What is Cloud Native ?

Published by Diwakar on January 18, 2023January 18, 2023

Cloud native refers to the practice of designing and building software applications that can run in cloud computing environments.

This typically involves using cloud-native technologies and architectures, such as microservices, containers, and Kubernetes, to create applications that can be easily deployed, scaled, and managed in the cloud. Cloud native applications are designed to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, such as increased scalability and cost savings, while also being able to run across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments.

What are Characteristics of Cloud Native?

The components of a cloud native architecture or cloud native technologies typically include:

1. Microservices: breaking down a monolithic application into smaller, independently deployable services.
2. Containers: packaging an application and its dependencies together in a lightweight, portable container.
3. Kubernetes: a container orchestration platform that automates the management and scaling of containerized applications.
4. Service Mesh: a configurable infrastructure layer for microservices application that makes communication flexible, reliable, and fast.
5. CI/CD pipeline: continuous integration and continuous deployment tools that automate the build, test, and deployment of code changes.
6. Observability: including logging, monitoring, and tracing, to gain visibility and understanding of the application behavior and performance.
7. Scalability: the ability to dynamically scale up or down the number of instances of a service based on demand.
8. Resilience: to handle failures, self-healing and self-recovery mechanisms to minimize downtime and ensure high availability.

These components work together to enable cloud native applications to be deployed and managed in a flexible, scalable, and resilient manner, allowing them to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

Why Cloud Native?

Cloud native architectures offer several benefits over traditional, monolithic architectures:

1. Resilience: Self-healing and failure handling are key features of cloud native apps, which reduce downtime and provide high availability.
2. Scalability: Applications that are cloud native may be readily scaled up or down to meet changing demand, enabling businesses to more effectively utilise resources and cut costs.
3. Enhanced Developer Productivity: because to the ability to work independently on various components of the application and deploy them separately thanks to the microservices design and containerization. This results in quicker development and deployment.
4. Flexibility: Because cloud-native apps can operate on a variety of cloud services providers and on-premises environments, businesses are free to select the platform that best suits their requirements.
5. Faster Delivery: Cloud native architectures make it possible for businesses to design, deploy, and iterate on new products and services more quickly.
6. Easy to: upgrade, fix, or roll back a specific service without affecting the entire application thanks to cloud native app development.
7. Cost-effective: Organizations can cut costs by only paying for the resources they actually need because to the flexibility of scaling up and down resources.

Overall, cloud-native app development and cloud native services offer organisations a way to build and deploy applications that are more flexible, scalable, and resilient, which can help them to stay competitive and respond quickly to changing business needs.

To Understand more about it or get in-depth details see the The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which is a website that provides information and resources on cloud native technologies and practices. The CNCF is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to promoting and advancing the development of cloud native software.