Everything is in the cloud, from love, industry, your friends, money, leisure, and even your job. Businesses understand this and regardless of the nature of their products or services, be they physical or digital, they know that the relationship with their consumers has changed forever. The digital transformation permeates all the productive layers of the economy and this is where the cloud becomes relevant.
Since its inception, the objective of the cloud has been to speed up the process of digital transformation, democratize access to technology, and reduce the complexity of launching new services. However, this has changed over the last decade.
Due to the speed of growth of cloud adoption and its own competition, the main providers, seeking to increase customer loyalty, chose to increase their catalogs by offering increasingly specialized and complex tools. In an increasingly fragmented and competitive sector, companies face new challenges when implementing this technology.
The complexity of the cloud
The increase in cloud offerings has turned the market into a huge bazaar where only experience allows consumers to find the products or services that will really speed up their business without compromising their long-term strategies.
This situation has unleashed a change. The community has reacted by seeking a new type of cloud: a modern, open cloud that is once again focused on accelerating digital transformation processes, democratizing access to technology, and giving control back to the consumer. This is how cloud-native technologies were born, which once again allow companies to create dynamic and scalable applications, using modern architectures regardless of where they are deployed.
At the epicenter of cloud-native technologies is Kubernetes, a technology that makes it easy to manage scalable infrastructures. But at the same time, this new ecosystem has been populated with tools that allow companies to have detailed control over the use of their resources. All this has laid the foundations for a new evolution of the cloud.
Focus on the application and not on the infrastructure
Cloud-native technologies have focused on solving infrastructure provisioning and management. However, this is not the complete solution to the problem. Companies looking to accelerate their digital transformation projects need their projects to substantially shorten their time-to-market, so their development tasks should focus on adding value to their projects. For this reason, the market demands solutions that help streamline these processes and allow developers to bring their ideas to production as quickly as possible.
In this context, the Open Application Model (OAM) specification was born, an app-centric language that allows developers to describe in a more expressive way how their applications are composed and how they should be deployed in the cloud. This makes collaboration between developers and DevOps easier, speeding up implementation, reducing release times, and the risks of launching our services to the market. In addition, the OAM abstraction enables the adoption of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies vital in the evolution of new digital businesses.
Understand what is happening
Applications today are made up of many interrelated services running on different machines or environments. Current solutions flood operators with scattered data that is difficult to understand or synthesize for day-2 operations. Once the applications are deployed, the next challenge is to answer a simple question: Is our system working as expected? Although the question is simple, in many cases finding the answer is not.
To understand what is happening with our application, we need platforms that provide a different user experience. These should focus on providing the information that the user really needs in order to understand what is happening in their system, helping them make decisions and execute actions quickly and efficiently. It should also not be forgotten that when the user needs to solve a problem, they need to obtain enough detail to make an accurate diagnosis. This new user experience is the next frontier of the future cloud.
Security and networking in the new cloud applications
More applications, more environments, and more users. The future cloud is open to many actors who must collaborate and who will participate in the development process. Security is therefore key to ensuring the integrity and scalability of the cloud. However, cloud solutions make this management complicated and the developer does not clearly understand how to implement it in their services.
The new cloud allows the user to describe security using an app-centric language, where the way your application is going to communicate and who are the actors that have access to it are described. This allows, in a very simple way, to understand how the applications are exposed, having complete control over their access. In this way, security is at the heart of the application lifecycle.
Technology and sustainability
Within the current socio-economic framework, companies, especially European ones, are prioritizing a combined strategy of technology and sustainability, which will make them more competitive with more scalable business models. The problem with the current cloud is that having a balance between sustainability and efficiency in our applications is an arduous task.
New cloud applications allow operators to have more granular control of services. With this information, it is easy to optimize resources to make more energy-efficient use by optimizing the density of services in our infrastructure. In this way, energy consumption can be reduced and, therefore, the carbon footprint produced by our applications is reduced. Creating sustainable business models requires technologies that have sustainability principles as their goal.
NAPPTIVE: the future of cloud-native apps
Napptive simplifies the process of designing, developing, and putting cloud-native applications into production and accompanies companies in overcoming these challenges. Thanks to its platform, users can count on a secure multi-tenant Kubernetes environment, which allows the deployment of OAM applications in a matter of seconds.
This platform focuses on applications, allowing the user to understand in a simple way if they are working correctly. In addition, it lays the foundations for the creation of sustainable and scalable applications in companies that are addressing the problem of digital transformation.
If you are interested in knowing more about our solutions, do not hesitate to contact us and try our platform. It’s free to use, you simply need to log in with your existing GitHub account to get started!