Let go of antediluvian practices! Let go of hardware and accustomed servers! A new era of cloud computing has brought new standards of application development.

In order to succeed in a dynamic and technologically advanced world, there is an immense need for companies and software-driven markets to change the way of designing, building, and using applications. That is where cloud-native computing comes in.

This blog is a detailed guide for people who are unaware of cloud-native application methods. Well, cloud-native application development is a method that runs and optimizes the best practices of cloud computing.

Through this highly versatile methodology, developers enable to deploy cloud computing resources at full capacity. Developers can integrate with new technologies like microservices faster, serverless, and more. It is a process of improving app development based on the latest technologies and techniques.

Applications that develop and deploy using cloud-based technologies are cloud-native applications. They are built, tested, managed, and deployed in the cloud. Cloud-native application development is a versatile platform that aims to revolutionize software by supporting platform ops and DevOps capabilities.

Whether you operate in telecom, healthcare, or any other industry, business applications have become the foremost priority of business strategies. The transformation in business processes requires the development and delivery of new applications for users.

Cloud-native applications are an amalgamation of coupled services. They tend to deliver well-recognized business value (capable of incorporating user feedback for continuous improvement). Hence, cloud-native application development processes speed up how companies build new applications, optimize the existing ones, and connect them all effectively and efficiently. Organizations and businesses throughout the globe adopt cloud computing services to escalate the scalability and availability of applications. These benefits are attainable by self-service, on-demand provisioning of resources, and automation of the application lifecycle from development to production.

The overall IT industry has been built on legacy technology infrastructure. This heritage system is reliable and trustworthy with scalability, improved customer experience, budget-friendly prices, greater agility, and access to innovation. However, if users want to take full advantage of cloud computing, there is an immense need to adopt new technologies and methodologies. The overall infrastructure of this development process lets the developers use existing components like catching services, data visualization, and workflow engines. This process alleviates the intricacy of the overall development process. Developers have to focus on the complexities of the application, not the overall framework.

Consider the following steps and move your application to the cloud. 

DevOps: This is a direct approach towards culture, automation and platform that plays a crucial role in delivering increased business value and responsiveness.

Microservices: This architecture helps in breaking down applications into small components that are independent of one another. 

API: The application programming interfaces include tools, definitions, and protocols for building application software. APIs are responsible for connecting products and services without knowing their implementation processes.

Containers: Through well-designed containers, applications are packaged and isolated according to the entire runtime environment. Containers make it easy to move them among different environments while retaining full functionality.

Why more and more companies are opting for cloud-native Application development processes? 

Cloud-native application development processes increase the functions and operations of companies whose computer resources are available across different environments. For instance, your company might have a few resources on Amazon Servers, Google Servers, and Oracle databases that run on your premise. This hybrid-cloud architecture helps your company derive business value and generate revenue.

The key benefits of cloud-native application development: 

– Resilience and greater tolerance level

– Security

– Integration with enhanced and modern technologies

– Faster time-to-market delivery

– Reduced maintenance and infrastructure cost

– No vendor lock-in

Resilience and greater tolerance level 

Cloud-native development processes often deal with contemporary approaches. It means cloud-native applications have properties like self-healing in cases of downfall and downtime. For instance, if one container stops operating the other one goes up immediately. Or if there is a failure of services within the microservices net, it will not impact the overall operations of infrastructure.

Security 

Security is one of the crucial parts of an application. It is possible to set up automated quality checks for enabling strict code control supervision through this cloud-native application feature. So, every time developers try to change the code, it happens before deployment to production.

Integration with enhanced and modern technologies 

Cloud-native application development encompasses contemporary architectural methods like microservices, containerization, serverless, and more. As a result, companies end up getting exceedingly responsive infrastructure. It always scales up and down.

