What Is Cloud Native and Why Is It Important?
When Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) general manager Priyanka Sharma has to explain what she does to someone at a dinner party, she starts by asking if they’ve heard of Kubernetes: CNCF’s primary open-source software project, which helps organizations manage their cloud computing resources.
Often, people say yes. Sometimes, they don’t. In that case, she’ll ask if they’ve heard of Amazon Web Services, a popular Amazon subsidiary that rents out cloud computing resources.
That usually takes care of the “cloud” portion. But what about the “native”?
“Cloud-native technology is when engineers and software people utilize cloud computing to build tech that’s faster and more resilient, and they do that to meet customer demand really quickly,” she explained.
To understand cloud-native technology, it’s important to understand cloud computing.
Storing and sharing digital information requires servers that provide computing power and storage capabilities. For a long time, most companies bought their own servers and kept them close by. They could adjust their computing power by adding or subtracting servers — as long as they had the necessary in-house IT support.
Then, things got a little easier with the popularization of virtual machines (VMs) — or virtual operating systems that can run alongside each other, powered by a single physical machine. With VMs, companies could get the same computing power with fewer physical servers. But still, there was room to grow.
Technologists turned physical machines into virtual machines by installing pieces of software called hypervisors. By equipping multiple machines with hypervisors, they found they could make virtual machines share resources like one big system. It was a cluster of nebulous computing resources — like a cloud.
Today, technologists can spin up their own cloud environments on private servers, or pay companies like Microsoft, Amazon or Google for computing resources in public clouds.
Running software in public clouds relieved companies of some IT requirements and scalability headaches. But the transition to cloud alone didn’t create cloud-native technology.
“You could totally be on somebody else’s [computing resources] and do things exactly as you did in the past,” Sharma said.
As technologists understood more about the benefits of cloud environments, they started building software that took advantage of those benefits. The most notable change, Sharma said, was the move from tightly coupled systems with many dependent components to loosely coupled systems made of tiny components that could run quasi-independently.
Those components are containers. Thanks to Docker, technologists figured out how to package up — or containerize — software with all its libraries, so it could run anywhere. The accompanying system architecture is microservices, or collections of containers.
With containers and microservices, individual software components could be scaled up, scaled down, modified or removed in response to customer needs.
Consider a weather app, Sharma said. If a city experiences a natural disaster, traffic from that city would likely skyrocket. The app’s owners could increase the computing resources dedicated to data from that city, without affecting app speed for users elsewhere.
“Cloud native has been extremely successful because the business impact is straightforward,” she said. “People are able to address customer needs faster, delight them and make more money. So proliferation has been huge.”
And with that proliferation came a boom of platforms and services that support cloud-native technology — like Kubernetes, which helps organizations deploy and manage containerized applications across cloud environments.
“That’s why, when you hear the words ‘cloud native,’ you may hear all kinds of things,” Sharma said. “It’s a huge ecosystem.
