The high-level concept of cloud-native is simple: systems that give users a better experience by virtue of operating in the cloud in a genuinely cloud-centric way. In other words, the cloud may make an existing database easier to start up, but if the database doesn’t support elasticity then it can’t take advantage of the scaling capabilities of the cloud.
The motivation for defining cloud-native was driven by two distinct aspects. First, we wanted to capture the thinking and architecture that went into creating properly “cloudy” systems. Secondly, we wanted to highlight that not every system that has been rebranded “cloud” was (or is) actually taking proper advantage of cloud.
Fast forward to today and we have a new definition of cloud-native from the CNCF. The new definition is much simpler, offering three main characteristics:
- Containerized
- Dynamically orchestrated
- Microservices oriented
Read more at The New Stack
