[What Is] Cloud-Native and its future

The methodology of cloud-native enables applications, as we know them, to function in a cloud environment and utilize it to the fullest. But what does the cloud offer, that wasn’t here before?

Forecast: Cloudy

Services that function in the cloud are characterized by an unlimited presence – they are accessed from anywhere, with a functional connection and are located on remote servers. This can curb costs, as you do not have to create and maintain your servers in a dedicated, physical space. If you do, even more costs can arise from the expertise needed to be built within your company to support such a solution.

Cloud-native apps are designed from the ground-up to be present in the cloud and use its potential to the fullest.

Apps re-imagined

The cloud-native approach breaks down apps into microservices. One app contains a set of services, which are independent of each other – one failure does not break the entire app. If paired with service standards like Kubernetes, containers can automatically heal failures once they occur. Furthermore, cloud-native apps can use a variety of languages to build each service. This is possible due to the specified independence of each service. There is a clear separation by API

Apps are packed into containers. Containers guarantee, that all components which are needed for the application in these container images are present and ready to be immediately deployed within a container runtime. Since these containers or blocks, function as one, users can utilize horizontal scaling capabilities, based on actual demands.

Since services are split-up and independent of each other, cloud-native apps can apply a continuous delivery approach. Here, different teams can collaborate on different parts of the container, and manage a continuous development, independent development and improvement of services in the container without redeploying the whole environment.

Industry shift towards clouds

It is hard to move on from an approach, which has proven itself over the years and became a standard. However, the cloud-native approach can offer unmatched scalability & agility for the end-user, unlike traditional applications.

Integration is made easier due to the enormous involvement of the open-source community, namely the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This foundation covers most of the major projects present in common cloud architectures, including Kubernetes.

If your company is looking forward to adapting to these changes, stay tuned for what PANTHEON.tech can offer on this front.