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Today’s blog post is about the awesome IBM Garage Cloud Native Toolkit to support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD).
I want to provide a basic overview from my perspective, which I structured in the following sections:
Zip-disks, iPods, BetaMax, Google Glass. If there's one thing that's constant in the world of technology, it's change. Today, cloud adoption has provided one of the fastest routes to business transformation. In the past, IT systems had to be retrofitted for cloud capabilities. Now, applications have evolved to leverage new capabilities; Cloud Native.
Cloud Native applications are designed, built, and deployed specifically for either public, private, or hybrid cloud. They are “born into” the cloud environment and bound not to exist elsewhere, taking the best advantage of what a cloud can offer. They derived from the modern IT development approaches popularized and well-acclaimed over the years, including microservices, continuous development, and continuous integration and DevOps.
"Cloud" or “cloud computing" are becoming very common terms we hear while talking about current technology. As developers, we continue to experience the advantages of working with cloud applications. In cloud computing, another term that is emerging is cloud-native. Before we get into the actual topic, let us understand what cloud-native is all about.
Companies across the world now understand the difference a cloud application can make. Cloud-native applications are those which have evolved directly from the cloud revolution. In other words, developers build them within the cloud environment.
When we talk about cloud-native mobile application development, we're thinking specific kind of applications that are able to make native use of infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and other such cloud computing providers. One can even call it an approach to build as well as run applications which use the characteristics and nature of the cloud while resulting in a workflow and such processes that take complete advantage of the platform.
It is by utilizing cloud computing services that these cloud-native applications are able to so dynamically function. Also, the scalability of these apps is commendable, looking at how they are just loosely connected with the various cloud infrastructure components — that means, these apps can easily be scaled up or down, as and when required. Only the modern and just the best amongst all tools and technologies available are used to develop cloud-native apps. These include Agile methodology, GCP, AWS, and other cloud platforms, containers such as Kubernetes and Docker, and so on.
For cloud-native applications, Kubernetes and Istio deliver a lot of important functionality out of the box, like ensuring resiliency and scalability. This functionality works generically for microservices, no matter in which language they have been implemented and independent from the application logic.
Some cloud-native functionality, like application-specific failover functionality, metrics, and fine-grained authorization, cannot be handled by Kubernetes and Istio, since it needs to be handled in the business logic of the microservices.