Cloud-Native App Development: Everything You Need to Know
Building a cloud-native application may be one of the best decisions you make for your company. It offers a consistent user experience in public, private, or hybrid clouds. These applications are built using modern design principles and frameworks.
With this approach to application development, businesses become ready for the present and the future. You can create and update apps faster, better, and risk-free than with other techniques.
In this blog post, we will help you understand the cloud-native application development process.
Why Consider Cloud-Native Application?
Cloud-native applications use platforms and workflows that were built for the cloud. They link to cloud services to enhance capabilities without a lot of coding and are easily modified and scalable.
Let’s check out the benefits of Cloud-native applications to know them better.
Fault Tolerance
The term “cloud native development” refers to modern methodologies such as cloud kubernetes, microservices, etc. It indicates that the program has self-healing capabilities during downtime, such as starting up another container if one stops working rapidly.
Unlike monoliths, if a service within the so-called “microservices net” suddenly fails, it won’t affect the operation of the entire infrastructure. Without stopping the system altogether, you can isolate and resolve the problem in this situation. As a result, almost 99% uptime is attained.
Adaptability
Cloud-native applications are flexible enough to adapt to changing business requirements without imposing dependencies that force users to use a specific software version.
For instance, if a business wants to release an application for mobile devices, it can create the mobile front end and utilize APIs to access data on the server without changing any code in the back end. It is possible to alter either application without damaging it.
Scalability
Cloud-native apps use software-defined infrastructure to minimize or eliminate hardware dependence. This strategy increases horizontal scalability by adding commodity servers instead of upgrading current servers with more expensive CPUs, storage, and memory. The capacity to scale horizontally enables huge cloud services like Facebook and Amazon.
Portability
Without modifying the code, developers can create apps that run on anything from a mainframe to a smartphone using containers. It’s ideal for deploying apps wherever required, given the rising popularity of “edge computing,” a distributed processing architecture that pushes automated choices to the outer reaches of the network.
Automation
Developers can automate continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to test and push code to production by employing DevOps best practices. It enables businesses to quickly put concepts into production rather than waiting days or weeks.
Additionally, using methodologies like canary deployment (rolling out releases to a specific group of users or servers) and blue-green (using two identical production environments and gradually transferring user traffic from one environment to the other) to decrease downtime and make improvements without jeopardizing reliability.
With the ability for dynamic resource allocation, cloud-native development makes all of this much simpler.
Reduced Downtime
The size and geographic distribution of data centers make the cloud more redundant. Simply diverting traffic to another area makes dealing with outages easier.
Additionally, by deploying modular upgrades and avoiding the need for a complete revamp of the production system, enterprises may release software updates with zero downtime and higher uptime owing to container technology.
Features Of Cloud-Native Application
The cloud-native app architecture’s microservices are bundled in containers that connect and exchange data using APIs. All of these components are managed via orchestration tools.
Some of these programs’ most important features include the following:
- Microservices-based: An application is divided into several separate services, or modules, using microservices. Each service uses its data and promotes a certain corporate objective. These modules use application program interfaces to communicate with one another.
- Container-based: A type of software called a container isolates an application logically so it can operate independently of physical resources. Microservices are prevented from interfering with one another using containers. They prevent programs from using up all the shared resources on the host. They also permit running the same service in numerous instances.
- API-based: Microservices and containers are connected by APIs, simplifying security and maintenance. They serve as the link between the loosely connected services, allowing communication between microservices.
- Dynamically Coordinated: Tools for managing container lifecycles, which can get complicated, are called orchestration tools for containers. Resource management, load balancing, scheduling restarts after an internal failure, and provisioning and deploying containers onto server cluster nodes are all tasks handled by container orchestration technologies.
How To Develop Cloud-Native Application?
Here are the following 6 steps to consider if you wish to embrace cloud-native architecture:
Step 1: Evolve Your Business Practices
The line-of-business, app development, and operations teams must adapt to new techniques of developing and deploying the app fairly quickly and efficiently as part of cloud-native app development. You need to take a wide range of procedures, tools, teams, and activities into account for effective coordination and collaboration while deploying cloud apps.
Managing numerous distributed environments, newer app workloads, and super-customized legacy apps for those that integrate their cloud app strategies provides corporate problems in this era of rife innovation. At this stage, businesses should create a collaborative cloud culture that goes beyond the simple adoption of cutting-edge tools and trends in technology.
It’s a culture that persuades people to choose the most cooperative strategy to produce a high-performing app. An ideal business culture that is integrated perfectly into cloud-native application processes.
Step 2: Make Your Existing App Faster
In many circumstances, replacing the old software with a new one is impossible since it is so important to revenue creation and business processes. You must collaborate with a cloud-native application development company at this point. The question presented here is how the current app can speed up.
Moving your current app to a contemporary architecture based on microservices and API-based communication is the answer to this business necessity. This is one of the newest strategies for modernizing outdated applications. You must have a solid microservices architecture to accomplish this. This does not imply that you must act quickly or move everything simultaneously. No!
