The term cloud native refers to a specific approach to deploying cloud hosted applications to take advantage of the capabilities and benefits offered by cloud computing platforms. These applications are built with the cloud in mind from the ground up, rather than being adapted or migrated from traditional on-premises environments.
Cloud native applications are designed to be:
Scalable: They can easily scale up or down to accommodate changes in workload or demand, leveraging the elasticity of cloud resources.
Resilient: They are designed to be highly available and fault-tolerant, with built-in mechanisms for handling failures and recovering gracefully.
Agile: They are developed using agile and DevOps practices, allowing for rapid iteration, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.
Portable: They can run on any cloud platform or infrastructure, enabling flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.
A key characteristics of a cloud native application is a highly modular and granular component architecture, such that each component can be deployed, scaled, and managed separately. This is contrary to the older monolithic software architectures of the pre-cloud era.
Microservices architecture, containerized packaging and serverless backend are some of the major traits of a cloud native application.