Tell us about your infrastructure requirements and how to reach you, and one of team members will be in touch shortly.
Let us know which data center you'd like to visit and how to reach you, and one of team members will be in touch shortly.
Tell us about your infrastructure requirements and how to reach you, and one of team members will be in touch shortly.
Let us know which data center you'd like to visit and how to reach you, and one of team members will be in touch shortly.
It’s impossible to dispute that the cloud has revolutionized how businesses operate. Part of this revolution has been due to the development of cloud-native applications. Cloud-native applications present a different set of challenges to traditional applications. With that in mind, here is a brief guide to integrating cloud-native applications in data centers.
Cloud-native applications take their name from the fact that they are developed to leverage the capabilities of cloud architecture. This requires them to have a different set of characteristics from applications developed for traditional infrastructure. Here is an overview of the five main points of difference between cloud-native applications and traditional applications.
Microservices architecture is an architectural style in which complex applications are deconstructed into smaller, loosely coupled services. Each microservice encapsulates a specific business capability and communicates with others through lightweight protocols like HTTP or messaging queues. This architecture promotes modularity, enabling teams to develop, deploy, and scale services independently.
Containerization refers to packaging application code, dependencies, and libraries into a single unit (container). This ensures consistency across development, testing, and production environments. Containers offer resource efficiency, enabling higher workload density on infrastructure, and simplifying deployment with immutable infrastructure patterns.
Continuous Integration (CI) involves automating code integration and testing, ensuring that changes are frequently merged into a shared repository. Continuous Deployment (CD) automates the deployment of validated changes into production, enabling rapid and reliable software delivery. CI/CD pipelines orchestrate the build, test, and deployment phases, promoting code quality, reliability, and faster time-to-market for cloud-native applications.
Cloud-native applications leverage auto-scaling capabilities provided by cloud platforms, dynamically adjusting resources based on metrics like CPU utilization or request rate. Elasticity ensures that applications scale seamlessly, responding to spikes in traffic without manual intervention, thus optimizing resource utilization and cost efficiency.
Fault tolerance mechanisms, such as circuit breakers, retries, and graceful degradation, enable cloud-native applications to handle transient faults and degrade gracefully under adverse conditions. Additionally, distributed architectures and data replication strategies ensure data integrity and availability. This minimizes the risk of data loss or corruption during failures.
Traditional data center architecture was designed on the assumption that it would be used to support traditional monolithic applications. These generally ran on dedicated physical servers with resources such as network, storage, and compute managed separately.
None of this applies to cloud-native applications. This means that integrating cloud-native applications in data centers typically requires a significant reworking of data center infrastructure. Here are five key points that will generally need to be addressed.
IaC enables the automated provisioning and management of infrastructure resources through code, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability. IaC facilitates rapid provisioning of environments, simplifies infrastructure changes, and enhances collaboration between development and operations teams.
SDN abstracts network control from physical hardware, enabling centralized management and programmable control of network traffic. SDN controllers dynamically configure network policies and routing based on application requirements, improving agility and scalability. Implementing SDN enables data centers to support dynamic workload placement, traffic engineering, and service chaining, optimizing network performance for cloud-native applications.
Traditional storage systems may not be well-suited for the dynamic nature of cloud-native workloads, requiring scalable and resilient storage solutions.
Distributed storage systems like Ceph and GlusterFS provide scalable, fault-tolerant storage pools accessible via network protocols like NFS or S3. Container-native storage solutions, such as Portworx and Rook, integrate with container orchestration platforms to provide persistent storage for stateful applications running in containers.
These solutions offer features like data replication, snapshotting, and volume resizing, ensuring data durability and availability for cloud-native applications.
Orchestration and management platforms like Kubernetes are essential for integrating cloud-native applications in data centers. Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, providing a declarative approach to application deployment and lifecycle management.
Kubernetes abstracts underlying infrastructure complexities, enabling portability and interoperability across different cloud and on-premises environments. Features like service discovery, load balancing, and auto-scaling ensure high availability and performance for cloud-native applications.
Additionally, Kubernetes ecosystem tools like Helm and Operators extend its capabilities, simplifying application packaging, deployment, and lifecycle operations in data centers.
Cloud-native architectures introduce new attack vectors and security challenges that require proactive mitigation strategies. Implementing network security policies, such as microsegmentation and zero-trust networking, helps enforce least privilege access and isolation between application components.
Container security solutions, including image scanning, runtime protection, and vulnerability management, mitigate risks associated with containerized workloads.
Identity and access management (IAM) solutions ensure proper authentication and authorization for accessing cloud-native resources, while encryption mechanisms safeguard data both at rest and in transit.
Continuous monitoring, auditing, and compliance enforcement are also critical for maintaining robust security in cloud-native environments.
Successfully integrating public and private clouds in hybrid IT environments can enable businesses to reach new levels of operational flexibility and efficiency. Making this work does, however, require businesses to...
Unlock the potential of your business with our expertly explained guide on cloud hosting and data center colocation. Learn about the technical nuances, benefits, and drawbacks. Discover how the synergy between these services creates a comprehensive IT infrastructure solution. Optimize performance and reduce costs efficiently.
What can IT leaders gain from an effective hybrid IT strategy? From agility to cost savings, we’ll guide you through the top hybrid considerations.
Discover the DataBank Difference today:
Hybrid infrastructure solutions with boundless edge reach and a human touch.