Cloud Native for Business Applications
In recent years we’ve seen demand for digital transformation increase at rapid scale, largely accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as many businesses turned to technology to support core business functions. Cloud native technologies have emerged in answer to many business challenges, enabling businesses to build and run applications that harness the full potential of cloud computing.
Leveraging the unparalleled speed, flexibility and scalability of the cloud, cloud native technologies are disrupting traditional ways of doing business and have changed the way software development is done today. But just how can cloud native technology transform your business applications and what are its benefits?
In this article, I’ll explore how the elasticity of cloud native technology (specifically, serverless technology) makes it a good fit for growing enterprises.
What is cloud native?
Cloud native is the concept of building and running applications that take advantage of the cloud computing model. Typically, cloud native business applications may be:
- Software that makes use of SaaS solutions provided by a cloud vendor
- Software where you don’t have to provision your own infrastructure to use it
- Software that is pay-per-use rather than pay-per-instance
- Software that is developed to run in the cloud, that you couldn’t lift and shift to traditional infrastructure
What do we mean by business applications?
Business applications are software that aid a business to function or software that helps a business automate processes. Business applications may not be customer facing, but could instead focus on the running of a business operation. Business applications are commonly found in enterprise scale businesses.
To scale or not to scale?
A lot of the emphasis of using a cloud native solution is how relatively easy it is to scale, processing thousands of requests per second and up to a theoretically unlimited ceiling.
For business applications, that hyper scale is not as much of a pressing concern, but the same mechanism of auto scaling can give a similar benefit. To ‘zero scale’ allows for a business application to run with a low running cost, scaling down when not required but still being accessible when needed. The through-put of a business application is generally quite low — there may be thousands of requests spread consistently throughout the working day and few requests on the weekend.
As you can see from these usage graphs below:
We have peaks in function invocations on working days mainly between 8am and 6pm, but we do have some that appear outside these bounds. Some of these may be batch processes happening at a set interval, but importantly there are instances where it is just a user performing an action out of usual office hours. In this age of flexible working we need to offer more flexibility to self-serve to our end users.
What about cold starts? Don’t users find it the responses sluggish?
With experience of running cloud native applications over the last seven years, I can tell you that end users very rarely notice cold starts. Once an application is running in the morning, the usage pattern generally keeps the most used functions warm, and the lesser used functions are just that, lesser used, and users generally don’t notice those being slightly slower.
Benefits over infrastructure
Using cloud native technology, our teams have been much more focused on delivering features that bring benefits to businesses rather than worrying about infrastructure. Most business applications will need authentication, email or SMS notifications, business logic, and hosting of documents and static files. For a more traditional approach, the infrastructure to run a typical application could be very asymmetrical, complicated and hard to manage.
Cloud native removes a lot of the day-to-day infrastructure work you would expect your DevOps team to carry out. I would always recommend utilising a third-party monitoring tool. These tools are very unobtrusive and allow your team to focus on delivering business benefit while the tool will give you all the insights you need into how your application is performing.
Won’t an off-the-shelf solution be better?
An off-the-shelf solution can be a great start to digitising your business, but you will have to adjust your business processes as you go. More often than not, the need for a business application spins out from a spreadsheet that has been outgrown. Businesses are willing to invest in low code type tools but end up with resources tied up looking after these systems. It’s common for businesses to “make do” with existing apps and systems even if they’re no longer fit for purpose to cut costs or to avoid the friction of change.
This results in inefficiencies which can overcomplicate processes and hamper operations. So, when adding another application into the mix, it’s important to carefully consider your business’ objectives as well as the functional and technical requirements of the application, keeping in mind potential integrations required as well as scalability.
Key takeaways
- You don’t have to run costly servers for your business application
- Invest in a monitoring tool so you can gain insights into how your application performs
- Don’t worry about cold starts, end users rarely notice
- Focus on business benefit and delivering end users features that increase productivity or reduce waste
- Consider your business’ objectives, keeping in mind how you plan to grow and scale when considering an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution
About Leighton
Leighton is a software development business that builds high performing teams and develops successful software applications for its customers. We’re on a mission to help organisations and their customers thrive in today’s fast paced world. For as long as we can remember (and we’ve been around for 30 years) organisations have struggled to deliver digital change. That’s where we come in. We help organisations thrive by bringing people and technology together.
