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.
