Cloud Native Part 1: What Is Cloud Native?

Martin Kaschke
3 min readJul 1, 2022
Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash

Suppose you tried to find a formal definition of “cloud native.” In that case, you end up in a rabbit hole that leads you to more questions or realizes that everyone uses a different meaning depending on the argumentation and context. So you came to the result, that everything is “cloud native” somehow.

I researched during the last months and read many articles about the phrase and how it is used in multiple contexts, including SaaS applications and cloud providers describing their service as well as professional consulting firms. This is my resume.

There are three different major categories that I regularly see for the use of the phrase “cloud native”:

The first category is “cloud native,” as buzzwords trying “cloud native–wash” applications and services to sound more technical and advanced, often used by cloud services or web applications. In this case, cloud-native does not have real meaning/definition. It is just used as a filler word to describe that the application or service is in the cloud.

The second category, “cloud native,” is used when outlining the development and operations of applications in the cloud, combining best practices, like DevOps-approach, agile software development, and general architecture (e.g., microservices), not mentioning or not going into detail about a specific…

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