Defining Cloud-Native Workloads from an Infrastructure Perspective: An Update

This IDC Market Perspective provides an update on what defines an application as being cloud native from an infrastructure perspective. As cloud-native technology continues to grow in popularity, it is important to understand the main characteristics of a cloud-native application, why contributing technologies such as containers are separate from this definition, and what infrastructure technology is supporting these applications. Cloud-native technology will shape certain workloads more than others, and this document investigates how cloud-native technology will impact the enterprise infrastructure workload market, especially in how data management will be impacted. Finally, this document looks at the role operating systems have in supporting the growth of cloud-native applications."In the past few years, we have seen the implementation of cloud-native applications become widespread across a variety of organizations from small businesses to enterprises," said Max Pepper, senior research analyst, Worldwide Infrastructure Research at IDC. "As the benefits of scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness they provide becomes well known, it's critical for organizations to understand clearly what defines a cloud-native application and what workload infrastructure can best maximize the potential cloud-native applications offer to the full extent."