"Cloud Native" - Why it matters?

The main difference between Cloud Native and Cloud Hosted products lies in their architecture, design philosophy, and how they leverage cloud infrastructure. Cloud Native products are built specifically for the cloud from the ground up, designed to fully utilize cloud computing capabilities such as scalability, elasticity, and high availability. They often have microservices/distributed architecture, support rapid development cycles with DevOps & Continuous Deployment, and use cloud-optimized databases. Examples include Netflix or Slack. On the other hand, Cloud Hosted products are typically legacy or traditional software applications originally built for on-premise environments but moved to the cloud. They often have monolithic architecture, host apps on virtual machines, and may not scale as efficiently or dynamically as cloud-native products. Examples include older CRM systems like SAP or ERP software. The primary reason some vendors offer Cloud Hosted is that it requires less development effort than making a traditional application fully Cloud Native.