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Want to go cloud native? Start with the right people, says author

“You can’t just tell everyone we’re going to going use this new thing, go have at it,” says Justin Garrison, co-author of “Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment.”

January 23, 2018
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Any organization can move to cloud native, says Justin Garrison, senior systems engineer at Disney, if they start with the right people.

“You can’t just tell everyone we’re going to going use this new thing, go have at it. Because they’re going to do the same things they did before this environment came along or try to work their way around it,” says Garrison, co-author of “Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment” speaking on Cisco’s “Cloud Unfiltered” podcast.

And while challenges abound, there are reasons to make the effort to move into this new territory.

“People just don’t scale, people make mistakes and people aren’t good at doing the same thing over and over again,” he says. “Whereas you can have declarative things set in policy and you know how your infrastructure should look that the computer….(and) the computer will do that over and over again and be really good at it.”

It’s also about a two-way relationship with infrastructure, he says giving credit to co-author Kris Nova for the concept of infrastructure-as-software — rather than infrastructure as code. In a cloud native environment, you want software that’s managing it. In other words, it’s not just a one-way where code is pushed and then something happens. But the interface mutates how the infrastructure looks on both sides, he adds.

Garrison got started in tech in college, while “babysitting labs” and in open source around the same time through a second-hand computer and Linux. Now heavily involved in Kubernetes and CNCF, he offered some advice about getting started in open source communities.

“It doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter what your skill sets are, it matters that you can provide time,” he says. “If you can offer time, an hour a week, half an hour a day, just go troll through the forums or GitHub repos and find a need.”

You can watch the whole 41-minute episode on YouTube or catch Garrison’s talk on cloud native at the upcoming SoCal Linux Expo.

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