What Does It Mean To Be ‘Cloud Native?’*

*Cloud Natives Aren’t All The Same

If you talked about ‘the cloud’ two decades ago, people would look up at the sky. Today, most people in the digitally connected world understand that ‘the cloud’ refers to some faraway server farm where data is stored. But now, there’s another term to contend with: cloud native.

That’s not a guy with a loincloth and spear floating in some fuzzy firmament, but rather computer infrastructure and applications that are built primarily in the cloud, remotely, by writing code on virtual servers over the Internet.

The ability to build applications – pieces of software that do everything from track your calorie intake to transferring money – on a laptop without ever installing a server room or renting a rack at a data center has revolutionized application development and led to a dizzying array of new products and services.

But not everyone wants to go native in the same way. Many developers insist on building their applications on virtual machines in the cloud that they control while CTOs and CEOs are more inclined to take advantage of the multitude of cloud-based, back-end services now delivered by application programming interfaces, or APIs.

“Building cloud native applications means creating software that is designed with the advantages—and disadvantages—of the cloud in mind,” said Klint Finley, former Wired reporter and the author of a recent report by the application platform company Lightbend – Cloud Native Adoption Trends 2020-2021.

It turns out that most developers still prefer systems they can personally maintain and scale, while the business side clearly prefers systems that are delivered “as a service” via API, the survey says. Consuming back-end services by API rather than building and maintaining your own is the defining characteristic of the emergent cloud.

“It means taking advantage of the fact that it’s possible to outsource entire categories of functionality—like databases and authentication—to public cloud services and planning for the fact that communication between those cloud components might be unreliable,” Finley said.

Twenty years ago, big tech companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP, Cisco and Intel began talking about distributed networks, calling them ‘utility computing’ or ‘grid computing.’ Then in 2007, Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud, the first large public cloud, allowing engineers to manage virtual computers through an Internet interface. On the back end, however, Amazon split up functionality and sent it to data centers spread all over the globe.

Initially, companies used the cloud for backup storage, but quickly began migrating primary infrastructure to the virtual machines.