97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 16. Practice Visualizing Distributed Systems

Kim Schlesinger

Site Reliability Engineer at Fairwinds

Before cloud computing, ops engineers were more likely to have seen, held, and physically maintained their servers. The primary reason for the industry-wide shift from on-premises datacenters to cloud service providers is that cloud providers carry the burden of maintaining the physical computers and hardware they rent, which allows cloud engineers to focus on designing cloud infrastructure, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and applications. It also means that servers are far away and invisible.

Highly skilled cloud engineers are able to imagine parts of the systems they build and maintain, and they can visualize how a request flows from one component to another. This isn’t a skill most of us are born with, but with determination and practice, you can begin imagining and understanding your invisible systems, and this will help you be a better engineer.

While there are several ways to begin visualizing your cloud infrastructure, no matter the path you take, it is important that you construct these visualizations yourself, not just look at diagrams or graphs created by someone else. The act of wrestling part of your system into a diagram or model will be the fastest path to understanding, even if your model isn’t perfect.

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