cloudnative

Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that exploit the advantages of cloud computing delivery models. It emphasizes scalability, resilience, and agility by deploying in dynamic, distributed environments such as public, private, or hybrid clouds. Cloud-native applications typically consist of small, independently deployable services (microservices) that communicate over lightweight interfaces and can be developed and deployed by autonomous teams.

Key technologies and practices include containers, container orchestration, declarative configuration with infrastructure as code, continuous integration and delivery, and immutable infrastructure. Containers package applications and their dependencies for consistent deployment across environments. Orchestration platforms, most prominently Kubernetes, manage deployment, scaling, and lifecycle across clusters. Service meshes may manage inter-service communication, security, and observability. Infrastructure as code and declarative APIs enable repeatable provisioning and versioning.

Architecture and patterns: Cloud-native favors stateless services and externalized state, with stateful data stored in managed services or external databases. It emphasizes automation, self-healing, and horizontal scaling. Deployment patterns include rolling updates, canary releases, blue-green deployments, and automated rollback. Observability through metrics, logs, and tracing is integral to maintain reliability.

Governance and ecosystem: The term is associated with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which promotes standards and a landscape of projects including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Helm. The cloud-native approach emphasizes portability across cloud providers and environments, though practical deployments may leverage provider-specific services.

In practice, cloud-native combines technology with a DevOps-oriented culture and organizational changes to enable rapid development, frequent releases, and resilient operations across cloud environments.