Unlock The Potential Of Cloud-Native Application Development
20 Aug 2021
Cloud-native applications offer a whole new level of scalability & flexibility in the cloud. It is across public & private cloud environments. This application development methodology prepares organizations for both the present day and the future. And, guess what the apps are built quicker and updated instantly with higher quality and limited to no risk, compared to any other approach
In the new normal, while the usage & application of the cloud is prevalent there seem to be many questions on this adoption approach. Read on to learn as we try to answer why cloud-native app development is gaining serious momentum, why they are popular & how you can leverage it to take your business forward.
Table of Contents:
- What is a Cloud-Native Application?
- Benefits of Cloud-Native Applications
- Why build Cloud-native Applications?
- Cloud-Native vs Traditional Enterprise Apps
- How do you build Cloud-Native Applications?
- Languages & Tools Used for Cloud-Native App Development
- Things to Consider When Building Cloud-Native App
What is a Cloud-Native Application?
Application that is purposely built to take advantage of limitless computing capabilities on a specific platform or device by utilizing microservices architecture.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Applications
Wondering why cloud-savvy companies are turning their heads towards cloud-native development?
Here’s why:
Adaptability
The applications can evolve with the changing needs of businesses without creating dependencies that affect customers. For instance, if a company decides to build a mobile app, they can build the front end and use APIs to gain access to data without making any modifications in the backend code.
Scalability
They make use of software-defined infrastructure to get rid of hardware dependency. It utilizes commodity servers for horizontal scalability instead of using expensive processors, memory & storage for existing servers.
Portability
With the help of containers, developers can write applications that run on all devices including a mainframe without changing the code. With accelerated growth in edge computing, a distributed processing architecture that makes automated decisions possible throughout the network, it’s best to deploy applications whenever required.
Why Build Cloud-Native Applications?
The cloud-native approach of software development helps:
- Achieve faster time to market by speeding up application development and update
- Ensures availability and high performance of the application in case of overloads and complexity in user requests.
- Use of cloud services helps reduce the overall development costs
- Offers a pay-as-you-go model for cloud services & resources
Further, as a business, if you also have a question around whether to go which cloud architecture to go for, check out what we talked about being cloud native vs cloud agnostic.
Cloud-Native vs Traditional Enterprise Apps
| Cloud-Native Apps | Traditional Enterprise Apps | |
| Development Time | Conform to a framework that maximizes flexibility. | Take a lot of time to be built. They are usually developed and released as one big package |
| OS Dependency | Developers utilize the platforms as a means to abstract away the dependencies | Has a dependency between the OS and the application resulting in complex migration and scalability |
| Release Cycle | Ensures a faster release pace for an update specific bug can be located or traced to a particular microservice within a specific container | Amount of time spent searching the problem’s source and then working on the fix results in a delay in response to user queries |
| Development Process Transition | Collaborative – Right combination of people, processes and tools provides a swift and smooth transfer of finished application code into production. | Siloed – Finished application code is managed by the operations team in the production environment that slows the processes |
| Cost-Effective | Pay for what you use and with no downtime for work processes execution | Have to create & set up the data storage and for all the services |
| Security | Offers the capability to access from anywhere across the globe while making it easy to use. | Is a concern as the stored data can be accessed by anyone with server access. One can view and use the data stored, and the application on the cloud |
| Delivery Approach | Continuous Delivery ensures that individual software releases are rapid and offer organizations a better feedback loop to better respond to customer needs. | Waterfall Development results in the release of software every few weeks or months even though components of release are already ready causing a delay in responding to customer needs |
Want to Go Cloud Native?
Rishabh with an experienced team and next-gen tools can develop, test, deploy, and manage native applications.
How Do You Build Cloud-Native Applications?
It requires rethinking of the approach for organizations while building and operating apps to suit application delivery and align the architecture specifics as listed below;
- Microservices – An architectural approach to develop applications as a collection of small services where each of them implements business capabilities as a standalone process and communicates via HTTP APIs or messaging. Each such microservice, as part of the automated system, helps deploy, upgrade and scale the same application by enabling frequent updates to live applications without impacting the performance.
