What is an essential capability of cloud-native development?

The essential capability of cloud-native development is continuous integration and deployment. This approach emphasizes automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors and deploying them to production rapidly and reliably. Continuous integration ensures that code is frequently merged and tested in order to detect issues early, while continuous deployment automatically pushes changes to production, enabling faster delivery to users and quicker iterations based on feedback.

This capability aligns perfectly with cloud-native principles, which prioritize flexibility, scalability, and responsiveness. It allows development teams to leverage cloud environments efficiently, enabling them to scale applications and manage resources dynamically. This contrasts with high investment costs, manual data handling, and static resource management, which do not align with the agile and automated nature of cloud-native practices.