Cloud-Native DevOps: Introduction and Overview

Cloud-Native DevOps: Introduction and Overview

Based on the name, Cloud-native DevOps may appear to be the process of running containerized applications in the cloud, but this definition is misleading.

Instead, cloud-native DevOps is a strategy for organizing your teams to take advantage of the automation and scalability that cloud-native technologies provide. This can increase your company's velocity.

Understanding

To define or explain cloud-native DevOps effectively, we must first understand cloud-native apps (CNAs) and DevOps.

• CNAs are applications designed for resiliency, agility, operability, and observability.
• DevOps is a practice where operations and development engineers collaborate across the whole lifecycle.

Based on both statements, we can see that nothing is genuinely related to the cloud; they are just ideas and methodologies used when developing a set of services or apps.

As a result, cloud-native DevOps can be defined as a collection of processes involving:

• Continuous improvement,
• Automation,
• Cross-functional teams,
• And improved alignment with business goals while keeping consumer expectations in mind.

These concepts relate to people, tools, culture, and processes, not to the location of the application itself (cloud or on-prem).

Cloud-Native DevOps is a strategy for increasing your company's velocity and structuring your teams to take advantage of the automation and scalability that cloud-native technologies provide. These cloud-native technologies are intended to be:

• Resilient - Embracing failures rather than attempting to prevent them, and taking advantage of the platform's dynamic nature.
• Agile - Allowing for quick deployments and iterations.
• Operable - Controlling application life cycles from within the application rather than depending on external processes and monitoring.
• Observable - Answering questions about the application's condition by providing information.

Needed changes

To properly adopt cloud-native DevOps, three fundamental changes must occur:

• Cultural change from silos to proper DevOps - As previously said, running apps in the cloud is not required to be cloud-native; rather, DevOps is required to be cloud-native. The purpose of DevOps is to get everyone on the same page with the same tools and priorities.
• Organizational change requires everyone's buy-in to work together to attain the same goal - The goal is to foster a speedier feedback loop between developers and end-users, which will speed up application development and give business action items.
• Changes in technology that affect how the application is constructed - Moving from a monolith to microservices, for example.

Methods for implementing cloud-native DevOps

CNA implementation is more difficult than cloud deployment. To be deemed cloud-native, a CNA must possess the following characteristics:

• Conforming to microservices patterns - Monolithic apps should be divided into smaller services that can be built separately. It can be iterated on as long as each service complies with a contract. The application is made up of all of these services.
• Making use of containerization - Without regard for the underlying system, code can be packaged.
• Following the pattern of declarative communication - CNAs must have confidence that the network will deliver the message and respond with a success or failure. This contributes to the standardization of a communication model by offloading the functional implementation of how something achieves a desired state from the application to a distant API or service endpoint.
• Container orchestration deployment - Kubernetes is the most popular orchestration platform and for good reason. The most significant advantage of k8s is that it abstracts away the intricacies of underlying computation, storage, and networking resources.
• Writing code that adheres to the 12-factor application principles - This ensures that cloud platform installations have clean, declarative contracts.
• Increasing the level of automation in CI/CD pipelines - Continuous integration and deployment are not new to cloud-native, but the added complexity they offer needs further automation to deal with the pipeline's complexity.
• Revealing health check - This is useful for understanding what is happening with the application. The application informs the platform it is operating on about its current condition, making monitoring easier.
• Telemetry data collection - Latency, request per minute, and other metrics are required to establish whether you are reaching service level targets (SLO). Telemetry data may and should be notified to consider your application cloud-native.

Conclusion

Cloud-native DevOps is not a perfect solution. It's as important to be informed of its advantages and disadvantages. Still, cloud-native DevOps may be a beneficial tool for businesses trying to accelerate automation and customize production to better serve consumers. Cloud-native applications have grown in popularity in recent years and are expected to dominate software development in the future.

If you want to know more:

• visit our devops service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

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