Cloud Native application development refers to the process of designing, building, and deploying applications specifically to operate within a cloud computing environment. The aim is to fully leverage the advantages of cloud services, such as scalability, flexibility, and resource optimization. Cloud Native applications are built using a set of principles, practices, and technologies that work together to enable rapid and continuous delivery of new features, resilience, and agility.

Key characteristics of Cloud Native application development include:

1. Microservices architecture: Instead of building monolithic applications, Cloud Native applications are designed as a collection of small, independent, and loosely coupled services called microservices. Each microservice focuses on a specific business capability, making it easier to develop, test, deploy, and scale individual components independently.

2. Containerization: Cloud Native applications often use containers as a lightweight, portable, and consistent way to package and run applications and their dependencies. Containers can be easily deployed, scaled, and managed across various cloud environments. Docker and Kubernetes are popular containerization technologies used in Cloud Native development.

3. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD): Cloud Native applications typically follow a DevOps approach, which emphasizes automation, collaboration, and rapid iteration. CI/CD pipelines are used to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying applications, enabling faster and more frequent releases.

4. Scalability: Cloud Native applications are designed to scale horizontally, meaning they can handle increased workloads by adding more instances of a service rather than increasing the capacity of a single instance. This allows for efficient resource utilization and better performance under varying workloads.

5. Resilience and fault tolerance: Cloud Native applications are built to be resilient and fault-tolerant, ensuring that they can recover quickly from failures and continue to operate smoothly. This is achieved through techniques like load balancing, auto-scaling, and self-healing.

6. Infrastructure as code (IaC): Cloud Native development leverages IaC to define, provision, and manage the underlying infrastructure required for an application. This approach allows for consistent and repeatable infrastructure management, reducing manual efforts and the potential for errors.

7. Cost: The cost of an infrastructure in the cloud can be apportioned over time, currently the costs of this service are quite affordable, both for small and large companies. The most important thing is that over time the infrastructure can grow as the company's applications grow, there are very reliable providers such as AWS, Digital Ocean among others.

By adopting Cloud Native application development, organizations can build and deploy applications that are more scalable, resilient, and agile, while also taking full advantage of the features and capabilities provided by modern cloud platforms.

Cloud Native Development Goals

The primary goals of Cloud Native application development include:

1. Building services instead of applications: Cloud Native development emphasizes creating modular services that can be easily combined and reconfigured to meet evolving business requirements.

2. Utilizing components from multiple technologies: Cloud Native applications often use a mix of open-source frameworks, languages, and tools, allowing developers to choose the best-fit technology for each service.

3. Maintaining high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance: By designing applications to be resilient and adaptable, Cloud Native development ensures optimal performance and user experience, even as workloads and environments change.

4. Minimizing code and maximizing reuse: Cloud Native applications are built using reusable components and patterns, reducing the amount of custom code required and making it easier to maintain and update the application over time.

5. Faster delivery of new features and releases: Continuous integration, testing, and deployment enable Cloud Native applications to be updated and improved more quickly and frequently than traditional applications.

6. Improved user experience: By leveraging the full capabilities of cloud computing, Cloud Native applications can provide better performance, responsiveness, and reliability, resulting in a superior user experience.

Reduced operational costs: Cloud Native applications can make more efficient use of computing resources, leading to lower infrastructure and operational costs.