Category Archives: All

What is Platform Engineering?

What is platform engineering? And why is it necessary and how to make it work compared to DevOps.

In this conversation, we really hit on the challenges of creating automation teams for building automation in scalable ways. Frustratingly, we never really came up with a particularly good answer to “what is a platform team” and why you should care. Strangely, your organization is probably building one.

Transcript otter.ai/u/zJeQbqXIyD8kZUxfKQdvQAfQGog
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/building-co…chnology-9617733/

Rob’s Hot Take:

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, reflects on the November 9th DevOps Lunch and Learn session focused on platform engineering. He highlights the challenge of executing platform engineering initiatives despite the straightforward concept of improving automation and tooling at an architectural level. Hirschfeld emphasizes the importance of defining success metrics, empowering teams to enforce standards, and adopting consistent, repeatable patterns and practices to advance the industry’s maturity. He encourages listeners to explore the insightful discussion at the2030.cloud for a deeper understanding of platform engineering’s significance.

A Path for Cloud Standardization?

We discuss standards, de facto standards, and cloud standards. It comes down to how we are creating repeatable results for the cloud marketplace.

Ideally, we’re creating marketplaces where standards can be shared. We’d consider Amazon as the primary example, but we also talk about hardware and Kubernetes which have their own marketplaces.

Ultimately, we asked if we are creating standardized cloud infrastructure? The short answer is no.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/kGT8pGfbslZRgFktM0pE3AifwWI
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/measuring-g…tar-pick-3988555/

Rob’s Hot Take:

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, reflects on the November 30th DevOps Lunch and Learn session focused on standards and vendors’ attempts to establish standard operating processes. He highlights the market’s lack of convergence or trust in vendor-driven standards, emphasizing the durability of certain influential standards in the industry compared to vendor-specific APIs. Hirschfeld underscores the ongoing need for standard operating models and APIs to address market complexity, encouraging listeners to explore the insightful discussion at the2030.cloud for deeper insights into standardization efforts within the industry.

Securing Software Supply Chains

Today we talked about supply chains, but mainly security and the security aspects of supply chains because we have a very serious challenges here.

We have made software and on boarding software for developers so easy, but haven’t put the same efforts in how to manage production systems! The team really talked about what it takes to build production systems that respect security, supply chains, dependency graphs, and inclusion in a way that cross teams.

It’s an incredibly important topic, and it is the foundation of any successful supply chain hardening effort.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/6zfld2gBpZMSGT8Vk_1Ka3pWtN0
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/light-city-…traffic-10390684/

Serverless At The Edge

Serverless at the edge, part one. This is a dynamic and engaged conversation with key questions like:

What is serverless?
Do we need serverless?
How is edge serverless different than cloud serverless?

We see edge environments as collecting data from sensors that needs to be heterogeneous, multi vendor, dynamic and centralized. But where centralized?

I think that the serverless aspect of this really drives home the idea that we need to be able to make small, quick, easy updates into an edge environment into a sensor environment. But how we accomplish that is still to be defined.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/XOOi-HhvbqC6NG16-7ns6j_hPLE
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-whit…ing-tray-3772524/

Rob’s Hot Take:

In the November 11th episode of the Cloud 2030 podcast, the discussion centered around the concept of serverless at the edge, a topic not widely understood. Distinct from traditional cloud-based serverless systems like Lambda, serverless at the edge involves diverse sensors and input sources, requiring different architectures. The conversation emphasized the critical role of serverless at the edge but highlighted the need for unique definitions and platforms, shaping the future of this technology.

Ops Research and Mapping

We explored Operations Value mapping. This lead to an a very interesting discussions of complexity budgets and how to measure complexity budgets. This includes managing supply chain, and value pipelines, and system coupling.

Complexity budgets could be a very powerful measuring tool for understanding operations value In an organization. Overall, this helps you explain the cost of complexity to organizational leadership.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/T1jXorfZO6Yc7fovBEXKgxSnxao
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/old-map-of-…-on-wall-4338273/

Can we Secure SaaS? RE: facebook & Twitch

During this 20 minute check-in we dive security and SaaS infrastructure.

Can we protect the secrets that people are trusting to SaaS providers to store for us? The topic was inspired by the Twitch leak where a lot of sensitive information was exposed exposed to the public. That comes on the heels of all sorts of other leaks, compromises and down time on systems.

Overall, it seems like bad news is coming faster and faster for operators. The fundamental question is NOT can we trust a SaaS provider to secure information. We know the answer is NO. But what to do about it?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/bHe8mibvYE4vTIjWleOfJ2Z7iwI
Photo by Joy Marino from Pexels [ID 3054158]

Implementing Biometric Privacy at the Camera?

We start talking about conferences using biometric security, edge detection, and included your right to be forgotten.

In this fascinating conversation, we go into future projections of what it’s going to take for people get privacy including the idea of using AI so face are left out the photographs! Would be possible? If so, what would drive that as potential thing.

We started it humorously thinking about all the cameras and all the biometrics that could be collected during AWS reinvent, which a lot of us will be at, at least in the shadows.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/fqYayHreB9FVPt2SzFFSMu7QAgo
Photo by Cleyton Ewerton from Pexels [ID 5063551]

Why are Backups so Tricky?

Why are Backups so Tricky?

Backups are really, really tricky! We talk through a lot of different things that you have to consider in making successful backups like security, resilience, how you store the data, how you recover the data and rebuild the systems. Basically, we ran the gamut on backup challenges.

You really need to think through a lot of the considerations! Our discussion will help make you better at backups.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/icmWxa0LmLT1Um-uAVWwGFc9Wq4
Photo by Alena Darmel from Pexels [ID 9037305]Cloud2030DataBackupsReliabilitySecurityResilience

Rob’s Hot Take:

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, reflects on the October 26th discussion about backups, emphasizing their critical role in successful recovery efforts. He highlights the complexities of securing data at rest and the potential vulnerabilities backups may pose in scenarios like ransomware attacks or disaster recovery. Hirschfeld urges listeners to consider the entire system architecture and storage mechanisms to avoid potential losses, inviting them to explore the comprehensive discussion at the2030.cloud for deeper insights.

Does Business Value Mapping Deliver?

Today’s episode is about business value mapping. Instead of focusing on Ray Wang’s “Who wants to rule the world” book, we got really deep into the why.

We discuss what is business value mapping, how it works, why it works, when it doesn’t work, and what it takes to make it succeed.

So if you’ve read Ray’s book, I think you’ll get a lot of extra depth out of this, if you haven’t read it at all, it might be a good primer on why you want to learn more about business value mapping and how to apply it within your own organization.

This is part one, we’re actually having a whole other session about operations, value mapping, and talking that through in the next session.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/P_8lounzOlH-Ufw4urRDMpU9ILs
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels [ID 5370916]