You hear "go Cloud-Native," but if you're like many, you wonder, "what does that mean, and how can applying a Cloud-Native strategy help my company's Dev Team be more productive?"
At a high level, Cloud-Native architecture means adapting to the many new possibilities—but a very different set of architectural constraints—offered by the cloud compared to traditional on-premises infrastructure.
Cloud-Native architecture optimizes systems and software for the cloud. This optimization creates an efficient way to utilize the platform by streamlining the processes and workflows. This is accomplished by harnessing the cloud's inherent strengths:
- its flexibility,
- on-demand infrastructure; and
- robust managed services.
Cloud-native computing couples these strengths with cloud-optimized technologies such as microservices, containers, and continuous delivery. Cloud-Native takes advantage of the cloud's distributed, scalable and adaptable nature. By doing this, Cloud-Native will maximize your dev team's focus on writing code, reducing operational tasks, creating business value, and keeping your customers happy by building high-impact applications faster, without compromising on quality. You might even think you can’t do cloud-native without using one of the big cloud providers- this simply isn’t true, many of the benefits of cloud-native are the approaches and emphasis on better tooling around automation.
Why Move to Cloud-Native Now?
#1 - High-Frequency Software Release
Faster and more frequent updates and new features releases allow your organization to respond to user needs in near real-time, increasing user retention. For example, new software versions with novel features can be released incrementally and more often as they become available. In addition, Cloud-native makes high-frequency software possible via continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), where full version commits are no longer needed. Instead, one can modify, test, and commit just a few lines of code continuously and automatically to meet changing customer trends, thereby giving your organization an edge.
#2 - Automatic Software Updates
One of the most valuable Cloud-native features is automation. For example, updates are deployed automatically without interfering with core applications or user base. Automated redundancies for infrastructure can automatically move applications between data centers as needed with little to zero human intervention. Even scalability, testing, and resource allocation can be automated. There are many available automation tools in the marketplace, such as FP Complete Corporation's widely accepted tool, Kube360.
#3 - Greater Protection from Software Failures
Isolation of containers is another important cloud-native feature. Software failures and bugs can be traced to a specific microservice version, rolled back, or fixed quickly. Software fixes can be tested in isolation without compromising the stability of the entire application. On the other hand, if there's a widespread failure, automation can restore the application to a previous stable state, minimizing downtime. Automated DevOps testing before code goes to production (example: linting and software scrubbing) drives faster bug detection and resolution- reducing the risk of bugs in production.
WOW – Cloud-Native Seems Perfect – What's the Catch?
Switching over to Cloud-Native architecture requires a thorough assessment of your existing application setup. The biggest question you and your team need to ask before making any moves is, "should our business modernize our current applications, or should we build new applications from scratch and utilize Cloud-Native development practices?"
If you choose to modernize your existing application, you will save time and money by capitalizing on the cloud's agility, flexibility, and scalability. Your dev team can retain existing application functionality and business logic, re-architect into a Cloud-Native app, and containerize to utilize the cloud platform's strengths.
You can also build a net-new application using Cloud-Native development practices instead of upgrading your legacy applications. Building from scratch may make more sense from a corporate culture, risk management, and regulatory compliance standpoint. You keep running old application code unchanged while developing and phasing in a platform. Building new applications also allows dev teams to develop applications free from prior architectural constraints, allowing developers to experiment and deliver innovation to users.
Whether you decide to create a new Cloud-Native application or modernize your existing ones, your dev team needs to use these three tools for successful implementation of Cloud-Native Architecture:
- Microservices Architecture.
A cloud-native microservice architecture is considered a "best practice" architectural approach for creating cloud applications because each application makes up a set of services. Each service runs its processes and communicates through clearly defined APIs, which provide good foundations for continuous delivery. With microservices, ideally each service is independently deployable This architecture allows each service to be updated independently without interfering with another service. This results in:
- reduced downtime for users;
- simplified troubleshooting; and
- minimized disruptions even if a problem's identified.
Which allows for high-frequency updates and continuous delivery.
