Cloud Native

The evolution of cloud native involves moving from traditional monolithic applications to microservices-based architectures that are designed to run in cloud environments. This evolution is driven by the need for greater scalability, reliability, and agility in software development and deployment. It also involves the adoption of modern technologies and practices, such as containers, Kubernetes, and DevOps, which lets you build, deploy, and manage cloud native applications more efficiently. The future of cloud native is expected to continue to be shaped by modern technologies and innovations in the areas of automation, security, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Cloud native architecture refers to a set of design principles and patterns for building and deploying cloud-based applications that are scalable, resilient, and secure. It involves the use of modern technologies and practices such as containers, microservices, and DevOps to design and deliver cloud-based applications.

In a cloud native architecture, applications are broken down into smaller, independent, and loosely-coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and managed independently. These services communicate with each other using APIs, and are packaged and deployed using containers. This lets you build applications that can be easily scaled, managed, and updated without disruption to the overall system.

Cloud native architecture also emphasizes the use of automated, continuous delivery pipelines to deploy applications and services. This lets you quickly and easily deploy new features and bug fixes, and continuously monitor and optimize the performance and availability of your applications.

To summarize, cloud native architecture helps you build and deploy cloud-based applications that are scalable, resilient, and secure, and that can take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a non-profit organization that hosts and promotes open-source projects and technologies related to cloud native computing. The foundation aims to create a thriving ecosystem of cloud native technologies and foster its growth and adoption.

The CNCF provides a neutral platform for technology vendors, users, and developers to collaborate on cloud native projects and drive the development of cloud native technologies and standards. Some of the popular projects hosted by the CNCF include Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and Linkerd.

The CNCF operates under the auspices of the Linux Foundation and provides a neutral and vendor-neutral home for cloud native technologies. The foundation also works closely with other organizations and industry groups to promote cloud native best practices and advance the state of cloud native computing.

The goal of the CNCF is to make it easier for organizations to adopt and use cloud native technologies, while also ensuring the long-term sustainability and growth of these technologies. By providing a platform for collaboration and innovation, the CNCF is helping to drive the development of cloud native computing and shape its future.

Cloud native refers to a set of practices and technologies that let you build and run scalable applications in the cloud. CNCF is an open-source software foundation that hosts and promotes the development of cloud native technologies. In other words, CNCF is the organization behind the cloud native movement.

Cloud native is the current trend and there is market demand to match the latest technological innovation in the cloud. You can leverage benefits from cloud native in different ways according your needs and goals. Benefits of cloud native include:

• Scalability: Applications can scale horizontally by adding more instances or vertically by increasing the size of virtual machines.
• Resilience: Applications can automatically recover from failures and handle increased traffic with the help of load balancers and auto-scaling.
• Cost savings: Cloud-native applications can take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model and dynamically allocate resources, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
• Faster time-to-market: Cloud-native applications can be developed and deployed faster using continuous delivery and DevOps practices.
• Improved security: Security can be built into the application using cloud-native security features, such as network segmentation and encryption.

Traditional applications, also known as monolithic applications, are built to deliver functionality in on-premises environments and require additional applications to fulfil operational and maintenance needs. Advantages of cloud native over traditional applications are:

• Scalability: Cloud-native applications are designed for automated scale up and down for changing workloads capacity demand, making application flexible and cost-effective over traditional, monolithic applications.
• Resilience: Break down applications into smaller, independent components, so that cloud-native applications can continue to function independently, even though one or more components isn't functional or available.
• Flexibility: Cloud-native applications can be deployed in OCI, other cloud platforms, and on-premises, providing more flexibility in your choice of infrastructure.
• Speed: Cloud-native technologies, similar to containers and microservices, enable accelerated development, testing, and deployment cycles, resulting in faster time-to-market.
• Cost savings: Cloud-native applications take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model and commitment consumption model of cloud computing, reducing the costs of infrastructure and maintenance compared to traditional, on-premises solutions.

Cloud native frameworks provide the building blocks for developing, deploying, and managing cloud native applications, and are widely adopted by organizations across industries. By leveraging these technologies, you can take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing and build modern, scalable, and resilient applications.

