What Does Cloud Native Actually Mean?

In today's rapidly evolving technology landscape, "cloud native" has become a ubiquitous term. But beyond the buzzword, what does cloud native actually mean for organizations and developers? This comprehensive guide breaks down cloud native concepts, benefits, and implementation strategies that platforms like Sealos are designed to support.

Cloud Native Defined: Beyond the Hype

Cloud native isn't just about running applications in the cloud. At its core, cloud native represents a comprehensive approach to building and running scalable applications designed specifically for cloud environments. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines cloud native technologies as those that "empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds."

More comprehensively, the CNCF states: "Cloud native practices empower organizations to develop, build, and deploy workloads in computing environments (public, private, hybrid cloud) to meet their organizational needs at scale in a programmatic and repeatable manner. It is characterized by loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable."

Microsoft offers a straightforward definition: "Cloud-native architecture and technologies are an approach to designing, constructing, and operating workloads that are built in the cloud and take full advantage of the cloud computing model."

Cloud native refers less to where an application resides and more to how it is built and deployed. A cloud native application consists of discrete, reusable components known as microservices that are designed to integrate into any cloud environment. These microservices act as building blocks, often packaged in containers, working together as a whole to comprise an application, yet each can be independently scaled, continuously improved, and quickly iterated through automation and orchestration processes.

Fundamentally, cloud native is about structuring teams, culture, and technology to take advantage of modern architectures and advanced automation to manage complexity and increase software development velocity. It's about taking full advantage of cloud-based services and delivery models rather than simply relocating existing applications to cloud servers.

Importantly, cloud native is not solely about cloud adoption or where applications are deployed. Organizations can apply cloud native principles whether they deploy on-premises, in a public cloud, or using a hybrid or multi-cloud model. The key is on-demand computing power and access to modern data services and application services. Cloud native refers primarily to how applications are built and delivered, following a set of architectural principles that enable greater agility, resilience, and portability across environments.

True cloud native development builds on several core technologies and approaches:

• Immutable infrastructure: Never modifying deployed servers but instead automatically building new ones with appropriate changes
• Containerized applications: Packaging applications with their dependencies for consistency and portability
• Dynamic orchestration: Automating the management of containers using platforms like Kubernetes
• Microservices architecture: Breaking applications into small, loosely coupled services
• DevOps culture: Creating collaborative environments between development and operations
• CI/CD pipelines: Enabling continuous integration and delivery of code changes
• Service mesh integration: Facilitating communication between services across multi-cloud environments
• Event-driven architecture: Building components that respond to specific types of events
• Serverless computing: Writing code without concerning with server management

Cloud Native vs. Other Cloud Approaches

To better understand cloud native, it's helpful to compare it with other cloud-related terms:

What is a Cloud-Native Application?

A cloud-native application is specifically designed from the ground up to take advantage of the elasticity and distributed nature of the cloud. To better understand what a cloud-native application is, it's best to start with what it's not—a traditional, monolithic application.

Traditional Monolithic Applications

Monolithic applications function as a single unit, often with custom-built operating systems, middleware, and language stacks for each application. Most scripts and processes are also purpose-built for the build, test, and deployment. Overall, this application architecture creates close dependencies, making it more difficult to change, test, deploy, and operate systems as they grow over time. What starts out as simple to design and deploy soon becomes complex, hard to evolve, and challenging to operate.

Cloud-Native Application Characteristics

By comparison, cloud-native applications make the most of modern infrastructure's dynamic, distributed nature to achieve greater speed, agility, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. Cloud-native applications are typically broken down into multiple, self-contained services through the use of technologies and methodologies, namely DevOps, continuous delivery and continuous integration, containers, microservices, and declarative APIs.

This enables teams to deploy and scale components independently, so they can make updates, fix issues, and deliver new features without any service interruption. Cloud-native applications are built with the assumption that failures will happen, and they're designed to be resilient and self-healing.

The Pillars of Cloud Native Architecture

Cloud native is built on several foundational pillars that collectively enable the speed, agility, and resilience these systems are known for. There are various ways to create a cloud-native architecture, but the goal is always to increase software delivery velocity and service reliability and to develop shared ownership among software stakeholders.

The fundamentals of cloud-native architectures are based on five core pillars:

1. Microservices

Almost all cloud architectures are based on microservices, but the key benefit they deliver is composability—breaking down an application into a collection of smaller, lightweight services that can easily be composed and connected to each other via application programming interfaces (APIs). For example, an ecommerce application might be composed of a specific service for the shopping cart, another for payment, and another one that communicates with the back end about inventory management.

Composability also enables teams to swap and re-compose components to meet new business requirements without disrupting another part of the application. This approach enables:

• Faster development cycles with autonomous teams
• Improved fault isolation
• Easier scaling of specific components
• Technology diversity where appropriate

Companies like Netflix (600+ services), Uber (1,000+ services), and WeChat (3,000+ services) deploy hundreds to thousands of times per day using microservice architectures. This approach allows them to rapidly respond to market conditions by updating small parts of complex applications without full redeployments.

