Understanding Cloud-Native Apps And How Your Business Can Benefit From It!

Although rapid change has become a necessity of life in this world of instant gratification, obsolescence-avoidance and generating value from technology over a long period of time are critical. Modernizing a business model is an ongoing project. The faster you can build and distribute your product or service to your customer, the more competitive you are. 

This is what cloud-native is built to handle!

The rapid growth of virtualization technologies and the popularity of distributed frameworks hastened the trend to migrate applications to the cloud.  Cloud-native is a powerful new application-building approach using independent components (microservices, and other concepts) that are fast and simple to test and modify.

Are you pondering over a shift to the cloud? This blog will help you understand all you need to know about cloud-native. We are also listing out key benefits you can expect in your cloud journey. 

What are Cloud-Native Apps?

Cloud-native apps are tools and applications that function in the cloud. These are highly scalable and fast. Cloud-native apps use the Platform as service tools and agile methodology to transform the entire software development process. Cloud-native apps are hosted using services from the hyperscalers (e.g., AWS, Google, Microsoft) but need not be bound to a particular cloud vendor.

Cloud-native apps should not be mistaken for another tool or another platform. It is a complete shift to a set of different practices, design, accelerated production environment, and more. It means a transformation within the entire development team of an organization.

Read more: Cloud-Native Application Development: How It’s Powering App Delivery!

Why Is Cloud-Native Important Today?

Today’s digital marketplace needs to deal with several challenges. And cloud-native computing paradigm is an apt response to those challenges. To stay relevant, businesses are expected to respond quickly to changing customer needs, and new market opportunities, and keep up with the emergence of disruptive technologies. 

Cloud-native gives an organization the flexibility it needs to meet growing business requirements by addressing concerns about software reliability, security, and data management. 

Let us delve deep into two important aspects: agility and reliability.

1. Agility

Regardless of what the business is, all organizations must ensure their technology continues to provide value. In software, agility is demonstrated by quick responses to new demands, made possible by reducing the time taken to deliver new features and resolve bugs. 

Cloud-native practices enable organizations to respond quickly and scale up or down to handle increased or decreased demand. With modular and flexible software businesses can pivot easily when they face challenges and respond faster to customer demands, market trends, and employee preferences.

2. Reliability

Building software around cloud-native practices helps you create simpler and highly scalable applications that are more reliable and secure. 

But the advantages go beyond that.

You can utilize the native security offerings provided by cloud providers. These security offerings extend the cloud provider’s security knowledge and learnings into your application, increasing your security.

In a nutshell, improved agility will help you move faster and react more quickly to security vulnerabilities that impact your applications and your organization. Thus, you will be less likely to fall victim to threats from bad actors.  

Read more: Can Moving to Cloud-Native Improve Business Agility?

Increasing Business Benefits of Cloud-Native App 

Different industries benefit differently from cloud-native technology. These features are what will set your business apart from your competing organizations. However, these benefits support the goals of all industries of varying sizes and scopes.  Here are key benefits:

1. Reduced rollout time

The top goal for any business is a quicker time to market. Reduced rollout time offers a competitive advantage allowing businesses to embrace the current trends. Over the lifetime of an application, cloud-native practices result in faster product development and launch for updates of bug fixes and new features enhancements.

2. Cost-effective

Legacy architecture confined organizations to fixed resources regardless of their involvement in the software development process. This led costlier process as the backup was an additional service.

In cloud-native infrastructure, all solutions are designed to function on the cloud. This reduces costs on backup, maintenance, development, and usage of resources. Opting for pay per use model can drive down costs considerably.

3. Ease of management

Using a serverless platform enables straightforward infrastructure management as it does not need configuring an on-premise network and storage. With the growing popularity of cloud-native platforms, companies can reduce the time for infrastructure setup. Given that, they can now better use existing human resources in more relevant ways. 

4. Improved customer experience

Traditional applications required a dedicated team for each task and long periods of time to update the software. With cloud-native apps, you no longer require to spend so much time and resources for an enhanced customer experience.  The majority of customers use mobiles, and cloud-native applications take a mobile-first approach. It places emphasis on customer experience far greater than the traditional applications. 

5. Reduced vendor lock-in

It is essential to choose a vendor who assures performance, security, and maintenance. However, one may have to stick to the same vendor due to the time and effort invested, even when they deliver poor quality service. With cloud-native infrastructure, you can avoid vendor lock-in by allowing services from multiple cloud providers.

6. Reusability and serverless platforms

The cloud-native infrastructure uses serverless platforms to upload portions of the code. This allows the development team to reuse the individual parts of a project’s code as they develop a new project. Since each part of the cloud-native services function contains its own logic, it saves the development team time and expense. 

7. Easy troubleshooting

Cloud-native infrastructure has an inherent fault-tolerant mechanism. How does this work? The entire application is divided into microservices. Each of these microservices acts as a separate service function, which makes tracing the origin of the issue is much easier.  Once the issue is tracked, it is isolated and fixed at the source. Testing microservices is faster because each one has limited interaction with the rest of the application. That means far fewer opportunities for the introduction of “unexpected” side effects. 

Build Your Cloud-Native App with Fingent

With applications at the center of almost every business strategy, all industries have become software companies. Businesses that hope to be leaders in their space need the competitive edge provided by high-quality, custom-built software – developed and deployed fast. 

Fingent top custom software development company understands how this journey requires investing in processes, infrastructure, and architecture to compete in the current, fast-changing marketplace.  Fingent is uniquely positioned to partner with companies to deliver solutions. Let us bring our experience as applied technologists to help you maintain the technology effectiveness that meets the operational challenges and customer expectations of your business.