Cloud-Native application development is an approach that focuses on how you build and deploy an application. A truly cloud-native application provides a consistent user experience, whether in the public, private, or hybrid cloud.
This application development method prepares you for the present and the future. You can create and update applications quickly, with higher quality and less risk than other methods. In this blog post, we’ll look at cloud use cases so you can learn about the benefits of this innovation.
What Is Cloud Software?
You may be familiar with the “cloud,” which refers to storing data on servers with remote access.
Cloud applications are designed to run in the cloud, built into its architecture, and facilitate access to the cloud. The benefits of cloud-based software include the stability and efficiency associated with cloud-based operations and the lightweight and flexible design suited to the task.
Why Consider Cloud-Native Applications?
Cloud applications take advantage of the platforms and processes built in the cloud. They scale well, are easily modified, and connect to cloud services to expand capabilities without writing code.
According to TechTarget, today’s developers are designing, building, and delivering cloud applications with cloud scalability in mind. Cloud applications typically use one or more cloud constructs.
Think differently about how you build software to take full advantage of cloud development. Traditional approaches, with their thorough specifications and six-month turnaround times, must give way to iterative processes that deliver functionality as quickly as services.
4 Examples of Cloud-Native Applications
1. Software Containers
Software containers are portable integrated operating environments that contain an application and all the software components needed to run it.
Containers have become a trendy alternative to complex virtual machines because they:
- Small, usually measured in megabytes or less.
- Fast Deployment
- Reusable and portable
Once you’ve written your app in an ampule, you can move it to any stage that supports containers (which is most of them), and the app will run smoothly. Your application is not tied to a cloud platform – it can run on any suitable with sufficient support resources, from a laptop to a supercomputer.
2. Microservices
Microservices are loosely joined software services that can be combined to create an application.
This eliminates developers’ need to reinvent the wheel and makes applications flexible and extensible. Microservice applications are built like Lego blocks with minimal custom coding, resulting in faster, more reliable development. You can change or add new services without thorough integration testing.
3. Software-Defined Infrastructure
Changing software switches, dials, and plugs make the hardware work almost entirely. This makes it easy to:
- Scale capacity up and down
- Redistribute resources
- Automatically start and stop services
Cloud applications assume the underlying infrastructure is coherent and adaptable to their needs.
4. Application Program Interfaces (APIs)
APIs are software connectors that provide functionality that can be used by other software.
They make extending or customizing applications easy without affecting the underlying code, which is a good practice that should generally be avoided. APIs also allow developers to leverage the rich functionality of other applications.
An excellent example of an API-enabled application is Google Maps. With Google Maps, a real estate application developer can integrate Google’s mapping functionality into their program by querying geographic information using an API. Imagine how much time a developer can save by not building map functionality from scratch or installing a request on their server.
3 Benefits of Cloud-Native Applications
What makes cloud development so valuable? Good companies look for the following characteristics:
1. Flexibility
Cloud applications can change to meet business needs without making dependencies that lock customers into a specific software version.
For example, suppose a company wants to make an application available on mobile devices. In that case, it can create a mobile interface and use an API to access data on the server without changing any code on the back end. This loose coupling allows changes to be made to any application without breaking it.
2. Scalability
Cloud applications use software-defined infrastructure to reduce or eliminate hardware dependency. This approach adds commodity servers for scale-out rather than adding more expensive processors, storage, and memory to existing servers.
Horizontal scalability is what makes large-scale cloud services like Amazon and Facebook possible.
3. Portability
Using containers, developers can transcribe applications that run on any device—from a smartphone to a mainframe—without changing the code. With the growing approval of “edge computing”—a distributed processing architecture that allows automated decisions to be made far beyond the network—it’s good to be able to deploy applications where they’re needed.
Legacy Systems Versus Cloud Architecture
Most legacy requests can run in the cloud but don’t take advantage of cloud architecture’s extensibility, scalability, and portability.
Legacy systems can still benefit from consecutively on cloud platforms, and there can silently be significant value in leveraging APIs or building extensions on top of them using microservices.
For example, you can replace the green screens of the processer days with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) by selectively revealing input and output fields via APIs that map to GUI-based primitives. Some legacy applications can be summarized in containers to exploit cloud scalability and portability without code changes.
When legacy systems are not update beyond server-centric architectures, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and ineffective systems management increase; however, cloud applications are integrally adaptable solutions that offer freedom and suppleness to users and developers.
How to Build a Cloud-Native Application
Working directly with bottles, microservices, and APIs is difficult for beginners. However, a low-code platform dramatically reduces the complexity associated with traditional development methods.
When choosing a provider, ask if the low-code platform supports the cloud designs described above and look for a full-featured platform-as-a-service. It should include a complete set of development, operation, and maintenance tools.
Many low-code development tools were developed before the widespread use of cloud technologies. Developers may have modified them to run in the cloud, but a significant difference exists between cloud-native and cloud-compatible.
According to InfoWorld, cloud development focuses on how you build and deploy applications, not where. New agile development methodologies used by cloud companies emphasize modularity, reusability, and frequent code releases. Developers should think about using existing services rather than creating their own. Because new services can be easily add, it is often easier for a developer to show the end user that a new feature works than to write a specification.
There is no room for the “it wasn’t invente here” mentality when building cloud applications. Creativity is express in the services developers use to create features that delight users. This is a reward in itself.