- Container-based Infrastructure Platform.
Now that your microservice architecture is broken down into individual container-based services, the next essential tool is a system to manage all those containers automatically - known as a ‘container orchestrator. The most widely accepted platform is Kubernetes, an open-source system originally developed in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, and others. It runs the containerized applications and controls the automated deployment, storage, scaling, scheduling, load balancing, updates, and monitors containers across clusters of hosts. Kubernetes supports all major public cloud service providers, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud.
- CI/CD Pipeline.
A CI/CD Pipeline is the third essential tool for a cloud-native environment to work seamlessly. Continuous integration and continuous delivery embody a set of operating principles and a collection of practices that allow dev teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably. This implementation is known as the CI/CD Pipeline. By automating deployment processes, the CI/CD pipeline will allow your dev team to focus on:
- meeting business requirements;
- code quality; and
- security.
CI/CD tools preserve the environment-specific parameters that must be included with each delivery. CI/CD automation then performs any necessary service calls to web servers, databases, and other services that may require a restart or follow other procedures when applications are deployed.
As you can probably guess, countless tools make up the cloud-native architecture. Unfortunately, these tools are complex, require separate authentication, and frequently do not interact with each other. In essence, you are expected to integrate these cloud tools yourself as a user. We at FP Complete became frustrated with this approach. So, to save time and provide a turn-key solution, we created Kube360. Kube360 puts all necessary tools into one easy-to-use toolbox, accessed via a single sign-on, and operating as a fully integrated environment. Kube360 combines best practices, technologies, and processes into one complete package, and Kube360 has been proven an effective tool at multiple customer site deployments. In addition, Kube360 supports multiple cloud providers and on-premise infrastructure. Kube360 is vendor agnostic, fully customizable, and has no vendor lock-in.
Kube360 - Centralized Management. Kube360 employs centralized management, which increases your dev team's productivity. Increased Dev Team productivity will happen through:
- single-sign-on functionality
- speed-up of installation and setup
- Quick access to all tools
- Automation of logs, backups, and alerts
This simplified administration hides frequent login complexities and allows single-sign-on through existing company identity management. Kube360 also streamlines tool authentication and access, eliminating many standard security holes. In the background, Kube360 automatically runs everyday tasks such as backups, log aggregation, and alerts.
Kube360 - Automated Features. Kube360's automated features include:
- automatic backups of the etcd config;
- log aggregation and indexing of all services; and
- integrated monitoring and alert framework.
Kube360 - Kubernetes Tooling Features. Kube360 simplifies Kubernetes management and allows you to take advantage of many cloud-native features such as:
autoscaling; to stay cost efficient with growing and shrinking demands on systems
- high availability;
- health checks; and
- integrated secrets management.
Kube360 - Service Mesh.
- Mutual TLS based encryption within the cluster
- Tracing tools
- Rerouting traffic
- Canary deployments
Kube360 - Integration.
- Integrates into existing AWS & Azure infrastructures
- Deploys into existing VPCs
- Leverages existing subnets
- Communicates with components outside of Kube360
- Supports multiple clusters per organization
- Installed by FP Complete team or customer
As you can see – Kube360 is one of the most comprehensive tools you can rely on for Cloud Native architecture. Kube360 is your one-stop, fully integrated enterprise Kubernetes ecosystem. Kube360 standardizes containerization, software deployment, fault tolerance, auto-scaling, auto-healing, and security - by design. Kube360's modular, standardized architecture mitigates proprietary lock-in, high support costs, and obsolescence. In addition, Kube360 delivers a seamless deployment experience for you and your team.
Find out how Kube360 can make your business more efficient, more reliable, and more secure, all in a fraction of the time. Speed up your dev team's productivity - Contact us today!
Subscribe to our blog via email
Email subscriptions come from our Atom feed and are handled by Blogtrottr. You will only receive notifications of blog posts, and can unsubscribe any time.
Do you like this blog post and need help with Next Generation Software Engineering, Platform Engineering or Blockchain & Smart Contracts? Contact us.