by What is Cloud Native Software?
It refers to applications and services that are specifically designed and built for cloud computing and deployment models like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). These applications are optimized to take full advantage of the elastic nature of modern cloud infrastructure and platforms.
Characteristics of Software
Some key characteristics that define its software include:
Microservices Architecture
These applications are made up of loosely coupled microservices – independent, lightweight services that communicate over standard protocols. Each service focuses on one specific function rather than bundling everything together into a single monolithic application. This allows for greater scalability, flexibility and continuous deployment.
Containers
Cloud Native Software applications are containerized and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are used to deploy and manage containers at scale. Containers provide a standardized unit of software that packages code and dependencies together. This helps ensure consistency across development, testing and production environments.
Scalability
Cloud Native Software applications can dynamically scale up or down in response to workload demands using automation, eliminating the need for developers to over-provision resources. The application’s infrastructure elastically expands or contracts to handle traffic spikes without impacting performance or availability.
Highly Available
These software employs redundancy mechanisms like replication, decentralized data stores and load balancing to ensure high availability even during outages or failures in individual services or components. The application remains responsive and accessible.
Observability
Application metrics, traces and logs are immediately available for cloud native applications deployed in containers. This allows problems to be quickly identified and addressed through monitoring dashboards, APM tools and tracing integrations. Errors and anomalies are visible end-to-end.
Decentralized Data Management
Its software favors decentralized, distributed data stores like NoSQL databases as opposed to heavier SQL databases. This provides flexibility to replicate data across availability zones and share it between microservices distributed globally for lower latency.
Automation
Continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) practices are leveraged to package, release and update its applications quickly through automation. Complex manual processes are replaced with workflow scripts for reliable, repeatable deployments with low overhead.
Cloud Benefits of Its Software
By taking advantage of these modern cloud design practices and technologies, cloud native applications are able to fully leverage the elasticity and pay-as-you-go advantages of cloud computing. Some specific benefits include:
Reduced infrastructure costs – Its architectures allow workloads to dynamically scale up and down based on demand, lowering costs by eliminating over-provisioning. Granular metering and pay-as-you-go pricing models enable greater savings.
Increased availability – Cloud resiliency features like auto-scaling, load balancing and regional availability zones ensure its applications remain up and responsive even during outages. Redundancy is built-in.
Greater agility – Modular microservices and automated CI/CD pipelines empower faster delivery of new features and fixes. Businesses can iterate more quickly based on customer and market feedback.
Improved scalability – Microservices and containers allow its software workloads to expand and contract rapidly based on usage, handling massive sudden spikes or periodic traffic loads.
Simplified maintenance – Pain points like server patching and upgrades are handled by cloud providers, freeing developer resources. Central logging, metrics and tracing bring more visibility into app operations.
Cloud Native Transformation in Practice
As enterprises migrate more of their existing monolithic applications and legacy systems to new architectures, the benefits are clear:
E-commerce giant Amazon deployed their entire infrastructure on microservices and containers to support peak volumes during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales periods, avoiding cost overruns.
Netflix shifted to a containerized, event-driven microservices model running on Amazon Web Services to enable tremendous scaling worldwide without compromising performance or reliability.
Banks like Capital One have been able to roll out new digital banking features much faster through its transformations, improving customer experiences.
By modernizing applications to be with containers and microservices, businesses in every industry are gaining increased velocity, flexibility and cost optimization – helping them compete and thrive in today’s digital landscape. The cloud native approach promises to reshape software development practices and infrastructure strategies for years to come.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public Source, Desk Research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it.
