User experience is increasingly the most important feature of cloud technology. Many companies, of different sizes and sectors, are gradually implementing digital services to support their customers, improving the speed, scalability and long-term resilience of their offer.
All this, as you can imagine, translates into a greater complexity and distribution of IT infrastructures and, to accompany this process of change, it becomes absolutely necessary optimize resources And theirs managing using specific tools and strategies for almost all business flows.
This is where strategies and technologies come into play. Cloud Native.
What does Cloud Native mean?
In this article it is not my intention to delve into the world of Cloud Native applications in its entirety, but to highlight what may be behind it. This is why I think it is important, in a nutshell, to define the term Cloud Native as the approach to software development that, through cloud computing resources, creates and runs scalable applications in modern and dynamic environments such as Public, Private or Hybrid Clouds.
This method, supporting the development process thanks to microservices, allows companies to change resources quickly and frequently, functionality and much more from the applications themselves. All without affecting the provision of the service, on the contrary, improving its efficiency and ensuring availability and resiliency of the service itself.
The architecture of Cloud Native applications
The architecture of Cloud Native applications, by its nature, is different compared to traditional application architecture. In fact, if the latter follow a more monolithic structure, modern applications follow a set of principles that enable the possibility of optimizing scalability, flexibility and resilience in the cloud.
Today's applications are always on the move, both because of the constant changes between different processing and development environments, and, above all, because they also depend on the underlying infrastructure that can change and update. To make these resources flexible, they are decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure, through stacks and technologies such as containers, microservices and serverless.
In general, the cloud-native paradigm abstracts the underlying infrastructure, exposing it through an API (Application Programming Interface). This simplifies the scalability and movement of the applications themselves, indirectly improving their willingness and resiliency. Infrastructure, in this context, is considered immutable and short-lived rather than permanent, meaning that if a server goes down, it can be instantly destroyed and replaced with a new one.
Thanks to this approach, the cloud native applications are able to better adapt to changing requirements and business flows, remaining stable even when the underlying infrastructure is evolving or has difficulties, improving its overall robustness and flexibility.
To make these concepts concrete, in the figure below you see a full stack potential useful for creating and running a cloud native application. This includes:
- The method DevOps, that is, the collaboration process that can be adopted to accelerate the development and execution of an app;
- the technologies that can enable the containerization and abstraction of resources in a distributed cloud infrastructure such as Docker and Kubernetes;
- and above all, the lower level that represents the basis of a Cloud Native strategy: its infrastructure.
Let's now go deeper into this last point and what options are available right at the base of a stack for Cloud Native applications.
So, which cloud infrastructure to choose?
Once you understand what technologies a stack for Cloud Native applications can be composed of, you will probably wonder which Compute infrastructures, cloud or on premise, you can host everything.
Although the options available to you are different and clearly vary according to the needs of your business, here is a comparison between what you can choose:
Hyper-Scaler: Public Cloud
Here we are talking about the Big names in the Cloud Provider sector: Amazon Web Service, Azure, GCP. The choice between services, infrastructure resources and software available in their “universe” is certainly vast and complete for every need. And it's obvious that such unlimited scalability can potentially guarantee ahigh resilience and availability for your applications.
The limitations associated with solutions of this type are mainly related tointeroperability between services from different cloud providers and, very often, to their lock-in actions. In fact, it is not uncommon that, precisely because of the wide range of solutions in the respective service ecosystems, it is difficult to integrate or choose other providers with as many efficient solutions.
An additional limit is linked to the data sovereignty. Although regulatory and regulatory changes are taking place in this area, the transfer of the data itself outside the European Union is still hazy today.
Private Cloud: VMware or On-premise
If, on the other hand, you opt for aprivate infrastructure, especially in the Cloud or and partly also the on-premise option, what you have certainly guaranteed are powerful and dedicated resources to your needs. In this way, you can reap the advantages and strengths of a dedicated, and not shared, infrastructure and in complete freedom increase the efficiency of your applications. Clearly, especially if the choice falls on on-premise, what limits this type of infrastructure is precisely its scalability, which remains high but not unlimited.
CloudFire: Public Cloud
Unlike previous proposals, the latter represents a solution alternative to restrictions of scalability of a private infrastructure, the interoperability of services between multiple cloud providers and the management of hyper-scaler data sovereignty.
First of all, CloudFire With the service Public Cloud, similar to Scaleway and OVH, offers a service of Infrastructure as a Service based on Openstack. This allows the user to have a dynamic resource pool and manageable by aon demand resource interface. In addition, being an opensource software, Openstack does not limit integrations with additional solutions. It is precisely the concepts of community and opensource that flow through the veins of this technology that make the solution highly integrable with others.
On the data sovereignty side, on the other hand, thanks to the release from the large Cloud Providers mentioned in the first point, with CloudFire's Public Cloud you have the guarantee that your data is in Italy and Europe, guaranteeing you the total freedom to limit its transfer outside.
Concluding
Choosing your Cloud infrastructure for a Cloud Native application, and not only that, can be a critical and delicate operation. On the technical side, not all infrastructures with certain compute, network and storage components are suitable for the use of Cloud Native applications. Second, we should not underestimate the margin of choice in integrations and interoperability with other providers.
Welcoming the paradigm shift to accelerate the implementation and development cycles of Cloud Native applications is now imperative, and the question that needs to be answered seems to be: Am I ready? If the answer is no or if you want to talk to those who have already had to go through this transition, Write to us! 🥰
We have addressed these issues in greater depth in our latest Tech Talk Public Cloud: IaaS for Cloud Native Platform!
