Cloud technology is nothing new in software development, as countless modern apps use it for their infrastructure. However, it’s one thing to migrate an app to the cloud and another to build a native solution with cloud optimization. Companies can take better advantage of its capabilities by purposefully designing their apps for the cloud.
Maximizing resource use, boosting performance, and ensuring full security are all great. Yet, to achieve them, you need two things. First is building your app native to the cloud, second is doing everything you can to optimize it. Today’s guide will teach you how to do the latter, delivering cloud optimization based on JetBase’s own extensive experience.
What is Cloud-Native?
Cloud-native is the modern approach to app development, where the product is designed specifically for the cloud environment. It’s deployed, runs, and fully relies on the cloud to function. With proper cloud native optimization, you open up new heights of scalability and flexibility, allowing for more ambitious projects than before.
Going cloud-native also has a slew of typical benefits that businesses can expect, such as:
- Lower cost of operation
- Adoption of DevOps
- Consistent uptime
Although building a cloud-native app may not be cheaper than building a regular one, you won’t have to shoulder the cost of physical infrastructure. That alone can be a significant money-saver, while the move to agile pipelines offers another cost reduction. According to research, cloud optimization results in better automation and faster delivery, saving money on each project.
This efficiency, cost-cutting, and reliability make cloud-native a popular choice, as more than 60% of companies in the Americas and Europe use it for development. What’s great is the value that draws these businesses in can be pushed even further with proper cloud optimization. Let’s talk about how to do just that.
10 Things To Optimize in Your Cloud-native Applications
Optimization isn’t a rigid process in which you can only do what others have done before. It’s about improving your software by improving parts of it, which enhances the overall result.
Still, knowing what you can do is very helpful in setting goals. So, to give you an idea of how you can effectively conduct cloud optimization, here’s our rundown of 10 things you can work on.
1. Use Microservices
Microservices help scale up and outward. Each is assigned a specific task, and they work together as a full unit with the help of APIs. This makes your app run more efficiently, and if one of the microservices fails, the rest will be unaffected. As a result, your app has great fault tolerance and stability, a perfect example of cloud optimization.
2. Containerize
Putting processes into separate containers allows you to flexibly set limits to how much resource each of them can use. This prevents bottlenecking and resource hogging, which allows you to scale up faster and risk-free. Containers also go in tandem with microservices, so both can be your first step toward cloud optimization.
3. Introduce Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Changing your infrastructure can be tricky, especially when multiple apps and processes depend on it. However, by introducing IaC, you can automate certain infrastructure changes, make it safer to edit, and lay the groundwork for DevOps, which is crucial for cloud optimization.
4. Improve Monitoring
It’s imperative that you gather a lot of data about your system and product performance, as you’ll later use it to upgrade and refine your ecosystem. However, to do so, you need to focus on quality monitoring and gather information from varied sources. This may not be the most exciting part of cloud optimization, but setting up checks and observational algorithms is essential.
When done right, this allows you to look at your well-optimized app… and find even more things you can improve. It’s a self-sustaining loop, where investing in high-quality monitoring is optimization, but it also creates space to optimize other areas of your ecosystem.
5. Set Up Recovery and Backup Plans
Experimenting is natural in the process of cloud optimization, but that doesn’t mean you need to risk any elements of your ecosystem. Before you begin to disrupt everything, make sure you have a recovery plan and have enabled regular backups that allow reverting to older versions. This way, your dev team can make bold moves and try out different approaches with zero risk.
We’ll discuss reverting below, but suffice it to say that you should have multiple backup points available so your team can choose previous versions. This allows them to do A/B testing, changing one element at a time or taking a “buckshot” approach. The latter is riskier in theory, but it doesn't pose a threat when you have recovery set up.
6. Add Orchestration
If you opt to containerize your app, orchestration is the next logical step. You can set up automated load balancing and a deployment pipeline using tools like Kubernetes. This lifts responsibilities off your team’s shoulders and makes containers a more effective choice. This kind of synergy between different elements and processes is the epitome of cloud optimization.
