We’ve made it our mission to provide you with the best (and only the best) tools to work with the cloud. That’s why our Top 10 CNCF projects to look out for in 2023 list is being untangled in our blog, explaining each technology and why we are die-hard fans of it. Take a look at the series!

We’ve been talking about why cloud-native application development is something you should seriously consider, what its basic structure is and how its main components interact, and how to approach this change of paradigm. Let us now introduce the concept of cloud-native application platform, and how you can leverage it in your organization. 

I. Introduction

As Evan Bottcher defined: 

“A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge, and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.”

Thus, a cloud-native application platform would be a digital platform with the goal of making cloud-native application development more accessible. It is designed with standardization in mind, reduces maintenance overhead, reduces the cognitive load for the developer, gives more autonomy to the developer (without more responsibility) and, it also evolves and adapts to new features demanded by the environment.

Platform Engineering focuses on developing an ecosystem that can be efficiently used from the Dev, Ops, and SRE standpoints. It provides developers with more autonomy over their own code in the whole development cycle, it allows DevOps to automate as much of the development and deployment process as possible (and it also liberates them from mechanical tasks so they can improve their DORA metrics innovating and experimenting with new products), and finally, it gives SRE a way to centralize and manage the reliability of the projects.

Napptive Playground is the perfect example to illustrate this. It is an integrated solution that can be used by any member of your organization including developers and non-technical users to deploy applications in modern infrastructures. At Napptive, we focus on providing developers with the tools they need to facilitate creating cloud-native applications in the simplest way possible. Our playground offers a multi-tenant OAM-ready solution to deploy applications, and it is free to try!

II. Benefit 1: Simplified Deployment Process

Cloud-native application development can be a difficult challenge: the technologies implied in the deployment of a service bring the dev team to a several-step process with a lot of possible failure points. To do the task successfully, the team must fluently use all the technologies that are part of the cloud infrastructure in the organization, and even so, there is a fairly high chance of messing it up.

Napptive makes this process intuitively easy, whether you use the web interface or the CLI. What would take the dev team a lot of precious time (that they could have invested in, you know, developing the app) becomes a painless process that involves five clicks or less in the web interface. There’s a catalog where the dev team can choose the app they want to deploy, or they can deploy their own apps as well (either from Git or from a set of YAML files).

III. Benefit 2: Enhanced Developer Productivity

With the cloud-native app development paradigm taking over the tech industry, we’ve noticed that the weight of adapting to the changes fell on the dev teams. They were in charge of learning complex tools to create, use and maintain resilient structures without so much as a reliable requirements list to follow. And, when there was a DevOps team to take care of it, the dependence of DevOps’ availability to move on with their work was frustrating at best, and paralyzing their production at worst.

Napptive provides an ideal environment for an endeavor like this. With its easy environment creation and management feature, it gives the dev team the autonomy they need to respond to the client’s feedback faster. They can also manage the resources available, maintaining isolation between projects and even between different steps of the same project. There is a growing library of services at their disposal that they can easily deploy and even adapt to their needs.

All of this is presented with an intuitive web interface that makes the deployment process unbelievably easy, saving a lot of time that the dev team can dedicate to what really matters, which is developing the actual project.

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!

IV. Benefit 3: Reduced Expertise Requirement

We understand the importance of knowing the tools you’re using to do an excellent job. We also see the speed at which this industry advances, and the need to adapt quickly to new environments. Cloud-native application development is a fascinating field, but it has a steep learning curve. For starters, Kubernetes is a must in any cloud-native infrastructure, and depending on the specific needs of your company, you may need one or more of the tools we’re reviewing in our Top CNCF Projects series. Each of these tools requires time to master, and sometimes we simply don’t have it.

The Napptive environment provides developers with everything they need to start working with cloud-native apps, in an easy and intuitive way. It also offers them the possibility to learn about the technologies used under the hood if they so desire, at their own pace, with the ability to create a safe sandbox where they can tinker with these tools and not break the production environment because of the wrong parameter in a command. So, not only we don’t gatekeep that knowledge to keep you tied to our technology forever, but we actively encourage you to learn about what we use and how we use it, and are happy to walk that path with you.

This is part 1 of a 2-part article about the benefits of using a cloud-native application platform. Don’t forget to come back next week for part 2!

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.