Preface ======= The cloud is ubiquitous. Everyone uses the cloud to either access or deliver services, but not everyone will build and operate a cloud. So why should anyone care about how to turn a pile of servers and switches into a 24/7 service delivery platform? That's what Google, Microsoft, Amazon and the other cloud providers do for us, and they do a perfectly good job of it. The answer, we believe, is that the cloud is becoming ubiquitous in another way, as distributed applications increasing run not just in large, central datacenters but at the edge. As applications are disaggregated, the cloud is expanding from hundreds of datacenters to tens of thousands of enterprises. And while it is clear that the commodity cloud providers are eager to manage those edge clouds as a logical extension of their datacenters, they do not have a monopoly on the know-how for making that happen. This book lays out a roadmap that a small team of engineers followed over the course of a year to stand up and operationalize an edge cloud and then operate it 24/7. This edge cloud spans a dozen enterprises, and hosts a non-trivial cloud native service—5G connectivity in our case, but that’s just an example. The team was able to do this by leveraging 20+ open source components, but selecting those components is just a start. There were dozens of technical decisions to make along the way, and a few thousand lines of configuration code to write. We believe this is a repeatable exercise, which we report in this book. The code for those configuration files is open source, for those who want to pursue the topic in more detail. What do we mean by an edge cloud? We're drawing a distinction between clouds run by the hyperscale cloud providers in their massive data centers, which we think of as the core, and those run by enterprises (or managed for them) at the edge. The edge is where the real, physical world meets the cloud. For example, it is the place where data from sensors is likely to be gathered and processed, and where services that need to be close to the end user for reasons of latency or bandwidth are delivered. Our roadmap may not be the right one for all circumstances, but it does shine a light on the fundamental challenges and trade-offs involved in operationalizing a cloud. As we can attest based on our experience, it’s a complicated design space with an overabundance of terminology and storylines to untangle. Intended Audience ------------------ We hope this book makes valuable reading for anyone who is trying to stand up and operationalize their own edge cloud infrastructure, but we also aim to provide useful information for at least two other broad groups. First, there will be a set of readers who need to evaluate the options available, particularly to decide between using the cloud services offered by one of the hyperscalers or building their own edge cloud (or some combination of these). We hope to demystify the landscape of edge clouds for this audience to help inform those decisions. Secondly, there will be a group of application and service developers who need to build on top of whatever cloud infrastructure their organization has chosen to use. We believe it is important for these developers to understand what goes on "under the hood" of the cloud at least at a high level, so that they can make their applications manageable and reliable. There is increasingly close interaction between developers and operators (as evidenced by the DevOps movement) and we aim to facilitate that collaboration. Topics such as monitoring and observability are particularly important for this audience. Guided Tour of Open Source -------------------------- The good news is that there is a wealth of open source components that can be assembled to help manage cloud platforms and scalable applications built on those platforms. That's also the bad news. With several dozen cloud-related projects available at open source consortia like the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Apache Foundation, and Open Networking Foundation, navigating the project space is one of the biggest challenges we faced in putting together a cloud management platform. This is in large part because these projects are competing for mindshare, with both significant overlap in the functionality they offer and extraneous dependencies on each other. One way to read this book is as a guided tour of the open source landscape for cloud control and management. And in that spirit, we do not replicate the excellent documentation those projects already provide, but instead include links to project-specific documentation (which often includes tutorials that we encourage you to try). We also include snippets of code from those projects, but these examples are chosen to help solidify the main points we're trying to make about the management platform as a whole; they should not be interpreted as an attempt to document the inner-working of the individual projects. Our goal is to explain how the various puzzle pieces fit together to build an end-to-end management system, and in doing so, identify both various tools that help and the hard problems that no amount of tooling can eliminate. It should come as no surprise that there are challenging technical issues to address (despite marketing claims to the contrary). After all, how to operationalize a computing system is a question that’s as old as the field of *Operating Systems*. Operationalizing a cloud is just today’s version of that fundamental problem, which has become all the more interesting as we move up the stack, from managing *devices* to managing *services*. This topic is both timely and foundational. Acknowledgements ------------------ The software described in this book is due to the hard work of the ONF engineering team and the open source community that works with them. We acknowledge their contributions, with a special thank-you to Hyunsun Moon, Sean Condon, and HungWei Chiu for their significant contributions to Aether's control and management platform, and to Oguz Sunay for his influence on its overall design. Suchitra Vemuri's insights into testing and quality assurance were also invaluable. This book is still very much a work-in-progress, and we will happily acknowledge everyone that provides feedback. Please send us your comments using the `Issues Link `__. Also see the `Wiki `__ for the TODO list we're currently working on. | Larry Peterson, Scott Baker, Andy Bavier, Zack Williams, and Bruce Davie | June 2022