Building cloud-native applications

Cloud-native applications are specifically designed and implemented to operate in cloud-only environments. The nature of the application, infrastructure requirements, and data volumes can significantly influence the decision to use the cloud. Smaller organizations and startups often use the cloud for all their infrastructure and software/applications needs. Many such organizations also offer their products on a subscription-based licensing model to their customers (SaaS model).

Applications having wide variability in their usage patterns are great candidates for the cloud. The infrastructure costs in such cases can be reduced significantly by scaling up resources to match the increased demand, and scaling down subsequently to serve lighter loads. Similarly, it is common to scale up for a specific task, such as training a machine learning model (at certain intervals) instead of maintaining high capacity infrastructure, continuously. Specialized workloads requiring high memory, short bursts of high-compute server usage, GPUs, and so on, can leverage the ability to provision resources on demand (as per the requirements). For example, running large-scale deep learning workloads typically require GPU-based instances for quicker turnaround times. These server instances can be spun up and used, only when they are actually required.

Both streaming applications with incoming data at very high velocities and batch systems with very high data volumes, can benefit from easy availability and scalability of cloud resources. Additionally, applications using unstructured data such as vast document corpuses, image repositories, and audio and video libraries, can leverage the storage and processing power available on-tap in the cloud. The variety and number of ready-to-use cloud services that are available (via simple APIs) to developers, allows them to build applications without having to worry about the complexities of the underlying service. 

We would like to conclude our introduction to cloud computing by getting you started on AWS, right away. The next section will help you set up your AWS account and familiarize you with the AWS management console.