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Perhaps you’ve heard your colleagues discussing cloud-native architecture, and you’ve wondered what the term means. In this post, we answer the following questions: What is cloud-native architecture, and why does it matter for your chip design and verification work?

Cloud-native computing is an approach in software that allows organizations to create scalable applications. These applications run in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Containers, immutable infrastructure, microservices, service meshes, and declarative APIs all demonstrate cloud-native approaches. Cloud-native architecture combines methodologies from cloud services, DevOps practices, and software development principles. The approach abstracts IT layers from networking, servers, data centers, operating systems, and firewalls. Applications built on cloud-native architecture deliver scale and performance while offering faster time to market.

Foundation of Cloud-Native Architecture

Cloud-native architecture rests on six foundational elements:

1. Cloud infrastructure. Cloud-native architecture takes full advantage of cloud computing infrastructure and managed services to thrive in a dynamic, virtualized environment. With automation, the underlying infrastructure becomes disposable. Within minutes, it can be provisioned, resized, scaled, or destroyed on demand.

2. Microservices. Cloud-native systems use microservices, a popular architecture for building modern apps. These services are small and independent, interacting through a shared fabric. They share the following features:

• Implementation of a specific element within a broader domain
• Independent development and deployment
• Self-contained storage technology, dependencies, and programming platform
• Autonomy over their processes
• Interactions through HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, WebSockets, or AMQP

3. Modern design. The 12-factor application is a widely accepted modern design method. Developers follow these principles and practices to create optimized applications for cloud environments. They pay attention to portability across different platforms and automation. Many practitioners consider 12-factor an excellent foundation for building cloud-native apps. With these principles, systems can scale and deploy efficiently while adding new features to quickly react to the market.

4. Containers. Containers offer portability and consistency across environments. It’s simple to containerize a microservice. Container images combine code, dependencies, and runtime into one package. The images go in a container registry, which acts as a library or repository. Registries can live on your development computer, your data center, or the cloud.

5. Backing services. Cloud-native systems depend upon many ancillary resources known as backing services. These resources include security services, analytics, distributed caching, message brokers, relational and document databases, streaming and storage services, and monitoring.

6. Automation. You can automate platform deployment and application provisioning with infrastructure as code. Software engineering practices like testing and versioning are applied to DevOps. Deployments and infrastructure are automated, consistent, and repeatable.