deployment. By embracing containerization, microservices architecture, and DevOps practices, organizations can build applications that are not only hosted in the cloud but are also designed to harness the full potential of cloud computing technologies. Cloud-native applications are agile, scalable, and resilient, allowing businesses to respond swiftly to market demands and stay ahead in the digital race.
Understanding the distinctions between cloud computing and cloud-native technology is pivotal as we navigate the ever-changing technological landscape. Embracing the principles of cloud-native development can empower organizations to innovate faster, enhance user experiences, and drive unparalleled growth in the digital era.
