To meet these growing demands, a new approach is emerging that is profoundly transforming the way we think about IT systems: the native cloud.
Understanding cloud native
Cloud-native refers to a design approach that enables applications to be created, deployed and managed specifically for cloud environments. These applications take full advantage of the elasticity, scalability and distributed nature of the cloud. This approach goes far beyond a simple move to the cloud – what is commonly known as ‘lift and shift’. It involves a complete rethink of how software is developed and operated.
Cloud-native applications represent a break with traditional models. They are distinguished by their microservices architecture, their containerisation and their ability to evolve dynamically according to needs. Unlike traditional monolithic applications, they adopt a modular approach in which each component operates autonomously while communicating effectively with the other services.
The cloud-native philosophy also incorporates the notion of automation at every level, from development to operation. Error-prone and time-consuming manual processes are replaced by automated workflows that guarantee consistency and repeatability.
The architecture of native cloud applications
Microservices: the modular backbone
At the heart of the native cloud are microservices, small independent software components that each perform a precise, well-defined function. This granularity represents a paradigm shift away from traditional monolithic applications.
Microservices are designed according to the principle of single responsibility. For example, in an e-commerce platform, there could be separate microservices for product catalogue management, payment processing, user management and the recommendation system.
This independence offers several major advantages:
- teams working in parallel;
- adoption of different technologies adapted to the specific needs of each service;
- and greater overall resilience.
Communication between these microservices generally takes place via well-defined APIs, favouring weak coupling between services.
Immutable infrastructure: stability, security and predictability
In a native cloud architecture, immutable infrastructure is based on a simple principle: never modify a server once it has been deployed. In the event of an update or configuration change, a new instance is automatically created, with its own environment. This ‘replace rather than modify’ approach eliminates configuration drift and reinforces the predictability of deployments.
On Clever Cloud, this logic is applied systematically. Each deployment is carried out in an ephemeral, reproducible environment, guaranteeing identical, healthy execution conditions for each iteration. In the event of compromise, altered code is automatically removed on redeployment, considerably strengthening the security of applications – particularly those that are often targeted, such as certain PHP CMSs.
APIs: the common language of services
Application programming interfaces (APIs) play a crucial role in enabling microservices to communicate with each other in a standardised way. They clearly define the data required by each service and the expected results, without imposing the internal execution method.
This abstraction establishes a clear contract between the consumer and supplier services. As long as this contract is respected, each team is free to modify the internal implementation of its service without affecting the other components of the system.
The service mesh: invisible orchestration
The service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices, offering essential functionalities such as service discovery, load balancing, intelligent routing, security and observability.
What makes service meshing particularly powerful is that it extracts these cross-functional concerns from the application code. Developers can therefore concentrate on the business logic of their services.
Containers: the standardised unit for deployment
Containers encapsulate the microservices code and all its dependencies in a coherent, portable package. This encapsulation ensures that applications work identically whatever the execution environment.
Unlike traditional virtual machines, containers share the host system kernel while maintaining strict isolation. This lightweight approach means they can be started up almost instantaneously and resources are used as efficiently as possible.
At Clever Cloud, each container is deployed in a dedicated virtual machine. This architectural choice reinforces the isolation between applications and significantly increases the level of security, by partitioning the execution environments. Containerisation is based on a secure and shared PaaS model. To guarantee automatic and continuous updates, the platform favours the use of runtimes managed by language. These environments enable us to easily keep the runtime image up to date, thereby ensuring greater security.
On the other hand, the content of a Docker container cannot be updated by the host once it has been deployed, which limits the scope for intervention in the event of a vulnerability. This is why Clever Cloud recommends that its users opt for its runtimes in the majority of cases – which covers around 95% of requirements. A Docker runtime remains available for specific cases where this is required.
Virtual machines: the universal isolation brick
All applications deployed on Clever Cloud, whether they use managed runtimes or Docker containers, run in virtual machines. This model guarantees strict isolation between instances, with a dedicated operating system kernel per VM.
This choice of architecture enables:
- clear separation of execution environments;
- fine-tuned resource management;
- and improved security against lateral attacks.
