The business landscape is witnessing a significant transformation, with a rise in the adoption of cloud-native applications to meet dynamic customer demands. This shift towards application modernization allows organizations to fast-track innovation and significantly improve developer productivity. Additionally, it aids businesses in transitioning their monolithic applications to the cloud, fragmenting them into flexible, loosely coupled services.
As per a Forrester report, an impressive 15% of worldwide firms, not limited to those already technologically adept, have expressed commitment towards enhancing their technological experiences, operations, and ecosystems in 2021. Moreover, Gartner forecasts that by 2022, 90% of applications will be cloud native.
The driving force behind this widespread adoption is container management, which offers agile support at scale. Organizations capable of leveraging scalable business models for continuity while optimizing costs are predicted to fast-track their digital transformation journey.
Crafting a cloud-native future: key considerations
To jumpstart their voyage towards cloud-native application development, organizations must formulate a strategic plan for cloud-centric environments. This is a critical step that not only accelerates their digital transformation objectives but also guarantees automated business processes and sustained business continuity.
- Tackling APIs, containers, and microservices can be a daunting task. However, organizations can circumvent this complexity by choosing low-code platforms, which streamline legacy application development processes.
- Proactively engaging with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to ascertain if their platforms align with cloud-native objectives and embracing Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions can set a robust foundation for a successful CNAD journey.
- By utilizing templates as building blocks, organizations can close gaps in automation and management, ensuring smooth workflow execution.
- An agile approach to infrastructure, complemented by a complete Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) stack, can revolutionize infrastructure management, shifting organizations from reactive to proactive operations.
Best practices of cloud-native application development
- Breaking down monolithic applications into loosely coupled microservices.
- Automating infrastructure and workflows.
- Streamlining CI/CD pipelines.
- Storing IaC in an efficient version control system.
- Implementing DevOps methodologies and processes.
Unleashing innovation with cloud-native applications
Cloud-native applications, characterized by their scalability and flexibility, comprise multiple independent microservices. With DevOps and an agile approach, developers can effortlessly incorporate new features in cloud-native development, creating microservices that collectively form the application. This innovative structure allows for individual microservices to be rewritten without the need for a comprehensive update while integrating new codes into production.
The compelling advantages of cloud-native application development include cost-effective application creation, eliminating the burden of modifying legacy applications. This innovative approach not only retains existing customers but also attracts new ones by providing cutting-edge solutions.
Reaping the benefits of cloud-native application development
Large-scale development elimination
By utilizing containers on the cloud, organizations can modernize their applications efficiently and seamlessly, resulting in quicker deployments and continual modernization that caters to future needs. Furthermore, it saves time and resources during improvement processes.
Enhanced performance
The cloud-native strategy allows software developers to deliver performance improvements with agility, effectively addressing evolving customer demands.
Improved collaboration
As open-source software gains momentum, integrating platforms and applications becomes crucial. The cloud-native strategy facilitates collaborations with relevant applications and CSPs, yielding advanced functionalities with integrated features.
Accelerated speed-to-market
The flexibility and efficiency delivered by cloud-native development positively impacts businesses, enabling the real-time introduction of new features for customer use. This saves on operational expenses while scaling resources according to demand dynamics.
Competitive edge
Cloud-native application development allows organizations to integrate cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, ensuring they remain at the forefront of competition with highly intuitive and responsive customer engagements.
Building the infrastructure of tomorrow!
The fail-fast principle and cloud-native applications are trending. The advent of containerization and chaos engineering practices enable organizations to scale in failure mode, with containers playing a pivotal role as flexible innovation catalysts.
Despite having their workloads in traditional systems, organizations often grapple with establishing new architectures and modern application development due to technical debt, management complexities, and high maintenance costs. Thus, transitioning traditional workloads to the cloud is critical to simplifying IT environments.
Several open-source platforms are catalyzing the transition of business support systems and operations support systems to a microservices-based cloud-native infrastructure. These platforms automate business and network operations, delivering immense value. Consequently, organizations are adopting open-source frameworks and integration tools to implement future-proof infrastructure on the cloud.
With the growing trend of cloud-native applications across industries, organizations are modernizing their legacy applications for cloud compatibility. To meet and exceed customer expectations, businesses are adopting strategic, advanced workloads to future-proof their practices and solutions. In this journey, choosing the right cloud partner is as crucial as adhering to the best practices of cloud-native development. It unlocks potential growth avenues through technical enablement and superior expertise in go-to-market strategies.
