What are the six (06) criteria of a high cloud native architecture ?

Cloud-native technologies enable businesses to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs are prime examples of this approach.

But hey, what are the characteristics of a good cloud native architecture?

To manage all the moving parts of your cloud native application, automation is recommended in every step from development to deployment. This can be achieved by using modern automation tools and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines (we will talk about pipelines more later in the course, but for now, please know that a CI/CD pipeline is a concept that can be used for the multiple steps that are needed when you deliver a new version of your software) that are backed by a version control system like git. Building, testing and deploying applications as well as infrastructure with minimal human involvement allows for fast, frequent and incremental changes to production. A reliable automated system also allows for much easier disaster recovery if you have to rebuild your whole system.

Applications and infrastructure fail from time to time. This is expected, and therefore cloud native application frameworks and infrastructure components include health checks which help monitor your application from the inside and automatically restart them if necessary. Additionally, since the application has been compartmentalized, there is a chance that only parts of your application stop working or get slower, while other parts don’t.

Scaling your application describes the process of handling more load while still providing a pleasant user experience. One way of scaling can be starting multiple copies of the same application and distributing the load across them. Automating this behavior based on application metrics like CPU or memory can also ensure availability and performance of your services.

Just like scaling up your application for high traffic situations, scaling down your application and the usage-based pricing models of cloud providers can save costs if traffic is low. To optimize your infrastructure usage, orchestration systems like Kubernetes can help with more efficient and denser placing of applications.

Using Microservices allows to break down applications in smaller pieces and make them more portable, easier to test and to distribute across multiple teams.

Cloud environments are often shared between multiple customers or teams, which calls for different security models. In the past, a lot of systems were divided in different security zones that denied access from different networks or people. Once you’re inside a zone, you can access every system inside. Patterns like zero trust computing mitigates that by requiring authentication from every user and process.

Conclusion: By adhering to these six principles, solution architects can create easily coupled, resilient, manageable, and observable systems. Combined with robust automation, these cloud-native architectures will help software engineers make high-impact changes frequently and predictably, with minimal effort.