What is cloud-native development?

What is cloud native?

Cloud native is a software design, development, and operating approach that takes full advantage of the cloud computing model. Cloud-native applications are built to be run in the cloud. The reason for doing so is that we can leverage the capabilities of the cloud to build resilient, highly scalable, and highly available applications.

Cloud-native techniques help build loosely coupled systems that allow each component to be independently managed, scaled, and recover from failures without bringing down the entire system. Cloud native offers organizations the speed and agility that can give them a competitive advantage by moving fast and building resilient systems on a larger scale.

Microservices, containers, container orchestrators, immutable infrastructure, APIs, Infrastructure as Code, and source control management are some technologies used to create cloud-native applications.

Cloud-native applications are often built as microservices running in Docker containers and orchestrated in Kubernetes. CI/CD pipelines are used to provide necessary infrastructure, push features, and changes into production continuously. Moreover, a fair bit of PaaS services and managed services are used in the cloud-native architecture.

One interesting fact about cloud native is that it's not tied to the cloud environment per se. We can use the cloud-native architecture in private clouds as well. It's about how, and not where, applications are developed and deployed.