For this, applications are developed on cloud infrastructure using modern tools and techniques. Using cloud-native technologies benefits businesses as they enable quick and frequent changes to applications without affecting service delivery, this helps businesses break barriers to innovation and improve their competitive advantage.

For cloud-native applications to be effective and deliver on their promise, it is important to plan the right cloud architecture and document the cloud engineering strategy so the apps can be scalable, flexible, and resilient.

Why Enterprises are Building Cloud Native Applications?

The availability of digital technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, and IoT are transforming the way businesses operate today. Increased access to data is seeing a corresponding increase in the need for storage and computing power. Traditional, on-prem systems cannot cope with this pace of change and the investment can be formidable.

By modernizing their application and migrating to the cloud, businesses can reap many benefits. But, modernizing goes beyond mere migration of apps. Some or most apps must be made cloud-native to provide the intended benefits, which include:

• Improved Efficiency: Cloud-native applications are developed using the agile approach including DevOps and continuous delivery. Scalable applications are being built using cloud services, automated tools, and modern design culture.
• Lower Cost: The cost of infrastructure is drastically reduced when businesses opt for the cloud-native approach as they share resources and pay only peruse.
• High Availability: Building robust and highly accessible applications is made possible by cloud-native technology. In order to give customers a great experience, feature updates don’t result in app downtime, and businesses can scale up app resources during busy times of year.
• Flexibility, Scalability, and Resilience: The traditional apps are called monolithic because they are a single block structure composed of all the required functionalities. Any upgradation can be disruptive and needs changes to be made across the block, making them more rigid and hard to scale. Cloud-native applications, on the other hand, are made up of several small, interdependent functionalities called microservices. As a result, changes can be made to the different units without affecting the rest of the software, making them more resilient, flexible, and scalable.
• Easier Management: Cloud Native architecture and development are containerized and utilize cloud services by default. It is often called serverless and tends to reduce infrastructure management.

Cloud Native Architecture: Designed for Scale

Cloud-native architecture is designed such that it is easy to maintain, cost-effective, and self-healing. It does not depend on physical servers, hence called serverless technology, and provides greater flexibility.

APIs are needed for the cloud-native microservices to communicate with each other using an event-driven architecture for enhanced performance of every application. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is an open-source platform that facilitates cloud-native development with support for projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

The cloud-native architecture typically consists of:

• Immutable Infrastructure: The servers hosting cloud-native applications do not change even after the deployment of an application. In case additional computing resources are needed, the app is migrated to a new, high-performance server, and does not require a manual upgrade.
• Loosely-Coupled Microservices: The different functionalities available as microservices are loosely coupled – that is, they are not integrated as in a monolith, and remain independent of each other, only communicating when needed. This allows changes to be made to individual applications without affecting the overall performance of the software.
• Application Programming Interface (API): Microservices communicate with each other using APIs and state what data a microservice requires to deliver a particular result.
• Service Mesh: The communication between the different microservices is managed by a software layer called the service mesh in the cloud infrastructure. This can also be used for adding more functions without the need to write new code.
• Containerized Microservices: The microservice code and other required files, such as  resource files, libraries, and scripts, are packed in containers, which are the smallest compute unit in the cloud-native application. As a result, cloud-native applications can run independently of the underlying operating system and hardware, allowing them to be run from on-premise infrastructure or on the cloud, including hybrid clouds.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Small, frequent changes are made to the software to improve its efficiency and identify and troubleshoot errors quickly. This improves the quality of the code on an ongoing basis. CD makes the microservices always ready to be deployed to the cloud as and when needed. Together, the two make software delivery efficient.

Overcoming Cloud-Native Development Challenges

Despite the many advantages and ease of development and maintenance of cloud-native applications, it is not without challenges. As the business expands, so can the number of microservices, requiring more oversight and maintenance. It requires strong integrators, APIs, and the right tools for improved management of asynchronous operations. Ensuring that each integrates well with the overall system and performs as expected is critical. Further, regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) make security and governance critical for compliance.

These challenges make comprehensive testing and quality assurance essential. Therefore, a good cloud-native app development approach should include:

• Assessing the needs: A good understanding of the required functionality is essential to start from scratch or modernize existing apps. Building cloud-native apps from the ground up may be more beneficial even for businesses that are modernizing so that they can leverage the advantages better.
• Designing the architecture: Right from the cloud model to use to whether to build from scratch or repurpose are some of the many decisions that need to be taken at this stage. This will influence the nature of the technical stack the business should opt for.
• Security and Governance: While the cloud service provider may have their own security protocols for the servers, each organization must have its own governance policy and implement security to protect data and ensure compliance.
• Testing and QA: Testing each microservice individually and as a composite unit is critical to ensure performance and customer satisfaction.