VMs are provisioned on the fly for each deployment, following the principles of immutable infrastructure. They are ephemeral, reproducible and automatically destroyed in the event of redeployment, guaranteeing a clean environment for each iteration.
Cloud native development: tools, practices and culture
Cloud-native development goes far beyond the simple adoption of technical tools. It is part of a profound cultural and organisational transformation, where teams adopt practices of continuous collaboration, automation, rapid delivery and declarative infrastructure management.
At the heart of this approach is the DevOps culture, which breaks down the traditional silos between development and operations. It promotes close collaboration, shared responsibility, advanced automation, proactive monitoring and automated incident management. DevOps and native cloud share the same objective: to speed up the application lifecycle and make it more reliable.
To achieve this, teams draw on a wide range of tools: IDEs, versioning systems, CI/CD pipelines, APIs, command-line tools and infrastructure as code.
Automate the application lifecycle with Git and GitLab
The use of a version manager such as Git, coupled with integration platforms such as GitLab, makes it possible to accurately track the history of changes, collaborate effectively as a team and automate testing, code reviews, deployment and environment management. This DevOps approach increases reliability and speeds up time-to-production.
CI/CD: deliver more often, with greater peace of mind
Continuous integration: towards consistent quality
Continuous integration (CI) enables developers to incorporate their changes frequently into a shared code base. Each integration automatically triggers a series of tests to check that the new modifications do not introduce any regressions.
This approach radically transforms the dynamics of software development by encouraging frequent incremental changes that are easier to manage. Continuous integration pipelines automate the entire process and boost the confidence of teams when adding new functionality.
Continuous Delivery: from code to automated deployment
Continuous Delivery (CD) extends Continuous Integration by automating the application deployment process. It ensures that code validated by integration tests is automatically prepared for deployment to production.
In its most advanced form, this automation goes so far as to automatically put into production every change that passes all the tests. Advanced deployment strategies such as blue-green or canary deployments further reduce the risks associated with going into production.
Infrastructure as Code: declare for better management
Terraform is one of the key tools in the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach. It enables the infrastructure to be described in versionable configuration files. By applying these configurations, Terraform takes care of creating, modifying or deleting cloud resources in a declarative way.
This approach guarantees the reproducibility of environments, facilitates scalability and enables better collaboration between developers and ops. In a native cloud environment, coupling Terraform with tools such as GitLab or GitHub Actions enables complete automation of infrastructure management within CI/CD pipelines.
Public APIs: automating and interconnecting Clever Cloud services
Clever Cloud offers public APIs (v2 and v4) for programmatic interaction with the platform. They enable you to control applications, add-ons, logs, tokens and much more. These APIs are designed for custom integration, internal tools and advanced automation. By combining them with GitLab CI or Clever Tools, you can manage the entire lifecycle of Clever Cloud services directly from your workflows.
Clever Tools: the command-line interface for managing Clever Cloud
Clever Tools is the official CLI for Clever Cloud. Open source and cross-platform, it lets you create and manage your applications, databases, add-ons and other cloud resources from your terminal. It also simplifies access to public APIs with the ‘clever curl’ command, automatically managing authentication.
Clever Tools gives you a powerful tool for automating your workflows, integrating Clever Cloud with your existing scripts or quickly diagnosing a service. All the commands are documented in our developer documentation.
Serverless approach: focus on value
At Clever Cloud, the serverless approach is based above all on a pay-per-use pricing model. Resources are billed only when they are actually used, allowing developers to concentrate on creating value, without worrying about fine-grained infrastructure management.
Rather than maintaining services all the time, applications can react on demand: they run when they are needed, in an elastic and automated way. The underlying infrastructure is managed entirely by the platform, reducing the operational burden while guaranteeing performance and scalability.
What are the benefits of cloud native development for businesses?
Increased operational efficiency
Cloud-native development incorporates agile practices that fundamentally transform operational efficiency. These methods enable teams to rapidly create scalable applications and react swiftly to changes in the market.
This operational agility translates into a significant reduction in time-to-market. Where traditional development cycles could take months, cloud-native organisations are able to deploy new functionality in a matter of days or weeks.
