The Rise of Cloud Native Software Development
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Cloud Native Software |
What is Cloud Native
Software?
It is an application designed and built to leverage resources that are provided
via cloud computing services. Rather than using on-premises servers and
infrastructure, its applications are designed to take advantage of cloud
computing delivery and consumption models like serverless computing,
microservices, and continuous delivery.
Microservices Architecture
One of the core architectural principles of software development is adopting a
microservices architecture. With microservices, large monolithic applications
are broken down into independent, collaborating components or Cloud
Native Software. Each microservice is small, loosely coupled, and
highly cohesive. This means they can be independently developed, tested,
deployed and scaled.
Microservices architectures are well-suited for cloud environments as services
can be packaged and run as independent processes that communicate over
well-defined APIs. This allows fine-grained scaling of services based on
resource usage and Cloud Native Software. Services can also be independently
upgraded and maintained without impacting the entire application.
Containerization
Containerization is another key aspect of cloud native applications. Services
developed using microservices are packaged into containers using container
images. Containerization allows bundling code and dependencies together in
standard units that can be easily run anywhere.
Popular container platforms like Docker provide portable runtime environments
that enable deploying and scaling containerized microservices across cloud and
on-premises infrastructure. Containers allow for faster deployments, greater
scaling flexibility, and easier migrations between environments compared to
virtual machines.
Continuous Delivery and DevOps
Cloud native applications are designed for continuous delivery using modern
DevOps practices. Code changes can be frequently built, tested and released
through automated pipelines. New versions of services can be rolled out
independently without complex coordinated deployments.
Monitoring and logging infrastructure provide visibility into the health and
performance of services in production. Fault handling is designed to
automatically respond to failures to maintain availability and reliability targets.
Continuous delivery gets new features and fixes to end users faster while also
reducing risk.
Serverless Computing
Serverless computing can be used to build event-driven, responsive cloud native
apps without maintaining servers. With serverless, developers only pay for the
resources used when responding to incoming events like API calls, file uploads
and database changes. Platforms like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions handle
provisioning and scaling servers automatically based on traffic.
This makes serverless well-suited for episodic, real-time workloads that are
unpredictable in nature or scale. It reduces operational overhead while
allowing developers to focus on business logic. Serverless has simplified
building highly-available systems with auto-scaling and pay-per-use economics.
Distributed Systems Management
Cloud native apps are distributed by design and may span availability zones or
regions. Service discovery allows references between services without hardcoded
dependencies. Load balancers ensure efficient routing of traffic across
instances. Centralized configuration enables flexible deployments and rollbacks
using Git version control practices.
Monitoring distributed systems is vital for observability. Distributed tracing
provides end-to-end visibility for troubleshooting performance bottlenecks,
failures and errors across services. Log aggregation streams diagnostics to
centralized monitoring for correlation and anomaly detection. Alerting notifies
operators about events requiring remediation.
Standardization and Governance
While cloud native principles emphasize agility, standardization is important
to ensure quality and security. Configuration as code and infrastructure as
code templating helps standardize environments and deployments. Continuous
Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines are automated across teams.
Open source tools and practices like CNCF open standards improve portability
between platforms. Governance provides policy, audit, lifecycle management and
security best practices across teams and projects. This balance of agility and
standardization enables large-scale application development.
Benefits of Adoption
Migrating or building new applications using its principles provides several
strategic and operational benefits to businesses. It allows scaling elastically
to handle sudden traffic spikes. High availability is built-in using principles
like redundancy, self-healing and auto-scaling. Continuous delivery accelerates
time to market for new features.
Development is more productive using container-based local environments that
match production. Teams can independently develop, deploy and scale
decentralized services. Operations complexity is reduced since infrastructure
is software-defined and auto-managed. Granular metering with serverless allows
optimizing costs based on actual usage patterns. Disaster recovery is more
robust using geographically distributed deployments.
The techniques and tooling that compose cloud native development are enabling a
new generation of digital services that are more scalable, resilient and
cost-effective to build and operate in the cloud era. Companies adopting these
practices gain competitive advantage through faster innovation, reduced costs
and ability to respond to changing market demands more nimbly.
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