As with the other post on 97 things every developer should know, this is not a hard and fast list.
It is a bit of interesting info from people in the industry that may or may not have the required experience and may be in a specific part of the business not relevant to you.
It is however always useful to read, learn and grow…so here is a summary of the book
What is the Cloud?
On-demand Compute and storage resources – a datacenter accesible over the internet
Essential characteristics of the cloud model:
- On-demand self-service – no need to call, open a ticket or send email for something to be provisioned
- Broad network accessible – accessible from a multitude of devices on different networks
- Resource pooling – making a pool of resources available to multiple customers – not knowing where the physical machine is. An abstraction.
- Rapid elasticity – resources should scale up and down based on customer requirement – an engineer need not worry about adding and removing capacity
- Measurred service – pay for what you use for a given unit of time
Why the cloud?
Procuring new hardware, installing and maintaining takes a long time – taking away from the key to company revenues – the application
Technology can be a cost saver and an enabler…
Three keys to making the right multicloud decision
- visibility – having information where it matters a trusted source of truth
- efficiency – best use of resources
- governance – security, quality and policy enforcement allows for improved innovation and speed of delivery
Use Managed Service – Please
Operations at scale are a hard problem – failure is rampant
Automation and standardisation is crucial
Managed services like Amazon Relational DB (RDS), google cloud SQL or Microsoft Azure SQL.
They have the experience and have been through the trouble. Unfortunately these are proprietary things and limit your freedom – so there is a tradeoff between using standard MySQL or Postgres and the big cloud version of the service.
Examples:
- File storage
- Object cache
- Message Queues
- Stream processing
- ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
Why?:
- They have experience
- Cheaper
- Faster for development
Why not?:
- You cannot tweak anything
- Lock-in
A Cloud Computing Vocabulary
- Availability – Ampunt of time (as a percentage) of a service being live and functional
- Durability – Chance that data will be lost or corrupted
- Consistency – when writing to a datastore the data read is the same value immediately
- Elasticity – Dynamically matching resource requirements based on the load
- Scalability – how elasticity is achieved…vertical (bigger hammer) or horizontally (more hammers)
- Serverless – Running application code without managing infrastructure also known as faas function as a service
- Fully managed – cloud resources extracted away so the cloud provider takes all responsibility from the software developer
Every Engineer Should be a Cloud Engineer
If you are lazy and don’t want to re-invent the wheel.
Describe your problem and their will be a cloud service for it – the trick is making it fit together.
Tips:
- Turn on billing alerts
- Make use of free-tier
- Use external documentation
- Change one setting at a time
- Few people understand IAM (Identity and Access Management)
Manage Up: Engage with Executives in the Cloud
- Understand what executives need
- Tell them how your proposal meets their needs in their language
- Be trusted in a world of marketing buzzwords and high expectations
- KNow the numbers
- Know how executive performance in measured
Architecture
Whats Next for Containers?
Combining the best of Containers and VMs: MicroVMs and UniKernels
MicroVM’s: VM’s for specific use cases, can boot in milliseconds.
MicroVM runtimes launch the vm then launch the container in it.
Unikernels: lightweight, immutable OS – application is combined with OS drivers and libraries. Example: MirageOS
Performance and security benefits.
Downside is they are completely different from containers.
Containers aren’t Magic
The OCI (Open Container Initiative) is a definition of a seperate place for applications to live.
Your CIO wants to Replatform only Once
Pitch why new infrastructure will increase velocity, security, reliability, future proofing and scalability.
Must be cloud agnostic.
Kubernetes is the ultimate PaaS builder.