Cloud-native applications deliver the full value of cloud in modern enterprises, where “everything-as-a-service” is already the standard way to build new apps of all shapes and sizes. These applications are referred to as cloud-native and they are built with the express purpose of leveraging cloud environments, allowing for scalability, agility, availability, and quicker time-to-market. Follow these architectural patterns and best practices to create applications that are simple, robust, and scalable in the cloud.

In this article, we are going to cover the fundamental concepts and operational practices of developing small cloud-native services, learn where these things differ from traditional development patterns and in which manners different businesses can make best use of cloudy happenings.

Cloud-Native Application

A cloud-native application always uses the inherent flexibility, scalability and automation of one or multiple clouds. Cloud-native applications are those built with the dynamic and scaling cloud environment in mind, as opposed to legacy applications that get migrated to the cloud (a.k.a. “lift-and-shift”).

Since these monolithic applications will be decomposed, the new cloud-native services could for example use microservices architecture, being deployed in containers and orchestrated by a container-platform like Kubernetes. It lets developers build applications, which are consistent, have self-healing capabilities and can scale in an optimized way to handle different workloads.

Key Characteristics of Cloud-Native Applications:

• Microservices Architecture: Systems have loosely coupled services connected by APIs
• The concept here is to containerize each service into a lightweight, transportable container.
• Orchestration and Automation : Combined with platforms like Kubernetes to assist in the management and deployment of containers.
• CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): Automated pipelines which allow faster and more consistent code integration along with rapid deployments.
• Dynamic scalability: Cloud-native software applications can expand horizontally whenever needed because of the on-demand nature of cloud resources.

Cloud-Native Application Development Principles

Using cloud infrastructure is just a small part of the story as far as cloud-native development goes. It requires a new software delivery and maintenance paradigm so that we can modernize how the companies design, develop, deploy, patch and maintain solutions. Here are the core principles:

1. Microservices Architecture

One of the basic tenets of cloud-native application development is building an application with a microservices architecture. While monolithic applications have all functionalities tightly coupled, a cloud-native application splits up the app into smaller services that are looser coupled and can be deployed separately. Each microservice is designed to serve the specific purpose, it might be related to user authentication, payment processing or managing product catalog etc.

Benefits of Microservices:

• Agile development :services are built, deployed and operated independently, which will fuel innovation throughout the different teams.
• Resilience: Individual Microservice Failure will not bring down the entire System, hence high availability.
• Polyglot Technology: It allows independent services to be written in different languages with separate technology stacks.

2. Containerization

Containers are lightweight, portable environments that package up everything needed to run an application — the code, runtime, libraries and dependencies — and client-server applications built using microservices architecture in the cloud-native space take full advantage of them. Containers are a form of Lightweight Virtualization, Docker is the most widely known container orchestration technology and Kubernetes is your de-facto standard.

Benefits of Containerization:

• Consistency in different environments: Containers make sure that an application works the same way for instance in development but also testing production as well.
• Can run containers that enabled to execute on Docker anywhere, giving the team can use multi-cloud providers.
• Container’s lightweight:-containers are skinny as compared to virtual machines, & hence need an efficient system.

3. DevOps and CI/CD Pipelines

Cloud Native Developers need DevOps(Continuous Integration/Continous Deployment) practices as their essential part. Such practices allow developers to push out code often and quickly, while automating a lot of the testing, integration, and deployment process.

• However I think a high level overview of both probably covers something like this  CI Developer frequently checks code into shared repository, which will trigger a build that runs tests to catch bugs early.
• Continuous Deployment — Code, when all the tests are clear, is deployed into production.

Benefits of CI/CD:

• Faster Time-to-Market: Automated pipelines help developers to develop and produce new services easier.
• Better Collaboration: One of the best features of CI/CD is that it encourages teamwork between developers and operations, meaning smoother processes and fewer slowdowns.
• Lesser Human Error: As the name suggests, automation results in reduced human intervention and thereby chances of manual errors in deployment processes.

4. Scalability and Elasticity

Cloud-native applications are built to scale horizontally, for example you can run more services instances to take care of the increased demand. This is unlike the traditional ones, which increase capacity of a single machine (vertical scaling) One important fact is that Horizontal scaling makes more sense in cloud, because resource allocation can happen automatically.

