What characteristics an application built with a Cloud Native approach has

7.10.2025 A Cloud Native application is software designed for the cloud from the start, with microservices, containers, automation, and CI/CD. It scales easily, is resilient to failures, and is not tied to any specific infrastructure.

The result is fast releases, a stable service, and flexible economics.

You roll out a new feature once every few months.

Because every release means approvals, testing, rollbacks, and fixes. And users do not want to wait.

Such software is easier to scale, improve, and launch.

That is why the business brings products to market faster, saves resources, and keeps up with customers.

A Cloud Native application is built for the cloud from the very beginning.

It does not depend on specific hardware or the installation location.

The main thing is to use the cloud environment to its full potential.

Do not confuse this with simply moving an application to the cloud without changes: taking an old application and running it on a virtual machine is not yet Cloud Native.

True Cloud Native requires a new application architecture designed for the cloud. Cloud Native products have a set of key traits.

Let us list them and explain them in simple terms, without jargon:

Modular architecture (microservices).

The application is split into small independent modules, or microservices.

These components can be improved and scaled independently.

If one component fails, the others keep running.

New features are added faster because changes in one module do not break the entire application at once. Containerization.

Microservices are packaged in containers - standardized shells that contain everything needed to run them, including code, libraries, and settings.

Thanks to containers, the application runs consistently in any environment, whether in your own data center, in the cloud, or with different providers.

Containers make deploying new versions simple and fast.

In addition, applications in containers consume fewer resources than if each part were run on a separate virtual machine. Scalability.

Cloud architecture makes it easy to add capacity when demand grows. A Cloud Native application is designed from the start to scale horizontally, launching more service instances under load. In a traditional data center, this would require buying and installing new servers. In the cloud, the system can provision additional resources in minutes.

When customer traffic drops, excess capacity is switched off.

This way, the application always adapts to current business needs. Resilience. A Cloud Native application is designed to keep running even if part of the system fails. Any component, or even an entire server, may go down, and that should not stop the service.

Data is replicated, services are duplicated, and traffic is distributed.

Automation and CI/CD. In the Cloud Native approach, routine work is handed over to machines.

Infrastructure setup, new version deployment, and testing are all highly automated.

DevOps principles, which combine development and operations, are implemented through CI/CD pipelines, or continuous integration and delivery systems.

This means updates can be released frequently, even daily, with minimal risk.

Automated tests verify quality, and automated deployment rolls out changes without downtime.

For the business, this means fast product improvements without long release pauses.

Open technologies that are compatible across different clouds are often used.

Thanks to containers and standard APIs, such software can run in a public cloud, a private cloud, or several clouds at once (multi-cloud).

This reduces the risks of vendor lock-in and provides flexibility, making it possible to move the system if needed with minimal changes.

A well-designed Cloud Native application helps you pay only for the resources you actually need. In the cloud, you scale to match demand, so you do not overpay for idle servers during quiet periods.

There's no longer a need to keep spare computing power on hand for peak loads.

Companies cut capital costs on buying and upgrading hardware, hosting it, electricity and cooling.

Cloud Native is widely used across various industries.

Here are a few striking examples from CIS:

The scale of the task is enormous: this application has ≈75 million monthly active users, more than 120,000 client logins per minute and a 99.99% availability requirement (no more than 52 minutes of downtime per year).

Cloud technologies and microservices help sustain such loads.

Around 200 teams work on the product in parallel - otherwise it would be impossible to add new features quickly.

High reliability (four nines) is achieved through a fault-tolerant distributed architecture.

Banks lead the move to the Cloud Native approach overall, since they handle huge volumes of data and transactions that demand flexibility and scale. Online marketplaces (Ozon).

For sales and peak loads, Ozon's architecture automatically distributes the load across many services.

This allowed the company to weather record sales without crashes or delays.

Another example is Wildberries, which is adopting cloud solutions to scale data storage and services as its audience grows.

Without the Cloud Native approach, running marketplaces with millions of shoppers would be extremely hard. IT services and ecosystems (Yandex).

Yandex is gradually breaking up its old large systems into microservices to speed up product development.

They release new versions every day, sometimes several times a day - made possible by automated delivery pipelines and splitting the application into independent components.

Similar approaches are used in other services of the ecosystem

In addition, IT platforms such as Yandex.Cloud or VK Cloud provide businesses with ready-made tools for running Cloud Native applications in domestic infrastructure.

According to the State of DevOps study, 72% of CIS enterprises have already adopted cloud technologies in one form or another.

Companies assess how flexible, scalable and secure solutions built with the Cloud Native approach can be.

In other words, most major players have already moved to the cloud, especially banks, telecom, online services, and retail.

This confirms that Cloud Native is a sought-after practice in the CIS market.

It is important to understand how a Cloud Native application differs from traditional software running on its own servers (on-premise).

