Cloud-Native Evolution

Chapter 1. Introduction: Cloud Thinking Is Everywhere

Businesses are moving to cloud computing to take advantage of improved speed, scalability, better resource utilization, lower up-front costs, and to make it faster and easier to deliver and distribute reliable applications in an agile fashion.

Cloud-Native Applications

Cloud-native applications are designed specifically to operate on cloud computing platforms. They are often developed as loosely coupled microservices running in containers, that take advantage of cloud features to maximize scalability, resilience, and flexibility.

To innovate in a digital world, businesses need to move fast. Acquiring and provisioning of traditional servers and storage may take days or even weeks, but can be achieved in a matter of hours and without high up-front costs by taking advantage of cloud computing platforms. Developing cloud-native applications allows businesses to vastly improve their time-to-market and maximize business opportunities. Moving to the cloud not only helps businesses move faster, cloud platforms also facilitate the digitization of business processes to meet growing customer expectations that products and services should be delivered via the cloud with high availability and reliability.

As more applications move to the cloud, the way that we develop, deploy, and manage applications must adapt to suit cloud technologies and to keep up with the increased pace of development. As a consequence, yesterday’s best practices ...