What is a cloud-native application?
A cloud-native application is one that wholly embraces the traits and behavior of a Cloud platform, independently of its underlying infrastructure. Such applications are effectively highly scalable and operate in a resilient and consistent manner throughout its lifecycle.
Let us take a dive into this definition. A Cloud platform is one that operates over or is built into a Cloud infrastructure. Cloud Foundry, as described in Chapter 1, is such a platform that offers the benefits of the orchestration of containers over a number of cells (Virtual Machines), which offers the capability for application scaling, resiliency, and consistency. Application/horizontal scaling enables efficient leveraging of resources on an infrastructure, in a way that application instances could be scaled up or down to cater for varying levels of incoming traffic loads. This would maximize the utilization of the infrastructure. Contrary to this is the concept of vertical scaling...