One of the most recent trends in the IT industry is the rising number of organizations preferring cloud-native applications to meet evolving customer demands. Application modernization has empowered several organizations to develop and deliver innovation rapidly. Other than improving developer productivity, cloud-native application development facilitates organizations in moving monolithic applications to the cloud by breaking them down into loosely coupled services.
According to Forrester, every organization, not only the already digitally savvy ones that amounted to 15% firms worldwide, are committed to advance technological experiences, operations, and ecosystems in 2021. Moreover, 90% of applications are estimated by Gartner to be cloud-native by 2022. Container management remains a major driver behind adoption of the cloud-native architecture as it delivers agile support at scale. Organizations that develop the ability to leverage scalable business models for business continuity vis-a-vis cost optimization are highly likely to witness accelerated digital business transformation journey.
Key Areas to Consider in the Move to CNAD
For organizations to kickstart their journey of cloud-native application development, mapping a strategic plan for cloud-centric environments is vital. This not only helps them in fast-tracking their digital transformation objectives but also ensures automated business processes and business continuity.
- Working with APIs, containers, and microservices directly can be challenging. However, organizations can opt for low-code platforms that enable reducing complexities pertaining to legacy application development methods.
- Questioning the CSP whether the platform will support their cloud-native goals and adopting PaaS solutions can be a good start for organizations in their CNAD journey.
- Organizations must look to bridge the gaps in automation and management by using templates as building blocks for seamless execution of workflows.
- An agile approach to infrastructure empowers organizations in going reactive to proactive in their operations. This, along with leveraging a complete IaaC stack, helps organizations in revolutionizing their infrastructure management.
Best Practices for Cloud-Native Application Development
- Segregating monolithic applications into loosely coupled microservices.
- Achieving infrastructure and workflow automation.
- Implementing efficient CI/CD pipelines.
- Storing the infrastructure as code (IaC) in an effective version control system.
- Implementing DevOps methodologies and processes.
How Do Cloud-Native Applications Accelerate Innovation?
Unlike monolithic applications, cloud-native applications are capable of being highly scalable and flexible, comprising numerous independent microservices. By leveraging DevOps and with an agile approach, software developers are allowed to add new features easily in cloud-native development, building different microservices that, when aggregated, make up the application. Cloud-native applications enable developers to rewrite microservices individually, rather than updating every component while delivering new codes to the production.
The aforementioned advantages of cloud-native application development provide the ability to build new applications at low cost, relieving organizations from the hassle of modifying their legacy applications. It not only gives organizations innovative solutions for retaining their existing customers but also attracting new prospects.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Application Development
Eliminating Large-Scale Development
Organizations can eliminate large-scale development by leveraging containers on the cloud, which helps them modernize their applications seamlessly and efficiently. Cloud-native application development leads to faster deployment and enables modernization on-the-go for future requirements of organizations. Additionally, it helps them save on resources and time during the process of making improvements.
Enhanced Performance
Organizations tend to struggle with the ever-evolving demands of customers, which in turn builds pressure on the DevOps teams for meeting these demands. The cloud-native strategy facilitates software developers in delivering performance improvements with agility.
Better Collaboration
Performance optimizations remains a key priority of organizations and integrating platforms and applications is a must as open-source software gain traction. The cloud-native strategy allows organizations to collaborate with relevant applications as well as CSPs, which in turn results in advanced functionalities with integrated features.
Increased Speed-to-Market
The flexibility and efficiency delivered by cloud-native development have positive impacts on businesses, empowering them to introduce new features for their customers to use in real-time. This further helps them to save on operational expenses while scaling resources vis-à-vis demand dynamics.
Competitive Potential
Most organizations across the globe are adopting the cloud-native approach for consistent delivery of better customer experience. Cloud-native application development allows organizations to integrate technologies such as blockchain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This complements their efforts to remain at the forefront of competition with highly intuitive and responsive customer engagements.
Achieving the Infrastructure of the Future
Cloud-native applications are a popular trend and so is the fail-fast principle. Containerization, along with the practices of chaos engineering, has allowed organizations the feasibility to scale in failure mode. Containers can be attributed to the successful cloud-native computing visions, serving as a flexible innovation catalyst.
With their workloads in traditional systems, organizations find it challenging to establish new architectures and modern application development. The reasons behind this include technical debt, management complexities, and high maintenance costs. It is critical that organizations move their traditional workloads to the cloud for simplifying their IT environments.
Several open-source platforms are accelerating the advancement of business support systems and operations support systems to microservices-based cloud-native infrastructure. These platforms are enabling business and network automation, driving completely automated operations and bringing high value. Open-source frameworks and integration tools are being adopted by organizations for implementing the infrastructure of the future on the cloud.
Use Case
Operational optimization and performance improvement are significant USPs of the cloud-native development approach. For example, a leading NGO, Feed Ontario, faced inefficiencies in their user’s system, which resulted in inaccurate data reporting to food banks and donors. With Blazeclan’s solution of cloud-based end-to-end system, Feed Ontario was able to move away from their monolithic architecture and achieve an effective donor creation system. This helped them in optimizing their operations by approximately 60% and improve performance by nearly 70%.
Following was the solution developed for Feed Ontario.
Future-Proofing the Business
As the trend of cloud-native applications grows across industries, organizations continuously look to modernize their legacy applications for readiness and compatibility on the cloud. For meeting customer requirements while exceeding their expectations, businesses are adopting strategic, advanced workloads for future-proofing their practices and solutions being developed.
Here, selecting the right cloud partner is as critical as following best practices of cloud-native development. It provides them with the opportunity to unlock potential avenues of growth through technical enablement and top-notch expertise in go-to-market strategies.
Recommended Read: Cloud-Native Vs Traditional
Recommended reading: Key Considerations to Architect your Applications on Cloud