The advent of virtualization and infra technologies over the recent years has led to a paradigm shift from on-prem to cloud architectures, paving way for improved scalability, elasticity, and resilience. The overall premise of this approach has been to build efficient, loosely coupled applications, thus enabling improved time-to-market, shortening development cycles, resulting in faster feature releases.

The cloud-native approach helps harness the advantages of microservices architecture, and the DevSecOps approach to meet the needs of today’s businesses. By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.

Pillars of cloud-native architecture:

For enterprises to enable faster development, reliability, efficient resource utilization and enhanced security, there is a set of guidelines and principles that are provided as part of cloud-native development. The bare bone pillars of cloud-native architecture are:

• Declarative application programming interfaces (APIs)
• Microservices
• DevSecOps
• Containers
• Automation-first approach

Challenges faced in adopting/implementing cloud-native development:

While cloud-native development aids in staying ahead of the demand curve, it also comes with its inherent challenges:

• Complex architectures: Cloud-native architecture is increasingly turning complicated to align with the heterogeneous nature of applications and business needs
• Access to talent: This has been an ongoing pain area as the fast pace of innovation and technology changes have led to a skill gap
• High investment: Automation-first approach and polyglot nature of cloud-native calls for significant investments early in the cycle
• Security threats: The usage of multitude of technologies and distributed architecture increases the attack surface, which means vulnerability identification and timely fixes have become a top concern and priority

Thinking of accelerating your cloud-native development journey?

With a combination of best practices, open-source technologies, cloud provider offerings and cultural shift like DevSecOps, enterprises can unlock the full potential of cloud-native development. There is a need to abstract the complexities of these technologies and integrate them together for a seamless user experience.

Platform-based automation is the answer.

• Platform-based automation bring disparate pieces of cloud-native architecture together in easy-to-use manner
• It enforces consistent tools and practices across teams and projects, thereby achieving standardization
• By minimizing the learning curve, new team members quickly become productive
• Out-of-the-box automation helps reduce the initial investment and reduces time to value
• Integrated security controls facilitate secure-by-design development

Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform is an excellent example of how platform-based automation can tackle the challenges associated with cloud-native development. It automates repeatable activities across the application lifecycle, from design, development, testing, build, deployment to observability. It helps reduce the dependence on niche skill set, significantly reduces development effort, expedites time-to-value and results in improved quality.

Client success:

Infosys has successfully implemented several cloud-native development projects for clients across the globe, using platform-centric strategy. We partnered with a US based investment management company to rewrite their legacy retirement solution. Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform was deployed to accelerate the development journey for 300+ developers. We successfully developed more than 200 APIs, microservices, and batch applications, saving up to 40% development effort and speeding up delivery by as much as 25%.

Similarly, we helped a UK based energy and utilities major to build a smart meter solution with digital customer experience. Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform offered automated workflows for provisioning of application environments, microservice development, built-in DevSecOps pipeline and full-stack observability in a container-based cloud environment. Platform based automation de-risked the entire development lifecycle and helped achieve on-time roll out of the solution.

Conclusion:

Enterprises must embrace digital transformation and modern, cloud-native technologies to stay competitive. Platform-based automation provides tools and technologies to expedite the development lifecycle quickly and effectively. It enables standardized processes, while ensuring greater efficiency and reducing the risk associated with large scale development projects.