What does Cloud Native mean? Let’s discuss Containers, Orchestration, and Microservices

Have you ever thought about having a business and not worrying about infrastructure failures, downtime, and other technical issues? Perhaps it was impossible a decade ago until cloud-native computing was introduced.

Cloud-native is a service that takes full advantage of the cloud model and is widely used in software development especially because Agile models are used today.

Gone are the days when we had to take care of everything from infrastructure to deployment of our software. Now we are given the opportunity to focus fully on our core goals and excel at our business without worrying about all the time-consuming petty issues since the native cloud is going to take care of that for us.

Cloud-native has truly revolutionized the software industry with its unmatchable features.

It is used to build scalable applications in all three types of cloud:
public, private, and hybrid cloud.

Cloud-native is widely practiced in the software industry. In fact, it is the trendiest topic in the field of software development right now.

By definition,

Cloud-native computing helps applications to fully exploit the functionalities of the cloud computing models. Containers, orchestration, and microservices make the deployment and management of your applications easier and scalable.

Now let’s go into the details of how it helps in exploiting the advantages of the cloud with the help of containers, orchestration, and microservices.

Containers:

Containers are executable packages that contain everything that’s required to run the application. You require a virtualized environment to run these containers since they need to be isolated from other environments.

Containers are portable and independent of the environment they run on. It’s particularly useful for horizontal scaling.

Docker is one of the most widely used applications of Containers in the cloud.

Orchestration:

The deployment problem is easily solved with the containers. However, if you need to halt the running application nodes, you need to take a few things into consideration.

Tasks like balancing loads and sharing keys can be exhausting and time-consuming. That’s where we require orchestration. Kubernetes is used for orchestration to make management easier.

Microservices:

Now that we’re done dealing with the deployment issues, we need to put some thought into architecture. Unlike monolithic architecture that uses the whole system as a unified entity, microservices architecture put us at ease by separating each service and treating it as an independent unit. Most of the services in the microservices architecture are independent of each other which makes it a lot easier to handle the application as a whole.

Now, let’s look at how we can combine the three services to work together..

• Firstly, the container service makes the system reproducible and transparent. It also helps in isolating different resources.
• Secondly, orchestration makes it easy to optimize resource utilization.
• Lastly, microservices architecture helps in making the system agile and scalable.

To sum up, the implementation of a complex system is no more a problem with cloud-native computing. By exploiting all three services provided by the cloud, applications are built with no hassle.

Advantages of cloud-native:

• If we compare cloud-native to a monolithic architecture, we would know how easy it is to manage applications in the cloud-native environment. This model allows iterative development and follows the Agile methodology which makes it very likely to build an up-to-date application. Adding new features is extremely easy with this model.
• The end-user faces no downtime when the application is being updated and improvements are being made. The user experience is improving rapidly with cloud-native technologies. The speed is also optimum to meet the business needs.
• A highly scalable application and infrastructure are provided automatically. Although there’s some involvement of infrastructure, cloud-native applications can be run on PaaS (Platform as a service) model too.
• Automatic updates are a part of cloud-native applications and you don’t have to update anything manually.
• You don’t have to bear the consequences of a failed infrastructure, outages, and technical issues that cause downtime and non-availability of services.

Conclusion:

To sum up, we can safely say that cloud-native is the future of Software development, especially the Agile models. We can easily exploit all three services mentioned above and make our development process fast, easy, and reliable. Besides, staying up to date is no more a problem with the native cloud.