Digital transformation is gaining ground all over the world. But is it limited to maintaining an online presence? Of course, not. It covers cloud-based applications as well, which have become the ultimate game-changer in today’s world. By allowing businesses to leverage the maximum potential of cloud computing, cloud native apps offer multiple benefits, like scalability, elasticity, and agility. In this article, we will dig deeper into cloud native app development, discussing every aspect of this development practice.        

Introduction to Cloud-Native Software

A cloud-native application is an app developed using microservices, which is exactly the opposite technique of monolithic application development. Rather than using a single monolithic structure that includes all the features and functionalities, cloud native developers can break them down into smaller microservices. Apps built using microservices are pieced together like Lego blocks with minimal custom coding, resulting in quicker and more reliable development. 

Above all, with a cloud native architecture at your disposal, you can add new services without excessive integration testing. And we think these benefits are the reason the cloud native application market size worldwide is expected to touch the USD 30.24 billion mark by 2030, growing from USD 7.06 billion in 2023.      

Legacy Systems vs. Cloud-Native Architecture

Most legacy apps can operate on the cloud, but they can’t benefit from the scalability and portability that come with cloud-native architecture. However, legacy systems can still take advantage by running on cloud platforms. All one needs to do is use APIs or build extensions on top of them with the help of microservices.   

Take, for instance, you can replace “green screens” from the mainframe days with GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces). The only thing you need to do is expose input and output fields selectively through APIs that map to GUI-powered primitives. Some legacy apps can be entirely enclosed in containers to benefit from cloud scalability and portability without needing any code changes.    

Also, when legacy systems fail to update past server-focused architecture, there is a higher scope for bottlenecks, inefficiency, and mismanaged systems. On the other hand, cloud-native applications are highly adaptable solutions that provide freedom and flexibility to developers and users. 

Why Cloud-Native Applications are Useful in 2025

Cloud-native applications are useful because they make the most of processes and platforms that originated from the cloud. They are extremely scalable, easy to change, and effortless to connect to cloud services to increase capabilities without extensive coding.  

Developers nowadays design, create, and offer cloud native apps, keeping the scalability of the cloud in mind. Cloud native applications often use one or multiple architectures that were born in the cloud.     

To maximize the benefits of cloud native development, you need to think outside the box about how you create applications. And traditional approaches, with their long list of specifications, need to pave the path for iterative processes that offer features as quickly as services.  

How to Build a Cloud-Native App (Step-by-Step)

Building a cloud-native application involves designing and developing your app to fully leverage cloud computing models, particularly scalability, elasticity, resilience, and agility. This typically means adopting microservices, containers, DevOps practices, and cloud infrastructure.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to building a cloud-native application:

Step 1: Working Together Through DevOps 

The journey starts with the people in your company and the automation processes that help them work together. So, make sure to make your development team and operations team work in tandem with a shared objective and ensure getting continuous feedback via DevOps.   

Step 2: Leveraging Containers 

Make use of containers because they support these collaboration practices by providing a suitable app deployment unit and self-contained execution environment. By leveraging DevOps and containers, software developers can easily release and update applications as a collection of smaller services, such as microservices, rather than waiting for a single large release.   

Step 3: Managing Communication via Service Mesh Layer

Focus on the architecture’s modularity, loose coupling, and the autonomy of its services when working on cloud native development. Every microservice adopts an organizational capability, operates in its own process, and interacts through APIs or messaging. This interaction can be handled via a service mesh layer, which is an infrastructure layer for microservice apps that manages inter-service communication.  

Step 4: Optimizing Your Existing App

Optimize your legacy apps by taking advantage of a pragmatic, service-based architecture. Keep in mind that you don’t always need to begin with microservices to expedite application delivery as part of cloud native apps. This optimization is backed by CI/CD pipeline, automated deployment operations, and standard development environments.  

Let’s move to explore the benefits of cloud-native app development:

Benefits of Cloud-Native Development

Cloud native development offers a myriad of benefits that improve app performance and organizational operations to a great extent. Here is a list of all the benefits you must take a look at:  

1. Speed & Agility

The implementation of DevOps practices in cloud-native development supports its iteration and deployment features. With such a faster development cycle, companies can easily introduce new features and products to market quickly. This helps in addressing customer needs and competitive pressures rapidly.   

