Cloud-Native Evolution

Chapter 5. Summary and Conclusions

Becoming cloud-native is about agile delivery of reliable and scalable applications. Businesses migrating to the cloud typically do so in three stages:

• The first stage involves migrating existing applications to virtualized infrastructure—initially to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with a lift-and-shift approach and implementation of an automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to speed up the release cycle.

• In phase two, monolithic applications begin to move toward microservices architectures with services running in containers on Platform as a Service (PaaS).

• In Phase 3, businesses begin to make more efficient use of cloud technologies by shifting toward dynamic microservices.

A dynamic microservices architecture enables businesses to rapidly scale applications on demand and improves their capability to recover from failure; however, as a consequence, application environments become more complex and hence more difficult to manage and understand.

At each step along this journey, the importance of scheduling, orchestration, autoscaling and monitoring increases. Taking advantage of tooling to automate these processes will assist in effectively managing dynamic microservice environments.