Cloud native frameworks are modules, libraries, packages, and repositories available for implementation natively from cloud providers, also available to be integrated with application code and side loaded. Some popular cloud native frameworks are:

• Kubernetes: An open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of containerized applications.
• Istio: An open-source service mesh that provides network traffic management, observability, and security for microservices.
• Knative: An open-source framework for building, deploying, and managing serverless applications on Kubernetes.
• Envoy: An open-source service proxy for cloud-native applications that provides load balancing, traffic management, and observability.
• Prometheus: An open-source monitoring and alerting system for cloud native applications.
• Fluentd: An open-source data collector for cloud native logging and analysis.
• OpenFaaS: An open-source framework for building and deploying serverless functions on Kubernetes.
• Jaeger: An open-source, end-to-end distributed tracing system for cloud-native applications.
• OpenTracing: An open-source API and instrumentation standard for distributed tracing of cloud-native applications.

Cloud native frameworks aren't limited to this list. The list is for reference only.

Cloud native technologies is another layer of abstraction on cloud native frameworks to build consumable solutions. These are often known as platform as a service (PaaS) offered in the cloud to reduce maintenance and operations overhead. Some of the popular technologies are:

• Containers: Lightweight, portable, and self-contained units of software that can run on any infrastructure.
• Kubernetes: Open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, orchestration, and management of containerized applications.
• Microservices: Software architecture design in which an application is broken down into small, independent components that can be developed, deployed, and managed independently.
• Serverless computing: Computing model in which the cloud provider manages the infrastructure and automatically allocates resources capacity needed to run applications.
• CI/CD pipelines: A series of automated processes for continuously building, testing, and deploying code.
• Service mesh: A configurable infrastructure layer for microservices applications that makes communication between service instances flexible, fast, and reliable.
• Load balancers: A component that distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances of an application for better scalability and reliability.
• Auto-scaling: The ability of an application to automatically scale its resource usage in response to changes in demand.

Cloud native technologies are constantly evolving. This list isn't an exhaustive list, and is for reference only.

Use best practices to build cloud native applications that are scalable, resilient, secure, and able to deliver better user experiences. These practices also let you adopt cloud computing and take advantage of its benefits, such as reduced operational overhead, faster time-to-market, and increased agility. Best practices for building cloud native applications are:

• Microservices architecture: Break down applications into small, independent, and loosely-coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and managed independently.
• Containerization: Package applications and dependencies into containers to provide a consistent and portable runtime environment for applications.
• Automated deployment: Automate the deployment and management of applications using tools such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, Kubernetes, and cloud-native orchestration tools.
• Resilience and scalability: Design applications to be resilient and scalable by using techniques such as self-healing, failover, and auto-scaling.
• Observability: Monitor and measure the performance and behavior of applications using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and tracing tools.
• Security: Implement security best practices and technologies to secure applications and data, such as using encryption, secure communication protocols, and access control mechanisms.
• DevOps culture: Adopt a DevOps culture that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and continuous improvement across development, operations, and security teams.
• Cloud-agnostic: Design applications to be cloud-agnostic and able to run in any cloud infrastructure or on-premises data center.

Cloud native design patterns help you build and deploy cloud native applications that are scalable, resilient, and secure. By following these patterns, you can take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing and deliver better user experiences.

• Microservices: Breaking down a monolithic application into smaller, independent, and loosely-coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and managed independently.
• Service Mesh: Implementing network communication between microservices using a service mesh, such as Istio or Linkerd, to provide features such as traffic management, security, and observability.
• Circuit Breaker: Implementing a circuit breaker pattern to prevent cascading failures and improve the resilience of microservices.
• API Gateway: Implementing an API gateway to manage and secure access to microservices and provide a single entry point for external consumers.
• Containerization: Packaging applications and dependencies into containers to provide a consistent and portable runtime environment for applications.
• Auto-Scaling: Automatically scaling application instances based on demand to improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Blue-Green Deployment: Deploying new application versions to a parallel environment and switching traffic between the old and new versions to minimize downtime.
• Canary Release: Gradually releasing new application versions to a subset of users to test and validate before releasing to the entire user base.
• Strangler Pattern: Gradually replacing parts of a monolithic application with microservices over time to minimize disruption and risk.

