What Is Cloud Native?

A cloud-native application must :

• Scale on demand
• Self-heal
• Support zero-downtime rolling updates
• Run anywhere that has Kubernetes

Let us just take a second to define what some of these buzzwords mean.

Scale on demand

Scaling on demand is the ability for an application and associated infrastructure to automatically scale up and down based on demand.

If configured correctly, Kubernetes can automatically scale your applications and infrastructure up when demand increases and scale them down when the demand drops off.

Self-heal applications

Kubernetes can also self-heal applications and individual microservices.

This requires a bit more knowledge of Kubernetes, which will be covered later.