12. Demystifying the Cloud-Native Computing Paradigm

Undoubtedly, the cloud journey is on the fast track. There are many powerful technologies and tools to simplify and speed up cloud processes and operations. Pioneering algorithms are being unearthed to advance the cloud movement. Enabling frameworks, integrated platforms, knowledge guides, design patterns, evaluation metrics, best practices, a growing array of tools and other enablers from product, platform, and tool vendors and service organizations are collectively making the cloud paradigm mesmerizing. It all started with server virtualization. Then came a number of automated tools to accelerate and augment IT server operations. Thereby every physical server machine gets segmented into a few logical/virtual machines (VMs). With such segmentation, the IT resource utilization efficiency has gone up significantly. Further on, provisioning and using coarse-grained IT resources such as virtual machines became easier and faster. That is, the on-demand computing method emerged and evolved quietly. In other words, the computing requirements of individuals and industries are getting fulfilled rapidly through VMs. Typically provisioning and bringing VMs into real action consumes a few minutes. But doing so with physical machines takes a few hours. The IT costs came down sharply with the virtualization concept. In a nutshell, the much-needed IT agility, affordability and adaptivity requirements are being neatly guaranteed through the virtualization. There are Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) (alternatively referred to as hypervisors) to realize the distinct benefits of virtualization.