Many organizations are thinking about the best ways to bring their trusted, core applications into a modern IT landscape and, one of the most effective ways is a cloud-native IT strategy.

I recently wrote about how a lift and shift approach from Linux to the cloud using Virtual Machines (VMs) can be accomplished without the need to re-architect or change your proven applications. In this article, I’ll help you consider another approach – one that gives you the power to do more with your applications by going cloud native.

This means building, deploying, and running apps that leverage container technology and apply a microservices-oriented architecture to increase the overall agility and maintainability of your applications. This also enables you to introduce continuous integration and delivery to increase the reliability and speed of your development and deployment processes.

Pursuing a cloud-native strategy across your organization can help you harmonize your IT landscape and improve the delivery speed and quality of your applications, while also keeping development aligned with your new apps.

Cloud-native Adabas & Natural

That’s why Adabas & Natural is ready for a cloud-native future, optimized for cloud scale and performance. So, as you develop both near- and long-term plans to run on the cloud, you can trust that Adabas & Natural will be ready for each step of your journey.

Cloud native applications running in containers are hyper-responsive, lightweight, scale faster and offer you multi-cloud portability compared to those running on VMs, let alone traditional monolithic applications on proprietary hardware. You can build and update cloud native Adabas & Natural applications more quickly, leveraging continuous delivery and agile DevOps practices.

You gain the portability to run on any cloud, with computing isolated from the underlying infrastructure. And you can get more value from your unique application capabilities by communicating business logic and data through APIs to new channels, apps and services.

The path to a cloud-native Adabas & Natural architecture includes the following ingredients:
 

• Refactoring your applications toward a microservices-oriented architecture. Microservices are a collection of loosely coupled, independent, deployable services. Each microservice implements a business capability and communicates via HTTP or messaging APIs. Developer teams can deploy, upgrade, scale, and restart each microservice independently, to update live applications more often without interrupting business continuity.
• Running on containers. Containers are lightweight, standalone, executable packages, isolated from the underlying infrastructure. Platforms such as Docker enable your developers to build, deploy and scale services independently, each running in its own container. Kubernetes enables you to automate and orchestrate container operations for breakthroughs in efficiency.
• The culture and tools to fully embrace DevOps in your organization. Agile DevOps processes and CI/CD workflows help your developers develop, test and deploy new capabilities faster, to respond to a changing environment and evolving business needs. NaturalONE, the default development environment for Natural, is an Eclipse®-based Integrated Development Environment that lets your developers integrate with established and open-source DevOps toolchains and processes.
• Unlock the potential of your business logic and data. A cloud-native architecture using containers makes it easy to communicate with other enterprise applications, mobile apps and IoT devices. You can share data seamlessly with analytics or artificial intelligence platforms to generate new insights from your existing business logic.

No journey happens in a single step, and no two journeys are identical. Some businesses find a single-instance VM running on the cloud works well for their current needs. Others are updating their application from a single-instance architecture to a distributed architecture, for greater availability and scalability. Distribution is a key element of cloud native.

We offer the freedom to choose how your Adabas & Natural applications move to the cloud in alignment with your larger IT strategy. From VMs to containers, we’re focused on building Adabas & Natural to meet your evolving cloud needs.

As you look toward a cloud native future, chart your path with confidence that valuable Adabas & Natural applications will stay a core part of your organization.

Watch our cloud webinar series below.