How To

Modern Application Development: The Smart Dev's Guide

Applications across the IT industry are undergoing massive changes in design philosophy. Containerization and the shift to microservice-based architecture mark a turning point in modern application development, to say nothing of the widespread adoption of the cloud. Smart developers can pave the way to a bright cloud-centric future by adopting new development methods built upon layers of simplicity.

Key Takeaways:

Modern development practices facilitate innovation, speed, and control in an IT landscape marked by overwhelming amounts of apps and data.
With the rapid growth of cloud computing technology, modern apps should be cloud-native and able to capitalize most effectively on cloud-based resources.
Use cases that highlight the value of modern cloud-native apps include situations that call for elasticity, automation, and flexibility.

Understanding Modern Application Development

To keep up with growing demands, companies must implement practices for designing, building, and managing applications that yield the most rapid innovation. The desired result of this modern approach is to build apps that are more reliable, scalable, and secure.

Achieving a faster time to market is increasingly essential in an IT environment where each application has countless competitors. At the same time, consumers demand quality as well as quantity because the standards have been set so high time and again.

Modern development practices make it possible to meet consumer demands while also benefiting businesses in key ways. The benefits of embracing this development philosophy include greater cost-efficiency and new remote development capabilities.

Modern application development can improve the developer experience by using serverless technologies to simplify the process, while also improving the customer experience by ensuring the delivery of better applications.

Cloud-native modern applications

Cloud-native applications are practically synonymous with the idea of modern applications in today’s IT landscape. With the ever-more widespread adoption of and migration to the cloud, it stands to reason that the most cutting-edge apps are those designed with the cloud in mind.

A cloud-native application packages its code as containers and exists on an architecture of microservices. These applications also tend to be deployable across elastic cloud infrastructure and contain some degree of automation in their functionality.

According to research from MarketsandMarkets, the value of the global cloud-native applications market is an estimated $5.9 billion in 2023. This value is projected to grow to approximately $17 billion by 2028 at a compound annual growth rate of 23.7%.

As the adoption of the cloud becomes more widespread and organizations opt for cloud-native methodologies that better leverage the capabilities of the cloud, the definition of modern application development will overlap more and more with cloud-native development.

Modern development shares another similarity to cloud-native development in that they both prioritize DevOps support as well as built-in monitoring capabilities. In line with the principles of DevOps, modern cloud-native development integrates automation as a tool to improve and shorten the development cycle.

Modern cloud-native development scenarios

Cloud-native development naturally brings the flexibility and scalability of the cloud platform into the fold. This leads to use-case scenarios in which modern application development can effectively handle spikes in user demand.

Many businesses experience seasonal demand periods or other spikes in traffic. An elastic application developed with cloud-native functionality can provision new resources to meet these demands and then downsize appropriately to maintain cost efficiency.

Automated chatbots represent another modern cloud-native development scenario, especially as artificial intelligence and machine learning grow in sophistication. The accessibility of cloud resources makes it easier than ever to create reactive conversational interfaces that can handle all but the most complicated of customer queries.

Organizations using cloud-native methodologies in DevOps scenarios can implement powerful security measures alongside Kubernetes on their cloud platform of choice. DevOps in the cloud can also accommodate machine learning and AI thanks to the quantity of compute resources available in the cloud to power retraining programs.

A particularly common use case that demonstrates the value of modern cloud-native applications is when organizations need on-the-fly scalability to accommodate fast-changing demands and cost thresholds. Cloud-native apps built with modern application development techniques are highly scalable and elastic, making it possible to provision compute capacity as necessary in any scenario.

Modern application development with the right cloud platform

In a time when cloud-native applications are the most modern of applications, smart devs stand to benefit from using the tools and techniques at their disposal to facilitate the most efficient cloud-native development. This is possible and often more attainable on a cloud platform that accommodates the cloud-native apps of today and tomorrow, as well as other modern development practices.

Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) is the solution for developers looking for support for all workloads and use cases across both private and public clouds. With AHV Virtualization on NCP, developers can deliver and manage an end-to-end, production-ready Kubernetes environment with push-button simplicity, all in a secure development lifecycle.

Modern application development harnesses the power of the cloud for greater efficiency. However, the distributed and siloed nature of multicloud environments brings complexity to IT networks. NCP, along with other tools and infrastructure elements in the Nutanix ecosystem, act to break down those silos so that developers can focus on innovation in an environment built for user simplicity.

Learn more about why businesses need cloud-native applications and how modern application development can help optimize applications in the cloud.

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