Cloud-native is an approach that includes building & running applications that have been redesigned to take advantage of cloud computing architectures but are not limited to cloud applications – we see cloud-native technologies and practices present in on-premises environments in the enterprise. Cloud-native is about how applications are created and deployed, not where. 

We can also define cloud-native by the technologies and approaches that characterize the trend, all intended to make software development and deployment more fluid and composable – containers, microservices, Kubernetes, service mesh and serverless.