Cloud computing creates an abstract environment for deploying applications; we use virtual runtimes. This means that we have no location awareness and no assurance that our application will stay in the same data center or virtual machine. We cannot even trust that the IP address of the application will remain the same after 10 minutes. The following diagram shows a successfully applied reference architecture for cloud applications using IBM Cloud Public (Bluemix):

Cloud-native applications should scale horizontally, which means that whenever the workload demand increases, the application should increase the number of instances of that application to handle new requests. Similarly, if the workload decreases, the number of application instances should be decreased.