The choice between being a specialist or a generalist is debated by many engineers. Nowadays, the industry may need something in between.

Over the years there’s been an explosion in infrastructure platforms and application frameworks that form the foundation of “cloud native.” Modern infrastructure platforms range from container orchestrators such as Kubernetes to serverless platforms aimed at rapid application development. In parallel, shell scripts that administrators used to deploy, configure, and manage these platforms evolved into what is now called Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which formalizes the use of higher level programming languages such as Python or Ruby or purpose-built languages such as HashiCorp’s HCL (through Terraform).