Tag Archives: Terraform

Building Open Ecosystems [Tofu vs Terraform]

We dive into the dynamics of open source projects and monetization today, specifically starting around the TerraForm and open tofu split. That topic is one that we love to chew over and potentially over analyze, but today’s discussion is different.

We go into how ecosystems are built both in open and proprietary and cloud systems, and look at sort of a historical perspective on what makes a project successful from an ecosystem perspective. We also dive into why some projects work like that, and why some projects don’t.

Today’s episode gives a new take on some of the dynamics going on in the open source communities through the lens of what happened with Open Tofu and TerraForm.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/ONDvgS9yGMrSN-bXMT…?utm_source=copy_url
Photo by James Wheeler: www.pexels.com/photo/lake-pebble…of-water-1574181/

Tofu vs a Death of Expertise

The TerraForm fork, now known as the OpenTofu project, is our first topic in today’s episode. We discuss what’s going on with that, the challenges, as well as the potential pressures from HashiCorp that created this whole situation.

How do we get experts to recover their authority and how do we look at organizations like that? We have about 20 minutes of really involved conversation about the book, Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols, from the previous podcast. If you haven’t heard our first part of the conversation, I suggest you go back and listen to our full Death of Expertise podcast.

We cover two topics, one of them short term and one of them long term. So it’s a nice, balanced industry discussion around what the fork means, what its impacts are and a little bit of recap. There’s some really spicy opinions around 32 minutes in if you want to jump forward, we resume our discussion about death of expertise.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/zGUYDP6DynzxPBNLM9…?utm_source=copy_url
Photo by lil artsy: www.pexels.com/photo/person-abou…ur-dices-1111597/

VMware Explore, Hashicorp & Industry Update

What’s going on from VMWare to Broadcom to HashiCorp and their license changes. We discuss current topics, even to the sad news about Kris Nova passing during a mountaineering expedition.

If you’d like to catch up on the tech news, then this topic hopefully has aged well and you will enjoy it!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/J18ecRKKwc8As_TLyC…?utm_source=copy_url
Photo by Oziel Gómez: www.pexels.com/photo/man-wearing…-mountain-925263/

Hashicorp BSL vs OSS License Discussion

Hashicorp made a license change into a BSL, a business license which is not open source that allows or makes code available, but instead restricts the use of Hashicorp products to people who are effectively paying customers or enterprise customers.

If you’re embedding or repackaging the software or competing with Hashicorp, you are prohibited from using it. We spent this podcast looking into why, how, and what implications there were, as well as historical precedents.

References
* www.runtime.news/hashicorp-closes-a-door/
* opentf.org
* blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-te…pen-ab0b9ba65bca
* spacelift.io/blog/spacelift-lat…t-on-hashicorp-bsl
* ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/ne…results-fiscal-0
* www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#comp…uct-bsl-coverage
* www.linkedin.com/posts/rhirschfel…7665233920-MxcP/

Photo by BİLAL KARADAĞ: www.pexels.com/photo/yk-1-17939409/
Transcript: otter.ai/u/ZjTzZZiYh_dXri3rSk…?utm_source=copy_url

Orchestration Automation Workflow [with Terraform]

Building reliable automation at scale for infrastructure presents challenges. In this episode, we discuss orchestration, workflow automation, and the reconciler pattern in the context of Terraform.

We refer to the pattern of Terraform, automation, and orchestration systems as “TACOS” and today we dig into how you test it and check it against drift. These are real topics of operational concern for anybody building any type of infrastructure.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/w-NA0HBsTc5NRaqWQQwlWUj4Whw
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/person-hold…ith-food-8448079/

Rob’s Hot Take:

In the April 5th Cloud 2030 Podcast episode, Rob Hirschfeld discusses orchestration, automation, and workflow, focusing on Terraform and introducing the “Terraform Automation and Orchestration” (TACO) pattern. The conversation emphasizes that while Terraform is a valuable tool, the broader patterns of reconciliation, GitOps, and event-driven automation are crucial for building and maintaining complex systems over time. Hirschfeld encourages listeners to view tools like Terraform and Ansible as initial steps in a journey, prompting consideration of scaling, building orchestration systems, and understanding the importance of comprehensive system development. For more in-depth discussions, explore the full episode on orchestration, automation, and workflow from April 5th, and join the ongoing conversations at the2030.cloud.

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]

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]

Nic Jackson on HashiCorp Product Philosophy in Open Source and Feature Minimization

In this week’s podcast, we speak with Nic Jackson, Developer Advocate, HashiCorp (@sheriffjackson). Nic provides insight into the product and development philosophy of HashiCorp and how it impacts their products and open source components. The last section of the podcast on product feature limitations and how companies go too far is very interesting.

” HashiCorp Overview and Design Philosophy of their Solutions
” Company vs Community Open Source Comparison in Terraform
” Abstractions and Portability Failings
” Product Features and Doing Too Much