Building applications that run on your own servers and networks used to mean some very firm demarcations between what was considered a developer task and what was left up to the network team. The move to cloud platforms and cloud abstractions (even on your own hardware) has changed where those divisions fall — just as network operations teams have been adopting new ways of working, in part to keep up with new demands from developers used to being able to control the environment of their application without having to wait for access to resources, whether that’s VMs, storage or connectivity.
In the cloud, you don’t touch a physical network switch because clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform don’t let developers anywhere near that level of the hardware. But developers set up all the networking for their applications, managing IP ranges and creating virtual networks and performing networking tasks that they want to automate and operationalize.
“More and more, cloud native developers are having to grapple with networks in a way they hadn’t before,” explains Nigel Kersten, vice president of ecosystem engineering at Puppet.