2. Scalability & Flexibility

Cloud-native apps have the tendency to scale resources depending on the changing demands in the market. This enables the optimum performance during peak hours without allocating more computing resources, such as CPU, memory, or storage. Apart from that, this flexibility also assists companies in managing varying workloads efficiently, which minimizes the risk of downtime and enhances user experiences. 

3. Resilience & Availability

Another advantage of cloud-native applications is that they are designed with resilience in mind. This is the reason they have features, such as automatic failover and self-healing capabilities. These apps remain highly available, even when things fail, providing consistent uptime and reliability for users. 

4. Cost-efficiency

Cloud-native app development method improves resource utilization by driving down operational costs of using resources when required. This pay-as-you-go model gives relief to owners from the additional expense of on-premises infrastructure. This way, companies can assign budgets more efficiently while taking advantage of the cutting-edge technology advancements.   

By benefiting from all these pros of cloud-native app development, businesses can accomplish a more agile, flexible, resilient, and cost-effective infrastructure that can stand the test of time.

Best Practices for Cloud-Native Development

Cloud-native development is not just about using containers or Kubernetes, but about embracing principles that allow your applications to be scalable, resilient, manageable, and observable in a dynamic cloud environment.

Here are the best practices to follow when developing cloud-native applications:

1. Make Use of Containers

Using this container technology enables a program and its other dependencies to be packed into a single unit, which is known as a container. And all the containers can be configured with the help of particular CPU and RAM limits. This helps in preventing resource overconsumption on a host and enhances the program’s stability and predictability.   

2. Use Microservice Architecture

Microservice architecture is used to carry out a few specific tasks, which assist in interacting with other microservices using well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This tried and tested method offers a bunch of advantages, including flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance. Also, every microservice can be operated in an independent manner, making it easy to scale, develop, deploy, and manage efficiently and effectively.   

3. Take Ownership of Products

Follow the “Products Not Projects” approach from AWS. Give your team full control of the lifecycle of the application. It is the responsibility of your team now to be more focused on achieving success. This boosts the quality of the product on which they are working. 

4. Automate the Release Pipelines

The cloud-native development technology includes a CI/CD pipeline, where CI (Continuous Integration) refers to a process of regularly incorporating the code changes from various developers into a shared repository. Next, by automatically preparing the changes in the code for deployment to production, continuous delivery (CD) expands on continuous integration (CI). Thus, it is advisable to make the most of CI/CD to generate the best quality code more frequently and at a faster pace.  

5. Apply IaC (Infrastructure as code)

Writing code to explain and handle all the infrastructure resources is known as IaC or Infrastructure as Code. It makes sense to use IaC to build and rebuild cloud apps and infrastructure without requiring manual labor or specialized scripting.     

Tools and Technologies for Cloud-Native Apps

There are several tools in the market for creating cloud native apps. Here is a list of the most popular ones that will simplify your journey to cloud-native app development for your organization. 

1. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a leading open-source tool that comes in handy for cloud-native computing. It automates the deployment, management, scaling, and tracking of containerized apps. Using this tool, teams can handle containers as separate entities and lower operational costs. Thus, Kubernetes offers a very efficient and scalable platform for deploying and scaling cloud-native applications.  

2. Istio

Istio is the next open-source tool on this list for cloud-native applications that offers an easy method to connect, handle, and secure microservices. With this tool, companies can handle traffic, connect services across various cloud environments, and implement security-related policies. So, if you want to automate service discovery, get in-depth insights into the app architecture, and strengthen app security, Istio is the best choice.   

3. Prometheus

Prometheus is a reliable monitoring tool that helps organizations track the performance and availability of cloud-native applications. The open-source project allows firms to gather real-time metrics from their cloud-native environments and create alerts based on pre-defined parameters. This tool immediately detects anomalies and reports them, and incorporates smoothly with Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies to simplify troubleshooting and root cause analysis.   

4. Helm

Helm is a well-known tool for packaging, deploying, and handling cloud-native applications. The open-source project has powerful tools for chart creation, which is an easy way to describe, install, and upgrade Kubernetes applications. Using this tool, establishments can share and reuse applications across their cloud environments and optimize their deployment processes’ efficiency. 

Key Components of Cloud-Native Architecture

Cloud-native architecture is designed to fully leverage the cloud’s scalability, flexibility, and resilience. It’s a shift from traditional monolithic applications toward a model that emphasizes modularity, automation, and continuous delivery.

Here are the key components of a cloud-native architecture, explained clearly:

1. Microservices Architecture

The Microservices Architecture approach supports breaking down complex applications into tiny, independent services that are easy to manage separately. This method allows organizations to change and update various components of an application without impacting its other parts.  

