Udacity | SUSE: Intro to Cloud Native Fundamentals
Tags: 100daysofcode, devops, cloudnative, programming
Published: 2021-06-09 10:26:14

> *This is the second article in the series,* ***Udacity: SUSE Cloud Native Foundations.*** *Here I'll be going through the fundamentals of Cloud Native, what is CNCF, and the keypoints to consider when adopting Cloud-Native practices.*

This section briefly discuss what cloud native means. It is expected that readers must have an understanding of the following concepts which will be used throughout the entire 6-part series.
- web application development, specifically Python
- running commands in the CLI or command-line interface
- using git commands
- a DockerHub account

------

## What the heck is Cloud Native

In its simplest terms, Cloud native refers to building and managing applications at scale using either private, public, or hybrid cloud platforms.

The first two key things to know is this focuses on **speed** and **agility** - how quickly anorganization can response and adapt to change.

The third key thing: **containers**.
You might have heard of this buzzword being thrown around in technology nowadays.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4h5yjk77myax2frbyqcd.png)

Containers are simply **processes** but are treated as the smallest unit of an application. They are closely associated with cloud native applications as containers are a great way to deploy applications quickly and resiliently given their lightweight feature.

Now, when you hear containers, it is also often followed by another buzzword: **microservices**.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ea6wxrnsn7gnsml87wj1.png)

This will have its own section in the succeeding notes but for now, just know that microservices are a collection of small, independent, and containerized applications.

-----

## Cloud-Native Landscape

With the advent of containers, the need for tools to manage and maintain them also arise. Some of the container orchestrator tools that are being used is the market are Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and Docker Swarm, with **Kubernetes** being the leading tool in deploying containerized workloads.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8nikx73ro9axi2dqrhl4.png)

It was a project inside Google and was released in 2014 and is currently being maintained by **CNCF** or **Cloud Native Computing Foundation**, a vendor-agnostic organization that manages open-source projects. The main features of Kubernetes are the automation of:

- Configuration 
- Management
- Scalability

Over time, Kubernetes was developed to include more than just automation but also other functionalities:

- Runtime
- Networking
- Storage
- Service Mesh
- Logs and metrics
- Tracing

---

## Business and Technical Considerations

Adoption cloud-native practices means consideration alot of factors, specifically business and technical keypoints, which would need to be assessed by all the stakeholders.

From a business perspective, the adoption of cloud-native tooling represents:

- **Agility** - perform strategic transformations
- **Growth** - quickly iterate on customer feedback
- **Service availability** - ensures the product is available to - customers 24/7

From a technical perspective, the adoption of cloud-native tooling represents:

- **Automation** - release a service without human intervention
- **Orchestration** - introduce a container orchestrator to manage  thousands of services with minimal effort
- **Observability** - ability to independently troubleshoot and debug each component

---

> *Now that you have an overview of what Cloud-Native is, you're ready to dive in to the architecture consideration, which you can read in the succeeding article.*

> *If you enjoy this write-up and would like to learn more, make sure to hit the* **Follow** *just below and bookmark the series. I'll also be glad to connect with you on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/eden_noel08). <br>See you there!* 😃
____________________________________________

{% user jeden %}