What is a recommended best practice for developing cloud-native applications?

Implementing API gateways for backend functionality is a recommended best practice when developing cloud-native applications for several reasons. API gateways serve as a single entry point for clients, which helps in managing and securing access to microservices. They provide important functionalities such as request routing, load balancing, authentication, and monitoring, which are essential in a cloud-native environment where applications are typically composed of multiple, loosely coupled services.

This approach enhances the application's scalability and maintainability. As applications evolve, API gateways can help manage changes in service endpoints without requiring clients to be updated. Furthermore, they support various additional features like rate limiting and throttling, which can protect services from being overwhelmed by too many requests. This level of management is critical in a distributed architecture, ensuring that different components can communicate seamlessly while adhering to best practices for security and performance.

Other options do not align as closely with cloud-native principles. Storing dependencies in the application code repository can be a part of version control but may complicate dependency management and increase the application’s size. Managing log files alongside the application might lead to issues in logging data retention and analysis over time. Developing workers that share state to save on storage counters the cloud-native ideal of statelessness, which encourages designing applications that can scale horizontally