1 Introduction
This chapter covers
- Understanding cloud-native application
- Introducing Helidon
- Explaining Helidon flavors
- Discovering which flavor is right for your application
We live in a cloud computing era, and it dictates its own application design requirements. This book is about building cloud native applications.
Applications designed to operate in a cloud environment utilizing all cloud benefits are called cloud native.
The main cloud benefit is an ability of easily scaling. This is what we didn’t have when we had our applications hosted in data centres, and it makes the difference. For example, you can scale up your application during working hours when it’s intensively used and scale it down for the rest of time. Another sample is testing. You can deploy a big testing infrastructure quickly and dispose it quickly when your testing is finished. In both examples you are not paying extra for resources you don’t need. So, at the end it’s all about money. Cloud environment can be very cost-efficient if right application design is used.