How Cloud-Native Application Development Enhances Business Agility and Resilience

BySara Suarez

The digital era disruption has compelled organizations and industry experts to embrace a transformational journey to succeed in the competitive market. Besides, the rapid pace of digital transformation has pushed enterprises to consider innovative business models to meet real-time user requirements and accomplish business objectives.

The cloud-native approach is enabling businesses to develop such delivery models and has emerged as the recent trend of digital disruption. As per the reports, the global market of cloud-native application services is estimated to touch 208 billion US dollars by 2023. Cloud-native app development facilitates companies to bring ideas to the market rapidly as markets have become exceedingly dynamic and users have become highly demanding.

Introduction to Cloud-Native App Development

Cloud-native applications are operated and managed in the cloud and are designed to take advantage of the intrinsic features of a cloud computing software delivery model. Simply put, Cloud-native application development is known as the process of building and running programs that work on the basis of a distributed cloud computing model. Cloud-native applications adopt Microservices architecture. This architecture effectively distributes resources to each function that the app utilizes, enabling the application to be scalable and compliant with cloud architecture.

DevOps experts highly prefer cloud-native applications in order to promote business agility. They are designed, developed, and operated contrary to conventional monolithic applications. However, cloud-native applications boast shorter app lifecycles than monoliths and are highly manageable, resilient, and transparent.

Core Functionalities of Cloud-Native Applications

Cloud-native apps capitalize on cloud computing frameworks and other combined cloud services. Since not all services are available on the same server, cloud-native application development experts need to build a network among machines using software-centric architectures. The services exist in various servers and they operate in diverse locations. This architecture enables cloud apps to scale out efficiently and offers other exclusive features like:

  • Web-Based Technologies – Instead of C and C++, cloud-native applications leverage Java, Ruby, HTML, PHP, or .NET
  • Cross-Functionality – Cloud-native apps support cross-functionality where a single application can serve various, distinct user groups. This is something conventional monolithic solutions struggle with even today.
  • Real-Time Computing – Like other cloud services, cloud-native applications offer real-time updates to keep up with availability. Similarly, if a service of the app goes down, containers will automatically resolve and ensure availability.
  • Automation – To handle dynamic scaling requirements and operate cost-effectively, cloud-native applications leverage automation. This helps businesses to remain active and responsive.
  • Redundancy – When a specific container fails, another container can subjugate its position immediately. This denotes the cloud-native application’s redundancy. Also, the chances of downtime occurrences are low in cloud-native apps.
  • Distributed Operation – Typically, a cloud-native application’s state is recorded in an external entity, it’s not connected to the infrastructure it operates on. In simple terms, Cloud apps are different from a web service that runs using a server. This allows cloud apps to function in a distributed method and helps maintain accessibility.
  • Advanced Security – Cloud-native app ensures comprehensive authentication mechanisms and advanced security models that combat cyber threats effectually

3 Crucial Approaches of Cloud-Native Application Development

The cloud-native app development typically involves agile methodology, DevOps, cloud platform, containers such as continuous delivery/Kubernetes, and microservices. Businesses should consider three important approaches of cloud-native app development:

1. Apps Strategy – First, businesses need to identify the key driver for growth before starting the cloud app development process. The drivers must be aligned with business objectives in order to experience cloud-agnostic development. Developers from the right cloud application development company help businesses design the coupled services for comprehensive platforms to maintain accessibility.

2. Platform Strategy – Businesses should choose an appropriate container framework and Platform-as-a-Service modules for caching, integration, and persistent data storage. With the support of developers, businesses can set up the selected modules in the cloud and then implement app onboarding via automation and pilots.

3. Operation Strategy – In this phase, the restructuring of administrative roles comes into action. It denotes that the people and culture in a business need to be organized through training and coaching. It will support the businesses to combat challenges by conducting strategic valuations and objective adjustments. This strategy also involves defining policies, procedures, and platforms.

Why Businesses Need to Adopt Cloud-Native Applications

Gain a Competitive Advantage

In general, cloud-native app development means shifting from a focus on IT cost savings to considering the cloud as a medium of business development. With cloud-native applications, businesses can rapidly build and deliver solutions in response to customer requirements and achieve persistent success.

Reduce Development Costs

One of the major benefits of building cloud-native apps is that microservices and containers can act as building blocks for other projects in the future. Since experts are using a single tech stack to develop all their apps, cloud-native apps make it easier for experts to avail and reuse components utilized for previous projects.

This reusability has several advantages that can help businesses produce cost-effective apps:

  • Reduces Intricacy of Development Process – Developers can focus more on the project’s vital functions rather than developing the common framework. It also enables developers to build more sophisticated applications in less duration.
  • Easy Testing – Using microservices leads to minor problems, reducing the load in the pipeline. The process of foreseeing, detecting, and debugging problems in cloud-native applications is much easier than in traditional monolithic applications.
  • Enhances UI/UX – Modular strategy makes it easier to standardize the functionality and appearance of cloud-native apps. Companies with more than multiple services or applications can take advantage of this to simplify the learning curve for customers.
  • Faster Time to Market – Microservices architecture pattern aims to deliver self-contained applications. Users can develop, test, and deploy apps inside a single environment which speeds up the product’s time to market.

Resilience

If the legacy applications fail, the whole service could be affected. Whereas, by adopting a cloud-native development approach, businesses can focus on building up resilience. The fast-paced cloud-native environment helps engineers and developers design applications that stay active regardless of downtime and complications in the environment.

Improve Customer Experience

With cloud-native application development, organizations can achieve modernizations and add functionalities continuously to solutions that their customers use and experience. The implementation of API-based integration can enable the linking of business data storage and front-end apps, impeccably enhancing the employee experience via back-end data management.

Wrapping Up!

With the popularity of distributed frameworks virtualization technologies, it’s the right time for businesses to migrate applications to the cloud. The cloud-native infrastructure supports easy and fast application development, and effortless deployment, and allows solutions to be scaled as required. With numerous benefits, it’s no doubt that cloud-native app development is a powerful approach in the software industry.