Cloud native is a term used to describe container-based environments. Cloud-native technologies are used to develop applications built with services packaged in containers, deployed as microservices and managed on elastic infrastructure through agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows.
Where operations teams would manage the infrastructure resource allocations to traditional applications manually, cloud-native applications are deployed on infrastructure that abstracts the underlying compute, storage and networking primitives. Developers and operators dealing with this new breed of applications don’t directly interact with application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by infrastructure providers. Instead, the orchestrator handles resource allocation automatically, according to policies set out by DevOps teams. The controller and scheduler, which are essential components of the orchestration engine, handle resource allocation and the life cycle of applications.
Cloud-native platforms, like Kubernetes, expose a flat network that is overlaid on existing networking topologies and primitives of cloud providers. Similarly, the native storage layer is often abstracted to expose logical volumes that are integrated with containers.
Read more at The New Stack
