How to implement a cloud-native application architecture

Application transformation is the driving force behind modernizing how an organization builds and manages applications. It fosters speed, efficiency and adaptability, and behind all of these facets, cloud-native architecture plays a crucial role.

In this article, I explore the journey of creating a cloud-native application using Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Runtimes and Red Hat Quay. I outline key phases from development to production deployment, demonstrating how these tools can help organizations excel.

Why application transformation matters

In today's ever-evolving digital landscape, businesses face a critical challenge: how to break free from the constraints of legacy systems and embrace the potential of cloud-native architecture while preserving existing investments where appropriate. Cloud-native solutions offer a path to greater agility, scalability and an improved security posture, but why are they so crucial?

First, consider the typical obstacles posed by traditional systems. They often feature complex monolithic codebases that slow down development and deployment processes, making it difficult for organizations to respond swiftly to market changes. Security vulnerabilities can be more arduous to address and maintaining regulatory compliance can be a daunting task.

This is where cloud-native architecture comes into play. At its core, cloud-native is about tapping into the power of microservices and containers. Microservices allow you to break down applications into smaller, more manageable components, helping accelerate development and deployment. Containers provide a more consistent and isolated environment for running these microservices, enabling portability across different infrastructures.

For organizations seeking to effectively integrate existing applications with cloud-native architectures, OpenShift offers a unified platform that supports both traditional and cloud-native applications. For example, features like OpenShift Virtualization give organizations a path to a cloud-native future while letting them keep existing workloads running in virtual machines (VMs) on a single platform. Alongside Red Hat Application Foundations and other middleware products and services, OpenShift Virtualization helps organizations connect data sources between legacy and modern applications, allowing organizations to reap the benefits of cloud-native practices without disrupting their existing systems.

Furthermore, OpenShift streamlines operations by enabling the automation of  continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workloads. This helps organizations more rapidly build, modernize and deploy both traditional and cloud-native applications at scale, allowing them to respond to market shifts more quickly and improve their development agility.

When it comes to scalability, cloud-native solutions shine. By adopting containerization and orchestration, businesses can more easily scale their applications to meet growing demands. Red Hat Runtimes (included in Red Hat Application Foundations), for instance, offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly distributed cloud architectures, which potentially reduces deployment cycle times.

Lastly, security is always an ongoing concern. Rigorous testing and security checks are essential to the development process. Tools like Red Hat Quay, a private container registry, enhance security by scanning images for vulnerabilities. Combined with Red Hat OpenShift, it can not only store pulls from approved external image registries but also the built images from the automated CI/CD workflow. This improves the security posture of the entire image lifecycle.

In summary, cloud-native is more than a technology—it's about empowering teams to break free from legacy constraints and innovate more rapidly to help drive the business forward.

Let’s get implementing

Here, we break down the key phases of this cloud-native application journey using Red Hat products, from development through testing to production.

Step 1. Development and initial integration

• Develop locally or remotely: Start by establishing your development environment, which can be set up locally or remotely. Utilize tools like Git or Maven for source code management and Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant containerization. Additionally, consider using Red Hat Runtimes, which is included as part of Red Hat Application Foundations. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks like Spring Boot and Quarkus, well-suited for highly distributed cloud architectures. This approach facilitates a consistent development process, preparing the application for a similar operational environment.
• Push to CI/CD pipeline: Once the initial development phase is finished, you can incorporate your code into OpenShift's CI/CD pipeline. To optimize the transition from development to testing within this pipeline, explore techniques such as hooks, plugins or uploads for automating the start of image builds. Hooks can trigger builds automatically when code changes occur, plugins facilitate integration with container registries and manual uploads grant precise control over the build process, which helps improve the efficiency and dependability of your software delivery pipeline.

Step 2. Continuous integration and container management

• Automate container image builds: The CI/CD pipeline in OpenShift automatically generates container images with each code revision, using source-to-image workflows to adhere to specified build configurations. This automation helps verify that your application's container images stay updated with the latest code changes while incorporating testing processes. Tag these images with specific labels or tags to indicate their version or purpose (e.g., devImage, v1.0, latest).
• Manage images with Red Hat Quay: After the automated image build, the container images tagged for development are stored and managed within Red Hat Quay before being pushed to the development infrastructure for further deployment and testing. Red Hat Quay serves as the repository for these container images, so they are always available for deployment.

Step 3. Testing and validation

• Deploy for development testing: The container images tagged as devImage are deployed by Red Hat Quay within the OpenShift development environment for testing. This initial testing phase is to confirm that the application's basic functionality is working as expected. It typically involves unit tests, integration tests and other tests that validate individual components of the application. The primary goal is to catch and address issues early in the development process.
• Execute advanced testing: After the initial development testing is completed, the container images tagged for testing can be promoted to the OpenShift testing environment to undergo more extensive and comprehensive testing. This phase generally includes a broader range of tests, such as system integration testing, performance testing, security testing and more. The goal is to thoroughly validate the application's functionality and performance under various conditions. Advanced testing helps identify potential issues that might not have been caught during the initial development testing phase.

Step 4. Deployment and production readiness

• Finalize for production: After tests pass in the testing infrastructure, the container images are tagged for production deployment. This involves verifying that the application meets all scaling and operational standards required for production use.
• Deploy in production: Finally, the fully tested application is deployed in the production environment. This marks that the application is ready for end users and that the development and initial deployment phases of its life cycle are complete

Wrap up

These steps provide an overview framework for cloud-native application development using Red Hat products and solutions. For a more comprehensive exploration and deeper understanding, we encourage you to read Building Your Cloud Native Applications, where you'll find a more detailed examination of its design.

For organizations seeking to integrate innovative technologies into their operations on a cloud-native foundation, solutions such as "Telco 5G N6 LAN Consolidation with F5" and "Telco Service Assurance on Public Cloud" solutions are particularly relevant. These are suited to telecommunication companies exploring edge computing and demonstrate the use of tools like Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. "Intelligent Automation Workflow for Claims" shows how organizations can combine automation with data science to enhance operational efficiency and facilitate data-driven decision-making. Collectively, these solutions demonstrate how modern technologies can be integrated with cloud-native practices to drive operational innovation and agility.

To explore additional architectures that integrate modern technology in cloud-native frameworks, visit our Red Hat Architecture Center.