In your career you have dealt a lot with infrastructure as code. Can you probably share with us what are some of the most horrendous anti-patterns or code smells in infrastructure as code? Yeah. So I think one of the other things that we see with Terraform projects and similar projects is with multiple environments. It's like a separate Terraform project for each environment even though it's meant to be the same system.
"With Infrastructure as Code, you’re not trying to kind of reverse engineer or understand what ended up somehow onto each system, you’re actually saying, this is how the system is built and because it’s built from that code. So there is no difference."
In this episode, I had an in-depth discussion with Kief Morris, the author of the O’Reilly “Infrastructure as Code” book. We started from what is Infrastructure as Code and why we should implement this important concept for managing our infrastructure, especially in the cloud era. We also discussed Infrastructure as Code principles, patterns, anti-patterns, pipeline, testing, and also recent new tools in this space. Kief also mentioned about his upcoming 2nd edition of the Infrastructure as Code book and what new changes that he is introducing. Do not miss our Pet vs Cattle discussion!
Listen out for:
- Kief’s career journey and how he started doing infrastructure as code - [00:03:22]
- How Kief got into writing Infrastructure as Code Book - [00:07:24]
- What is Infrastructure as Code and why - [00:10:35]
- Pet vs Cattle - [00:18:56]
- Infrastructure as Code principles & patterns - [00:20:15]
- Automation fear - [00:27:06]
- Refactoring infrastructure code - [00:30:49]
- Infrastructure as Code pipeline & testing - [00:36:17]
- Pulumi and CDK - [00:48:29]
- Infrastructure as Code anti-pattern example - [00:50:07]
- 2nd edition of Infrastructure as Code book - [00:51:40]
- Infrastructure as Code reverse engineering - [00:53:40]
- Kief’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:55:02]
_____
Kief Morris’s Bio
Kief is a Global Director of Cloud Engineering at ThoughtWorks. He enjoys helping organisations adopt cloud age technologies and practices. This usually involves buzzwords like cloud, digital platforms, infrastructure automation, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery. Originally from Tennessee, Kief has been building teams to deliver software as a service in London since the dotcom days. He is the author of “Infrastructure as Code”, published by O’Reilly.
Follow Kief:
Like this episode?
Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback.
Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
Pledge your support by becoming a patron.
For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/5.
