Understanding operating systems and infrastructure

Everything starts at a server. It doesn’t matter if you’re running workloads on the cloud, on serverless platforms, or containers – everything starts at a server. The reason why engineers don’t always think about servers, or where workloads start in today’s world, is that the underlying infrastructure is abstracted away from us. In the cloud world, there aren’t a lot of times when you’ll have to ask, what hardware are you using to run these VMs? Dell? HP? Instead, you’re worried about what happens after the servers are deployed, which is sometimes called Day-Two Ops (insert more buzzwords here). What we mean by that is instead of ordering servers online, racking them, and configuring some virtualized hypervisor on them (ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, and so on), engineers are more concerned now with automation, application deployments, platforms, and scalability.

In many start-ups and...