What is Cloud Based Applications?

The Cloud-based applications, are also known as the cloud applications or software as a service (SaaS),they are the kind of applications that are hosted, maintained, and can be accessible entirely over the internet. The Cloud-based applications, do offers the benefits of the cloud, but can be slower to deploy. Because they weren’t originally designed for the cloud, they might not be able to take full advantage of all the cloud’s benefits. Unlike the other traditional software that are installed on individual computers or servers, cloud-based applications run on remote servers provided by a third-party cloud service provider like AWS, GCP and Azure. Users can access these applications through a web browser or through a some sort of interface, without the need of installing and maintaining the software on their local devices. This Cloud Based model do offers some advantages, like scalability, accessibility from anywhere in the world with the help of internet connection, and they are also very cost-effectiveness through the subscription-based pricing models or pay-as-per-use model. Some examples of cloud-based applications are:- Google Workspace, Salesforce, Dropbox, etc. Basically, we can say that the cloud-based applications have modernized the way for the individuals to access, use, and pay for software which will simply leads in increasing the efficiency, flexibility, and collaborations.

What is Cloud Native Applications?

Cloud native applications refers to the software applications that are designed and built to fully influence the capabilities of cloud computing environments. The Cloud-native applications are faster to deploy because there’s no hardware or software to install. The cloud-native applications are built in a way to take advantage of the cloud's elasticity and scalability and multiple cloud services offered by cloud providers like AWS, GCP and Azure. The Cloud Native Applications are designed in a way to minimize the interruptions, by using the microservices architecture simply because you are only paying for the cloud resources that you use. Well, the cloud native applications are designed with the focus on scalability, agility, utilizing cloud-native principles such as microservices architecture, containerization, and the container orchestration tools like Kubernetes. By adopting a cloud-native application development approach, organizations or the individuals can take the advantage of the flexibility and elasticity of cloud infrastructure, by enabling them to rapidly deploy and scale their applications to meet the frequently change in demands. The cloud native applications are typically designed to be modular, highly automated, thus allowing for CI/CD pipelines to streamline the development and deployment processes.

Benefits of Cloud Based Applications?

1. Cost Saving: The cloud-based applications generally operates on a subscription based model, by allowing users to pay only for the resources and features they needed or they used. This eliminates the need for the hardware and software investments, thus reducing the capital expenditures.

2. Scalability: The cloud-based applications can scale up the resources up or down based on the demands. This scalability ensures that applications remain responsive and performant, even during peak usage periods.

3. Security: The cloud service providers invest heavily in data security measures, including encryption, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems, to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access and cyber threats.

4. Disaster Recovery: The cloud-based applications are often hosted in geographically distributed data centers with redundant infrastructure, ensuring high availability and minimizing downtime in the event of hardware failures or some kind of natural disasters.

5. Automatic Updates: The cloud-based applications are typically updated and maintained by the service providers, thus eliminating the need for users to manually install updates again and again.

6. Increased Collaboration: The cloud-based applications includes collaboration features such as real-time co-authoring, version control, and well documented repositories. These features enable teams to work together more efficiently and effectively, regardless of their location, innovation, and teamwork.

Benefits of Cloud Native Applications?

1. Innovation: The cloud-native architectures boost up the developers to innovate rapidly by providing access to a wide range of cloud services, APIs, and development tools. By influencing the managed services for functions such as machine learning, Internet of Things, etc. The Developers can introduce the advanced capabilities into their applications without doing all the same process again and again. This sort of access to various technologies fasters the experimentation, creativity, and innovation, driving continuous improvement.

2. Elasticity: The cloud-native applications can easily adjust their resource consumption based on the workload fluctuations, by ensuring the efficient resource utilizations and cost optimizations. This elasticity enables the organizations and individuals to scale the resources up or down in real-time.

3. Speed up the Productivity: The cloud-native application development practices centers around the agility and the rapid iteration, by enabling the organizations or individuals to bring new features and updates to market faster. By decoupling functionality into smaller, manageable components and leveraging continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, developers can streamline the development and deployment process.

