Cloud Native Architectures

Cloud Native Architectures are specifically designed to leverage the vast capabilities and services of major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP, allowing applications to fully utilize the dynamic, scalable, and distributed computing environment that the cloud offers. These architectures are not merely about hosting applications in the cloud; they are about building and running applications that exploit the cloud’s flexibility, scalability, and resilience to the fullest.

Principles of Cloud Native Architecture

  1. Automation First
    • Prioritize automation to reduce manual effort, increase efficiency, and minimize the risk of human error throughout the software delivery process.
  2. Adopt Microservices Architecture
    • Utilize a microservices architecture to create modular, flexible, and independently deployable services that enable agile development and scaling.
  3. Prefer Stateless for Scalable Architecture
    • Design stateless applications that do not retain user session information on the server, promoting scalability and simplifying management.
  4. Prefer Serverless, Containerization (with Orchestration) in That Order
    • Embrace serverless computing for its cost-effectiveness and scalability, and use containerization with orchestration tools like Kubernetes for complex applications requiring fine-grained control.
  5. Favor Managed Services
    • Leverage managed services offered by cloud providers to offload infrastructure management, focusing on adding value rather than maintaining commodity components.
  6. Practice Defense in Depth
    • Implement multiple layers of security controls (physical, technical, and administrative) throughout the IT system to protect the integrity of the architecture.
  7. Design for Resiliency
    • Build systems that are capable of recovering from failures and continue to function with minimal downtime, ensuring reliability and continuous service availability.
  8. Actively Manage Cost
    • Continuously monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud spending to ensure cost-effectiveness without compromising on performance and scalability.

DevOps

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) with the goal of shortening the system development life cycle and providing continuous delivery with high software quality. In the context of Cloud Native Architectures, DevOps emphasizes on automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and close collaboration between developers and operators. This is instrumental for cloud native systems as it allows for rapid, reliable, and repeatable deployment of applications across highly scalable and distributed cloud environments.

SRE

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), on the other hand, extends the DevOps philosophy by introducing aspects of software engineering into the operational domain. SRE focuses on creating scalable and highly reliable software systems. Key to Cloud Native Architectures, SRE principles such as Service Level Objectives (SLOs), automation, and blameless postmortems, ensure that the operational challenges of running large-scale systems are met with engineering-driven solutions. SREs work towards balancing the need to release new features while ensuring the reliability of the systems in cloud environments.

Cloud Native Architecture BluePrint

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Cloud Native Standards

Cloud Native Computing foundation (CCNF) : https://www.cncf.io

Google’s Cloud Native Principles: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/5-principles-for-cloud-native-architecture-what-it-is-and-how-to-master-it

Microsoft Azure Page on Cloud Architecture Patterns: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/

AWS View of Cloud Native Applications: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/cloud-native/

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