Chapter 22. System Fundamentals Will Still Bite You
Noah Abrahams
Imagine you’ve just joined a new company, ready to embark on your first day of cloud engineering. You’ve been reading all about DevOps principles, and you’re excited to get started in a world dominated by APIs and GitOps. This level of technology comes with the promise of focusing on only what’s directly relevant to your role, while everything else is just “taken care of” for you. You go to push your first deployment and…the job fails? It hits…an issue with an upstream repository? How is that even a thing? Doesn’t all this stuff “just work”?
The most common mistake that I’ve seen among those getting ramped up with cloud computing is to assume that because these are commercially available solutions, all the possible underlying issues are somehow magically taken care of. Being available for your use absolutely does not mean that the systems you’re given are free from bugs or idiosyncrasies. I’ve spent the past few years working at a layer of container orchestration that is multiple levels of abstraction away from what would otherwise be traditional “system management,” and it can really make you feel like you’re working in another realm entirely—so it’s important to not lose sight of what your stack is built from.
Kubernetes pods aren’t terminating properly? Maybe that’s not an API or etcd issue, ...
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