front matter
The first time I toured a data center, I was fascinated by the entrance retinal scanner, flashing lights, cooling systems, and colorful wiring. Coming from an electrical engineering background, I could appreciate the complexity of managing hardware. I came upon the confusing concept of cloud computing when a company hired me to manage a private cloud platform. I no longer plugged in wires and crafted servers. Instead, I stared at progress bars in a user interface for thousands of servers and wrote terrible scripts to provision them.
At that point, I realized I needed to learn more. I wanted to automate more infrastructure and write more sustainable code that other team members could use. My learning journey reflected the growth of cloud computing and the DevOps philosophy. We needed to learn how to change and scale our infrastructure to keep up business innovation and avoid affecting critical systems! With the public cloud making it even easier to get infrastructure resources on demand, we could almost start treating our infrastructure as an extension of our software.