4 Advantages to building cloud native applications with AWS

The State of Cloud Native Security report 2018 states that 62% of enterprises today choose to go for cloud-native applications for more than half of their new applications. And this number is set to grow by 80% over the next three years. This is no surprise given the fact that most organizations are already heavily invested in their chosen cloud platform, and would like to use it up to its full potential.

Cloud-native applications are essentially those created specifically for the cloud and designed to leverage the gamut of resources available on the cloud. Being ‘cloud-native’ means that an application has a vast operational landscape, capable of being available from wherever the cloud is instead of being tied down to a physical location. 

The three defining characteristics for cloud native applications are:

• Built with a microservices-based architecture
• Containerized development
• Dynamic orchestration of network and database resources

Besides this, agile development methodologies and the CI/CD approach is also common to most cloud-native applications.

The current leaders in cloud services - Amazon Web Services(AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform(GCP) - offer a whole host of services to enable the creation of cloud native applications. However, AWS is one of the top performing providers when it comes to cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And this is both in terms of critical analysis, as shown by the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS providers, as well as customer preference, as seen in Gartner Peer Insights. 

AWS is an enterprise favourite on the strength of its global infrastructure network and exhaustive range of serverless computing, storage and database solutions. Supporting giants like Netflix, Airbnb, and Comcast, AWS brings in a set of significant advantages for enterprises creating cloud-native applications.

Here’s a look.

Cost-Effectiveness

30% of on-premise server capacity is idle at any given time, and yet organizations continuously spend money on upkeep and maintenance. With cloud-native applications, this expenditure on unused resources is completely eliminated. 

AWS offers dynamic scaling, allowing you to increase or decrease resource consumption based on application usage. Tools like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing help manage consumption of resources, ensuring that the massive AWS infrastructure is available to you on demand. 

But what makes this cost-effective is AWS’ pay-as-you-go models for all their cloud services whether it relates to infrastructure, platform or software. You pay only for the amount of resources used, and for the time frame you used them. This results in massive reduction in cloud expenditure outlays as you no longer have to maintain idle resources in anticipation of a surge. 

There are also secondary cost savings generated with cloud-native applications in the form of multitenancy. Several different apps can dynamically share platform resources leading to reduced expenditure.

Flexibility 

Kicking off cloud-native applications is in itself a huge paradigm shift for an organization, in terms of how they function and how application development takes place. On top of that, if your chosen cloud platform also calls for the use of unfamiliar technology in terms of operating systems, languages or databases, things can get really complicated, really fast. Not to mention the added cost of training your team in these new elements.

However, going cloud-native on AWS comes with a lot of flexibility as you can choose any combination of operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services, as per your business needs. So your teams have the advantage of working with the technology tools that they are comfortable with, leaving them more time to focus on building better applications.

Besides that, the AWS platform is easy to use for your application development teams, with well documented resources and APIs, and the AWS Management Console. Once again, this gives a smooth learning curve for your teams, enabling you to start creating cloud-native apps in no time.

No Strings Attached

While AWS does have long term contracts with several enterprises, all their solutions for severless applications operate on a pay-as-you-go basis. There is no minimum usage requirement or even a fixed usage period, with all charges accruing on a per hour basis. So on the off chance that you want to terminate using AWS services, you can do so immediately. Without a lock-in period, your AWS billing stops immediately and you are free to move on to other solutions.

Reliability

One of the key reasons why cloud-native applications are superior to applications simply migrated to the cloud is that they are built as containerized microservices. This means that:

• Different business functions are built into independent microservices, only loosely coupled with each other, and failure in one does not cause failure of the whole application
• The application as a whole, or even parts of it, can be easily moved around because the containers are designed to be self-sufficient and will work uninterrupted, no matter where they are hosted

This is what makes cloud-native applications more reliable and resilient. Whether a particular part of an application fails or an entire server region goes down, the applications will continue to function.

This reliability is further strengthened when backed by AWS’ global infrastructure. AWS Availability Zones (AZ) currently span five continents, with multiple isolated server locations. Each AZ is designed with physical redundancies to ensure uninterrupted performance. Even in the case of an entire AZ going down, AWS systems ensure that your cloud-native applications can seamless move to the next unaffected location. 

Besides this, AWS has a wide network of technology partners that can help enterprises build resilient cloud-native applications. Owing to the fact that AWS Partners go through a stringent certification and verification process, you can rest assured that they bring in the best experience and expertise to your application development process. 

Cloud-native applications gives enterprises the ability to get to market faster and offer improved customer experiences. Consequently, they gain a competitive advantage that’s hard to beat with applications that are just migrated to the cloud. And there seems to be no better cloud IaaS provider for your applications than AWS.

Srijan’s is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, with AWS certified teams that have the experience of working with a range of AWS products and delivering solutions to global enterprises. From chatbots with AWS Lex to creating an enterprise decision analytics platform, our teams have in-depth expertise in solving enterprise challenges.

Ready to build cloud-native applications with AWS? Just drop us a line and our expert team will be in touch.