Building Cloud Native Application

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The Cloud Native term is getting increasingly popular for modern applications which make best use of the cloud, containers and orchestration. There are many more open-source software available for each area like ‘build’, ‘deploy’, ‘monitoring’ etc. You can run an existing application on cloud, but that does not make it cloud native. Cloud native applications are independent services, packaged as self-contained, lightweight containers that are portable and can be scaled quickly based on the demand.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) plays a vital role in fostering open-source technologies to support adoption of cloud native applications and also defining the standards. The CNCF lists immutable infrastructure, microservices, declarative APIs, service meshes, and containers as the technological blocks of cloud-native architecture.

Her are a few characteristics of cloud native applications

Automation

Application needs to use some common standards, interfaces, and formats in order to get it deployed without human intervention. Additionally, developers can use blue-green deployment strategy to make improvements to the application without any disruption to the user experience. Cloud native application are designed to deliver using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, which is the most important aspect for automating the building, testing, and deployment.

Independent and flexible

The application should be decoupled from the infrastructure resources so that it can be moved across Nodes. By containerizing the microservices, cloud-native applications run independently of the underlying operating system and hardware. Containerized micro services can be moved across nodes and even one cluster to another. This helps in deploying cloud-native applications on premises, on cloud infrastructure, or on hybrid clouds seamlessly.

Resilient and Scalable

Traditional applications usually have a single point of failure, application stops working if the main process crashes or due to any underlying network/ hardware issues. Auto recovery is not built in the traditional applications, human intervention is required to revive the application health. A well-designed cloud native application is able to survive and is serviceable even in the event of an infrastructure outage. Cloud native application can be made highly available as they are distributed by design.

Dynamic

A container orchestrator such as Kubernetes can make optimal usage of the available resources. It can scale up or down on-demand based on application traffic. It can also run multiple copies across multiple availability zones to achieve high availability. 

Distributed

Cloud native is an approach to building and running applications that takes advantage of the distributed and decentralized nature of the cloud. Instead of deploying your code as a monolithic application, cloud native application is based on distributed microservices architecture.

Monitoring

Distributed applications are usually difficult to debug and trace. To gauge the health of the application, it’s important to monitor the logs and metrics generated by the application, and underlying infrastructure. Cloud Native applications should stream the logs to a centralized storage. Monitoring tools can be run on the centralized logs to generate alerts real-time.