Foreword
==========


First the applications all moved to the cloud. And now they're being
torn apart. Let me explain what I mean by that.

As markets grow, the unit of function around which one can build a
business shrinks. A classic example of this can be seen in the history
of the automotive industry. The Ford River Rouge Complex was built in
the late 1920s. At the time, mass-produced cars were relatively new,
and the market was relatively small. And so factories like the River Rouge
Complex had to build all the subcomponents too. Roughly, in one side
of the factory went water, rubber, and iron ore, and out the other
side came full automobiles. Of course, as the market for cars grew, so
did a massive ecosystem of suppliers of car components: wheels,
seats, floor mats, and the like. Today the large car companies are
more akin to integrators than auto parts makers.

The same dynamic is happening with the application. In the 1970s the
same manufacturer would build the chips, the circuit boards, the
system form factor, the operating system, and each of the
applications. Over time as the market has grown, the system has
disaggregated. The hardware and software separated and spawned multiple
independent companies. And then companies started to be built around
independent applications.

The market hasn't stopped growing and over the last few years we've
seen the application itself disaggregate. Commonly used subcomponents
of applications are being pulled out, and entire companies and
projects are being built around them. Today, if you're building an
application, there are third-party APIs available for authenticating
users, sending texts or email, streaming videos, authorizing access to
resources, and many other useful functions.

So what does this have to do with the book you're about to read? While
the last decade was a consolidation of applications into the
cloud, the next decade is largely going to be about the explosion of
applications and application components away from it. Now that
subcomponents of workloads have been largely decoupled from having to
sit with the application, they can be run anywhere. And in particular
they can be run on infrastructure that's purposely built and optimized
for them! In fact, we are starting to see what can only be described
as an anti-cloud trend where large companies are choosing to pull some
workloads back from large clouds to their own optimized
infrastructure. And we're even seeing startups choosing to build their
own infrastructure from the get-go because they understand the cost
and performance advantages of doing so.

In "Edge Cloud Operations: A Systems Approach" the authors provide a
detailed overview of not just cloud operations (which are so last
decade) but operations in this new era of distributed clouds. In many
ways, the cloud era was a low point of systems, because so much below
the application layer was buried deep within the engineering organizations of
the three large cloud providers. But that's changing, and to change
with it, you need to understand how it all works. And that's exactly
why you need to read this book.

| Martin Casado
| General Partner, a16z