Cloud native application stacks: a lightly-opinionated survey
As you may know, Weaveworks is a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, whose mission is to create and drive the adoption of container packaged, dynamically managed, microservice oriented applications. These modern...

As you may know, Weaveworks is a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, whose mission is to create and drive the adoption of container packaged, dynamically managed, microservice oriented applications. These modern systems solve modern problems of team velocity, marketplace agility, and maintaining a technical edge that can be the difference between business success and failure. And to do so, they take advantage of a huge number of high quality open source projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Weave — projects that solve problems in domains from job scheduling to monitoring, virtualization to configuration management, and everything in between.
The field of projects is so large that it can be tricky to keep up, even for those of us deeply embedded in the ecosystem! That’s why I was pleased to give a talk this week at GlueCon, titled Cloud Native Application Stacks, from Orchestration to Monitoring: A lightly-opinionated survey. The talk describes and contextualizes the software that powers modern infrastructures, from huge platforms like AWS, down to individual components like Consul. My goal was to make a really huge field of information approachable, or at least understandable, to someone who might have just a little exposure to one small piece. And from the immediate feedback I’ve received, it seemed to be equally interesting both to engineers in the space who want to better understand the tools at their disposal, as well as product and engineering managers who want to get a better sense of the evolving technical landscape.
Whether you’re new to the ecosystem, or just want a refresher on the state of the world circa May 2016, please do take a look. And I’m very interested in feedback — if you think I’ve missed something important, or want to alert me to a new tool or project that’s just entered the scene, I’d love to hear from you!
Photograph (c) Wendy Nelson, licensed under CC.