Nov 10, 2024 · 6 min read
Cloud native is more than just running applications in the cloud—it is about architecting applications to take full advantage of cloud computing models. This means designing for horizontal scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency from the ground up.
The twelve-factor app methodology provides principles for building cloud native applications. Treating backing services as attached resources, storing configuration in the environment, and designing for statelessness enables applications to scale horizontally and fail gracefully.
Microservices architecture decomposes applications into loosely coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. While this adds complexity in service communication and data consistency, it enables teams to move faster and scale specific components as needed.
Containers and Kubernetes have become the standard deployment model for cloud native applications. Containers provide consistent runtime environments, while Kubernetes handles orchestration, scaling, and self-healing. Together, they abstract away infrastructure concerns and enable portable deployments.
CI/CD pipelines are essential for cloud native development. Automated testing, building, and deployment enable rapid iteration while maintaining quality. GitOps practices take this further by using Git as the source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration.
Observability—logging, metrics, and tracing—is crucial in distributed systems. Understanding how requests flow through services and identifying performance bottlenecks requires comprehensive instrumentation and correlation of telemetry data.
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