There is no up-front cost and resources can be precisely metered to meet demand.
The cloud offers self-service, so an expert user can leverage the resources to build solutions quickly.
All major cloud providers have a global scale, which means services can be provisioned all over the world to meet demand in a geographic region.
Many tasks, such as racking servers, configuring network hardware, and physically securing a data center, no longer exists. Companies can focus on building core intellectual property versus reinventing the wheel.
The performance of applications can leverage a continuous upgrade cycle. The network, the storage and the compute improve over time consistently. Additionally, Cloud-Native applications are able to leverage new capabilities in the cloud to further increase performance.
The core architecture of the cloud offers redundancy at every step. There are multiple regions and multiple data centers in each region. Cloud-native architecture can design around these capabilities, leading to highly available architectures. Additionally, many-core cloud services are themselves highly available, like Amazon S3, which has nine nines, or 99.999999999% reliability.
You are only as good as your weakest link with security. By consolidating to centralized security, a higher level of security occurs. Problems such as physical access to a data center or encryption at rest become industry standard on day one.
A relational database is a tabular system that stores a finite amount of information. You can think of a relational database as a spreadsheet of values/data, where each row in the spreadsheet has a unique ID.