rynowak
commented
9 hours ago Hi folks, we're trying to assess interest in the topic and find contributors who want to work on this paper with us. We plan to present this at the TAG App-Delivery general meeting on 10/16 (schedule willing).
The best way to get involved is to comment on this issue OR to reach out to us on CNCF slack in the #wg-infrastructure-lifecycle channel OR to attend a working group meeting.
You can learn more about the working group here. We'd love to have you participate and contribute along with us!
👋 WG-Infrastructure-Lifecycle dropping in to say hello :wave:
TAG AppDelivery has adopted a new process for writing and publishing technical papers. This issue is our initial proposal for writing a paper as one of the working group's deliverables.
You can learn more about the working group here. We'd love to have you participate and contribute along with us!
Title: Cloud-native infrastructure lifecycle
Description:
As the cloud native approach matures, the workloads we run have increasingly complex infrastructure needs. While we all strive to control costs, enforce best practices, and ensure secure configurations, the reality is often fragmented.
Despite the complexity and sophistication required, not enough has been done to meet the challenges. We're seeing significant investment in new open source infrastructure projects both in and out of CNCF but effective tooling for cloud native infrastructure lifecycle management remains elusive. The Platform Engineering movement emphasizes treating infrastructure as a product, but there's no standardized approach for managing its lifecycle.
While savvy users are embracing cloud native practices, infrastructure requirements are inherently diverse. We see an opportunity to champion technology-agnostic best practices. Infrastructure lifecycle management deserves the same level of attention and planning we dedicate to established areas of cloud native development. This ensures security, resilience, manageability, sustainability, and observability.
Audience:
Any end-user involved in or responsible for the management of cloud-native infrastructure - regardless of job title, workload, or chosen technologies.
Impact:
The whitepaper will guide end-users in managing infrastructure to ensure it is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable. Any end-user, regardless of their role or technologies choices can leverage the whitepaper’s guidance to implement a mature and stable infrastructure management practice.
Scope:
This scope of this whitepaper covers a set of recommended practices and maturity guidelines that are generally applicable and technology agnostic. There are many complex domain-specific and workload-specific areas of infrastructure management, and we’d like to avoid going deep in any specific area to serve the biggest possible audience.
Our initial proposed set of topics (non-exhaustive):
Configuration / Infrastructure as Code
Deployment approaches (Infra as Data, etc.)
State management/backups
Observability
This sounds like a lot, even for an initial list. It's a really big topic and we'd rather deliver a small amount of a good content than a large amount of questionable content. We need to begin the process and see where the contributor/user interest is to refine this list more.
We've got a clear picture right now on some topics that definitely out-of-scope:
Also, there are potentially many overlaps between other CNCF guidance and our proposed whitepaper. For example, many areas of the infrastructure lifecycle are security-critical. We plan to surface the existing guidance created by others where possible, and to collaborate with other TAGs and WGs.