Follow these 8 best practices for cloud-native app development

Choose the right design pattern

Developers have many options when it comes to the design of a cloud-native application. Choose a design pattern that reflects the app's use goals and company priorities. The most popular cloud design patterns include the following:

• Sidecar. The main application operates as one set of services. Auxiliary functionality, such as that for monitoring tools, runs alongside it as sidecars.
• Event-driven. The application performs functions in response to specific events, instead of operating continuously.
• Command query responsibility segregation. CQRS separates application write operations from application read operations.
• Gatekeeper. A single public-facing application instance serves as a gateway that forwards requests to other privately hosted instances.

If security is a top priority, a gatekeeper design pattern could work; it reduces the exposure of the application to the internet. For another use case, CQRS is beneficial for apps that require high data availability. Because the CQRS pattern allows only specific parts of an application to modify data, it reduces the risk of accidental data overwrites or corruption caused by a buggy application.

Select the best hosting stack

The right hosting stack benefits cloud-native application development. No matter how you design a cloud-native app, there are several types of tools that can help you deploy and manage it, including the following:

• Service meshes. These help automate service discovery and communication inside the application.
• API gateways. These manage incoming requests and route them to the appropriate services.
• Load balancers. These distribute requests across instances of a cloud-native app.
• Orchestrators. These manage containers across a cluster of servers.

You don't need these tools to operate a cloud-native application, but using them can simplify application management and enhance performance and security in some cases.

Manage cost-effectiveness

The best cloud-native apps don't just offer great performance and security. They're also cost-effective by consuming cloud infrastructure resources in an efficient way.

Strategies to optimize the cost-effectiveness of cloud-native applications include the following:

• Design apps to run in containers. Containers generally allow more applications or services to reside on a single server, which enables more efficient overall resource usage.
• Ensure dynamic scaling. Hosting costs should fluctuate based on the load placed on the application.
• Collect quality data. Configure applications to report rich performance and research consumption metrics. This data can help identify services or components within a cloud-native app that consume more resources than they should -- and, by extension, cost more than they need to.

Bake in security from the start

Security cannot be an afterthought during the cloud-native application development process. In practice, organizations need policies to ensure secure development. These can include guidance to plan and implement secure application authentication, authorization within the application development process and ways to prevent developers from building any business functionality and tacking on authentication later.

Developers should also plan to maximize the security of application data. This includes data stored inside the application, as well as data housed externally, such as in an object storage service. Implement data encryption and access control features across all storage locations.

Use serverless strategically

Cloud-native developers should research when to -- and when not to -- design applications as serverless functions. There are many good reasons to use serverless computing to deploy cloud-native apps, including the following:

• Decreases overall cloud spending.
• Scales up and down rapidly.
• Reduces the effort to deploy and manage applications.

Even so, serverless has clear drawbacks, including the following:

• Less portability. In general, it's hard to migrate an app from one cloud-based serverless compute engine to another because each cloud's serverless services work in unique ways.
• Less language support. Developers sometimes use wrappers, enabling them to run serverless functions that aren't natively supported on a given platform. That requires extra effort, however, and it may reduce performance.

Serverless makes sense if factors like ease of deployment and scalability are priorities. It doesn't make sense if you prioritize portability. It also might not be a fit for applications written in less common languages.

The best cloud-native apps are those that run on 'pure' open source technologies.

Avoid vendor lock-in with cloud services

Ideally, a cloud-native app runs in any IT environment. That way, it doesn't depend on a particular cloud provider or type of cloud platform. To achieve such portability, avoid services that are tied to a specific cloud provider. Also, ensure that the app doesn't depend on a specific vendor's service or feature in its environment to operate.

Likewise, steer clear of PaaS products that let developers build and deploy an app only to a particular cloud or type of host environment. That said, some PaaS or PaaS-like offerings -- such as OpenShift, which is based on the container orchestration tool Kubernetes -- that run on top of open source platforms do enable some degree of portability since it's possible to migrate to alternative distributions of the open source platforms without fully refactoring or repackaging your apps.

The best cloud-native apps are those that run on "pure" open source technologies. This way, they don't depend on services, tools, configurations or add-ons that are available only from certain cloud providers.

Consider multi-cloud and cross-cloud strategies

Cloud-native apps don't need to run in just one cloud. To increase reliability and cost-effectiveness, design apps that can run on a multi-cloud architecture. This enables you to select from among different clouds to host each application based on whichever cloud offers the best pricing and performance.

Some developers are also now embracing cross-cloud, a strategy that involves deploying the same application on multiple clouds at the same time. This is different than a multi-cloud strategy in which some of a company's applications run in one cloud and others in a separate cloud.

Developers shouldn't assume that their cloud-native apps will always run in the cloud. They should design applications that can run anywhere.

Multi-cloud and cross-cloud applications require designs that abstract the application from underlying cloud services and infrastructure so that the app can run seamlessly anywhere -- and migrate to a new cloud easily if necessary.

Don't rule out on-premises deployment

The term cloud-native is misleading. Cloud-native technologies don't necessarily run in the cloud. They can also operate on premises. You can take a containerized microservices-based application and deploy it into an on-premises Kubernetes cluster.

Sometimes, on-premises deployments are preferable if they deliver a lower total cost of ownership. For particular use cases, on premises may also offer better security and data privacy controls than is possible in the public cloud.

Developers shouldn't assume that their cloud-native apps will always run in the cloud. They should design applications that can run anywhere. Avoid dependency on services that are available only in the public cloud, and integrate with platforms, such as Kubernetes, that make it easy to run cloud-native software both in the cloud and on premises.

Remember, there's no one right or wrong way to develop a cloud-native application. Getting the most from cloud-native applications requires a well-planned development process that is tailored to an application's use cases and priorities.

Chris Tozzi is a freelance writer, research adviser, and professor of IT and society who has previously worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator.