Preface

Ten years ago, a CIO at a global bank scoffed when I suggested they look into private cloud technologies and infrastructure automation tooling: “That kind of thing might be fine for startups, but we’re too large and our requirements are too complex.” Even a few years ago, many enterprises considered using public clouds to be out of the question.

These days cloud technology is pervasive. Even the largest, most hidebound organizations are rapidly adopting a “cloud-first” strategy. Those organizations that find themselves unable to consider public clouds are adopting dynamically provisioned infrastructure platforms in their data centers.¹ The capabilities that these platforms offer are evolving and improving so quickly that it’s hard to ignore them without risking obsolescence.

Cloud and automation technologies remove barriers to making changes to production systems, and this creates new challenges. While most organizations want to speed up their pace of change, they can’t afford to ignore risks and the need for governance. Traditional processes and techniques for changing infrastructure safely are not designed to cope with a rapid pace of change. These ways of working tend to throttle the benefits of modern, Cloud Age technologies—slowing work down and harming stability.²

In Chapter 1 I use the terms “Iron Age” and “Cloud Age” (“From the Iron Age to the Cloud Age”) to describe the different philosophies that apply to managing physical infrastructure, where mistakes are slow and costly to correct, and managing virtual infrastructure, where mistakes can be quickly detected and fixed.