The evolution of cloud computing has given rise to Cloud Native Applications (CNAs), presenting new challenges in governance, particularly when faced with strict compliance requirements. This work explores the unique characteristics of CNAs and their impact on governance. We introduce a comprehensive reference architecture designed to streamline governance across CNAs, along with a sample implementation, offering insights for both single and multi-cloud environments. Our architecture seamlessly integrates governance within the CNA framework, adhering to a “battery-included” philosophy. Tailored for both expansive and compact CNA deployments across various industries, this design enables cloud practitioners to prioritize product development by alleviating the complexities associated with governance. In addition, it provides a building block for academic exploration of generic CNA frameworks, highlighting their relevance in the evolving cloud computing landscape.

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are employed to ensure the performance of Cloud solutions. When a component fails, the importance of logs increases significantly. All departments may turn to logs to determine the cause of the issue and find the party at fault. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper with the logs to hide their role. We argue that the critical nature of Cloud logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. This article proposes such a mechanism by describing a blockchain-based log storage system, called Logchain, which can be integrated with existing private and public blockchain solutions. Logchain uses the immutability feature of blockchain to provide a tamper-resistance platform for log storage. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical structure to address blockchains’ scalability issues. To validate the mechanism, we integrate Logchain into Ethereum and IBM Blockchain. We show that the solution is scalable and perform the analysis of the cost of ownership to help a reader select an implementation that would address their needs. The Logchain's scalability improvement on a blockchain is achieved without any alteration of blockchains’ fundamental architecture. As shown in this work, it can function on private and public blockchains and, therefore, can be a suitable alternative for organizations that need a secure, immutable log storage platform.

Microservices have become a popular pattern for deploying scale-out application logic and are used at companies like Netflix, IBM, and Google. An advantage of using microservices is their loose coupling, which leads to agile and rapid evolution, and continuous re-deployment. However, developers are tasked with managing this evolution and largely do so manually by continuously collecting and evaluating low-level service behaviors. This is tedious, error-prone, and slow. We argue for an approach based on service evolution modeling in which we combine static and dynamic information to generate an accurate representation of the evolving microservice-based system. We discuss how our approach can help engineers manage service upgrades, architectural evolution, and changing deployment trade-offs.