Foreword

I still remember the first time I woke up in the middle of the night to a pager going off and discovering production was offline. Our systems were down, we inevitably were losing money, and it was my fault.

Ever since that moment I have been obsessed with architecting rock-solid infrastructure and infrastructure management systems so that I never find myself in that situation again. Over my career, I have contributed to Terraform, Kubernetes, The programming Language, and Kops, and created Kubicorn. I not only have witnessed the evolution of systems infrastructure, but I have helped shape it as well. As the infrastructure industry develops, we are discovering that enterprise infrastructure is now being managed in new and exciting ways via the application layers of the stack.Kubernetes is, by far, the most mature example of this new paradigm of managing infrastructure.

I co-authored this book, in part, to introduce the new paradigm representing infra‐structure as cloud natvie software. Furthermore, I hoped to encourage infrastructure engineers to begin writing cloud native applications. In the book, we explore the rich history of managing infrastructure, and we define the patterns of managing infrastructure for the future of cloud native technologies. We explain the importance of API-driven infrastructure in software. We also explore the bootstrap problem of creating the first infrastructure component of a complex system and teach the importance of scaling and testing infrastructure.

I joined Heptio as a Senior Developer Advocate in 2017 and feel lucky to be working closely with the brightest systems engineers in the industry. Building clean, opensource technology has always been important to me, and Heptio shares that passion.It’s such an honor to work in an environment that empowers me to bring what I love our industry. I hope you enjoy the book as much as Justin and I enjoyed writing it.

— Kris Nova