Most modern software development teams already practice continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). As DevOps teams seek to boost pace and scale, they turn to cloud computing for assistance. These two principles, CI/CD and cloud-native, are combined in order to enable teams to work in various environments.
What is Cloud-Native CI/CD?
Cloud-native development focuses on modularity, and loose coupling between the services so that each service can run independently. With the adoption of the cloud-native architecture, the applications are now built as microservices or a set of multiple independent services. Microservices are the core of the cloud-native application architecture.
A cloud-native CI/CD is a practice to build, test, deploy, and monitor cloud-native applications (microservices) over the cloud. Continuous integration and continuous delivery is a process to ensure the continuous testing and verification of the code's correctness during software development. It is to ensure that the stable releases can be deployed continuously at a regular interval with high velocity and minimal errors. For example, a cloud-native application can be deployed using Docker, uses Elastic Container Registry(ECR) for storing the container images and deployed to Elastic Kubernetes service(EKS) or uses Amazon EC2.
Phases In Cloud-Native CI/CD Process
Following are the phases involved in the cloud-native process:
- Application Definition & Development
- Orchestration & Management
- Runtime
- Provisioning
- Infrastructure
The following image shows the infrastructure automation with GitOps by using DevOps best practices for application development:
Why Do We Need Cloud-Native CI/CD?
With the boom of virtualization technologies and the growing popularity of distributed frameworks, it is now a trend to migrate applications to the cloud. Cloud-native CI/CD is important in order to deliver the cloud-native applications via a pipeline that includes continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) toolchains.
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As DevOps teams look to increase velocity and scale, they look to cloud native CI/CD in order to achieve a faster velocity to build, test and deploy the changes.
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Cloud-native CI/CD pipelines are used to automate the building, testing, and deployment of cloud-native applications.
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Multiple cloud-native applications have integrated CI/CD processes that may include steps to build and deploy the application, and provision and manage its various cloud resources.
Market Trends For Multi-cloud Management
According to Grand View Research, the global multi-cloud management market size is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25.3% from 2022 to 2030.
The following data shows how customers are increasing their investments in hybrid and multi-cloud applications:
Based on survey responses from 510 professionals familiar with cloud technology
Building Blocks of Cloud Native CI/CD
The cloud-native CI/CD pipeline tools work with application software deployed in containers. Kubernetes or Docker Swarm are some container orchestrators that manage these containers. Cloud-based CI/CD pipeline tools, on the opposite hand, are meant for applications deployed during a cloud infrastructure instead of being hosted on local servers or machines.
CI/CD automatically builds and deploys new code to streamline the software release cycle. For cloud-native development, the CI/CD methodology focuses on delivering microservices in a cloud-based infrastructure. This means that instead of delivering a monolithic application, we are deploying microservices that work together to make up a complete application.
Now, let us go through the assorted building blocks of the cloud-native stack that help achieve the above-described goals.
1. Infrastructure
The infrastructure layer provides several cloud resources which are required while developing apps on the cloud. These include the computer, storage, network & operating system which is usually provided by the Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Openstack, and VMware).
2. Provisioning
We have automation tools that help manage images, deploy and provision the infrastructure. Ansible, Chef, and Puppet are the DevOps tools that give the flexibility to manage the configuration & environments. Terraform, and CloudFormation provides workflows to provision the infrastructure. Tools like Twistlock, and Clair provide the capability to scan the container images.
3. Runtime
The runtime provides the environment during which the application runs. It consists of the Container Engines where the application runs together with the associated storage & networking. Containerd and rkt are the widely used container engines. Flannel and OpenContrail provide the mandatory overlay networking for containers to interact with each other. Datera, Portworx, and AppOrbit provide the required storage enabling easy movement of containers across clouds. Orchestration and management tools like Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm manage clusters allowing easy scheduling and orchestration of containers across multiple hosts. AVI and Envoy provide proxy and load balancer services.
4. Application Definition & Development
You can build microservices for applications with multiple languages like Python, Java, Ruby, and NodeJS. Moreover, Habitat & Bitnami provide image management for the appliance to encounter all infrastructure whether they be containers or otherwise. Jenkins, TravisCI, CircleCI, and other build automation servers provide the aptitude to line up cloud native continuous integration and delivery pipelines.
5. Monitoring, Logging & Auditing
One of the key features of managing cloud-native infrastructure is the power to look at and audit the applications and underlying infrastructure. All modern monitoring platforms like Datadog, Newrelic, and AppDynamic support monitoring of containers and microservices. Splunk, Elasticsearch & Fluentd help in log aggregation, while Open Tracing and Zipkin help in debugging applications.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Architecture
Advantages with Cloud-Native Architecture
Key Takeaways
Conclusion
Cloud-native applications are often delivered via a DevOps pipeline that features continuous integration and continuous delivery CI/CD pipeline. CI/CD pipeline is important for automating the building, testing, and deployment of cloud-native applications. Cloud-native applications can scale because their functions are broken into microservices that allow individual management. Cloud-native applications have become very important due to the value they bring as they provide the same experience across private, public, and hybrid clouds. To know more about the DevOps QA process, contact QASource now.
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