First Principles of Cloud Native Technology - Ronald Petty, RX

The presentation discusses how to understand and maintain a system that has been inherited, with a focus on cloud-native technologies and tactical processes. The speaker emphasizes the importance of self-reflection, sharing information, and learning about the lower-level technologies.

• Understand the technologies in the system and reflect against others
• Use metrics and acceptance tests to ensure the system is solving what it's supposed to
• Empower others by sharing information and filling in knowledge gaps
• Drill through the continuum of cloud-native technologies and understand the lower-level technologies
• Run pods locally to gain knowledge about dependencies and failures

The speaker mentions that distributed computing is a complicated subject, but people tend to be weaker in understanding the lower-level technologies. Running a pod in the production cluster and locally can help gain knowledge about dependencies and failures.

Have you ever inherited a system? If you ever feel unclear the system's purpose, it's time to break it down into first principles. With so many Cloud Native tools available it can be overwhelming to decide which tools are most directly solving the problem (or could solve it). We will take a systematic approach to enumerating and grouping core issues and how the related tools solve them. We start with a review of core operating concepts, basic data and network models. From there we contrast OS level solutions to these problems and their challenges. We next enter the Cloud Native layer and see how they leverage OS level concepts to solve these problems. Finally, we compare potential solutions to core issues at different levels (OS or Cloud Native). This talk is focused on how to break down tools into functional areas and contrast them to each other. Leaving this session you will have more techniques to reason about these tools and model solutions.