Cloud Native Application Development - Adopt or Fail

In today’s digital world, software strategy is central to business strategy. To stay competitive, organizations need customized software applications to meet their unique needs — from customer engagements to new product and services development. Drawn-out development projects are no longer acceptable, given business demands. Therefore, the need to speed up application development, testing, delivery, and deployment is no longer optional but a must-have competency.   

At the same time that developers are confronting this challenge to deliver solutions more quickly, they are also facing the most diverse technology ecosystem in the history of computing.  To address this challenge, development teams must modernize architecture, infrastructure, and processes to deliver higher-quality applications with greater agility.

Cloud native development is an approach to building and running applications that fully exploits the advantages of the cloud computing model.  Cloud native development multidimensionality involves architecture, infrastructure, and processes based upon four key tenets:

1. Services-based architecture: could be microservices or any modular loosely coupled model for independent scalability and flexibility of maintenance and polyglot language runtimes.
2. Containers and Docker image: as the deployment unit and self-contained execution environment with consistency and portability across cloud infrastructures.
3. DevOps automation: implementing processes and practices and instrumentation of development to test deployment of applications.     
4. API-based design: The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. No direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model with an outside- in perspective.

You can either build these capabilities yourself and spend precious time and resources on DIY projects or use a platform that provides these capabilities out of box and focus on developing and delivering cloud-native applications and services with speed and agility.

Cloud Native Platform

These capabilities are usually provided by a platform for building and operating cloud-native applications and services. This platform is made up of:

1. Container orchestration engine and APIs  to manage, provide security configuration, and monitor the containers
2. Catalog of tested and supported containerized runtimes to design your applications
3. Infrastructure which supports microservices architecture (MSA), application lifecycle, and supporting services such as discovery, load balancing, resilience, and scalability
4. Tools to build, deploy,  and automate DevOps processes (Agile, CI/CD)
5. Middleware as services

When companies build and operate applications in a cloud native way, they can bring new ideas to market faster and respond sooner to customer demands.  Cloud native development means maturing from cloud as a “IT cost savings objective” to the “catalyst of business growth mission.”  In the apps-driven world, businesses that can quickly build and deliver new applications as well as modernize existing applications in response to customer needs will be well-positioned dominate their industries.

Learn More

Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes:  Containerized language runtimes for building application on OpenShift using microservices and API-based design.

Red Hat OpenShift: Red Hat’s container and Kubernetes platform for faster deployment of cloud native apps.

Red Hat Middleware: Applications services for integration apps and data and automation of business processes.