An introduction to cloud-native applications
In the continuously competitive market of digital companies, the main issue is IT agility.
However, with technology evolving every day, companies are struggling to catch up with digital transformation, adopt new trends such as the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), mobility, or the Internet of Things (IoT), and change their business models in order to be able to adapt to the new reality of the market.
This delay is caused by the interdependencies of services related to the lifecycle of an IT project, where changes to the source code of a classic monolithic client-server application can destabilize systems in the maintenance phase.
For this reason, companies are looking to adopt more optimized, scalable architectures to ensure resiliency and continuous availability, while minimizing resource consumption costs and implementing cloud-native applications.
This change should be made quickly, especially for start-ups that want to build rigid infrastructures with minimal costs.
A cloud-native approach includes all the concepts of building and deploying scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments on any cloud platform, be it a public, private, or hybrid cloud. Organizations use cloud-native technologies to build and run scalable applications.
Today, application environments are modern, automated, and dynamic because we can publish any application and store data in a public, private, or hybrid cloud. We can use technologies such as containers, service fabric, and immutable infrastructure, and patterns such as microservices, declarative APIs, and event buses. These techniques help us implement loosely coupled solutions that are easy to maintain, resilient, and observable.
The robust automation of environments, as in the case of infrastructure as code, allows engineers to make major changes frequently without worrying about the impact and with minimal effort.
A cloud-native application has specific features that present the pillars of cloud-native architecture and a design pattern, used to build a new application from scratch that can be deployed in a cloud environment.
Microservices are a part of cloud-native application architecture and run as a bundle independently of each other on a containerized and orchestrated platform. They connect and communicate through APIs.
Figure 1.1 – The pillars of cloud-native architecture
Applications based on cloud-native application architecture are reliable and provide scalability and performance to meet the recurring goal of achieving a fast time to market, if they are well designed.