Back matter

Acknowledgments

A technical book is never built from one person's knowledge alone.

Google Cloud exists because thousands of engineers, operators, security people, technical writers, support engineers, product teams, and users have spent years building, documenting, testing, breaking, and improving it.

The same is true of the open-source systems that make modern cloud engineering possible.

My thanks go to the people who maintain Kubernetes, OpenTofu, Ansible, Linux, the countless libraries and command-line tools used around them, and the documentation that lets the rest of us understand what the software is actually doing.

Good documentation deserves particular credit.

There is an enormous difference between software that works and software that another human being can operate safely. The engineers and technical writers who document APIs, failure modes, limits, security behavior, migration paths, and edge cases make the entire ecosystem better.

I also owe a general debt to the systems administrators, network engineers, security engineers, developers, SREs, platform engineers, and operations people I have learned from over the years.

Some lessons come from elegant systems.

A lot of the useful ones come from things that broke.

Finally, thanks to the readers who report errors, question assumptions, send corrections, and point out when a supposedly obvious explanation was not obvious at all.

That feedback makes the next version better.

Production note: Add personal acknowledgments here before publication if there are specific reviewers, contributors, friends, family members, technical experts, or early readers you want to thank by name. Do not publish somebody's name as a reviewer or contributor without their permission.