Cloud-Native Applications

Cloud-Native Applications

Cloud-native applications are designed to exploit cloud advantages: scalability, resilience, manageability, and observability.

Microservices

Decompose into small, independent services communicating over APIs. Each owns its data, deploys independently. Benefits: independent scaling, fault isolation. Challenges: distributed complexity, data consistency.

API Gateway

Single entry point handling routing, authentication, rate limiting, load balancing. AWS API Gateway, Kong, Nginx.

Event-Driven Architecture

Events trigger and communicate between services. Message queues (SQS, RabbitMQ) for async. Event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis) for real-time. Loosely coupled and scalable.

12-Factor App

Best practices: one codebase, explicit dependencies, config in environment, stateless processes, port binding, concurrency, disposability, dev/prod parity, logs as event streams.

Service Mesh

Istio, Linkerd manage service-to-service communication: traffic management, mTLS security, observability, retries, circuit breakers.

Serverless Patterns

API backend (Lambda + API Gateway), event processing, scheduled tasks, stream processing, chatbots.

Summary

Cloud-native uses microservices, events, containers, and serverless to fully leverage cloud capabilities.