An Introduction to the Cloud-Native App Lifecycle

This first chapter is about introducing the basic concepts of cloud-native development and the lifecycle involved. You will learn the basic concepts behind building and deploying applications on any cloud platform, including adopting a microservices architecture, containerization, and orchestration.

To enable developers to build applications with more flexibility and more portability compared to applications hosted on traditional servers or virtual machines (VMs), we will learn how to use containers and serverless architecture.

To accelerate the product development process and improve the quality of our apps, we will follow the Twelve-Factor Application design principles and methodology. As projects grow, code bases also become more complex, and it is strongly recommended that you test new versions of software.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• An introduction to cloud-native applications
• Application design
• Application lifecycles
• The Twelve-Factor Application design methodology
• Serverless applications of cloud-native applications