Software Architecture — Introduction to Cloud Native Application Architecture

What is Cloud Native Architecture and Application Development? — Overview of Cloud Native Architectures and Technologies.

.NET Hub — Cloud Native Application Architecture

TL;DR:

Cloud-native architecture and technologies are an approach to designing, constructing, and operating workloads that are built in the cloud and take full advantage of the cloud computing model. It’s a new way to construct large, complex systems.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) provides the official definition:

Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.

Cloud Native Architecture

Cloud native has become a driving trend in the software industry. The approach takes full advantage of modern software development practices, technologies, and cloud infrastructure.
Cloud native is a development approach that improves building, maintainability, scalability, and deployment of applications.
Cloud native changes the way you design, implement, deploy, and operate systems. At the core, the idea of cloud native architecture is to optimize your software for cost efficiency, reliability and faster time-to-market by using a combination of cultural, technological and architectural design patterns.
It’s about how applications are created and deployed, not where.

Cloud-native systems are designed to embrace rapid change, large scale, and resilience.

Cloud Native Applications

Cloud-native applications are applications built around various cloud technologies or services hosted in the (private/public) cloud.
They are distributed systems (commonly designed as microservices), and incorporate the concepts of microservices, and containers.
They use DevOps methodologies to automate application building and deployment that can be done at any time on demand.
These applications provide API through standard protocols such as REST or gRPC and they are interoperable through standard tools, such as Swagger (OpenAPI).

Cloud-native technologies are used to develop applications built with services packaged in containers, deployed as microservices and managed on elastic infrastructure through agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows.

Characteristics of Cloud Native Architecture

Cloud native is about speed and agility. The Twelve-Factor App is a guideline for developing cloud native applications, which starts with simple things like version control of your codebase, environment-aware configuration and more sophisticated patterns like statelessness and concurrency of your application.

High level of automation

To manage all the moving parts of cloud native application, automation is recommended in every step from development to deployment. This can be achieved by using modern automation tools and CI/CD pipelines that are backed by a version control system like git.
Building, testing and deploying applications as well as infrastructure with minimal human involvement allows for fast, frequent and incremental changes to production.
A reliable automated system also allows for much easier disaster recovery if you have to rebuild your whole system.

Self healing

Applications and infrastructure fail from time to time. This is expected, and therefore cloud native application frameworks and infrastructure components include health checks which help monitor your application from the inside and automatically restart them if necessary.
Additionally, since the application has been compartmentalized, there is a chance that only parts of your application stop working or get slower, while other parts don’t.

Scalable

Scaling your application describes the process of handling more load while still providing a pleasant user experience.
One way of scaling can be starting multiple copies of the same application and distributing the load across them.
Automating this behavior based on application metrics like CPU or memory can also ensure availability and performance of your services.
With KEDA (Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaler), you can drive the scaling of any container in Kubernetes based on the number of events needing to be processed.

Cost-Efficient

Just like scaling up your application for high traffic situations, scaling down your application and the usage-based pricing models of cloud providers can save costs if traffic is low.
To optimize your infrastructure usage, orchestration systems like Kubernetes can help with more efficient and denser placing of applications.

Easy to maintain

Using Microservices allows to break down applications in smaller pieces and make them more portable, easier to test and to distribute across multiple teams.

Secure

Cloud environments are often shared between multiple customers or teams, which calls for different security models.
Patterns like zero trust computing mitigate that by requiring authentication from every user and process.

Right-sized capacity

Cloud native application platform automates infrastructure provisioning and configuration, dynamically allocating and reallocating resources at deploy time based on the needs of the application.
Building on a cloud native runtime optimizes application lifecycle management, including scaling to meet demand, resource utilization, orchestration across available resources, and recovery from failures with minimum downtime.

Benefits of Cloud Native Architecture

Reliability

Through microservices and Kubernetes, developers can build flexible applications and quickly isolate the impact of a failure to prevent a total crash.

