There are numerous characteristics that an application should have when transitioning to a cloud infrastructure. Key characteristics of cloud-enabled (cloud-native) applications include the following:
Secure multitenancy
This means that the application is configurable so that multiple customers can share the same instance of it, while maintaining separation of all data and user accounts. Customers and users within the shared application instance cannot see one another nor any data other than their own by using security access controls lists (ACLs), role-based permissions, and sometimes separation of databases (the application is still shared but can access and utilize separate databases when appropriate).
Elasticity
Applications should be elastic as traffic, demand, and usage increases. Elastic means that an application can scale out (adding more compute resources or additional virtual machines) to handle an increase in workload or utilization. A properly designed cloud-native application should be able to automatically detect high utilization and trigger the necessary steps to start up new VMs or application services to handle peak workloads. Then, when peak utilization diminishes, it should reduce VMs or compute instances.
Legacy applications that were not specifically designed to run in the cloud can often use a VM hypervisor to monitor processor and memory utilization, triggering more VM instances when a manually defined peak- utilization threshold is attained. These elasticity techniques make it possible for the applications to take advantage of the power of the cloud infrastructure to dynamically scale—even if the application wasn’t originally designed as cloud-native; although, a cloud native application is more efficient.
Resiliency
Resiliency refers to the application’s ability to survive and remain online during an infrastructure outage or failure. A properly designed cloud-native application would have multiple techniques to retry failed transactions and there would be multiple instances of the application services running on other servers or VMs.
Legacy applications that were not designed for a cloud can use tools within a hypervisor or cloud infrastructure such as traffic load balancing, clustering, and server/VM failover, but these are not as effective and transparent to the end user as a cloud-native application’s resiliency. There are many other aspects of resiliency and cloud-native application design benefits that will be covered later in this chapter.
Authentication systems
Applications that might have run within existing enterprise datacenters often utilized the internal corporate Microsoft Active Directory or some other identity management system to authenticate user logons. Ideally, applications hosted in a cloud should not assume Active Directory or the internal identity system is available; instead, they should favour an industry standard for authentication and directories such as LDAP, OAUTH, or SAML. These provide authentication capabilities with OAUTH and SAML a bit more robust and appropriate as part of a single sign-on (SSO) system.
There is also a growing trend towards IaaS and SaaS identity management systems, where firms ‘outsource’ authentication and authorization to vendors when integrate at the API level with various directory protocols and identity systems [eg. Centrify and Azure EMS].
Universal access
The applications must be accessible from anywhere on the Internet or other wide area network (WAN) circuit. The application should be compatible with any and all access methods, from web-based access, virtual private network (VPN) access, and every variety of desktop, notebook, tablet, and mobile device. This also means that the user data must also be immediately available when moving from one computing device to another. As a general rule, you should follow the same philosophy as software-defined networking: never hardcode any network addresses or assume anything; always assume applications, users, and data could exist or operate from anywhere in the world through any network connection and any form of user interface or device.
Multitiered applications and platforms
Many cloud applications employ a multitiered design wherein there are multiple layers, or tiers, of services. These tiers separate the backend data- base, middleware and applications, and frontend processing. This tiered design facilitates higher levels of security, application upgrade modularity, and independent scalability of individual tiers as needed, based on utilization. Tiered applications also benefit from shared platform or PaaS applications in the cloud, such as a database service, that multiple applications can share for lower cost of maintenance, licensing, and operations.
Mobility
With the increasing number of applications hosted in a cloud environment, users or consumers often use mobile computing devices such as tablets or smartphones. The legacy assumption that end users only have desktop PCs or a particular PC operating system (OS) is no longer true.
The concept of mobile first was adopted over the past few years but is more recently replaced with ubiquitous access the intention of both being that applications need to be designed with the ability for users to access the system through any form of computer device, from any location, and have the same experience. Mobility might also require additional security and asset configuration management features and tools to ensure identity, data encryption, data privacy, and synchronization to mobile devices for offline viewing.
Key Take-Away
Ubiquitous access, elasticity, resiliency, and persistent data are the keys to successful cloud-native applications. Applications and data must always be accessible, from any form of computing device and any location, and with a consistent user experience.