Preface
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
Cloud native data center networking. That’s quite a mouthful to chew if you’re a reader. Or to bite off if you’re the writer. Let’s unpack the easy pieces first.
This is a book about building a robust, scalable network infrastructure for data centers. So if you’re a network architect or network operator looking to understand, build, or validate your thinking about data centers, this book is for you. If you’re a data center operator responsible for not just the network, but also compute and storage, and you’re looking to get up to speed on the current thinking in network design of data centers, this book is for you. And if you’re a network developer looking to find information that’s scattered or is oral knowledge only, this book is for you.
More precisely, this book is about the design of a specific kind of data center network, the cloud native kind. If you search online for “cloud native,” you’ll find that it’s typically associated with a specific kind of application design—microservices—and on a specific operating system—Linux—and that it relies on a lot of open source code. But those are means. The ends are about building robust, agile, scalable applications that allow the business to keep pace in a fast-moving world. When applied to networks, it means building a network that matches the applications and business needs in a ...