Cloud-native development makes way for applications that are packaged in containers, deployed as various microservices, managed on elastic infrastructure, built on agile DevOps processes, and delivered in continuous workflows. The cloud-native DevOps abstracts the underlying compute, storage and networking primitives, abstaining the concerned DevOps teams’ direct access to programming interfaces (APIs). With orchestrator handling resource allocation itself, they are reduced to mere policymakers.
Cloud-native development tools, such as Kubernetes, simulate a flat network tied to present networking topologies and primitives of cloud vendors. The infrastructure abstraction not only facilitates interoperability between cloud environments; it also allows developers to take the emerging patterns to their advantage and to build and deploy applications on top of them.
Kubernetes is the workhorse of contemporary workloads running on the top cloud-native development workflows. It won’t be an overstatement to call it the operating system that will take cloud-native development to the future. In an ideal world, where developers build applications as a set of independent microservices, package them in containers and deploy them with Kubernetes; the shift is clearly towards cloud-native development as further elaborated through these points.
1. Applications are managed through agile DevOps processes
Each service of a cloud-native application goes over a self-regulating life cycle, which is managed through a nimble DevOps process. Multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines may work together to deploy and orchestrate a cloud-native application.
2. Applications are packaged as lightweight containers
Cloud-native applications are developed as an assortment of independent and autonomous microservices packed inside lightweight containers. Unlike virtual machines, containers are easy to scale-out and in a rapid fashion. Because the unit of scaling is now containers, infrastructure utilization is optimal too.
3. Applications are developed with best-of-breed languages and frameworks
Each service that forms a functionality of the cloud-native application is developed using a language and framework best suited for the feature. Cloud-native applications are multilingual and polyglot; services can use a number of programming languages, runtimes, frameworks, and databases.
How about adding real-time video streaming service to an application developed in Node.js with WebSockets while choosing Python and Django for exposing the API! The versatile methodology to developing microservices lets you pick the best programming language and framework suited to deploy that functionality and gives you much-needed freedom down the line.
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