What is a cloud-native application?

Back in 2010, Paul Freemantle wrote an early blog post about cloud-native (http://pzf.fremantle.org/2010/05/cloud-native.html) and used the analogy of trying to drive a horse-drawn cart on a 6-lane highway. No matter how much better a highway is as a road, there is a limit to how much a cart can transport and how quickly. You need vehicles that are designed for driving on a highway. The same is true of applications.

An application designed to run in a traditional data center is not going to run well on the cloud compared to one that was designed specifically to take advantage of the cloud. In other words, a cloud-native application is one that has been specifically designed to take advantage of the capabilities provided by the cloud. The Stock Trader application from Chapter 8, Building and Testing Cloud-Native Applications, is an example of such an application. A real-world example of microservices is Netflix.

Perhaps at its core, the promise of the cloud is being able to get compute resources on-demand, in minutes or seconds rather than days or weeks, and being charged based on incremental usage rather than upfront for potential usage – although, for many, the attraction is just no longer having to manage and maintain multiple data centers. The commoditization of compute resources that the cloud provides leads to a very different way of thinking about, planning for, and designing applications, and these differences significantly affect the application. One of the key changes in application design is the degree to which applications are distributed.