Cloud Native Infrastructure

Chapter 4. Designing Infrastructure Applications

In the previous chapter we learned about representing infrastructure and the various approaches and concerns with deployment tools around it. In this chapter we look at what it takes to design applications that deploy and manage infrastructure. We heed the concerns of the previous chapter and focus on opening up the world of infrastructure as software, sometimes called infrastructure as an application.

In a cloud native environment, traditional infrastructure operators need to be infrastructure software engineers. It is still an emerging practice and differs from other operational roles in the past. We desperately need to begin exploring patterns and setting standards.

A fundamental difference between infrastructure as code and infrastructure as software is that software continually runs and will create or mutate infrastructure based on the reconciler pattern, which we will explain later in this chapter. Furthermore, the new paradigm behind infrastructure as software is that the software now has a more traditional relationship with the data store and exposes an API for defining desired state. For instance, the software might mutate the representation of infrastructure as needed in the data store, and very well could manage the data store itself! Desired state changes to reconcile are sent to the software via the API instead of static code repo.

The first step in the direction of infrastructure as software is for infrastructure operators ...