Benefits of Cloud-native applications
Tags: cloudnative, cloudcomputing, microservices, cloudapps
Published: 2022-05-31 12:59:26

[Cloud-Native apps](https://bpbonline.com/search?q=cloud+native&type=product) take advantage of the emerging cloud-based technologies like functions as a service, [microservices](https://bpbonline.com/search?q=microservices&type=product), containers, [Kubernetes](https://bpbonline.com/search?q=Kubernetes&type=product), and declarative event-driven APIs. These are the building blocks used to design, construct, deploy, and run modern applications. These technologies are at the core of all automated pipelines for continuous implementation and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which is the foundation for modern Development and Operations - [DevOps](https://bpbonline.com/search?q=DevOps&type=product).

At the heart of the design, Cloud-native applications are these loosely coupled services, which can be viewed as being small snippets of specialized code. They may be called functions or microservice, depending on their characteristics. Either way, they are used to build a specific service. Typically, the ground rule is 1 microservice = 1 purpose = 1 service. This rule ensures service independence and that resources for each service are efficiently provisioned, making the application flexible and adaptable to a cloud architecture.

**Benefits of Cloud-native applications**
We typically build Cloud-native applications to take advantage of the speed and efficiency of the cloud. 

Some of the benefits we derive from them are as follows:

**Design efficiency:** Cloud architectures generally use a pay-for-use model, which means you no longer have to concern yourself with detailed and tiresome capacity planning for application resources.

**Cost-effective:** As the resources will scale as needed, which eliminates the overprovisioning of hardware. Virtual servers can be readily spun-up when needed, and cloud-native applications can be up and running in seconds. Containers are preferred over VMs to maximize the number of microservices run on a host, which saves time, resources, and money.

**Independently scalable:** As each microservice is logically isolated and scales independently, it is not affected by the configuration of the others.

**Portability:** Cloud-native applications are designed to be vendor-neutral where possible to aid portability. Using containers to port functions and/or microservices between different vendors' cloud platforms provides agility and avoids vendor lock-in.

**Reliable:** If a failure should occur in one microservice, there's no effect on the adjacent services because these cloud-based applications are isolated in containers.

**Easy to manage:** Cloud-native applications use automation tools and procedures to deploy new app features and version updates. Developers can track all microservices and components as they're being deployed. Applications are decomposed into several smaller single-purpose services. By design, one team is responsible for a specific microservice.

**Clear visibility:** A microservice architecture isolates services, so it makes it easier for teams to monitor applications using tools such as GCP's Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, which are now part of GCP's Operations Suite or Anthos.

**The future of cloud-native applications:** Cloud-native applications have experienced a surge in popularity recently and are predicted to be the future of software development. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation estimated that there were at the number of cloud-native developers had gone up to at least 6.5 million in 2020 from 4.7 million in 2019. This popularity and subsequent uptake are due to Cloud-native applications. being the solution to some of cloud computing's inherent problems. Nevertheless, migrating to the cloud to improve operational efficiencies has its own challenges.

**Cloud-native design considerations:** At a high level, cloud-native applications are being designed and built to take advantage of the cloud architecture, which means they are adapting to the many new possibilities and challenges. When designing applications, we typically consider the following:
- The functional requirements of a system (specifications: what it should do)
- The non-functional requirements (requirements: how it should perform)
- Constraints (acceptable boundaries to change)

The functional aspects don't change too much when developing Cloud Native applications, but how we go about doing things changes. Cloud architecture has very different ways to accomplish things than on-premises designs, and it imposes different constraints. If architects fail to recognize and adapt their approach to meet these constraints, the resultant systems are often suboptimal, fragile, and hard to manage. A well-architected cloud-native system, on the other hand, should be largely self-healing, cost-efficient, and easily updated and maintained through Continuous Integration /Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), which is the backbone of DevOps.

Hope this was helpful.