Cloud Native Applications: Key Characteristics and Applications


Introduction

A cloud-native application is created to take advantage of the cloud's scalable, distributed computing environment. Cloud-native apps are created from scratch to take favor of the cloud's adaptability, scalability, redundancy, and portability. It empowers strong, tractable, and noticeable weak coupled systems. Engineers can easily implement them to make major advancements regularly.

Key Characteristics of Cloud Native Application

The following are some of the essential characteristics of these programs −

  • They don't have any server or operating system requirements at all. However, only a selected group of devices, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) or solid-state discs (SSDs) may offer the precise features that a microservice may need. These programs function at a more abstract level than the majority of others. They are not biased towards any certain hardware or software.

  • As a result, it is well suited to the concept of IAAS ("infrastructure as code") as it can more fully automate them. Large and complex programs must be automated. It greatly simplifies the process.

  • The software was developed using a microservice architecture, which allowed for a high degree of component isolation. The application runtime makes it possible to find and talk to services that are a part of the same application but don't work together. Scaling the system's performance and functionality can be achieved by effectively combining elastic infrastructure designs and applications.

  • APIs for communication and collaboration are its core: cloud-native services used easy application programming interfaces (APIs), which can be based on protocols like Neural Autonomic Transport System (NATS), Representational state transfer (REST), or even Google's open Remote Procedure Call (RPC). In order to facilitate the connection between services, which is essential to the effectiveness on which end customers have grown to rely, google’s open RPC is frequently utilized. REST is a technique used by programmers and developers to make APIs HTTP-accessible (HTTP). Users can communicate asynchronously thanks to NATS's publish-subscribe capabilities.

  • Simply said, cloud-native apps are a collection of distinct, stand-alone services that can be easily grouped together and conveyed in little, light containers. Contrary to virtual computers, containers can swiftly switch in size. Infrastructure usage rises as containers take over as the new scaling unit.

  • This infrastructure is shared, elastic, self-service, and virtual, and it was used to create these applications. Due to this, the applications can synchronize with the underlying infrastructure, allowing them to dynamically contract and expand as required to meet changing demands. There is also the option of virtualization and shared storage. They accomplished this through the infrastructure synchronization capabilities of the application.

  • Cloud-native applications follow governance models established by a set of allocation policies. Services adhere to regulations governing resource distribution. Examples of such policies include CPU caps and storage, as well as network regulations.

  • Although each application service has its own distinct software development life cycle, an Agile DevOps methodology is applied throughout. Developers can employ several concurrent continuous integrations and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for the deployment and administration of cloud-native apps. This whole lifecycle is under process control.

  • This particular pattern guarantees greater resilience and availability. In addition to stateful services, there are also stateless services. Along with ideas of statehood, statelessness, and even micro-storage systems, persistence must be considered.

  • When building cloud-native software, developers select the coding language and framework that perform best for each service. Cloud-native apps that support several languages employ a range of technologies and programming models. A Web sockets-based real-time streaming service can be built using Node.js, and the API may be made available using Python and Flask. They can choose the ideal language and framework for each task by employing a microservices development approach.

Cloud-native Applications & Tools

These applications give developers a fantastic toolkit at their disposal. Here are a handful of the best programs and tools on the market.

Draft

This developer tool's two components are Draft Create and Draft Up, respectively. Draft Create spins up the artifacts required to run Kubernetes applications, and Draft Up creates container images and deploys them to a Kubernetes cluster.

Telepresence

Telepresence speeds up application development by allowing developers to establish services locally, connect those services to distant clusters, and automatically launch an update when local changes take place.

Jenkins X

This tool enables developers to build CI/CD pipelines without prior knowledge of Kubernetes or the need to keep up with its ever-expanding features.

Gitlab

The more comprehensive Gitlab toolset is integrated with this incredibly well-liked CI/CD platform.

Weavenet

Multiple containers can be located on the same host or spread across other hosts thanks to this virtual two-layer network application.

Conclusion

It is widely assumed that developing cloud-specific software will be the way of the future. We have seen the key characteristics of cloud-native applications like loose coupling, self-service, lightweight containers, stateless and state services, API collaboration, automation in application development, and different policies. Additionally, we have seen a few tools and their capabilities for using cloud-native applications.

Updated on: 05-Jan-2023

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