Cloud native infrastructure is more than servers, network, and storage in the cloud—it is as much about operational hygiene as it is about elasticity and scalability.
Important aspects of the cloud-native infrastructure:
Containerization
Containers are the nearly universal form of infrastructure within a cloud-native application. Containers are runtime environments for executing code. Containers consume fewer cloud resources and can be easily configured, scaled, replicated and orchestrated via such management systems. The use of containers facilitates CI/CD implementation and infrastructure automation.
PaaS
Cloud-native PaaS services help digital enterprises quickly innovate, experiment and scale to market demands. To make the cloud more attractive to users, major PaaS solution providers like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google App Engine, etc, offer PaaS services for developing, testing, deploying, managing and updating cloud applications.
Automation
With the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, your DevOps team can automate cloud infrastructure setup and management of its components. They use configuration files to organize unified and instantly configured development environments and trace changes committed to the infrastructure.
Parallel Development Environments
As services of a cloud-native app are detached and have clear criteria for their functional operability, they enable a high level of automation and can be simultaneously developed and then assembled, tested and deployed through the branching CI/CD pipelines.
Autoscaling
Cloud infrastructures are driven by virtual computing nodes like EC2s in AWS and VMs in Azure or Google Cloud Platform. Each component of a cloud infrastructure consumes CPU, RAM or storage capacities attributable to it and the consumption should timely follow the demand: scale up or down. That’s why its important automating resource orchestration to:
Reduce cloud consumption by scaling down when a service is idle.
Ensure sufficient performance of a service by scaling up.
Load Balancing
In addition to cloud resource autoscaling, cloud platforms provide for load balancing to distribute traffic and computing loads over the virtual instances. And if a cloud vendor offers access to a global Content Delivery Network, cloud load balancers may be used to route traffic to and from the nearest edge servers making your cloud app highly responsive.
Application Monitoring
Monitoring of a cloud-native app can be divided into two layers:
Health checks to define whether a micro-service is functional at all. The functional state is automatically reported to a host platform, which can scale up or down the dedicated virtual instances.
Metrics analysis giving the advanced picture of app performance. It is mostly used by the developers to automate up/downscaling of an app or plan the changes to the app if the service level indicators aren’t met.
Security
A cloud-native app lets you build perimeter and component-level security. However, integration of access verification mechanisms into each app component may become a burden to performance. To avoid this, you are suggested using intra-component authentication: a signed-up user gets a token, which is then compared with a reference token cashed in each service to grant or deny access. This technique greatly contributes to app security with the least effect on its performance.