FAQs

The post Cloud-Native Engineering: A Guide to Building Modern Applications appeared first on Indium.

With nearly 70-80% of organizations are now in the year 2022 using container-based services according to Gartner prediction, there comes the need for container orchestration. Scheduling containers, provisions for life cycle and health checks, monitoring, authentication, scaling, networking, Image registry and for metrics and logging.

Kubernetes and OpenShift are the two widely used container orchestration tools. This article will bring you the benefits of OpenShift over Kubernetes.

Let’s go through the common problems faced by the customers in container orchestration and how OpenShift provides the solution to mitigate the problems.

Use Cases

Organisations who are all using Kubernetes orchestration tool already, are facing lot of challenges.

a. The main and the bigger challenge is managing the security of the Kubernetes cluster and the application. Its organization’s own responsibility to enable authentication & authorization, manage security vulnerability scanning and run periodic security patches

b. Another challenge is designing the cluster network and its configuration. The manual network configuration may lead to create complex network setup which will leads to performance lag.

c. Another one is misconfiguration of cluster nodes and pods. The master node and the worker node configurations are very crucial part, and it is very hard to trace and debug the misconfiguration.

d. DevOps tools integration with Kubernetes is a time-consuming process as we have to setup the CI/CD tools manually and integrate them with OpenShift.

OpenShift has the solutions for all above use cases. OpenShift reduces the time to market from 40-60 % and it saves the 50-60 % of the debugging time.

Now we can see, the overview of Kubernetes and OpenShift and then how OpenShift has the benefits over Kubernetes.

Overview of Kubernetes

Kubernetes as a cluster container orchestration tool, provides a powerful processing structure wherein pods are replicated to ensure application is working effectively and reliably. Hence Kubernetes provides scaling, failover, application isolation and processing speed for applications.

Kubernetes automates deploying, managing, and scaling containers, while other capabilities like automation, monitoring, log analytics, service mesh etc need to be manually configured by the users.

With all that Kubernetes do to orchestrate containers, integration of other components like networking, ingress, load balancing, storage, monitoring, logging , CI/CD pipeline, multi cluster management and accelerating development and deployment of containerized applications at scale need to be done by the user.

Overview of OpenShift

OpenShift comes as a cloud offering by RedHat to provide all these capabilities with Kubernetes at its core. It is powered by OKD (Origin Kubernetes Distribution) which includes

– Kubernetes

– Docker

– Istio

– Tekton

– Prometheus

– Grafana

– RHEL Core OS

OpenShift offered as a cloud-enabled PaaS by RedHat is convenient to develop cloud-based services at a faster rate.

OpenShift helps in managing development lifecycle, standardize workflows, build CI/CD pipeline, and release management for the fastest delivery of applications.

Some of the new features of OpenShift

Podman – The Linux-native tool to develop, manage, run open container and initiative containers and pods. Maintains different caches for different users.

Service Mesh – Just like Istio, controls how different parts of the application share data with one another, helps monitor and track code, create routes for deployments, and test error handling without disturbing code.

Operators Hub – installs software quickly, handles control plane applications, operating system upgradation, databases and events letting the developer focus more on the code.

Source to Image (S2I) – When building containers, the S2I build in OpenShift complies the code from source, build a container image, and push it to registry, all without having to write a Dockerfile.

IDE integration – helps in developing locally, debugging the code, and maintain pipelines.

Key Features and Solutions in OpenShift

1. In-built security – Increased security in OpenShift by offering “Secure by Default” and “Container cannot run as root”. Kubernetes doesn’t provide in-built authentication and authorization leaving the developers to create bearer tokens and RBAC.

2. Native Network Solutions – Networking in Kubernetes requires 3rd party plugins whereas OpenShift has the out-of-the-box networking solution called Open vSwitch, which comes with three native plug-ins.

3. Integrated CI/CD tools – The time-consuming process of deployment in Kubernetes is addressed by the DeploymentConfig of OpenShift, by means of creating an application and a project and have the DevOps automated delivery process.

4. The OpenShift routers – The routers allow the external access services and is regarded as more matured than the Kubernetes ingress.

5. Visual control – The web interface of Kubernetes is complex for a beginner to learn and adapt to .On the other hand OpenShift provides a better user experience like the on-touch login.

6. In-built container Registry – Kubernetes has no integrated image registry whereas OpenShift has inbuilt image registry and pairs seamlessly with Docker Hub. Image streams are used to effortlessly search for and manage container images.

