What characteristics an application built with a Cloud Native approach has

7.10.2025 A Cloud Native application is cloud-first software with a microservices architecture, containers, automation, and CI/CD that scales easily, is resilient to failures, and is not tied to specific infrastructure.

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

You roll out a new feature once every few months.

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

The market is changing, and you are not adapting fast enough. Cloud Native is an approach in which applications are designed for the cloud from the start.

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 an application designed from the outset to run in the cloud.

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

The key is to use the full capabilities of the cloud environment.

Do not confuse this with simply moving a program to the cloud unchanged: 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.

Each is responsible for its own function. For example, in a food delivery service, separate microservices handle the menu, checkout, payment, delivery, and reviews.

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 (code, libraries, settings).

Thanks to containers, the application runs with the same stability in any environment, whether in an in-house data center, in the cloud, or across 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.

A cloud architecture makes it easy to increase 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, that would require buying and installing new servers. In the cloud, the system provisions additional resources automatically within minutes.

When customer traffic drops, excess capacity is switched off.

As a result, the application always adapts to the business's current needs. Fault tolerance. A Cloud Native application is designed to keep running even if part of the system fails. It assumes that any component, or even an entire server, may fail, and that should not stop the service.

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

If one node goes down, requests are automatically switched to a backup. As a result, users do not notice any issues: the system remains stable during failures.

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

Infrastructure setup, version deployment, and testing are all as automated as possible.

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

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.

Infrastructure independence. A Cloud Native application avoids being tied to a specific provider or server.

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 risk of relying on a single vendor and provides flexibility, making it possible to move the system if needed with minimal changes.

Cloud fault tolerance directly affects product reliability.

If the failure of one component does not bring down the whole system, customers keep getting the service without interruptions.

The risk of major outages is reduced through automatic failover. Plus, automated testing and gradual rollouts reduce the number of bugs in production. As a result, users encounter errors and downtime less often.

For the business, this means reputation and customer loyalty.

Scalability provides flexibility that is not only technical but also business flexibility.

The application can handle a sudden surge of customers — the system simply taps more capacity for the peak and then returns to normal.

This is relevant, for example, during the sales season or when launching an advertising campaign.

The business does not lose sales because of a site that goes down.

In addition, a modular architecture makes it easier to introduce changes for new market requirements.

A company can quickly try out new features and remove or refine old ones.

A properly built Cloud Native application helps you pay only for the resources you actually need. In the cloud you scale to demand — so during quiet periods you don't overpay for idle servers.

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.

Automation reduces the need for a large administrator staff. Many Cloud Native solutions are also built on open-source software, which cuts licensing fees.

Cloud Native is widely used across various industries.

Here are a few striking examples from CIS:

The country's largest bank is transforming its services with Cloud Native. For example, SberBank Online is gradually moving from a monolith to a microservices architecture.

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.

About 200 teams work on the product in parallel — otherwise it would be impossible to add new functionality 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).

The largest e-commerce platforms are also built on cloud principles. For example, the Ozon platform runs more than 10,000 microservices, processing up to 30 billion requests — that is the volume of traffic coming from users.

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 adopts 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).

In CIS, companies build their services on Cloud Native principles from the start. For example, the food delivery service Yandex Eda had grown to more than 180 microservices by 2023, although part of its functionality still remained a monolith.

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

They release new versions daily, 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, the IT platforms themselves — for example, Yandex.Cloud or VK Cloud — give businesses ready-made tools to run Cloud Native applications on 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 made the move to the cloud — above all banks, telecom, online services and retail.

This confirms that Cloud Native is an in-demand 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).

Several key differences: Architecture. Cloud Native applications are built as modular systems from the start, so they are easier to improve and scale in parts.

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

Scaling and infrastructure. A Cloud Native application can easily get additional resources in the cloud at the press of a button, or automatically.

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

In a cloud model, you pay for the resources actually used, for example, the number of virtual machine hours or the amount of storage.

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.

Support and operations. In a public cloud, the provider takes on part of the burden: it monitors the hardware, networks, and base software updates.

Your team does not need to worry about replacing a failed disk or installing OS patches - the cloud platform handles 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 option can be private clouds, where a company uses the Cloud Native approach on its own servers, gaining some of the cloud's benefits while retaining control. Cloud Native provides flexibility and fast response to change, while traditional systems offer full control at the cost of more complex support. In today's environment, 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 that it's "time to migrate": frequent failures due to overloads, releases that take too long, high costs of maintaining legacy infrastructure, and the inability to roll out 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 can't simply switch off the old system and turn on the new one — a phased strategy is required.

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 advise planning the migration gradually — start with less critical services, refine the approach, and then tackle the key 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: a readiness to work in new ways and continuously improve processes.

Choosing the platform and tools. Decide where you will deploy the cloud infrastructure — in a public cloud (CIS providers, for example,

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 combination: some workloads in their own environment, some in a public cloud.

It is best to describe infrastructure as code (Infrastructure as Code) — this helps recreate environments automatically and simplifies maintenance.

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.

Start with less critical components to minimize risks. Make sure each module has data backups and a rollback plan in case something goes wrong.

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).

If your own resources are not enough, consider help from specialists. Integrators that specialize in deploying cloud solutions (for example, system integrators or DevOps consultants) can help plan the architecture, run training and set up tools.

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

The key is to train your team in parallel so that it can maintain the system on its own going forward.

Moving to Cloud Native is a major project that requires management 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; the main thing is not to put it off.

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