Faster time-to-market delivery 

Cloud-service applications are designed in a manner that alleviates the efforts of maintaining and providing infrastructure. So, the primary focus and concentration of the IT team are on future releases instead of infrastructure maintenance. Alongside, strict and standardized business processes enable code, design, deploy, and never compromises on quality.

Reduced maintenance and infrastructure cost 

You might have seen millions of articles covering cost reduction techniques by IT solutions.

Given below are the main reasons for maintenance and infrastructure cost reduction. 

– Cloud-native applications tend to have free plans and continuous support of users.

– They are resilient and robust.

– The uptime rate is higher. That brings revenue to businesses.

– Less effort is required for maintaining the infrastructure in the cloud.

No vendor lock-in 

That refers to the fact users can switch the tools if they are not satisfied with the services and prices. There is no need to choose a single public cloud provider. Multi-cloud solutions are getting more and more popular among many companies and organizations.

How to refactor current applications into a modern cloud-native one? 

It becomes strenuous to give a piece of advice regarding refactoring. It varies from infrastructure to infrastructure. Not everyone is willing to turn everything upside and commence. However, a few recommendations of refactoring include:

– Companies need to containerize the environment and applications. It allows the applications to become more portable and integrate with cloud-native practices.

– Always be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort coding and make applications according to cloud-native standards. It might be heavy on the pocket but never forget about TCO and ROI. Your efforts eventually pay off.

– Always ensure to containerize with your applications and environments. However, sometimes there is a need for vague modifications. Now is the time to make your applications portable with cloud-native practices.

– If you are looking for reliable ways of delivering quality products and services at a faster rate, then the cloud-native app development process is what you need. Aside from this feature, cloud-native obtains superior flexibility and optimizations.

Add new tools, update the resources, and scale them down easily whenever there is a need. Enterprises with legacy applications think of hybrid solutions to be the most winning way towards modernization.

However, the most challenging task of modern cloud indigenous systems include the high cost of revamping, the time needed for renovation, possible inconsistencies at an early age, and the need for change on the organization level.

What are the types of cloud-native applications?

Structured cloud-native applications

Unstructured cloud-native applications

Structured platform: 

A structured platform addresses the shortcomings of PaaS. Both of these platforms are open source. They play a crucial role in supporting various languages and frameworks.

Unstructured platform: Many businesses and startup companies are opting for cloud-native app development processes and homegrown tools. This unstructured technology moves together for semi-structured platform models. It is one of the examples that directly comes from the open container initiative ( OCI) and cloud-native computing foundation.

The working of cloud-native applications 

Management and building of cloud-native applications result in continuous improvement of deploying microservices in containers.

The process of building cloud-native applications.

Underlying infrastructure: 

The base provides all computing resources for applications.

Modern cloud-native computing services run, scale, and manage the microservices.

Provisioning the infrastructure 

• Tools that tend to provide infrastructure.
• Tools like Ansible that help in processes.
• Services that cloud computing companies offer services for architecting an infrastructure.

Applications runtime 

It provides modern storage.

Runtime for containers like Docker

Network services like AWS VPC.

Deployment and management of applications 

Tools like Kubernetes. Services discovery happens through various tools like Etcd, Zookeeper.

What are the best practices of cloud-native? 

Auto-provisioning: Automatic provision of different environments by using code that is used in Git.

Auto-redundancy: Cloud-native applications don’t fail easily. Whenever there is an occurrence of any issue, the application moves to another server seamlessly and automatically.

Auto-scaling: Whenever there is a spike in traffic, this cloud-native application development practice escalates or alleviates the resources. The design of the application is often carried out by using Microservices.

Given below are the tools to manage cloud-native applications.

AWS, Google Cloud – Helps in providing cloud computing services.

ELK Stack – Help in providing a complete monitoring solution.

Fluent – Peculiarly used for logging. It helps in collecting and sharing log data tools like AWS cloud watch.

Prometheus – It helps in monitoring tools that record time-series data for microservices.

Grafana – is a visualization tool.

Istio – Enables the service mesh,