By using cloud architecture, companies make their applications more scalable, flexible, and resilient in the digital space. For these reasons, organizations are actively moving workloads into hybrid and cloud native environments. All this has had a significant impact on the design and development of applications which cloud migration services can help companies with. This article elaborates on the advantages of cloud native architecture and how it can benefit your project.
Cloud architecture
Cloud infrastructure planning and design involves the use of several main components. The key components of cloud native architecture include containers, microservices, DevOps, automation and orchestration, and immutable infrastructure. Using these technologies, principles, and concepts, companies build and deploy applications that take full advantage of cloud computing.
Containers
Containers offer a consistent method for packaging applications and their dependencies into single packages. They are lightweight, portable, and resource-saving tools for testing, moving, and deploying applications in a variety of computing environments. Containers make developing microservices easier and are also an important architectural approach that complement cloud native computing.
Microservices
Microservices is an architectural approach that breaks down applications into smaller, frequently used, and loosely coupled software components. Each component performs a specific function. Their modularity and high level of independence enable different teams to work on different components of the application simultaneously.
This approach increases agility and speeds up innovation, streamlining the development workflow and significantly reducing time to market.
DevOps
DevOps focuses on the collaboration and integration processes, tools, and teams to set up an environment where developers rapidly create and deploy software as needed, and with minimal disruption. Cloud native DevOps helps companies achieve their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) goals.
Combining DevOps and cloud technologies makes software development and its use more flexible and effective. Combined, these approaches allow companies to meet changing market needs and boost their competitiveness quickly and reliably.
Automation and orchestration
Cloud native applications are often automated to replace manual tasks such as maintenance and updates. As a result, these tasks are performed smoothly and reliably. These applications are designed to be dynamically managed, enabling the underlying infrastructure to automatically adapt to changes and new requirements. Consequently, you can reduce or increase computing resources depending on the traffic load and quickly restore the system in case of failures.
This autonomy requires you to use automation and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. This tool monitors applications and infrastructure and, if necessary, reacts according to certain rules and policies. Automation and orchestration are critical features of the cloud architecture, providing speed, scalability, cost optimization, and resilience.
Immutable infrastructure
Cloud applications are designed to run on cloud infrastructure, e.g., Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, but their infrastructure components are not immutable. For that reason, they can’t be changed after deployment. Such infrastructure components are disposable and get removed as needed rather than updated. If updates or patches are required, cloud applications are moved to the new infrastructure. This avoids potential failures and ensures consistency in server configuration and reliability.
The key technologies and principles of cloud architecture focus on providing flexibility, scalability, reliability, and efficiency in developing, deploying, and managing cloud-based applications.
Benefits of cloud architecture
Cloud architecture and cloud native design offers many benefits for users, developers, and companies with off-the-shelf digital products. Projects enjoy portability, cost savings, scalability, flexibility, and resilience.
Portability: Cloud architecture decouples applications from the underlying infrastructure and platform. Companies don’t need to rely on vendor-specific features that potentially limit their applications.
Cost savings: cloud spend optimization is another benefit of moving from on-premises infrastructure. By adopting the cloud, companies are able to cut costs, avoiding expensive investments in infrastructure and hardware. Cloud-induced cost savings come from resource optimization – container orchestration and serverless computing implement dynamic provisioning and can resize as needed.
Scalability: As needed, cloud architecture uses container orchestration to scale applications. It requires no changes to the underlying architecture to support scalability.
Flexibility: Cloud architecture provides high deployment flexibility, enabling companies to opt for the cloud provider and infrastructure that suits their needs.
Resilience: Cloud architecture supports microservices, distributed computing, and portability. This way, you can create more fault-tolerant applications. As a rule, these applications continue to work even if some of their components fail.
Transitioning to cloud architecture brings several benefits. With automation, flexibility, scalability, and resilience, cloud applications can help ensure continuous delivery and reliability. Regardless of the industry, cloud native principles and practices can improve software and streamline business operations. SHALB’s team has the experience to move your architecture to the cloud, and also integrate important practices such as infrastructure as code DevOps. Our experts will be happy to help your project stay competitive in a rapidly changing economy.
