Cloud-Native Architecture

Abstract

In the recent years, the degree and pace of changes on the software scene has accelerated like never before. The open source movement ignited a large number of scattered and often independent teams to enter a race of bringing new software components, tools, platforms, protocols, or services to market at an incredible pace. Cloud computing removed many hardware-related entry barriers by allowing teams to self-provision virtualized hardware resources in a matter of seconds. With cloud-provider-managed, both virtualized and even bare metal, hardware capabilities available at one’s fingertips, nearly anyone can launch and develop a small software project. Containerization briefly covered in the previous chapter often enables new approaches in designing applications and requires the presence of new supplementary tools to make the solutions production-ready. There are old questions to be answered such as how to solve storage, networking, messaging, and service discovery challenges, this time in the age of containers. There are new waters to explore – service mesh, container registries, and schedulers, to name a few. Let’s list the three information age turning points which considerably impact the way we architect new-generation software solutions. These are as follows: