4 Reasons Businesses Are Turning to Cloud-Native Solutions

1. Greater Flexibility Using Microservices in the Cloud

In contrast to the inflexibility of traditional, monolithic applications, microservices architecture breaks down applications into smaller, independent services.

This customizable option supports DevOps practices so teams can update and scale specific services without affecting the entire system. Ultimately, this speeds up development cycles and makes continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) easier to implement.

“As applications get larger and more complex, the traditional monolithic approach to building enterprise applications has become problematic and inefficient. Over time, the addition of features creates interdependencies that greatly increase software complexity, leading to longer development and testing cycles and multiplying software bugs,” say experts at Juniper Networks.

CDW cloud expert Erik Ross adds that microservices provide organizations with complete control over their cloud migrations.

“Traditionally, an organization might consider moving a server into a cloud environment. But the advent of microservices introduces a new paradigm,” Ross writes in a CDW blog. “Organizations instead can rethink how resources are consumed. With microservices, an application doesn’t simply run from a server; rather, it consumes resources in the cloud without the need to purchase hardware.”

IT leaders can also migrate complex websites from monolithic platform hosts and separate payment processing and ordering systems. This ensures that one will continue to work should the other malfunction, according to Google Cloud.

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2. Faster Deployment Cycles with Containerization

Maintaining consistency across diverse development, testing and production environments can be complex and costly. But the highly flexible and adaptive nature of cloud-native applications makes this possible. By bundling applications together with their dependencies, containerization creates a single software package that is faster and more reliable.

“Adopting container technology dramatically improves the application lifecycle, from inception to production deployment,” according to a post by Palo Alto Networks.

Containerization also helps developers and ops teams rapidly develop, test and deploy applications faster, notes Red Hat. “And, because containers are based on open-source technology, you get the latest and greatest advancements as soon as they’re available. Container technologies — including Kubernetes and Docker — help your team simplify, speed up and orchestrate application development and deployment.”

Katie Norton, a research manager for IDC’s DevOps and software supply chain security research practice, told BizTech that microservice architecture can also fuel experimentation within the enterprise. “Developers can create ephemeral production environments that can be cloned to test changes and liquidated once their purpose has been served, empowering application developers to try new innovative ideas.”

3. Enhanced Observability Across IT Environments

Cloud-native apps enhance observability across IT environments, allowing IT teams to gain real-time insights and proactively address issues across distributed systems.

“Observability provides answers with metrics, logs and traces across the IT stack to give you the full picture of your IT health. This single-pane-of-glass view provides comprehensive visibility for better business insights, allowing organizations to troubleshoot and innovate faster, bringing value to their business,” writes Colleen Marinelli, a senior product marketing manager for Aria Operations for Applications at VMware.

IT teams can pinpoint issues at a granular level, identify performance bottlenecks and receive early warnings of potential failures. This swift troubleshooting means less downtime and better performance across applications. Teams can also receive automated alerts and data-driven insights to fine-tune code and configurations in real time, according to IBM. 

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4. Built-In Security with Every Application Update

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of cloud-native applications is that security is often built into the infrastructure, offering stronger, scalable protection as applications evolve. With security controls embedded at each layer — containers, microservices  and APIs — any new code inherits the latest security policies.

This DevSecOps approach is perhaps the only way to deploy updates fast without compromising security. 

For Brett Shaw, a cloud security expert at CrowdStrike, “the elastic and dynamic nature of a containerized microservice infrastructure expands the attack surface and further complicates an organization’s security challenges. The infrastructure size, composition and variety can fluctuate throughout a single day, and security configurations must account for these changes,” he writes.

A cloud-native application protection platform, or CNAPP, is one solution to this dilemma. It combines many security, compliance and management tools into a single software solution to minimize complexity and facilitate DevSecOps, notes Shaw.

Ultimately, a CNAPP offers consolidated end-to-end security and continuous software scanning and response, writes Jamie Gale, a CrowdStrike product marketing manager.

With CNAPP, teams can also take advantage of cloud security posture management solutions, which “not only give visibility and alerts but also provide guided remediation or automated remediation to close security gaps and maintain golden standards and healthy security posture,” Gale writes.