Cloud Native Go, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. What Is a “Cloud Native” Application?

The most dangerous phrase in the language is, “We’ve always done it this way.”¹

Grace Hopper, Computerworld (January 1976)

If you’re reading this book, then you’ve no doubt at least heard the term cloud native before. More likely, you’ve probably seen some of the many, many articles written by vendors bubbling over with breathless adoration and dollar signs in their eyes. If this is the bulk of your experience with the term so far, then you can be forgiven for thinking the term to be ambiguous and buzzwordy, just another of a series of markety expressions that might have started as something useful but have since been taken over by people trying to sell you something. See also: Agile, DevOps.

For similar reasons, a web search for “cloud native definition” might lead you to think that all an application needs to be cloud native is to be written in the “right” language² or framework, or to use the “right” technology. Certainly, your choice of language can make your life significantly easier or harder, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient for making an application cloud native.

Is cloud native, then, just a matter of where an application runs? The term cloud native certainly suggests that. All you’d need to do is pour your kludgy³ old application into a container and run it in Kubernetes, and you’re cloud native now, right? Nope. All you’ve done is make your application harder to deploy and harder to manage.⁴ A kludgy application ...