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

by Justin Garrison, Kris Nóva

If you're considering the use of cloud native applications and microservices, you also need an infrastructure with the same elasticity and scalability of the applications they're running. This practical guide shows you how to design and maintain infrastructure capable of managing the full lifecycle of these implementations.

Engineers Justin Garrison (Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Kris Nova (Dies, Inc.) reveal hard-earned lessons on architecting infrastructure for massive scale and best in class monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting. The authors focus on Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects and explain where each is crucial to managing modern applications.


Understand the fundamentals of cloud native application design, and how it differs from traditional application design
Learn how cloud native infrastructure is different from traditional infrastructure
Manage application lifecycles running on cloud native infrastructure, using Kubernetes for application deployment, scaling, and upgrades
Monitor cloud native infrastructure and applications, using fluentd for logging and prometheus + graphana for visualizing data
Debug running applications and learn how to trace a distributed application and dig deep into a running system with OpenTracing

Genres: Technology, Software, Technical, Computer Science, Computers, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

Published December 12, 2017

Reviews

[Konstantin Root · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really mixed feelings about this book:
* There is only 130 pages of content in it
* There is a lot of "water" inside the book - could be easily reduced 2-3x in size without losing details
* Target audience is unknown - it has a high-level overview in many places, but in some sections, it goes to the code. But even there it's too basic - anyone who develops software in this area already knows those basic principles.

My summary - skip it.

[David Robillard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is a bit misleading. It should be « Cloud native infrastructure with Kubernetes ». The first few chapters are good to have a common language. And then if you don't use Kubernetes, then the rest of the book is not quite that valuable. But if you do use it, then it's a good starting point.

[Vinayak Hegde · Rating 1 out of 5]

What an underwhelming book. If you read a few blog posts about how Netflix manages their production, it's architecture and simian army range of tools, you already know almost everything that is there in the book. It offers no new insight and is mostly repetitive and pontificate (mostly about how there is only one true way of building apps - that is using containers and kubernetes). Even in the cloud there are a range of tools and architectures that can used to build different applications. The book suffers from tunnel vision (mostly looking at serving apps with less complex business logic and large databases / datastores). The only redeeming factor was a chapter on security and managing cloud. But even they lack sufficient depth and these is some hand-waving there. Hence the 1 star review.

Passable and you are not missing anything if you work with the cloud for a couple of years. The hawking of kubernetes at every juncture was also jarring.

[Juan Font · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, but disappointing. Seems like a collection of blog posts.

[The Viet]

"Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment" delves into the complexities of modern infrastructure, aiming to guide readers through innovative solutions and adoption challenges. The authors, who appear to have a strong academic background, bring a scholarly perspective to the topic. This is evident in their thorough referencing and theoretical approach.

While the book excels in providing a comprehensive overview of the latest innovations and dilemmas in cloud technology, it falls short in offering practical, real-world examples. The dynamic environments discussed often remain theoretical, lacking the tangible illustrations that could make the concepts more relatable and applicable for practitioners in the field.

However, the book's strength lies in its extensive references, which are a treasure trove for anyone seeking to understand the evolution and adoption of cloud technologies. From detailed case studies to insightful analyses, the authors offer a wide array of resources that could be particularly valuable for students or researchers.

In summary, while "Cloud Native Infrastructure" may not be the first pick for industry professionals seeking practical guidance, it stands out as an academic resource. It offers a deep dive into the theoretical aspects of cloud infrastructure and would be an excellent addition to the library of students or scholars in the field."

[Anton Antonov · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the get-go this comparison of what PaaS, IaaS, SaaS and on-premise are is something really rare to find in such a concise way.

Moving onwards, for me, it was a cornerstone to understanding the evolving landscape of Cloud Native applications, writing applications for Kubernetes, and gaining a feel, or call it intuition, for designing “platform” applications. These applications have been serving projects at work for the past six years.

It’s another one of those books that I won’t try to dissect in a book review. Do read it if that’s your area of interest. I nudge you in the direction of:
1. Network Resilience: This is an essential system quality attribute for such services and, partially, for tools as well.
2. Designing Infrastructure Applications: While writing these services and tools, my problem area was the bootstrapping of other applications in the cloud. Aha!
3. Testing Infrastructure Applications: The most important part is to make sure your infrastructure applications are maintainable and evolving with the ever-changing landscape of cloud services, providers, APIs, etc. And on the other hand, it’s where I cut more corners than I should have in my practical experience. 🫠

[William Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors disclaimer is so in you will be far get more out of this book if you directly manage infrastructure or are a part of ops or an SRE team. That being said this title gives great insights on how you can add additional levels of abstraction to your own in-house system or even on top of IaaS providers like Amazon. The approach is refreshing as this is not a book about how to leverage this tools but about how to leverage The learnings from giant companies which have pioneered on the front on cloud native infrastructures and computing. The appendixes located at the back of the book also serve as excellent tools and talking points to start difficult conversations surrounding the pros and cons of subjects such as vendor lock-in.

