A new generation of digital business platform applications is arising, writes Wikibon Lead Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely.  These new applications are data-intensive, providing enterprises with a real-time view of how customers are interacting with their digital products. Companies use this data in various ways, including anticipating customer needs and improving their products based upon customer desires.

These new cloud-native applications – which are built upon software-defined infrastructure, distributed application principles and microservices – provide much greater agility to the enterprise. Small sections can be updated or even replaced independently without impacting the overall application.

They are designed to both capture and consume large amounts of data. Gracely identifies five tiers of data that they create and/or analyze to provide insights, often in near-real-time:

1. The caching tier;
2. The database tier;
3. The logging tier;
4. The analytics tier; and,
5. The object tier.

They run on public, private and hybrid cloud environments, and their complex underlying data structure requires a modern data management architecture that can accommodate rapidly changing expectations. Gracely recommends that IT organizations study the design patterns of cloud-native applications and evaluate commercial offerings that will simplify the infrastructure and operations of these environments.