Top 10: Cloud Native Frameworks
The telecommunications industry is starting to embrace more cloud-native operational support systems, so that communications service providers (CSPs) can keep pace with today’s fast-changing technology landscape.
Cloud native is the software approach of building, deploying, and managing modern applications in cloud computing environments. With cloud adoption growing, businesses are now turning more towards these frameworks in order to optimise their operations and enhance their services moving forward.
Businesses are also using cloud native frameworks for a variety of reasons, including to improve cost-effectiveness, scalability, reliability, automation and to boost efficiency.
Mobile Magazine therefore looks at some of the cloud native frameworks that businesses use to build, run and deploy applications in any environment.
10. Helidon
Helidon is a collection of Java libraries for writing microservices that run on a fast web core. Powered by Java virtual threads, it is a cloud native ecosystem that has what users need to write cloud-ready applications that can be integrated with Opentelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger/Zipkin and Kubernetes.
Its libraries interoperate with popular tools from the cloud-native space so there is no need for any specific tooling or deployment model. Likewise, Helidon WebServer provides a modern functional programming model and offers a simple-to-use and fast foundation for microservices.
9. Kalix
Kalix is a fully managed cloud platform for building and running event-driven applications that scale from zero to infinity. It is a platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build and deploy cloud-native microservices and APIs.
- Domain-driven design to help architects simplify domain modelling and handle business logic complexity
- Built on Akka (see entry below) to drive creation of reactive, event-driven applications that are high performance, resilient and scalable
- Infrastructure inferred from code that is auto-generated
With Kalix, organisations can achieve high velocity while operating applications at the lowest possible cost. It is designed to make cloud native application architecture easy, accelerate time-to-business value and adapt to evolving business needs.
8. Akka
Akka is a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed and resilient message-driven applications. The framework enables users to focus on meeting business needs instead of writing low-level code to provide reliable behaviour, fault tolerance and high performance.
- Multi-threaded behaviour — without the use of low-level concurrency constructs like atomics or locks; relieving users from thinking about memory visibility issues.
- Transparent remote communication between systems and their components — relieving users from writing and maintaining difficult networking code.
- Clustered, high-availability, elastic architecture, that scales on demand — enabling users to deliver a truly reactive system.
Lightbend, the company behind Akka, is used by development teams to build the most demanding cloud native application environments that can be globally distributed.
7. Spring Cloud
Spring Cloud is a popular framework that provides tools for building and deploying microservices on cloud platforms. It integrates with Spring Boot and offers features like service discovery, distributed configuration, and circuit breakers.
The offering handles microservice-specific challenges such as configuration management, service discovery, and load balancing. Likewise, the Spring Cloud Configuration is designed to offer integration with version control systems like Git to help you keep user configurations safe.
6. Dropwizard
Used for developing high-performance RESTful web services, Dropwizard is a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance web services. It pulls together stable and mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a simple and light-weight package that lets developers focus on getting things done.
Likewise, Dropwizard is able to offer support for sophisticated configuration, application metrics, logging and operational tools to allow development teams to ship a production-quality web service in the shortest time.
5. MicroProfile
MicroProfile is an open forum to optimise Enterprise Java for a microservices architecture by innovating across multiple implementations and collaborating on common areas of interest with a goal of standardisation. Its latest iteration, MicroProfile 7.0, is a major release that specifies Jakarta EE 10 Core Profile as a dependency to simplify integration.
The release also includes updates to several specifications, and allows certification on Java SE 11 and higher. Likewise, the MicroProfile Starter helps developers start their microservices development journey.
4. Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source technology that helps automate containerised application deployment, scalability and maintenance. Also known as K8s, it is an open-source system designed for automating deployment and scaling, grouping containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.
The framework builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at tech giant Google, in addition to the best-in-class ideas and practices from across the cloud community.
3. Vert.x
Vert.x is a toolkit that supports cloud-native development, used for building reactive applications on the JVM using an asynchronous and non-blocking execution model. It provides modern reactive client stacks for implementing web APIs, event streams, and databases.
The framework helps users with a comprehensive end-to-end reactive client stack for modern applications, including for Web APIs, databases, messaging, event streams and the cloud. It is also a polyglot event-driven application framework that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
2. Quarkus
Quarkus was created to enable Java developers to create applications for a modern cloud-native world. As a Kubernetes-native Java framework, it is tailored for GraalVM and HotSpot and is crafted from best-of-breed Java libraries and standards.
The goal is to make Java the leading platform in Kubernetes and serverless environments, alongside offering developers a framework to address a wider range of distributed application architectures. Helpful for Java developers working with a cloud-native or reactive approach, the Quarkus model can adapt itself to suit the needs of the developer.
1. Micronaut
Micronaut is a modern full-stack framework for building microservices and serverless applications. It has built-in cloud support and a large ecosystem of integrations. First released in 2018, it is an open-source JVM-based framework designed to avoid reflection to reduce memory consumption and improve start times.
The framework is known for its ability to help developers make the development of integration tests much easier and faster, given that startup time and memory consumption is not tied to the size of an app’s codebase.
A significant difference between Micronaut and other cloud-native frameworks is that Micronaut is able to analyse metadata as soon as the application is completed.
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