Native Cloud Foundation: The Building Blocks of Modern Cloud-Native Infrastructure
Migrating applications to the cloud promises cost savings and flexibility, but applications not designed for cloud environments typically underperform. For teams working to understand the cloud beyond basic migration, modernizing software to align with native cloud principles is essential.
Cloud-native apps use containerization, automation, and orchestration with tools such as Kubernetes. These systems deliver greater scalability and resilience through self-healing capabilities, dynamic resource allocation, and vendor flexibility.
Understanding the core building blocks of a native cloud foundation helps IT decision-makers evaluate whether their current infrastructure is truly cloud-native and identify opportunities for modernization.
What Is a Native Cloud Foundation? Core Principles and Objectives
A native cloud computing foundation is a collection of tools and practices that help IT teams fully leverage cloud computing’s capabilities. Traditional applications can be hosted on cloud servers, but aren’t built to take advantage of them from the ground up. That means missing out on opportunities that are unique to distributed computing, elastic scaling, and automated management.
The foundation extends beyond app architecture to also touch networking, storage, security, and deployment pipelines. Organizations that follow these principles gain four key advantages:
- Portability: Applications can run across different cloud providers instead of being stuck on a single platform. This gives the business flexibility to choose the best platform for each workload as business requirements and pricing structures evolve.
- Scalability: Cloud-native systems can automatically adjust capacity based on real-time demand. They can automatically spin up additional app instances during traffic spikes, then scale down during quiet periods to manage costs and performance.
- Resilience: Cloud-native apps also typically feature self-healing mechanisms, which can detect and solve failures autonomously. When a server goes offline, the integrated orchestration layer can restart impacted components without human intervention.
- Abstraction: Applications will operate independently of underlying hardware and infrastructure requirements. Developers get more time to spend on application logic instead of server management and manual configuration.
While traditional virtualized environments can offer some cloud benefits, they can’t transform infrastructure into a dynamic, programmable platform.
Containerization and Microservices: The Application Layer
Containers bundle an application and all of its dependencies into a single, portable unit. It’s a fundamental unit in cloud-native architecture that covers libraries, configuration files, and the runtime environment, among other elements. This allows the application to run identically on any server that hosts it.
Traditional virtual machines required a full operating system for each instance. But containers share the host system’s kernel while maintaining isolation. This makes them significantly more lightweight, so companies can run hundreds of containers on infrastructure that might only support a dozen virtual machines.
Microservices complement containerization. They break applications into smaller, independent services that communicate through APIs. For example, an e-commerce platform might separate its shopping cart from its user authentication process. That way, teams can update individual services without redeploying the entire application, supporting scalability.
Containerized microservices are the key to portability across cloud environments. Teams can run the same container on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and even on-premises data centers without additional labor.
Orchestration and Automation: Managing at Scale
As containers multiply, it becomes increasingly difficult to run them manually — and that’s where orchestration comes into play. Kubernetes is the major standard, helping teams manage complex containerized apps with minimal human oversight. It does so by automating the full application lifecycle, including:
- Determining which servers should run which containers
- Monitoring container health
- Redistributing workloads when servers fail
- Automatically scaling applications by launching additional container instances when traffic increases
The automation can be especially helpful when making updates. IT teams can roll out new app versions gradually, directing a small percentage of traffic to them to monitor for errors. If problems materialize, Kubernetes will automatically roll back to the previous stable version.
Self-healing capabilities take the benefits a step further. When a server goes offline, it reschedules impacted containers onto healthy machines within seconds. These automated processes eliminate tasks that previously required specialized teams, often working nights and weekends.
Infrastructure Abstraction and Platform Services
Infrastructure abstraction is the practice of separating apps from the hardware and systems they run on. This decoupling allows apps to interact with standardized platform services through APIs. It helps code run consistently regardless of where you host it.
Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) plays a critical role in the cloud-native abstraction layer. It lets teams define their entire infrastructure in code files that can be:
- Version-controlled and tested like application code
- Deployed automatically across environments
- Replicated quickly to verify identical configurations have been used across the development process
Traditional web and cloud-based solutions require managing many individual components. Cloud-native platforms offer managed services that teams consume through APIs without having to maintain the underlying infrastructure.
The key benefit is consistency across diverse environments. The same code can be deployed to AWS, Google Cloud, on-premises data centers, and edge computing devices with minimal edits.
It opens up a variety of impactful opportunities. For example, companies can negotiate better pricing by quickly shifting workloads between cloud providers as costs evolve. Or, they can deploy rapidly in new regions to provide a low-latency experience to users globally.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Building a Mature, Cloud-Native Foundation
Tool sprawl is a common challenge in cloud-native development. When teams use multiple platforms without clear integration strategies, it adds unnecessary complexity that delays timelines.
Skill gaps may also arise, as your existing IT staff may lack experience with containerization and orchestration technologies. Similarly, security teams may struggle to adapt policies designed for traditional infrastructure to meet the demands of container environments. You may even experience cultural resistance.
To find success, start with pilot projects to demonstrate value before moving into broad rollouts. You may also need to invest in training programs and establish tool governance standards to avoid sprawl. Enterprise solutions like Dell’s cloud client workspace can help to bridge your legacy and cloud-native environments during the transition.
IT teams working on cloud-native development often benefit from community knowledge bases and peer learning opportunities. You can join our community to connect with other IT leaders navigating the same cloud modernization challenges.