• Atuo-scaling: cloud native microservices use auto-scaling policies (CPU usage, network traffic) to add or remove service instances.
• that inelastic applications require enough config and tuning such that they meet peak throughput requirements (more often than not we overprovision and waste resources); elastic application self-adjust the partitioning based on load to achieve max performance with lowest cost.

5. Resilience and Tolerance of Failures

The light of a cloud-native application resilience is an important principle. Cloud-native applications are architected with microservices and containers to get up faster during failures. Patterns such as circuit breakers and service meshes control traffic between services, and come with built-in fault tolerace.

• Graceful Degradation: To limit disruption to users, cloud-native applications are built so that they keep working even when a few services are down.
• Redundancy and Failover: Cloud-native applications take advantage of the redundant services by running them on multiple regions/zones, ultimately establishing a highly reliable system.

6. Solution: Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a key element of cloud native development. Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, these types of tools allow you to model and provision (i.e. set up) your infrastructure resources (e.g servers, databases, networks etc…) which code providing consistent configurations throughout environments AND automation for provisioning!

Benefits of IaC:

• Version Control: Source decoed can have its infrastructure configurations stored and versioned, similarly to the code itself.
• Repeatable: Teams can reproduce these environments in different stages (development, testing, production) by running a script
• Scalable: IaC is easier when a new infrastructure needs to be scaled up by just adding additional resources or services.

Cloud-Native Applications Design Patterns and Best Practices

Although it is only part of the equation, embracing cloud-native principles is not enough. Developers should pay attention to good practices so that their software remains viable and robust for a long time. Following are some best practices while developing cloud-native applications:

1. Separate State from logic of application

Implementing stateless design is another concept often considered one of the best practices in cloud-native development. that is, each service instance should be stateless with no sessions. Instead, manage state in an external data store (databases, caching services like Redis).

Importance of Stateless design

• Stateless Applications are easy to scale horizontally because Any instance can handle any request, And there is no need for synchronizing the state.
• Resilience: Stateless services are able to replace or migrate and restart without losing important data.

2. Use Managed Services

Cloud providers provide a lot of managed services like databases, message queues, monitoring which can save time during development. Cloud-native applications will be capable of using these services thereby relieving management requirements for operations type task such as backups, scaling, and patching.

• Amazon RDS: Is a an managed service on Amazon Database.
• Azure App Services: It is a PaaS(Platform as Service) for web application.
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub — Messaging queue with little or no management effort.

Managed services enable developers to build their business logic more and focus less on infrastructure management.

3. Monitor and Log Everything

Cloud-native applications require observability. Services for monitoring services like Prometheus and Grafana can send alert notifications to help keep a track of system performance; logging tools such as ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) or Amazon CloudWatch can collect detailed logs to troubleshoot problems.

Key Metrics to Monitor:

• Latency: Time taken by the services to respond : To make sure that different services are able to meet the performance SLAs.
• Error Rates: Creating hooks on the applications and services to track failures for getting notified beforehand.
• Scaling: Scale in/out by monitoring CPU, memory, and network.usage

4. Security Best Practices

When it comes to cloud-native applications, security is king. Quick Tip Apply security best practices such as IAM, network segmentation, and encryption to your application and data. Enforce security policies with cloud-native security tools like AWS IAM, or Azure Security Center

• This is a part of Secure Software Shift Left: security checks in the CI/CD pipeline to discover vulnerabilities early in the development phase.
• Implement the principle of least privilege [Zero Trust Architecture]: architecture everyone is authorized before access resources e.g each microservice-kubernetes pod are authenticated & authorized before start using database.

5. Embrace Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering — aka the practice of purposely causing system failures to help identify weaknesses for improving fault tolerance, is a best practice some organizations harness to protect cloud-native applications from failure. In production environment, we often use tools like Gremlin and Chaos Monkey for simulation of failures.

Conclusion

To create a cloud-native application, new thinking around design and deployment practices is a must. Architectural principles such as microservices, containerization and automation through DevOps process will enable businesses to build scalable, resilient and agile applications that utilize cloud on full. These best practices include using managed services, security by design and monitoring as well as chaos engineering to ensure that cloud-native applications are both high-performing and secure and also remained resilient in a dynamic cloud environment.

With businesses increasingly valuing agility, innovation and scale, I believe that cloud-native development has a huge part to play in defining the future of software delivery & infrastructure management.