Challenges in cloud development

While developing a cloud-native application we are facing so many problems at the time of development but what if list out some of the scenarios before actually starting development, let discuss what will be the challenges

·       Availability

·       Performance & Scalability

·       Data Management

·       Design & Implementation

·       Messaging

·       Monitoring

·       Security

·       Recover from Failures

Let's talk a little bit more about the above challenges

Availability

Availability is the proportion of time that the system is functional and working, usually measured as a percentage of uptime. It can be affected by system errors, infrastructure problems, malicious attacks, and system load. Cloud applications typically provide users with a service level agreement (SLA), so applications must be designed to maximize availability.

Performance & Scalability

Performance is an indication of the responsiveness of a system to execute any action within a given time interval, while scalability is the ability of a system either to handle increases in load without impact on performance or for the available resources to be readily increased. Cloud applications typically encounter variable workloads and peaks inactivity. Predicting these, especially in a multitenant scenario, is almost impossible. Instead, applications should be able to scale out within limits to meet peaks in demand and scale in when demand decreases. Scalability concerns not just compute instances, but other elements such as data storage, messaging infrastructure, and more.

Data Management

Data management is the key element of cloud applications and influences most of the quality attributes. Data is typically hosted in different locations and across multiple servers for reasons such as performance, scalability, or availability, and this can present a range of challenges. For example, data consistency must be maintained, and data will typically need to be synchronized across different locations.

Design & Implementation

Good design encompasses factors such as consistency and coherence in component design and deployment, maintainability to simplify administration and development, and reusability to allow components and subsystems to be used in other applications and in other scenarios. Decisions made during the design and implementation phase have a huge impact on the quality and the total cost of ownership of cloud-hosted applications and services.

Messaging

The distributed nature of cloud applications requires a messaging infrastructure that connects the components and services, ideally in a loosely coupled manner in order to maximize scalability. Asynchronous messaging is widely used and provides many benefits, but also brings challenges such as the ordering of messages, poison message management, idempotency, and more.

Monitoring

Cloud applications run in a remote data center where you do not have full control of the infrastructure or, in some cases, the operating system. This can make management and monitoring more difficult than an on-premises deployment. Applications must expose runtime information that administrators and operators can use to manage and monitor the system, as well as support changing business requirements and customization without requiring the application to be stopped or redeployed

Security

Security provides confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances against malicious attacks on information systems (and safety assurances for attacks on operational technology systems). Losing these assurances can negatively impact your business operations and revenue, as well as your organization’s reputation in the marketplace. Maintaining security requires following well-established practices (security hygiene) and being vigilant to detect and rapidly remediate vulnerabilities and active attacks.

Recover from Failures

Resiliency is the ability of a system to gracefully handle and recover from failures. The nature of cloud hosting, where applications are often multitenant, use shared platform services, compete for resources and bandwidth, communicate over the Internet, and run on commodity hardware means there is an increased likelihood that both transient and more permanent faults will arise. Detecting failures, and recovering quickly and efficiently, is necessary to maintain resiliency.

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Amol Gunjal

.NET | Web API | ASM | Cloud | DevOps | Azure (PAAS)