From the Introduction

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re an engineer developing infrastructure or infrastructure management tools this book is for you. This book will help you understand the patterns, processes, and practices to create infrastructure that is intended to be run in a cloud environment. By having an understanding of how things should be, you can better know the application’s role and what should be consumed as external services.

Application engineers can also discover what services should be a part of their applications and which they can rely on from the underlying platform. Through this book they will also discover the shared responsibilities they have with the engineers writing applications to manage the infrastructure.

Systems Administrators who are looking to level up their skills and take a more prominent role in designing infrastructure and maintaining infrastructure in a cloud native way can learn from this book.

Do you run all of your infrastructure in a public cloud? This book will help you know when to consume cloud services and when to build your own abstractions or services.

Run a datacenter or on-premisis cloud? We will outline what modern applications expect from infrastructure and help you understand the necessary services to utilize your current investments.

This book is not a how-to and outside of giving implementation examples we’re not prescribing a specific product. It is probably too technical for managers, directors, and executives, but could be helpful depending on the involvement and technical expertiese of the person in that role.

Most of all, please read this book if you want to learn how infrastructure impacts business, and how you can create infrastructure that has proven to scale to the demanding needs of Internet sized applications. Even if you don’t have applications that require scaling to that size you will still be better able to provide value if your infrastructure is built with the patterns described here with flexibility and operability in mind.

Why We Wrote This Book

We want to help you by focusing on patterns and practices rather than specific products and vendors. There are too many solutions that exist without an understanding of what problems they address.

We believe in the benefits of managing cloud native infrastructure via cloud native applications, and we wanted to prescribe the ideology to anyone getting started.

We want to give back to the community and drive the industry forward. The best way we found to do that was to explain the relationship with business and infrastructure, shed light on the problems, and explain the solutions implemented by the engineers and organizations who discovered them.

Explaining patterns in a product agnostic way is not always easy, but it’s important to understand why the products exist. We frequently use products as examples of patterns, but only when they will aid you in providing implementation examples of the solutions.

We would not be here without the countless hours people have volunteered to write code, help others, and invest in communities. We love and are thankful for the people that have helped us in our journey to understand these patterns and hope to give back and help the next generation of engineers. This book is our way of saying thank you.