Lately I’ve been having discussion with customers around the topic of Cloud-Native Apps. It’s cool to talk about these new developments, but it also raises a lot of questions with my attendees and they want to know what my opinion / definition is about Cloud-Native.

Most of the times I refer to the analogy of Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrant. This term was first coined by Marc Prensky with his article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants in which he describes the failure of American educators to understand the needs of modern students. Or to look into a broader perspective, you have people (Digital Natives) that grow up with modern technology like computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. and people (Digital Immigrants) that have learned (or not) these new technologies later in life and have not grown up with them. It shows how different types of people consume the technology today and how they work with them.

And that’s where the analogy can be made to cloud native vs. cloud immigrant applications. Cloud in my opinion is a convergence of multiple technologies at the same time, that makes things possible that we’re not possible 5 – 10 years ago. But applications have been around since the start of the mainframe and boomed when we got the the client-server era. These applications nowadays reside on virtualized platforms. Platforms that are now converted to private clouds. Question however is if these applications make full use of the capabilities of a cloud environment. They were not designed with cloud in mind and are still very dependent of the capabilities that the infrastructure has to offer even if it’s all software-defined. They live in the cloud, but as they were not designed for it, they can be called “cloud immigrants”.

This of course is different from the applications that developers create today. If given the opportunity to design an application from the start, developers choose a resilient and scalable architecture and make use of architecture designs such as microservices. Everything is loosly coupled and can be replicated all over the cloud (or even clouds). This makes these applications “cloud native” and they make full use of all the benefits that a cloud architecture has to offer.

So both types of applications can run on a cloud platform, but both have different characteristics. Below a table showing the difference in some of the characteristics of “cloud immigrant” and “cloud native”.

There is no right or wrong when looking at the characteristics of the two different application structures. It just depends what the requirements are with regards to your applications. “Cloud immigrants” over the last decades have served us well. The majority of the applications today still are “cloud immigrants”. And for the years to come we’ll still need to support them and run them in our clouds. Migrating “cloud immigrants” to “cloud native” is not an easy task at hand and to give an example for that we just have to look into the past : we’re still running mainframe today, wasn’t that supposed to be migrated to the client-server model?

However “cloud native” is the way forward and IT departments need to prepare themselves to host these applications on top of their cloud infrastructures. Question then becomes : How do you run “cloud immigrants” and “cloud natives” jointly together?