What is cloud-native architecture ? Can I use cloud managed services in cloud-native architecture?

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I am designing a software architecture for our client, i am aware of cloud-enabled and cloud-native architecture terminology. I have read lots of articles on cloud-native, though when i talk to other tech people about cloud-native architecture i got confused. cause most of people have impression that cloud-native architecture is a one which runs in containers on Kubernetes.

My question is if i am designing cloud-native architecture and deploy it in AWS cloud, can i use AWS managed services apart from docker containers in my architecture or cloud-native architecture is completely independent of cloud services ?

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2 Answers

It's tricky to find consensus on definitions here, but in my own experience the term 'cloud-native' is definitely increasingly container- and microservice-specific, with Kubernetes as the de-facto poster boy. A definition from the CNCF is available here.

The baseline appears to be an abstraction above infrastructure, with a focus on portability and reproducibility, avoiding lock-in where possible. That said, managed services from particular providers do abstract responsibility for infrastructure quite successfully, so may be desired.

In this scenario, you may wish to declare your infrastructure configuration using a neutral method, like Terraform, and therefore reduce some inherent friction around portability, while still being able to make use of managed services.

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The general term cloud-native refers to an application which is entirely deployed in public cloud, and uses the services provided by a particular cloud provider (infrastructure management, message passing, etc.)

This is, of course, opposed to the classical model where you had to manage the infrastructure and take care of provisioning, availability and so many other things.

The confusion might arise from the fact that there is Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is an open source organisation that promotes cloud adoption and manages the development of Kubernetes, Prometheus and other very successful open-source projects.

So people may refer to cloud-native apps as being apps which use all (or many) projects maintained by CNCF, including Kubernetes.

To avoid the confusion, you can use the term cloud-based to refer to an app that is entirely deployed in cloud and it's not necessarily linked to CNCF projects.

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