Cloud-native infrastructure and applications

Cloud-native infrastructure removes the expensive proprietary appliance-based hardware used to run applications and replaces it with cheaper COTS hardware. With advancements in virtualization software, a network is also provided as a service. This improvement ushers in a whole new way of developing software as microservices. Containers are a cloud-native way of providing infrastructure to a cloud-native application. The runtime environment for executing code is provided by containers, which could contain images of the operating system and other customizations that are needed to run the application code (microservice). This brings in the portability aspect of cloud-native applications, since the code is contained within the container and the execution environment is coupled with it; hence, it can be moved across and scaled easily.

Figure 3.2 – Cloud-native infrastructure

This ushers in the capabilities...