Adopting cloud native requires a cultural shift in your organization's approach to software development, in addition to changes to people, processes and technologies. You can adopt cloud native in a strategic and efficient manner, realizing the benefits of increased scalability, reliability, and agility. The following information describes common steps for adopting cloud native.

Assessment

Assess the current state of your infrastructure, processes, and application architecture to determine the level of cloud native readiness.

Planning

Develop a cloud native strategy that outlines the desired outcomes, timeline, and the steps to be taken to adopt cloud native.

Pilot

Start small, with a pilot project or a single microservice, to test the cloud native process and gain experience with the technology.

Tooling

Invest in the right tools and technologies for building and managing cloud native applications, such as containers, Kubernetes, and DevOps tools.

Transition

Re-architect applications to a microservices-based architecture, breaking down monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable services.

DevOps

Implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for automating the software delivery process.

Training

Train development teams on cloud native principles, practices, and tools.

Culture

Foster a culture of collaboration and experimentation within your organization, encouraging teams to experiment with new technologies and processes.

Operate

Monitor and continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your cloud native adoption and make adjustments as needed.

Cloud native implementation in general has two use-cases: non-cloud native application workload already running in production and building a new application workload using cloud native tools and technologies. Both scenarios have advantages and disadvantages based on business needs. You can choose either one based on the following comparison.

The future of cloud-native technology is expected to grow and become increasingly prevalent in the coming years. As businesses continue to adopt cloud-based solutions for infrastructure and applications, demand for cloud-native technologies will increase. The following information describes some of the key trends in cloud-native technology.

Increased adoption of microservices architecture

This will lead to greater adoption of cloud-native technologies that support microservices, such as Kubernetes, Istio, and Envoy.

Focus on security and compliance

As more sensitive data is stored in the cloud, security and compliance continues to be a major concern. Organizations will look for cloud-native solutions that can meet security and compliance requirements.

Integration with AI/ML

Cloud-native solutions will increasingly integrate with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to provide greater insights and automate processes.

Emergence of hybrid cloud solutions

Organizations will seek to bridge the gap between on-premises and cloud-based solutions, resulting in an increase in demand for hybrid cloud solutions.

Cloud-native technology continues to provide the agility, scalability, and cost savings needed for today's fast-paced business environments.

OCI provides a range of cloud native offerings, including:

• Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE): A fully managed Container Engine for Kubernetes service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containers in OCI.
• Functions: A serverless computing platform that enables developers to build and run microservices without having to manage infrastructure.
• Load Balancer: A highly available and scalable load balancing service for distributing incoming traffic to multiple backend services.
• Object Storage: A scalable, highly available, and secure object storage service for storing and retrieving large amounts of data.
• Block Volume: A persistent block storage service for storing and managing data that is attached to compute instances.
• Virtual Cloud Network (VCN): A highly secure and scalable virtual network that lets you isolate and secure applications and data.
• Database: A fully managed relational database service that provides support for multiple database engines, including Oracle Database, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
• Autonomous Transactions Processing: A fully managed database service that delivers fast, automated, and highly secure database services.

These cloud native offerings from OCI let you build, deploy, and manage cloud native applications in a secure and scalable environment. Using these services, you can take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing and deliver better user experiences.

Cloud-native technology has several challenges to consider before adopting it:

• Complexity: Cloud-native solutions can be complex and difficult to implement, requiring specialized skills and experience to manage.
• Security and compliance: While cloud-native solutions provide enhanced security features, they also bring new security and compliance challenges, such as data privacy and regulatory requirements.
• Integration with existing systems: Integrating cloud-native solutions with existing systems can be challenging, requiring significant time, effort, and resources.
• Cost: While cloud-native solutions offer cost savings in some areas, they can also incur additional costs, such as the need for specialized skills and infrastructure, in addition to the cost of migrating existing applications and data to the cloud.
• Performance: Performance can be an issue with cloud-native solutions, especially when dealing with large amounts of data or applications with demanding performance requirements.
• Dependency on cloud providers: Organizations that adopt cloud-native solutions are heavily dependent on cloud providers, which can limit flexibility and control over infrastructure and applications.

Consider these limitations when deciding if cloud-native technology is right for your organization. While it offers many benefits, it may not be the best fit for every organization, and alternative solutions such as on-premises or hybrid solutions may be more suitable.

• Containers
• Microservices
• Serverless