Disclaimer: This blog content has been taken from my latest book:
“Cloud Native Microservices with Spring and Kubernetes”
A quick overview of 12 Factor Apps and newly added 3 factors for standard of cloud Native Application
One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys
Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
Store config in the environment
Treat backing services as attached resources
Strictly separate build and run stages
Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
Export services via port binding
Scale out via the process model
Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible
Treat logs as event streams
Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes
New 3 more factors for modern applications:
- API First
- Telemetry
- Security , Authentication and Authorization (A&A)
13. API First
API first suggests to start API designing first and expose all cloud native micro-services thru REST API endpoints. Try to follow best REST API practices, set API contract like request, response payload, API name, security and arguments. In modern applications cloud native apps are exposed and integrated thru APIs. Use API Gateways to follow these standards. I like Spring Cloud Gateway open-source to implement code centric API standards, its faster, lightweight and easily configurable by the developers.
14. Telemetry
Add advance feature of monitor hundreds and thousands of micro-services apps, containers, environment. It’s very important to monitor logging, disk space usage, memory consumption, performance, and so on. Based on these telemetry data platform can scale, self-heal and manage alerts for end users and platform operators. Analytics can be done using Machine learning and based on that any organization can derive to future business strategy!
15. Security , Authentication and Authorization (A&A)
Security of microservice cloud native application is Super Important. Security is a major concern in modern era, where hackers are really smart to steal confidential and critical information. Make sure almost all security policies are in place at H/W, N/W and S/W. These are very high level important security measure.
- DOS, DDOS protection
- API should be secured using A&A – API token, RBAC, OAuth
- Web content should be exposed externally on HTTPS
- Network should have firewall protection
- API request/response payloads should be encrypted
- Firewall and router level security should be in place
- Database protection
- MFA (Mutii-factor authentication)
Modern Applications with Cloudification Zone 