The future of cloud-native applications: leveraging Kubernetes and serverless architectures | by Adelina Martin | December 2024

Digital transformation is accelerating at breakneck speed and every industry is moving toward cloud-native applications. It’s no wonder that such applications have become the foundation of modern software development. What are these applications mainly used for? Well, they are intended to leverage the cloud environment successfully and deliver solutions that provide unparalleled scalability, agility, and resilience.

Some essential aspects of cloud native technology include containers, microservices, and Kubernetes. And these aspects certainly lead the way and have the potential to create enormous transformation. The future says that applications will be more dynamic and innovative, it is undeniable.

When we talk about the future of software development, cloud-native applications seem to be setting the tone like never before. Since you are reading the following article, you must do a quick search on what cloud native development is. There is a high probability that you have come across tons and tons of information and are continuing to piece it together because you haven’t come to a proper conclusion. Cloud native is no longer just a buzzword, it has become a requirement to succeed in the game in a short time. However, the question remains: what is cloud native?

One of the most common and modern definitions of cloud native is that it is a paradigm involving seamless development, execution, and monitoring of production applications. All of this is possible in modern environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds.

The main attribute of the cloud native approach is its uniqueness and different features that work in harmony to improve the software development process. Some of the key attributes include:

• Microservices architecture — Previously, the concept of traditional monolithic applications was quite popular, but this is no longer the case, all thanks to the incorporation of microservices architecture. Now, cloud-native applications tend to adopt this architecture to a large extent. These include loosely coupled and interdependent software modules.
  The following architecture ensures:
  Seamless agility
  Successfully facilitates modular development
  Independent deployment
  Promotes scalability
  Ensuring the development of resilient systems
• Containerization and container orchestration – The next one is container, cloud native applications tend to encapsulate code and dependencies in containers. This is what containerization is for. Think of it as a well-optimized orchestration of these containers that can lead to absolute deployments and automated scaling.
• Cloud Computing Design — Most cloud-native applications are expected to be successfully hosted in the cloud. Here you will also find amazing delivery models offered by different cloud service providers. Some of the incomparable aspects to consider here include scalability, elasticity, and resource optimization. It is possible to successfully manage workload, seamlessly adapt to changing demands, and optimize resource utilization.
• DevOps Principles – DevOps culture and platform engineering are heavily considered here. And right now, seamless collaboration between development and operations is a must. By doing so, it is possible to successfully accelerate software development, delivery and various operational procedures. Ultimately, speed and efficiency are improved.
• Statelessness — Among these applications, each client-server request includes all the information necessary for its execution, embodying a stateless design.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and using immutable infrastructure – Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and immutable infrastructures to ensure consistency, repeatability and efficiency. This is all done in the supply infrastructure.
• API communication – Application programming interfaces (APIs) are supposed to have clear and concise contracts between different services, ensuring independent scaling and technological diversity.
• Incorporation of observability – It is now possible to successfully integrate integrated logging, monitoring and analytics. This helps you gain insights into application performance and diagnose problems.

So, are you ready to embrace the paradigm shift? Below are some of the best cloud native app development strategies to achieve unprecedented speed and ensure customer experience. And do you know what’s the best part here, cloud native software development practices ensure to think beyond on-premises boundaries, providing 24/7 availability and seamless accessibility.

It may interest you to know that the application cycle is quite simplified in a cloud environment. With different technologies such as serverless computing and containerization, developing serverless computing is quite simple. What is this trend of cloud-native application development leading to? It allows businesses, regardless of their size and industry, to get rid of unnecessary complexities. Moreover, here you are supposed to pay for the services or tools you use from the cloud providers and nothing else.

So, with serverless computing, the software developer can fully focus on developing, optimizing, and seamlessly operating cloud-native applications in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.

The very next trend in cloud native application development to consider is Kubernetes and containerization. As mentioned earlier, Kubernetes is essentially a container orchestration system. It helps developers successfully deploy Kubernetes, scale and manage a wide range of cloud-native applications without much hassle. Not to mention that these aspects result in a pure simplification of the lifecycle of Cloud-Native applications.

So, if the software application is deployed in a different computing environment, it is possible to migrate with all kinds of dependencies including all the highly necessary files for configuration, libraries, etc.

Here continuous integration and continuous deployment approaches are highly considered and these container based applications tend to ensure that all the native cloud based applications are operational successfully and that too in the most efficient manner . Now, what are the tasks that need to be considered here?

• Deploying configured changes
• Storage system deployment
• Balancing different workloads
• Intuitive user interface successfully supports scaling
• Self-healing in case the container fails to execute the scheduled task

In addition, it is now possible to integrate different external systems without altering the source code. And do you know what is the best here, all these applications strictly comply with internal and external operating protocols and regulations.

These days, security is no longer considered a priority. You find that cloud architecture can sometimes be longer and more difficult, which also leads to unwanted security breaches, leading to damaging scenarios, breaches and worse. This is why this trend of cloud-native applications is necessary. The DevSecOps approach is essential to seamlessly bridging the gap between code and product security in the cloud.

So, what is DevSecOps? It merges different types of security aspects presenting a wide range of DevOps practices. So basically this one turns out to be the most preventative approach, capable of fixing configuration errors much faster. Here, some of the most advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are taken into account.

The DevSecOps approach ensures test automation and emphasizes the development of cloud-native applications in a serverless environment to seamlessly mitigate risks and pave the way for faster deployment cycles.

Cloud native application development is here to stay, that’s a given! So why not make the most of it by pursuing innovation and scaling your business to incredible heights like never before? I hope you found the following post insightful. So what are you waiting for, it’s time to get rid of the complexities, costs and dependencies of infrastructure, it’s time to opt for cloud native development platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, etc.