Cloud Native tools and techniques

For past few weeks/ months I was interested in the roadmap of how Cloud Native applications are built and what are the components of a CN applications.

Here is the roadmap for maturity for Cloud Native applications, 

On one extreme you have monolith with frontend/backend combined into one. For low usage applications this is still ok. Typical technologies and tools in Java world is to build a Spring MVC application and deploy that into Tomcat. 

1st logical progression towards a microservices architecture is to refactor this application to Spring Boot in the backend and React/Angular in the frontend and build them has 2 services (frontend Gateway and backend service) and deploy into PCF. Most of the companies are at this level. 

If that is not sufficient in terms of scale, the next logical step is to use a microservices framework like JHipster and scaffold an entire application with multiple microservices using Domain Driven design and build a gateway frontend in React/Angular and consume these microservices thru the Gateway. Out of the box JHipster uses Spring Cloud/Netflix stack like Eureka for service registry, Ribbon for load balancing, Histrix for circuit breaking and Zuul for monitoring and others. I kind of love /JHipster for its simplicity of implementing microservices out of the box to create boilerplates for Docker containers, Kubernates Yml files and others and we can out of the box deploy it to Google Kubernates Engine (GKE) or AKS (Azure)

The next logical step is to use something like Istio service mesh or Linkerd with Kubernates or Mesos for the cloud, does all the things that JHipster tools do as above + a lot more. The emphasis is on the health of the microservices in Kubernates with tools like Graphana, Kaili (Telemetry), Policy Enforcement in addition to Service Registry, LB and Circuit breaker

Once you have above things in place, you can literally can implement some of the Site Reliability best practices, and also implement Chaos testing in production that is one of the highest maturity.