What makes an application cloud-native?
Before diving into how cloud applications are implemented, and what you need to consider, we need to look into what cloud apps are. This includes both definitions of cloud operating models in general, what makes the cloud different to on-premises, and an investigation of these differences in more detail. There is no standardized text book answer for the term cloud-native, or a list of checkboxes to tick, but this chapter attempts to shed some light on common practices associated with the term.
With cloud computing, you will hear all kinds of as a Service suffixes, with some making more sense than others. As explained in Chapter 10, Deploying to AWS and Azure, the pillars here are the following three acronyms:
- IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
- PaaS – Platform as a Service
- SaaS – Software as a Service
A classic analogy for explaining these is pizza as a service. At one end of the spectrum, you have...