9 May 2020 Why is cloud native important?

Cloud-native computing is an approach in software development that utilizes cloud computing to its fullest due to its use of an open-source software stack to deploy applications as microservices. Typically, cloud-native applications are built as a set of microservices that run in Docker containers, orchestrated in Kubernetes and managed and deployed using DevOps and Git Ops workflows. The advantage of using Docker containers is the ability to package all software needed to execute into one executable package. The container runs in a virtualized environment, which isolates the contained application from its environment.

cloud-native has been one of the hottest topics in software development. Some developers just call it hype that will lose traction and disappear after some time. For others, it’s the future of software development. Whatever the future will bring, cloud-native is currently one of the biggest trends in the software industry. It has already changed the way we think about developing, deploying, and operating software products.

Cloud-native is a lot more than just signing up with a cloud provider and using it to run your existing applications. It affects the design, implementation, deployment, and operation of your application. Cloud-native computing as championed, advocated, and evangelized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) itself is an approach that uses an open-source software stack to deploy applications as microservices. Each microservice is packaged into its own container and those same containers are then ‘dynamically orchestrated’ in order to ‘optimize resource utilization one would expect given the controllable, flexible and composable nature of the cloud model itself.

The CNCF works to host critical components of the software stacks in use here including Kubernetes and Prometheus overall the organization insists that it exists as a neutral home for collaboration as part of The Linux Foundation. Cloud-native computing embodies a set of architectures as well as best practices for developing and delivering applications running on those technologies. Typically, cloud-native applications are architected as a set of microservices that run in Docker containers, orchestrated in Kubernetes and managed and deployed using DevOps and GitOps workflows.

Cloud-native is the impetus behind the DevOps shift that has led us to a whole new set of methods and philosophies on how to do software development. Companies who adopt cloud-native and DevOps best practices like GitOps can increase mean time to deployment from 1 or 2 deployments a week to 150 deployments or more in a single day. With the ability to continuously deploy changes, development teams can conduct advanced deployments like canary tests and roll out features to subsets of customers more easily. Also, since your entire system is kept in git, rolling backward or forward is only a click away which allows developers to make frequent low-risk changes that can be easily backed out of. With this kind of automation and velocity, enterprises can bring new ideas to production within minutes or hours instead of weeks and months, resulting in a greater rate of innovation and competitiveness.