What are the most important practices for designing cloud-native enterprise software?

Designing cloud-native enterprise software involves several important practices to ensure scalability, reliability, and flexibility. By Define a clear strategy for adopting microservices. Understand why you're making the switch and set clear goals. By Dividing the application into well-defined, bounded contexts, each with its own microservice. Use Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles to help with this.

Designing cloud-native software requires building resilient, scalable, and manageable systems. Use microservices for scalability, containerize with Docker, and manage with Kubernetes. Implement DevOps for efficient CI/CD pipelines, ensuring rapid, reliable releases. Design for failure with strategies like circuit breakers and use chaos engineering to test system durability. Prefer stateless architectures, externalize state. Prioritize observability through monitoring, logging, and tracing to understand system health. Secure all layers with robust access controls and encryption. Aim for loose coupling to adapt to changes swiftly.

Microservices architecture also makes your application resilient. A failure or crash of one microservice will not affect the entire application and cause catastrophic failures but will be limited to that microservice.

Its important to ensure that service architecture is helping and not hurting you. Micro-services can help considerably to improve build time, encapsulate distinct systems, lower extraneous dependencies, isolate workload patterns, and isolate failures, but they can also introduce a huge amount of cognitive load and friction to change when left to sprawl. Ensure there's a reason for your services and aim to simplify when possible. Also invest early in shared build tooling and codegen/typing to ensure service to service communication is in sync, compatible, and reliable.

How about - What are the most important practices for designing software? I'm afraid this question gets left on the table far more often than organizations let on. Instead of even superficially studying the problem at hand, most just jump into the full on D&D [design and development] world and go to town. If they are trying to use an iterative model alone (a mistake in my opinion), they come up with versions like "the blue one" followed by "the blue one with a stripe and a wheel"... with no more idea of the final offering than the disjointed conversations they are applying to the problem. (out of room for a complete answer...)

The ability to anticipate and plan for various components or services in the system to fail, ensuring that the application remains reliable and available. This could include hardware failures, software bugs, network issues, and more. Understanding these failure scenarios is crucial.

Developers transitioning from building applications for a data centre to cloud needs to be extra careful as security is sometimes taken granted as firewalls are standard in data centres to detect and stop malicious traffic in its tracks. But it's not the same in the cloud. While clouds also have firewalls, many times ports are left open, data or interfaces are not behind an authentication layer and it can be exposed to public internet and can be exploited by malicious actors. Especially in open source software management consoles are exposed without any authentication and can lead to unauthorised and malicious access.

In my experience the security best practices is essential to protect the software and data from potential threats and vulnerabilities. E.g : Authentication and Authorization: Implement strong user authentication, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) for sensitive systems. Use role-based access control (RBAC) to manage user permissions and limit access to specific resources.

In my view embracing a DevOps culture is essential for modern software development and operations. DevOps fosters collaboration, communication, and automation between development and operations teams to deliver software faster and more reliably.

I agree but regularly monitor and analyze the performance of your software, and be prepared to make adjustments as your application grows and user demands change. Performance and scalability optimization is an ongoing process that requires continuous attention and improvement.