PoC on OpenShift

For beginners OpenShift is very good opensource container application platform and easy to learn than Kubernetes. To begin with simple OpenShift setup, we did a PoC on OpenShift through Hyper-V method and Virtual Machine method in Windows-10 machine. The MiniShift tool supports to configure the OpenShift cluster service. We have configured

projects for NodeJS & Python applications, configured monitoring the cluster and we can get the OpenShift control dashboard like this,

My Project Dashboard

Monitoring Dashboard

Assigning Static IP

The way we assigned the Static IP address to the OpenShift cluster through latest feature Virtual-Switch network configuration.

The following command will attempt to assign an IP address for use on the Internal Virtual Switch ‘MyInternal’:

PS> minishift.exe config set hyperv-virtual-switch “MyInternal”

PS> minishift.exe start `

  –network-ipaddress 192.168.1.10 `

  –network-gateway 192.168.1.1 `

  –network-nameserver 8.8.8.8

Having dealt with the fairly advantageous features of OpenShift it will be no surprise that many organisations are opting for OpenShift and making use of it to the best of their capabilities.

The post OpenShift – An edge over Kubernetes appeared first on Indium.

In today’s environment, the requirement for flexibility and stability has become a vital aspect. Depending on the enterprise, an optimal IT infrastructure may include private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT environments. Acquiring cloud migration solutions does not have to be a difficult proposition for businesses that fear disruptions to their operations. They can enjoy the advantages of cloud migration while continuing to operate on-premise assets.

Eventually, cloud migration process from on-prem is not merely a technical challenge but one that requires leadership support and buy-in. A key aspect of ensuring success is to follow industry best practices such as

1. Choosing the right cloud partner

2. Getting stakeholders and senior leaders aligned

3. Setting measurable goals

4. Identifying the strategy

5. Training the teams

6. Following the process

Listen to our CTO, Satish Pala speak on Cloud migration : Cloud Data Migration Demystified

Identifying the Cloud Partner

When choosing a cloud partner, people generally look for partners who are reliable, flexible, customizable, and can offer secure access. It is also essential to keep the following points in mind.(i). Security

(ii). Privacy

(iii). Compliance

(iv). Competency

(v). Experience and Expertise

(vi). Cost structure

Framework

Identify Strategy: Almost all the cloud partners are the same in the services they offer. However, the tool or console they use can vary. Let’s understand the six ‘R’ s, which help strategize or accelerate cloud migration.

Rehost: This entails migrating the application and servers from on-prem to the cloud as an automated or manual process.

Re-platform: This process uses the list and shift strategy to migrate on-prem to the cloud with some changes in the platform (like oS change) but without any change to the infrastructure.

Regroup:  In this process, existing on-prem applications migrate to the cloud by adopting a new service (SAAS) from a cloud partner and returning the existing services.

Refactor: This process would entail changing or transforming the full app functionality.

Retire: Some of the services or servers which are no more needed are retired from service.

Retain: If you don’t want to move specific modules hosted on different on-prem applications that are complex to maintain, these modules are dropped out of the migration process and marked as ‘retain.’

Make a diagram with all the above pointers and document the prerequisites in each category. Finally, test, transition, and move to production.

Learn more on cloud migration here: Cloud Migration Done Right: Don’t do it ALL in one go

Tools to Accelerate Migration

Some tools help the team migrate on-prem to the cloud effortlessly.

Migration Checklist

The handy checklist below helps sort the technical parameters required to migrate on-prem to the cloud.

Sample Data Transfer using Cloud Partner Console

Anyone can migrate data from on-prem to cloud storage using a data transfer service. Connecting all virtual machines to the data transfer pool will help to initiate the data transfer. Also, we may need to install the agents and docker to create an instance within the cloud to manage the data transfer.

Once a connection is established between the cloud storage and on-prem, we need to initiate data transfer from the source file to destination storage using a cloud partner console.

We can schedule jobs periodically by identifying all the jobs to be run as part of the migration process. After successfully transferring data, we can open the destination instance file and see the amount of data transferred from on-prem virtual machines to cloud storage. We can even go back to the bucket created by the agents and cross-check whether the data has been moved.

Indium’s expertise in cloud migration solutions: Migration & Optimization of a Real-time Microfinancing Application

Wrapping Up

Organizations should adopt cloud migration solutions by carefully evaluating which workloads and applications could help companies obtain the maximum benefits with minimal disruption to business operations. IT optimization results that include improved adoption, scalability, and cost-effectiveness should help organizations move towards digital transformation and innovation.

The post The Cloud Partner’s Role in Migration Success appeared first on Indium.