Cloud Native App Development: Is it really worth it for a business?

Quick Summary: Want to know what cloud native app development is and how it can benefit your business? In this blog, we have covered all the aspects of cloud native development, including the meaning, benefits, examples, principles, processes, and more to give you a detailed understanding. Stay tuned for good information that will aid you in making a better decision about app modernization.

Today, technology is changing at a pace never before and businesses need to align their strategies accordingly to stay in the game. Cloud is one of those technologies that have shaped the future of modern businesses. With constantly changing customer expectations, it has become quite difficult to provide rapid updates for your software applications with traditional infrastructure.

So, you need scalable and flexible applications that are quick to update to meet changing customer needs. Cloud provides an environment where you can stay abreast of market changes by quickly building and releasing software updates. But you can take the full benefits of cloud only when you opt for cloud native development services instead of just shifting on-premises applications to the cloud.

You can develop your software solution on the cloud from the ground up as well as deploy and manage it in the cloud with cloud native solution. The number of enterprises choosing cloud native app development is increasing rapidly.

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As per the stats reported by our experts, 8 out of 10 companies allocate more than $1.2 million yearly to cloud costs. This indicates the future of cloud-native development that is bright and beneficial for businesses. If you are planning for cloud native application development, this guide is crucial for you as it provides all the essential details you need in decision-making.

What is Cloud Native Application Development?

Cloud-native development is an approach that lets you build, deploy, and manage software applications in the cloud. It is different from cloud-enablement approach where applications are migrated to the cloud, whereas cloud-native applications are built exclusively for cloud environments. So, instead of cloud migration with a strategy like “lift and shift”, they are developed from scratch to meet the needs of the cloud.

Enterprises can choose from public, private, or hybrid clouds to build and deploy their applications. Since these applications are natively built for the cloud platform, they can leverage the full potential of the underlying infrastructure and processes. These are modern applications that are highly scalable, easy to modify, and can be quickly updated.

How do Businesses Benefit from Cloud Native Application Development?

Cloud native app development benefits businesses in multiple ways, inclusive of the competitive advantage. It is one of the best application modernization methods. The following are all the benefits of cloud native applications.

• Scalability

Scalability, arguably, is one of the major advantages of cloud services. Scaling your on-premises infrastructure is cumbersome and costly as you will need additional hardware and other IT resources. As you choose cloud native app development, scaling becomes so painless. You can quickly scale up or down based on your requirements with cloud services.

It will add extra cost to your cloud billing when scaling up, but it will be much lower than overall investments in additional IT resources. Due to the microservices architecture, you can also scale up only the required components of your application.

• Reliability

Developers can build resilient applications with the cloud that ensures higher availability of your applications. These apps are not affected by feature updates and applications keep running without downtime. You can easily scale your application in peak time and improve user experience. In microservices, components are independent, so updating one component will not affect the overall performance of a complete system.

• Improved Efficiency

Cloud native offers the benefits of agile strategies like CD (Continuous Deployment) and DevOps that enable developers to quickly build and release software products. Developers leverage automation to streamline and speed up the build, testing, and deployment process. It increases the efficiency of your business when it comes to developing and deploying applications to your target audience.

• Cost-effectiveness

Investing in cloud native development provides cost benefits because you don’t need on-premises infrastructure to host and run your applications. Since the cloud provider offers the complete infrastructure, including the hardware and software for computing services, you just pay for the services instead of purchasing expensive IT assets. So, you can transform your Capex (Capital Expenses) to Opex (Operational Expenses).

Cloud services are available for a certain fee based on the pricing model offered by the cloud provider. Additionally, you pay only as much as the resources your app consumes. For example, if your application sees traffic spikes in specific time periods, you need to bear additional costs for that time period only.

• Speedy Development

Cloud-native development allows developers to create quality applications at a fast pace. Developers can build containerized applications that can be quickly deployed compared to hardware-dependent applications. They can follow DevOps practices to build and deploy applications that enable them to quickly release application updates without affecting the operations of applications.

Cloud Native Application Examples

There are many examples of cloud native applications that are used in daily life. Below is a list of popular cloud-native apps.

