The main trait of cloud-native design is to treat the various cloud resources as the building blocks of your application. Individual virtual machines (VMs) are seldom used in cloud-native design. Instead of targeting a given operating system running on some instances, with a cloud-native approach, you target either the cloud API directly (for example, with FaaS) or some intermediary solution such as Kubernetes. In this sense, the cloud becomes your operating system, as the POSIX API no longer limits you.
As containers changed the approach to building and distributing software, it is now possible to free yourself from thinking about the underlying hardware infrastructure. Your software is not working in isolation, so it's still necessary to connect different services, monitor them, control their life cycle, store data, or pass the secrets. This is something that Kubernetes provides and it's one of the reasons why it became so popular.
As you...