Edge Control Planes

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 and Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels [ID 3889936]

Challenges of API Design

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: otter.ai/u/2Pz3LwG4qPl58s3ewwGFCCFmg8w
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Is Open Source Working?

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: otter.ai/u/vto0yPpBuZtqngkc_zqMDp9J39M
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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
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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
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Distributed Infrastructure

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 back to “do we need to have localized processing?” If we do, how do we manage it?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/BkxvOrQMmmQiYQpxa-OogrMyNNw
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Edge Impact of Digital Twins

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 the edge.

These designs don’t fit traditional models and it is what makes edge unique. Edge is not a single application, but a connected system that going to have to emerge to make all this work together.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/-uFSclONwRhhc4QlFywiSJAIF10
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Topics for a Security Training Course

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 see: docs.google.com/document/d/1x5QLP…ng=h.c2phqte5q4pl

Transcript: otter.ai/u/UyMAmiHi-rRAreMa0FjxaVNomhQ
Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels [ID 226746]