What is cloud-native architecture?

Cloud Native architecture is a software development approach that utilizes the capabilities and benefits of cloud computing services and infrastructure to build and deliver applications. The following are some of the key characteristics of cloud-native architecture.

Immutable infrastructure

Immutable infrastructure is an architectural approach in which the infrastructure components are created and deployed in a way that they remain unchanged throughout their lifetime. If any changes are to be made in an infrastructure, a new instance is created with the updated configurations and the old instance is replaced.

Microservices

Most cloud applications are built as a collection of small, independent services called microservices. Each microservice is responsible for a specific business capability. As they are loosely coupled, these services can be deployed, developed, and scaled independently.

API

Application Programming Interface (API) is a capability used by software programs to communicate with each other and exchange information. These APIs can be built, deployed, and managed in a single or multi-cloud.

Service mesh

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that is dedicated to controlling and managing the communication amongst the microservices in a cloud-native architecture. As a system grows, the complexity of managing the interactions between the microservices also increases. A service mesh acts as an abstraction by applying a set of features consistently across all services.

Containers

Containers provide consistent environments across different computing environments by packaging the microservice code and other required files. Regardless of the system and hardware, cloud-native applications can run on them due to the containerization of the microservices.

Cloud Native stack

Developers use the following set of technologies, frameworks, and tools to build and deploy cloud-native applications. These layers are called the cloud-native stack.

Infrastructure layer

Comprising the operating system, network, storage, and other computing components. It serves as a foundation upon which cloud-native applications are built and deployed.

Provisioning layer

The software components responsible for managing and allocating the underlying infrastructure with the resources required for running the cloud-native applications account for the provisioning layer.

Runtime layer

This layer executes and manages the application code and runtime environments. It provides the required tools, libraries, and services that allow the execution and management of applications.

Container Orchestration layer

This layer assists in the managing and scaling of containerized applications. It includes container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. These platforms help deploy, scale, load balance, and self-heal containers.Re-deploying a failed container

Application layer

This layer includes software technologies used to build the cloud-native application. These software technologies include container images, CI/CD tools, databases, etc.

Observability tool

To monitor the application metrics such as memory, CPU usage, and latency, an observability tool is used to evaluate and improve the system, ensuring there are no issues with service quality.