- Containers offer efficiency and speed over standard virtual machines (VMs). This makes it an ideal compute vehicle for deploying individual microservices because of its low overhead on creating & destroying containers and high package density in a single VM (with a unique writable file system and resource quota). We use an open-source container orchestration system with top-of-the-line tools like Kubernetes to drive organizational operations with efficiency and speed.
- DevOps, as you might be aware creates a collaborative culture between software developers and IT operations to deliver high-quality software that solves customer challenges.
- Automation plays a significant role within the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and in Agile and DevOps. With CI/CD in DevOps, software development teams can focus on meeting business requirements, code quality, and security faster. Continuous Delivery offers automation to move incremental software changes into production constantly. It helps deliver software more frequently with less risk and even get feedback faster.
- Cloud-native security offers smart ways to reduce risks in the enterprise by repairing vulnerable software, frequently repave servers and rotate user credentials.
With Rishabh, you can expect a team of highly skilled developers to help migrate your legacy applications onto cloud-native architectures. We help automate routine processes and provide exposure to our DevOps practices. It drives faster time-to-market & strengthens organizational agility.
Languages & Tools Used for Cloud-Native App Development
Practically any web programming language can be used for development. Though it would be largely dependent on the ones supported by your cloud provider and your requirement. For microservices architecture, the support for reactive programming, parallel algorithms, concurrency, asynchronous, and composability is important to consider. Based on our experience, Java, Python, .NET, Golang & Node.js are majorly supported by cloud providers. Each of them has its share of individual strength that powers the project.
Tools for managing cloud-native applications,
- AWS, MS Azure – Platforms offering cloud application development services.
- Kubernetes – Enables container orchestration to deploy and manage containers.
- Prometheus – Monitoring tool that records time-series data for distributed Microservices.
- Fluentd – Helps collect and share log data for sending out log aggregations to tools such as AWS CloudWatch.
- ELK Stack – Offers complete monitoring of the overall development process.
- Grafana – Popular open-source analytics visualization tool to create charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources
- Istio – Enables universal traffic management, telemetry, and security for complex deployments
At Rishabh, with our custom cloud application development services focus we utilize the above listed and best in class tools and technologies for cloud-native app development
Things to Consider When Building a Cloud-Native App
The native architecture empowers operations teams with improved and automated processes that deliver better outcomes for customers.
Here are ways in which you can get more out of the development process:
Prioritizing for Modernization
Every application doesn’t need to be a cloud-native one. IT professionals and businesses need to collectively prioritize legacy and Greenfield workloads to identify strategies, ROI & technical feasibility for every project.
Code to a Contract
Developers need to practice a 12-factor principle to regulate platforms and services. The options available are plenty and developers may want to tap on various technologies and patterns for every app created. However, the smart thing to do here would be to identify platform limitations and focus on ways to innovate rather than starting a new one for every app every time.
Choose between Building and Buying a Platform
Some teams may want to build a platform from scratch using both open-source automation and container technologies. However, component selection, deployment & integration can hamper the app development process and a DIY platform will require continuous maintenance.
Selecting between Self-paced and Immersive Skill Building
Immersive learning gives teams a solid grasp over agile development practices like continuous delivery and forming new development habits.
Final Words
Enterprises around the world are migrating to the cloud very rapidly because of the endless opportunities it can offer to users. As we learned above with cloud-native applications – data management, application development, deployment & providing services is comparatively easy. All of this over a pay-per-use costing model.
If you need a helping hand to support covering all aspects of cloud-native development, Rishabh can be extension of your team, even at a short notice. We ensure in providing global & certified workforce for helping in cloud-native development.
Ready to Begin Your Cloud-Native Journey?
We can help you achieve the flexibility to scale by increasing efficiency & accelerating innovation!
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