Understanding Cloud Native Application Bundles

The Cloud Native Application Specification, CNAB 1.0, was just released. A collaborative effort between Microsoft, Docker, Pivotal, and others.

Carolyn Van Slyck, the co-creator of Porter, the friendly cloud installer that gives you building blocks to create CNAB bundles from your existing pipeline, will demonstrate real world bundles, answering common questions:

• What is a bundle?
• When are bundles useful?
• Does this replace existing technology?
• Why wouldn’t I just use helm, terraform, etc?
• Are all CNAB tools the same? Interchangeable?

#react-native #reactjs #cloud #web-development #docker

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

How native is React Native? | React Native vs Native App Development

If you are undertaking a mobile app development for your start-up or enterprise, you are likely wondering whether to use React Native. As a popular development framework, React Native helps you to develop near-native mobile apps. However, you are probably also wondering how close you can get to a native app by using React Native. How native is React Native?

In the article, we discuss the similarities between native mobile development and development using React Native. We also touch upon where they differ and how to bridge the gaps. Read on.

A brief introduction to React Native

Let’s briefly set the context first. We will briefly touch upon what React Native is and how it differs from earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is a popular JavaScript framework that Facebook has created. You can use this open-source framework to code natively rendering Android and iOS mobile apps. You can use it to develop web apps too.

Facebook has developed React Native based on React, its JavaScript library. The first release of React Native came in March 2015. At the time of writing this article, the latest stable release of React Native is 0.62.0, and it was released in March 2020.

Although relatively new, React Native has acquired a high degree of popularity. The “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019” report identifies it as the 8th most loved framework. Facebook, Walmart, and Bloomberg are some of the top companies that use React Native.

The popularity of React Native comes from its advantages. Some of its advantages are as follows:

• Performance: It delivers optimal performance.
• Cross-platform development: You can develop both Android and iOS apps with it. The reuse of code expedites development and reduces costs.
• UI design: React Native enables you to design simple and responsive UI for your mobile app.
• 3rd party plugins: This framework supports 3rd party plugins.
• Developer community: A vibrant community of developers support React Native.

Why React Native is fundamentally different from earlier hybrid frameworks

Are you wondering whether React Native is just another of those hybrid frameworks like Ionic or Cordova? It’s not! React Native is fundamentally different from these earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is very close to native. Consider the following aspects as described on the React Native website:

• Access to many native platforms features: The primitives of React Native render to native platform UI. This means that your React Native app will use many native platform APIs as native apps would do.
• Near-native user experience: React Native provides several native components, and these are platform agnostic.
• The ease of accessing native APIs: React Native uses a declarative UI paradigm. This enables React Native to interact easily with native platform APIs since React Native wraps existing native code.

Due to these factors, React Native offers many more advantages compared to those earlier hybrid frameworks. We now review them.

#android app #frontend #ios app #mobile app development #benefits of react native #is react native good for mobile app development #native vs #pros and cons of react native #react mobile development #react native development #react native experience #react native framework #react native ios vs android #react native pros and cons #react native vs android #react native vs native #react native vs native performance #react vs native #why react native #why use react native

Multi-cloud Spending: 8 Tips To Lower Cost

A multi-cloud approach is nothing but leveraging two or more cloud platforms for meeting the various business requirements of an enterprise. The multi-cloud IT environment incorporates different clouds from multiple vendors and negates the dependence on a single public cloud service provider. Thus enterprises can choose specific services from multiple public clouds and reap the benefits of each.

Given its affordability and agility, most enterprises opt for a multi-cloud approach in cloud computing now. A 2018 survey on the public cloud services market points out that 81% of the respondents use services from two or more providers. Subsequently, the cloud computing services market has reported incredible growth in recent times. The worldwide public cloud services market is all set to reach $500 billion in the next four years, according to IDC.

By choosing multi-cloud solutions strategically, enterprises can optimize the benefits of cloud computing and aim for some key competitive advantages. They can avoid the lengthy and cumbersome processes involved in buying, installing and testing high-priced systems. The IaaS and PaaS solutions have become a windfall for the enterprise’s budget as it does not incur huge up-front capital expenditure.

However, cost optimization is still a challenge while facilitating a multi-cloud environment and a large number of enterprises end up overpaying with or without realizing it. The below-mentioned tips would help you ensure the money is spent wisely on cloud computing services.

• Deactivate underused or unattached resources

Most organizations tend to get wrong with simple things which turn out to be the root cause for needless spending and resource wastage. The first step to cost optimization in your cloud strategy is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for.

Enterprises often continue to pay for resources that have been purchased earlier but are no longer useful. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it on a regular basis brings you one step closer to cost optimization. If needed, you can deploy automated cloud management tools that are largely helpful in providing the analytics needed to optimize the cloud spending and cut costs on an ongoing basis.

• Figure out idle instances

Another key cost optimization strategy is to identify the idle computing instances and consolidate them into fewer instances. An idle computing instance may require a CPU utilization level of 1-5%, but you may be billed by the service provider for 100% for the same instance.

Every enterprise will have such non-production instances that constitute unnecessary storage space and lead to overpaying. Re-evaluating your resource allocations regularly and removing unnecessary storage may help you save money significantly. Resource allocation is not only a matter of CPU and memory but also it is linked to the storage, network, and various other factors.

• Deploy monitoring mechanisms

The key to efficient cost reduction in cloud computing technology lies in proactive monitoring. A comprehensive view of the cloud usage helps enterprises to monitor and minimize unnecessary spending. You can make use of various mechanisms for monitoring computing demand.

