Cloud-Native Application Development on AWS

While we do suggest best practices for making an engagement successful, a big part of our business is listening in partnership. “What do you need or what’s outside your core competencies? How do you do your best work? Where do you think we can make the biggest impact?” These are the sorts of questions we’ll ask at the outset to develop the right framework for your project and your teams. We have several engagement models which are highly flexible and adaptable, so we can find a way of working that best matches your needs and goals.

While there’s no such thing as “the right stack,” there are technologies that may be better suited to your AWS back-end or design choices that can help you accelerate with what you’re already using. Web development moves fast, adopting what’s new often has risks and tradeoffs, and endless refactoring won’t help you execute on objectives—but we can develop a strategy that correctly weighs each of these concerns so that you reach your performance aims while minimizing disruption to your development progress.

You should consider transitioning when maintaining current systems hinders your scalability, agility, or introduces significant operational costs—and ideally start planning a transition prior to one of these becoming detrimental to your business. To transition well, assess and prioritize your technical debt. For most situations, we recommend a phased transition:

1) Start with non-critical services to minimize risk.

2) When possible, use a microservices architecture and allow for incremental migration.

3) Continuously integrate and deploy to test regularly.

4) Keep teams informed and review regularly to ensure your migration pace aligns with feature delivery demands.

It lets you expedite development and enhance your application quality. A cloud-native approach allows for rapid adaptability of your applications by letting your release cadence to be as fast as you want without creating disruption for users. So cloud-native application development lets you concentrate on business value, not infrastructure setup. It’s also more cost efficient as you're billed only for the actual resources used, adjusting for demand spikes without maintaining idle resources.

To secure your application, consider doing the following:

1) Implement IAM policies to control user and system access.

2) Regularly update and patch all components.

3) If you’re using containers, employ security practices like image scanning.

4) Use end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest.

5) Apply a zero-trust network model, ensuring every access request is validated, and use VPCs to segment the sensitive parts of your application appropriately.

6) Set up monitoring and logging for real-time threat detection.

7) Establish incident response protocols. All of these are achievable with AWS native services but may require some additional thought when architecting an application.

This is a common misconception that undersells the value and the strategic thinking involved in developing in a truly cloud-native way. In reality, a cloud-native approach is holistic, encompassing architecture, design, and even culture shifts. First, understand that cloud-native isn't merely a lift-and-shift of existing applications to the cloud. It’s about adopting native services to transform performance and cost, like serverless, and correctly structuring for microservices, containerization, and continuous delivery practices. And because it emphasizes scalability, resilience, and rapid iteration, you may also need to transition your development culture to make the most of your new cloud-native capabilities.