Developing Open Cloud Native Microservices

Chapter 1. Introduction

What It Means to Be Cloud Native

Cloud native applications can be described in a single line: applications that utilize and are optimized, or native, for cloud computing environments. To fully understand what this means, you must understand cloud computing and how it differs from traditional monolith software development. Software professionals, to ensure their companies remain competitive, must employ a modern style of development and deployment that uses the compute and management infrastructure available in cloud environments. In this section, we will discuss cloud native in depth to prepare you for the rest of this book.

Microservice Oriented

First, cloud native architectures break from the traditional design of monoliths and rely on containers (e.g., Docker) and serverless compute platforms. This means that applications are smaller and composed at a higher level. We no longer extend an existing application’s functionality by creating or importing a library into the application, which makes the application binary larger, slower to start and execute, and more memory-intensive. Instead, with cloud native we build new microservices to create a new feature and integrate it with the rest of the application using endpoint type interfacing (such as HTTP) and event type interfacing (such as a messaging platform).

For example, say we needed to add image upload capability to our application. In the past, we would have imported a library to implement this functionality, ...