Category Archives: All

Your next DC… Edge or Cloud?

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 rethink what makes Edge different than Cloud.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/y2ubHGGIhY31hRyiV6mW_B8e-os
Photo by Agafonova Photo from Pexels [ID 5284983]

Certificate Management (Let’s Encrypt Expiry)

Understanding and Managing Certificates is a critical operational skill in which we cover the basics and then go deeper.

If you are familiar with SSL HTTPS, you are using certificates on a daily basis. And yet, actual management of trust and root CA is and distributing private and public keys or distributing public keys and managing private keys is tricky.

Even our expert panel still struggles while we understand what’s going on. One of the challenges with this is in education and having people understand what they’re actually getting from certificates and trust, and what they’re not getting.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/CpGE5ybdVqiIlfoNqMIknTsLId4
Photo by Andres Ayrton from Pexels [ID 6551298]

Modular Automation via Pipelines and Digital Twins

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 in really fascinating ways!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/O1KFCsmEpMpV-hNZjTzJ_ewxaUA
Photo by Alena Darmel from Pexels [ID 7751055]

Deep Dive into Secrets Management

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: otter.ai/u/SvO6_I3RIiGmc2FLJM70y9xoQB4
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels [ID 4587991]

Continuous Infrastructure Automation

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 that this is the right path, but the path to get there is challenging. There are a lot of components that have to be considered: everything from artificial intelligence or machine learning, to how to manage and control and standardize the automation that does all that work.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/KmdQpMPJDPL1BjzXjEIEeavQRco
Photo by Aleksejs Bergmanis from Pexels [ID 681335]

Terraform Usage Patterns (Gitops, IaC, Templates)

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 discussing in the fall because building infrastructure in a scalable automatable way, is a critical topic for the group.

This is an ongoing topic for us – stay tuned for more episodes!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/A-NgZOfa1xeIPA1uQOh8_bSStck
Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels [ID 1079033]

Building our IT Talent Pipeline

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 programs, real certification programs, like we have in other trades?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/FTOvatXEYSxNze00HKXVz8OZHxU
Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels [ID 8613305]

Designing for 5G and Digital Twins

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 involve overlaying the physical world with the virtual world.

How the heck are we going to connect all these things together?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/7lSSCwLdGiF9JqyunUHo19m6yPk
Photo: www.pexels.com/photo/two-boys-si…ent-moon-1651483/

Do we have a Right To Right for Data & IP?

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!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/7EVT0C9T0KDCcUIWBsGYKHdiT6Y
Photo: Photo by Blue Bird from Pexels [ID 7218008]

That’s Not Terraform Orchestration!

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 run a workflow or a control plane. We’re not even getting to the point where we’re coordinating or orchestrating aspects of different systems and using remote or API driven infrastructure.

Even if you use Terraform, you will get a lot out of this discussion!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/Ohbfr0Uprm95WYYI4357IdUodOU
Photo by Gabriel Santos Fotografia from Pexels [ID 2102568]