What is Cloud Native software development?
Cloud Native Development is a set of software development methods that benefits from the cloud computing model to create and run applications, managing the complexity of the required architecture, and enabling faster delivery of functionality and updates.
The Cloud Native approach focuses on splitting a large problem into smaller problems and automating each process of the necessary operations. This reduces downtime and creates more productive and efficient systems, while providing more control over the implementation in the different environments of our application. It also offers tools that report on the health of our application, speeding up the debugging process if errors occur, allowing us to solve problems quickly and efficiently, as well as auditing the performance of our software with the different cloud services.
We should also keep in mind that the different cloud service providers consider the security of the application, its data and its low latency accessibility as their top priority. Thus, they provide different tools for developers to guarantee the security of their application, while also being able to deploy it in any country or region in a very simple way.
The Stack Overflow community’s annual 2022 survey on the percentage of professional developers using different cloud platform providers shows their usage trends in the following image:
Figure SEQ Ilustración \* ARABIC 1: Survey 2022 Stack Overflow – Cloud platforms
[https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-platform-prof]
Why do we trust Python for cloud-native development?
Python is one of the most popular languages nowadays. Since its creation, it has maintained a philosophy that emphasises readable, clean and easy-to-learn syntax. Unlike other programming languages that focus more on parentheses, brackets, colons and commas, Python uses line breaks and groups one inside the other with tabs (4 spaces). Hence, developers can focus on spending more time on programming and less time on debugging syntax.
Its interactive mode helps to debug the code directly from the Shell and test each code fragment in a fast and fluid way.
It has a variety of libraries that can be easily extended based on the requirements of your application, which are supported by a large active community that collaborates every day in the creation of these libraries.
It is scalable, thus providing a better structure for maintaining large programmes in a more systematic way.
Python is a very versatile language as it can be used in different fields such as web development, Big Data, Machine Learning, scripting, desktop application development or video games, among others. It should also be noted that it is an open source and multiplatform language (Linux, Windows and Mac).
The TIOBE programming community’s indicator of the popularity of programming languages places Python in first place in July 2022. This index is updated on a monthly basis and shows the number of available courses, suppliers and software engineers trained to carry out developments globally.
Figure 3 TIOBE Index for July 2022
[https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/]
The economic and operational benefits brought to their users seem to be sufficient grounds to consider that the models followed by the market will also follow this line.
While the above-mentioned advantages are strong arguments to promote this architecture, they are also an incentive from an energy point of view.
In recent years (and especially in recent months), social, political and climate concerns have driven companies to search for improvements in the energy efficiency of their operations to alleviate the rising costs caused by energy prices whilst simultaneously encouraging the adoption of sustainable actions aimed at complying with environmental, social and governance policies. In this respect, the EU’s goal is to reduce emissions by at least 55% by 2030.
In this scenario, the EU’s plan for ecological transition is clear. And the use of serverless architectures stand as an ideal lever to achieve it.
The aforementioned operation implies that only processes triggered by specific events are executed. Thus, energy consumption is considerably reduced if compared to a physical server or virtual machine, which must necessarily be kept running 24 hours a day, even if it is not fully exploited. Accordingly, the main public cloud providers offer their customers specific methodologies to build environmentally efficient infrastructures. Also, they have real consumption evaluators that proactively suggest infrastructure changes that will have a lower impact, guaranteeing performance.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that serverless infrastructures will progressively acquire a predominant role in the IT sector, thus making it a more efficient and environmentally conscious sector.
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