Building cloud‑native software requires more than writing functional code. It involves adopting development practices that ensure applications are scalable, resilient, observable, secure, and easy to operate in modern cloud environments.
Within the European Weather Cloud (EWC), these principles are complemented by platform‑specific expectations around identity management, tenancy isolation, storage usage, and secure integration with EWC services.
This page outlines the core principles and recommended practices that help teams design, build, and maintain high‑quality cloud‑native systems tailored to the EWC environment.
Key themes include:
Dependency and environment management to guarantee reproducible builds and avoid conflicts across machines and CI pipelines.
Container‑first development using lightweight, immutable images and clear separation between build and runtime stages.
Infrastructure as Code to ensure environments are versioned, reviewable, and consistent across deployments.
Automation and CI/CD pipelines to enforce testing, security scanning, and continuous delivery with minimal manual intervention.
Observability through structured logging, metrics, tracing, and health endpoints to support debugging and performance analysis in distributed systems.
Security by design with secrets management, least‑privilege access, image scanning, and dependency auditing integrated into the development workflow.
Scalability and resilience patterns such as stateless services, graceful shutdown, horizontal scaling, and fault‑tolerant design.
Cloud‑native architecture principles including microservices, API‑driven communication, and event‑based integration where appropriate.
User and Access Management for authentication and privilegies.
Secret Management for storing secrets and how to use them in automations
Storage Usage when to use Object Storage or NFS or Block Storage.
Networking and Connectivity when to expose services through EWC load balancers, restrict traffic with security controls, and use HTTPS for all communication.
Tenancy Awareness to keep resources scoped to your tenancy, avoid hard‑coded tenancy assumptions, and follow EWC quota and governance guidelines.