Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure

Chapter 1. Introduction: Why Cloud Native?

Even though using the cloud provides a way to solve problems with the scalability, availability, and reliability of our applications, it is not a silver bullet. We cannot put our applications in the cloud and expect them to be up and running forever, nor can we package our applications in containers to turn them into microservices that can run smoothly in the cloud. To take full advantage of what the cloud has to offer, we need to develop infrastructures and services with the cloud at the forefront of our minds.

To truly understand the cloud native journey and its importance, we need to first look back at what the world of infrastructure and services looked like during the early days of the internet. So, let’s embark on this journey.

The Journey to the Cloud

Back in the early days of the internet, the overall web application infrastructure was hosted using physical servers that needed to be procured and prepared before applications could be served from them. IT teams had to physically buy the servers and set them up on premises, install relevant server operating systems, prepare the environments, and then deploy applications on top of them. There were many problems with this approach: for example, you’d have underutilized servers (since you’d never end up fully using them), it was difficult to run multiple applications, and setup and maintenance costs were high. Virtualization was developed to allow more efficient utilization of physical ...