The modernization of applications is driving organizations to innovate and deliver rapidly. A rising number of businesses are turning towards cloud-native applications to meet their ever-evolving customer needs. Apart from boosting productivity, cloud-native application development enables companies to move monolithic applications to the cloud by breaking them down into smaller services. According to Gartner, more than 95% of digital workloads will be cloud-native by 2025, up from 30% in 2021. Cloud-native application development can help enterprises deliver applications faster and more efficiently, enabling them to surge ahead of the competition. In this blog, we discuss how cloud-native application development is accelerating innovation and delivery for businesses.
What is Cloud-Native Application Development?
A cloud-native application is designed specifically to work on the cloud computing architecture. Cloud-native application development leverages the benefits of cloud computing, such as scalability, flexibility, and resilience. Software developers use many tools and techniques to design, develop, and operate workloads on the cloud architecture.
Cloud-native application development empowers businesses to build apps quickly, bring them to market, and gain a competitive edge. Cloud-native application development is largely based on microservices that are reusable components of a cloud environment. You can build new applications quickly and optimize existing ones based on cloud principles and techniques.
Cloud-Native Architecture
The cloud-native architecture comprises five basic elements: microservices, containers, APIs, backing services, and modern design. These features help companies deliver their products faster and cater to their customers’ requirements. Clous-native applications can aid collaboration between IT specialists and developers, creating value for the brand.
- Microservices
Microservices are autonomous and self-contained applications that can be scaled, deployed, and upgraded independently without affecting the end user. Since microservices are independent, you can eliminate all interdependencies and collaboration efforts. Teams can work parallelly on them, increasing the speed of operations. Microservices offer elasticity in cloud computing. Containers are agile, and you can easily move, test, and deploy applications.
- Containers
Cloud-native applications can be packaged and run in containers. Microservices are grouped into containers and deployed on the host operating system. Containerization enables the bundling of the entire cloud-native application into a single unit that will contain all necessary components, such as libraries or configuration files.
- Backing Services
Backing services are resources that cloud-native systems depend on to function. These resources include message brokers, data stores, and identity services. Backing services can be dynamically bound to a microservice and act as an attached resource that can be decoupled from the application. It can also be detached via a configuration tool.
- APIs
Application programming interfaces, or APIs, enable microservices to communicate with each other. In cloud-native apps, RESTful APIs communicate between microservices. APIs enable developers to customize or extend applications without altering the underlying code.
- Customization
Even with the availability of a variety of tools and techniques, IT teams cannot avoid challenges in application development. Hence, they must focus on customization, application monitoring, and management techniques that align with the IT infrastructure and the organization’s cloud model.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Application Development
- Eliminates large-scale development
Organizations can leverage the containers on the cloud to run small, loosely coupled, independent services, eliminating large-scale application development. A single monolithic application is broken down into several small, independent, and autonomous pieces called microservices. Businesses can run their applications efficiently and seamlessly. Cloud-native application development enables quick deployment and modernization to drive future organizational growth. Organizational resources and time can be saved during the process of future enhancements.
- Enhances performance
Businesses must constantly cope with ever-evolving customer demands in terms of services and features. These demands can put pressure on the DevOps team to meet them and deliver them on time. The Cloud-native application development strategy supports quick delivery, deployment, and feedback, leading to quick application delivery. Software developers can deliver performance enhancements with speed and agility.
- Promotes collaboration
Optimization of performance remains a key concern for businesses of all sizes. They strive to integrate applications and platforms to gain momentum for the success of open-source software development. The Cloud-native application strategy enables organizations to integrate and collaborate with other platforms and relevant applications that can offer advanced functionality and features.
- Increases speed-to-market
Cloud-native application development offers developers a lot of flexibility and scalability. Cloud-native applications can scale services independently and automatically without continuous management. This feature enables businesses to introduce new features in real time as per customer demand. This aids them in saving on operational expenses incurred in scaling resources according to demand dynamics.
- Better customer experience
Many organizations globally are adopting cloud-native application development to maintain consistent quality and offer an enhanced customer experience. Cloud-native application development enables businesses to integrate cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain. These technologies empower companies to stay ahead of the competition through highly responsive and intuitive customer engagements.
- Cost-Effective
As applications are cloud-based, storage and computing resources can scale as per requirements, eliminating the need for overprovisioning. By implementing containers to maximize the number of microservices deployed on the host, businesses can save resources, time, and money.
How can Cloud-Native Application Development Accelerate Innovation?
Unlike single, colossal applications, cloud-native applications are capable of being highly flexible and scalable as they comprise numerous independent microservices. By leveraging the agile approach and DevOps, software developers can include new features seamlessly in cloud-native development, creating many microservices that make up a single application when put together. Through cloud-native applications, developers can re-write individual microservices rather than updating every component of the application during the delivery of updated codes.
Cloud-native application development can aid businesses in building new applications easily at a lower cost and avoiding the hassles of modifying existing legacy applications. By bringing ideas to market quickly, organizations can get opportunities to deliver innovative solutions to their existing customers and attract potential ones.
Conclusion
Cloud-native application development is the way to future-proof your business. Businesses will need to adopt cloud-native technology to make their processes agile and efficient. Cloud-native application development is a quick and cost-effective way to build new apps. Cloud-native application development is a prerequisite for innovation and digital transformation. The transition to cloud-native app development can be hassle-free if you choose the right partner, like STL Digital, for your cloud services in the USA. Our experts and developers have the know-how to guide you through every step of the transition to the cloud.
FAQs
1.What are the main factors to consider before choosing a cloud platform?
- The available cloud platforms must be analyzed to see if they fit the customer’s needs.
- The cloud’s development and deployment model must include all business scenarios and requirements, both currently and in the future.
- The chosen cloud platform must support containerization.
2.What are the main challenges in cloud-native app development? - Identification of the correct tools and platforms
- Understanding and managing the architectural complexity of the cloud platform
- Setting up the cloud infrastructure
- Keeping the infrastructure and tools updated
- Creating the budget to invest in cloud-native application development
3.What is the best practice for cloud-native application development?
- Developers must use continuous integration and continuous delivery to create high-quality code more often and quicker. With CI/CD, they can combine code changes into a single repository, where automated tests and builds are run and code changes are released for production.
4. What are the main drawbacks of the cloud platform?
- Cloud-native development strategies, architecture, and methods are a bit complex when compared to traditional applications.
- Cloud-native applications require more tools to work, requiring a complex technology stack.
- Certain cloud-native apps may require specific APIs from a particular vendor, making them vendor dependent.
