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Shayne Boyer for Microsoft Azure

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What is cloud native?

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Cloud Native – what is it? Loosely defined, it's running scalable applications in the cloud using containers, microservices, and immutable infrastructure managed with through devops.

As defined by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.

What is your definition of Cloud Native?

I had a conversation with Brendan Burns, a Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Azure and co-founder of the Kubernetes open source project, to get his definition of the term.

Subscribe to the show at aka.ms/cloudnativeshow, follow me and Brendan on twitter, checkout more great content from the Azure team at http://dev.to/azure.

Top comments (3)

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simbo1905 profile image
Simon Massey • Edited

Something that jumped out to me on your video was the phrase “API driven infrastructure”. I have seen a very large government programme move to Azure completely miss that advantage. Rather that having devs use cloud APIs to provision there was a separate “devops” group mouse clicking on Azure to setup environments for each agile dev team. To address that we wrote an small app to provision a Kubernetes namespace, a database, a project on VSTS, a new git repo with a fork of the latest C# demo app, and then kick off the first build and deploy. Inside of 15 minutes after running the app it would email a team all the details including a link to the repo and the sample code running on Azure.

In the video it was said that getting so that 99% of customers on Azure don’t think about VMs is where he wants to get to. That is of course totally awesome for devs as defining how your code runs using declarative API is exactly where we want it be. It’s pretty terrifying for folks coming from the Ops side. It has to happen as every big organisation is being disrupted. Yet I don’t think organizations are actually sending their ops teams on programming courses to create small self-service apps that provision API driven infrastructure while enforcing the corporate standards.

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devmonte profile image
Grzegorz Jońca

Hi Shayne, is there a way to get the same T-Shirt as you have in the video? :)

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spboyer profile image
Shayne Boyer

That was from the Ignite conference this past year. Not sure they’re available elsewhere. I want Brendan’s :-)