What Does Cloud Native Really Mean?

Welcome to your Cloud Native masterclass!

It’s no secret that cloud native is quickly becoming one of the most popular modern software development methods. When the topic of cloud-native comes up, though, a lot of people aren’t sure what they’re talking about.

So, what does cloud native mean? We hope that by the end of this post, you will have a thorough knowledge of this term.

Cloud-native techniques, to put it simply, are concerned with the development and storage of cloud-based building and modeling capabilities. Cloud-native utilizes the cloud computing model to its fullest extent. Cloud-native apps are built to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, fluidity, and robustness.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defined cloud-native as;

“Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.”

Some companies use cloud-native techniques to develop their software, and some of the popular ones are Netflix, WeChat, and Uber. For example, Netflix has over 600 services in production and deploys 100 times a day. WeChat has over 3000 production services and deploys 1000 times per day, while Uber has over 1000 services in production and deploys several thousand times per week.

CLOUD-NATIVE LANDSCAPE

Four layers are essential to take note of in the cloud-native stack, and they are;

1. The App Definition and Development Layer

This is the topmost layer of the cloud-native stack. It is concerned with the developing tools used by developers to build applications. These tools can include message systems, databases, container images, and CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery).

2. The Application Architecture layer

This layer of the cloud-native stack is mainly concerned with all required to model and procure the environment that will aid the smooth running of an application. This typically involves addressing the infrastructure as code, building automation, keeping images in a repository, and treating the security needs of an application with authentication tools, policy and key management, and others.

3. The Deployment and Packaging layer

This layer is concerned with everything that runs a cloud-native application. For example, this could be the Docker runtime (if Docker is the container that will be used) and storage and networking.

4. The planning and management layer (CLOUD)

This layer brings together all the necessary tools for deployment, scales, manages applications that have been containerized, and plans and schedules everything.

BENEFITS OF THE CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS

The cloud-native approach has some advantages over regular and traditional application development. This is a result of the fact that the cloud-native has a different working architecture from the conventional means of app development. The benefits that the cloud-native applications have over the traditional approach are:

1. Languages

Most of the apps built with the traditional architecture are made with traditional programming languages like C/C++, C#, and enterprise Java. However, developers tend to use more web-centric languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Go, .NET, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and PHP with cloud-native applications. Therefore, you are very likely to attract the best engineers when it is seen that you use modern programming languages.

2. Elasticity

Cloud-native applications exploit and utilize the fluidity of the cloud by bending utilization, totally relying on insistence and need. However, the traditional architecture of developing software applications would require the physical provision of extra infrastructure to run effectively. There are also cost implications for this. The cloud-native apps allow you to pay for what you use.

3. Downtime

The cloud allows more prolixity, and this is due to the measure and topographical expansion of data centers run by the larger-scale cloud vendors. This is so that disruptions can be managed adequately by quickly redirecting traffic to a different region and avoiding expensive downtime.

4. Automation

Cloud-native methods open up a plethora of automation opportunities for engineers to build once and move on to more significant and demanding challenges.

5. Updatability

Cloud-native apps are built to be consistently updatable, very strong, and available, compared to traditionally made applications that are usually updated once or twice a year using a cascaded procedure. This feature accounts for a boost in productivity as teams concerned with development have the allowance to concentrate on their competitive advantage and give new features to users more consistently than average.

6. Stateless

Cloud-native applications are primarily stateless. This means that they do not carry over data that has been saved from one session to another. This model gives the opportunity to move very quickly across various servers, store easily for a boost in performance, consume less storage, and also helps to avoid any vendor lock-in by not being accustomed to a definite server.

Conclusion

Conclusively, it is safe to say that cloud-native applications are more intentionally built than traditionally made applications. Organizations that use cloud-native methods attract the best talents and more engaging developers, this is why at Woodcore, we’re empowered for the present and the future by using cloud-native technologies to power our core banking solution. It is a very modern approach to software development that every organization should employ.