Over the last two decades, the fundamental building blocks of application delivery has evolved. It started with non-virtualized servers from Sun, moved to virtual machines from VMWare and AWS (on first private and then public clouds, the latter being called Infrastructure-as-a-Service), and then continued to buildpacks on Platform-as-a-Service offerings such as Heroku. We’ll review this evolution, and the subsequent one toward open source approaches to VMs, IaaS, and PaaS like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Native computing is defined as orchestrated containers of microservices. We’ll bring our history up to the current day by reviewing the extraordinary excitement around containers as the building block for modern applications and discuss some of the advantages of a cloud native architecture, including isolation, avoiding lock-in, scalability, agility and maintainability, efficiency and resiliency.
Dan Kohn is executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.