Justin Garrison - Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment

by Justin Garrison and Kris Nova

Copyright 2018 Justin Garrison and Kris Nova. All rights reserved.

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978-1-491-98430-7

[LSI]

Technology infrastructure is at a fascinating point in its history. Due to requirements for operating at tremendous scale, it has gone through rapid disruptive change. The pace of innovation in infrastructure has been unrivaled except for the early days of computing and the internet.These innovations make infrastructure faster, more reliable, and more valuable.

The people and companies who have pushed the boundaries of infrastructure to its limits have found ways of automating and abstracting it to extract more business value. By offering a flexible, consumable resource, they have turned what was once an expensive cost center into a required business utility.

However, it is rare for utilities to provide financial value to the business, which means infrastructure is often ignored and seen as an unwanted cost.This leaves it with little time and money to invest in innovations or improvements.

How can such an essential and fascinating part of the business stack be so easily ignored?The business obviously pays attention when infrastructure breaks, so why is it so hard to improve?

Infrastructure has reached a maturity level that has made it boring to consumers. However, its potential and new challenges have ignited a passion in implementors and engineers.

Scaling infrastructure and enabling new ways of doing business have aligned engineers from all different industries to find solutions.The power of open source software (OSS) and communities driven to help each other have caused an explosion of new concepts and innovations.

If managed correctly, challenges with infrastructure and applications today will not be the same tomorrow.This allows infrastructure builders and maintainers to make progress and take on new, meaningful work.

Some companies have surmounted challenges such as scalability, reliability, and flexibility.They have created projects that encapsulate patterns others can follow. The patterns are sometimes easily discovered by the implementor, but in other cases they are less obvious.

In this book we will share lessons from companies at the forefront of cloud native technologies to allow you to conquer the problem of reliably running scalable applications.Modern business moves very fast. The patterns in this book will enable your infrastructure to keep up with the speed and agility demands of your business.More importantly, we will empower you to make your own decisions about when you need to employ these patterns.

Many of these patterns have been exemplified in open source projects. Some of those projects are maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The projects and foundation are not the sole embodiment of the patterns, but it would be remiss of you to ignore them. Look to them as examples, but do your own due diligence to vet every solution you employ.

We will show you the benefits of cloud native infrastructure and the fundamental patterns that make scalable systems and applications.Well show you how to test your infrastructure and how to create flexible infrastructure that can adapt to your needs.Youll learn what is important and how to know whats coming.

May this book inspire you to keep moving forward to more exciting opportunities, and to share freely what you have learned with your communities.