How Cloud Native Technologies are Boosting Innovations and Business Transformation

The cloud native computing has become an integral part of the IT framework. It acts as an accelerator for digital transformation, solving data problems and enabling faster data processing with a better return on investment. It also fosters a culture of remote work, which has become an important part of the business after the pandemic. According to an IBM study, a rapid transition to the cloud over the next three years will force companies to move 75 percent of existing non-cloud native applications to cloud environments.

Today, companies are competing for the cloud to deliver innovation at a larger scale and at lower costs as a key element of their digital transformation strategy. This is because the availability of cloud applications has helped organizations increase productivity, agility, efficiency, and scalability while reducing the shortage of internally managed applications and servers through cloud computing services.

Cloud Native

Cloud native is an approach to application creation and execution that leverages the cloud computing deployment model. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation states that this technology enables businesses to build and run scalable applications in today’s dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. CHCF also mentions that this form of computation uses an open-source software stack to be:

1. Containerized, in which each part (application, process) is packaged in its own container. This facilitates the reproducibility, transparency and isolation of basic infrastructure resources. Apart from that, containers also offer portability and ensure consistency across different environments.
2. Dynamically orchestrated, where containers are actively planned and managed to optimize resource use. Typically organized tasks include planning, affinity/anti-affinity, failure detection and health monitoring, networking, scaling, failure handling, service discovery, and incremental coordination of zero deployment upgrades. Many open tools are available, e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Mesos, which provide frameworks for handling the critical task of container orchestration.
3. Microservices-oriented, where the application is divided into microservices to increase the flexibility, functionality and overall maintainability of the application. Here each microservice has its boundaries and APIs well defined and developed and managed by a relatively small team. They communicate with others using standard communication protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS, WebSockets or AMQP.

To develop microservices and manage them independently in different cloud environments, we need a cloud development framework. This includes DevOps, flexible methodologies, microservices, cloud platforms, containers like Kubernetes and Docker, and continuous delivery. Kubernetes is an open-source system that includes functions such as automation, integration, and self-service. It provides a unified cloud development environment that enables teams to effectively manage and update applications.

The IT team must then avoid silos to penetrate the cloud. Here DevOps can help everyone involved to stick to the mission and work continuously on it, and enable collaboration between IT operations and development teams. Here, DevOps must have processes such as minimum viability development (MVP), multivariate testing, rapid iteration, and close collaboration across organizational boundaries. This includes automating platform deployment and delivering applications through infrastructure practices such as code or IaC.

Why do we need it?

Cloud native helps IT by removing barriers and shortening the path to business value. It helps companies perform actions automatically and has good metrics, color bars and notifications. It also improves the quality of IT services through continuous optimization through better identification of problems and potential improvements. It also offers real-time notifications.

Applications developed on cloud platforms have significant advantages over on-premises applications. Cloud applications, for example, are always up-to-date, whereas the latter requires updates delivered with a subscription by the provider and require downtime during the update installation. This is because the DevOps cloud-based development support framework makes constant and iterative changes and updates and fosters a culture of seamless and continuous improvement.

In addition, in contrast to the monolithic architecture of on-premises applications, cloud applications have a modular structure. Furthermore, cloud applications can easily run in virtual spaces and share resources with other applications. It’s important to remember that moving on-premises applications to the cloud can cause unnecessary errors and challenges. Therefore, it is important to regularly create new applications and update existing ones when you move to the cloud. Otherwise, the existing monolith can be disassembled and revised according to cloud-based principles from the start.