Cloud-native – At Home in the Cloud

Cloud environments provide the infrastructure for horizontal autoscaling. Cloud-native applications are able to use this infrastructure. In other words, they provide metrics that can be used to determine the required number of instances. And they also support dynamic load balancing.

Cloud environments provide the infrastructure to simultaneously run multiple versions of an application and dynamically distribute traffic across different versions. This enables complex deployment patterns such as Canary Deployments or Blue/Green Deployments. Cloud-native applications support these deployment patterns.

In the cloud, building and testing processes can be significantly accelerated and improved. The Docker image is the relevant software artifact that delivers software with all its dependencies. In the virtual infrastructure, the testing process can create any number of application environments that are almost identical to the production environment. If these environments are defined as infrastructure code, changes to the infrastructure can also be automatically tested via the CI/CD process.

Cloud environments provide a sophisticated monitoring infrastructure to evaluate application log data, metrics, and tracing information. Cloud-native applications fit into this infrastructure and actively provide metrics about their internal state.

Cloud environments are designed for largely automated operation. Incorrect instances are automatically restarted. In case of overload, instances are automatically terminated and moved to other hardware. This dynamic implies, that individual failed calls within a service landscape are the normal case and do not only occur in exceptional situations. Cloud-native applications use modern communication paradigms such as asynchronous communication and circuit breakers and automatically return to a consistent state after failed calls, without affecting the complete system.

In dynamic cloud environments, it is often not feasible to address services via fixed IP addresses or domain names. Cloud-native applications use dynamic service discovery mechanisms for communication and can handle dynamically changing infrastructure.