What Are Cloud-Native Services? Definition

Cloud-native services include as-a-service offerings from cloud providers, the microservices within an application or API, and the APIs themselves that communicate between an application and anything else.

As-a-Service Offerings
A company can get almost any aspect of the cloud offered to them by a cloud provider “as-a-service.” The major cloud-native services are infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) allows organizations to move away from hardware and rent virtual machines (VMs) or servers from a cloud provider.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is where infrastructure, operating systems (OSs), and software, among other tools, are provided. This allows developers to write code for applications and have the platform create the needed infrastructure to run, manage, and expose the code.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a more basic offering where a piece of software is not purchased once at a relatively large price and owned. Instead, customers make regular smaller payments to use the software. It is usually accessed via a web browser and can be seen with messaging software or word processing software. Companies performing cloud migration of their legacy applications aim to have similar functionality to a SaaS application.

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Cloud-Native Services: Microservices
Microservices are the architecture in cloud-native applications and APIs. Each microservice executes a different and specific function, whether that is communication, running processes, or implementing the functionality of the application.

Microservices are commonly described as “loosely coupled” because they operate largely independently of each other. Developers can make changes to one or a small group of microservices without having to update or otherwise impact the entire application.

It is also common to have microservices packaged in containers, further enabling developers to change only a chosen group of microservices. Developers can limit work and changes to a microservice in a single container.

Cloud-Native APIs
Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) said in an interview with SDxCentral that there is a major trend toward what he called “API-first” design, where the methods for communication are designed before the piece of software is made.

Kohn gave the classic example of the Java Pet Store application to illustrate the usefulness of having an API ready. Say the pet store has an inventory system where items in the store can be listed and tracked.

The next step is to make a web front-end to access the inventory. Having an API ready makes it easy for the front-end to communicate with the inventory system in the back-end. Then, when the pet store is ready to make an application for any mobile device, it doesn’t need to rewrite everything in the back-end to make it work — the applications just need to be able to communicate with the existing API.

That example is somewhat monolithic though, and Kohn said that an API can be broken into what are essentially different applications, which are made of microservices. This is the style of cloud-native services. There can be an API for any specific function. Going back to the pet store example, such functions could be credit card transactions or monitoring the number of leashes in stock.

Common APIs used for cloud-native software are REST, JSON, and gRPC. The latter is a CNCF project that originally was Google’s remote procedure call framework.

Cloud-Native Services: Key Takeaways
Cloud-native services include as-a-service offerings from cloud providers, the microservices that make a cloud-native application, and the APIs connecting cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
Infrastructure-as-a-service provides organizations with cloud infrastructure for rent, platform-as-a-service provides organizations with the means to develop products, and software-as-a-service are a type of cloud-native application.
Microservices are the functions of a cloud-native application.
Cloud-native APIs are the services that allow communication between pieces of software.
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