Tag Archives: Infrastructure

Broader Impacts of AWS Outage

We discussed the Amazon outage of December 7. Instead of simply blaming Amazon, we went looking for how the outage impacted people globally. We considered how hyper scalars are being treated and how these outages can be avoided or understood. We focused on who is impacted and what companies who are building on top of Cloud providers can do going forward.

We really took a classic Cloud 2030 approach for a very important and timely topic. Enjoy our discussion about the business impacts, understanding of the market and forward looking approach.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/cY4fk8mWIovIfkwfT4LDw2uy4QY
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-ho…ked-eggs-7719168/

Rob’s Hot Take:


Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, provides insights on the December 9th discussion regarding the Amazon outage on December 7th. Fresh from the outage’s impact, Hirschfeld highlights the industry’s reliance on cloud providers as utilities and underscores the need to acknowledge their business interests, which may not always align with customer needs during disruptions. He advocates for building resilience both at the provider and consumer levels, emphasizing the importance of understanding and mitigating the risks associated with hyperscale infrastructures. Hirschfeld invites listeners to explore the comprehensive conversation at the2030.cloud, focusing on industry-wide reflections rather than attributing blame to specific providers.

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.

Edge Networking: Facebook, BGP and 5G

Edge networking is hard! Because before we can talk about edge networking, we actually have to talk about edge management and edge control, and what it takes to build resilient infrastructure and train people to use it.

In the first half, we’re talking about the challenges of managing infrastructure, using the Facebook outage of the week we recorded as a starting point for how challenging it is to build resilient infrastructure.

In the second, we talk about edge networking with solid insights about how challenging edge networking really is not just creating networks in edge locations, but what does it take to sustain an edge network and the integration and technologies over the course of multiple technology generations?

Caption: otter.ai/u/U6PvW4S34DUi1Awiu4gcYMLp-pk
Photo by Tony Mucci from Pexels [ID 5367334]

Rob’s Hot Take:

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, reflects on the October 5th discussion about edge networking, highlighting the conversation’s focus on the long lifecycle expectancy of edge technologies and the challenges associated with their maintenance and evolution. He emphasizes the need to address these critical topics in edge networking discussions, inviting listeners to explore the in-depth conversation at the2030.cloud.

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]