What Does Cloud-Native Application Mean?
A cloud-native application is designed to take full advantage of distributed cloud resources and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. This type of application is typically composed of microservices that are packaged as lightweight containers to improve speed, agility and scalability.
Native cloud applications are governed by policy and have the following characteristics:
- Resiliency: Cloud spplications are built to take advantage of the redundancy and flexibility that a distributed architecture can provide.
- Agility: Because cloud native apps are composed of microservices, they are usually easier to develop, deploy and iterate than traditional desktop apps.
- Automation: DevOps teams can use a continuous deployment strategy to automate updates and other code changes without disrupting the user experience.
- Maximum Uptime: Cloud orchestrators help developers build high availability (HA) apps that have almost zero downtime.
A major benefit of cloud-native apps is their modularity. Each part of a cloud-native app can be developed and deployed separately from the others.