What is a cloud-native application? For the past two white papers in this series, Google have covered this subject by applying the principles of a microservice architecture as well as other application modernization techniques, but have they fully achieved the goals they established at the outset of their journey?

Before Google answer that, let’s first agree on a the formal definition of a cloud-native application: According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), A cloud-native application should have the following characteristics:

1. Containerized . Each part (applications, processes, etc.) is packaged in its own container. This facilitates reproducibility, transparency, and resource isolation.
2. Dynamically orchestrated . Containers are actively scheduled and managed to optimize resource utilization.
3. Microservices-oriented. Applications are segmented into microservices. This significantly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

With this definition, it would seem Google are missing a couple of elements in order to call their modified PetShop a true cloud-native application-containers and orchestration.

In this final white paper of the series, Google will introduce these missing pieces and show readers why and how they can be applied to their application so that it can achieve the status of being cloud-native.