Speed, agility, and resiliency are business imperatives. And they require a modern application portfolio that is easy to deploy and update regularly.
Developing cloud-native applications provides significant benefits to businesses. They are easier to deploy across the network and more resilient – surviving infrastructure outages more effectively. They are also smaller and more robust than traditional apps.
Scalability
Cloud-native applications run in software containers, which can be deployed on anything from a laptop to a supercomputer without changing code. This horizontal scalability makes them more flexible and adaptable than monolithic applications.
Microservices allow developers to build cloud-native applications using a variety of languages and databases. This flexibility makes it easier to change and improve applications as needed.
They can also be updated faster with continuous delivery and DevOps automation features. This means shorter development cycles and improved customer experience. Moreover, they can be modified based on feedback in a short time.
Flexibility
Cloud-native applications don’t depend on the underlying infrastructure, so that they can be deployed to any environment. This flexibility helps avoid cloud lock-in and allows teams to focus on building and deploying the application — not where it is running.
They are built with microservices that can be scaled up or down and reallocated on demand. This helps reduce costs by reducing the infrastructure needed to run an application.
By using microservices, developers can create a more agile development process that iterates on new features without the risk of breaking existing code or impacting user experience. These processes also help speed up deployment time.
Reliability
Traditional application architecture creates close dependencies on underlying infrastructure like hardware, OS, and software. This makes changing or migrating to a new infrastructure complex and risky.
Cloud-native applications are agnostic to their cloud platform, which means they can easily change to a different one with little disruption. This provides business continuity and cost savings.
Developers can quickly deploy an app on multiple cloud vendors using tools and serverless platforms. This reduces deployment time and allows engineers to focus on revenue-generating functionality and customer feedback, eliminating the need for non-value-added infrastructure management.
Ease of Deployment
Cloud-native technologies and methodologies such as DevOps automation, continuous integration/continuous delivery, containers, microservices, and declarative APIs help increase software development velocity and improve service reliability. This helps businesses innovate faster and deliver new features more regularly without downtime.
Unlike traditional applications, cloud-native architectures abstract away underlying infrastructure dependencies so teams can focus on software and not patching, configuring, or managing operating systems. This increases software development speed and reduces costs. Additionally, failures can be repaired and services restored quickly with zero downtime.
Scalability
With desktop and mobile OS updates happening nearly daily, compatibility and consistency were challenging for developers. With cloud-native applications leveraging platform-as-a-service technologies, code runs on the same infrastructure for a consistent experience across devices.
The microservices architecture breaks an application into multiple independent services that can be built & deployed separately. This improves modularity and makes it easy for teams to make changes without affecting the entire application. It also allows for fault-tolerant and self-healing applications that eliminate downtime. A combination of resiliency, auto-provisioning & container orchestration platforms enables this.
Reliability
Unlike traditional software development, cloud-native applications are designed with the scalability of the cloud in mind. This allows developers to regularly build, test, and deploy app updates without sacrificing service reliability.
Using containers, failed components are swept out, and new ones are deployed automatically, significantly reducing system downtime. This is a significant benefit for businesses that want to keep up with customer demands and competitors’ offerings.
Additionally, security is built into cloud-native architectures as they comprise more minor, separately secured services. This makes them easier to meet legal and industry requirements.
Ease of Deployment
As applications are not dependent on the underlying infrastructure. They can be deployed and updated more easily. Using techniques such as blue-green and canary deployments. Developers can implement changes in production with minimal downtime.
This approach also helps reduce maintenance costs by automating operations and removing manual IT tasks. It allows for implementing observability features to detect and correct issues as they occur. This is facilitated by the use of microservices that isolate services and make it easier to troubleshoot problems. A single engineering team can work on a particular service without affecting other application components.
Flexibility
With cloud-native applications, engineering teams can work on individual microservices independently without worrying about how they interact. This makes updating software based on customer feedback easier and enables business agility.
The independence of cloud-native applications enables them to run on different infrastructure platforms. This provides flexibility, especially when choosing a cloud provider with competitive pricing models or compliance requiring multi-cloud deployments.
A well-designed app is resilient and available, able to continue working in the event of an infrastructure failure. This is possible by using microservices and container orchestration platforms.
Scalability
Cloud-native applications use microservices infrastructure to improve app resiliency and facilitate portability across cloud environments. Moreover, they allow developers to easily track issues as they isolate problems to the source service without impacting other apps.
This makes it easier for development teams to focus on revenue-generating functions while leaving time-consuming non-value-added infrastructure issues to the cloud provider. Additionally, DevOps automation features and agile delivery methodologies like continuous integration and continuous delivery help to deliver software changes more rapidly. This enables companies to upgrade their applications with little or no downtime.
Reliability
Unlike traditional applications, which depend on hardware dependency, cloud-native architectures are software-focused. This allows for horizontal scalability and reduces the hardware needed to deploy a service.
They also enable a more resilient approach to security. Leveraging automated live patching makes it easier to repair vulnerable apps and ensure data compliance. In addition, they can be run on multiple infrastructure platforms without changing the code. This makes it easy to migrate to new vendors who offer more competitive pricing or better product offerings.
