From the Preface

Faster! Faster! Faster! Everybody wants to go faster but few know how. The demands of the marketplace are accelerating and the size of the opportunity increasing but some of us are just not able to keep up! What separates the traditional enterprise from the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Etsy? We know that these companies have grown to insane scale and yet, somehow, they still retain their competitive edge and stay well ahead of the competition. How?

It takes a lot of work to move an idea from concept to customer. To see an idea evolve to the point of utility, of value. Work moves through a lot of different stations on its way to production, from product management to user experience to developers, testing, and then over to operations. Historically, work slows at every one of these stations. Over time, as a community, we’ve optimized different parts of the process. We have cloud computing, so no longer need to rack-and-stack services. We use test-driven development and continuous integration to automate testing. We release software in small batches microservices to reduce the scope of change and the cost of change. We embrace the ideas behind devops weaponized empathy to foster a holistic perspective of the system and a sense of camaraderie between developers and operations, reducing the agonizing cost of misaligned priorities. Any of these things in of themselves is interesting, and an improvement over what they replace. But taken together, these things let us isolate everything in the value chain that matters. Taken together, these things are what we mean by cloud native.

As members of an industry and practitioners of a discipline, software developers are at an amazing juncture today. There are reliable, open-source, stable, and self-service solutions for infrastructure, testing, middleware, continuous integration and delivery, development frameworks and cloud platforms. These primitives let organizations focus on cheaply delivering higher order value and at larger scale.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is aimed primarily at Java/JVM developers who are looking to build better software, faster, using Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Cloud Foundry. You’ve heard the buzz around microservices. Perhaps you’ve seen the stratospheric rise of Spring Boot, and wondered why most enterprises today are using Cloud Foundry. If this matches you, then this book is for you.

Why We Wrote This Book

At Pivotal, we help our customers transform into digital-first organizations by teaching them continuous delivery and using Cloud Foundry, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. We’ve seen what works (and what doesn’t) and we wanted to capture the state-of-the-art as defined by our customers, and informed by our experiences. We don’t purport to cover every possible angle, but we’ve tried to touch upon key concepts - corners of the cloud native world that you’re going to run into - and introduce them cleanly.