Understanding Cloud Native & its Architecture

Overview

The term Cloud-Native first appeared 10 years ago when Netflix discussed their web application architecture in AWS re: invent talk 2013. At that time, the meaning of Cloud-Native was likely different than it is today. However, there were no clear definitions of this term and it means different things to different people or organizations.

In this blog, we are going to understand, what Cloud-Native is & what are the promises of Cloud-Native.

Cloud-Native is a software architecture pattern, which means any kind of application architecture whether it is web, mobile, or desktop completely built on a Cloud platform natively that is more scalable, available & loosely coupled. Before the Cloud Computing era, organizations did their infrastructure on-premise. The IT or system admins have to do all the hardware setup and configure all the services that are required to run the application. The more hardware to manage, the greater will be the cost.

Note: Cloud-Native is a pattern or approach to building applications using Cloud platforms and services for high availability, scalability, and modern dynamic environments, making loosely coupled systems.

When the Cloud Computing Era boomed in the tech industry, Some notable organizations started adopting the cloud quickly. They designed their architecture on the cloud completely which promises increased agility to ship new features without compromising their availability making it quicker to respond to changing customer demands. All the big giant companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have their own Cloud Platforms that empower organizations to build their application using their platform. So, investing time in Cloud Native will be a good idea.

When should we adopt the Cloud-Native approach?

The answer is It Depends. If the application is relatively small with monolith architecture a Cloud-Native approach may not be necessary. A simple deployment model may be sufficient. However, for larger and more complex applications, Cloud-Native can offer a wide range of benefits such as increased scalability, faster deployment cycles, and high availability. Ultimately, the decision to adopt a Cloud-Native strategy should be based on a careful evaluation of the application's requirements and the organization's resources.

You might have an understanding of Cloud-Native, we are going to cover, Cloud-Native architecture along with its benefits.

Cloud-Native architecture

Cloud-native technologies help organizations build and run scalable applications in dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid cloud. The cloud-native approach heavily relies on utilizing Cloud platforms, Containers, Microservices, DevOps, Immutable Infrastructure, and Service mesh.

In the past, it was very common to see applications poorly designed & utilized. Cloud-native architecture introduced much-needed wisdom on how to effectively design applications and infrastructure. The design patterns and practices created throughout the years of mistakes in evolution provided us with the solution of best practices that focus on Application availability, Cost management, Efficiency, and reliability. The approach in Cloud-Native must enable loosely coupled systems that are reliable, resilient, and highly available along with easier management and observability.

Cloud-native technology is built on 4 pillars that provide a strong foundation for its architecture.

• Microservices
• Container Orchestration
• DevOps & Automation
• CI/CD Pipelines

Microservices

Before Cloud-Native architecture design, traditional systems were developed as single centralized applications with tightly coupled services and components making them difficult to deploy. This tightly coupled behavior between different components can potentially affect the entire application even with a minor change.

Microservice Architecture is the fundamental pillar of Cloud-Native. They are small, focused & independent services which makes them easier to develop and deploy. When working with monolith applications, the application needs to be rebuilt and redeployed as a whole every time we do a single change which makes it less flexible. Services can't be developed with different technologies and due to its single source of truth, high availability & scalability are nearly impossible to achieve. However, tracking bugs and issues in a monolith is quite easy and communication is fairly simple. For large enterprises and complex systems, the monolith will never be a good option due to its limitations with flexibility.

That's where Microservices Architecture comes into play. It is a fine-grained architecture for your system where services are further divided or broken into smaller services as Task-level services. The philosophy that Microservice architecture follows is to Keep services small and decoupled and should do only one thing (Unix philosophy). That's why they are called Microservices.

Container orchestration

In Pre-containerization, apps were developed as single instances on a single machine that could consume resources of your hardware. Then Virtual Machines have been introduced to distribute the workload for different instances. Multiple instances of the application can run on a single computer by having multiple Virtual Machines. But VMs consume resources too, as they are full-fledged operating systems running on an existing operating system. To solve those issues, Containers have been introduced. They are lightweight processes that run the applications in an isolated environment irrespective of what version you have for that application runtime.

They enable developers to package their applications to ship, deploy, and run on any platform. Containers are the core of Cloud-Native. There are many container technologies or tools that exist right now but the most popular one right now is Docker. It is the most developer-friendly tool to work with your workloads. According to Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey docker has been the most-used tool in the developer's community.

Orchestration on the other hand is a technique used to manage multiple containers at once. Cloud Native follows the principle of microservice architecture, so when you work with containers for those services, it becomes really hard & less efficient to manage containers for these microservices manually. So to orchestrate or manage the containers we used tools like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, etc. These tools help developers tackle the problem by automating the scalability, load balancing, availability, scheduling, deployment, and networking of containers.

Devops & automation

DevOps or Development Operations, is one of the go-to strategies to include in your cloud-native architecture. The term Dev and Ops combines practices that allow us to adopt a Cloud-Native environment to ensure that a company constantly delivers quality software. DevOps is a paradigm-shifting approach to creating software. It has in recent times become the defective method for building, testing, delivering, and managing software applications.

The core idea that DevOps embodies is that both development and operation teams should work closely together throughout the entire software life-cycle. From the initial development, right through to the installation, running, and maintenance of the application. This is an important cultural shift that needs to be embraced for successful DevOps adoption.

Cloud-Native emphasizes automating the workflows and by applying the principles of DevOps, organizations can achieve automation and ensure the quick delivery of the systems. DevOps practices promote collaboration between development and operations teams. Automation of tasks such as provisioning, configuration management, and monitoring accelerates the deployment process and enhances operational efficiency.

CI/CD pipelines

When implementing DevOps practices into your cloud-native applications, you create automated workflows to build, test, deliver, and deploy the system for your environment. To achieve those steps, DevOps engineers create CI/CD pipelines to automate workflows. CI stands for Continous Integration and CD stands for Continous Deployment. It connects the development and operations to automate building, testing, and deploying the application. This practice ensures rapid and reliable software delivery, fostering agility and innovation.

Conclusion

Cloud-native architecture is an approach or pattern to design, develop, and deploy your systems using the above pillars we discussed. These pillars collectively enable cloud-native applications to achieve qualities like scalability, resilience, flexibility, and speed. By adhering to these principles, organizations can take full advantage of cloud infrastructure, allowing them to innovate rapidly and deliver value to customers more efficiently.

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