What does Cloud Native Have to do with Microservices?

The Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) defines cloud native as a collection of technologies that are used to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic cloud environments. These technologies include containers, services meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs. A move to the cloud is rarely just a change of platform. To take full advantage of all that the cloud has to offer, it is best to break large monolithic applications into a series of self-contained microservices.

To learn more about microservices, see out Microservices Training Courses.

Why Learn About Containers?

Containers solve the reliability problems that arise when software moves from one computing environment to another. This could be when moving applications from a developer’s laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment to production, or even when moving apps from on on-premise data venter to virtual machines in a public or private cloud. Containers do this by encapsulating the application code along with its dependencies, libraries, other binaries, and all configuration files needed to run it in one package. Containerizing the app and its dependencies means that differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure are abstracted away. Containers provide an excellent technology to implement microservices.

While containers have been a part of Linux for a long time, it was only when Docker exploded on the scene in 2013 that their usage has swept the IT landscape. These days there are plenty of competitors to Docker, including containerd, CRI-O, and podman. In addition to the container runtimes, there are a lot of options when it comes to container orchestration, like Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, Apache Mesos, and the wildly popular Kubernetes.

To learn more about Kubernetes, see our Kubernetes Training Courses.