Developers of cloud-native applications are at the heart of a process of radical transformation shaking up the business world. Using DevOps and SRE methodologies, modern development teams are bringing a level of agility to the game that is all about freeing enterprises from the shackles of the old, pre-cloud days and letting them take advantage of new opportunities at light speed.
But the developer community has a problem. The process of developing and delivering cloud-native applications in a DevOps paradigm demands the right connectivity to back it up, and traditional networks aren’t doing the job. Cloud-native developers need cloud-native networking—network solutions that work in the same frictionless and agile way they do—solutions that put the application first and replace traditional manual network configuration with connectivity-as-code.
To play their part, developers need application-friendly connectivity that is designed for applications composed of microservices and APIs which span many edges, clouds and service meshes. A new software only, cloud-native approach to connectivity is required to address this and other challenges such as security, performance and operational support at scale.
There are four things developers shouldn’t take for granted in a network solution: agility, security, simplicity and performance.
Agility
What application developers need is a cloud-native, agile, on-demand alternative to traditional networking—something that delivers the speed to market that they need, and safeguards their profitability. With a model such as application-specific networking in network-as-a-service models, application development teams can create on-demand connectivity across edge, cloud and service mesh environments to support their apps wherever their apps travel.
Security
App developers require zero-trust software defined perimeter security that meets and exceeds even the most stringent compliance standards, and can be controlled as code by their DevOps tools and applications.
Simplicity
New networking approaches that puts the application in contol can abstract the developer and DevOps teams from the complexity of differences between underlying networks, clouds or service meshes.
Cost-Effective Performance
Application-controlled network-as-a-service models can deliver operational cost reduction over traditional MPLS and VPN solutions, while boosting throughput and performance compared with legacy alternatives.
Conclusion
Developers deserve better networking. It’s time for them to say goodbye to the old way of doing things and move on from restrictive legacy solutions with their lack of scalability, absence of agility, poor security and unpredictable overheads.
— Galeal Zino
