Cloud Native
What is Cloud Native?
Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that utilize cloud computing benefits through containerization, microservices, and dynamic orchestration. Cloud-native application architecture reflects this workflow, with decentralized software architectures. Cloud-native cultures have four key principles:
- Self-Service Developer Experience: The new platforms and tooling that have emerged from cloud native technologies bring many advantages, but also require new skills and techniques in order to harness them effectively. Improving the developer experience is primarily focused on reducing the friction between forming a hypothesis to something running in production and providing (observable) business value.
- Progressive Delivery: The ability to be able to deliver software rapidly and safely are now table stakes for many modern organisations. Following the well-established principles of continuous delivery and ensuring that application code and config is always ready to be deployed is essential, as is the automation of both functional and nonfunctional tests and the deployment process itself.
- Projects to Products: IT is moving away from the traditional view of being a separate cost centre to an integral part of any business. Accordingly, modern software delivery teams must own the full product lifecycle, from hypothesis testing to deployment and long term operation.
- Cloud Native Architecture: Architecture styles such as microservices, event-driven systems and function-as-a-service in combination with container and cloud technologies are core drivers of creating software that is modular, resilient, and elastic.
Impact on Today
The cloud native culture is a new way of building software that decentralizes decision making so you can move faster. By empowering software engineers to be software owners, cloud native organizations deliver business value faster. The emergence of “cloud native” technologies and practices, such as microservices, cloud computing, and DevOps, has enabled innovative organisations to respond and adapt to market changes more rapidly than their competitors.