Software development is an ever-evolving field. What was cutting edge five years ago is now standard or surpassed by something even faster, more effective, or more feature-rich. One of the changes that the field has undergone in recent years is swapping over development, test, and deployment software environments to the cloud.
Cloud architecture is distributed in nature. Instead of doing software development on a desktop computer, testing combined modules together on a server, then doing deployment on another setup, like we may have in the past, we can do all this in the cloud. Being distributed across resources owned by another company means that physical hardware and configuration is no longer part of the equation - even the software used to perform software development tasks can live and run in the cloud.
Instead of only having live software applications run in the cloud, we can build and perform all maintenance tasks in the cloud instead, with cloud native architecture. Let’s check out five benefits of doing things this way.
1. Microservices provide location-independent modularity and issue isolation
Cloud architecture is built on many microservices that operate in isolation, but then interact with each other by well-defined APIs. This type of modularity is extremely useful in software development. With small, well-defined operations, and easily testable interfaces (APIs), it makes applications far easier to test and get to the crux of where any issues are occuring, whether they are bugs or performance problems.
In the past, software applications were developed as monoliths. Cloud architecture’s modularity itself helps build applications that are also themselves modular.
2. Containerization is standard
Another way in which cloud native architecture breeds modularity is via containerization. Containerization allows us to build microservices each with their own environment - a container. This container can have its own virtual CPU/s, memory, process space, etc.
You can run many different containers on the same real machine, but they exist in isolation with the option to use whatever languages, libraries, and other resources needed. This empowers developers to use what best suits the problem space of the particular microservice. Because they’re portable, they can run anywhere, distributed across different physical and/or virtual servers and even across different clouds. Kubernetes is currently king of the container space.
3. DevOps-driven development
While DevOps-driven development isn’t a cloud native concept, cloud architecture and services lend themselves to this approach. DevOps is, at its core, a way to do Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
When you are using containers to do development, then it’s imperative to do Continuous Integration to ensure applications always build and run as expected. Tooling like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet (often used in DevOps) are highly compatible with cloud offerings. Cloud orchestration’s infrastructure-as-code looks significantly similar to DevOps’ infrastructure-as-code.
While the two can exist independently in development, cloud architecture and DevOps make a compelling team. Check out the Guide to Cloud Native DevOps for more info.
4. Scalability is inbuilt
Many companies have dreams of their software, websites, or web apps reaching millions of people a day, doing swift business. When software is built on cloud native architecture, then it is generally built to provide infinite room to scale.
While resources still cost money to run, this is a problem of optimisation, not scalability. If built with resource-optimisation in mind, software can run smoothly and effectively with elastic load balancing without costing thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Scale is a non issue: concentrate on optimised code.
5. Built for what it will run on, instead of adapted to fit
Taking and porting traditional-style applications over to a cloud-based architecture often isn’t particularly effective. Sure, it works, but it doesn’t make the most of the opportunities afforded by cloud-based services.
Since there is a shift towards cloud for applications, it makes sense to build the software based on the target system. The beauty of containers and the like is that they are system agnostic: they work across clouds. That means that whether you choose private cloud or public cloud for running your application, you can reconfigure and configure at will, optimising based on reliability, speed, and cost.
Interested in building cloud native software?
We stay up to date in the best techniques, tools, and architectures to build software for all purposes. If you are wondering whether your application could benefit from cloud native architecture, then come and have a chat with us at CodeFirst . We can evaluate your project and ideas and work out the best approach to deliver software that performs to your requirements both now and in the future.