Cloud-Native Application Development

What is cloud native?

Cloud native is an approach to building and rapidly operating applications while constantly improving their quality and reducing risk. It makes full use of and derives benefit from the cloud computing delivery model. Cloud native is about how applications are built and deployed and not where they are located.

Types of cloud computing services

Cloud computing types are service deployment models that allow different levels of control over information and types of services that should be provided. There are three main types of cloud computing services, that are sometimes called the cloud computing stack:

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is used for Internet-based access to storage and computing power. It is the most basic category of cloud computing types enabling rental of IT infrastructure, i.e. servers and virtual machines, storage, networks, and operating systems, from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provides developers with the tools to build and host web applications. It offers users access to the components they need to quickly develop and operate web or mobile applications over the Internet. With this cloud computing type users do not need to worry about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, networks, storage, and databases.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is used for web-based applications. It is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet where cloud providers host and manage the software application thus making it easier to have the same application on all devices just by accessing it in the cloud.

Cloud-native vs. cloud-based development

While cloud-based development refers to application development executed by means of a browser pointing to a cloud-based infrastructure, cloud-native development refers to application development grounded in containers, microservices, and dynamic orchestration.

Cloud-native microservices

Microservices are a cloud-native architectural approach where a single application consists of a lot of loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller components or services. They work well with cloud-native applications due to their modular structure and compatibility with Agile and DevOps processes, together with harmony with container use.

What are cloud-native applications?

Cloud-native applications help companies speed up time-consuming and demanding tasks performed on optimizing existing applications and building new ones while, at the same time, enhancing user experience. These applications are a collection of independent services designed to rapidly include user feedback in order to ensure constant improvement.

Cloud-native application development aims at delivering applications clients and users require at the pace a company needs. PanonIT can build cloud-based applications and thus contribute to your business’s profitability and scalability as cloud-native applications are specifically designed to provide a consistent development and automated management across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

Cloud-native applications vs. traditional applications

The infrastructure resource allocations to traditional applications are managed manually. On the other hand, developers and operators handling cloud-native applications do not interact directly with application programming interfaces (APIs) but deal with resource allocation automatically in accordance with policies set out by DevOps teams.

Advantages of cloud-based applications

PanonIT expert team is at your disposal to maximize your business success. We will design applications to suit your company’s needs. Let’s just briefly go through some benefits of the cloud-based applications:

► Cloud-native applications are easier to manage since iterative improvements are implemented through Agile and DevOps processes;

► These applications are designed to continuously and automatically add new and improved features;

► Improvements are made non-intrusively without causing downtime or disruption of the end-user experience;

► Scaling up or down is now easier due to the elastic infrastructure underpinning cloud-based applications;

► Cloud-native development process meets the demands of the fast-paced and innovative business environment.

Why should your company move to cloud-based applications?

Your business needs cloud-based applications to:

► Improve the efficiency and flexibility of your business activities, thus directly contributing to business growth;

► Introduce new applications and advanced features on the fly thus enabling you to keep up with changing customers expectations and demands;

► Provide greater flexibility to make fast and real-time changes and responses;

► Stay competitive while delivering positive customer experience;

► Save resources and deploy them to your business’s growth and development;

► Work with other companies more effectively as your organization will be able to integrate and work with other cloud providers, companies, and related applications;

► Reach more people fast.

Choose a cloud-native platform

Cloud computing offers companies an alternative to building and maintaining costly on-premises services. It offers enterprises an opportunity to lower their costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. A lot of companies provide cloud platforms for development, management, and deployment of applications, such as:

Amazon Web Services (AWS), founded in 2006 by Amazon, is a comprehensive and broadly adapted cloud platform that offers an extensive range of IaaS and PaaS services. These include Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Relational Database Service (RDS). Their services are available to individuals, startups, enterprises, and governments together with a free 12-month tier.

Google Cloud, offered by Google, provides services in major areas including compute, networking, storage, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoT). The platform gives users the ability to create business solutions using Google-provided, modular web services. It offers a vast array of services including IaaS and PaaS solutions together with multi-layered secure infrastructure. Google Cloud offers $300 towards all services and products over the first 12 months.

Microsoft Azure, released in 2010, is a cloud computing platform by Microsoft. Users can run any service on the cloud or combine it with any existing applications, data center or infrastructure. Azure provides a wide range of solutions suitable for all types of industry and it supports the development, test, deployment, management, and security of applications and services. The solution is both Windows and Linux compatible and comes with a 12-month free tier.

IBM Cloud, introduced by the tech giant IBM, offers a wide range of services not all of which are cloud-based as it covers both virtual and hardware-based servers composed of public, private and management networks. IBM’s hardware servers provide clients with sole access to their entire server that greatly improves security and performance. IBM Cloud is integrated and managed by a single system that can be controlled via a web portal, API or mobile applications. IBM offers 256MB of Cloud Foundry Memory with no time limit.

Oracle Cloud, offered by another computing behemoth, is a feature-packed platform providing strong services in the areas of supporting different workloads, especially for IoT, OLTP, microservices, along with applications dependent on AI and machine learning. Oracle Cloud comes with two key service provisions: cloud architecture that includes data management, databases, and applications, and on the other hand, storage data that is primarily used for driving big data analytics for business intelligence insights. It provides a range of SaaS platforms such as HCM, EPM, SCM, and social media tools. Oracle Cloud offers a 30-day free trial with a free service tier.

Although the above-mentioned are the biggest names in cloud computing services, there are a number of other relevant cloud computing providers. PanonIT will help you handpick the best platform to accommodate your enterprise needs.

Containers and container platforms

When developers are writing code, they are working on their local development environment. However, when they try to move the code to production, they may encounter some problems, i.e. the code that worked perfectly on their machine does not work in production. This is where containers come in as they have solved this critical issue of portability allowing separation of code from the underlying infrastructure it is running on.

The most popular container platform is Docker providing an open standard for packaging and distributing containerized applications. Solutions for orchestrating containers emerged so that all containers are coordinated and scheduled, and applications are seamlessly upgraded without any interruption of service. Kubernetes (K8s), Mesos, and Docker Swarm are some of the more popular options for providing an abstraction to make a cluster of machines behave like one big machine, which is vital in a large-scale environment.

PanonIT team is here to guide our clients through the process of selecting the most suitable platform and application, together with other available full-stack DevOps services such as Source Control (Git, Bitbucket, MercurialHg, etc); CI/CD (Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI, etc); Configuration Management (Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Terraform, etc); Containerization (Docker); Orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc); Cloud/IaaS/PaaS (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM, etc); Performance Monitoring (AppDynamics, Nagios, etc).

What can PanonIT do for you?

Companies require a platform for building and running cloud-native applications, together with services automating and integrating the concepts of DevOps, continuous delivery, microservices, and containers.

PanonIT builds and operates applications in a cloud-native fashion so that your company can:

► Introduce ideas to market faster and, at the same time;

► Provide a quick response to user demands.

Our experts will build and operate a custom application that fits your business needs and upgrades your experience thus contributing to your business growth.