Foreword

In 2000, during the peak of the dotcom boom, I developed web applications in C++ and Perl. One had to personally go to the ISP data center and install the machine along with a RAID setup. From 2003-2006, the world moved to shared hosting powered by virtual machines. Today, the world is a different place, one where cloud computing providers, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and programming languages such as Python, Ruby, and Scala make it child's play to launch and scale websites.

While cloud computing makes it easy to get started, its offerings are ever expanding with new tools, deployment methodologies, and changing workflows. Take, for instance, what compute offerings should a developer build on? Software as a Service, or Platform as a Service, or Infrastructure as a Service Platform? Should the developer choose Docker, or a normal virtual machine setup for deployment? Should the entire software architecture follow an MVC or a microservices model?

Manish has a done a good job in the book, equipping a Python developer with skills to thrive in a cloud computing world. The book starts off with laying the foundation of what cloud computing is all about and its offerings. It's beneficial that most chapters in the book are self-contained, allowing the reader to pick up and learn/refresh their knowledge of what's needed for the current sprint/task. The workings of technologies such as CI and Docker are precisely explained in clear prose that does away with the underlying complexity. The Agile model of software development keeps us developers on toes, requiring developers to learn new tools in days and not weeks. The book's hands-on approach to teaching with screenshots on installation, configuration, and compact code snippets equips developers with the knowledge they need, thus making them productive.

A preference for full-stack developers, the implicit requirement of knowing cloud computing 101, and CIOs wanting to achieve a lot more with small teams are the norms today. Cloud Native Python is the book a freshman, beginner, or intermediate Python developer should read to get themselves up to speed on the tools and technology that power today's software development.

The complexity of cloud computing is in the details, be it the deployment workflow, managing infrastructure, security, or the tooling ecosystem. These choices have lasting implications for the software that's being built and the team developing and maintaining it.

Ankur Gupta
Founder of NumerateLabs LLP
Curator of newsletters: ImportPython & DjangoWeekly