2. Containers

A container is a virtual software package, comprising everything an app requires to run, like libraries, configuration files, and other software. They are designed to run while being independent from their environment, making sure that apps are consistent across all platforms. 

3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC is the practice of treating infrastructure as a software product, making it easy to scale and automate. This technique involves defining infrastructure, like storage, networking, and virtual machines, as code that can be version-controlled, effortlessly modified, and shared across development teams.    

4. DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Integration

DevOps is a strategy for software development that emphasizes interaction and partnership between development and operations teams. It counts on automation to streamline the whole software development process, right from coding to deployment. Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration are related concepts that help businesses deliver new software versions in a reliable manner and at a faster rate.   

5. Cloud Agnostic

Last but not least, being cloud agnostic means using a standard architecture that can operate on any cloud service provider. It makes sure that organizations are not limited to a specific cloud provider and can move between different providers as and when required.  

Cloud-Native Security Essentials

Before implementing cloud-native security solutions, the development team must get the hang of key elements of cloud-native security, including: 

1. Inventory & Classification: Precise inventory and proper classification of all assets are necessary to make sure that security operations teams can clearly see possible vulnerabilities across the software stack. 
2. Network Security: Analyzing all network traffic flows is essential for ensuring the security of assets and network traffic for a company’s strategy and provisions. The main aim behind doing this is to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of every system and information on the network.  
3. Compliance Management: A large number of systems should be designed to consistently implement mandatory regulations, such as standard configurations, trusted registry usage, and security best practices. 
4. Identity & Access Management (IAM) Security: IAM security is the practice of locking the cloud resources to specific people. This includes activities like privileged monitoring, access governance, and user entity behavior analytics driven by machine learning technology.  
5. Data Security: This is related to the safety and security of stored data, including the classification of data, prevention of data loss, and scanning malware in cloud storage.  

Cost Optimization in Cloud-Native Environments (FinOps)

Cost optimization in cloud-native environments is critical. While cloud offers scalability and agility, it also makes it easy to overspend if resources are not managed wisely. This is where a process backed by multiple techniques comes into the picture:

• Correcting Instances: Check out your compute usage, be it EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), ECS (Elastic Container Service), or RDS (Relational Database Service). Then, downsize instances that are not fully utilized. Make sure to use autoscaling wherever possible to fulfill the demand.  
• Using Spot & Reserved Instances: When it comes to non-critical or flexible workloads, it is advisable to use spot instances. However, for predictable usage, stick to Savings Plans or Reserved Instances that can save up to 70% compute costs. 
• Turning Off Idle Resources: Many development, staging, or QA environments operate around the clock unnecessarily. Therefore, it is a wise idea to schedule them to switch off during off-hours with the help of Lambda or CloudWatch.  
• Optimizing Data Storage: Establish lifecycle policies for S3 buckets to transfer data to inexpensive storage tiers, such as Glacier, and automatically delete outdated backups. 

Case Studies of Cloud-Native Success

Here are real-world case studies that showcase the success of cloud-native adoption, highlighting how leading companies transformed their architectures, improved agility, reduced costs, and scaled effectively by embracing cloud-native principles: 

1. Airbnb

Challenges: Airbnb is the most loved community marketplace that lets house owners and travelers connect with each other to rent spaces across the globe. After operating for a year, they wanted to shift to a reliable cloud provider because they were pretty concerned about peak booking periods and expansion worldwide.  

Cloud-native implementation: Airbnb shifted to a cloud-native architecture powered by Amazon Web Services. This helped them scale their platform quickly and efficiently. They implemented containerization, microservices, and serverless computing to manage increasing traffic and introduce new functionalities promptly.   

Impact: Airbnb accomplished a 300% increase in app performance while achieving a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs with the adoption of cloud-native development. This way, they were able to expand their global presence and introduce new features in a rapid manner.  

2. Netflix

Challenges: Being a major streaming company globally, Netflix experienced issues while delivering optimal quality video content to hundreds of thousands of users globally. They wanted to handle fluctuating demand and ensure low latency, which was quite challenging, especially with legacy systems.  

Cloud-native implementation: Netflix implemented a microservices architecture and used cloud-native technologies, such as AWS, to develop a flexible yet resilient platform for users. Using microservices, they were able to deploy features and updates quickly, enhance fault tolerance, and improve resource utilization. 

