Digital transformation is becoming a business imperative. What is the common denominator that underlies so much of the innovation and disruption taking place today? The answer is a reliance on cloud systems. Without elastically scalable, highly efficient, and disaster-resilient cloud architectures, these disruptive innovations would not be possible. Modern applications must be able to make full use of the elasticity and resiliency of cloud infrastructure. That’s why we call them modern cloud applications or cloud-native applications, what attributes should these applications have to drive a successful digital transformation?
Whether you are just starting on your journey to digital transformation, or are well on your way to cloud native, it’s time to really define how you can take advantage of new developments to create increased productivity, speed up time to market, and increase your enterprise potential using technology. Cloud native applications are the wave of the future, but what makes a modern cloud application different from what came before?
What is a “Modern Cloud Application?”
“Going native” has traditionally been terminology associated with a “back to basics” approach to just about anything! But how does this relate to the cloud, a decidedly new and cutting edge technology? Cloud native is related directly to how applications are built and run in a cloud environment. So instead of a return to tradition, cloud applications are now being built to operate entirely on the cloud – a new tradition of increased agility, reliability and scalability.
Brief History of Cloud Native Applications
Cloud was once built with a “monolithic” architecture. While it worked well for years, there were several issues developing which made cloud architects rethink their traditions. Monolithic infrastructures required multiple teams to work together on every code change. Any changes or features updaters required a great deal of work, integration and testing before deploying. Finally, development teams could only use two languages.
What are Microservices?
Microservices are a style of software development, and a converged digital infrastructure, relying on small independent services, managed by small, self-contained teams. Microservices architectures make applications more scalable, faster, easier to develop, and give new features a faster time to market. Microservices are widely relied on due to their many benefits, including:
- Highly maintainable and testable applications
- Loosely coupled with multiple systems or teams
- Independently and quickly deployable
- Specialization is easier with smaller services
- Autonomous components are quickly developed, deployed, operated and scaled
- Organized around business capabilities over futures
- Owned by a small team of developers, over distributed teams
7 Key Characteristics of Modern Cloud Applications
1. Agility
Microservices rely on small, independent teams that act within a small context. They work relatively independently and quickly, shortening application development times.
2. Cloud-Developed
Project assets are stored in the cloud, enabling correlation and using cloud resources for application testing, authentication and notifications, and also eliminating the need for more hardware.
3. Microservices-Oriented
Kubernetes let you run your microservices in separate containers, deployed independently, removing the risk of conflict between elements. Teams are increasingly relying on automation tools to manage, monitor and log any issues that need attention
4. Continuously Integrated and Delivered
Modern cloud native applications provide continuous integration and delivery, making it easier to create and remove elements, at a significantly lower cost.
5. DevOps-Enabled
Cloud native technology means easier DevOps. Internal teams can easily adopt cross-functional methods that ensure continuity and enable business goals.
6. Analytics-infused and user experience-centric
Container and microservices monitoring solutions are able to manage more objects and cloud native apps, generating vital data. Collecting this data was once complex, but modern cloud applications allow for easy monitoring of applications, microservices and containers.
7. Lightweight
Cloud applications, using a cloud infrastructure are less time-consuming to create, learn, manage and use. Less on-disk, memory, and CPU resources means shorter start up times. This trend has gradually begun to replace virtual machines, because of the efficiency, low cost, and responsivity.
Next Steps in Modern Cloud Applications
Because applications are changing the way we do everything, it’s important to prioritize his trend – it won’t be a trend for long! Sangfor NG-CDI is the next generation converged digital infrastructure that natively supports modern cloud applications that are microservice-based. A few of the benefits included with Sangfor NG-CDI include:
- Cloud-Native: Kubernetes is built into the kernel, and containers are supported natively on NG-CDI (Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure).
- Application Store: Expedite application deployment by packaging your application containers and VMs into Helm templates, offering 1-click application deployment.
- Unified Platform: NG-CDI provides unified management, networking, storage, monitoring and logging for VMs and containers, while namespace-based management gives users application-centric agility.
- Intrinsic Security: End-to-end cloud-native security, to maximize security of your infrastructure and applications, from the inside-out.
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