Nishant Singh - Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure: Building and Managing Cloud Native Applications

During the early days of the internet, the overall web application infrastructure was hosted using physical servers that needed to be procured and prepared before the application could be served from them. IT teams would need to physically buy the servers to set them on-premises, install relevant server operating systems, prepare the environments, and then deploy applications on top of them. The problem with this approach was manyfold, as youd have underutilized servers since you never end up fully using the server, difficulty with running multiple applications, high setup and maintenance costs, etc. Virtualization was developed to allow more efficient utilization of the physical server. Virtualization creates an abstraction layer over the physical hardware that allows the underlying resources such as processors, memory, storage, and so on, to be divided and shared.

Virtualization solved many problems with resource utilization and multitenancy, but you still needed to own the hardware to deploy your application, and you still needed to maintain all the overhead of running your data center. This gave rise to the need for running infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where the servers are owned by third parties who are responsible for the underlying infrastructure for your applications. This was the beginning of the cloud computing era, allowing companies to focus on their applications and underlying environments without worrying about hardware, overhead, or configuration issues. IaaS was followed by platform as a service (PaaS), which focused on reducing the toil further by separating the underlying software environment and runtime. This meant that developers only had to focus on writing their application and defining the dependencies. The service platform would be completely responsible for hosting, running, managing, and exposing the application. PaaS led the way to fully managed cloud services with the advent of software as a service (SaaS), popularly known as on-demand software, which provides consumers with the application as a service itself on a pay-as-you-go basis.

As cloud computing gained popularity, so did the idea to have cloud-native technologies that would use the cloud more efficiently while harnessing the full potential of cloud infrastructure and its various offerings. This gave rise to the development of cloud-native infrastructure and cloud-native applications development. Cloud-native infrastructure creates an abstraction on the cloud providers underlying infrastructure and exposes the infrastructure with APIs. This philosophy of managing infrastructure makes it very easy to scale and reduce underlying complexity that indirectly improves availability, resiliency, and maintainability. Similarly, cloud-native applications fortify the bridge between the application and infrastructure by incorporating supporting features such as health checks, telemetry and metrics, resiliency, microservices environment, self-healing, and so forth.

Lets now take a look at the challenges in the cloud computing environment.