Modernizing? Containers are Not Enough; You Need Cloud Native
Many people reading this article already understand the value containers bring to their applications. Most have even implemented a container-based operations infrastructure for their applications. Containers provide a lightweight and platform-agnostic way to package and deploy applications quickly and effectively. The build-once, deploy-anywhere model is the keystone of modern application deployment processes.
But containers by themselves are insufficient. You can take a large, inefficient, monolith application and put it into a container, and you’ll see many of the benefits of containers even with this simple implementation. Yet, your application is still a large, complex monolith with all the disadvantages associated with that architecture model.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses must continuously adapt and change to remain competitive. Unfortunately, monolithic application architectures are too fragile and slow-moving to be competitive in today’s world.
To remain competitive in today’s competitive environment, you must adapt all aspects of the cloud-native architectural model to thrive. Yes, moving to a container-based architecture is part of that process, but it is only a part. You must fully adapt the cloud-native mindset and architectural model to achieve modern architecture’s benefits.
Moving Beyond Containers to Cloud Native
Besides moving to a containerized application, what else does it take to become a fully cloud-native application?
Here are six steps you must take, beyond simple containerization, to become fully cloud-native.
Cloud-Native Step One: Move to a Microservices-Based Architecture
This is the most complicated and most involved step. Large, complex monoliths are brutal to support, hard to adapt and hard to update. Moving to a microservice-based architecture solves many of these issues, allowing a larger development organization to work on different aspects of the application independently. This enables practical application and organizational growth.
Cloud-Native Step Two: Move Your Containers to the Public Cloud
The ability to dynamically change your infrastructure is a game-changer for highly adaptive applications and the organizations that support them—adding new infrastructure components, scaling your operational infrastructure to meet sudden changes in demand and launching and terminating large-scale tests and evaluations quickly. All of this is enabled by dynamic infrastructures that the public cloud encourages.
Cloud-Native Step Three: Move to Cloud-Native Databases
In its most basic form, this might involve moving to a NoSQL database native within the public cloud environment, such as Amazon DynamoDB, Google Datastore or Azure Cosmos DB.
But migrating a large application from SQL to NoSQL databases is non-trivial, and the return on investment is often not worth it. Even if you stick with SQL-based databases, many good cloud-enabled, cloud-native, SQL-based databases are on the market. For example, Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native version of MySQL, and CochroachDB provides many of the same advantages of a NoSQL cloud-native database while enabling SQL-based access.
Whatever technology your application requires, moving to a cloud-native database gives you advantages of scale, support and flexibility unavailable in non-cloud-native databases.
Cloud-Native Step Four: Use Native Cloud-Based Services and Tools
Public cloud providers enable cloud-native applications in a variety of ways with a variety of tools. This includes networking services, such as load balancers, elastic IPs and virtual private networks. They also provide scaling services such as server auto-scaling for scaling your application resources. When used appropriately, even serverless computation services such as AWS Lambda offer considerable advantages to your cloud-native application.
Cloud-Native Step Five: Automate, Automate, Automate
Automation is the key to a practical modern, highly dynamic, scalable, cloud-native application. This includes automating the updating and deploying of services using a CI/CD pipeline and automating the creation of your infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools. Automation allows you to standardize, document, review and replicate processes that improve consistency and application availability.
Cloud-Native Step Six: Leverage DevOps and STOSA Process and Principles
If you already use containers, chances are you know DevOps principles. You may even be using them at some level. But fully adopting a DevOps culture is critical to modernizing your application and facilitating rapid innovation within your company culture.
Beyond DevOps, the Single Team Oriented Service Architecture (STOSA) process is a change in company culture and organization that enables strong ownership and accountability in modern application architectures. This ownership and accountability encourage innovation by enabling decision-making at the lowest levels of the organization yet keeping the organization focused and delivering a high-quality product to your customers.
Cloud Native is More Than Containers
Transitioning an application from containers to a cloud-native architecture can bring significant benefits, including improved scalability, resilience and agility. While the transition will require time and energy, the long-term benefits of a cloud-native architecture can make it a worthwhile investment, especially for businesses that seek to stay competitive.
