Benefits of cloud-native architecture

In recent years, technology has been changing rapidly and new companies have been born in the cloud world, disrupting old and long-standing organizations. Rapid growth is possible because of no upfront cost involved when organizations are using the cloud, and there is less risk in experimentation due to the pay-as-you-go model of the cloud.

The cloud agile approach helps employees in an organization develop innovative thinking and implement their ideas without waiting for the long cycle of infrastructure. With the cloud, customers don't need to plan excess capacity in advance to handle their peak season, such as holiday shopping season for retailers; they have the elasticity to provision resources per demand instantly. This significantly helps reduce costs and improve the customer's experience. For any organization to stay in the competition, they have to move fast and innovatively.

With the cloud, enterprises are not only able to get their infrastructure quickly across the globe but can also access a wide variety of technologies that were never available before. These include access to cutting edge technologies such as the following:

• Big data
• Analytics
• Machine learning

• Artificial intelligence
• Robotics
• IoT (Internet of Things)
• Blockchain

Also, to achieve scalability and elasticity, these are some of the reasons that can trigger the initiative for cloud migration and hybrid cloud strategy:

• The data center needs a technology refresh
• The data center's lease is ending
• The data center has run out of storage and compute capacity
• Modernization of an application
• Leverage cutting-edge technologies
• Need to optimize IT resources to save cost
• Disaster recovery planning
• Utilizing a content distribution network for the website

Every organization has a different strategy, and one size does not fit all when it comes to cloud adoption. The frequent use cases are putting development and testing environments in the cloud to add agility for developers so that they can move faster. As hosting web applications is becoming more economical and more comfortable with the cloud, organizations are using the cloud for digital transformation by hosting their websites and digital properties in the cloud.

For application accessibility, it is essential to not only build an application for the web browser but to ensure it is accessible through smart mobiles and tablets. The cloud is helping with such transformations. Data processing and analytics is another area where enterprises are utilizing the cloud since it is less expensive to collect, store, analyze, and share data with the cloud.

Building a solution architecture for the cloud is slightly different than it is for regular enterprise architecting. While moving to the cloud, you have to develop cloud thinking and understand how to leverage the in-built capabilities of the cloud. For cloud thinking, you follow the pay-as-you-go model. You need to make sure that you optimize your workload properly and run your servers when it's required.

You need to think about how to optimize costs by bringing up your workload (when needed) and choosing the right strategy for the workload, which always needs to be running. In the cloud, the solution architect needs to have a holistic view of each component regarding performance, scaling, high availability, disaster recovery, fault tolerance, security, and automation.

The other areas of optimization are cloud-native monitoring and alerting mechanisms. You may not need to bring your existing third-party tool from on-premise to the cloud as you can utilize native cloud monitoring better and get rid of costly third-party licensing software. Also, now, you get to have deployment capabilities to any parts of the world in minutes, so don't restrict yourself to a particular region and utilize the global deployment model to build better high availability and disaster recovery mechanisms. 

The cloud provides excellent deals for automation; you can pretty much automate everything. Automation not only reduces errors and speeds up process time to market; it also saves lots of cost by utilizing human resources efficiently and freeing them up from performing tedious and repetitive tasks. The cloud works on a shared responsibility model where cloud vendors are responsible for securing physical infrastructure. However, the security of an application and its data is entirely the customer's responsibility. Therefore, it's important to lock down your environment and keep a tab on security by utilizing cloud-native tools for monitoring, alerts, and automation.

Throughout this book, you will learn about the cloud perspective of solution architecture and get an in-depth understanding of cloud architecture. In the next section, you will learn about various strategies for cloud migration.