What is Cloud Native Architecture?
Cloud Native refers to a collection of practices and open-source projects, like Kubernetes, governed by the CNCF. It's used by enterprises to build modern products and services.
WHY IT EXISTS: Cloud Native technologies and practices exist to help enterprises successfully build and adopt modern applications. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was formed to provide a neutral home for these technologies, fostering collaboration and ensuring interoperability for organizations building new products and services.
THE MENTAL MODEL: The Cloud Native model is about composing systems from a curated set of open-source projects. The CNCF provides a technical vision and organizes these projects into maturity levels (Sandbox, Incubating, and Graduated) to signal their stability and production-readiness. The goal is to use a common stack of tools and best practices developed by a large community of contributors.
HOW IT WORKS: Adopting a Cloud Native architecture involves leveraging CNCF-hosted projects and participating in the community. This works by using foundational technologies like Kubernetes, etcd, and Cilium. Organizations can follow project journey reports, get training and certifications to build expertise, and contribute back to the ecosystem, ensuring the tools evolve with real-world needs.
WHEN TO USE IT: Use Cloud Native approaches when your organization is building complex products and services and wants to leverage a vibrant, vendor-neutral ecosystem of tools. It is particularly suited for enterprises seeking to modernize their application development and deployment strategies with community-vetted technologies and established best practices.
WHEN NOT TO USE IT: The ecosystem, as represented by the comprehensive Cloud Native Landscape, is vast and can introduce significant overhead. For small, simple applications with stable requirements, adopting the full suite of cloud native technologies might result in unnecessary complexity compared to more traditional approaches.
ONE CANONICAL EXAMPLE: Kubernetes is a flagship graduated project of the CNCF and a canonical example of a cloud native technology. The CNCF provides extensive support around it, including official certifications, software conformance programs, and a network of certified service providers. This demonstrates the model of a core open-source project being supported by a foundation to ensure its stability and widespread, successful adoption by enterprises.
Read the original → cncf.io
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