Thought Experiments in Cloud Native

I was thinking of a thought experiment today regarding Cloud Native, or the concept of Cloud Native in comparison to Cloud Traditional (not sure that Cloud Traditional is a term).

When we imagine Cloud Native, we are looking at containerisation (containers) and orchestration (K8S). Whilst there are other options, these represent what I think to be the core of Cloud Native. When I think of Cloud Traditional, we are thinking VMs and infra provisioning (I’m going to imagine using EC2/AWS).

My comparison is how similar could I get them to act? For example, within an autoscaling group (orchestration), deploying an immutable AMI (containerisation for VM) I could simulate the beginning of the process. If I then added on the ability to monitor and react to metrics by adjustment of infra-provisioning (using Terraform) I could simulate a lot of what is enabled by using Cloud Native in a Cloud Traditional format.

The data persistence is managed by similar methods (S3 + DynamoDB/RDS), the routing is managed by load balancers, therefore giving a similar experience without the requirement for containerisation.

Does this represent a far easier onboarding route for traditional applications both negating the need for significant re-training or re-tooling to fit into Cloud Native? Maybe…