Flip to switch from traditional infrastructure management to automation

 There is no flip to switch from traditional infrastructure management to automation. So there’s no value in approaching infrastructure automation with this unrealistic goal in mind.Rather, modern approaches to infrastructure automation depend on some corresponding shift toward cloud platforms and tools. But you don’t need to get there overnight.At the outset, Fisher sees this stage as a creative process as much as a technical one: “To understand what to containerize, you need to step back and understand the core services and building blocks of your application.” 

There are many perspectives on the right path to containerization, especially if you are also refactoring an application (or multiple applications) as microservices. Fisher’s a fan of starting on the front-end and working your way down the stack from there.

“One of the best ways to approach this is to understand where your end-users most frequent[ly visit] in the UI/UX, and move down the stack,” Fisher says. “This approach is often referred to as ‘micro-frontends,’ or the front-end analog of back-end microservices. Once you have an understanding of what needs to be containerized, there are a plethora of tools to help with the horizontal scaling of the infrastructure that difference between computer engineering and computer science the services – Kubernetes is the most popular.” (We’ll get back to tools in a moment.)