What does cloud native really mean?

Information based on this Reddit post made:

04 / 10 / 2022

/r/kubernetes

Things referenced & their sources:

Pet vs cattle. Adaptative scaling:

Read “12 factors”

<aside> 💡 Built with the "cloud" in mind. This mainly means resiliency and most of the time stateless. Additionally no hard requirement on the OS/Filesystem...

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<aside> <img src="/icons/fabric-swatch_blue.svg" alt="/icons/fabric-swatch_blue.svg" width="40px" /> It's all about scaling, high availability, and making sure you won't lose any data.

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1. Your application is running in the cloud. The main thing is you don’t care about managing actual machines, but that you manage your compute resources as an amorphous blob of servers and you don't care where your apps run aside from resource constraints. You schedule your apps to run, and they run somewhere.
1. Every bit of infrastructure and application configuration is captured in a desired-state configuration language of some kind. Cattle not pets. You can scale or provision as much or as little as you need to. You can easily build more more servers without a ton of manual effort. This has ramifications for high availability, and the ability to scale.
1. You have high availability, and high durability. You have designed your application under the assumption that anything can and will fail at some point. Your application can handle the loss of some percentage of compute resources and not bat an eye. A database primary can die and you can flip to a secondary. A data center can go down but you can replace servers in another one.

<aside> <img src="/icons/fabric-swatch_blue.svg" alt="/icons/fabric-swatch_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Cloud native technologies help organizations build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds.

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Containers, service meshes, micro-services, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.