For instance, you can use a heatmap to understand the highs and lows in computing visually. This heat map indicates the start and stop times which in turn lead to reduced costs. You can also deploy automated tools that help organizations to schedule instances to start and stop. By following a heatmap, you can understand whether it is safe to shut down servers on holidays or weekends.

#cloud computing services #all #hybrid cloud #cloud #multi-cloud strategy #cloud spend #multi-cloud spending #multi cloud adoption #why multi cloud #multi cloud trends #multi cloud companies #multi cloud research #multi cloud market

Becoming Cloud Native

There are few companies operating in today’s markets affected most recently as we are with the events of 2020 that have not undergone a digital transformation of some sort. Research shows that 80% of executives are accelerating plans to digitize work processes and deploy new technologies in response to the impact of COVID on the business world. The traditional model of business is undergoing radical change in an endeavour to employ digital technologies better to suit multiple purposes across a variety of sectors, and cloud native is one of the key drivers that re-architects cloud environments with the intent of adapting the means for how to deliver services. cloud native is a modern and advanced software development approach; which is why it is becoming of high importance to many companies.

Digital Transformation Risks

But moving to a new software development approach is not easy, and organizations can be slow to adopt radical change in the interests of safeguarding their market, output and business. So, to mitigate risk, organizations can take a step-by-step approach to becoming cloud native in several phases, where they can first replicate the new approach on a smaller scale inside a department/team/project architecture to test the results. If positive, it is then possible to scale the approach organization-wide continuously till the whole enterprise cloud architecture becomes cloud native. If implemented correctly, the cloud native approach supports organizations to improve speed, agility, and resilience in the app development and management process.

#cloud native #cloud #cloud computing #cloud native development #cloud-native applications

Cloud-Native Application Bundles: Containerisation with Cloud-Native Applications

One of the few remaining challenges of deploying applications as microservices, running in containers, is complexity. A cloud environment may start as a simple ecosystem for microservices, but it doesn’t take much for that simplicity to be replaced by a complex web of containers.

Modern container orchestration systems like Kubernetes don’t really help with simplicity either. In fact, it is too easy to end up with a complex network of pods across multiple clusters when you don’t incorporate Kubernetes deployment best practices correctly.

When it was first made popular back in late 2019, the Cloud Native Application Bundles, or CNAB, is designed to combat the complex nature of containerisation. Today, CNAB has become the go-to standard for simplifying the process of bundling, installing, and managing apps in containers.

A Cloud-Agnostic Solution

CNAB was first introduced in 2018, but it wasn’t widely adopted until late in 2019. As a standard, one of the biggest advantages offered by CNAB is its support for any cloud computing environment. Yes, it is a cloud-agnostic approach that can be implemented in any environment.

In fact, the primary goal of CNAB is to make containerisation easier to incorporate across different cloud environments. Moving a bundled app from one cloud cluster to another should involve nothing but the standardised process.

CNAB itself is a tool that was initially developed by Microsoft and Docker. Considering that Docker is still used on top of existing container orchestration systems, it is easy to see how CNAB immediately became the universal tool to use.

Before we get to the technical side of CNAB, there are several additional advantages to acknowledge first, starting with the fact that CNAB makes deploying applications easy. Since packages are standardised, you can scale up the distribution of pre-made apps.

That level of standardisation is perfect for developers offering on-premise or self-hosted solutions. Rather than having to manually install and configure everything, applications can be delivered as packages or bundles, and any cloud administrator can install them easily.

CNAB also highlights security as an important factor. The signing and verification runtimes that are part of CNAB makes securing bundled apps easy. In fact, administrators can always check the crypto signature of bundled apps to make sure that they come from legitimate sources.

Introducing: Duffle

The packaging and unpacking of cloud-native applications are best done using Duffle, a tool natively built to adopt CNAB. It is the implementation of the CNAB specification to the letter, despite many other tools introducing their own takes on authoring application bundles.

Duffle depends on a Docker engine to build and install CNABs. If you are using a local development environment, you need to make sure that you can use Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows, or Docker on Linux to eliminate the dependency. You can also use Docker in the cloud if one is available.

The tool itself is straightforward. Once you have your application ready for deployment, simply run duffle build ./appfolder/yourapplication/ to start the process. Duffle will take you through 6 steps and you will have a successful build at the end of the wizard.

Running bundled applications requires you to run duffle install command while cleaning up applications can be done with the duffle uninstall command. You may also want to generate credentials for the bundled apps for them to run properly.

There are some parameters to be defined before you can bundle applications successfully, starting with the usual name-version-description-keywords combination of the metadata. You can then add cnab under invocationImages and begin defining how the bundle should be processed.

Everything else is easy. The app itself can be in any form you like as long as it is designed to run in Docker containers. You can also define user-overridable parameters for the install process, plus you can embed executable images if there are dependencies to manage.

That’s the entire CNAB standard. As long as these parameters are defined, you will have no trouble creating bundles and installing them using the commands we discussed earlier.

#blog #cloud technology #cloud-agnostic approach #cloud-native application bundles #cnab #container orchestration tools #containerisation #kubernetes #microservices

Start With CI/CD Using the Cloud Native Toolkit From the IBM Garage

Today’s blog post is about the awesome IBM Garage Cloud Native Toolkit to support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) in today’s agile world.

Today’s blog post is about the awesome IBM Garage Cloud Native Toolkit to support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD).

I want to provide a basic overview from my perspective, which I structured in the following sections:

• Motivation
• Basic Overview
• Try it out
• Open-Source Tools/Technologies
• What are the major tasks inside an OOTB Tekton pipeline?
• Summary

#cloud native #cloud native applications #cloud native apps #cloud #ci/cd