Introduction
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
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