The cloud is the most significant technology shift we’ve seen in the past 20 years. It has changed how we build, deploy and scale applications at every stack layer. In this session, we’ll explore how companies can embrace a cloud-native development approach to achieve business objectives faster than ever before by developing microservices and containers in a DevOps environment with platforms like JFrog.
Cloud-native Applications – Concepts, Practices and Patterns
Cloud-native is an architecture style that uses the principles of software engineering and cloud computing to develop resilient, scalable, and elastic applications. A cloud-native application is one that can be deployed in any environment (private, public, or hybrid), has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and is easier to manage than traditional applications.
Cloud-native development focuses on creating microservices from discrete components that are easy to deploy and scale independently. These microservices allow you to break up your monolithic app into smaller pieces to scale each service separately as needed.
Containers are lightweight virtual machines with their operating system kernel and their own file system space, making them ideal for running multiple applications on a single host server without having multiple operating systems installed.
DevOps refers to a set of practices used by IT operations teams to improve efficiency while automating manual processes using automation tools such as Puppet or Ansible along with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins or TravisCI that allow developers have greater visibility into production issues faster.
How to go from zero to Cloud-native in 5 Steps?
If you are a business owner and want to adopt cloud computing for your company, start with the following steps:
Define your vision of what you want to achieve with cloud computing.
Define the goals and requirements for implementing a solution using key performance indicators (KPIs).
Implement a solution using DevOps tools and processes, such as continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), microservices architecture (MSA), containerization, serverless computing, etc., that help build applications in a cloud-native way by utilizing third-party services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) over traditional monolithic architectures where all application building blocks run on servers hosted within an organization’s data center behind firewalls
DevOps best practices for Cloud-native Applications
There are several DevOps best practices that can help you get the most out of your cloud and DevOps environments.
Use a CI/CD pipeline – Continuous integration (CI) is the process of automating build, test, and deployment processes. It’s often coupled with continuous delivery (CD), which extends CI to automatically promote code through development, staging, and production environments.
Use microservices architecture – Microservices architecture involves breaking an application into more minor services that communicate over APIs instead of depending on each other directly. This approach helps prevent cascading failures from taking down an entire system or service when a single component malfunctions or fails to meet its responsibilities. In addition, it allows for faster deployments by limiting changes to individual components rather than having them impact all parts at once—a significant benefit when operating in either a cloud or containerized environment where instances need regular updates due to security patches or feature additions/changes
DevOps, Microservices and Containers – An unbeatable Combo
Microservices are an excellent fit for containers. Traditional applications are monolithic, which means they’re like traditional houses — one large structure with all the rooms. On the other hand, Microservices are like multiple small apartments inside a larger building. They have fewer dependencies and are more isolated from each other, making them easier to scale independently and deploy quickly on their own.
As we’ve mentioned previously, DevOps is essential to any successful cloud strategy because it increases collaboration between your developers and operations teams. While DevOps naturally encourages containerization practices (since containers make it easier for developers to build and deploy code), there are additional benefits that come from combining DevOps practices with microservice architectures:
Automated provisioning – In cloud environments, you already use tools like Puppet or Chef to automate provisioning tasks such as setting up servers or configuring software packages. Now that you’re using containers instead of virtual machines (VMs), this same process can be used for each microservice instance running inside your container cluster. Since each service runs its process within its container image — rather than having multiple copies running at once — these processes will behave predictably during redeployment or scaling operations without negatively affecting other services within the cluster.
Elasticity – Because microservices can be deployed individually without affecting others’ performance levels (as long as they’re not sharing resources), companies can quickly increase capacity by adding more instances while still meeting SLA agreements. This is particularly useful for workloads that require low latency or fast response times.
Scalability – Because each microservice can be scaled independently, companies can increase capacity by adding more instances while still meeting SLA agreements.
Portability – Microservices are portable, which means they can be used on any cloud platform or within any data center.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen in this blog post, the cloud and DevOps are a powerful combination that can help any business achieve its goals. By embracing these two technologies, you can improve your productivity and agility while reducing costs. Although it may take some time to get started with both of these new approaches, we encourage you to try them out today.
