The IaC Podcast

Tools, workflows and the Terraform ecosystem - Masterpoint's Matt Gowie dives deep into the IaC tooling landscape, covering tools like Terragrunt and Atmos, linting with TFLint, security scanning, CI/CD workflows and more. From Terraform 0.11 to OpenTofu, static code analysis to encryption, gain an inside look at pragmatic IaC practices. Matt Gowie is a seasoned entrepreneur, cloud architect, and platform engineer based in Boulder, Colorado. As CEO and CTO of Masterpoint, he leads a team dedicated to developing top-tier infrastructure-as-code solutions for a diverse clientele. With over twelve years of experience in software development, tech startups, and cloud infrastructure, Matt has a deep passion for Terraform and OpenTofu. He actively contributes to the community as a core maintainer of one of the largest open-source Terraform Module libraries and an AWS Community Builder. Outside of work, you can find him rock climbing across the American West, training for an ultramarathon, or exploring remote corners of the globe.

How have DevOps movements broken down the longstanding cultural barriers between developers and operations teams? What role have container technologies like Docker played in shaping today's IT landscape? John Willis, with over 35 years in IT management, dives into these questions, sharing his insights on simplifying complex systems and fostering integration between development and operations. Tune in to this must-listen episode as we explore the evolution and future of DevOps with a pioneer in the field. John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years and is a prolific author, including "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" and "The DevOps Handbook." He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.

How could read access to an S3 bucket escalate to a full AWS environment compromise? Daniel Grzelak walks us through a real red team engagement that sparked his research into Terraform state file vulnerabilities. Hear about the evolution of these vulnerabilities into significant security concerns and how OpenTofu 1.7's state encryption feature is set to change the game. Listen now and explore Daniel's detailed insights on 'Hacking Terraform State for Privilege Escalation' here. Daniel Grzelak is a 20-year cybersecurity industry veteran, investor, advisor, and speaker. He is no longer the CISO at Linktree nor the Head of Security at Atlassian, but he tries to stay relevant by hacking AWS and Cloud in general.

Go behind the scenes with The IaC Podcast's special KubeCon episode. Host Roni Frantchi gives you an insider's look, capturing the conference experience, much-anticipated talks, insider takes on the OpenTofu fork, and AI's potential impacts on ops and workflows, among more! You can watch full recordings of the talks mentioned on the CNCF YouTube page. Thank you to our amazing guests for this KubeCon edition: Abdel Sghiouar - Senior Cloud Developer Advocate, Google Joep Piscaer - DevRel Leader, TLA Tech Melissa McKay - Developer Advocate, JFrog Joel Studler - DevOps Engineer, Swisscom Ashan Senevirathne - Product Owner, Swisscom Daniel "phrawzty" Maher - Head of Developer Relations, Scaleway Barun Acharya - Software Engineer, Accuknox + CNCF Ambassador Saloni Narang - DevRel Freelancer Saiyam Pathak - Field CTO, Civo Stuart Miniman - Senior Director of Market Insights, Hybrid Platforms, Red Hat

How widespread is Infrastructure-as-Code adoption? What tools are dominating the IaC space? Could AI play a disruptive role? Join us as we dig into Firefly's comprehensive State of IaC Report and explore the latest trends with co-founder Eran Bibi. Tune in for a must-listen episode on where organizations currently stand in codifying cloud resources, and key insights into the future of managing Infrastructure-as-Code. Download The State of IaC Report Eran Bibi is Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Firefly. With years of experience in anything DevOps/SRE and security, he has earned a reputation as a CI/CD and SRE expert and an avid admin of Cloud Platforms and containerized environments. Prior to Firefly, Eran was Head of DevOps & Cloud Platform at Aqua Security and DevOps Group Lead at Finastra. Eran is a frequent speaker at Cloud Native meetups, AWS community meetups, and other cloud workshops and conferences. Sponsored by: https://www.env0.com/

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.

In episode 6, we sit down with Pepe Amengual, Principal at Slalom Build, and Dylan Page, Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Autodesk, to talk about the open-source tool Atlantis. We discuss building Atlantis’ open-source community of contributors and maintainers, newly-implemented improvements to the project, and more. Tune-in today! PePe Amengual is a 10x unicorn who fights crimes against Terraform by day and slays manual processes by night. He loves open source, devops and helping teams be awesome by empowering them with great tech.Dylan Page is a Principal Infrastructure Engineer for Autodesk, based in Detroit, Michigan. He works primarily on Autodesk's Construction Cloud product. Having joined Autodesk in early 2020, He has spent the last 3 years streamlining and improving an internal developer platform for the Autodesk Construction Cloud product specializing in Kubernetes and Terraform. Prior to Autodesk, He spent 5 years at DigitalOcean helping build and grow the developer cloud. He has spent a lot of time understanding developer needs and how to provide them with the best tools to deploy their applications and services with ease and reliability.

In episode 5, we chat with Elad Ben-Israel, Creator of AWS CDK and Co-Founder/CEO at Monada, to talk about how and why CDK was created, how Elad built a high-adoption community surrounding the CDK project, and what's next for Elad. Tune-in today! Elad Ben-Israel is the creator of the AWS CDK, CDK8s, JSII and Projen. After an amazing journey, Elad has recently left the comforts of AWS to start a new company called Monada. Monada’s mission is to democratize the cloud by reimagining cloud development from the ground up (pun intended of course). Elad lives in Tel-Aviv with his husband and 4-year-old twins, and in his spare time attends Burning Man and sweats at the local CrossFit gym. Elad has given several talks in the previous days of CDK in front of large audiences at multiple conferences around the world.

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Brown, an AWS Community Hero and GCP Champion Innovator, to talk about Terraform and IaC tools. During the episode, we discuss the differences between popular IaC tools and which infrastructure management use cases (like drift, state management, and more) are best suited for them. Tune-in now to learn more! Andrew Brown is known for his multiple free cloud certification courses and cloud bootcamps across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform and more, teaching hundreds of thousands of students globally. Andrew Brown specializes in EdTech with 15 years of experience building learning platforms.

For our latest episode, we sit down with Amir Jerbi who is currently the Co-Founder and CTO of Aqua Security, a platform that provides scalable security for the complete development-to-deployment lifecycle of containerized applications. Amir brings decades of expertise on containers, Kubernetes, cloud security, enterprise software, software development and DevOps to the conversation. Amir formerly worked at CA Technologies in the security group, helping fortune 100 customers to secure their Linux and Windows hosts as they moved to virtualization technologies. During the episode, we dive in to providing security for cloud native and containers, and how tools like Trivy can help teams quickly find and correct vulnerabilities before moving to production. We also discuss how tools like TFSEC, which checks for the configuration of cloud resources that Terraform and the cloud formations are generating, can further close security gaps for teams. Listeners will also learn how to integrate the two tools to implement security best practices for their organizations. Tune-in now!

On this episode of The Iac Podcast, we chat with Elliot Graebert, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure at Skydio—a cloud platform that supports advanced autonomous drones and enables organizations to fly drones directly from their browser. Elliot's initial background was in Software Engineering, and over the past 7 years, he started Palantir's first DevOps team as well as leading 4 internal infrastructure teams. He is passionate about IaC and the value of having a balance between SRE and SE. Elliot also writes about DevOps/infrastructure projects on https://medium.com/@elliotgraebert. We discuss with Elliot the rise of self-service infrastructure, Terraform Cloud and Terraform Cloud alternatives as well as their challenges and benefits, and how these tools can encourage IaC collaboration and cross-functionality across developer teams. Listeners will also learn how to balance accessibility to IaC in their organizations with standard security measures. Tune in today!