Cloud Native Application Principles

Pre-requisite: Cloud architecture

Numerous businesses developed unique design patterns and best precises to enable more efficient operation as a result of the popularity of cloud native application architecture. 

The Most Important Cloud Native Architecture Models 

1. Pay-as-you-Go

Resources are distributed using a pay-per-use or pay-as-you-go pricing model and a cloud architecture with central hosting. According to resource utilization, customers are billed. This implies that you can optimism resources to the core and scale them as needed. Additionally, it provides variety and freedom in terms of services and payment methods. For instance, the serverless design allows you to only provision resources when the code is really performed, which means you only pay when your application is actually being used.

2. Self-service Infrastructure

A cloud native application architecture’s core feature is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Whether you use an elastic, virtual, or shared environment to deploy your apps, they will automatically realign to the underlying infrastructure and scale up or down to accommodate shifting demands. That means that in order to develop, test, or deploy IT resources, you do not need to request and obtain authorization from the server, load balancer, or a central management system. The waiting time is cut down, and IT management is made easier.

3. Managed Services

In order to effectively manage the cloud infrastructure, from migration and configuration to management and maintenance while optimizing’s time and costs to the core, cloud architecture enables you to fully exploit cloud managed services. It is simple to manage each service as an agile DevOps process because each is viewed as having its own separate lifecycle. Several CI/CD pipelines can be managed independently and used simultaneously.

One such serverless compute engine is AWS Faregate, which uses a pay-per-usage business model to enable you to create apps without the need to manage servers. Another tool for this objective is Amazon Lambda. In the cloud, relational databases may be created, scaled, and managed with the help of Amazon RDS. In order to securely handle user authentication, authorization, and management across all cloud apps, you can utilize Amazon Cognito, a strong tool. You can quickly set up and administer a cloud development environment with the aid of these tools, and you may do it for very little money and work.

4. Globally Distributed Architecture

The cloud native architecture’s globally distributed design is another essential element that enables you to install and manage software throughout the infrastructure. It is made up of a network of standalone parts put in various places. To cooperate in reaching a single objective, these elements communicate with one another. Businesses can employ distributed systems to significantly boost resource utilization while still giving users the impression that they are interacting with a single machine. In these circumstances, hardware, software, and data resources are pooled together to run a single function across multiple machines. These systems are fault resilient, transparent, and extremely scalable.

Client-server architecture is no longer employed in modern distributed systems; instead, multi-tier, three-tier, or peer-to-peer network topologies are used. Distributed systems provide scalability, fault tolerance, and low latency as features. Unfortunately, they require sophisticated monitoring, data synchronization, and integration. It’s difficult to avoid network and communication breakdown. The cloud service provider handles the governance, security, engineering, evolution, and lifecycle management. This implies that your cloud-native programmed won’t need to be updated or patched, and you won’t have to worry about compatibility problems.

5. Resource Optimization

In a conventional data Centre, businesses must first buy and install all of the necessary infrastructure. The company has to make additional infrastructure investments at busy times. The freshly acquired resources sit idle after the peak season has passed, wasting your money. You can instantly spin up resources whenever you need them and shut them down once you’re done with them with a cloud architecture. You will only be billed for the resources used, as well. As they won’t need to invest in long-term resources, your development teams will be free to test out fresh ideas.

6. Amazon Autoscaling

A cloud native architecture’s autoscaling functionality, which helps you automatically modify resources to maintain applications at optimal levels, is a potent tool. The benefit of autoscaling is that you can scale particular resources while abstracting each scalable layer. There are two approaches to resource scaling. While horizontal scaling involves the addition of additional machines to scale out resources, vertical scaling involves changing the design of the system to handle the growing load. Capacity is the upper limit for vertical scaling. With horizontal scaling, resources are limitless.

For example, AWS comes standard with horizontal auto-scaling. Amazon monitors and changes resources based on an uniform scaling policy for any application that you build, whether they are Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, DynamoDB indexes, Elastic Container Service (ECS) containers, or Aurora clusters. Either you can set scalable priorities, such as cost reduction or high availability, or you can balance the two. Although AWS’s autoscaling capability is free, the scaled-out resources will cost money.

7.  12-Factor Methodology

Developers at Heroku created a 12-factor methodology that enables organizations to quickly build and deploy apps in a cloud native application architecture. This methodology aims to efficiently manage dynamic organic growth of the app over time while minimizing software erosion costs, as well as to enable seamless collaboration between developers working on the same app. The same codebase should be used for all programmed deployments, and it should be packaged with all dependencies kept apart. These are the most crucial lessons to learn from this procedure.

It is preferable to keep the setup code separate from the app code. Statelessness enables you to execute, scale, and terminate processes independently. Similar to how you should manage build, release, and execute stateless processes separately, you should create automated CI/CD pipelines. The apps should be disposable so that you may start, stop, and scale each resource separately, which is another important advice. The cloud architecture is a fantastic fit for the 12-factor methodology. The 12-factor methodology also stresses the need of having a loosely linked design. Finally, your development, testing, and production environments should all be the same. Microservices, Docker, and containers might all be used.