There is so much confusion around the term cloud native. Let’s first understand the definition. I like Gartner’s definition as it is much more concise.
“something is cloud-native if it is optimally leveraging or implementing cloud characteristics.”
In an architectural view, Cloud-native applications should ideally be latency-aware, instrumented, failure-aware, event-driven, secure, parallel, automated and resource-consumption-aware (LIFESPAR).
In generic terms it is also defined as CSP (Cloud Service Provider) native, which usually means using the native features of a given cloud e.g. using Azure functions from Azure Cloud, AWS Lambda from AWS cloud or App Engine from Google Cloud.
Where does Cloud Native fits in relation to Container-Native, CSP Native and Multicloud, the diagram below form Gartner sums up nicely.
Thinking Space 