I don’t do this too often but I wanted to share an excellent blog post by one of my colleagues. I was writing something along the same lines as it seems there is a lot of confusion around what cloud native apps are and what they bring. Even when it comes to containers there still seems to be a lot of confusion. What fits where and how you can leverage certain technologies to its full potential will all depend on your application architecture if you ask me. If you read the examples of how these types of apps are (or aren’t) administered you can also see that with the wrong understanding and knowledge applying the same logic to an app which is not just there could lead to a world of pain.
Anyway, Massimo’s post is a great start for everyone who wants to have a better understanding of the evolution which is going on in the developers world. Thanks Massimo for taking the time to write this great article. Below a short out take and the link, I urge all of you to read it and soak it in.
Cloud Native Applications for dummies
This is where the virtual machines (aka instances) hosting the code of our cloud native application live. They are completely stateless, they are an army of VMs all identically configured (on a role-basis) and whose entire life cycle is automated. In such an environment traditional IT concepts often associated to virtual machines do not even make any sense. See below for some examples.
- You don’t install (in the traditional way) these servers, because they are generated by automated scripts that are either triggered by an external event or by a policy (e.g. autoscale a front end layer based on user demand)
- You don’t operate these servers, for the same reason above.
Sounds like the beginning of Skynet, Now all we need is the containers to become self aware and we’re done.
There, see, I KNEW containers on VMs were baby AIs