Seven Models of Cloud Native Applications

Published in

Squadcast

3 min readNov 29, 2023

Introduction

In today’s cloud-driven landscape, organizations are transitioning from legacy monolithic systems to agile, scalable, and secure cloud-native solutions. Some are even forging new cloud-native applications. However, the concept of cloud-native design remains subjective, lacking a universal blueprint. This blog aims to provide clarity and guidance for designing precise cloud-native applications and container deployment. It addresses the intricacies of end-to-end cloud development, encompassing architecture, development, testing, deployment, security, and observability.

Traditionally, separate development teams handle these aspects in isolation. This blog bridges these gaps and outlines seven practical models for standardizing cloud-native architecture, drawing from real-world experience in cloud-native application design and development.

Seven Models of Cloud Native Design

Cloud-native entails developing microservices/micro-frontends apps and deploying them within containers on private, public, or hybrid cloud platforms. These platforms autonomously manage, automate, orchestrate, and secure these applications and their data. Container orchestration engines handle most cross-cutting concerns. This blog outlines key approaches to creating and deploying modern cloud-native apps, emphasizing performance optimization and cost efficiency. These apps leverage cloud-managed SaaS and automatically deploy new source code changes on cloud container platforms. We will now briefly explore these seven models and their business-value components.

Please refer this diagram for quick overview:

1. Modern Design & Development Model

2. Modern Infrastructure/DevOps — CI/CD

3. Build & Deployment Model

4. Cloud Observability

5. 4C’s of Cloud Security

6. Cloud Platforms

7. Automation

Conclusion

Every application has different types and needs. The cloud-native definition is different for other apps and organizations. This same “Seven model” can’t fit on all cloud-native applications architecture. They are sometimes driven by business unit/LOB, technology compliance, cost, and operational overhead.

These are some of the latest and modern industry practices that many IT organizations widely accept.

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Squadcast is a Reliability Workflow platform that integrates On-Call alerting and Incident Management along with SRE workflows in one offering. Designed for a zero-friction setup, ease of use and clean UI, it helps developers, SREs and On-Call teams proactively respond to outages and create a culture of learning and continuous improvement.