August 18, 2015 at 08:59PM
"[T]hink of cloud as a provider of durable cloud native abstractions that are resilient to failures." #readingToday  

It is time to think of cloud as a provider of durable cloud native abstractions that are resilient to failures. The term "cloud native" is fairly new with no clear definition. I would describe a cloud native abstraction as one with two fundamental characteristics:

Durable: The abstraction may be built using ephemeral parts, but the abstraction itself is durable in the sense that it survives failure of its parts.
Declarative: The user of the abstraction declares the desired state, and the service providing that abstraction attempts to maintain the abstraction in that desired state.

It's been just over three years since I started working on building a fairly large cloud infrastructure at eBay. Our initial focus was to make infrastructure programmable and to enable agility through self-service APIs with some checks and balances for efficiency, security and availability. This model put infrastructure basics like compute, network and block/object storage [...]