What are cloud-native applications?

What are cloud-native applications – and how are they different from cloud-based apps? What are their advantages? Find out more in our guide.

A cloud-native app is one that was written specifically for cloud computing. These programmes make use of the cloud's intrinsic qualities by being deployed, managed and executed remotely.

Cloud-native applications use microservice architecture. This divides up the available resources across many services to make the app more malleable and cloud-ready.

Advocates of DevOps point to the agility that cloud-native apps can give to businesses. They're unlike your typical cloud-based monolithic apps in every way. In addition to being robust, controllable and visible, the life cycles of cloud-native apps are much shorter.

The basics of cloud-native application architecture

Cloud-native applications use the computing frameworks provided by the cloud and the cloud services provided by these frameworks. As a result of the fact that not all services are hosted on the same server, developers of cloud-native applications are required to build a network between machines using software-based architectures.

The services are hosted on various servers, each of which is located in a separate physical location. Applications can scale out horizontally with the help of this architecture.

But since the infrastructure enabling cloud-native apps doesn't operate locally, the apps themselves need to be developed with redundancy. This way, the programme can tolerate a breakdown in the underlying hardware and automatically remap IP addresses.

Cloud-native vs. cloud-based apps

The terms "cloud-native" and "cloud-based" are often used interchangeably. They both operate on public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures, but there are key differences in their designs.

Cloud-based apps are built for cloud and cloud platform use. Although cloud-based apps may use dynamic cloud infrastructure, they don't always fully exploit these features.

Cloud-native applications have been created especially for the cloud. The development of cloud-native applications uses the inherent qualities of the cloud and can be adjusted to its changing environment.

Cloud-native applications are more developed and advanced. They need their architecture to be designed from scratch – you can't simply upgrade older software.



Their use of microservice architecture is what distinguishes them from cloud-optimised web apps, monolithic web apps or N-tier apps.

Best practices for cloud-native application development

DevOps is built on operational excellence, which informs best practices for creating cloud-native apps. Companies will take a variety of approaches to development depending on the nature of the business challenge being solved and the tools at their disposal while working with cloud-native architecture.

When designing a cloud-native app, it's important to think about development, performance metrics and how your team will encourage continuous improvement as the app ages. There are five aspects of this.

1. Automation. This enables reliable provisioning of cloud application environments across different cloud service providers. With automation, modifications to a codebase can be monitored with infrastructure as code (IaC).

2. Monitoring. The team should constantly monitor the development environment and application usage. They should be able to monitor everything with ease – from the underlying infrastructure to the application itself.

3. Documentation. Cloud-native app development is a collaborative effort involving multiple teams working separately. It's essential to keep detailed documentation so that you can monitor the application's progress and see each team's contributions.

4. Formulation of incremental changes. Applications and their underlying architectures should be modified in a gradual and reversible way. That way, groups can adapt to new circumstances without cementing faulty assumptions. IaC allows programmers to monitor modifications made to a code base.

5. Designing for failure. It's important to have procedures in place when problems arise in the cloud. This necessitates the use of test frameworks to mimic failures for analysis.

Benefits of cloud-native applications

Cloud-native applications are built specifically for the cloud and can take full advantage of its streamlined operations. These are just a few of the many advantages of using them:

They're cost-effective

When more space or processing power is required, either can be added. The need for hardware redundancy and load balancing can thereby be avoided.

Adding virtual test servers is simple and cloud-native apps can be deployed rapidly. You can save time, resources and money by using containers to run as many microservices as possible on a single host.

They're independently scalable

It's possible to scale up or down any individual microservice without affecting others. If some parts of an app need to be updated more quickly than others, a cloud-native architecture can handle that.

They're portable

Cloud-native applications don't favour one cloud provider over another – and they use containers to make it easy to move microservices around.

They're reliable

These cloud-based applications use containers to ensure that the failure of a single microservice has no impact on other services.

They're easy to manage

The process is simple to control. App features and updates can be rolled out more quickly and reliably with cloud-native applications because of automation. Developers can monitor all changes made to microservices and other components in real-time.

Because of the modular nature of microservices, a single engineering team can concentrate on developing a service without worrying about how it will interact with other services in the application.

They offer visibility

Because a microservice architecture compartmentalises services, it's easily visible to engineering teams.

Conclusion

The most crucial consideration for businesses is whether to rearchitect to a microservice architecture if you move an entire programme to the cloud-native paradigm. This approach has the advantages we mentioned above but takes up substantial resources.

An alternative is to move towards cloud-native by introducing microservices for novel use cases and then rebuilding the whole programme later. In some situations, this incremental approach could make more sense.

Ascend Cloud Solutions is an experienced cloud services firm based in Cork, Ireland. Our mission is to make the cloud as clear as day. Are you interested in our managed cloud migration services ? Please don't hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.