Over the last couple years, the term “cloud-native” has entered the collective consciousness of those designing and building applications and the infrastructure that supports them.
At its heart, cloud-native refers to a software architecture paradigm tailored for the cloud. It calls that applications 1) employ containers as the atomic unit for packaging and deployment, 2) be autonomic, that is centrally orchestrated and dynamically scheduled, and 3) be microservices-oriented, that is be built as loosely-coupled, modular services each running an independent process, most often communicating with one another through HTTP via an API.
Dissecting those characteristics further implies that modern applications need be platform-independent (e.g. decoupled from physical and/or virtual resources to work equally well across cloud and compute substrates), highly elastic, highly available and easily maintainable.
