Cloud-native can be described in different ways, depending on who you ask. However, a common definition for cloud-native is that it’s a blueprint for building web applications at scale with a more consistent availability.
For example, think of a streaming service like Netflix. If one part of their system handling video recommendations goes down, the rest of the platform (like video streaming) continues to work because each function operates independently.
Also, as more users start streaming, Netflix should ideally be able to handle the growing demand for video without slowing down or affecting other features.
Read on to learn how you can leverage cloud-native to scale your business.
What Is Cloud-Native Application Development?
Cloud-native application development focuses on building and running applications designed specifically for cloud environments. These applications use the flexibility and distributed nature of cloud infrastructure to provide scalable and resilient solutions.
Unlike traditional monolithic apps, cloud-native applications are built using microservices architecture, where each component is an independent service. This allows businesses to manage and scale components individually, ensuring faster updates and continuous delivery without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Cloud-Native is Not the Same as Cloud Computing
It’s easy to confuse cloud-native with cloud computing, but they are not the same. Cloud computing refers to using remote servers to store, manage, and process data instead of relying on on-premise deployment. On the other hand, cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications designed specifically to operate in cloud environments.
For instance, hosting a traditional app on cloud-based platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud is cloud computing. However, a cloud-native app is built from the ground up to take full advantage of cloud services, ensuring better flexibility, faster updates, and seamless recovery from failures.
Pillars of a Cloud-Native Application Development
Cloud-native applications have at least four key pillars that make it possible to build cloud-based applications at scale.
1. Application Architecture
Cloud-native applications are made up of multiple inter-dependent services called microservices where each service focuses on a specific business function (e.g., user authentication or payment processing).
This separation allows teams to deploy, update, and scale services independently and reduces the chances of having downtime and increases productivity overtime.
2. Containerization
Containers package each service with its dependencies and ensure it runs consistently across different environments, which eliminates the “it works on my computer” problem.
Tools like Docker allow you to package applications into containers and make them easy to deploy across environments isolated from infrastructure-specific issues.
3. Container Orchestration
Container orchestration systems like Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containers and ensure that applications remain highly available and can scale on-demand.
This is achieved by automatically adjusting resources, handling failures, and maintaining service health.
4. DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines streamline development workflows by integrating operations and automating code testing and deployment. With that, your development team can focus on solving actual business problems instead of having to worry about deployment and all the challenges that come with it.
Software development that is set up to use these pillars to build, deploy, and manage applications is cloud-native application development.
Cloud-Native Tools and Platforms
Several tools and platforms have become synonymous with cloud-native development as they help ease the complexity.
Here are a few of them:
- Kubernetes: The leading orchestration platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
- Docker: A container platform that packages applications and their dependencies into a single, portable unit.
- Terraform: A popular infrastructure-as-code tool that allows businesses to define cloud resources in declarative configuration files and enables automated and consistent infrastructure provisioning.
- Istio: A service mesh that provides security, load balancing, and monitoring for microservices by managing the communication between them.
These tools make it a lot easier for businesses to adopt cloud-native practices.
Business Advantages of Cloud-Native Development
Cloud-native development provides tons of benefits to businesses. From the ability to scale up effortlessly to deploying new features quickly, these are the advantages you can look forward to.
Scalability
One of the biggest advantages of cloud-native development is its scalability. Cloud-native applications can scale horizontally, adding more instances of a service as demand increases. This means businesses can handle a sudden surge in traffic without any downtime or performance degradation.
For example, during Black Friday sales, an e-commerce business offering discounts and Black Friday deals can seamlessly scale its infrastructure to accommodate the surge in traffic and provide the best experience for its customers automatically.
Automatic Infrastructure Management
Cloud-native development enables businesses to focus on delivering application value to their customers without worrying about infrastructure needs.
Instead of manually monitoring your system resources and allocating more resources when needed, cloud providers are responsible for all infrastructure management in a cloud-native setup. This makes it easier for your business to focus on the most important thing: Delivering value to your customers.
Cost Optimization
With cloud-native, you can help your business optimize infrastructure cost by preventing the over-provisioning of resources, which makes businesses pay for infrastructure they don’t fully use.
You can provision only the minimum required infrastructure to keep your application running and scale up based on demands.
Serverless cloud architecture, which is a key part of cloud native systems, can further reduce your business costs because you only pay for the compute resources you use. This will significantly reduce your running costs when there are fewer resource demands.
Rapid Innovation and Adaptability
Cloud-native development allows your business to experiment rapidly and deploy new features quickly and independently. It also makes it easier to integrate or adopt new technologies easily without a major rewrite of existing application logic.
