Cloud-native applications are developed, refined, distributed, and managed using cloud technologies at every stage. They are based on DevOps development paradigms, Agile methodologies, cloud platforms, containers, and microservices, and leverage the latest technologies to speed up the development of new applications, update existing ones, and interconnect them in a standardized and efficient way.
What are cloud-native applications?
Cloud-native applications leverage the winning features of cloud computing, particularly scalability, flexibility, and resilience. They are based on the paradigm of interdependent services, or microservices, which give them greater agility and more efficient use of resources.
Agility benefits in particular, since cloud native development enables agile development practices such as DevOps and CI/CD, which give greater flexibility and scalability to the products created. Furthermore, cloud native applications do not require high initial setup costs, since they are developed and used directly in the corporate cloud. The specific characteristics of the cloud also make security and service quality operations more agile, for example, release management.
What is meant by Cloud Native
In general terms, Cloud Native is a term that describes a design and implementation approach, typically in the field of application development, capable of exploiting the most advantageous features of the Cloud from the outset. It is mainly used to highlight the differences compared to non-native environments that have simply migrated to the Cloud, typically characterized by a lower level of efficiency and reduced functionality.
What are the characteristics of cloud native architecture?
To be defined as such, Cloud Native architecture must meet certain specific requirements, which do not only concern infrastructure. In fact, it is not enough for a system to be hosted on a Cloud platform to define it as such, even if it originated directly on it. Instead, it must meet specific characteristics in terms of development, application architecture, distribution, and infrastructure.
Advantages of cloud-native applications
One of the most pressing needs currently felt by organizations is speed of service: the less time it takes to conceive, develop, and deliver functionality and value to customers, the more successful a business model will be. In this regard, cloud-native applications, by making the most of DevOps criteria, can largely automate development, build, test, and deployment processes, unlike what is possible in local processing based on existing proprietary server infrastructures.
Other undeniable business benefits include:
- Greater flexibility
Working with a cloud-native application consisting of a series of independent modules makes it easier for IT managers and development teams to plan and implement new features and updates by choosing the most suitable and cost-effective solutions available on the market for cloud platforms and services.
- Application resilience
A cloud-native application platform typically offers a consistent system of development, control, and automation using public, private, or hybrid cloud resources, while microservices architecture is inherently resilient. When a technical problem occurs in the service, an auto-redundancy mechanism can be implemented, automatically moving application execution to another server or virtual machine.
- Scalability and load control
Cloud-native applications can be designed with auto-scalability and auto-provisioning systems, i.e., using only the necessary resources without incurring additional costs and redundancies, scaling automatically when necessary and avoiding paying in advance for “reserve” resources. The update process can be fully automated, without any manual intervention, avoiding bottlenecks and the need for specialized personnel dedicated solely to this task.
- More agile management
Another important aspect is the simplification of infrastructure management. Using serverless platforms, such as Azure or AWS Lambda, drastically reduces the need to invest considerable resources in purchasing and configuring servers and resources, as well as offering the advantage of not having to deal with open source software updates or proprietary license renewals.
- Reduction of vendor lock-in
At the same time, the long-standing problem of vendor lock-in due to software licenses is avoided, as data exchange via cloud platforms is standardized to allow maximum portability. Therefore, an application, if well designed in this regard, can operate on any platform, public or private, using standard and open source resources, without significant changes to the code or operation.
- Not being tied inextricably to a single vendor but being able to choose from multiple cloud service providers those with the best feature/cost ratio is a concrete advantage of cloud-native applications for every business model.
Cloud-native applications with Sorint
With its extensive experience in the field, Sorint can provide companies with all the tools they need to adopt the cloud-native application paradigm, whether it involves creating the necessary infrastructure or migrating existing infrastructure to the cloud to enable the development methods required by this particular approach. This approach is also an integral part of Sorint’s strategy for its own products. Stolon, for example, is a high-availability PostgreSQL manager integrated with Kubernetes but capable of running on any type of infrastructure, precisely because of its cloud-native design.
In short, Sorint can support companies at any level of cloud-native adoption, providing infrastructure, know-how, or contributing to the development of applications.