When you look at a normal building, what’s the first thing you notice? Well, it’s made of bricks, like building blocks. Now imagine an app like that, built like a flexible set of LEGO, rather than a giant, solid block. That’s what cloud native application development services are, if they’re put simply.
Using cloud native application development services makes it easy for businesses to build and deploy apps in the cloud on any type of cloud infrastructure, such as public, hybrid, and private clouds. Developing any app with this technology enhances scalability, performance, and cloud platform efficiency. In this article, we’re going to dive into the best practices around cloud-native development, so let’s get in.
Key Best Practices Explained
These best practices, when implemented, make your entire process much simpler. They are:
Microservices Architecture: Breaking Apps into Small Pieces
Imagine if YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids were merged into one app, it’d become pretty inconvenient for people to use, right? Well, that’s the case with a good chunk of apps, and the Microservices architecture prevents just that.
Think of it like a restaurant chain, one branch specialises in chicken while the other in lamb, this lets people go exactly where they need to without navigating in a single place. But why is this helpful?
Well, it is helpful because of the fact that it lets you launch updates quite easily. It’s easier to fix an individual part than to sift through the whole code. Also, it lets your team work on multiple sections simultaneously and improves overall reliability.
Containerization: Packaging for Consistency
Now, the term might sound overly complex, but to put it simply, it means to take the app code while building it, and bundle it and its dependencies into portable containers. Think of it like multiple small businesses put into self-contained boxes, and each of them together makes a big business. But how does this even help?
This practice improves the overall speed of deployment, as developers can work on individual containers independently, and makes sure the work is consistent across different departments. To put it simply, containerization technology makes it easier to deploy by making it more scalable and resource-efficient. It also makes sure that things work the same way in different contexts. As the infrastructure inside the containers gets better, they become the unit of scalability.
Automated CI/CD Pipelines & DevOps Culture: Fast and Reliable Delivery
CI/CD Pipeline sounds like one of those fancy terms people in tech often mention, but it simply means the entire build, test, and deployment process. Now, automating the entire process and the collaboration between the development and operations teams, also called DevOps, is indeed one of the best practices. But why?
Well, think of it like a factory conveyor belt, but for code, the belt moves on its own while teams continue working in parallel, ensuring that the final product is free from any sort of flaws. This makes sure that the delivery is faster, and there are fewer errors, and it also leaves room for improvement.
Design for Failure (Resilience): Expecting the Unexpected
Just like how homes have an inverter to have electricity during a power cut, your app should be designed in a manner that it can handle power outages and any other server issues. Server issues are common, and you will face them once in a while. There should always be a backup server and a backup power source for this very moment.
High availability and less downtime directly translates to more users, as if there’s anything that users hate, it’s long server crashes and outages. But how can we do that? Use automated recovery plans to gracefully handle application failures. To keep the application stable and functional even when things go wrong, developers should employ features like autonomous scaling. Use data replication and distributed systems to lessen the impact of failures.
Observability and Monitoring: Knowing What’s Happening
When you look online at the news, have you ever wondered why? To know what’s happening around the world. Similarly, it is important to know what’s happening with your app and its behaviour all the time. To do this, you need to keep track of some key data, like logs, metrics, and traces, as they help you understand app behaviour better. But why track in the first place?
The phrase “prevention is better than cure” isn’t just applicable to medicines; it can also be applied to cloud native application development services, as monitoring and tracking allow you to identify any issues beforehand and resolve them before it bugs the user.
Statelessness and Cloud-Native Data Management: Keeping Data Separate
Storing current session data is strongly discouraged when it comes to cloud-native applications. Think of it this way, imagine you ask your teacher a question, and they answer based on your previous questions. Can be annoying at times, right? Similarly, each request to a service should be treated independently, and important information like preferences or shopping history should be stored separately.
This makes the service easier to scale as you can easily remove specific instances, and if a stateless service instance fails, it can be replaced right away without affecting any user sessions that are already going on. This is because no important state was lost in that instance.
API-First Design: Defining How Parts Talk
API-First design simply means how the different components of the application communicate, even before coding. Kind of like how one restaurant chain communicates with the other, this helps for a smooth integration and a clear interface.
Conclusion
These best practices form the bread and butter of cloud native application development services and ensure smooth integration and minimal hiccups when the user uses the app. Embracing these best practices will help you make the most out of the app and unlock the full potential of the cloud. Not just that, but it also helps businesses to keep innovating and moving forward.