Scalability

The ability to scale automatically is one of the main features of cloud-native technologies. Future needs are anticipated and handled by default, and payment is made only for resources in use.

Faster releases

With DevOps, cloud-native technologies allow teams to ideate, build, and ship applications faster, resulting in satisfied users and a successful organization.

Reduced cost

Kubernetes is an open-source platform used by many cloud-native technologies for managing containers. Containers provide standardization of tools and infrastructure, ensuring the effective use of resources and minimizing costs.

No vendor lock-in

Cloud technologies allow hybrid and multi-cloud use. Enterprises can run applications on any platform (using containerization and Kubernetes), such as public or private clouds, without making lots of modifications. This way, enterprises do not need to choose one infrastructure and face legacy vendor issues.

Pillars of Cloud-native Architecture

The speed and agility of cloud native derive from many factors. Foremost is cloud infrastructure.

Cloud

Cloud-native systems take full advantage of the cloud service model.
Designed to thrive in a dynamic, virtualized cloud environment, these systems make extensive use of Platform as a Service (PaaS) compute infrastructure and managed services.
Treat the underlying infrastructure as disposable — provisioned in minutes and resized, scaled, or destroyed on demand — via automation.

Modern design

The Twelve-Factor Application: A widely accepted methodology for constructing cloud-based applications is the Twelve-Factor Application. It describes a set of principles and practices that developers follow to construct applications optimized for modern cloud environments. Special attention is given to portability across environments and declarative automation.
While applicable to any web-based application, many practitioners consider Twelve-Factor a solid foundation for building cloud-native apps. Systems built upon these principles can deploy and scale rapidly and add features to react quickly to market changes.

Microservices

Cloud-native systems embrace microservices, a popular architectural style for constructing modern applications.
Built as a distributed set of small, independent services that interact through a shared fabric. They compose together to form an application.
Each implements a specific business capability within a larger domain context.
Each is developed autonomously and can be deployed independently.
Each runs in its own process and communicates with others using standard communication protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, WebSockets, or AMQP.

Containers

Containers are a great enabler of cloud-native software. The CNCF places microservice containerization as the first step in their Cloud-Native Trail Map, guidance for enterprises beginning their cloud-native journey.
Containerizing a microservice is simple and straightforward. The code, its dependencies, and runtime are packaged into a binary called a container image. Images are stored in a container registry, which acts as a repository for images.
When an application starts or scales, you transform the container image into a running container instance. The instance runs on any computer that has a container runtime engine installed.

Backing services

Cloud-native systems depend upon many different ancillary resources, such as data stores, message brokers, monitoring, and identity services. These services are known as backing services.
Cloud providers offer a rich assortment of managed backing services that you can simply consume. Monitoring, redundancy, and availability are built into the service.
Cloud-native systems favor managed backing services from cloud vendors.

Automation

Enter the widely accepted practice of Infrastructure as Code, or IaC. With IaC, you automate platform provisioning and application deployment. You essentially apply software engineering practices such as testing and versioning to your DevOps practices. Your infrastructure and deployments are automated, consistent, and repeatable.
Automating infrastructure: Tools like Terraform from HashiCorp, Pulumi, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Bicep, Google Cloud Deployment Manager and Cloud Providers CLI, enable you to declaratively script the cloud infrastructure you require. The script is versioned and checked into source control as an artifact of your project. You invoke the script to provision a consistent and repeatable infrastructure across system environments, such as development, QA, staging, and production.
Automating deployments: The Twelve-Factor Application, discussed earlier, calls for separate steps when transforming completed code into a running application. Modern CI/CD systems help fulfill this principle. They provide separate build and delivery steps that help ensure consistent and quality code that’s readily available to users.

Use Cases of Cloud Native Applications

Application developed by teams with expertise in different technology stacks.
Application with components that must scale independently.
System with which individual features must release without a full redeployment of the entire system.
Strategic enterprise systems that need to constantly evolve business capabilities and features.
Application that requires a high release velocity with high confidence.

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Happy Coding!!!

References: .NET Docs and Linux Foundation