cloud2030

How does Kubernetes create lock in versus how could Kubernetes be used to prevent lock in? Lock in is not always a bad thing. When you avoid committing to a single vendor, you may have to work to the lowest common denominator or deal with heterogeneity in your infrastructure. Heterogeneity is pretty normal, and you might have to do this work regardless, but when you commit to a vendor you get to f...

Building reliable automation at scale for infrastructure presents challenges. In this episode, we discuss orchestration, workflow automation, and the reconciler pattern in the context of Terraform. We refer to the pattern of Terraform, automation, and orchestration systems as “TACOS” and today we dig into how you test it and check it against drift. These are real topics of operational concern for...

How are Metaverse environments built? Today we talk about how we use intellectual property to build these Metaverse environments, and who has access to what and who's going to create it. That turns into a discussion on how you're going to pay for it. Typically, Metaverse is framed as a platform, but we got interested in the content, media wars, and streaming platforms. Since we started the convers...

What makes Everything as Code and Infrastructure as Code interesting? In today’s episode, we discuss what makes something code-like and the idea of Everything as Code, based on Patrick Dubois’ article “In depth research and trends analyzed from 50+ different concepts as code.” Reference: https://www.jedi.be/blog/2022/02/23/trends-and-inventory-of-50-as-code-concepts/ Some of our conclusions were p...

Organizations take a risk when they get locked into a vendor. In today’s episode, we talk a lot about the risks of lock in, both in general and in the context of Oracle. That discussion takes us into a question of insurance, and if insurance policies could ultimately drive people to reduce lock in exposure. This was a fascinating discussion, not only about lock in but about what would drive organi...

A Goldilocks' balance challenges us to trade off prescriptive and flexible platforms. James Urquhart shares his experiences with Cloud Foundry, VMware, and Amazon about trying to find the right balance between building it yourself versus a prescriptive service approach. We’ve decided that there needs to be a middle zone with enough opportunity for customization, as well as enough pre-set, prescrip...

The Okta hack highlights the value versus complexity trade off. In today’s episode, we ask if the complexity of using single sign on is the right move in this context. We also think about how to deal with these interconnected systems that have high degrees of complexity. We also discussed API design, and whether or not we should have more rigid or flexible APIs. You can’t remove complexity from th...

Making automation safe is essential to making it usable at scale. How do we make automation safe? We found a lot of great insights drawing from space craft design, aircraft, aircraft design and other systems where safety is super important. Automation is a force multiplier. If we don't factor in safety when we build it,then we could create a lot of harm in systems from wasteful spending to actual...

Majors versus minors are enterprise data centers versus blockchain, bitcoin and distributed ledger data centers. We dive into the differences in processing and environmental requirements for those two different use cases. While the idea of blockchain and distributed ledgers generate very different computational profiles, what we're building keeps coming back to the design of a data center is desig...

GitOps is a really important way of collaborating and communicating about infrastructure. But can GitOps escape from Kubernetes? While we did talk about Kubernetes too, we mainly talked about what it takes to implement GitOps outside of Kubernetes. We considered building a GitOps architecture and then having people understand and use it. We also cover the fundamental parts of GitOps like having a...

What resources does the Metaverse require? In this episode, we think of the metaverse as a distributed environment and ask if it could be owned by the people who are hosting the environments instead of centralized. One of the complicating factors is figuring out if the Metaverse is AR, VR, augmented or virtual systems. Consensus was that the augmented reality (AR) version of the Metaverse is proba...

Today's discussion was about distributed ledger technology (DLT), also known as blockchain and the technology behind Bitcoin. We had a balanced discussion: some people who were excited about the technology and others who were skeptical. That interplay really created one of the best conversations I've heard about DLT and its applications Throughout the conversation, we tested each other and we came...

Today's episode is about measuring complexity. Complexity is a topic that we cover a lot. And in this case, we really went past the idea that we could measure complexity, and into looking at the causes and costs of complexity. We had a remarkable conversation about what it means to say something's too complex? What are the consequences of complexity? And what should we do about them? Ultimately, i...

Today's episode is about Web3. By now hopefully you've heard of Web3, but… what is Web3 really!?! That's exactly what this conversation is about! We really talked about how Web3 is more than tech bros marketing Bitcoin. There actually are real legitimate business interests around Web3. Uses like breaking transaction log jams when a small number of providers are actually controlling and running the...

We went beyond what the Continuous Delivery Foundation is doing to talk about how to scale Continuous Delivery. Especially around the continuous reconciler pattern. So what does CD take beyond committing something in git? To make scalable continuous delivery systems and cross team continuous delivery systems means building things beyond GitOps that really scale and work for enterprise teams. The u...

This discussion is about the infrastructure behind augmented reality. We really dive into how augmented reality will take place in our environment. And the spoiler is it AR is already here! We are actually building augmented reality systems everywhere and they're showing up in our daily lives. The group believes very strongly that the automotive space is already leading AR for a whole bunch of rea...

How should we think about migrating legacy workloads to new infrastructure and modernize them? The group addresses this question methodically incuding how databases get linked, how they get used, how they get migrated, how important it is to maintain languages and what it would take to migrate in language. In the end, we look back on that conversation apply lessons learned to what we are building...

We know that humans have trouble keeping systems updated, but… how can we address the challenge of knowing which updates are required and, critically, if the updates with break other systems? Even knowing if they worked is a really thorny problem! In this episode, we focus on actions about what’s going on and why this problem has persisted in industry for so long. Starting from the news of the day...

We seem to be very worried about complexity in technology, but how bad is it really? Do we have a way of measuring complexity? Figuring out how to actually quantify it could help eliminate and manage it. We started by discussing mathematical concepts to capture the systemic nature of complexity. That turns out to be really hard, so we got into some really interesting thoughts about what it takes t...

This discussion sifts into tactical concerns for containers in the near term. We've gotten far with containers and Kubernetes. But what about process controls that we need to wrap around containers? We talked through how we need to be thinking about containers now that we have good control surfaces around them to make things work. If you were using containers and Kubernetes, this podcast will cert...

We talk about software licensing in open source, and what it means to the broader market. In fact, we cover how it's changing what the market actually is! This is not not just open source licensing in general because at the end we didn't care about the license. We are more concerned about utility, serviceability and operability of the products we use. We need to understand whether or not we can re...

We discussed the intersection of serverless and digital twinning. These two concepts are really tightly intermingled! We discarded the idea of a central single serverless hub managing everything; instead, we think sites would actually have a mesh of serverless, interconnected event processing and stream processing systems. This approach is much more function dependent, but really opens up a lot of...

We have a lot of questions about improving collaboration in organizations: How do we deal with change in organizations How can we get organizations to work together better? How do we encourage collaboration around the automation spaces that we're trying to build in DevOps. In our discussion, a lot came back to something as simple as version control! We also discuss how we handle coupling between s...

We started talking about blockchain and the edge, but that is not where it ended up at all! Our fascinating journey started with web3, and surprisingly, it’s potential for distributed infrastructure and distributed web. That led us to edge: managing and trusting devices on the edge through distributed ledger (DLT). That led us to the distributed ledger landscape. The journey is important because s...

What is a “green datacenter?” Can we make the IT infrastructure we use more environmentally sound? Maybe, but… it's a challenging problem because fundamentally running servers uses power. We went into how data centers use power with an eye to making them more efficient. But that’s only part of the story. We discussed ways to incent people to give up resources, CPU cycles, and idle servers. Those a...