“Cloud-native” refers to the approach of building and running applications that fully leverage the advantages of cloud computing. While there’s no single, universally accepted definition, here are a few key characteristics commonly associated with cloud-native applications:
Containerization: Cloud-native applications are typically packaged into lightweight, portable containers. Containers encapsulate everything an application needs to run, including code, runtime, system tools, and libraries, ensuring consistency across different environments.
Microservices Architecture: Cloud-native applications are often designed as a collection of loosely coupled microservices, each responsible for a specific function or feature. This architectural style enables scalability, flexibility, and resilience, as well as faster development cycles and easier maintenance.
Dynamic Orchestration: Cloud-native applications are orchestrated and managed dynamically. Technologies like Kubernetes are commonly used for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, ensuring efficient resource utilization and high availability.
DevOps Practices: Cloud-native development embraces DevOps practices, such as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), to automate and streamline the software development lifecycle. This allows for rapid iteration, frequent releases, and improved collaboration between development and operations teams.
Resilience and Fault Tolerance: Cloud-native applications are designed to be resilient to failures and faults inherent in distributed systems. They often incorporate features like auto-scaling, self-healing, and fault isolation to maintain availability and performance under varying conditions.
Scalability and Elasticity: Cloud-native applications can scale horizontally to handle varying levels of workload demand. They leverage cloud infrastructure’s elasticity to dynamically allocate and deallocate resources based on demand, optimizing cost and performance.
Cloud-Native Services: Cloud-native applications leverage managed services provided by cloud providers, such as databases, message queues, and authentication services, to offload infrastructure management tasks and focus on core application development.
Immutable Infrastructure: Cloud-native applications often adopt the principle of immutable infrastructure, where infrastructure components are never modified after deployment. Instead, changes are made by deploying new, updated components, reducing configuration drift and ensuring consistency.