Migrating to Cloud-Native Application Architectures

Chapter 1. The Rise of Cloud-Native

Software is eating the world.

Mark Andreessen

Stable industries that have for years been dominated by entrenched leaders are rapidly being disrupted, and they’re being disrupted by businesses with software at their core. Companies like Square, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, and Tesla continue to possess rapidly growing private market valuations and turn the heads of executives of their industries’ historical leaders. What do these innovative companies have in common?

• Speed of innovation

• Always-available services

• Web scale

• Mobile-centric user experiences

Moving to the cloud is a natural evolution of focusing on software, and cloud-native application architectures are at the center of how these companies obtained their disruptive character. By cloud, we mean any computing environment in which computing, networking, and storage resources can be provisioned and released elastically in an on-demand, self-service manner. This definition includes both public cloud infrastructure (such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure) and private cloud infrastructure (such as VMware vSphere or OpenStack).

In this chapter we’ll explain how cloud-native application architectures enable these innovative characteristics. Then we’ll examine a few key aspects of cloud-native application architectures.

Why Cloud-Native Application Architectures?

First we’ll examine the common motivations behind moving to cloud-native application architectures. ...