Understanding the Fundamentals

To comprehend the concept of Cloud Native, we must first grasp its underlying principles. At its core, Cloud Native refers to the design and development of applications specifically built to thrive in cloud environments. It emphasizes containerization, microservices, and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. This approach enables applications to be highly scalable, resilient, and portable, paving the way for efficient utilization of cloud resources.

1. Achieving Agility and Flexibility: One of the critical advantages of adopting a Cloud Native approach is the ability to achieve unparalleled agility and flexibility. Organizations can iterate, deploy, and scale each component separately without disrupting the system by decoupling applications into smaller, independent microservices. This empowers development teams to rapidly respond to changing business needs, roll out new features, and experiment with innovative ideas, fostering a culture of continuous innovation.

2. Scalability and Resilience at its Core: Cloud Native architecture embraces scalability and resilience. By leveraging containerization, applications can seamlessly scale up or down, depending on demand, enabling organizations to handle spikes in traffic or sudden surges in workload efficiently. Moreover, the system can automatically recover from failures using automated orchestration tools like Kubernetes, ensuring high availability and minimizing downtime.

3. Embracing DevOps and Collaboration: The Cloud Native philosophy aligns perfectly with the principles of DevOps, fostering collaboration and improving the overall efficiency of software development and operations. By breaking down monolithic applications into microservices, development and operations teams can work independently on different components, accelerating the release cycle and enabling faster iterations. This collaborative approach enhances communication, reduces bottlenecks, and delivers high-quality, reliable software.

4. Security and Governance Considerations: While the benefits of Cloud Native are substantial, it is crucial to address security and governance aspects. With components distributed across various containers and services, organizations must adopt robust security practices and implement proper access controls. Additionally, monitoring and observability tools become essential to gain insights into the system’s behavior and ensure compliance with industry regulations.

The Role of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is feasible only because of the technologies that enable resource virtualization. Multiple virtual endpoints share a physical network. Still, different virtual endpoints belong to various customers, and the communication between these endpoints also needs to be isolated. In other words, the network is a resource, too, and network virtualization is the technology that enables sharing a standard physical network infrastructure.

Cloud Native Meaning: Network Segmentation

Firstly, they rely on traditional network constructs such as firewalls and routers to enforce authentication. If traffic wants to get from one I.P. segment to another I.P. segment, it passes through a layer 4 to layer 7 rule set filter; then, those endpoints should be allowed to talk to each other.

However, network segmentation is a bit too coarse-grained compared to what is happening at the application layer. The application layer is going through significant transformational changes. The changes to network security represent the application less than the application should be described.

API gateways, web application firewalls (WAFs), and next-gen firewalls are all secondary to protecting microservices. They are just the first layer of defense. Every API call is HTTP/HTTPS, so what good is a firewall anyway?

Traditional Security Mechanism

We have new technologies that are being protected by traditional means. The conventional security mechanism based on I.P. and 5-tuple can’t work in a cloud-native microservice architecture, especially when there are lateral movements. Layer 4 is coupled with the network topology and lacks the flexibility to support agile applications.

These traditional devices must follow the microservice workload, source/destination IP address, and source/destination port number around the cloud, or else things will be practical. This is a design phase that will not happen. You need to bring security to the microservice, not vice versa.

Traditional security mechanisms are evaporating. The perimeter has changed and is now at the API layer. Every API presents a new attack surface, which results in a gap. A gap must be filled, and only a few companies do this. There are too few, and we need more. 

Outdated: Tokens and Keys

The other thing is the continued use of Tokens and Keys. They are hard-coded strings that serve as a proxy for who you are. The problem is that the management of these items is complex. For example, rotating and revoking them is challenging. This is compounded by the fact that we must presume that the I.T. organization infrastructure will become more horizontally scaled and dynamic.

We can all agree that we will arbitrarily see these things spin up and down with the introduction of technologies such as containers and serverless because it’s more cost-effective than building and supporting tightly coupled monolithic applications. So, the design pattern of enterprise I.T. is moving forward, making the authentication problem more difficult. So we need to bring life a new initiative. We need a core and identity construct that supports the design pattern when building for the future. 

Cloud-native meaning with a new identity-based mechanism

We need companies to recognize that a new identity-based mechanism is required. We have had the identity for human-centric authentication for decades. There are hundreds of companies built to do this. However, the scale of identity management of internal infrastructure is an order of magnitude more significant than it was with humans.

That means existing technology constructs and technologies such as Active Directory need to be more scalable and built for this scale. This is where the opportunity arises – building architectures that match this scale.

Another thing that comes to mind when you look at these authentication frameworks when you think about identity and cryptography is that it’s a bit of a black box, especially for the newer organizations that don’t have the capacity and DNA to think about infrastructure at that layer.

The organization is interested in a product that allows them to translate internal policies that are no longer in the internal data center but in the cloud. We need a way to carry out the mappings to the middleware public cloud using identity as the core service. When everything has an atomic identity, it can also be used for other purposes. For example, you can use it to chain identities together and better debug and trace, to name a few.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, embracing cloud-native architectures has become imperative for organizations seeking to stay competitive. By understanding the meaning and characteristics of cloud-native, businesses can leverage its benefits to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and deliver exceptional user experiences. Organizations must adapt and embrace this transformative approach to ensure long-term success in the digital era as the cloud-native ecosystem evolves.