Proliferating customer base, growing web traffic, and rising transactions — a dream come true for businesses. However, it requires an avalanche of resources and stupendous IT teams to deliver. After all, rapid change has become a necessity for keeping the business afloat in the era of instant gratification.
That’s precisely where cloud-native apps come in. As a matter of fact, almost 75% of businesses are now developing cloud-native applications. To that end, let’s get into the nitty gritty of cloud-native apps and understand their importance.
What Is a Cloud-Native Application?
Applications that are developed, implemented, and deployed using cloud-based technologies are cloud-native applications. In a nutshell, cloud-native applications are a collection of loosely coupled independent services. The key purpose of cloud-native apps is to speed up the process of building new applications, modernize the existing ones on the cloud principles, and connect them all. This approach helps develop and update applications quickly while improving quality and reducing risks.
Key Aspects of Cloud-Native Applications
- These applications are entirely built, tested, managed, and deployed within the cloud environment.
- Cloud-native services are packaged in containers and deployed as microservices with an orchestrator to manage multiple containers.
- The cloud-native applications are managed on elastic infrastructure that could be anywhere: private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud.
- This approach ensures that applications are resilient, scalable, observable, and fully automated.
Why Is Cloud-Native Important Today?
Businesses must deal with several pressing challenges created by changing customer needs and market dynamics. And cloud-native apps have the potential to respond to dynamic challenges and keep up with the pace of disruptive technologies.
Here is why cloud-native is essential:
Gain Competitive Advantage
The cloud-native approach allows businesses to switch from a focus on saving IT costs to seeing the cloud as a business growth engine. It enables organizations to quickly adapt to the changing customer needs and deliver applications to ensure success.
Reduced Downtime
The cloud environment automates the IT operations to transform businesses into lean and focused teams. The automatic upgrades and live patching eliminate downtime, not to mention the elimination of the risks of failure due to human errors,
Focus on Resilience
When the monolithic infrastructure fails, it can heavily affect the delivery of services. On the other hand, a cloud-native environment allows developers to design a system that stays online regardless of any hiccups.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Applications
1. Cost-Efficient
Conventional architecture has the concern of confining to fixed resources and incurring high costs, especially owing to the dynamism required to accommodate a successful software development process. But with cloud-native applications, the solutions are designed to function in the cloud. This cloud infrastructure compatibility allows businesses to reduce costs of development, backup, maintenance, and usage of resources.
2. Delightful Customer Experiences
The features of conventional applications such as software updates and dedicated teams for each task are no longer required to enhance customer experiences. Moving to the cloud helps take a customer-first approach to developing the application while focusing on feedback and the deployment cycle. It modifies the entire development cycle to emphasize customer experience.
3. Reduced Vendor Lock-in
With a monolithic way of application development, it is necessary to stick to the same vendor for performance, security, and maintenance services. But cloud-native application development avoids this vendor lock-in by allowing businesses to use services from different cloud service providers.
4. Automation
The adoption of cloud-native development practices helps in end-to-end automation throughout the software development cycle. This approach follows a continuous loop of deployment, testing, and feedback gathering to enhance productivity and customer satisfaction.
5. Real-Time Analytics and Compliance
With the increasing influx of data, it is vital to analyze and utilize the data in real-time to understand the performance issues, customer behavior, and so on. Cloud-native application development allows businesses to utilize the data in the best possible manner while ensuring compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, and other concerned regulations.
6. Better Security
Security becomes a critical concern with the constant sharing of data among different services across the organizations and decentralized communication structures. Cloud-native development ensures that every unit is exposed only to the relevant fields and data. Cloud-native infrastructure also provides various security layers such as restricted access, multi-factor authentication, and more.
7. Enhanced Flexibility and Scalability
While public cloud providers offer reasonably low-cost services, most businesses do not prefer to choose a single cloud environment. With a cloud-native environment, enterprises can build an application that can run on private or public clouds to avoid cloud lock-in. Cloud-native apps also allow horizontal scalability as the business grows and eliminate the need for hardware solutions and software-dependent infrastructure.
8. Serverless Platform and Reusability
Cloud-native applications utilize serverless platforms to upload multiple portions of the code that can perform specific functions when isolated. It helps businesses reuse the parts of the project’s code as and when required. Every part of cloud-native services can function separately rather than being orchestrated by a central application to save the cost and time of the development team.
Make the Best of Cloud-Native for Your Business
Collecting, storing, and analyzing data in today’s consumer-driven era has become exceptionally challenging without the right tools. Now is the time to realize the true potential of the cloud by building your applications as cloud-native.
And starting your modernization journey can be much easier if you choose the right cloud adoption partner. Reach out to us to discover how cloud-native applications can enable a seamless and profitable digital shift.
zCon Technical Blog 