• Spotify

It needs no introduction as it’s a popular music streaming platform. Spotify is a good example of a cloud-native application. It leverages container orchestration and cloud services to manage a huge music catalog. It also allows the app to support millions of devices concurrently. The Spotify app can scale on demand with cloud-native technologies.

• Netflix

It is the best example of cloud native development as this video streaming platform is built with microservices and uses Docker for containerization and Kubernetes for orchestration. With cloud-native deployment, they can scale their infrastructure seamlessly and release product updates quickly.

• Airbnb

When it comes to hospitality and lodging services, Airbnb stands out from the rest. Its underlying infrastructure makes it an agile and resilient platform that uses the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is handling the mobile app and website infrastructure of Airbnb. It provides easy scalability and a convenient way to manage payments and reservations.

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What are the Pillars of Cloud Native Development?

Cloud native applications are built and deployed to the cloud, enabling these applications to leverage the cloud platform to the fullest. Hence, they are optimized to utilize cloud resources at every stage. These applications are fault-tolerant, scalable, and quick to deploy.

Let’s see the components of these applications and how they work together.

Microservices

Cloud-native applications are divided into small components known as microservices that are loosely coupled to each other. These microservices are independent and communicate with each other via APIs. It is a microservices architecture which cloud-native apps are built upon. Every microservice handles a particular job and collectively they make the whole system functional.

Microservices work with containerization, as every application component is built with containers. Every component can be updated easily without affecting the others and if any of them fails, it doesn’t disrupt the whole system. Developers can work on individual microservices when they need to make updates. You can leverage microservices development to build resilient and manageable applications.

Containers

Containers are application components that combine code and its dependencies into a single package. They wrap up the microservices and other files together for cloud native applications. After containerization, the applications can easily run in different computing environments.

Your cloud application is divided into many components and a single container management/orchestration system manages all of these components. There are many popular container management systems like Kubernetes and Amazon ECS. These container orchestration systems help you easily deploy, manage, and scale your containerized applications.

API

API, which is an abbreviated form of Application Programming Interface, provides a way of communication between two or more software systems. Alternately, it helps two or more software systems to exchange data with each other. Microservices are an integral part of cloud-native applications.

APIs are used to ensure communication between different microservices that are loosely coupled with each other. Microservices request data with APIs and provide output through APIs. This type of architecture provides a lightweight, simple, and quick system that is efficient and consumes fewer resources.

CI/CD

Cloud-native development requires a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline that provides a collaborative and iterative approach for DevOps teams to build, test, and deploy applications. There is a centralized repository for coding that is accessible to all developers, and they can contribute to it. Automation is used in the CI/CD pipeline to compile, build, and test the application code while minimizing human error for quick deployment.

DevOps

Apart from reconsidering your application design, you also need to rethink the way your team is organized. An agile approach is needed to harness the full potential of the cloud and adopt new kinds of philosophy and culture for your team. DevOps is the model that you need for your team.

DevOps brings closer the development and operations teams that have been siloed. It provides a workflow that helps teams build and deliver software applications more quickly and reliably.

How do Cloud-Native Applications Work?

• Cloud-native applications use data and computing resources located on remote servers typically provided by a third-party company.
• Since these applications are built on the microservices architecture, the whole application is a collection of smaller independent services.
• Each of these services runs in separate processes and communicates via APIs. Docker container images are used to deploy and run application components.
• Every microservice works with a particular concern, like user login and data search.
• Application components running in Docker container images can be easily managed with container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

Cloud-native allows you to build scalable enterprise applications from the ground up by leveraging modern cloud environments like public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. These applications take advantage of loosely coupled services, continuous delivery for fast deployment, and scalability and agility of cloud native application platforms.

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What are Cloud Native Application Principles?

Applications in the cloud-native environment have different constraints than those residing in on-premises infrastructure. So, you need to optimize your applications to best leverage the benefits of the cloud, like resilience, scaling, automation, and more. The cloud-native architecture principles provide general guidelines on cloud native development. So, these principles help you optimize your applications for the distinctive capabilities of the cloud.

1. Single Concern

This principle resembles the single responsibility principle in software development that advocates assigning a single responsibility to every class. Similarly, in cloud-native development, this principle states that every container should handle individual concerns or jobs. Therefore, every container manages a single process that further handles only concern.

