4 cloud native concepts you should know

The shift to cloud computing has unlocked the ability for organizations to move faster, increase efficiency, and fine-tune the customer experience to stay competitive and adapt to changing market conditions. In order to fully realize these benefits, organizations must embrace new practices and patterns for building, deploying, and operating applications. Those that avoid change or are slow to evolve end up wasting money on unnecessary and unused resources and introducing operational toil for engineering teams — the exact opposite of your goals! This new paradigm of designing, building, and managing applications specifically for a cloud environment is called “cloud native.”

Learn the difference between applications that run in the cloud versus applications that are built for the cloud and how your organization can benefit from going cloud native. 

Cloud native describes an approach to building, configuring, deploying and managing workloads that take advantage of the dynamic and distributed nature of cloud platforms. 

At the heart of this approach is microservices, an architecture that decomposes the centralized monolithic application favored in on-premises data centers into a collection of loosely coupled and independently deployable services. It is this modularity that allows engineering teams to take full ownership over a set of services, each of which can be individually deployed and scaled.  

Containerizing these services means bundling everything needed to run the service — such as the code itself, library dependencies, and language runtimes — into a single image and deploying to a container orchestrator. 

Orchestrators, like Kubernetes, are the infrastructure platform that is responsible for managing the container lifecycle from scheduling where to run — it scales horizontally up and down, allocating node resources between containers and monitoring container health. 

All together it is these foundational elements — modular microservices owned by development teams that are packaged into portable containers and deployed to an orchestrator for management and scaling — that enable engineering teams to quickly and flexibly deploy updates, bug fixes and new features independently. 

Before your organization sets any objectives or goals for adopting cloud native, it is important for you and your colleagues to have a good understanding of the work ahead. It will require collaboration and coordination across engineering, operations, and security.  

The four components of cloud native architecture are: 

• Microservices
• Containers
• DevOps practices
• Open standards 

None of these components are optional — all of them are needed in order to unlock the benefits of cloud native.)

Microservices are smaller and more focused than their monolithic predecessors, which makes them easier to develop, test, and deploy. This allows teams to move faster and respond more quickly to changing business requirements and customer needs. Also, the smaller surface area means scaling efforts can be targeted resulting in more efficient resource use. 

For example, an e-commerce platform could have separate microservices for authentication, inventory management, a shopping cart, order management, and payment processing. During a flash sale the shopping cart and payment processing are likely to experience a steep increase in traffic and need to be scaled horizontally compared to the other services.

Containers are services packaged in a standardized format that is portable. In a cloud native environment containers are deployed to and managed by a container orchestrator. Orchestrators automate activities throughout the container lifecycle from scheduling to termination, which allows for flexible and efficient resource utilization. Containers are an extension of the operating system, not an emulation like a virtual machine — this means they use less resources and are quicker to spin up and scale out. 

This duo of container and orchestrator is powerful. Remember the earlier e-commerce example? With a flash sale, it is the orchestrator that automatically handles adding additional instances of the shopping cart and payment processing services; it removes them as demand wanes. In addition to scaling particular services or the available nodes in the cluster itself, orchestrators continuously scan and move containers to different nodes as needed to achieve your desired utilization profile.

In a world where developers are taking on full responsibility of their services, container orchestration is a necessity, not a nice-to-have.

DevOps is a methodology focused on enhancing collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. When adapted to your organization, DevOps results in consistently delivering better software more frequently. It can be misunderstood as a “role” when focusing on the DevOps Engineer — team members who are responsible for DevOps tooling (the deployment system and continuous integration and delivery pipelines (CI/CD)). Tragically, the focus on tech and titles minimizes the importance of culture, and results in recreating the very silos that DevOps practices seek to crumble. 

Fundamentally, DevOps is about how well your organization can facilitate technical changes while balancing stability and velocity. The key to better software delivery performance is introducing smaller changes more frequently; this is in contrast to earlier methodologies like waterfall, which promoted introducing large amounts of change infrequently. 

Below are common practices that support the ability to swiftly and sustainably deliver changes in DevOps environments:

• Shared responsibility for production between Dev and Ops
• Continuous experimentation and learning
• Shifting from silos to collaboration
• Game days

• Infrastructure-as-code
• Automated provisioning 
• Codified CI/CD pipelines
• Versioned database schema changes
• Managed configuration
  

DevOps is all about improving how your teams work together to facilitate technical change — whether that’s a developer adding code to power a new feature, a security engineer rolling out a patch, or an SRE optimizing site performance.

The cloud native ecosystem is underpinned by a variety of open source technology and standards, including Kubernetes, Fluent Bit, and Prometheus among many others that are under stewardship of organizations like Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Open Container Initiative (OCI).

The fact that the standards are open source in particular is important for several reasons:

• Provides flexibility to choose and change platforms and providers, which allows organizations to avoid vendor lock-in.
• Fosters interoperability between different cloud platforms and projects, which allows organizations more options for tooling and technology.
• Drives innovation within the cloud native community by reducing the barriers to entry for new projects to spin up  
• Encourages collaboration and contributions from everyone in the community with checks and balances to main vendor neutrality

As a great example of the benefits of OSS, consider containers, which are prized for their portability. It doesn’t matter if you’re developing locally on a laptop, running in an internal datacenter, or even multi-cloud — thanks to OCI’s open specifications for container images, distribution, and runtime, any container host is able to push or pull images from any registry. 

Without industry-wide adoption of these specs, every cloud provider or platform would come up with their own bespoke definition of a container. This would create confusion and complexity. It would also mean extra work for developers to accommodate and manage multiple proprietary container formats.

By architecting applications and infrastructure for the cloud, optimizing the software delivery process, cultivating a DevOps culture, and contributing back to the open source ecosystem your organization will be well poised to enjoy the benefits of going cloud native. These substantial business advantages include accelerating time-to-market, higher scalability, efficient resource utilization, and increased agility and flexibility.

When transitioning to a cloud native architecture, it is essential to complement your existing set up for monitoring with observability to understand system health. Monitoring matters but observability is mission critical – offering real-time insights into system behavior that enables developers and operators to quickly detect and address issues.

Chronosphere is an observability platform that is specifically tailored for cloud native environments. The Chronosphere Control Plane and the Live Telemetry Analyzer make it easy to corral cardinality and tame the firehose of logs, metrics, and traces coming from your multitude of microservices.