Cloud Native Infrastructure

Chapter 3. Evolution of Cloud Native Deployments

We discussed in the previous chapter what the requirements are before you adopt cloud native infrastructure. Having API-driven infrastructure provisioning (IaaS) will be a requirement before you deploy.

In this chapter, we explore taking the idea of cloud native infrastructure topologies and realizing them in a cloud. We’ll learn common tools and patterns that help operators control their infrastructure.

The first step in deploying infrastructure is being able to represent it. Traditionally this could have been handled on a whiteboard, or, if you’re lucky, in documentation stored on a company wiki. Today, things are moving into a more programmatic space, and infrastructure representation is commonly documented in ways that make it easy for applications to interpret it. Regardless of the avenue in which it is represented, the need to comprehensively represent the infrastructure remains the same.

As one would expect, defining infrastructure in the cloud can range from very simple designs to very complex designs. Regardless of the complexity, great attention to detail must be given to infrastructure representation to ensure the design is reproducible. Being able to clearly transmit ideas is even more important. Therefore, having a clear, accurate, and easy-to-understand representation of infrastructure-level resources is imperative.

We also gain a lot from having a well-crafted representation:

• Infrastructure design can be shared ...