What is cloud native?
The evolution of applications in the cloud
Cloud technology has revolutionized the way applications are developed and deployed. The introduction of cloud-native approaches has opened up a new era of application design and development. In this blog post, we will take an in-depth look at the concept of cloud native, explain the key principles and benefits, and show how AWS, as a leading cloud provider, is supporting the cloud-native transformation.
What is cloud native?
Cloud Native is an approach to application development and deployment that aims to harness the full power and scalability of the cloud. It is about designing and developing applications that are native to the cloud and can take full advantage of cloud technologies such as scalability, elasticity and agility.
The most important principles of Cloud Native
In order to develop a cloud-native application, certain principles and best practices must be taken into account. These include:
- Containerization: The use of containers, e.g. Docker, enables the rapid deployment and scaling of applications and ensures consistent execution in different environments.
- Microservices architecture: Applications are divided into small, loosely coupled services that can be developed, provided and scaled independently of each other. This improves agility and scalability.
- Automation and DevOps: The automation of deployment and operating processes in combination with close collaboration between development and operations (DevOps) enables applications to be brought to market more quickly and infrastructure to be managed more efficiently.
The advantages of cloud native
Cloud Native offers a wide range of benefits for companies that want to migrate their applications to the cloud or develop new ones. Some of the key benefits are:
- Scalability and elasticity: Cloud-native applications can react automatically to increasing loads and adapt dynamically to ensure optimum performance.
- Agility and speed: The combination of containerization and microservices enables faster development, deployment and updating of applications, resulting in reduced time-to-market.
- Cost efficiency: By using cloud resources on demand and being able to switch off unused resources, companies can optimize their costs and only pay for resources that are actually used.
- Reliability and availability: Cloud-native applications benefit from the highly available and scalable infrastructure services of cloud providers, which guarantee reliability and high availability.
The evolution of applications - from traditional applications to cloud-native
The development of applications has undergone an amazing evolution over time. Applications used to run on traditional physical servers, which were expensive and difficult to scale. These traditional applications were often monolithic, meaning that they were developed and deployed as a single unit.
With the emergence of cloud technology and the introduction of cloud-native approaches, this landscape has changed fundamentally. Cloud-native applications have been developed specifically for the cloud and benefit from the unique advantages and capabilities of cloud platforms. They are typically based on microservices that are packaged in containers and can be developed, deployed and scaled independently. This enables faster time-to-market, greater scalability and improved flexibility.
Cloud-native applications also utilize other advanced technologies such as serverless computing and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). Serverless computing allows developers to write and run code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. CI/CD tools and practices allow applications to be continuously developed, tested and deployed, shortening development cycles.
The evolution from traditional applications to cloud-native applications offers a number of advantages. Cloud-native applications are highly scalable as they are able to automatically adapt to changing load requirements. They are also more resilient to outages as they are based on a distributed and redundant system. In addition, they enable improved resource utilization as they only use the resources that are actually required. This leads to cost savings and optimized performance.
AWS supports the evolution from traditional applications to cloud-native applications with a variety of services and tools, which we will present in the next chapter.
7 steps to cloud-native applications
Transforming your traditional applications to cloud-native applications requires a carefully planned and step-by-step approach. Here are some important steps to make the process successful:
Evaluation of the application
Start with a thorough evaluation of your existing application. Analyze its structure, dependencies and scalability requirements. Identify potential challenges and opportunities arising from the transformation.
Division into microservices
Identify the different functionalities of your application and break them down into independent microservices. Each microservice should fulfill a specific task and communicate with other services via a clear interface.
Containerization
Package the individual microservices in containers. Containers enable efficient deployment, scaling and isolation of your applications. Use technologies such as Docker to create and manage the containers.
Orchestration
Use a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes to automate the deployment, scaling and management of containers. Kubernetes offers advanced features for load balancing, monitoring and error recovery.
Automation
Implement automation tools and processes to simplify the deployment, testing and updating of your cloud-native applications. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) make it possible to bring changes into production quickly and reliably.
Scaling and elasticity
Use the elastic scaling functions of the cloud platform to adapt the resources of your application as required. Scale your application horizontally to cope with an increased load and scale it down automatically when demand is lower.
Monitoring and security
Implement a comprehensive monitoring and security system to ensure the performance and security of your cloud-native applications. Continuously monitor your applications to detect and resolve potential performance problems or security breaches at an early stage.
Cloud Native with AWS
As one of the leading cloud providers, AWS offers a comprehensive range of services and tools that support companies in their cloud-native transformation. AWS supports the development and deployment of cloud-native applications with services such as:
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): A fully managed container deployment service that makes it easy to scale and manage containers.
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): A managed Kubernetes service that helps organizations deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters.
- AWS Lambda: A serverless compute service that enables code execution without provisioning or managing servers.
- AWS App Mesh: A service mesh that simplifies and controls communication between microservices in an application.
Cloud native security with AWS
AWS places great emphasis on cloud security and offers a variety of security services and features to protect cloud-native applications. These include:
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): A service for managing access rights and identities that ensures that only authorized users can access resources.
- AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF): A managed firewall service that protects web applications from common threats and attacks.
- AWS Shield: A DDoS protection service that protects companies from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Conclusion
Cloud Native is the new standard for developing and deploying applications in the cloud. It offers companies the opportunity to take full advantage of the cloud and improve their agility, scalability and efficiency. With AWS as the leading cloud provider and our expertise in cloud security, organizations have powerful tools and resources at their disposal to successfully execute their cloud-native transformation. Take advantage of cloud native and maximize security in the cloud. Contact us today and let's start your cloud-native journey together.
