Cloud and Infrastructure for Product Managers

A traffic spike, an expansion into another region or a rising cloud bill can bring infrastructure decisions into the product roadmap. Cloud and Infrastructure for Product Managers explains how digital products run and how infrastructure choices affect capacity, availability and costs when working with Engineering.

Understand the options for running a product

The book starts with servers and virtual machines before introducing containers, Kubernetes and serverless. It examines the responsibilities associated with each approach and presents AWS, Azure and Google Cloud alongside their core services.

Managed services, cloud storage and the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models provide context for discussing what the team operates and what it delegates to a provider. An ongoing SaaS case study follows how infrastructure evolves as the platform gains users, features and new business requirements.

Connect growth, availability and cloud costs

Horizontal and vertical scaling, autoscaling and capacity planning are explained through changes in demand and traffic spikes. The discussion examines why adding servers does not always resolve a performance bottleneck and why Engineering may need preparation time before a launch.

Regions, Availability Zones and redundancy provide the basis for discussing service continuity and expansion into new locations. The book also explains how cloud consumption translates into costs, how a feature can affect the bill and how FinOps connects spending with product decisions. Vendor lock-in adds the longer-term question of how a provider choice can constrain future options.

Discuss infrastructure decisions with Engineering

The material is written for Product Managers, Product Owners and business professionals working with digital products. It connects infrastructure concepts with practical questions about launches, reliability, managed services and operating costs. No prior programming or system administration experience is required.

For the system components behind an infrastructure proposal, continue with Software Architecture for Product Managers. Logs, Kibana and Observability for Product Managers covers investigating how a product behaves in production.