Organizations are increasingly looking to work in hybrid and multi-cloud environments to achieve digital transformation. They are interested in developing cloud native applications that can be deployed in cloud-native infrastructure.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF defines the following cloud-native infrastructure and applications:
“Cloud-native technology empowers organizations to build and manage scalable SRP (Single Responsibility Principle) based microservers. This approach is illustrated by containers, service meshes and microservices as well as immutable infrastructure and a declarative system.
These techniques allow for loosely coupled systems that can be managed, monitored, and resilient. Combining them with robust automation. They enable engineers to make high-impact, predictable changes quickly and easily with minimal effort.
Cloud-native applications are generally developed using the microservices architecture style (m11S). The SRP principle is the basis of the m11s application. An m11s should only do one thing and do it well. M11s should possess characteristics such as containerization, agility with DevOps methodologies, automatic frequent deployment, resilience, elastic scaling, and end-to-end security. m11s should only be deployed in a cloud environment that has evolved into a cloud-native one.
CNCF provided a trailmap for the cloud-native journey. This is not a guideline for moving to cloud native, but CNCF has documented the journey of many enterprises to cloud-native.
We will explore how Microsoft Azure’s various infrastructure and application services can accelerate the enterprise’s journey to cloud-native.
1. Containerization
A docker file can be created and used to build custom containers Images. Images can be uploaded to ACR (Azure Container Registry). ACR is a private, managed Docker registry service that uses the open-source Docker Register 2.0. ACR is a managed private Docker registry service that can build, store, secure and scan container images and artifacts using geo-replicated instances. It can be connected to multiple environments, including Azure Kubernetes and Azure Red Hat OpenShift, as well as other Azure services such App Service, Machine Learning, and Batch.
2. CI/CD Pipeline
Azure CI/CD and DevOps methods allow users to build CI/CD pipelines for continuous build, deployment and maintenance of containerized applications. CI/CD increases developer velocity throughout the entire software pipeline – test, development, staging, and production environments.
Azure also supports a bridge-to-kubernetes extension that allows developers to directly interact with the Kubernetes cluster while working with the microservice they are debugging. This approach allows developers to run code on their own development machine, while sharing the environment and dependencies provided by the production cluster. Developer velocity is dramatically improved by bridge to Kubernetes. This approach also takes advantage the fidelity, scaling, and performance that comes with running in AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service). Visual studio code can easily include Bridge to Kubernetes extension.
3. Orchestration and Application Definition
Azure Kubernetes Service can create a Kubernetes Cluster on which containerize apps can be deployed. AKS can scale containerize apps on a global scale. For more information on Orchestration, read Cluster Networking in Kubernetes.
4. Analyse and observation
Microservice deployments can have a large number of microservices, up to 600. This makes analysis and observation difficult. We need a new type of monitoring products to track matrix and end-to-end tracking.