2. Self-Contained

This principle states that every container should include everything that is required at build time. So, containers are packed with additional libraries, the application platform, language runtime, middleware, and other dependencies. As a result, a container is a standalone component that can function without external support.

3. Observability

Containers are self-contained components that work like a Blackbox. So, the inner workings of these containers are hidden. However, for cloud native development, they must expose APIs that allow the runtime environment to manage their states and monitor health. It helps in automating container lifecycle and updates that make software systems resilient and provide a good user experience.

4. Immutability

Immutability is one of the key characteristics of containerized applications. So, these apps should not change for different runtime environments. External configurations are used to deploy containers to different environments instead of modifying the container. This principle helps to avoid the duplication of container images.

5. Design for Automation

Software systems become more efficient with automation and the cloud makes it even easier with an automated infrastructure. It is faster to scale, deploy, and update software systems with automated processes than manual processes. Find how automation can help your processes and where you can apply it. Areas where you can utilize automation are scaling up and down, system monitoring, and CI/CD.

Key Steps in Cloud-Native Application Development

Building cloud native applications is a complex process that requires planning and expertise. The following are the steps to be followed to build a cloud native application.

1. Assess Your Requirements

Start with assessing your requirements for cloud native development. Many organizations try to re-architect their existing monolithic applications to make them ready for cloud native deployment. Although you can use the lift and shift strategy to migrate your existing application to the cloud, your application will only be cloud-enabled, not cloud-native. For applications to be cloud-native, they need to be built from scratch with microservices architecture.

2. Make Architectural Choices

Your application needs to be flexible, scalable, and resilient to be cloud native. So, you have to make several architectural choices, including the IT model (public, private, or hybrid cloud), AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud provider, microservices to be built, and technologies like containers. You can follow architecture like MACH, an abbreviation for Microservices, API, Cloud-native, and Headless.

3. Build and Integrate Components

This is the step to build and assemble your application components as microservices. For existing monolith applications, identify modules to extract them for microservices implementation. Provide a gateway of communication between different microservices by leveraging a RESTful API. Wrap those microservices into containers. This communication can be handled with a service mesh like Istio, which is an infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communication for microservices.

CI CD pipeline with automation ensures faster development, testing, and deployment of these components and they can be separately built without affecting the application.

Tools for Managing Cloud Native Applications

These are the tools that are vital for managing and running cloud-native applications. Developers utilize these tools for cloud native software development and deployment processes.

• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Helm
• Prometheus
• Istio

Challenges with Cloud Native Applications

Despite all the benefits of cloud native app development, there are some limitations of this too that should be considered. You need to assess all aspects before making a choice for a cloud-native approach.

Dependency

Another challenge with cloud native apps is their complete dependency on the cloud infrastructure they are deployed to. So, your applications are affected by the lifecycle of cloud services. This could result in compatibility issues, outages, and downtime. Continuous management and monitoring of infrastructure can be challenging.

Security

Since cloud native applications are decentralized and distributed, it could increase the security risks as a single vulnerability can put your data at stake. Therefore, you will require additional security measures like network segmentation and encryption.

Complexity

Developing, deploying, and managing cloud native apps is complex and your team requires a lot of training to cope with containers, microservices, and orchestration.

Vendor Lock-in

Flexibility and portability become very challenging when cloud-native apps are tied to a particular tech stack or cloud provider. It limits the portability and flexibility of your application. Choosing open-source technologies can help to overcome this challenge.

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In ConclusionFor many companies, the cloud has become an integral part of their business models. There are companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Airbnb that are utilizing cloud infrastructure to deliver their applications efficiently while quickly adapting to technological changes and customer demands.These companies have chosen cloud native application development that has empowered their business in many ways, from fast software updates to an agile team with DevOps.If you are considering cloud native development for your business, you can rely on Radixweb for all the support and efforts. We are an experienced cloud application development company and have catered to various businesses for cloud native development.We are proficient in diverse cloud native tools and technologies that enable us to build innovative applications for clients. Our developers can handle the complex requirements of the cloud environment and work with public, private, and hybrid clouds. Get applications with microservices architecture deployed in a containerized environment. Contact us with your queries and let’s discuss your needs.