The Cloud Native Mindset

What is Cloud Native?

Cloud Native refers to architectures and design decisions that are built with cloud thinking from the ground up. Rather than thinking in terms of traditional on-premises infrastructure — “we need a server and a firewall” — Cloud Native is about leveraging the modern capabilities of the cloud to solve the same problems in a new, cheaper, faster, and more efficient way.

Infrastructure in a new way

There is still a server somewhere in the stack. But in a Cloud Native setup, that’s rarely something you think about. Instead, we think about the logical components we need: storage, a database, and a website. If it’s a static website, we might draw on one type of component — if it’s dynamic, we use something else.

Our definition of infrastructure might become:

• a static website
• an API that delivers dynamic content
• a database that stores information about users and products

In a Cloud Native setup, each service can be delivered as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering — typically at little or no cost. And everything can be ready in minutes once you know what you want.

DevOps through Infrastructure as Code, pipelines, and automation

When Cloud Native is your guiding philosophy, the focus is largely on defining and automating the underlying technical details in a way that is done once and requires very little ongoing maintenance. Developers and DevOps engineers with Cloud Native skills rarely need outside help to deliver an end-to-end result in production. A consequence of Cloud Native is therefore often a significant reduction in the need for infrastructure specialists.

A DevOps specialist can help a development team define the necessary components as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), set up CI/CD pipelines, and automate processes. Developers with a DevOps mindset can also handle many tasks independently once the foundational structures are in place — enabling individual teams to deliver most changes without coordinating or waiting for external support.