2. Containers and Orchestration

Containers are lightweight, executable components that contain all the elements needed—including app source code and dependencies—to run the code in any environment. Containers deliver workload portability that supports "build once, run anywhere" code, making development and deployment significantly easier. They also help to reduce the chance of friction between languages, libraries, and frameworks since they can be deployed independently. This portability and flexibility makes containers ideal for building microservices architectures.

Container orchestration is also essential as the number of microservices grows to help manage containers so they can run smoothly as an application. A container orchestration platform like Kubernetes provides oversight and control of where and how containers run, repair any failures, and balance load between containers.

Key technologies:

• Docker for container creation and management
• Container registries for image storage and distribution
• OCI (Open Container Initiative) standards ensuring interoperability
• Kubernetes for container orchestration

3. DevOps

Cloud-native application development requires shifting to an agile delivery methodology like DevOps, where developers and IT operations teams collaborate to automate infrastructure and software delivery processes. DevOps allows development and operations teams to communicate more closely and come together around a shared purpose, creating a culture and environment where applications can be built, tested, and released faster.

4. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Automation can repair, scale, and deploy systems much faster than people. CI/CD pipelines help automate the build, testing, and deployment of application changes without the need to schedule downtime or wait for a maintenance window. Continuous delivery ensures that software releases are more reliable and less risky, allowing teams to deliver new services and features more rapidly and frequently.

Modern CI/CD systems enforce a strict separation across build, release, and run stages, with each release tagged with a unique ID and support for rollbacks. This approach enables organizations to move from quarterly releases to on-demand updates, catching problems early when they're less expensive to fix.

5. The Twelve-Factor Application Methodology

Many cloud-native systems follow the principles of the Twelve-Factor Application methodology, which provides guidance for building software-as-a-service applications that:

• Use declarative formats for setup automation
• Have a clean contract with the underlying OS
• Are suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms
• Minimize divergence between development and production
• Can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices

Key factors include codebase management, dependency isolation, configuration externalization, backing services as attached resources, and strict separation between build, release, and run stages.

6. Modern Design Practices

Cloud-native applications embrace modern design practices that focus on resilience, manageability, and observability:

• API-first approach: Everything is designed as a service, with the assumption that your code will be consumed by front-end clients, gateways, or other services
• Built-in telemetry: Comprehensive monitoring, health checks, and observability are integrated from the beginning
• Security and identity management: Authentication and authorization are implemented from the start, often leveraging role-based access control (RBAC)

7. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Cloud native approaches treat infrastructure provisioning as a programmable task. This declarative approach ensures consistent, repeatable environments while enabling version control and automated testing of infrastructure changes. IaC makes infrastructure deployments repeatable and prevents runtime issues caused by configuration drift or missing dependencies.

8. Container Orchestration

Managing containers at scale requires orchestration platforms, with Kubernetes emerging as the de facto standard. Kubernetes provides:

• Automated deployment and scaling
• Service discovery and load balancing
• Self-healing capabilities
• Storage orchestration
• Rolling updates with zero downtime

Cloud-Native Services and Technologies

Cloud-native services and technologies help you build, run, and deploy scalable applications in any environment. While your customers and business users benefit from a regular application, cloud-native services operate behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly.

For example, cloud-native services might describe the as-a-service offerings from cloud service providers (for example, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS service models), the microservices of an application, and the APIs that connect and enable communication between services.

What is the difference between cloud and cloud native?

There is actually a difference between cloud and cloud native. Cloud refers to cloud computing, where companies or individuals pay to access computing resources as an on-demand service.

While it is often used as a catch-all description for the tools and techniques used to develop software in the cloud, the term "cloud native" isn't solely about cloud adoption. Instead, it refers to how applications are built and delivered, rather than just where they are deployed. In some cases, an application may not even run in the cloud. It's possible to build applications with cloud-native principles and run it on-premises or in hybrid environments.

9. DevOps and CI/CD Practices

Automating the software delivery pipeline is essential for cloud native operations:

• CI: Automatically building and testing code changes
• CD: Deploying validated changes to production environments
• GitOps: Using Git repositories as the source of truth for deployments

Modern CI/CD systems enforce a strict separation across build, release, and run stages, with each release tagged with a unique ID and support for rollbacks. This approach enables organizations to move from quarterly releases to on-demand updates, catching problems early when they're less expensive to fix.

Cloud Native vs. Traditional Architectures

Cloud-Native Benefits

Faster Innovation

Smaller, loosely coupled services allow teams to work and develop autonomously. Cloud-native approaches increase developer productivity and velocity, making it easier for developers to innovate.

Reliable Releases

Cloud-native architectures enable developers to rapidly build, test, and deploy new and existing services. This allows you to bring products and services to market faster and reduces the risk of deployments.

