A Cloud-Native application follows a few distinctive characteristics:

• It is automatable; applications are standardized in such a way that they are tested, deployed, and to a certain degree managed automatically by machines. This goal is largely achieved through Kubernetes.
• It is flexible; containerized applications can be executed without any changes in various environments, from a small laptop to the largest hyperscalers.
• It is resilient and scalable; Cloud Native applications are highly available, thanks to redundancy, graceful degradation, and continuous monitoring.
• It is dynamic; applications can scale up and down automatically, following the demand of users, and also respecting budgets and capacity plans.
• It is observable; so that applications report all telemetry data required to monitor their functionality in real-time, allowing teams to react proactively to issues and plan capacity and costs.
• It is distributed; applications are no longer deployed as monolithic instances, but rather as a network of cooperative microservices.