Cloud
Best Practice: Design using cloud-native principles to reduce maintenance overhead
Sep 12, 2024
Designing with cloud-native principles simplifies system management and reduces the operational burden. By embracing microservices, containerisation, and automated scaling, organisations can focus on delivering new features quickly and reliably, without worrying about the complexity of managing infrastructure.
Why Cloud-Native Design Matters
- Reduced maintenance: Cloud-native architectures are built to handle scaling and resilience automatically. This reduces the manual work required to manage infrastructure, freeing up engineering resources to focus on innovation.
- Faster deployments: Cloud-native principles promote the use of loosely coupled microservices, which can be deployed and scaled independently. This allows for faster releases, improving the agility and responsiveness of your development team.
- Resilient systems: Cloud-native designs include automated scaling and fault tolerance, ensuring that your system can handle traffic surges and failures without downtime or intervention.
Implementing This Best Practice
- Build loosely coupled services: Design your applications as collections of independent services that can scale independently. Use microservices architecture to avoid monolithic applications that are difficult to maintain and scale.
- Implement auto-scaling: Configure auto-scaling on your services to handle increases in traffic automatically. For example, use AWS Auto Scaling or Azure Autoscale to dynamically adjust the number of compute resources available based on real-time demand.
- Use managed services: Minimise maintenance by using managed services for databases, message queues, and caching. Cloud services like AWS RDS, Azure Service Bus, and Google Pub/Sub reduce the need for infrastructure management, allowing your team to focus on business logic and features rather than server upkeep.
Conclusion
Designing with cloud-native principles transforms how businesses manage infrastructure, reducing maintenance overhead and increasing system resilience. By building with microservices, containerisation, and auto-scaling, your teams can deploy more quickly, minimise manual intervention, and ensure your systems are ready to scale with demand.