Scalability

Cloud-native architectures employ infrastructure automation, helping to eliminate downtime due to human error. You can balance load based on demand, allowing you to optimize cost and performance better.

Lower Costs

A streamlined software delivery process reduces the costs of delivering new updates and features. Cloud-native applications also allow for sharing resources and on-demand consumption, significantly lowering your operating costs.

Higher Availability

Cloud-native architectures provide high availability and reliability as they reduce operational complexity, simplify configuration changes, and offer autoscaling and self-healing.

Portability

Cloud-native apps are designed to run almost anywhere, making it easy to move them from one environment to another without making changes to the entire application.

Better Security

Cloud-native applications help you reduce attack surface area and make it easier to detect and respond to attacks or new vulnerabilities. They are also much easier to patch and update as they follow standardized deployment and management.

Improved Compliance

It's much easier and cheaper to implement and demonstrate compliance with cloud-native applications as most data security controls are implemented at the platform level. Cloud providers also maintain compliance with risk management frameworks, making it easier for you to meet compliance standards with residual controls.

The Business Benefits of Cloud Native

Organizations adopting cloud native approaches typically experience:

1. Accelerated time-to-market: Streamlined development and deployment processes
2. Improved scalability: Efficient resource utilization with on-demand scaling
3. Enhanced resilience: Built-in redundancy and self-healing capabilities
4. Reduced operational costs: Optimized resource consumption and automation
5. Innovation enablement: Technology flexibility and reduced experimentation barriers

Cloud-Native Challenges

Despite the many cloud-native benefits, this model does come with some trade-offs that should be considered. Cloud-native computing is not always straightforward to implement as beyond adopting new tools and technologies, it also requires cultural shifts to make its use successful.

Some common cloud-native challenges include:

• Distributed systems complexity: Dealing with distributed systems and many moving parts can be overwhelming if you don't have tools or processes in place to manage development, testing, and deployment
• Increased operational and technology costs: Without the right cost optimization and oversight in place to control the use of resources in cloud environments
• Lack of existing technology skills: Teams may need training to work with and integrate a more complex technology stack
• Resistance to cultural shifts: Implementing cloud-native technologies and DevOps best practices requires organizational change
• Executive buy-in: Difficulty communicating cloud-native concepts to gain support from non-technical executives

However, none of the above is unmanageable with the right expertise and strategy. For example, adopting a simple "lift and shift" approach to migrating to the cloud is a good place to start, but it won't provide many of the cloud-native benefits listed above. Many organizations end up stalling out at this stage because they haven't anticipated the expense and complexity of re-architecting to a cloud-native architecture.

We recommend not treating cloud native as a multi-year, big-bang project. Instead, it should be considered an ongoing journey of constant iteration to learn and improve as you go.

Common Cloud Native Implementation Challenges

Despite its benefits, cloud native adoption presents several challenges:

• Organizational resistance: Requires cultural shifts toward DevOps mindsets
• Legacy integration: Connecting cloud native systems with traditional applications
• Security concerns: Managing the expanded attack surface and container vulnerabilities
• Complexity management: Handling the operational overhead of distributed systems
• Skill gaps: Finding and developing talent with cloud native expertise

These challenges align with the broader implementation difficulties organizations face when transitioning to cloud-native architectures.

Cloud Native Adoption Strategy

Successful cloud native implementation typically follows these stages:

1. Assessment: Evaluate application portfolio and organizational readiness
2. Pilot: Start with non-critical applications to build expertise
3. Foundation: Establish core infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines
4. Migration: Gradually move workloads using the strangler pattern
5. Optimization: Refine practices and leverage advanced capabilities

The Future of Cloud Native Technologies

The cloud native ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, with emerging trends including:

• FinOps: Optimizing cloud spending and resource utilization
• Service mesh: Advanced networking, security, and observability
• Serverless computing: Moving beyond containers to functions
• Multi-cloud operations: Consistent deployment across diverse environments
• AI/ML integration: Embedding intelligence into cloud native applications

Sealos: Streamlining Your Cloud Native Journey

Sealos offers a comprehensive platform that simplifies cloud native adoption. By providing an integrated solution for Kubernetes management, application deployment, and observability, Sealos helps organizations overcome common implementation challenges and accelerate their cloud native transformation.

For organizations building cloud-native applications that require reliable data persistence, managed database solutions can provide the scalability and automation benefits that align with cloud-native principles while reducing operational overhead.

Conclusion

Cloud native is more than a technological approach—it represents a fundamental shift in how organizations build, deploy, and manage applications. By embracing containerization, microservices, infrastructure as code, and DevOps practices, companies can achieve unprecedented agility, resilience, and efficiency in their digital operations.

Whether you're just beginning your cloud native journey or looking to optimize existing implementations, understanding these core principles and technologies is essential for success in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape.