Cloud Without Compromise

Chapter 3. “Cloud Chapter 2”: The Path to Cloud Native

Throughout this book we talk about all the value that awaits organizations that put their cloud capabilities to work inside a hybrid cloud architecture, and the “cheated” value return (or disappointment) for most enterprise cloud projects today. We insinuated a new chapter of cloud computing was here (the 2.0 moniker is tiring): “Cloud Chapter 2” (notice the quotes...we’re not talking about a chapter in the book). “Cloud Chapter 2” is all about cloud as a capability, and underpinning those capabilities are a bunch of Star Trek–sounding open source projects and a very large ecosystem. Kubernetes (and the enterprise hardened and tailored Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version of it), Ansible, and Docker are the main ones. But like any great Emmy award winning movie, there is a large (and we mean very large) supporting cast of technology that can be leveraged (with just as interesting names—Fluentd, Grafana, Jenkins, Istio, Tekton, and oh so many more).

At times we struggled writing this book because we really wanted to keep its focus on the business user. Make no mistake about it, the Kubernetes ecosystem (and the software itself) can be very confusing because it’s so capable—but it is both a strength and a potential weakness. Business users are sure to get lost in the never-ending layers and components that allow you to expose this service to your broader technology stack, or the multiple ways in which to manage a deployment. ...