Cloud Native Developer
Cloud Native Developers build applications designed from the ground up for containerised, cloud infrastructure. Their English work includes explaining 12-Factor compliance to architects, writing runbooks for Kubernetes operations, justifying resource request/limit decisions, and presenting GitOps workflow changes to platform teams. This path covers the language of modern cloud infrastructure from container build to production observability.
Topics covered
- 12-Factor App principles
- Container & Kubernetes
- Health probes & graceful shutdown
- Service mesh & mTLS
- GitOps & deployments
- Observability & SLOs
Vocabulary spotlight
4 terms every Cloud Native Developer should know in English:
A methodology defining 12 principles for building portable, scalable, cloud-native SaaS applications — including config in environment, stateless processes, and logs as streams
"Our 12-Factor compliance was broken by baking the DB URL into the container image instead of reading it from the environment."
A Kubernetes health check that determines whether a container is still running correctly — failure triggers a container restart
"The liveness probe detected the deadlock and restarted the container, restoring service within 30 seconds."
A Kubernetes health check that determines whether a container is ready to receive traffic — failure removes it from the Service endpoint list without restarting it
"The readiness probe kept the new pod out of rotation until the JVM finished class loading."
An operational model where Git is the single source of truth for desired infrastructure and application state, with a pull-based operator (Argo CD/Flux) reconciling actual cluster state to match
"After adopting GitOps, every deployment is a Git commit — rollbacks are just git reverts."
📚 Vocabulary Reference
Key terms organised by category for Cloud Native Developers:
12-Factor & App Design
Kubernetes
Service Mesh & Security
GitOps & Delivery
Recommended exercises
Real-world scenarios you'll practise
- Explaining why the application failed 12-Factor compliance to a senior architect during a cloud migration review
- Writing a runbook for on-call engineers: how to diagnose an OOMKilled container and right-size limits
- Justifying the choice of Authorization Code + PKCE over Implicit flow to a security reviewer
- Presenting a GitOps migration proposal: push vs. pull model, security posture, rollback strategy