You must ascertain your company’s pace and, in accordance, use a staged technique to deconstruct the current app into its parts. This will guarantee that your program will be refactored using rock-solid design principles and that your domain boundaries are well specified. It will prepare your company for a more risk-free and granular shift to the popular microservices architecture.
You can also convert your monolithic architecture into a container-based one to update and deploy your most important old application. In essence, it has excellent ROI and accelerates deployment.
Step 3: Speed Up Your Software Development
Reusability has always been a significant advantage for accelerating software development. Using the advantages of reusability in cloud-native application development is not an exception. To get an advantage in speed and scale, the main thing to concentrate on here is how well the components are integrated and optimized into the underlying architecture.
The serverless architecture, messaging broker, workflow engine, API and mobile capabilities, catching service, integration connectors, and services for data visualization do not need to be recreated. You may always use your currently installed, well-optimized components in a container-based design. This is true for SaaS and PaaS app development services alike.
On the one hand, container-based infrastructure and the DevOps integration process hasten application deployment and delivery. To speed up the app development lifecycle and shorten the time it takes for the refactored program to reach the market, cloud-native app development may require one or more of these services.
Step 4: Choose The Right Tool
When you proceed with constructing a cloud-native app, you must select a programming language specifically suited to your company’s requirements. This is where the container-based design comes in handy for controlling the increase in application diversity and complexity. It will encourage and support the ideal fusion of frameworks, architectures, and languages to facilitate cloud-native development.
Your crucial role in choosing the appropriate tool for the job is another important aspect of the cloud-native app. The domain-based design, 12-factor approach, monolith-first strategy, test-based development, microservices, and mini-services can all be used to execute an accurate choice.
The cloud-native platform must be surrounded by the proper architecture, languages, and framework to meet your needs for app development. This is the fundamental component of picking the appropriate strategy.
Step 5: IT Automation For Fastest App Delivery
The cloud-native app development life cycle can be sped up by eliminating manual app development chores and automating the IT infrastructure. Automation may be integrated with every component or operation, including infrastructure provisioning, network provisioning, application deployment, and configuration management.
Therefore, eliminate or drastically cut down any potential human contacts that would be labor-intensive and cause an app launch’s go-to-market time to be delayed. IT automation can be developed by repeatable frameworks, procedures, and rules.
Automation can also apply to general areas like alerting, cloud computing, security, maintenance, and more specialized technology like containers and DevOps services. It won’t be long before the entire cloud native app is created using a comprehensive and thoroughly integrated automation architecture.
Step 6: Implement Deployment And Techniques
Delaying the resolution and identification of software bugs result in lengthening the app release cycle. It also impacts timely reactions to market and consumer demand changes.
Many users need better app experiences and app security difficulties and need help to maximize the app’s potential. This is a worry, particularly for high-traffic applications like online, mobile, edge computing, or IoT apps. A substantial company expense may result from purchasing more time to handle bug concerns.
Agile development methodologies were created to take advantage of “release early and often” in such circumstances. The DevOps and CD (Continuous Delivery) techniques are at the top of the list because they tightly integrate the operations team, developers, QA, and security teams to create a robust and accelerated software delivery process.
The end goal is to swiftly deliver code changes into production and establish your reliability so that developers may receive fast feedback.
The creation of cloud-native applications is moving toward end-to-end, highly automated ideas that cover all facets of automated testing, security compliance, vulnerability testing, and regulatory checks because of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery).
Each step in the creation of a cloud-native application uses a variety of software tools. They combine to form a development stack. The following applications are included in a cloud-native development stack:
- Docker: Docker is an open-source software program. Using a shared operating system, it generates, distributes, and manages virtualized application containers (OS). It isolates resources allowing several containers to use the same OS without conflicts.
- Kubernetes: Linux containers are managed and orchestrated using the Kubernetes platform, which also decides how and where the containers will execute.
- Terraform: Terraform defines resources as code and uses version control so users can know when and where resources were changed. Terraform was created to implement IaC.
- GitLab CI/CD: Users can automate software testing and deployment with the help of this continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) software. Unit tests and static and security analyses may be performed using GitLab.
- Node.js: This JavaScript runtime is helpful for real-time building apps like chat, news feeds, and other microservices. For instance, Node.js can designate the routes that link microservices to external APIs and construct virtual servers.
Wrapping Up
Enterprises increasingly use cloud-native apps to gather, access and store data in a consumer-driven environment. It is the best tool for a company to provide, cooperate on, and boost work productivity in the face of global competition.
By transcending the limitations of the conventional paradigm, cloud-native solutions have assisted numerous businesses in realizing their business visions.
Therefore, businesses may increase their agility, scalability, and productivity while preparing for the future by implementing the finest cloud-native strategy and hiring developers from reputed organizations.
If you want to deliver business value while ensuring that your applications are always available and performant, you can hire app developers in India for better services.
