There is a storm of “cloudy” terms out there. Just when you think you are ready to move your business processes to the cloud, another cloud rolls in. The latest clever cloud you may be hearing about is cloud-native. Let’s look at cloud-native so that you have a general understanding and can think of use cases for your business.
Cloud-native
At a high-level, cloud-native refers to an application designed to reside in the cloud from the start. Cloud-native is “born in the cloud.” More specifically, cloud-native is the methodology of building and running applications that fully exploit the power of cloud computing. Developers can build and run these applications in a public or private cloud.
Going Deeper into the Cloud
Native cloud native methodology has three characteristics.
1. Microservices
Cloud-native uses a microservices architecture application development style, a modular approach to building and updating applications. It divides services into smaller and smaller pieces and reuses services wherever possible. Developers continually use the product development cycle throughout – develop, build, test, deploy and release.
One way to understand how it works is to look at how Amazon began to use microservices. As with most companies, Amazon previously used a monolith structure where developers expanded the platform with more and more code. With every upgrade, developers had to painstakingly untangle interdependencies, resulting in lost time and revenue.
To optimize the capabilities of cloud technology, developers analyzed the source code and pulled out units of code that served a single, functional purpose and turned them into microservices. For example, they developed a single service for the Buy button on a product page, a single service for the tax calculator function, and so on.
Amazon assigned ownership of each independent service to a team of developers, allowing them to view development bottlenecks more granularly. They could resolve challenges more efficiently since a smaller number of developers could direct all of their attention to a single service. Most importantly, they could work on one service without affecting other functionality.
2. Containers
Containers are software components, like virtual boxes, that hold the microservices code and other required files for that microservice. Because the microservices are isolated, developers can easily access, scale, move or delete the services. By containerizing the microservices, cloud-native applications run independently of the underlying operating system and hardware.
3. Continuous Delivery
Cloud-native apps can run on a continuous delivery model. Developers and operations teams collaborate to build, test and release software updates as soon as they are ready without affecting end users are developers on other teams. This model fosters the collaboration between software developers and operations and creates a culture in practice where building, testing and releasing software happens rapidly, frequently, and more consistently.
In addition, cloud-native applications are dynamically managed in the cloud. They are often built and run on modern cloud-native platforms, which offer hardware decoupling, helping automate deployment, scaling and management of cloud-native applications.
Climbing the Clouds
Implementing a cloud-native approach can bring unprecedented speed, agility, and resilience. New application features and services can now be pushed to live applications for customer use whenever they are ready with zero impact on the end-user experience. In addition, cloud-native applications can be automatically scaled up or down quickly.
This solution can enable you to meet your employee and customer demands while optimizing the usage of resources.
To learn more about the best cloud options for your business, contact iTelecom.