Impact: By taking advantage of automation, Netflix attained a 70% reduction in deployment time while a 50% increase in deployment frequency. This assisted them in quicker innovation, better user experience, and efficient management of the boost in traffic. 

Challenges and How to Overcome Them

There is no denying the fact that cloud native service is the topmost choice for modernizing your approach in IT. But it also has certain limitations that might hamper the smooth functioning in some cases.

Here is a list of challenges that come with cloud-native application development:   

1. Cloud-native development makes it difficult to manage distributed systems. 
2. The utilization of microservices makes communication, performance maintenance, and data consistency challenging for orchestration. 
3. Ensuring data privacy, complying with regulations, and managing access controls is tough without robust security measures. 
4. Security concerns also emerge because of various endpoints, resulting in the exposure of a massive attack surface. 

Now, if you are thinking about how to address these issues in cloud-native development, we have some solutions lined up for you: 

Cloud-native solutions for success

To resolve these issues, you can apply the following techniques: 

1. Utilize automation tools and practices for efficiency. 
2. Make sure to handle powerful security and compliance through continuous monitoring, audits, and encryption. 
3. Automating CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure management, and deployment is a great idea as it minimizes the chances of manual errors.  
4. Monitor system performance, identify anomalies, and respond immediately to problems through daily monitoring and observability practices. 

By following the aforementioned practices, you can easily manage cloud-native development while keeping the environment secure and flexible. 

Future Trends in Cloud-Native Development

Cloud-native development is continuously evolving, and the new advancements in this field are redefining how apps are built and deployed. Some popular trends include:  

1. Edge Computing

As the demand for low-latency apps is shooting up, edge computing is appearing to be a significant component of cloud-native development. By processing data closer to the source, it minimizes latency and bandwidth consumption, making it suitable for IoT and real-time applications. Also, incorporating edge computing with cloud-native architecture enables more distributed, efficient, and resilient systems.    

2. AI & ML Integration

AI and ML are becoming a crucial part of cloud-native development. The main benefit of these technologies is that they allow predictive analytics, smarter automation, and more personalized user experiences. Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into cloud-native applications opens room for real-time data processing, quick decision-making, and fresh innovation at scale.

3. Zero Trust Security

In a zero-trust model, no service or user is trusted by default. Each request must be verified. Cloud-native apps now use identity-based access, encryption, and policy enforcement everywhere. This approach reduces risk, especially in multi-cloud and microservices environments. In the time to come, zero trust will become standard in modern architecture.

4. GitOps & Automated Deployments

GitOps is changing how teams manage infrastructure and deployments. All configurations stay in Git, making changes easy to track and roll back. Automation tools like ArgoCD or Flux watch Git and update systems automatically. This reduces human error and increases reliability. Developers can ship features faster and more safely. GitOps also brings better collaboration between dev and ops teams.

5. Serverless Evolution

Serverless computing is growing continuously with new advancements in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS). These technologies are playing a key role in facilitating the development process and lowering the operational cost of applications. 

The proper utilization of these trends will shape the future of cloud-native development. They will empower organizations to create more agile, flexible, and innovative applications that can fulfill the dynamic needs of the market. 

How InnovationM can Help You Get Started with Cloud-Native Adoption?

InnovationM is a leading cloud-native app development company that serves multiple industries, including telecom, banking, and healthcare. With cloud native applications at the center of our business strategy, we encourage you to invest in your processes, infrastructure, and architecture to compete in a modern yet dynamic market. When you build your app with InnovationM, you will get access to cutting-edge solutions that will offer secure communication links between applications and services, irrespective of how or where they exist. It means that legacy apps can also continue running independently in their actual environment while being connected to the new apps you create and deploy down the line.    

We strongly believe cloud native applications are the future, and every business should invest in them. In fact, Gartner analysts also believe that over 85% of companies will adopt a cloud-first principle by 2025, and they won’t be able to completely execute their digital strategies without taking advantage of cloud-native architecture and technologies. Not just that! By 2025, Gartner predicts that more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms.   

Conclusion 

Cloud Native is a method to develop and operate apps that reap the benefits of the cloud computing delivery model. Breaking down apps into smaller components makes it quite easy to scale, develop, and deploy applications. Key components of cloud native include microservices, containers, orchestration, and APIs, and multiple well-known tools are available to develop cloud-native applications. So, if you are willing to get started with your cloud native project, book a consultation call with mobile app experts at InnovationM .