Cloud-Native Applications

Cloud-native is a term that is invoked often but seldom defined beyond saying “we built it in the cloud” as opposed to “on-prem”. However, there is now an emerging consensus around key ideas and informal applications design patterns that have been adopted and used in many successful cloud applications. In this introduction, we will describe these cloud-native concepts and illustrate them with examples. We will also look at the technical trends that may give us an idea about the future of cloud applications. We begin by discussing the basic properties that many cloud-native apps have in common. Once we have characterized them, we can then describe how these properties emerge from the technical design patterns.