just because you have a virtualized infrastructure doesn’t
mean you have a cloud; the big difference is in the
operational model.
CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS
Cloud-native, or microservice, applications represent the
further intersection and evolution of virtualization and a
cloud environment. As virtualization became popular,
application developers started to ask themselves why
they needed a heavy operating system to run their
applications. All the patching, drivers, and configuration
requirements don’t go away just because you load a
virtual machine. All that work still needs to be done.
What if applications could be decoupled and written as
simpler packages that do not need a hypervisor or full-
blown operating system in order to function? That’s
exactly what happened. As Figure 13-10 shows, cloud-
native applications run on multiple servers in parallel
with each other.
Figure 13-10 Cloud-Native Applications
If a server goes bad in a cloud-native application
environment, no one cares because the application is
distributed across many servers in the data center, and
the application was written from the beginning to handle
failures and redirect work to working nodes. If you need