What is Cloud Native?

Cloud Native is a difficult concept to describe, however, it may be considered a method of attaining specific goals that benefit everyone engaged in designing, maintaining, and managing an application in the cloud.

A Cloud Native approach is one that is devoted to developing and running applications that fully leverage Cloud Native Technologies to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing and its Resources and Services across modern cloud environments, including Converged Infrastructure Resources such as Compute, Networks, and Storage, as well as Management Services such as Scheduling and Orchestration, and Application and Data Services. It is also Deployable on public, private, and public cloud environments regardless of Cloud Provider or geographic location Enabling deployments on multiple clouds allows for application scaling across or relocation to any cloud provider that supports cloud-native technologies.

In general, the goals of Cloud Native are to Adopt design patterns, concepts, and approaches that enable loosely connected systems based on Microservice Architecture principles that are: Automated using Agile processes, Easily Operable or controllable across many cloud environments, Observable at all application development lifecycle phases, and Resilient to production failures.

Cloud Native design makes use of Cloud Native Technologies, which were created with these design goals in mind. Examples of these technologies include Containers, a type of operating system (OS) virtualization in which application code is packaged in a standard manner with its libraries and dependencies so that it can be run anywhere, including on a desktop, traditional IT infrastructure, or the cloud.

In fact, the majority of cloud-native solutions presuppose that containers will be used as the main tool for developing, packaging, deploying, running, and scaling applications.

In conclusion, the ultimate objective of Cloud Native Application design is to seamlessly build, orchestrate and run highly scalable Cloud Native Applications that can horizontally “web scale” across cloud boundaries to meet consumer demands as well as scale vertically to take advantage of improved CPU, memory, and disk resources when available.