cloud2030

Today's episode, we talked about the challenge of making Modular Automation. We broke down why that is so hard and really dug into ways in which we can increase the modularity and reuse of automation. That led us to talking about infrastructure pipelines, infrastructure, reuse, and sharing state via digital twins in infrastructure. All of this comes together really fascinating ways! Transcript: ht...

We go into the details about Secrets Management. We explore how the process works, and how to do it right. We also cover the alternatives. This podcast is for you if you are trying to understand how secrets management works. We cover different scenarios where it can be applied, and where can go wrong. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/SvO6_I3RIiGmc2FLJM70y9xoQB4 Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels [ID 4...

"The peak of trustability" came up during our discussion of Trust in general. We really unwound what trust means starting from simple concepts like credentials and certificates and other security items. We got to a point where trust is also about software supply chain! Security includes how much you keep up with changes and what the latest things are. Then we realized that trust has an important t...

Continuous Infrastructure Automation is a critical concept about driving much more resilient and repeatable systems. As we build out applications on infrastructure, we should not treat them as a static deployment. Instead, we should think of infrastructure as constantly evolving, growing and changing. There's a lot of technology and challenges in building that! In discussion, we firmly believe tha...

Cloud versus Edge? This panel dove into what makes edge different than cloud. There are a lot of different technical and commercial drivers. And fundamentally, it matters who owns the sources of data and how data sources are different. This underscores how it is critical to understand data sources, infrastructure ownership, and how everything fits together. This discussion will change to you rethi...

DevOps Lunch and Learn was about security practices. Specifically, we built an outline of topics in security that we think are necessary for developers and operators to build secure applications. We basically built a week long course curriculum! As we go through what this course curriculum we walk through who needs to know this information and why. If you want to see all of the detail here, please...

We talk about Digital Twins and the Edge with Simon Crosby from Swim. AI. They are literally building digital twins in edge locations so he has a lot to share. We work to expand and understand how Simon's experience translates into general cases and what we're seeing in the edge. The systems that we're trying to build are at the intersection of models and "connectedness" of all the components for...

With Distributed Infrastructure and the Edge, we cover the challenges of managing applications that are, by definition spread out throughout heterogeneous infrastructure. Distributed Control is designed to control systems that are are not in cloud data centers with localized compute and storage. But then how do we manage it? We discussed details about how these systems get built, and kept coming b...

This episode is about Terraform orchestration, what some people might call a TACO, in which we actually tried to do cloud provisioning in a orchestrated way. But this is a really challenging thing to do! Orchestration is really hard so our discussion kept coming back to saying that this isn't orchestration at all: it's Infrastructure as Code and management. We need to find a consistent way to to r...

Right to Repair is the idea that when you buy a product, you're able to fix it. We've been building products lately that don't have that inherent part of the contract. In this episode, we really took Right to Repair to another level talking about Intellectual Property (IP) and ownership of that IP in the software components. This topic impacts every single business and every single consumer! Trans...

We talked about 5G, factories and edge infrastructure. They are very interconnected because they live at the network edge and are sensitive to how we need to route traffic. This is important as the basis for using digital twinning as a new user experience (UI/UX) around interacting with systems. This new approach is starting to emerge and it will be very network intensive, visually oriented, and i...

Cloud provisioning is very difficult when you go beyond simple provisioning and start thinking about how to to stitch together infrastructure in a repeatable way! Specifically, today's episode is a deep dive into Terraform usage patterns. We get very hands on as we talk about how you manage state files and how you connect things together with Terraform. We will spend a significant amount of time d...

In this episode, we question the IT talent pipeline. We really work through boot camps and how we are building talent and skills for the generation of IT workers. We ask some key questions like: Are degrees necessary? Can you teach these things quickly? How do we actually learn the skills that are necessary to build resilient systems? And what would it look like if we were creating certification p...

Is open source driving innovation? And Is it a necessary component of Right to Repair and ownership? Are there commercial drivers where people want those open capabilities? We transition into a deeper conversation about what's going on with open source. Is it being innovative? Who is leading? How is it working? Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/vto0yPpBuZtqngkc_zqMDp9J39M Photo by Jeffrey Czum from P...

Good APIs are hard to design! Making them long lasting and scalable is even harder. We discussed two aspects of API design. First, making about Event Bus for system integration and then RackN CTO, Greg Althaus, discusses what his team considers a good API design from Digital Rebar. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/2Pz3LwG4qPl58s3ewwGFCCFmg8w Photo by Tsunami Green from Pexels [ID 5192790]

Building an edge control plane is challenging! It's not clear even what is currently available. As always, data, data pipelines, data orchestration, and data choreography are all influential for edge infrastructure. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/yfa6Kzsd6CTjXOJ1MQjHBxp2J4Q Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels [ID 3889936]

IPUs, intelligent processing units, are also known as smart NICs, side cars, or supervisory computers. A well known example is Amazon's Nitro. We discuss the impacts of these supervisory processors, and how they can change the industry. This is clearly the trend of the future. Building supervisory systems as additional processing capability into our core servers that then abstract out how the bus...

The "right to repair" is a really thorny and political issue! We talked a lot about John Deere, Apple and Tesla not letting people fix the products they've bought from those companies. We have a lot of questions! Why they do that? What the challenges are with RTR? How we could avoid them? What pressures keep us coming back to companies that are offering goods that we don't have the ability to repa...

How can cloud economics of hyperscalar clouds be used to ended or limit their control? We discussed the state of the cloud ecosystem with a focus on where its going to go. After a full, rich, and dynamic conversation, we came back to security security, software (as opposed to SaaS), owning your own infrastructure, and the ROI of that infrastructure. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/Y7ZO7Y6e0JQr5Wz4h...

To understand CI/CD of infrastructure, you have to actually understand how the systems work together. In this podcast, we talked about low code, no code and how you would do integration testing for that. We also explore the idea of unit tests and code coverage for CI/CD presents challenges. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/oPGkPe8w-hG2LKXkQJhHAeJebe0 Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels [ID 40217...

How do we secure service meshes for zero trust? Especially since we don't know how they're going to be used or integrated? We went very deep into what it takes to secure service mesh. That included what type of application frameworks are going to be required to provide multi-service infrastructures that are secure and trusted in a performing way. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/CUJdKeyT_hHLAZG9XKqz...

Can you composing infrastructure tasks: provisioning, configuration, security and monitoring, all together? Basically a Linux Pipe for automation? Maybe! We talked about how hard it is to build robust, resilient infrastructure. The theme was supposed to be what could go wrong and finding the weak links in our infrastructure automation. Fundamentally we think that it's all weak links! We had a good...

How can GitOps and Infrastructure as Code scale your team's ability to write automation? We answer how to take your DevOps to the next level. We really dig into what the automation challenges are and how you can do better as you build an integrated infrastructure system. And of course, we did talk about Env0 and how Env0 solves the problem. And you will learn a lot about Env0 during this podcast....

We talk about the impacts of Terraform going 1.0, Ansible, and the Fastly outage. We mix all those things together with a little bit of vendor gossip. How might Terraform being "stable" change things? And is that going to help the industry hurt the industry? And what changes might be in stock? Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/mL1fLJUiXO7qOhfcdC1f6E2LGEs Photo by Ba Tik from Pexels [ID 3754294]

Learning DevOps is a challenge! We discuss using the DevOps Roadmap to coach people to get into the field of DevOps and infrastructure automation. DevOps is hard and challenging because the thing we kept coming back to there being so much to learn and understand. It can be really intimidating to get started! We spent some time actually trying to break that down and give some starting points on how...