Cloud
Native Applications

Container adoption supports these practices by offering an ideal application deployment unit and self-contained execution environment. With DevOps and containers, developers can more easily release and update apps as a collection of loosely coupled services, like microservices, instead of having to wait for one large release.

Cloud-native development focuses on an architecture’s modularity, loose coupling, and the independence of its services. Each microservice implements a business capability, runs in its own process, and communicates via application programming interfaces (APIs) or messaging. This communication can be managed through a service mesh layer.

You don’t always have to start with microservices to speed up application delivery as part of cloud-native apps, though. Many organizations can still optimize their legacy apps using a pragmatic, service-based architecture. This optimization is supported by DevOps workflows like continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), fully automated deployment operations, and standardized development environments.