Cloud Native Integration Strategy

Integration in Cloud Native Application

To identify Enterprise applications for migration to a cloud, we first identify and understand the business and technical factors for the migration. Reducing costs and business agility are typical business factors for application migration to clouds. Cloud computing can provide significant cost savings because of the increased utilization resulting from the pooling of resources and the standardization and automation required for cloud services for Enterprise.

After an application has been identified as a candidate for cloud migration, based on business and technical factors, it is necessary to consider for what type of cloud environment— SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS—the application is best suited for Enterprise.

Points to consider for the enterprises to go for Cloud Native Application adoption are,

•      Applications which have higher life expectancy

•      Reengineering of Legacy applications and adopt next generation technologies

•      Applications which are expected to undergo more frequent changes

•      Applications which will go through agile development process or DevOps process

•      Any new applications that have high scalability requirements

•      Enterprises undergoing a large scale applications movement to cloud

Elements of Cloud Native applications are,

•      Application design: The move to Microservices

•      API exposure: Internal and external access via standardized methods

•      Operational integration: Aggregating log and monitoring information to enable application management

•      DevOps: Automation across the application lifecycle 

Cloud Native Integration Strategy

 Integration solutions can leverage the new architectures such as

·        Serverless

·        Functions as a Service (FaaS)

·        Container-based applications and Platforms as a Service (PaaS)

 Applications by adopting Cloud Native Architecture become smarter and use APIs to expose their data. The new integration middleware should be smart enough to exchange data within and across the Enterprise not only with applications but with channels such as devices and sensors, and smart interactions such as Chatbots, voice apps and highly personalized interfaces in real-time. These channels interacting with Cloud native services are typically designed as Microservices.  

 A smart integration middleware use of API Management tools, Service Meshes and Event Buses. These can reside on Serverless architectures and containers, which are fast becoming the norm that enables continuous delivery. The turnaround time for building integrations has to be reduced to hours from weeks as the endpoints have become smarter.

APIs are used for the multi-channel integration of Enterprise applications. Microservices which are the new building blocks of applications require new types of orchestration and integration mechanisms. API Gateways enables the access to these Microservices, enabling integration between API clients and applications within and outside the Enterprise.

 Microservices addresses the challenges such as the volume of integration points, orchestration and events handling.

Service Mesh enables intelligent integration capabilities among services of the Enterprise applications. Service Mesh provides service discovery, routes requests to Cloud native service instances and handles failures.

Finally with Agile, the releases are small and frequent rather than large and few. The key is to enable to go to market faster.