In the recent times, three noteworthy trends have been seen in cloud computing. And we have seen how microservices has risen, and the public cloud has emerged as a new open source cloud computing projects. The particular projects influence public cloud elasticity and help to a great extent in designing applications.
Knowing The Market
Previously, in cloud computing, a migration of applications to Azure, Google and Amazon Web Services was observed. Practically, applications which run on hardware in the private data centers can be virtualized and installed in the cloud. The present scenario is that the cloud market has become mature. Thus, more applications are now written and directly installed to the cloud.
1. Cloud Native Applications
If you search that what native cloud applications mean, you will see there is no textbook definition. In simple words, it means the applications are designed in such a way that it is capable of scaling thousand of nodes and can run on modern distributed systems environment. It has been observed that many organizations, be it small or large, are moving to the cloud as there are innumerable benefits associated with it. Let’s ponder on the design pattern of the applications.
Before the emergence of cloud, we saw virtualization played a pivotal role where the operating systems were portable and were inside the virtual machines. In this way, depending on the compatibility with hypervisors such as KVM, Vmware or Xen project, the machine could move from one server to the other. In the recent times, the abstraction level has been seen at the application level that all applications are container based as well as run in portable units which can move from server to server with ease in spite of hypervisor all because of container technologies such as Core OS and Docker.
2. Containers
The container is the recent addition in the cloud technologies, noteworthy Core OS and Docker. These applications are nothing but the evolution of earlier innovation which includes Linux control groups (c-groups) as well as LXC, thus making the application portable. It allows the applications to move to production from development environment without reconfiguration.
The application is now installed from registers as well as through continuous operation systems to containers which are organized using tools such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible.
Ultimately, to scale out the applications, the schedulers like Docker Swarm, Mesos, Kubernetes, and Diego synchronize the containers across nodes and machines.
3. Unikernels
Unikernels are also an upcoming technology with similarity to containers. A unikernel is a paired down OS, combined with the single application into a unikernel application that runs inside a virtual machine. Unikernels at times is also known as library operating system, as it includes libraries which allow applications to use hardware and network protocols in amalgamation with a set of policies for isolation of network layer and access control. In the 90’s, systems were known as Nemesis and Exokernel, in the present time unikernels include Osv and Mirage OS. You will be happy to know that unikernel application can be installed across various environments. Unikernel is capable of creating highly specialized as well as isolated services, and in the recent times, it has been used increasingly for applications development in microservices architecture.
