Glossary of terms
Cloud Native is a approach to building and running applications that takes full advantage of the cloud computing model. It is a way of designing, constructing, and deploying applications to make the most of the benefits of cloud computing environments, such as scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency. Here’s a definition and description of the main features and scope of Cloud Native:
Cloud Native refers to applications and services that are designed, built, and deployed to run effectively on cloud computing platforms. These applications leverage the inherent characteristics of cloud environments, such as on-demand resource provisioning, automatic scaling, and containerization.
1. Containerization: Cloud Native applications are typically packaged and deployed as containers, which are lightweight, portable, and self-contained units that encapsulate the application and its dependencies. This enables efficient deployment, scalability, and portability across different environments.
2. Microservices Architecture: Cloud Native applications are often built using a microservices architecture, where the application is decomposed into smaller, independent services that communicate with each other through well-defined APIs. This approach promotes scalability, resilience, and agility.
3. Automated Deployment and Management: Cloud Native applications are designed for automated deployment, scaling, and management using tools and platforms like Kubernetes, which orchestrate containers and manage their lifecycle across a cluster of hosts.
4. Resilience and Fault Tolerance: Cloud Native applications are built to be resilient and fault-tolerant, leveraging features like service discovery, load balancing, and self-healing capabilities provided by cloud platforms.
5. Declarative Configuration: Cloud Native applications are typically configured using declarative approaches, where the desired state of the application is defined, and the platform takes care of reconciling the actual state with the desired state.
6. Observability and Monitoring: Cloud Native applications are designed with observability in mind, providing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing capabilities to understand application behavior and troubleshoot issues.
The scope of Cloud Native encompasses the entire application lifecycle, from development and deployment to operation and maintenance. It includes the following aspects:
1. Application Development: Cloud Native development practices, such as using cloud-native programming languages, frameworks, and tools that align with cloud principles and leverage cloud services.
2. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Implementing automated pipelines for building, testing, and deploying applications in a reliable and repeatable manner, enabling rapid and frequent releases.
3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Defining and managing cloud infrastructure resources (e.g., virtual machines, networks, storage) using declarative configuration files, enabling consistent and automated provisioning and management.
4. Containerization and Container Orchestration: Packaging applications as containers and managing their deployment, scaling, and lifecycle using container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
5. Service Mesh and API Management: Implementing service meshes to manage service-to-service communication, traffic routing, observability, and security within a microservices architecture.
6. Observability and Monitoring: Implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing capabilities to gain insights into the application’s behavior, performance, and health.
7. Cloud Services Integration: Leveraging cloud-native services offered by cloud providers, such as managed databases, message queues, serverless computing, and AI/ML services, to enhance application functionality and reduce operational overhead.
The Cloud Native approach aims to maximize the benefits of cloud computing environments, enabling organizations to build and run applications that are scalable, resilient, and cost-effective, while fostering agility, innovation, and faster time-to-market.
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