The Cloud is disrupting the world. A number of possibilities have emerged that were never possible before. Organizations are able to provision computing, network, and storage devices on demand. This has high potential to reduce costs in a number of industries.

Consider the retail industry, where there is high demand in pockets (Black Friday, holiday season, and so on). Why should they pay for hardware throughout the year when they could provision it on demand?

While we would like to be benefit from the possibilities of the Cloud, these possibilities are limited by architecture and the nature of applications.

How do we build applications that can be easily deployed on the Cloud? That's where Cloud-Native applications come into the picture.

Cloud-Native applications are those that can easily be deployed on the Cloud. These applications share a few common characteristics. We will begin by looking at the Twelve-Factor App--a combination of common patterns among Cloud-Native applications.