4. Scalability: The cloud-native applications are highly scalable, by allowing the organizations or individuals to handle varying workloads and user demands. They can automatically scale resources up or down based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency.

5. Resilience: The cloud-native applications are designed with the built-in mechanisms to handle failures and ensure higher availability. By using the distributed architectures, redundancy, and fault-tolerant designs, these applications can overcome the hardware failures, network issues, and other disruptions without exposing the any kind of impact on the user's experience.

6. Cost Efficiency: The cloud-native applications can help organizations to optimize costs by adopting a pay-as-you-go model and fostering the cloud-native services such as serverless computing and managed databases. By dynamically allocating resources based on the demands and utilizing efficient scaling strategies.

Difference between the Cloud Based Applications and Cloud Native Applications?

Now, after the getting through the difference or the comparisons between the Cloud Based Applications and the Cloud Native Applications we can say that the development of Cloud Native Applications is far much better and efficient as compared to the Cloud Based Applications.

So, as i prefer the Cloud Native Applications Development. So, let's discuss about the various other aspects of the Cloud Native Applications.

Languages that are used in Cloud Native Applications development?

Basically, any web programming language can be used for cloud-native applications development. However, the support for concurrency, parallel algorithms, composability, asynchronous and reactive programming, and frameworks for microservices architectures will be a significant plus. In cloud-native application development, the choice of programming language plays a crucial role in determining the efficiency, scalability, and overall success of the project. Languages like Golang (Go), Java, Python, Node.js, and .NET have emerged as leaders in cloud development due to their good ecosystems, strong community support, and compatibility with major cloud platforms. Each language brings its own unique strengths , making it suitable for specific use cases within the cloud-native environments. For example:

1. Golang stands out for its exceptional support for parallelism, making it an ideal choice for building highly scalable and efficient cloud-native applications. Its lightweight goroutines and built-in concurrency primitives facilitate the creation of concurrent, non-blocking code, enabling applications to handle large numbers of simultaneous connections with ease.

2. Java, excels in streaming processes and real-time data processing, making it suitable for building data-intensive cloud-native applications. Its robust ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, such as Apache Kafka and Spark, empowers developers to implement complex streaming pipelines.

3. Node.js, with its event-driven, excels in building lightweight, scalable web applications and microservices architectures. Its asynchronous programming paradigm, combined with frameworks like Express.js and NextJS, enables developers to create responsive, real-time applications.

4. .NET, backed by Microsoft's extensive tooling and high support, offers a great platform for building cloud-native applications across various domains. Its asynchronous programming features, coupled with frameworks like ASP.NET Core and Akka.NET, enable developers to build responsive, scalable applications.

5. Python's simplicity, versatility, and rich ecosystem of libraries make it a popular choice for rapid prototyping, data analysis, and machine learning tasks in cloud-native development.

Generally, in practice the organizations adopts a writing several languages strategy, like using multiple programming languages based on their strengths and the requirements of different components within their cloud-native application's architectures.

Tools used for developing Cloud Native Applications

Some popular tools used for developing cloud-native applications are as follows:

1. For Containerization/Containerization Platforms:- Docker and Kubernetes.

2. For Infrastructure as a Code (IaC):- Terraform, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation

3. For Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):- Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Circle CI, etc.

4. For Serverless Computing:- AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, etc.

5. For API Management:- Amazon API Gateway, Apigee, etc.

6. For Monitoring and Observations:- Prometheus, Grafana, etc.

7. For Code Analysis:- SonarQube, Trivy.

8. For Service Mesh:- Linkerd, Istio, etc.

9. For Artifactory Management:- jFrog.

10. For Collaboration:- Atlassian Jira.

These tools, among others, play a critical role in enabling developers to design, build, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications effectively. By utilizing these tools, organizations or the individuals can accelerate the software development life cycles, improve operational efficiency, and deliver innovative, scalable applications in the cloud. Moreover, developing cloud-native applications requires a comprehensive set of tools and technologies to facilitate various stages of the development lifecycle, from design and coding to testing, deployment, and monitoring.