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What Is Cloud Native?

More organizations and IT teams today are turning to cloud native applications and architecture to take full advantage of cloud computing environments. This paradigm shift in software development and deployment enables organizations to achieve greater efficiency, agility, scalability, and resilience.

What does “cloud native” mean?

The term “cloud native” describes a modern approach to building and running applications that fully exploits the power of cloud computing. A cloud native methodology transforms how applications are developed, deployed, and managed. Cloud native applications are designed and optimized from the ground up to run in the cloud and leverage the inherent capabilities of the cloud to achieve greater efficiency and agility.

Cloud native applications

Cloud native applications are designed to move with greater speed and agility. Built with collections of loosely coupled microservices that communicate through APIs, events, and messaging, cloud native apps enable independent components to be easily scaled, deployed, and upgraded without impacting service delivery. Because these apps are typically containerized, they are more portable across public cloud infrastructure, multiclouds, hybrid cloud platforms, virtual machines, and on-premises data centers.

Key elements of cloud native architecture

Cloud native apps are built on several key components.

  • Microservices are loosely coupled, reusable software components that are designed to integrate easily into any cloud environment. A cloud native app may rely on a variety of microservices that provide functionality, but each microservice can be scaled independently of others and continuously improved through multiple iterations. A microservices architecture enables cloud native apps to be developed more quickly and with greater flexibility.
  • Containers are lightweight, stand-alone, executable packages that include everything a piece of software needs to run across different environments, including source code, operating system, and libraries. Using containers, highly diverse cloud native applications can run at the same time on a single server, even though they rely on different operating systems.
  • Container orchestration automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications to minimize the complexity of handling container lifecycles, resource management, load balancing, provisioning, and troubleshooting.
  • APIs (application programming interfaces) provide a set of protocols and definitions that allow different software components to communicate with each other and share data.
  • Service mesh is a dedicated layer of infrastructure and software for managing communication between multiple microservices. Service mesh directs traffic between all the components of an application that need to communicate with each other.
  • Automation tools help operations teams streamline workflows and processes for provisioning, deploying, and scaling cloud native apps to deliver software quickly and reliably.
  • Operational tools handle data processing, storage, and business logic.

Cloud native technologies

Development and DevOps teams rely on several technologies and methodologies to develop cloud native applications.

  • Serverless computing is a cloud computing model in which a cloud services provider is responsible for provisioning and managing server resources. This frees developers to focus on creating applications without needing to worry about the underlying server infrastructure, helping to speed development.
  • Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines automate provisioning for rapid and reliable software delivery.
  • Immutable infrastructure improves the stability of cloud native applications by never modifying servers or infrastructure components after deployment. Instead of updating existing components — which can introduce bugs and configuration issues — new iterations of cloud native apps are deployed on new compute instances.
  • Observability enables teams to monitor, log, and trace capabilities and performance in distributed systems to minimize downtime (mean time to repair, or MTTR).
  • Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform. Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based platform for managing containerized applications.
  • Docker is a platform for creating and managing container images.
  • Cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft, and VMware provide cloud platforms and cloud infrastructure that are tailored for the needs of cloud native workloads.
  • Management platforms like GitHub help with version control and collaboration — essential when managing multiple cloud native projects simultaneously.

The benefits of a cloud native approach

Cloud native architecture provides significant benefits for organizations and IT teams.

  • Scalability: Cloud native apps can scale horizontally and vertically as needed, thanks to containerization and dynamic orchestration technologies.
  • Portability: With the ability to run apps across different cloud environments, cloud native architecture can match each workload to the cloud environment that will run it most efficiently and cost-effectively.
  • Resilience: Immutable infrastructure and self-healing capabilities enhance fault tolerance and simplify recovery.
  • Velocity: A cloud native approach enables development teams to release apps and upgrades faster while also improving quality.
  • Agility: The accelerated pace of CI/CD pipelines enables organizations to respond more quickly to changing requirements.
  • Cost optimization: On-demand serverless computing resources mean organizations pay only for the resources actually used. Autoscaling capabilities minimize the cost of managing cloud native apps.

The challenges of cloud native infrastructure

Managing cloud native architecture and applications poses several challenges for IT teams.

  • Greater complexity: A cloud native architecture can introduce substantial complexities for DevOps teams that are required to manage highly distributed systems, service dependencies, and orchestration tools.
  • Cloud security issues: Rapidly scaling containers and distributed applications in general may lead to breaches when associated security risks are not properly monitored and remediated. Think of how much harder it is to secure 10 cloud locations compared to 1.
  • Lack of observability: Cloud native applications may make the task of monitoring and troubleshooting performance more difficult.
  • Cultural resistance: Development and DevOps teams that are skilled in creating monolithic applications may be resistant to adopting the new practices and organizational changes required for cloud native development.
  • Skills gap: Not many people are familiar with these new technologies and design patterns, so it can be hard to find the right technical resources that can implement them.

The business benefits of going cloud native

By enabling more portable applications, cloud native architecture allows DevOps teams to easily move workloads across data centers and cloud providers. This advanced portability helps organizations to achieve clear business benefits.

  • Speed time to market: Accelerated software delivery cycles enable a faster response to market demands.
  • Optimize cloud spend: Portability enables organizations to move workloads to the cloud provider that offers the greatest ROI and most cost-efficient allocation of resources.
  • Improve customer experiences: Cloud native development allows teams to move core workloads to clouds that are closer to customers anywhere in the world, providing faster and more responsive customer experiences and addressing increasingly common localization needs.
  • Boost cloud agility: Cloud native development enables organizations to scale and reassign cloud resources as needed to adapt in real time to changing market conditions and customer preferences.
  • Mitigate cloud risk: Cloud native architecture helps mitigate business, localization, technical, and regulatory risk by letting organizations choose different vendors for various workloads, and to minimize downtime by avoiding a single point of failure for service outages.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The CNCF is an open source software foundation that promotes the adoption of cloud native technologies. It plays a crucial role in advancing the cloud native ecosystem by providing resources, fostering innovation, and ensuring that projects and technologies align with the needs of modern cloud-based applications.

Cloud native development differs from traditional approaches in its emphasis on containerization, microservices, DevOps practices, automated deployment, and leveraging cloud capabilities. It requires a cultural shift towards agile methodologies, collaboration between development and operations teams, and embracing cloud native technologies and architectures.

Cloud-enabled software is a legacy application that has been modified to run in the cloud. In contrast, a cloud native application has been designed from the ground up to leverage the capabilities of the cloud.

In cloud native architecture, portability is the ability to move applications and related components across different cloud environments (public, private, or hybrid clouds) with minimal effort and without significant changes. Portability helps organizations achieve greater flexibility, minimize vendor dependency, and enhance resilience.

Why customers choose Akamai

Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence.