The IaC Podcast

How can you gain deeper insights into your complex systems beyond just monitoring infrastructure health metrics? Join us as Charity Majors, CTO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb, challenges traditional approaches to observability. With experience from the infrastructure trenches of fast-growing startups, Charity pushes us to rethink our methods.Can high-cardinality data exploration reveal the "unknown unknowns" hiding in your telemetry? Is prioritizing user experiences over infrastructure stats the key to untangling your "hairball" systems? And what role should observability play across the full software development lifecycle? Charity offers a forward-looking perspective on evolving observability practices to match increasing complexity. Observe the future of observability - Tune in to our latest episode now!‍Charity Majors is a Co-Founder and Engineer at Honeycomb.io, a startup that blends the speed of time series with the raw power of rich events to give you interactive, iterative debugging of complex systems. She has worked at companies like Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab, as a systems engineer and engineering manager, but always seems to end up responsible for the databases too. She loves free speech, free software and a nice peaty single malt.Sponsored by: https://www.env0.com/

In this episode, open source guru Kris Buytaert discusses open source ecosystems, the benefits of collaboration, and the shifts towards proprietary models in certain tools. We explore OpenTofu as a reaction to Terraform, ponder whether an “Ansible of IaC” will emerge, and delve into the deeper meaning of licenses, ecosystems, and governance models—emphasizing that “one open source is not equal to another.”Join us in the exploration of the hallmarks of healthy open source and what lies beyond licenses as we assess community integrity.‍Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant. He's one of instigators of the devops movement, currently working for o11y.eu / @inuits.He is frequently speaking at, or organizing different international conferences and has written about the same subjects in different Books, Papers and Articles.He spends most of his time working on bridging the gap between developers and operations with a strong focus on High Availability, Scalability, Virtualization, and Large Infrastructure Management projects. Hence, he is trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th-floor test—better known today as the cloud—while actively promoting the DevOps idea.Sponsored by: https://www.env0.com/

A special community event with a panel of industry experts to discuss the GA release of OpenTofu. On the panel were env0's CEO and host of The IaC Podcast Ohad Maislish, Dotan Horovitz from Logz.io, Andrew Martin from ControlPlane, and Anders Eknert from Styra. The ensuing discussion unfolded as an interesting and engaging exchange, with topics spanning from evaluating open-source tools to considerations for licensing in engineering activities, and the potential macro implications of Terrafrom’s licensing shift. It was a great listen! In case you missed it, check out the recording.PS, The Q&A session was particularly interesting. If you only have a moment, jump straight to [55:50] and enjoy!

In this episode, we chat with Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, about the evolution of infrastructure management and operations over her career. We discuss the rise of configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet, and how Infrastructure-as-Code solutions like Terraform are now better suited for cloud-native environments.Mandi shares insights on key shifts like increased automation to reduce incidents, centralizing infrastructure code management, and using Terraform providers to configure SaaS products. Tune in for a thoughtful perspective on how infrastructure teams have matured their processes and adapted tools to the modern stack! Mandi Walls is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty. For PagerDuty, she helps organizations along their IT Modernization journey. Prior to PagerDuty, she worked at Chef Software and AOL. She is an international speaker on DevOps topics and the author of the whitepaper “Building A DevOps Culture”, published by O’Reilly.

In this episode, we are thrilled to welcome infrastructure industry veteran Robert Hafner. With over 15 years of hands-on experience under his belt, Robert has witnessed infrastructure practices evolve firsthand - from patched together bash scripts to modern declarative approaches.Today, he joins us to offer pragmatic perspectives on infrastructure as code maturity, drawn from his own journey towards increased confidence and reliability over time. Tune in as we plumb the depths of real-world IaC adoption, exploring everything from infrastructure testing practices to state management considerations at scale. This is an episode you won't want to miss!Robert Hafner is a Senior Principal Architect and author of Terraform in Depth. He has been working at the intersection of software and infrastructure since starting his first company in 2005. During that time he witnessed first hand the industry evolution from individual bash scripts to configuration management up to infrastructure as code. He's spent his career working with startups such as Malwarebytes and Rad AI on projects ranging from high availability sites, large data analytics (with 30+ million daily clients), to large scale GPU clustering and machine learning model hosting.

In this episode with Adam Jacob, we discuss Adam’s role in the history of the DevOps movement, from creating Chef to becoming CEO of Systems Initiative. You’ll learn about configuration management frameworks vs infrastructure as code, how DevOps workflows have evolved over time, and what’s next for the industry. Tune-in today!Adam Jacob is an engineering and product innovator, with decades of experience designing, building, and managing large production systems. Adam is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of System Initiative.Adam previously co-founded Chef Software, was the original author of Chef, served as CTO, and on the board of directors. Chef grew out of HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy responsible for helping build some of the earliest large-scale production cloud infrastructures. A systems administrator at heart, Adam has also been responsible for internal corporate automation, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts, and a whole lot of systems automation.

In our tenth episode with Derek Morgan, DevOps Course Creator and founder of morethancertified.com, we discuss how IaC management has shifted over the years, which technologies and tools are the best for different use cases, and the current state of IaC solutions and providers. Listen now!After working for years in traditional infrastructure management, consulting, and Devrel, Derek Morgan is now the founder and lead instructor for morethancertified.com, creating training courses that cover topics from containers to the cloud. If he's not creating training, you can find him training for a marathon, riding a bike, or on a climbing wall.

In our ninth episode, we chat with Anton Babenko, AWS Community Hero and Terraform Influencer, to take a deep dive into AWS, modules, and contributing to the open-source community. Tune-in now!Anton is an AWS Community Hero and helps companies around the globe build solutions using AWS and specializes in infrastructure-as-code, DevOps, and reusable infrastructure components. He spends much of his time as an open-source contributor on various Terraform & AWS projects. Such as Terraform AWS modules (downloaded more than 200 million times), Terraform best practices ebook (www.terraform-best-practices.com), doing serverless with Terraform (serverless.tf), Terraform Weekly (weekly.tf), Your Weekly Dose of Terraform (http://bit.ly/terraform-youtube).Anton co-founded and co-organizes AWS, DevOps, and HashiCorp User Groups in Norway and often speaks at technical meetups and conferences.

In our eighth episode, we sit down with by Ilia Lazebnik, Infra Architect at Placer.ai, to discuss his extensive open source contributions including over 2600 commits to the Terraform AWS Provider over the past four years. We'll also talk about providers in general, how Ilia collaborates with other open source communities, and much more. Tune-in today!Ilia is a Lead Engineer with more than 10 years of experience and with a passion for Open source software. He is experienced in leading projects to achieve concrete goals on a strict deadline. He has extensive knowledge in AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Containers and DevOps practices. He is also an active contributor to open source projects including being a Hashicorp core contributor to the Terraform AWS provider and terraform VPC modules.

In episode 7, we are joined by Anders Eknert, Developer Relations Lead at Styra, to take a deep dive into the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. You'll learn about everything from the basics of Policy as Code, to how OPA became one of the flagship projects of CNCF. We'll also discuss how recent events like the announcement of Hashicorp's BSL license are shifting IaC's open source ecosystem, and how proponents of open source are responding. Tune-in to learn more!Anders has a long background in the identity space, which eventually led him to access control and authorization. Today he leads developer relations at Styra, the founders and maintainers of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. He is also the maintainer of two kids.