What's next for modern infrastructure?
Modern infrastructure is incredibly complex. I identified 4 main "levels" of infrastructure abstraction:
Level 1: A website on a server
This is the most straight forward way to host a website. A webserver hosted on bare metal or a VM.
Level 2: Multiple servers behind a load balancer
At this stage, you start treating servers as cattle rather than pets. Servers may be spun up and down at will without influencing the availability of the application.
Level 3: An orchestrated cluster of servers
Instead of a server serving a specific purpose (e.g. webserver, DB server, etc.), a server becomes a worker for arbitrary workloads (see Kubernetes, ECS).
Level 4: Multicluster service mesh
If an organization manages multiple clusters (e.g. multiple application teams), they can be tied together into a service mesh to better optimize communication and observability.
Level 5: ???
History shows that we never stop abstracting. Multicluster service meshes are about the most abstract concept many people (including myself) can comprehend, but I doubt that this is the end of this journey. So, what's next for modern infrastructure?
This is post 049 of #100DaysToOffload.