Cloud Transformations (Native)- Decoding the 5 principles

Cloud-Native Transformations - Decoding the 5 principles

When we talk about Cloud Native, a sort of matrix starts building up in our heads. Starting from architecture, a tech stack, an approach to software development, its delivery model, overall a complete shift in all senses and packed together.

Adding more fragrance to the vault, thanks to the unlimited number of tools in the market together with their inbuilt complexities.

Let me clear the cloud by explaining the 5 Fundamental Principles of Cloud Native Architecture, how these are interdependent and comes to the rescue of one another. It will certainly be the magic word like “open sesame” & open the doors for the Cloud Treasure for you:

The five principles are:

• Containerisation
• Dynamic management
• Microservices
• Automation
• Orchestration

Containerisation

You can containerise things after deciding your architecture. Containers are defined as, Lightweight standalone executable software packages which include almost everything needed to run an application be it: code, runtime environment, system tools, libraries, and settings. With this, it is easy to host & deploy duplicate containers worldwide to make your operations reliable, flexible, and agile.

It is made to run & up the code in any computing environment with all dependencies. From limiting resource uses to set up security policies you can control everything by linking the containers together. You can consider them to be individual, scalable, and isolated systems where you can run applications of your choice. Running on any platform, anywhere these containers isolates its dependencies even from its Operating System. Now it is easy to

Dynamic management

Dynamic management is all about computed, network & storage resources that are provisioned based on the requirement or on-demand, using standardized APIs. This also does not have any upfront costs. This provides real-time responses to on-time real business needs, thus making optimum use of your new cloud platform.

Dynamic management helps you to cut the costs that are typically involved in capacity planning and provisioning of hardware resources. Plugin and plug out resources (engineers) at your convenience based on the customer demand.

Microservices

It is a suite of modular components of services. An approach for a large software to be developed in a modular way to run a unique process and often manages its own databases. Including performing various other tasks, a service can also generate alerts, log data, support UIs, and authentication. Microservices communicate via APIs and enable each service to be isolated, rebuilt, redeployed, and managed independently.

Automation

Let the machine do the repetitive tasks. In this process, the manual tasks are replaced with automated steps in scripts or code. For a better understanding, I would quote examples of automated test frameworks, configuration management, continuous integration, and continuous deployment tools. It also helps to improve the system reliability by limiting human errors in repetitive tasks & improve productivity. Apparently, it also frees people helping them to focus on the core tasks.

Orchestration

After setting up the Microservice architecture in place and then containerizing it, it is time to orchestrate it. A large enterprise-level application spans over multiple containers, which must be deployed across multiple server hosts around a comprehensive infrastructure including security, networking, storage, and other services.

As a practice, each orchestration engine deploys the containers, at scale, for the workloads needed, at the same scheduling them across a cluster while scaling and maintaining them. During this process, they also integrate everything with the container infrastructure.

Orchestration also encourages planning the architecture and use of common patterns of applications and services. Both of which improve reliability reducing the engineering engagements and thus cost and time. Thus, it frees developers from solving lower-level abstractions and focus on application.