Cloud Native

Cloud native means a program or service is born and grows on a server out on the internet, not inside your computer or phone. Think of the difference between a potted plant and a greenhouse. A potted plant needs its owner to water it, and it's affected when the room goes dark, but a greenhouse automatically manages temperature and light, so the plants keep growing even while the owner sleeps or is away.

Services built to be cloud native work the same way. Even if a user closes their laptop and goes to sleep, the service keeps running and doing its job on the server side. By contrast, a program installed only on your own computer stops the moment you turn the computer off.

This is also why the AI "teammate" style services appearing lately use this term so often. To hand off tasks like organizing email or replying to messages, the work needs to continue uninterrupted even when the user closes the app or falls asleep.

The article describes the AI teammate service 'Skydive' as "cloud native. It's always on, so it keeps working even while the user is asleep." Here, cloud native doesn't simply mean "data is stored in the cloud" — it means the service itself was designed from the start to keep running on a server continuously.

To check whether an AI service you use is cloud native, close the app or turn off your device and see whether it keeps doing things like replying to emails or sending messages. If the work continues even after you power off your device, it's the cloud native approach, always running on the server side. If the work stops when you turn the device off, it's an approach that depends on your device.