According to a report by RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud report, 94% of enterprises and SMBs are already using the cloud.

Now, it is not just migrating to the cloud again, businesses are looking out to go 'native'; thereby harnessing every benefit cloud computing has to offer. This is where you build and run applications completely in the cloud (no on-premise infrastructure is required).

Not just that, businesses are also increasingly looking to cloud-native applications to take advantage of technologies such as serverless computing, machine learning, and IoT.

Research-wise, Cloud-native is about speed and agility. The cloud-native approach enables organizations to build modern applications by leveraging cloud computing benefits based on a flexible consumption-based pricing model or pay-as-you-go pricing model. And they are loosely coupled and scalable, running on a containerized and orchestrated platform.

However, what do businesses get to enjoy when they go native? Below are five top benefits that make businesses adopt the cloud-native approach:

(1) Scalable: Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

(2) Faster time to market: Cloud-native provides a flexible architecture that empowers companies to respond to market conditions rapidly. Healthcare firms can improve patient care and save lives by providing the proper medication to the right customer at the right time. Meanwhile, a cloud-native approach enables a manufacturing company to move from schedule-based maintenance to time-based maintenance.

(3) Build more reliably systems: Cloud-native techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.

(4) Better products: Cloud-native enables businesses to deliver more features faster to their customers for competitive advantage. For example, Netflix or Amazon Prime can provide the right content to the right audience based on their interest. It also offers self-service automation and scalability to the development team for accelerating product development.

(5) Flexibility to adopt best practices: A cloud-native architecture is self-healing, cost-efficient and easily updated and maintained through continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). It enables you to break down silos across development, operations and security to deliver a consistent experience across the development lifecycle.

credit: Microsoftblog