How Will Cloud-Native Applications Benefit Business?
Digital Transformation crucial for businesses today!
To achieve the speed, flexibility, and scalability needed to prevail in the quick-moving and dynamic Concrete Industry, companies are embracing cloud-based services. To take full advantage of moving to the Cloud, the Cloud-Native approach is key.
According to the definition of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Cloud-Native technologies “empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds.”
What Are Cloud-Native Applications?
Cloud-Native applications, unlike traditional cloud migrant applications, are a collection of small, independent, and loosely coupled services deployed in cloud environments.
In cloud migrant, “monolithic” application architecture, owners must build, update and repair applications as a single unit – Cloud-Native applications are developed as microservices – small applications where each performs a single service/business function. These microservices communicate with each other via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and users can maintain each microservice individually without impairing the function of the whole application.
This approach helps software development teams to quickly add new features, improve or roll back functionalities without causing disruption to the entire application. Cloud-Native applications help to deliver business value by providing users the flexibility to quickly incorporate feedback for continuous improvement.
How do Cloud-Native applications differ from cloud-enabled applications? Let’s dig a little deeper to find out the basic differences between the two methodologies:
Key Differences – Cloud-Native Vs. Cloud-Migrant Apps
While cloud-migrant applications are on-premise apps tweaked to work in the cloud environment, they are not equipped to unleash the full benefits of the Cloud. Cloud-Native applications are built with a cloud-specific mindset to help fully leverage cloud computing models and are considered “the future of application development”.
| Key Feature | Cloud-Native Apps | Cloud-Migrant Apps |
| Existence | • Built in the Cloud • Functional in the Cloud • Deployed in the Cloud |
• Built on-premises • Hosted on the Cloud • Made remotely available |
| Design | • Multi-tenant instances | • No multi-tenant instances |
| Implementation | • Fast & efficient • No hardware & software configurations required |
• Slower • Server configurations, customizations & hardware/software set up required |
| Scalability | • Highly-scalable • Real-time changes can be made to the microservices • Whole application is not affected |
• No scalability • Manual upgrades required • Whole application is shut down unless changes are performed |
| Cost | • Relative cost-effective • Cloud infrastructure is leveraged |
• Costlier • Infrastructure upgrades required irregularly |
| Maintenance | • Changes can be applied to the microservices without disruptions | • Customized updates required for the specific installation environment |
Source: DZone
How to embark on a Cloud-Native journey?
Ready to make the most of cloud benefits? Ready for building applications that deliver faster time to market, superior customer experiences, and higher scalability? Ready to get all of these without any vendor lock-in?
A Cloud-Native application must be driven and invoked by business events such as marketplace events, innovation, end-user or client or customer interactions, and most importantly, it should serve the intended business needs.
When it comes to technology and process, Cloud-Native comprises of four phases:
Architectural style – Cloud-Native Apps are applications structured as a collection of loosely coupled services.
Microservices not only improve modularity and makes apps easier to develop & test, but also enable separate development teams to independently build, deploy and scale their services. It also allows incremental automated and continuous improvement of the application without causing downtime. Microservices can be enabled with server-less architecture which in addition to being cost-effective, helps developers to focus solely on revenue-generating functions leaving time-consuming non-value-added infrastructure issues to the cloud provider.
Development process – The architectural style defines development processes and in this case, we recommend adopting and implementing Agile practices.
The development process is split into smaller time windows in Agile which enables faster and more effective development by providing a continuous feedback loop. This provides the opportunity to quickly iterate an application based on user feedback and match user expectations as closely as possible.
Production process – Adopting DevOps methodologies suggests that users are already equipped to support the adoption of Cloud-Native development practices in their company.
This methodology focuses on speed and automation, that is, how rapidly one can move a project from the design stage to the production stage by minimizing human involvement in the production process. Thus, one can set up a production environment within days or hours instead of weeks or months required in traditional production processes.
Execution platform – By extending its support to various architectural & deployment styles, Cloud becomes the most flexible delivery platform available today.
From traditional cloud migrant applications systems to nimble clusters of containers to large serverless functions or virtual-machine deployments, Cloud allows organizations to derive maximum business benefits. However, the Cloud-Native approach helps to get the maximum benefit and value from the cloud and delivers scale, resilience, and agility to development teams and businesses.
Before taking a look at some of the benefits of Cloud-Native let’s take a look at these intriguing stats to imagine how the future of Cloud-Native would look like:
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| 55 percent of apps developed in the next 12 months will be designed as Cloud-Native | 75 percent of existing non-cloud apps will move to Cloud environments in the next three years | 25 percent of existing cloud apps will be completely rebuilt as Cloud-Native apps | 42 percent of existing cloud apps will be extended with new features and functions |
Source: IBM Cloud-Native Development Report
Primary benefits harnessed by adopting a Cloud-Native development strategy:
Speed: Cloud-Native approach makes the herculean task of meeting all the compliance requirements in a short time possible for organizations. Besides making the development process faster, it improves the software development lifecycle by taking care of issues like bugs and slow loading speed.
Scalability: Cloud-Native architecture enables a scalable development process without interrupting the whole application. It thus manages variable costs and supports an increasing customer base.
Cost-effective: Being server-less is a cost-effective method of enabling microservices and deploying applications, Cloud-Native provides the time to focus on other revenue-generating functions.
Automation: Adoption of Agile practices and DevOps methodologies in a company lay the foundation for Cloud-Native and help save IT costs by delivering apps faster than before.
Focus on deliverables: Cloud-Native empowers development teams to focus on essential business requirements rather than wasting time over infrastructure details. Apart from allowing remote access to their system from any location, it brings speed in the development process and enhances productivity.
Enhanced flexibility: Cloud-Native approach offers companies the flexibility to run applications on multiple platforms – public & private – without introducing major changes.
– Summary –
• In this fast-paced business environment, Cloud-Native technologies not only help to innovate faster but also react to marketplace events with more agility.
• To harness the business value from the Cloud-Native approach, different technologies, processes, and services are chained together to keep the cloud specifically in mind.
• Ready to adopt Cloud-Native application development? For embracing this Cloud-Native model, be ready to embrace changes within an entire project lifecycle right from the inception to coding to testing to the deployment of the application.
