Cloud Native

"Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil." - Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

Common Elements of Cloud Native

Containers allow you to easily package an application's code, configurations, and dependencies into easy-to-use building blocks. Containers can help ensure that applications deploy quickly, reliably, and consistently regardless of deployment environment. (source)

Continuous Delivery is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software, doing so automatically. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. (source)

Microservices are a software development technique that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. In a microservices architecture, services are fine-grained and the protocols are lightweight. The benefit of decomposing an application into different smaller services is that it improves modularity. (source)

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. (source)

Observability means you can answer any questions about what’s happening on the inside of the system just by observing the outside of the system, without having to ship new code to answer new questions. Observability is what we need our tools to deliver now that system complexity is outpacing our ability to predict what’s going to break. (source)