How do you update and maintain your cloud native application without disrupting the user experience?

DevOps principles emphasize collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery. By integrating development and operations teams, you can streamline the deployment process and ensure that updates are rolled out smoothly without disrupting the user experience. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are key components of DevOps practices, allowing for automated testing and deployment of new code.

Breaking down your application into smaller, independent microservices allows for more granular updates without affecting the entire system. Containers provide lightweight and portable environments for running these microservices, ensuring consistency across different stages of development and deployment. With microservices and containers, you can update specific components of your application without impacting the entire infrastructure.

This is core question that should be asked on how we create and deliver these applications. I completely agree that Microservices and Containers are key components but I think there needs to be a distinction made that when it comes to cloud native app's - they're more of an architectural component than a software functionality component like containers. Building applications with a Microservices architecture allows you to isolate and update those independently but increase in c-sat value when containers are used as the executable action to make updates to those Microservice user apps. I'm not typically involved at a deep technical level but would love to know if this thinking makes sense.

Blue-green deployments involve running two identical production environments, one active (blue) and one inactive (green). When deploying updates, you switch traffic from the blue environment to the green one, minimizing downtime and risk. Canary deployments, on the other hand, involve gradually rolling out updates to a small subset of users before making them available to the wider audience. This allows you to monitor the impact of changes and detect any issues before full deployment.

In addition to feature flags splitting users between the blue and green deployments can allow for feedback to be gathered either through direct user involvement or from user experience tools.

It’s key when monitoring an application to set out what is important to monitor across the infrastructure, application and user experience contexts. Whilst an application might not be registering exception failures through a monitoring tool, an issue could still be occurring ‘silently’ as user paths or synthetic monitoring may not have been considered. Defining service level objectives (SLOs) for each component and using these to guide service level agreements (SLAs) is the next step on this journey.

Monitoring tools provide insights into the performance and health of your application, allowing you to identify and address issues proactively. By setting up alerts and monitoring key metrics, you can detect anomalies and potential problems before they impact the user experience. Additionally, having robust logging and error tracking mechanisms in place enables you to troubleshoot issues quickly and efficiently.

Automation is essential for streamlining deployment and maintenance tasks, reducing the risk of human error and accelerating the release cycle. By automating repetitive tasks such as testing, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning, you can free up time for more strategic initiatives. Continuous optimization of your processes ensures that you are constantly improving efficiency and reliability, leading to a better overall user experience.

It's important to prioritize security, scalability, and reliability in your cloud-native applications. Implementing robust security measures, such as encryption, access controls, and vulnerability scanning, helps protect sensitive data and prevent security breaches. Designing for scalability ensures that your application can handle increased workload and user demand without performance degradation. Finally, prioritizing reliability through fault tolerance, redundancy, and disaster recovery planning helps minimize downtime and ensure a seamless user experience even in the face of unexpected events.