In this article posted to the DevOps news site Faun.dev, Aymen Eon Amri defines a cloud native database as “a database that is designed to take full advantage of cloud technology and distributed systems”. He goes on to emphasize the importance of running on Kubernetes and describes the key characteristics of this style of database including advanced scalability, elasticity, resiliency, automation, accessibility, reduced cost, and easy database management.

K8ssandra is mentioned as an example of a cloud native database, alongside Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, and Vitess:

K8ssandra is a NoSQL Kubernetes-native database solution built on the Apache Cassandra database. It provides a distributed, scalable, highly available, and production-ready cloud native database solution that runs on Kubernetes clusters.

The author also shares thoughts on cloud native database adoption at Slack.

See also: The search for a cloud-native database.