By Bruno Schaatsbergen, Group Manager, Developer Relations at HashiCorp
Personally, I believe infrastructure should be managed as code, version-controlled, automated and declarative-but that’s just the beginning. While this provides a decent foundation, I also recognize that these are only the first few steps. True complexity comes from managing infrastructure at scale, day in and day out. It’s not just about provisioning the infrastructure-it’s about managing its full lifecycle. From scaling to securing, from observability to disaster recovery, all without losing sight of the broader goal: enabling reliable and consistent application delivery.
As cloud-native applications become more complex, so do the challenges developers face in managing the infrastructure supporting them. Cloud platforms, edge computing in IoT devices, on-premises data centers, and hybrid environments have all become part of our daily infrastructure landscape. Each presents its own unique challenges and requires different approaches. While there are many open source and commercial projects available, the industry still lacks universally accepted patterns and practices for infrastructure lifecycle management.
Who should be able to see and access the state of your infrastructure? Should you manage it yourself? If so, how highly available should it be? Should your highly-available system’s availability be tied to the availability of your state storage? After all, your system is only as highly available as your state. What should software that abstracts cloud platforms look like? How should we handle infrastructure that has reached the end of its lifecycle? These are just a few of the many questions that the Infrastructure Lifecycle working group wants to explore and answer together, in a technology-agnostic way. We need your expertise!
Working group objectives
The Infrastructure Lifecycle working group within the TAG App Delivery aims to deliver a set of technology-agnostic principles and best practices applicable to anyone managing infrastructure. The mission of the working group is to create a comprehensive framework that enables developers like you and me to navigate the complexities of infrastructure lifecycle challenges beyond projects and tools. This framework includes the following:
- Infrastructure as code
- Control planes
- State management
- Disaster recovery
- Automation
- Testing
- Observability
The working group integrates valuable domain-specific expertise by collaborating with Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs), Working Groups (WGs), vendors, and end-users. It will develop practical examples and reference architectures to guide users in applying the Infrastructure Lifecycle framework across various environments. Additionally, the working group will publish real-world case studies and blogs, gathering user feedback on their experiences with the framework.
Co-chaired by Bruno Schaatsbergen (HashiCorp), Ryan Nowak (Microsoft), and Jochen Zehnder (56K.Cloud), the group brings together expertise from leading industry professionals.
Excited?
Are you a developer interested in shaping the future of cloud-native infrastructure lifecycle management? I would love for you to be part of it! The charter provides more information about the working group’s goals and direction.
- Bi-weekly meetings: Participate in our discussions on each month’s first and third Fridays.
- CNCF Slack channel: Connect with us on the #wg-infra-lifecycle channel on the CNCF Slack workspace.
Are you attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024? Don’t miss the chance to connect with the co-chairs and members of the Infrastructure Lifecycle working group at the TAG App Delivery booth to learn more about our initiatives!
To learn more about Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem, join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, in Salt Lake City, Utah, on November 12-15, 2024.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruno Schaatsbergen, Group Manager, Developer Relations at HashiCorp
Bruno Schaatsbergen focuses on making things simpler in software, systems, and delivery. He believes in minimizing waste and optimizing for joy. With a background in platform design, distributed systems, and software engineering, he finds joy in contributing to open-source projects and has a strong passion for Terraform.
