More businesses than ever are now making use of a cloud-native infrastructure, however, some are still hesitant to make the switch to a more digitalised world. Below, we discuss the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure to help you make the all-important decision within the business utilising cloud-native applications.
What Is Cloud-Native infrastructure?
Cloud-native technology can be interpreted in many different ways, depending on who you ask. To break it down simply, cloud-native architecture is a digital way for businesses to increase velocity and take advantage of modern automation and scalability that only going cloud-native can provide.
The Benefits of cloud-native Infrastructure
The biggest companies in the world can attribute their success to the support of cloud-native technology, Amazon, Google and Netflix all invested.
By running a business’s infrastructure through the public cloud, business objectives can be properly focussed on while the cloud produces faster value than ever before and this is constantly improving and updating.
Faster Releases
The time it takes to release new apps, updates and features can make the difference between being an innovative business and lagging behind the competition.
The quicker something can be released to customers the higher the chances an element has to succeed. Using modern DevOps allows automation for software delivery and cloud-native applications support this.
Improved Customer Experience
With fast and continuous updates, customer experience is improved and cloud-native technology allows developers to take a mobile-first approach to their development of apps.
Nowadays, there is a huge focus on customer experience and by being able to react and adapt to feedback from users is key.
By implementing these changes as quickly as possible, users can receive the services they want, need and expect before they are put off from inadequate applications.
These updates can be rolled out with just a select few of users, meaning any bugs or errors can be quickly rectified from user feedback, without interrupting the full functionality of the app with all users.
These can all be implemented without interruption to the current running of applications.
Easy Management
Infrastructure management can be made effortless with the use of cloud-native architecture with the use of serverless platforms. These allow you to add code in the form of functions, the platform then runs these functions automatically for you, meaning you don’t have to worry about the hassle of provisioning cloud instancing, ensuring adequate storage space or configuring networking. Serverless takes aways all the tricky, time-consuming elements.
Reduces Costs
With the cloud, businesses only ever pay for what they use and there is no requirement to pay for anything upfront, many providers will even allow you to get started for free.
These providers operate at a substantial economic scale, which leads to these incredible tools and infrastructures being available at just a fraction of the cost of deploying them within businesses own data centres.
Also read: On Premise vs. Cloud – Which One is More Beneficial?
Being able to access these tools only takes a few clicks and can significantly reduce the time taken to utilise them.
All this means businesses can test new databases, tools and instance types at a nominal cost and very little risk or effort.
Increased Reliability
Downtime used to be tolerated within applications when they first came about, however, customers nowadays expect their apps to be running smoothly 24/7.
Using cloud-native applications such as microservices architecture, developers can easily build their apps to be tolerant to faults and resilient to problems with ‘self-healing’ integration.
This means, even when there are failures, they are quickly and easily isolated from the rest of the app, meaning everything else can continue to run as it should.
Cloud-native uses microservices, as opposed to servers and monolithic apps, which leads to better uptime and a better user experience.
Why Is Cloud-Native Important?
The main take-away from cloud-native architecture is that it removes constraints and reduces the path to business value. The fewer developers have to think or worry about beyond their coding, the better the results.
When analysing user feedback, cloud-native allows developers to put their coding above everything else. This means that coders can begin developing, testing and rolling out new updates in record time.
Now more than ever, it is crucial for businesses to make the leap and switch to a cloud-native architecture. User expectation is as high as it has ever been and this will only climb higher over the next few years.
Being able to provide the best service to users while reducing costs and alleviating stressful, time-consuming tasks for developers can be the difference between success and failure.
