From Cloud First to
Cloud Native
Agile – DevOps – Microservices – Cloud
Cloud native driving digital transformation journey
From Cloud first to Cloud Native
Organizations have mainly focused on application migration. Lift and Shift model has helped moving old apps and functionality onto a cloud platform, this emulates old-world applications and architectures. Unlocking the next level of cloud benefits requires a different approach which includes cloud-native mindset, reorganizing people, processes, technology, and workflows. Being cloud native is creating applications with the cloud specifically in mind and containerizing existing applications.
Cloud native is much more than just a programming model or a new way of writing code. It transforms the entire lifecycle of how requirements are collaboratively collected, coded, tested and deployed. It changes the way we run our application, now it is about running and managing the containers, containers can be a single application, or a single functionality written as a microservice.
Containerizing Business Logic & Data Access Layer
Each of the functionality can be written in a microservice and can be run as container. Containerization removes the risk of any friction or conflict between languages, libraries or frameworks. Containers are portable and can operate in isolation from one another and it is remarkably simple to create a microservices architecture with containers and move them to another environment seamlessly.
Container Orchestration
Orchestrator (cluster manager) like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm or others mange containers and help using containers as an application. Kubernetes seem to be winning the race and is the complete orchestration platform and major cloud providers supports it with easy to install solutions.
Continuous Automated Deployment
Software changes and new features rolling out on a regular basis through an automated continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline (CICD) supports the agile application development cycles.
Monitoring
With containers we manage more objects, services, and servers than before. Cloud native apps also generate a lot of extra data that needs to be kept track of. Collecting data from an environment composed of so many moving parts is complex. Prometheus was built specifically to monitor applications and microservices running in containers at scale and is native to containerized environments.
Cloud Native Mindset
To implement cloud native technology and DevOps best practices the internal teams must not only learn to adopt cross-functional methods that ensure software is iterated on with a continuous cadence but that it also complements the business goals of the company. The actual switch to cloud native may be the simplest part in your journey; however, getting those changes to stick and propagating them throughout your organization could well be the most difficult part of the process.
Cloud Native Benefits for Enterprises
Agility and Productivity
GitOps and DevOps enables developers to use fully automated continuous integration continuous delivery pipelines (CICD) to rapidly test and push new code to production. This results in a greater rate of innovation and competitiveness.
Cost Optimization
Containers can significantly decrease infrastructure costs because they are more lightweight than VMs and can share a single OS. Underline hosts running on cloud native technology enables pay-per-use models and with right scaling strategies cost can be optimized.
Attract and retain top talent
Cloud native technologies are appealing to developers and infrastructure professionals. Cloud native initiatives not only attracts top talent but also excite existing team and provide them a great learning opportunity.
Scalability and Reliability
Kubernetes running on cloud platforms inherits the on-demand elastic scaling of compute, storage and other resources. Enterprises can take advantage of built-in scalability to match any demand profile without the need for extra infrastructure planning or provisioning.
GitOps and DevOps best practices provide developers with the ability to cleanly rollback and recover faster from disaster in the case of a cluster meltdown This helps businesses offer better SLA’s and and quality of service.
Reduced vendor lock-in
Cloud native applications are more portable and beyond the reach of vendor predatory pricing. You can easily migrate to alternate public clouds with better product offerings or where compliance requires multi-cloud infrastructure. Cloud native components such as managed cache, databases or Service bus provides endpoints and provides consistent APIs. Hence even your applications are using cloud native services of a particular cloud provider moving away from it does require major changes and efforts
The ACC Cloud Native Core Solution comprises of
- Monolithic to microservices/serverless
- Agile software development
- Adapting DevOps and Gitops best processes
- Selecting and managing right hyperscale cloud platform