Cloud-native architecture paves the way for the future of app development. This technology is characterized by its agile approach and helps companies to make the most out of cloud services that have emerged as a key driving factor behind digital transformation in modern industries. Apps developed with a cloud-native approach are playing a major role in transforming how diverse businesses operate, and deliver value to their customers.

Cloud computing has witnessed exceptional growth and development over the last decade, owing to many advantages offered by this system. It helps companies cut down on their expenses, provides superior flexibility, and helps boost their security and stability. More than 90% of enterprises already use a cloud service today, and the rate of cloud adoption is expected to consistently increase in the future.

However, several companies that have already adopted the cloud platform are now finding it difficult to identify new ways to deliver more innovation and value from their existing cloud strategies. A major reason behind this being that these firms are largely focused on application migration, which is the process of moving old apps and their functionality onto the cloud. While this system worked well in the initial stages, to meet the market requirements, businesses now need to unlock the optimal benefits of the cloud, to enjoy superior agility and lower IT expenses. The best way to do so would be to adopt a “cloud-native” approach, which involves developing applications and recognizing people and workflows, specifically as per the cloud.

Cloud-native basically implies an approach of building services and applications for the cloud environment. Unlike their legacy counterparts, these apps are designed for the cloud right from day one. They can additionally be fixed and deployed much faster, and tend to have quite a fluid architecture. As a result, these applications can be placed and moved through diverse environments with ease.

• Cloud-Native Architecture – Monolith vs Microservices: The issue with monolithic architecture is that it takes a considerable effort to deploy any new features developed to production. Several teams are required to competently coordinate the code changes, and a lot of upfront integration and functional testing is needed ,to deploy several features at once. Microservices, on the other hand, empowers developers to deliver new features much faster to their discerning customers.
• Management and monitoring: With microservices, monitoring solutions are required to manage more servers and services than ever before. In addition to having more objects to manage, cloud-native apps are also able to generate an expansive range of extra data that they have to keep track of. It can prove to be quite complicated to collect data from an environment that features so many moving parts.
• Service integration: Typically featuring a set of disparate services, cloud-native applications have a distinctive disruptive nature that makes them highly flexible and scalable, in comparison to monoliths. However, this also implies that cloud-native workloads include way more moving pieces that have to be seamlessly connected together to achieve success. Effective service integration largely depends on selecting the right deployment techniques.
• Cultural changes: Implementing cloud-native technology into an organization depends on its existing company culture. It is vital for internal teams to adopt cross-functional methods to make sure that various advanced softwares are iterated with a continuous cadence that complements the business goal of a firm. In many instances, making the actual switch to the cloud-native environment is the most straightforward part of the journey, while propagating those changes throughout an organization is the most challenging aspect.
• Keep up with the latest cloud-native developments: It is important to embrace and implement the latest cloud-native developments to succeed in this digital world through optimizing processes to create new value for customers. The latest cloud-native developments also aid businesses to enjoy more flexibility and enjoy the benefits of cutting-edge technology.
• Building cloud-native delivery pipeline apps: Cloud-native apps can run on private, public, on-premises, or hybrid environments. Several application delivery pipelines even today majorly run on the traditional on-premises environments that are still clunky when integrated with apps that run on containers and public clouds. The best way to overcome these challenges would be to move the CI/CD pipeline into a cloud environment, so as to mimic production conditions and bring pipelines closer to the apps. The deployment process becomes faster when the code is written closer to where it is deployed.

While going cloud-native is certainly advantageous, it is not that easy. However, by maintaining proper practices and implementing systematic strategies, one can unlock incredible scalability, reliability, and agility through this system. Ensuring proper management and monitoring of the environment, keeping up with the latest cloud-native developments, and building cloud-native delivery pipeline apps can be quite instrumental in this process.

Organizations can effectively improve their business processes with reduced costs, overheads, and manual efforts owing to the many advantageous features of cloud-native applications. These are portable, resilient, scalable and can be updated with ease, and hence can significantly aid companies to provide better experiences to their customers.