Challenges and Considerations in Adopting Cloud-Native
While cloud-native has a lot of benefits as we’ve already seen, there are also challenges to consider when deciding whether it's the right choice for your business.
Identifying the Right Tools or Platforms
With so many tools available, you’ll need to discuss the options with your team. Start by clearly defining your objectives by asking the following questions to be sure cloud-native is even what your business needs:
- What do you need to achieve? If you're facing issues with scaling, consistent availability, or time to market, cloud-native architectures might address these directly. For example, Kubernetes might be essential if your business needs dynamic scaling, while Docker could be important for standardizing environments.
- What are your goals? Cloud-native can help if you need systems that grow seamlessly with user demand or can adapt to evolving market trends. This question can help narrow down your selection to cloud platforms that provide seamless scaling and adaptability, like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, which are built for these requirements.
- What type of tool will best support those goals? For example, if you need platforms that support rapid feature deployment, microservices, or cost effective scaling, you can start evaluating options based on factors like cost, ease of use, features, and available support.
Managing Complexity
While cloud-native architectures offer a lot of advantages, managing a distributed system with multiple microservices across development environments can become complex really quickly.
Unlike traditional monolithic systems, where most issues can be traced within a single codebase, cloud-native environments require tracking interactions between several independent services.
You’ll need to invest in observability tools that provide deep visibility into system performance, failures, and bottlenecks. Highly vetted open source monitoring tools like Prometheus or Grafana could be used to monitor logs, traces, and metrics across services. This way, you can identify and fix problems in production before they become bigger failures.
Security Concerns
Cloud-native architectures increase the surface area for potential security vulnerabilities. Containers, application programming interface (APIs), and microservices all come with unique security challenges. Each of these components operates independently, which means there are more entry points to secure.
To address this, you’ll need to adopt a zero-trust security model — where every service, no matter where it runs, must be authenticated and authorized before it can communicate with others. Tools like Kubernetes should also be locked down to prevent unauthorized access to container orchestration.
Lack of Technical Experts
Cloud-native is a niched area in the software development space and there are not a lot of cloud-native software developers. This can be solved by hiring a team of experts like Focused to architect your cloud-native application development.
Monolithic vs. Cloud-Native App Development
Before the cloud-native architecture, we had traditional application architecture like the monolithic architecture — which still very much exists — where applications are developed as a single tightly coupled unit.
Here’s a comparison of both systems.
Modularity
In a monolithic architecture, we develop applications as a single unit. This approach makes updates and scalability much more difficult, especially in large applications. Any form of change in the codebase will require testing and redeploying of the whole application, which can lead to a prolonged downtime.
For a cloud-native approach, what we have is a modular software design strategy in the form of microservices. Each microservice operates as an independent unit, allowing for isolated changes and independent deployments without interrupting the entire application. The use of cloud-native tools like Kubernetes for container orchestration ensures these microservices are efficiently managed.
Scalability
Monolithic systems typically rely on vertical scaling, which means adding more resources to a single server as your application grows beyond its initial capacity. For example, you might increase the RAM and disk space of your existing server to meet increasing demand. However, this approach can lead to higher costs since you may end up paying for resources that your system isn’t fully using.
On the other hand, cloud-native architecture uses horizontal scaling, which allows you to add more resources automatically based on real-time demand. As a result, you only provision what you need at any given time, which will significantly lower the cost of running your application while still keeping your business available.
Reliability
Failure in one component can bring down the entire application in a monolithic system since they are all tightly coupled.
But in a cloud-native architecture, each microservice is independent of the other. This means if a component fails, the other services will remain operational.
Time to Market
Because monolithic applications are built as single units, they make initial development and deployment faster as developers work within a single codebase and framework.
The monolithic approach can be ideal for your business if:
- You are an indie hacker and need to launch your product quickly
- You are building a simple application without a global audience in mind
- You need to hit the market quickly and iterate fast
However, as the application grows, its complexity can slow down development cycles. Changes in one area often affect others, which can lead to extensive testing and delayed updates.
On the other hand, cloud-native applications separate concerns more efficiently, with multiple codebases, frameworks, and services working independently. While this might increase development time initially, it enables independent updates and faster iteration down the road.
Get Started With Cloud-Native App Development
If you need help migrating to cloud-native or transitioning your team to use cloud-native development practices, Focused has an experienced team that can help you get started. We’ll help your team every step of the way from initial planning to deployment and continuous improvement.
Back to Explore Focused Lab