Your organization needs a cloud-native application platform and, in this 2-part article, we are explaining why. But before continuing where we left off, let’s recall what a cloud-native platform is.

According to Evan Bottcher’s definition, “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge, and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.” It enforces the standardization of processes, reduces maintenance overhead as well as the cognitive load for developers, gives more autonomy to developers (without more responsibility), and it also evolves and adapts to new features demanded by the environment. A cloud-native application platform, then, is a digital platform that helps Devs, Ops, and SREs in an organization optimize the creation of cloud-native applications.

In Part 1, we already listed three benefits of using a cloud-native application platform in general (and Napptive in particular, we cannot be more proud of our product!). We highly suggest reading it if you haven’t already. But in case you prefer just a quick refresher for now, here you have the main points from it:

1. Simplified deployment process – platform users can leverage all the necessary technologies involved in cloud-native development in a few intuitive steps. 
2. Enhanced developer productivity – as the deployment process gets easier, the Dev team gains more time for actually developing the product.
3. Reduced expertise requirement – the platform manages the complexity so that users do not have to master all the underlying processes. 

Now that we all are on the same page, let’s move on to the last two benefits that we want to highlight.

Rapid Adoption of Cloud-Native Technologies

As Frank Lazaro points out, “One of the significant benefits of accelerated technology adoption is the improvement in productivity and efficiency. New technologies often streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and enable employees to focus on value-added activities.” Even more, “Organizations that fail to keep up with the speed of change risk falling behind and losing their competitive edge.”

However, stepping into cloud-native development is hard. It implies a whole paradigm shift, which requires understanding the differences and implementing a new approach to development. What’s more, the learning curve of many cloud-native technologies (such as Kubernetes, to begin with) is steep. A good internal platform must ease the transition by alleviating the adoption efforts. The Napptive Playground offers a top-layer interface that is very easy and intuitive to use. Under the hood, it uses exactly the cloud-native technologies you need to start developing. Before you know it, you will be using a series of cloud technologies like Kubernetes, KubeVela, and more. No need to learn beforehand which tools do what, how to use and configure them… Unless you want to, of course! And at a pace, you are comfortable with.

In a business context, that means skipping to the point where the Dev teams are actually working on products. The platform architects have already done the work of figuring out how to use the necessary cloud-native technologies for your organization. You can adopt these technologies at a minimal cost and start your cloud-native journey with confidence in your setup.

Napptive enables developer self-service. We encourage you to try our playground and experience accelerated cloud-native development. It’s completely free, all you need to do is simply sign up and get started!

Flexible and Scalable Solutions

We are living in a fast-evolving context where necessities change every few months. In order to stay competitive, organizations must create flexible and scalable solutions. For Geetika Tandon, some of the essential elements of modern application development are (among others):

• Support for continuous deployment + building microservices and APIs: Products that can be created through smaller incremental builds, or organized as a set of microservices that work together, are built with the ability to stay up-to-date. Changes in users’ preferences can be met in minimal time by tweaking or adding a microservice. 
• Virtualization: Solutions that do not care whether they are running on bare metal, in a cloud, or a virtual machine are so portable that organizations are free to make strategic decisions about where they should live. 
• Use of automation: Automating resource usage with a container orchestrator such as Kubernetes provides scalability in a cost-effective way. Applications scale on demand and can be provisioned and de-provisioned automatically.

The Napptive Playground supports both scalability and flexibility, as its main purpose is to easily deploy microservices in a Kubernetes cloud. In addition, you can use GitHub Actions with Napptive to include it in your continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

Conclusion

In this 2-part article, we have reviewed five reasons why your organization would benefit from using a cloud-native application platform like Napptive Playground. Apart from the inherent advantages that an internal platform offers, you would have:

1. Simplified deployment process – platform users can leverage all the necessary technologies involved in cloud-native development in a few intuitive steps. 
2. Enhanced developer productivity – as the deployment process gets easier, the Dev team gains more time for actually developing the product.
3. Reduced expertise requirement – the platform manages the complexity so that users do not have to master all the underlying processes. 
4. The rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies – the platform saves your organization a lot of time and effort by having it all figured out. You can start developing right away.
5. Flexible and scalable solutions – with Napptive, you can build modern applications that meet the users evolving necessities in a scalable and cost-effective way.

In case you have not yet tried Napptive, we encourage you to sign up for free and discover how we are helping propel the development of cloud-native apps.