Cost optimisation: promise and reality
The native cloud is often presented as a means of optimising costs through an on-demand consumption model. In theory, resources adapt dynamically to business activity: they ramp up during peak periods and scale down during off-peak periods. But in practice, this promise can come up against a very different reality, depending on the provider.
For some major cloud players, the complexity of their pricing – between egress fees, additional services and opaque models – makes it difficult to predict budgets. This vagueness can quickly turn a cloud strategy into an unforeseen expense.
Clever Cloud takes a different approach, based on transparency and cost control. Each application automatically scales within the limits you set, and you can set a maximum consumption ceiling. Per-second billing ensures that you only pay for what you actually use, with no nasty surprises at the end of the month.
The result: you stay in control, with a predictable model that’s aligned with your usage.
Built-in resilience and high availability
Native cloud applications are designed to be resilient in the face of outages. Their distributed architecture limits the impact of individual failures. Even if one component fails, the application as a whole continues to function.
This architecture intelligently distributes the workload to maintain optimum performance, even during peaks in use. Automatic failure detection mechanisms can redirect traffic to healthy instances in a matter of seconds.
Accelerated development cycle
In the native cloud environment, development teams can deploy multiple updates on a daily basis without service interruption. This rapid deployment rate creates a virtuous circle where feedback from users can be rapidly integrated into the product.
This speed is based on complete automation of the delivery pipeline. The ability to carry out rapid experimentation and A/B testing means that the user experience can be continually refined on the basis of concrete data.
Technological independence and portability
In the world of native cloud, portability is often presented as a key advantage. But in reality, many applications remain heavily dependent on proprietary services, such as certain databases or vendor-specific monitoring solutions. This dependency makes migration complex and costly, limiting companies’ technological freedom.
At Clever Cloud, we are making a different choice: we are designing a platform that favours the use of open standards and interoperability. Our aim is to guarantee our users genuine portability, without dependence on closed technologies. This involves a declarative approach, tools that are compatible with heterogeneous environments, and a philosophy that is resolutely geared towards digital sovereignty.
As a French sovereign cloud, we are making a concrete commitment to fighting technological lock-in, notably through our membership of the Eclipse Foundation and our active support for the European open source ecosystem.
With Clever Cloud, you remain in control of your applications, your data and your infrastructure.
The open source ecosystem: the strength of the community
One of the remarkable features of the native cloud movement is its deep roots in open source. This open governance ensures that these technologies evolve according to the real needs of the community rather than the commercial interests of any particular company. The collaborative approach also promotes interoperability between different solutions, avoiding technological lock-in.
At Clever Cloud, this open source commitment comes naturally: our platform is largely based on open source building blocks, and we actively contribute to major technical projects such as Sōzu or Biscuit. This investment in the European open source ecosystem allows us to stay close to the needs of developers, while reinforcing the robustness and transparency of the tools we offer.
Companies adopting the native cloud can therefore rely on a proven, scalable and resilient foundation, built by and for the community.
Challenges and considerations for cloud-native adoption
Increased complexity and learning curve
One of the paradoxes of cloud-native is that it aims to simplify the development and operation of applications over the long term, while introducing a degree of complexity at the outset. Adopting these practices requires a major paradigm shift, and entails the all-too-common risk of building a “gas factory” by piling on technology for technology’s sake, without any real business justification.
Teams need to embrace new concepts in automation, observability and declarative infrastructure management. Fortunately, PaaS platforms such as Clever Cloud absorb this technical complexity by automating many tasks such as deployment, scalability and monitoring – allowing developers to focus on business value.
This initial investment in understanding and best practice quickly pays for itself in the time and reliability saved by a well-mastered native cloud approach.
Security and compliance in a distributed environment
Cloud-native applications are based on distributed architectures that require a tailored approach to security. The DevSecOps approach makes it possible to integrate security practices from the earliest stages of development, in a continuous and automated way.
In sectors subject to stringent regulatory requirements, compliance must be taken into account right from the design stage. The use of mechanisms such as TLS mutual authentication via service meshes, or the strict segmentation of environments, helps to strengthen security without making operations more cumbersome. The aim is to strike a balance between system protection and deployment fluidity, without becoming over-complex.
