Cloud-native applications are applications designed and developed with the advantages of cloud technologies in mind, rather than being built with traditional approaches that were the standard before the Cloud was established. These applications use cloud capabilities to enable rapid development, optimization, and interconnectivity. This means that companies can bring products to market faster, discover insights easily, solicit feedback from users, and then roll out improvements rapidly.
To aid this flexible development process, cloud-native apps tend to be built in small pieces, utilizing microservices to complete tasks while remaining lightweight themselves. Cloud-native apps are different from cloud-based apps in that they are built specifically to fully use cloud features rather than just a few cloud services or resources.
Comparatively, legacy applications built with traditional software development methods tend to be monolithic and opaque and run on a single system. Often these systems are “snowflakes,” with hardware infrastructure growing in tandem with the enterprise application into a unique and uncoupled configuration. These legacy apps further run into the challenge of obsolescence, at which point organizations can reflect on the need to migrate their on-premises apps to the cloud.
Cloud-native applications rely on leveraging DevOps, microservices, containers, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) methods, to redefine how developers achieve business goals by changing the use of traditional on-premises infrastructures to the use of cloud environments. For many reasons, costs, security, flexibility, innovation, cloud-native apps are the future for business-critical applications.
While cloud-native apps leverage cloud technologies to deliver rapid value, the term ‘cloud native’ refers to the ideology around developing and running applications within a dynamic distributed computing environment, like a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud.
The overarching design approach in cloud-native is to support applications for a CI/CD style process. Microservices, containers, APIs, and dynamic orchestration are the key cloud capabilities that enable continuous development. Thanks to advances in technology, cloud development considerations will give birth to new, flexible design principles. Today, the current principles used to guide developers when building cloud-native applications are:
Cloud-native application architecture encompasses several technologies that have shifted how engineers address the development process, application architecture, deployment & packaging, and application infrastructure. It is the coordination of these technologies and how apps use their services that define the cloud-native architecture category. Several of those enabling technologies include:
Cloud-native applications inherit many of their benefits from the flexibility architecture underlying the cloud that abstracts away many challenges inherent in older technology architectures. Some of those benefits include:
Aspect |
Cloud-Native Applications |
Traditional Applications |
---|---|---|
Management |
Subscription services help predict IT expenses with exceptional accuracy. IT resources are managed by the CSP, freeing up a company’s staff. |
Complete responsibility for infrastructure and application, preventing downtime and ensuring security is owned by the company, but granting them full customizability. |
Operating System |
Cloud providers handle all operating system maintenance, users just need to choose the right environments for their business. |
Maintaining the OS environment is the responsibility of the enterprise, however, this grants the opportunity to build tight dependencies between applications, the OS, and hardware. |
Resource Capacity |
Resource capacity is dynamically and automatically allocated as demand fluctuates. |
Resource capacity must be manually added if needed, so many teams opt to add more capacity than required to hopefully insure against overloads. The idle capacity is now a cost center. |
DevOps |
DevOps and CI/CD approaches give cloud native app developers collaborative capabilities, and immediate controls to fix or update apps. The ability to rapidly deploy software and fixes allows enterprises the agility to push their business goals.
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Developing for on-premises enterprise infrastructure can mean that the organization is reliant on aging development approaches not suited for cloud development, like in waterfall development. This style forces teams to release large updates periodically, potentially suffering delays, missed opportunities. |
Architecture |
With the advent of APIs and microservices, more than a new architecture that supports cloud native apps better and faster has emerged. Independent microservices have also shaped how development teams work. Separate teams can be tasked with a particular microservice. And that service can be independently maintained. |
Enterprise architectures are characterized as monolithic because they include everything. These bulky and hard-to-manage apps present many challenges: dependency issues, data silos, security, incompatibility with future technologies, etc. |
Scalability |
Cloud architectures aim to automate all of their systems and are ideal for automatically scaling workloads. For many, this is the chief value proposition. |
Typically these solutions do not feature automated scaling. Home-grown automation solutions can cause more harm than good if developed poorly. |
Disaster Recovery |
Containers allow for rapid recovery because of their dynamic nature. If they need to be moved, scaled, or restarted, they can be quick. |
Enterprises run their own systems, and so they may not adhere to a container architecture, but rather use virtual machines. VMs require much more overhead than containers, and so cannot be spun up as quickly. However, VMs are much preferred to a system reset. |
DevOps provides many of the founding principles and best practices for building cloud-native apps. These include:
Security in the cloud is an important concern, especially when many continue to allude to the fact that the growth of cloud and IoT has significantly expanded the Internet, and so the threat surface for cyber-attacks and network invasions. Because of the nature of the cloud, security concerns and responsibilities have shifted. The “Fortress” model was the traditional standard security model for many enterprises—enterprise assets were protected inside the fortress behind company firewalls. Today, because enterprise traffic traverses the public Internet, security has been reconfigured, and new technologies have slowly augmented fortress strategies or replaced them altogether.