Preface

Welcome to the JavaScript Cloud Native Development Cookbook. This cookbook is packed full of recipes to help you along your cloud-native journey. It is intended to be a companion to another of my books, Cloud Native Development Patterns and Best Practices. I have personally found delivering cloud-native solutions to be, by far, the most fun and satisfying development practice. This is because cloud-native is more than just optimizing for the cloud. It is an entirely different way of thinking and reasoning about software systems.

In a nutshell, cloud-native is lean and autonomous. Powered by disposable infrastructure, leveraging fully managed cloud services and embracing disposable architecture, cloud-native empowers everyday, self-sufficient, full-stack teams to rapidly and continuously experiment with innovations, while simultaneously building global-scale systems with much less effort than ever before. Following this serverless-first approach allows teams to move fast, but this rapid pace also opens the opportunity for honest human error to wreak havoc across the system. To guard against this, cloud-native systems are composed of autonomous services, which creates bulkheads between the services to reduce the blast radius during a disruption.

In this cookbook, you will learn how to build autonomous services by eliminating all synchronous inter-service communication. You will turn the database inside out and ultimately turn the cloud into the database by implementing the event sourcing and CQRS patterns with event streaming and materialized views. Your team will build confidence in its ability to deliver because asynchronous inter-service communication and data replication remove the downstream and upstream dependencies that make systems brittle. You will also learn how to continuously deploy, test, observe, optimize, and secure your autonomous services across multiple regions.

To get the most out of this book, be prepared with an open mind to discover why cloud-native is different. Cloud-native forces us to rewire how we reason about systems. It tests all our preconceived notions of software architecture. So, be prepared to have a lot of fun building cloud-native systems.