When we first started building products for startups, we treated “on the cloud” and “cloud-native” like the same thing. Get it deployed, make sure it runs, move on.
Then real usage happened.
We saw products slow down under traffic spikes. Small failures would ripple into bigger issues. Scaling meant manual tweaks.
Deployments felt heavier than they should have. None of this was dramatic, just the kind of friction that slowly eats into a product’s reliability and a team’s time.
Over time, we learned that building for the cloud is different from just building on the cloud.
What changed for us wasn’t some big rewrite. It was getting better at the basics:
- breaking products into smaller, independent services
- letting infrastructure scale automatically instead of guessing capacity
- using managed cloud services so teams can focus on product, not maintenance
- designing systems that expect failures and recover quickly
This shift made launches calmer, updates smoother, and scaling far less stressful, for us and for the teams we work with.
We’ve been refining how we approach cloud-native builds and automation across SaaS and web projects, and it’s been a clear upgrade in how products behave in the real world.
Would love to hear how your team learned the difference between “hosted on the cloud” and “built for the cloud.”
Top comments (0)