Cloud native are characterized by the utilization of features like microservices, containers, development pipelines, and the entire infrastructure to be expressed as code. 

1. Application Design: 
One of the most important requirements of the cloud-native applications is speed. So, the design of application helps in speed delivering and iterating application functionality.

2. API Exposure: 
The biggest challenge in cloud-native's microservices application architectures is getting different services to communicate, which means how to handle or accept service requests and return data. Cloud-native solutions use lightweight APIs based on protocols such as REST, gRPC, or NATS.
 
3. Operational Integration: 
Operational integration is also one of the most important elements of cloud-native application development. The big challenge in this is the overhead of moving new code up-gradation or releases into production. New code releases or up-gradation require the whole application to be deployed.
 
4. DevOps:
DevOps is playing a major role in cloud-native application development, it's a process to structure your cloud team to take benefits of the automation and scalability that cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes offers. By using cloud-native DevOps, you can improve your business growth.

5. Testing: 
The testing is the most important element of any development, without testing, you not able to say that your product, software, or application is good or bad. So like others, cloud-native application development requires testing to get an end result.