[Nickolai · Rating 1 out of 5]

Книга очень слабая и мне, откровенно, жаль потраченного на нее времени. Во-первых она лишена какой-либо внятной системной структуры: авторы постоянно перескакивают с одной темы на другую, а потом в следующих главах снова и снова к ним возвращаются. Во-вторых, пособие чересчур теоретизировано и почти не содержит практики. Достойных примеров кода практически нет, хотя постоянно подчеркивается важность определения архитектуры именно в коде. Ну и самое главное - авторы почти забывают о том, что существуют готовые надежные решения того, что они предлагают, а вместо этого показывают, как это можно реализовать с нуля.

[Saran Sivashanmugam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Justin and Kris provides a set of principles and recommended patterns for running cloud-native infrastructure. This book is heavy on CNCF standards and tooling. So you may need some familiarity with microservices, containers, and kubernetes before reading it. I specifically liked the tool agnostic patterns written for "Side-car" proxies. The book provides a good jumpstart to learn the cloud-native ecosystem and tailor your tools and procedure choices for your infrastructure.

[Miguel David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short book, but one that has the potential to be taught at Universities in a few years time. It manages to describe infrastructure patterns without ever having to be tied down to a provider or implementation (apart from examples).
Most of the patterns discussed are being actively implemented now with the Kubernetes ecosystem, but some of the patterns are still yet to come, which is exciting. I hope they write a follow up that is more on the implementation side of things.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful, but far from meeting the expectations based on the title itself. Simply uneven: on one hand, it covers such subtle details like a difference between "Infrastructure as Code" & "Infrastructure as Software" (and does it well!) on the other one it doesn't deal properly (or sufficiently) with more common (& fundamental) terms like "service mesh". In the end: it's useful, but don't expect it to be a proper compendium on CNI. Disssapointment.

[akshat · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a very high level, this book covers the patterns and principles needed to reliably run your business applications in today's Cloud infrastructure.
If you're building abstractions for running applications in a cloud, this book provides patterns you can follow to make the abstractions scalable, secure, and stable.
Also gives pointers to go deep into specific topics like observability, chaos, etc.

[Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book serves mostly as an introduction to what cloud native infrastructure is. If you’re not familiar with “infrastructure as software” or overall the overall cloud native concept, then this book is a good introduction. If you are, the it’s gonna feel like it’s trying to teach you how to suck eggs.

Personally, I liked it but did find it a bit slow and basic. Then again, I needed the introduction :)

[Salvador · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introduction to the way cloud infrastructure is built and why we need it. It’s very short because every topic is explained carefully and basically not repeated at any other point. This is because it’s structured more or less like a handbook.

The only caveat with this kind of approach is that if you read it from beginning to end you get the impression that it’s written for many people at once, and you may be a little disoriented. All around good introductory read nonetheless.

[Hugo Lopes Tavares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good overview and starting point for modern infrastructure practices. I liked the book content organization, useful quotes, and references. However, I didn't read every page of it because of my familiarity with the content.

[Senthil Kumaran · Rating 3 out of 5]

This explained the philosophy of Cloud Native infrastructure well. It requires slow reading as the topic covered is very generic and mostly has loosely defined terms. Author's try to highlight that, and yet to try to convey the meaning of what really cloud-native means.

[Joberto Diniz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t even finish the book. It’s not clear who’s the target audience. Is it talking about code patterns? Is it talking about architecture patterns? Is it talking about infrastructure as code? Mix all in a bag and be lost with this book

[Jari Pirhonen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short book, but still too much details for my purposes. Anyway, quick read and I got better understanding of cloud native infrastructure.

[Asher Manangan · Rating 5 out of 5]

infrastructure as a code/software will change how we view traditional infrastructure management

[Lakshmi Prashanth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clarified how resources are interwoven. I keep coming back to refer this book in my journey.

[akhy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is strongly biased toward Kubernetes although it never explicitly say so. But it's okay as Kubernetes is sort of a de facto cloud native orchestrator anyway.

The content is nothing really new for me. But it does emphasize on most common misconceptions about today buzzwords like cloud native, containerization, etc.

[Delhi Irc]

Location: GG6 IRC
Accession No: DL029863