Chapter 1. Revolution in the Cloud A NOTE FOR EARLY RELEASE READERS With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on. If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at gobrien@oreilly.com. There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. —Alan Watts There’s a revolution going on. Actually, three revolutions. The first revolution is the creation of the cloud, and we’ll explain what that is and why it’s important. The second is the dawn of DevOps, and you’ll find out what that involves and how it’s changing operations. The third revolution is the coming of containers. Together, these three waves of change are creating a new software world: the cloud native world. The operating system for this world is called Kubernetes. In this chapter, we’ll briefly recount the history and significance of these revolutions, and explore how the changes are affecting the way we all deploy and operate software. We’ll outline what cloud native means, and what changes you can expect to see in this new world if you work in software development, operations, deployment, engineering, networking, or security. Thanks to the effects of these interlinked revolutions, we think the future of computing lies in cloud-based, containerized, distributed systems, dynamically managed by automation, on the Kubernetes platform (or something very like it). The art of developing and running these applications —cloud native DevOps—is what we’ll explore in the rest of this book. If you’re already familiar with all of this background material, and you just want to start having fun with Kubernetes, feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 2. If not, settle down comfortably, with a cup of your favorite beverage, and we’ll begin. The Creation of the Cloud In the beginning (well, the 1960s, anyway), computers filled rack after rack in vast, remote, air-conditioned data centers, and users would never see them or interact with them directly. Instead, developers submitted their jobs to the machine remotely and waited for the results. Many hundreds or thousands of users would all share the same computing infrastructure, and each would simply receive a bill for the amount of processor time or resources they used. It wasn’t cost-effective for each company or organization to buy and maintain its own computing hardware, so a business model emerged where users would share the computing power of remote machines, owned and run by a third party. If that sounds like right now, instead of last century, that’s no coincidence. The word revolution means “circular movement,” and computing has, in a way, come back to where it began. While computers have gotten a lot more powerful over the years—today’s Apple Watch is the equivalent of about three of the mainframe computers shown in Figure 1-1—shared, pay-per-use access to computing resources is a very old idea. Now we call it the cloud, and the revolution that began with timesharing mainframes has come full circle.