Becoming a ‘Cloud Native’…

During my college years, I never thought that cloud infrastructure will be my specialty especially since I never had any interest in it. But the Cloud and being Cloud Native really has taken me places from Retailing (Uniqlo), Banking (Simplex) in Tokyo to Publishing (Conde Nast, Vogue, Vanity Fair) in London.

Looking back how I became a cloud native I realized students could not easily find their path to the industry. It seems like the majority of the students I come across with, are intimated by the jargon we are using on the domain.

In here I would like to share my understandings and how to enter this new specialization.

What is a cloud native?

A cloud native is an engineer who writes application and/or infrastructure code in line with the principles of redundancy, resiliency and scale leveraging the power of the cloud and the containerization.

In other words we talk about application and infrastructure that are running on the cloud best practice philosophies. We write code that is reusable and runs anywhere especially in a containerized fashion.

This does not only mean that running an application in the cloud running in a vm will make you automatically a cloud native (You are more like a cloud tourist/spiker). A cloud native like a native in your own country makes you knowledgeable about the best places (best practices and only practices) as well as the right way of doing development in the cloud.

All this can be attributed to a cloud native, in honesty though it is a new space and definitions and standards are still being written

Why?

Why do development with all this overhead anyways? If we can write applications the traditional monolithic ways using traditional infrastructure running in a data center we own somewhere.

The reasons are many but the most important advantage is the rate of ‘innovation’. The first mover to each market has an undisputed domination to each of their market. You can innovate faster if you use innovative underlying development technologies. For Infrastructure engineers abstracting how cloud in general from the application developers increases the application developers productivity.

How/Where to start?

Learn by doing

Learning is doing, if you have a specific enough problem that you have to solve then you need to learn and necessity is the key to building your technical arsenal. Starting a tutorial about a specific topic, joining a boot camp and creating a project to show to your portfolio is fine but it can only get you so far. The real life business problems which needs solutions that not only works but scales and in line with your business and technical visions needs to be thorough and should be done the right way.

This is especially the same with learning how to be a cloud native. Finding a good company with strong fundamentals on how they do applications and infrastructure can help you find your feet and start your journey as a cloud native. Learning new things from the people in the industry by attending conferences will help as well.

Join the Journey!

We will start a podcast with a co-host and I am looking for a co-host to explore the different dimensions on how to be a cloud native and what that entails. The ultimate goal is to find out what a cloud native is and what it will be, from different perspectives and how it applies to each sector of the economy. We will deep dive into different topics such as.

1. CNCF and the CNCF Landscape
2. Containerization
3. Application and how development differs on the cloud
4. Infrastructure and introduction into cloud infrastructure
5. Logging and monitoring
6. Container Orchestration
7. Load balancing, Proxying
8. KPIs and DevOps Culture

And many other cloud native topics. We will make the podcast as entertaining as possible while tackling and learning about each topic and most importantly this blog serves as a call for any willing co-host in this topic.

Let me know if you are interested in this on the comments below. Thanks!