What is cloud-native?

When applications are designed and architected to take advantage of the underlying IaaS and PaaS services supported by the cloud computing platform, they are called cloud-native applications.

This means building reliable system applications, such as five nines (99.999%), that run on a three nines (99.9%) infrastructure and application components. We need to design our application components to deal with failures. To handle such failures, we need a structured approach for scalability and availability. To support the entire scale of applications, all the pieces need to be automated.

Cloud adoption typically happens in a series of steps, where the enterprise starts exploring the services before they start building cloud-native applications. The adoption starts with the movement of Dev/Test environments to the cloud, where rapid provisioning is the key ask from the business and developer community. Once the enterprise is past the environment provisioning stage, the next step/models in which the enterprise applications are migrated to the cloud-native model will be discussed in the following sections.