Cloud Native Infrastructure

Chapter 5. Developing Infrastructure Applications

When building applications to manage infrastructure, you need to consider what APIs you will expose as much as what applications you will create. The APIs will represent the abstractions for your infrastructure, while the applications provide and consume APIs in the infrastructure.

It is important to have a firm grasp on why both are important and how you can use them to your advantage in creating scalable, resilient infrastructure.

In this chapter we will give a fictional example of a cloud native application and API that go through normal cycles for an application. If you want more information on managing cloud native applications, please see Chapter 7.

Designing an API

Note

The term API here is dealing with the infrastructure representation in a data structure and not concerned with how that representation is exposed or consumed. It is common to use an HTTP RESTful endpoint to communicate data structures, but the implementation is not important for this chapter.

Evolving infrastructure requires evolving the applications that support the infrastructure. The feature set for these applications will change over time, and thus infrastructure will implicitly evolve. As infrastructure continues to evolve, so must the applications that manage it.

Features, needs, and new advances in infrastructure will never stop. If we’re lucky, the cloud provider APIs will be stable and not change frequently. As infrastructure engineers, we need ...