Cloud Native Services That Make Your Life Easier By Supporting Fast, Scalable, and Reliable Deployments

Cloud native services empower your organization to take advantage of the speed, scalability, and reliability of the cloud. The cloud native approach involves using tools and applications that are built for cloud technologies from the ground up, rather than trying to adapt traditional infrastructure and services to the cloud. The benefits of using cloud native services for application development and deployment include:

Speed

The cloud native approach supports automation, CI/CD, and other DevOps principles that help streamline the software development life cycle (SDLC) and speed up releases. Cloud native infrastructure can also be automated and orchestrated to provision resources faster. Then, developers can build and deploy applications at a quicker pace.

Scalability

Cloud native practices like microservice architecture  makes it possible to independently add or delete microservices and the associated infrastructure as needed, minimizing the effect on the larger application. Cloud native services also support software abstraction and ephemeral infrastructure so you can easily scale your resources to meet changing business requirements.

Reliability

Cloud native services use techniques like automatic failover and blue-green deployments to ensure resources and applications are always available. Plus, cloud native applications are more resilient to failure because microservices and containers can run independently of each other, which means one can fail without bringing down the entire system.

Now, let’s discuss five cloud native services that can help you achieve faster, more scalable, and highly reliable deployments.  

6 Cloud Native Service Practices That Make Your Life Easier

• Microservices

Cloud native applications are often built on the microservices model, which breaks software down into small units of code that can be developed, deployed, scaled, and managed individually. Microservices support DevOps agile practices by enabling developers to release code in short sprints. They also make flexible deployments possible so you can scale up or down to meet demands. Some examples of cloud native microservices development frameworks include Moleculer, Quarkus, and Spring Boot.

• Containers

Many cloud native applications are containerized, which means each microservice or code unit is packaged up with all its dependencies, then tested and deployed. Cloud native containers create a flexible, scalable, and streamlined development and deployment environment. Docker is the most well-known cloud native container platform, but there are other options available such as Podman and LXD.

• Container Orchestration

With small, simple applications, you can manage your containers without orchestration. However, as your complexity grows, you’ll likely need to employ orchestration. Cloud native container orchestration automates many of the tasks involved in provisioning, deploying, and scaling your containers. Kubernetes is by far the most popular container orchestration system, but it’s designed for large-scale operations and has a steep learning curve. If you and your team are just beginning the transition to cloud native development, a more scaled-back solution like Nomad may be a better fit.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, abstracts cloud infrastructure configurations as software code, which allows you to apply version control and automate the resource provisioning process. This empowers you to control the quality of new and updated configurations, understand changes between versions, and quickly create new cloud native development, testing, and production environments. Some popular open-source cloud native IaC tools include Terraform and Pulumi. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud also offer IaC tools for their respective ecosystems.

• Configuration Management

Configuration management is another under-appreciated practice that can simplify your development process in the long run. Tools like Ansible and Chef make it easy to record a system’s desired state and ensure it is configured correctly every time. This makes it faster and easier to provision resources and gives you peace of mind — you no longer have to worry about inconsistent configurations introducing performance, security, or compliance issues. 

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD, is a DevOps methodology that automates parts of the software development lifecycle, like code integrations, testing, and deployment processes. Cloud native CI tools enable developers to work on the same codebase simultaneously by providing cloud-based source code versioning control and integration testing. Cloud native CD tools focus on releasing and deploying containerized microservice applications to your cloud-based infrastructure. Some examples of cloud native services for CI/CD include Tekton and Copado.

Cloud native services make it easier to develop, deploy, and manage your applications and infrastructure in the cloud. By taking advantage of cloud native tools for microservices, containerized applications, IaC, and CI/CD, you can release software faster, scale up and down as needed, and ensure the resilience and reliability of your end product.

For more help implementing cloud native services in your development environment, contact the cloud native DevOps experts at Copado Strategic Services.