Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that fully leverages the cloud computing delivery model. It's not just about where your applications reside (in the cloud), but how they are designed, developed, and operated to harness the cloud's inherent benefits: flexibility, scalability, and resilience.
Think of it this way: traditional applications are often built like a single, massive block – a "monolith." Any change, no matter how small, requires re-building and re-deploying the entire block.
Cloud-native, on the other hand, embraces a modular approach. Your applications are broken down into small, independent, and loosely coupled services called microservices. Each microservice performs a specific function and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This makes the whole system more agile and reliable.
“Cloud-native isn’t just born in the cloud – it’s also built for the cloud.”
As mentioned, breaking down applications into small, independent services. This allows for focused development, easier maintenance, and independent scaling of individual components.
Containers pack these microservices into lightweight, portable, and self-sufficient units. Containers ensure that your application runs consistently across different environments, from a developer's laptop to a public cloud.
Orchestration is managing and automating the deployment, scaling, and operation of containerized applications. Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration, helping you manage the complexities of a distributed microservices environment at scale.
It’s a cultural and operational philosophy that emphasizes collaboration, automation, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). DevOps practices ensure that cloud-native applications can be developed, deployed, and scaled reliably.
It’s the idea that once infrastructure is provisioned, it should not be modified. Instead, if a change is needed, new infrastructure is provisioned and the old is replaced. This ensures consistency and predictability.
Without automation, the scale and speed of cloud-native systems would be impossible to manage. It involves automating virtually every aspect of the software lifecycle, from provisioning infrastructure to deploying code and monitoring performance.
Further Reading: Cloud Native vs Cloud Agnostic: What Powers the Multi-Cloud?
Adopting a cloud-native approach can bring a multitude of advantages to your organization:
With microservices and CI/CD pipelines, you can develop, test, and deploy new features and updates much more rapidly. This allows you to respond to market changes and customer demands with unprecedented speed, giving you a significant competitive edge.
Enhanced Scalability and Elasticity
Cloud-native applications are designed to scale horizontally, meaning you can easily add or remove instances of individual microservices based on demand. This ensures your applications can handle sudden spikes in traffic without performance degradation, and you only pay for the resources you actually use.
By breaking down applications into independent microservices, the failure of one service is less likely to impact the entire application. Containers and orchestration tools also provide self-healing capabilities, automatically replacing failed components to maintain high availability.
Greater Flexibility and Portability
Containers allow your applications to run consistently across any environment – public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid setups – reducing vendor lock-in and providing you with more choices for deployment.
The ability to scale resources on demand means you can optimize your infrastructure utilization, reducing unnecessary expenditures on idle resources. Furthermore, the automation inherent in cloud-native development can lower operational overhead.
By running multiple containerized applications on the same underlying infrastructure, you can achieve higher resource utilization compared to traditional virtual machine-based deployments.
Simplified Management
While initially complex, the automation and standardized tooling of cloud-native environments ultimately simplify application management and operations.
While the benefits are compelling, it's important to acknowledge the potential hurdles you might face on your cloud-native journey:
Complexity of Distributed Systems: Managing numerous independent services, their interactions, and data consistency can be challenging without the right tools and expertise.
Security Concerns: A dynamic, distributed environment with many moving parts can expand your attack surface. You'll need to implement robust security measures at every layer, from container images to API gateways, and ensure security is integrated throughout your development pipeline (DevSecOps).
Monitoring and Observability: With microservices, it becomes crucial to have comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing capabilities to understand how your applications are performing and to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues across distributed components.
Cultural Shift and Skill Gaps: Embracing cloud-native requires a significant cultural shift within your organization, fostering greater collaboration between development and operations teams (DevOps). You may also encounter skill gaps within your existing teams, necessitating training or new hires with cloud-native expertise.
Cost Management: While cloud-native can optimize costs, misconfigurations or a lack of understanding of cloud pricing models can lead to unexpected expenses. Careful cost monitoring with native and third-party tools and optimization strategies are essential.
Legacy System Integration: Integrating new cloud-native applications with on-prem and legacy systems requires a true hybrid cloud approach. It requires careful planning and potentially API-driven solutions.
Cloud-native services are the fundamental building blocks and managed offerings that enable you to fully embrace cloud-native development. They abstract away underlying infrastructure complexities, allowing your teams to focus purely on delivering business value through applications designed for speed, scale, and resilience.
Below are some popular cloud-native services that remove the heavy lifting of infrastructure management and let teams build scalable, resilient, cloud-first applications faster.
Suggested Reading: Cloud-Native vs. Cloud-Based: How They’re Same but Different
The emma platform is a holistic multi-cloud management solution that allows you to manage the infrastructure powering your cloud-native applications and workloads across all cloud environments—on-prem, private, public, and edge. With single-pane-of-glass visibility, orchestration, and governance, emma helps you fully realize the benefits of the cloud-native approach: agility, portability, resilience, and cost efficiency.
Embrace cloud-native principles now to build applications that are adaptable, scalable, and resilient, ready for whatever future technology brings.
