Cloud Native Computing: What does it mean, and is your app Cloud Native?

There is a growing choice of Cloud Platforms available today - these provide services and tooling for developers to deploy applications to the Cloud. The Cloud has brought considerations such as elastic scalability and distributed computing to the forefront of modern application architectures. Over time, a new type of application has now emerged, known as the Cloud Native Application. Such an application is said to be purpose-built for deployment on the Cloud. This has even led to a new paradigm known as Cloud Native Computing. In practice though, it is easy to be confused or unclear as to what Cloud Native means. How does a Cloud Native approach change the way in which developers code applications? How does this influence the architecture of an application? Does it force you to use a certain set of technologies such as Containers? Or, does it mean that an application that simply runs and scales on a distributed Cloud Platform is somehow considered to be running natively on the Cloud? Cloud Native Computing impacts on the answers to each of these questions, and applications running on the Cloud may not be considered Cloud Native at all.

In this talk, the meaning of Cloud Native will be explored and clarified. With practical examples where appropriate, the concepts behind a Cloud Native Application will be demonstrated. These examples will not only touch on the common terms and phrases around Cloud Native Computing such as DevOps, Microservices, The 12-Factor App methodology, but also on the technologies that have driven the creation this new paradigm, such as Cloud Foundry, Docker, and Kubernetes. How these technologies are used to deploy and scale Cloud Native Applications on "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) Cloud Platforms will also be presented.

At the conclusion, what is considered a Cloud Native Application and why should be clear - the attributes and typical architecture of such an application, as well as how technologies and PaaS services can be used to drive these applications on the cloud.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Michael J. O'Sullivan is a Staff Software Engineer working in the IBM Hybrid Cloud Organisation, with the IBM Cloud division in Cork since 2015. His current product assignment is IBM API Connect, part of the IBM Hybrid Cloud Integration portfolio. Michael has worked on Development, Delivery Pipeline/Deployment Automation, and Performance Testing teams for various IBM Cloud Platform services, which has provided daily experience of customer deployments and operations with these services, such as the IBM Cloud Containers Service for both Docker and Kubernetes, and the IBM Cloud Logging and Metrics Services. Michael has also worked on deployment of these services to OpenStack and VMware platforms. In 2018, Michael received Cloud Foundry Developer Certification. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from University College Cork (2012 - 2015), where, under the supervision of Dr. Dan Grigoras, engaged in research of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) - specifically, studying and implementing solutions for delivering seamless user experiences of MCC applications and services. Prior to this, Michael graduated with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Computer Science from University College Cork in 2012. Outside of work, Michael is the current Chairman of the CoderDojo that runs every Saturday at IBM Cork, and has a great passion for all-things aviation.