Matt Stine on cloud-native architecture

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Matt Stine, global CTO of architecture at Pivotal. He is the presenter of the O’Reilly live online training course Cloud-Native Architecture Patterns, and he has spoken about cloud-native architecture at the recent O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference and O’Reilly Security Conference.

Discussion points:

• The importance of creating a shared understanding of core architectural terms: “There are probably 20-30 conflicting definitions of ‘microservices’ floating around,” Stine says. “If we try to build some complicated software on top of a poor shared understanding, basically we’re all going to be confused.”
• How patterns can make sense of an ongoing paradigm shift in software architecture: “The industry is learning quite rapidly that this ‘design thinking’ and this ‘language thinking’ is really important,” he says. “We’re taking a much more holistic view of software engineering.”
• Stine explains six key architecture concepts that can be used as guideposts in a journey to the cloud: modularity, observability, deployability, testability, disposability, and replaceability.
• Stine’s three principles of cloud-native security are: rotating user credentials frequently, repaving servers and applications from a known good state often, and repairing vulnerable software as soon as updates are available.

Other links:

• The video Designing Cloud-Native Architecture for Continuous Delivery, presented by Matt Stine
• The video Designing Cloud-Native Architecture for DevOps, presented by Matt Stine
• The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, February 26-28, 2018, in New York City—best price ends December 1, 2017
• The Software Architecture Radio podcast, hosted by Matt Stine