Cloud-native is an approach to building applications that are deployed directly into a cloud infrastructure. Applications built in this approach are easily portable—they can be run on different operating systems and are not tied to a particular machine.
What does cloud-native mean?
Applications built with this approach are easily portable—they can be run on different operating systems (based on a Linux kernel) and are not tied to a particular machine. Cloud-native applications can be built with different languages, runtime, and use the most suitable frameworks for a particular functionality. That allows for better control over the whole application and greater flexibility in choosing the right technology. The cloud-native approach can be used for microservices. Instead of creating a single large app, we split it into smaller chunks called microservices. Each of them is responsible for performing a single task, e.g., managing user login or stock inventory. These chunks communicate with each other even though they might be written in different languages or use different technologies. Cloud-native is also connected with the serverless concept. The application’s developers do not set up servers and manage them to deploy their software. Instead, these tasks fall to a service provider that charges for the computing resources used. Physical servers are used, but their management is shifted to the cloud provider. This allows developers to focus on the code and push it into production faster.
Benefits of building cloud-native applications
Cloud-native applications are stateless, meaning they don’t store data generated by a client during one session to use them in the next session with the same client. On the other hand, stateful applications do store such data and use them when the same client starts a new session (e.g. log in via a web portal). Stateless applications have several advantages. They are easily scalable both vertically and horizontally. They can be cached easily, and reap an attendant boost in speed. Finally, a stateless application needs less storage and is not bound to a particular server. To work properly it needs only the information provided by a client in one session.
