To learn more about the many features of a cloud-native architecture and the benefits it can bring to your business, download The Cloud-Native Architecture White Paper today.

A cloud-native architecture can realize many benefits for your business, helping you achieve high availability, scalability, and expedite your release cycles, while streamlining your operation and maintenance. But, under the hood, how does a cloud native architecture achieve this?

First, let's explain what "cloud native" means. The word "cloud" simply refers to the application residing in the cloud instead of in a traditional, on-premises data center. Businesses have been using the cloud in this manner for some 15 years. The word "native" is where things get interesting. From a business perspective, cloud native represents applications that are designed to run on the cloud, fully utilizing the elasticity and distributed nature of the cloud.

A cloud-native architecture features that are not business-centric are moved out of the code base of applications. In other words, non-business features are offloaded from the code base of applications to the cloud infrastructure, automating cloud-native applications and making them more lightweight and agile. Let's look into some of those key cloud native technologies now.

1) Container Services

Containers are standardized software units that package an application and its dependencies so the application can run efficiently and reliably across different computing environments. This helps organizations achieve the agility to grow their business in the long- and the elasticity to cope with short-term peaks in demand. Containers also provide seamless application distribution and delivery, decoupling applications from the underlying runtime environment to provide portability.

Kubernetes is the standard container method to schedule distributed resources and implement automated O&M. At Alibaba Cloud, our Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) provides a fully-managed service compatible with Kubernetes, where users can quickly secure and manage their applications, and create a large number of Kubernetes clusters within seconds.

2) Microservices

Microservices represent an architectural style that breaks down an application into a loosely coupled collection of services. Microservices are not only highly maintainable and testable but can also be deployed independently and organized around your business capabilities, making them easy to understand, develop and maintain.

A Kubernetes cluster can provide excellent support for your microservice operations and our Microservices Solution simplifies your container management, providing a lightweight deployment.

3) Serverless Services

Serverless computing is a software design pattern where applications are hosted by a third-party service. Also known as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), serverless eliminates the need for server software and hardware management, freeing developers from these tasks.

Alibaba Cloud provides a range of tools for developers to embrace serverless services, including Function Compute, which prepares computing resources and can runs your code. SAE can also integrate your serverless and microservice architectures, and our Serverless Workflow can further coordinate the execution of multiple distributed tasks.

4) Service Mesh and Message Services

Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) is a new technology, which was developed in a microservice software architecture and applies to distributed applications. It is designed to integrate features, including connectivity, security, throttling, and observability, between microservices into the platform infrastructure; decouples applications from the platform infrastructure; and centrally manages the traffic of service applications that run on various computing infrastructures, including ACK.

This allows developers to focus on the business logic without worrying about the microservice governance issues, improving the application development efficiency and accelerating business exploration and innovation.

Message services can also help maintain and monitor your cloud-native architecture, where the Alibaba Cloud Message Service can seamlessly transfer messages between your applications.

5) Cloud-Native Database Services

A cloud-native database service allows you to store, manage and retrieve data from the cloud, providing features beyond those available with traditional database models.

PolarDB is a next-generation distributed cloud relational database service, which is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL and Oracle syntax. Each cluster can use more than 1,000 CPU cores to process data and store up to 100 TB of data. PolarDB-X is capable of storing even larger amounts of data, handling ultra-high concurrent throughput and large table performance bottlenecks, and improving the low efficiency of complex computing.

6 Cloud-Native Big Data Services

If you need to store, manage and access big data across your cloud-native architecture, you need a new-generation cloud-native data warehouse that features high concurrency and low latency for data queries.

Our AnalyticDB for MySQL, for example, is compatible with MySQL protocols and the SQL:2003 syntax and can instantly analyze large amounts of diverse data. Our AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL solution was also developed based on the open source Greenplum Database project and is compatible with the ANSI SQL 2003 syntax and the PostgreSQL and Oracle database ecosystems.

Get the Cloud-Native Architecture White Paper

A cloud-native architecture must combine a range of state-of-the-art cloud-based technologies to help you reap the full rewards of the cloud. Alibaba Cloud can help you set-up, deploy and manage a cloud-native architecture to innovate and optimize your business. To find out more download The Cloud-Native Architecture White Paper today.

Community

6 Key Technologies Enabled by Cloud-Native

1) Container Services

2) Microservices

3) Serverless Services

4) Service Mesh and Message Services

5) Cloud-Native Database Services

6 Cloud-Native Big Data Services

Get the Cloud-Native Architecture White Paper

Read previous post:

Read next post:

Alibaba Clouder

You may also like

Comments

Alibaba Clouder

Related Products

Function Compute

Microservices Engine (MSE)

Serverless Workflow

Serverless Application Engine