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Native Cloud Apps: Ship Faster, Lower Risk, & Develop your Company

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The primary requirement for all organizations today should be to support digital enterprise. For businesses to compete in the new economy, they need to adopt a different building system. Modern technologies and architectures are pushing organizations to follow different platform styles as well.

Gartner's advice is to develop any new app designed in Java or another language as a cloud-native app and to create every new framework as a cloud-native software system. The reasoning is that when the company is ready to migrate to the cloud, the teams will be able to shift quickly into a cloud system.

Cloud-native is a design and operating approach that ultimately uses the advantages of the cloud computing model. The cloud has redefined the business environment in nearly all sectors by removing the reliance on capital resources and staff to operate an enterprise data center, replacing it with on-demand and pay-as-you-go computing power without limit.

Reduced spending on IT means lower entry barriers, with the competitive advantage being a feature of the pace teams that can carry new ideas to market. New realities are emerging in the areas of application architecture and health for this latest design and pace. Local Cloud Natives Casey West and Stuart Ingram and Casey West are going through the topics of Architecture and Protection and continuously Providing Security.

Stuart Ingram builds fault-resistant systems with circuit breakers.

Murphy's Law is universal and consistent- if anything can go wrong, it will go the wrong - which is particularly true in heterogeneous distributed systems. Failures can take several types, from a total collapse of service to a single latent service that causes a catastrophic cascading failure for the users or even occasional service failures.

In this talk, let us explore how to create robust, highly accessible systems using circuit breaker and bulkhead design patterns that help provide service and consumer guarantees irrespective of QoS breakdowns in operation. See how telemetry analysis of service interactions, latency, and failures can provide useful early insights into problems before impacting the customers.


You will learn how Netflix, one of the most significant examples of a distributed system, applies such principles at scale and how you can adapt them to the big or small infrastructure.

Continuously delivery of security in the cloud by Casey West

What does keeping systems safe in the cloud mean? When software workloads are distributed across elastic clusters, the notions of what it means to be a secure shift are scaled automatically and changed rapidly. Let us look at why what and how of cloud applications; 

The Why

Once it comes to delivering apps, early technology pioneers like FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix & Google) have several common themes. They have invested in building capabilities that allow them to release new features regularly. They accomplished this rapid cadence of release while ensuring the safe and reliable operation of their applications, in turn enabling them to respond more effectively to the needs of their customers.

Going beyond ad-hoc automation and implementing cloud-native activities that offer such predictable capabilities have achieved this degree of agility. The four main principles of Cloud Native practices are DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Microservices, and Containers.

We all have the same common objective of making the production of software and the operations team more productive through automation.

These techniques have, however, only been successfully proved at the aforementioned software-driven companies at this stage. Smaller, more agile businesses are recognizing the benefit here as well.

The what

Native Cloud Apps practices include four fundamental tenets.

Microservices are an architectural approach for developing applications as a collection of small, independent services running on their own and communicating over HTTP APIs. 

DevOps is the partnership between the software developers and IT operations to automate the software delivery process and improvements in infrastructure.


Containers enable the virtualization of lightweight by dynamically separating a single server into one or more separate containers. Compared to standard Virtual Machines (VMs), boxes give efficiency and speed. Containers, along with the framework, can handle and transfer device dependencies. While in many cases, the OS and the cloud platform underlying it are abstracted. 

Continuous delivery allows for the quick, reliable, and frequent release of applications with less risk.

The how

Now, let's look at the cloud's numerous native stack building blocks that help achieve the goals mentioned above. We have grouped here tools and solutions according to the problem they solve. Let us start with the infrastructure layer at the edge, then the tools used to supply the infrastructure, after which we have the container runtime environment. 

Provisioning: The provisioning layer consists of automation tools that assist in network provisioning, image management, and device deployment. Spinnaker, Terraform, and Cloud Creation provides workflows for network provision.

Infrastructure: At the very edge, we have the infrastructure layer that typically includes the cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Openstack, and VMware) for the computing, storage, network, and operating system.

Runtime: The Runtime provides the environment the application is running in. This consists of the container engines, where the application runs along with the storage and networking related. Containers and rkt are the Container Engines most commonly used. Flannel, OpenContrail provides containers with the requisite overlay networking to communicate with each other and with the outside world.

Application Description and Development: We can develop multi-language micro-services for applications -Python, spring / Java, Ruby, Node. Packer, Habitat, and Bitnami provide the framework with image storage that can run through any platform- container or otherwise.

Orchestration and Management: Tools such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos abstract the container management clusters that allow for easy scheduling and orchestration of containers across multiple hosts. Consul offers discovery software registries while AVI, Envoy offers proxy services, load balancer, etc.

About the Author

Software developer and solution provider with over 7 years of experience, including general management of mid to large size organizations, corporate development, product development, business operations, and strategies. Currently managers at EPixelSoft- A Software Development Company- A one-stop-sho...   View more...