Organisational and cultural transformation
Adopting the cloud is not just about introducing new technologies. It requires a profound transformation of organisational culture and ways of working.
The move to cloud native is redefining the profiles and skills needed within technical teams. The traditional boundaries between developers and operational staff are being blurred in favour of more versatile roles. Microservices architecture is naturally accompanied by a reorganisation of teams into multi-disciplinary, autonomous teams.
Native cloud: pillars of an increasingly mature model
FinOps: controlling cloud costs
As organisations intensify their use of the cloud, the fine-tuning of resource management is becoming a key issue. Today, FinOps is an essential practice in cloud computing and native clouds, making it possible to control expenditure while preserving the performance and agility of environments.
This approach was born in response to the growing complexity of hyperscalers’ billing models, which are often opaque and difficult to anticipate. The aim of FinOps is not just to reduce costs, but to understand them better so that we can make informed decisions that are aligned with technical needs and business objectives.
Kubernetes as a distributed abstraction layer
Kubernetes has established itself as a standard for orchestrating large-scale containerised applications. It now plays an increasingly central role, acting as an abstraction layer that masks the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. Kubernetes operators extend this logic by automating the management of increasingly complex application resources. This ecosystem continues to evolve. Clever Cloud is working on the integration of a managed Kubernetes optimised for the platform.
GitOps and Terraform: automating declarative infrastructure
GitOps is a natural extension of DevOps practices: it takes the Infrastructure as Code concept one step further. In this approach, the desired state of the infrastructure and applications is entirely defined in a Git repository, which acts as a single source of truth. Automated agents continuously compare this declared state with the actual state and ensure synchronisation.
Tools such as Terraform play a structuring role here. They enable the infrastructure to be described in a declarative, versionable and reproducible way, with a view to end-to-end control. Combined with a GitOps approach, they offer a level of automation and reliability that is difficult to achieve with manual approaches.
Control plane: orchestrating complexity
In native cloud architectures, the control plane refers to all the components that supervise and control the operation of applications: routing, security, configuration, supervision, traffic management, etc. The service mesh is one of the components of the control plane. The service mesh is one of the key tools in this control plane. It facilitates the management of communications between services, provides detailed metrics, and offers authentication, encryption and resilience mechanisms.
Security is therefore only one component – important but not exclusive – of this control layer. Reducing a mesh service to its security function alone would be like saying that a car is made for seatbelts.
At Clever Cloud, we adopt a Zero Trust approach, which moves away from the traditional perimeter model. The latter is based on the idea that the inside of a system (or network) is safe, as long as it is protected by firewalls, NATs (network address translation) or DMZs (demilitarised zones, used to isolate services accessible from the outside). Today, these peripheral protections are insufficient in the face of modern threats.
In our infrastructure, no traffic is authorised by default. Each peer is identified and authenticated, and communications are encrypted from end to end. This deep security limits lateral movements in the event of a compromise, isolates components and increases the overall resilience of the system.
By combining this approach with advanced control plane automation, we are building a robust, reliable cloud that is capable of meeting today’s security requirements without sacrificing agility.
The native cloud: an essential transformation
The native cloud is not just a technological evolution: it marks a profound transformation in the way applications are designed, developed and operated. This approach makes it possible to meet the growing demands for speed, scalability and reliability imposed by modern digital environments.
But this transformation does not happen with a snap of the fingers. It requires a well thought-out strategy, often progressive, adapted to the context of each organisation.
That’s the choice made by Guest Suite, a Nantes-based publisher of SaaS solutions dedicated to e-reputation. When it overhauled its technology platform, the team began a phased migration to native cloud applications, to facilitate deployment on Clever Cloud’s PaaS. Each application component was migrated independently, under the responsibility of the Tech leads, in order to limit the risks while maximising the benefits.
“We needed to concentrate on our core business: developing features that bring value to our customers. Clever Cloud allows us to do just that.”
