BrainBlog for WSO2 by Jason English, Principal Analyst, Intellyx
No two application design approaches appear more disparate than no-code and cloud-native development.
No-code solutions were generally designed to allow non-technical businesspeople, or ‘citizen developers’ to glide solo without the need for IT department help, replacing manual processes and drafting software-like functionality with drag-and-drop ease of use—and of course—no coding.
Conversely, the cloud-native engineering movement is usually on the other end of the velocity spectrum, beyond low-code and even pro-code—in a heady airspace where engineers must specify Infrastructure-as-Code and set up YAML files to declare Kubernetes orchestration in a cloud service.
Wait—maybe there’s much more to this story than saying no-code is only a fit for simpler delivery environments, or that cloud-native is inherently better or faster in some way.
The cloud-native ephemerality paradox
“Cloud-native computing means far more than simply using Kubernetes in a public cloud. Referring to it as a new paradigm is no exaggeration, as it requires different ways of thinking about the entire software landscape.”—Jason Bloomberg, President & Principal Analyst, Intellyx LLC, “Rethink the Modern Application: How to Think Like a Cloud-Native Engineer”
In order to compose cloud-native applications that can truly scale on demand to meet customer needs, there’s a complex coordinated dance of automated environments and API calls that has to happen behind the scenes. Containers, functions and temporary data stores flashing into existence and collapsing nearly as fast.
The average lifespan of a container today is only 5 minutes—and skewing that average are a few uncharacteristically long-running instances hiding the fact that many more containers disappear in seconds…
