Software Architect's Handbook

What are cloud-native applications?

Cloud-native applications are specifically designed for the cloud model. Applications designed for the cloud are able to take advantage of it as their target platform, providing organizations with a competitive advantage, greater agility, easier deployment, on-demand scalability, reduced costs, increased resilience, and other benefits.

The expectations of today's modern applications are different from those of the past. Cloud-native applications have some distinct characteristics that allow us to meet those expectations and requirements. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) currently defines cloud-native as using an open source software stack to make applications that are containerized, dynamically ...