•The outcomes of a systematic mapping study on cloud-native applications (CNA) are presented.•Identified principles, architectures, and methodologies for CNA are explained.•Existing engineering trends for cloud-native applications are summarized.•Research implications of existing CNA studies are discussed.•Promising future research directions for CNA engineering are proposed. It is common sense that cloud-native applications (CNA) are intentionally designed for the cloud. Although this understanding can be broadly used it does not guide and explain what a cloud-native application exactly is. The term “cloud-native” was used quite frequently in birthday times of cloud computing (2006) which seems somehow obvious nowadays. But the term disappeared almost completely. Suddenly and in the last years the term is used again more and more frequently and shows increasing momentum. This paper summarizes the outcomes of a systematic mapping study analyzing research papers covering “cloud-native” topics, research questions and engineering methodologies. We summarize research focuses and trends dealing with cloud-native application engineering approaches. Furthermore, we provide a definition for the term “cloud-native application” which takes all findings, insights of analyzed publications and already existing and well-defined terminology into account.