Traditional enterprise systems are often monolithic: one large program where everything is interconnected. In a monolith, changing one feature can affect the entire project, which slows product development. In a cloud microarchitecture, changes are localized, so risks are lower and speed is higher.

If you gain more customers tomorrow, you simply increase your rented capacity - that is all. With your own servers, it is not that simple: you need to buy new hardware, install it, and configure it - which takes weeks or months. Cloud Native gives you flexibility here and now, while on-premise means a long infrastructure planning cycle.

With a cloud model, you pay for the resources you actually use, such as the number of virtual machine hours or storage volume.

You can quickly scale capacity up under load and then scale it back down without paying for excess. In the traditional model, capital expenditures are unavoidable: you have to buy servers in advance, and they will sit partly idle during quiet periods.

The result is either overpaying for spare capacity or risking a resource shortfall at peak times. The cloud shifts costs to a flexible pay-as-you-go model.

Your team does not need to worry about replacing a failed disk or installing OS patches - the cloud platform takes care of that.

You focus on developing your product rather than maintaining infrastructure. With on-premise, everything falls on the IT department: you need to keep specialists on staff, provide 24/7 coverage, and handle hardware issues yourself.

A compromise can be private clouds, where a company uses a Cloud Native approach on its own servers, gaining some cloud benefits while retaining control. Cloud Native provides flexibility and fast response to change, while classic systems offer full control at the cost of more complex support. In today's conditions, flexibility matters more for most commercial players.

That is why the trend is for more and more applications to be built as cloud-native from the start or gradually reworked for the new architecture.

Your business is growing, but the current IT system barely handles the load or cannot adapt fast enough to new tasks.

Competitors ship updates and new services faster than you do.

A digital transformation or entry into new markets is planned, where IT solutions will need to scale.

Signs it is time to move include frequent outages from overload, slow release cycles, high costs to maintain aging infrastructure, and an inability to adopt innovations quickly.

As experts note, the gap between companies using Cloud Native and those staying on old approaches is widening rapidly.

Soon it will be impossible to ignore: the first group gains flexibility, scale and speed, while the second risks falling behind. Where to start the migration: with planning and preparation.

You cannot simply turn off the old system and switch on the new one - you need a phased strategy.

Practice shows that trying to rebuild a large monolith all at once is doomed to fail.

Assess the current state of your applications and infrastructure.

Identify the bottlenecks: what is slowing growth and where improvements are needed.

Define the business goals of the migration: speed up releases, cut costs, improve reliability, etc.

Based on this, draw up a roadmap.

Experts recommend planning the migration gradually: start with less critical services, test the approach, and then move on to the core systems.

It is important to define upfront which properties the applications should gain after migration (scalability, module autonomy, automation, etc.).

This helps teams understand the end goal.

Pilot projects and breaking up the monolith.

If you have a large legacy monolith, start carving out individual modules from it as microservices.

In parallel, build new features directly in the cloud architecture from the start.

This gradual splitting lets you transform the system without halting the business. For example, extract one functional piece at a time from the monolith into a standalone service.

Deploy new services in containers and connect them through APIs.

Step by step, you'll replace parts of the monolith with cloud components.

Train your IT specialists in the new technologies.

Developers and administrators need to master containerization (e.g. Docker), container orchestration (Kubernetes), microservice architecture principles, CI/CD automation tools, and methods for monitoring distributed systems.

The team must understand the DevOps philosophy and keep learning.

As practitioners note, Cloud Native is largely a matter of culture: being ready to work in a new way and continuously improve processes.

Yandex Cloud, VK Cloud), in their own private cloud, or in a hybrid setup.

Account for security, budget and compatibility requirements with your stack.

Many choose a hybrid setup: some workloads in their own environment, and some in a public cloud.

It is better to describe infrastructure as code (Infrastructure as Code) - this helps recreate environments automatically and makes support easier.

Roll out monitoring and logging systems right away to have a full picture of how the new services run.

Gradual migration and testing.

Move services to the new architecture in stages, testing continuously at each step.

Gradually move functions and data, verifying them in the new environment.

This gradual approach ensures that business processes won't stop and users won't feel any discomfort.

All changes must be transparent and manageable.

Partnering with experts (optional).

You do not have to do everything yourself - sometimes it is faster and cheaper to bring in experienced specialists to avoid common mistakes.

The main thing is to train your team in parallel so it can support the system independently later.

Moving to Cloud Native is a major initiative that requires leadership involvement and investment.

But the benefits are tangible: companies bring products to market faster, use their IT budget more efficiently and offer customers a stable service. When IT flexibility directly affects competitiveness, the cloud approach becomes a growth driver.

It has already proven effective at large companies.

You can start with a small pilot project, the main thing is not to delay.

The investment pays off through higher reliability, speed and customer satisfaction.