7. Embrace “Products not Projects”
Allow your team to own the work they do and give them full control, turning it from a project into a product. This is an ethos promoted by AWS, and it fits neatly with cloud optimization. By giving your engineers free rein and ownership of the product, you allow them to work without constant double-checks with management and worrying about bureaucracy. That way, you can see bold approaches driven by skill and knowledge, not a desire to stick to the norm.
8. Keep Things Lightweight
When you containerize your app, make sure that each container is a lightweight, efficient element. The whole point of the process is to ensure scalability, and overloading the system with heavy, complex containers renders the whole effort moot. This is where cloud optimization gets down to the finer details, as you optimize each separate element to make the whole system run better.
9. Reassess Language Choice
As you’re reading this, you likely already have a full stack picked out for your project and have chosen the language that you think works best. However, the spirit of cloud optimization calls for recontextualizing your decisions, and language is no exception. Will your choice work well with containers? Can it support IaC? Does it lend itself well to a cloud-native project?
Answering these questions is key to picking the perfect tool for the job, not just one that’s trendy or familiar. Optimizing your solution may not be comfortable, but it’s effective, so don’t be afraid to take your team out of their comfort zone. Should the resulting language choice be unfamiliar to your in-house engineers, you can always count on JetBase to help.
10. Consider Going Serverless
Lastly, another example of bold moves is going serverless. That’s a cloud-native method where you don’t work with the servers, relegating it to your cloud provider. Instead, your team focuses on the app itself. What’s so unusual about this? Well, handing over full control of the infrastructure can be a bit intimidating, especially for those concerned with data privacy.
However, plenty of companies use the serverless approach, and with the right security measures and a favorable deal with your provider, it’s a safe and cost-efficient solution. After all, cutting the expenses associated with infrastructure is an important aspect of optimization.
Cloud Optimization Best Practices
The above list may seem pretty extensive, but it shouldn’t intimidate you. All you’re doing with this is making your product better, realizing its innate potential. Besides, if you’re worried about the structure of your cloud optimization, you can stick to common best practices. This way, you’re guaranteed to keep your app safe while your team tinkers away to improve it. Plus, of course, you boost the chances of success.
Build Automation
Setting up a pipeline that automatically deploys changes and updates will not only save time and money, it will also free up your team to focus on more pressing issues. Implementing Continuous Integration and Deployment means faster testing and quicker prod availability. CI/CD is a tried and true method for smoothing out your delivery pipeline.
Go Full DevOps
While automation is part of this, DevOps also includes the aforementioned IaC, as well as an agile approach to developing your app. It guarantees that your team will accomplish their goals in a timely fashion without sacrificing quality, as is often the case when speed is overvalued. DevOps finds the golden balance between efficiency and results, and you’d do well to include it in your cloud optimization efforts.
Follow Security Guidelines
Changing how your software works is an inevitable consequence of cloud optimization, but certain elements should never be compromised. Chief among them are, of course, security measures, which must meet typical industry standards and, ideally, surpass them. Just because forgoing encryption or some safety procedures may speed things up doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Use single sign-on, minimize access roles, and do regular audits to confirm security is intact.
Don’t Hesitate to Revert
While the motto of “Move fast and break things,” used by Facebook up until 2014, is still a popular quote in the tech world, it should come with a caveat. That caveat is - feel free to experiment and break things as long as you’re ready to go back and redo everything. We mentioned the importance of cloud optimization backups above, but it’s equally key to use them.
Too many devs try to brute-force their ideas into software that struggles with them, and that is not a healthy approach. If something doesn’t work, revert it and fall back onto an earlier backup.
Cloud Optimization with Jetbase
There’s plenty of flexibility when it comes to cloud optimization, and the rewards are more than worth it. But just as cloud-native solutions incentivize an agile and structured approach, so does the process of optimizing them. In order to guarantee your efforts are, well, optimized, it’s best to have a team with some experience do it.
JetBase has that in spades, as we’ve been delivering custom cloud projects for more than a decade, working as a tight-knit team of professionals. We can help you with cloud optimization, set up DevOps pipelines, and upgrade your project from idea to reality. Our developers offer transparent and proactive communication and focus on delivering exactly what you asked for.
So, if you want to go cloud-native and do so with a bang, JetBase is the company for you. Get in touch today, and we can get started on your cloud native optimization.
