Category Archives: Infrastructure

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]

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]

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
Photo by Tsunami Green from Pexels [ID 5192790]

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
Photo by Jeffrey Czum from Pexels [ID 4118958]

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]

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/

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
Photo by KEHN HERMANO from Pexels [ID 3881034]