– Thomas Mathieu, CEO of Guest Suite
This gradual approach has enabled them to quickly see tangible benefits: automated deployments, better management of backups, renewed flexibility, accelerated onboarding for developers… all gains that translate the promise of the native cloud into practice.
Fully adopting this approach also means initiating a cultural change in teams, towards greater autonomy, resilience and collaboration. Driven by an active community and a sustained pace of innovation, the native cloud ecosystem is evolving fast. The organisations that succeed are those that adopt a posture of continuous adaptation, while relying on solid partners and robust technological foundations.
Cloud-native: what you really need to know
Cloud-native is not just a technical trend. It’s a paradigm shift in the way modern applications are designed, developed and operated. This approach is based on solid principles that have been widely adopted by organisations seeking to become more efficient, resilient and autonomous. Here are the key points to be aware of:
- An architecture designed for the cloud: The native cloud is based on a distributed architecture, often based on microservices, containerisation and an infrastructure designed to be immutable. The aim is clear: to take full advantage of the scalability and elasticity offered by a cloud environment.
- Automation at the heart of the lifecycle: One of the pillars of the native cloud is automation. Deployments, backups, scalability, monitoring: everything can (and should) be handled automatically. This frees up technical teams to concentrate on what really matters: the product. Guest Suite, for example, has reduced its time-to-production and gained peace of mind thanks to automated redeployments and standardised environments.
- Tangible benefits that can be seen quickly: Companies that adopt the native cloud quickly see an improvement in their operational efficiency: more frequent production start-ups, greater resilience, easier onboarding of new recruits, and reduced maintenance efforts. These are benefits that our customers are already seeing in the first few weeks, with no need for over-engineering.
- A change in practices and culture: Moving to a native cloud is not just a question of technology. It also involves a change in the way we work. Teams are becoming more autonomous, silos are breaking down, and collaboration between development and operations is intensifying. The tools are changing, but above all the mindsets.
- A gradual, controlled transition: Making a successful transition to native cloud requires a methodical approach. It’s not a question of rewriting everything at once. At Clever Cloud, we support our customers through gradual migrations, service by service, without any big bang. This is what Guest Suite has done, keeping control of its platform while gaining in stability, performance and autonomy.
FAQ – Native cloud
Native cloud VS. cloud computing: what are the differences?
Cloud computing is the technological foundation on which the native cloud is built. It refers to the infrastructure, resources and services provided on demand by cloud providers. The native cloud, on the other hand, represents the approach used to create and run applications optimised for this environment. A company can use cloud computing without adopting a native cloud approach – for example, by simply migrating its traditional applications to virtual machines in the cloud – but then it will only benefit from a fraction of the potential advantages.
How do you choose between microservices and monolithic architecture?
The choice depends on a number of contextual factors. Opt for microservices if you have large teams, differentiated scalability needs by component, or high resilience requirements. This approach is also appropriate when business boundaries are well defined and the organisation can manage the additional operational complexity. Stay monolithic for simple applications, small teams, or at the start of a project when business boundaries are not yet clear. A hybrid ‘modular monolith’ approach can serve as an intermediate step, allowing the code to be structured into distinct modules while retaining a single deployment.
Where should you start migrating to the native cloud?
Adopt a gradual, methodical approach. Start by assessing your current architecture to identify the components best suited to migration, generally the least critical services or new developments. Gradually automate your deployment pipelines, starting with the most manual and time-consuming processes. Invest heavily in training your teams in the new practices and tools, because the human dimension is often the limiting factor. Systematically measure the benefits at each stage to adjust your strategy and demonstrate the value of the transformation. This iterative approach limits the risks while capitalising on what you learn.
Does native cloud computing cost more?
In the short term, costs may indeed rise due to the investment required in training, new tools and application refactoring. This initial investment phase is normal and should be anticipated in the business case. In the medium and long term, the native cloud generally delivers substantial savings thanks to the automatic optimisation of resources to match actual demand, the drastic reduction in time-consuming manual tasks, the significant improvement in the productivity of development teams, and the reduction in costly breakdowns and incidents. The key lies in a rigorous FinOps approach to managing and optimising cloud spending.