Infrastructure as code is complex because infrastructure is complex. You have two choices: automation or abstraction. You can automate the provisioning of infrastructure using tools like Cobbler, Terraform, or shell scripts depending on the API you're working with. You are essentially encoding configuration decisions into a tool and running it. Hopefully the target API supports idempotency.

There is a lot of buzz around internal developer platforms, but it feels like PaaS all over again, but this time the new products are aiming even higher up the stack, and integrating developer workflows beyond deployments. Take @ChoreoDev for example. wso2.com/choreo/
Choreo integrates API testing, CI/CD, and just enough observability to get pretty far without adding any other tools. The best part is the consolidation of all these concepts behind a common UI.

If you don't need Kubernetes don't use it.

What is being described here was already happening. Companies are spending too much time managing CI/CD pipelines, IaC, random bash scripts, and a whole collection of custom tooling no one wants to talk about.

https://twitter.com/petecheslock/status/1671536499748118532

Containers were about adopting a new abstraction and decoupling your application from the machine. Bundle your application and dependencies so you can spend less time messing with OS and configuration management tools. Docker and Kubernetes are optional.

During a recent fireside chat, I was asked what was it like navigating the tech industry as a black person. I'm in no position to speak for all black people, but I had something to say.

The Amazon Prime Video team was able to reduce cost by moving from Serverless backed by Lambda to monoliths running on VMs.

"Moving our service to a monolith reduced our infrastructure cost by over 90%. It also increased our scaling capabilities." primevideotech.com/video-streamin… This isn't a dig against Lambda as that platform helped the team build the service fast and get to market.

"We designed our initial solution as a distributed system using serverless components, which was a good choice for building the service quickly."

You can run databases on Kubernetes because it's fundamentally the same as running a database on a VM. The biggest challenge is understanding that rubbing Kubernetes on Postgres won't turn it into Cloud SQL. 🧵

https://twitter.com/thesobercoder/status/1624078573979197440

First, the fundamentals. Kubernetes will schedule a database just like any other application. If you use a deployment, Kubernetes will schedule your database on a random node in the cluster, and if you add a volume, Kubernetes will mount it. That's it. The rest in on you.

I'm digging into the AT protocol. This is super interesting on the surface. The idea feels familiar, host your content on your own machines or third party service, make that data, in this case social media posts, available to one or more services. atproto.com If the AT protocol takes off, you'll end up with multiple services that look and feel like Twitter, but behind the scenes are pulling the same content from multiple sources -- where content creators choose to host it.

Why is @openpolicyagent so popular?

Because of how straightforward it is to integrate into existing applications. 🧵 You start by defining an authorization policy using Rego. This policy only allows HTTP requests using the GET method.

package ping.authz

default allow := false

allow {
input.method == "GET"
}

Git might be the best example of Web 5 today.

Your data is stored in a decentralized system, you can even run your own node, and use private keys as your identity.

However, the rise of centralized services such as GitHub hint at what Web 5 might look like in the long run.

https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1553021339945996288

While data stored in git is portable across hosted platforms, the data created on those platforms, such as stars on a GitHub repo, is not.

GitHub owns that data and is responsible for the authenticity of star counts, which represent reputation, and that's not portable — yet.

A deprecation policy is essentially a written response to the innovator's dilemma. New services can enable people to do things they couldn't do before, and while the initial cost of adoption is high, it's often worth the trade off for the new capabilities.

Once customers get things to work they want it to stay that way.

The ECASH Act

E-Cash is a digital dollar issued by the U.S. Treasury, not the Federal Reserve. E-Cash is a true bearer instrument, like paper money, no intermediaries for settlements, and works by transferring a balance from one secure device to another. ecashact.us The goal is to replicate the anonymity and privacy respecting features of physical cash and enable universal access and usability.

I worry about what happens if you lose your secure device which holds your e-cash balance, but I guess we have the same problem with paper money.

When I was coming up in the game, the goal was to get good at something, then decide to put in the extra effort to be great, and if you did, the money would follow.

Unfortunately, wages haven't kept up with the cost of living, and that formula no longer works for most people. Getting good at something isn't easy. Depending on the situation you're born into, it's hard to get started, let alone succeed. Add in all the gatekeeping, and debt traps, it's downright impossible.

That's why we say, "I made it", when we do the impossible.

Do you own your own tweets? 🧵 First we need to understand what a tweet is. According to the dictionary a tweet is: "a post made on the social media application Twitter."

So what's a post?

DevOps was the first time I heard a new term used to describe the work I was already doing. It helped some people realize there was a better way of doing things, but it also distracted some from understanding what needed to be done. The principles that DevOps stood for required equal parts technical and social skills, a culture of learning, and accountability demonstrated by producing results.

Some chose to skip that part and simply changed their job titles and called it good.

Let's Encrypt, which is the centralized Web2 service used to secure most Web3 project websites. letsencrypt.org

https://twitter.com/mhluongo/status/1473308812991946757

Wikipedia, the centralized free encyclopedia service created by a decentralized set of users from all walks of life. wikipedia.org

My curiosity in a recent set of technologies is driven by fear. Parts of our society isn't in a healthy place, and some people are attempting to rage against the machine by creating a new one without consideration for the people who will be forced or tricked into using it. The old machine hasn't been kind to people like me and I'm not convinced the new machine is being designed to do a better job.

I'm skeptical of most technologies which is why I invest time in understanding them. In addition to understanding, if you believe in what you discover, then this is also an opportunity to lead in the space.

https://twitter.com/codeFreedomRitr/status/1465041948675297293

The hard part is avoiding FOMO and blindly following random projects aiming to separate you from your money.

I just started reading Square's decentralized bitcoin exchange whitepaper, and it's not clear if Square is aiming to abstract away bitcoin behind something like @CashApp, or simply become another Coinbase built around an open protocol. tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tb… Either way, it seems like bitcoin, and its ecosystem, is moving towards a more centralized future.

I'll be playing with Azure's new Container Apps service on my lunch break. I got the bar set pretty high because of cloud run, so here we go. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services… I was legit afraid of dealing with Azure's authentication flow, but the ability to sign in with my @github credentials, I'm off to a great start.

I'm reading the Bitcoin white paper and the section on privacy is a head-scratcher:

"a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner."

Is this really how people are using Bitcoin in practice? So, if I understand this right, once people know your Bitcoin addresses, they can track every transaction? If so, I'm convinced this thing was created by the federal government.

I was really struggling with Rego, the policy language behind @openpolicyagent, until @mpvl_ highlighted that Rego is a query language, not a general purpose language.

Yes, I skipped the part of the official docs that calls this out. In short I was using it wrong. I took a step back and shifted focus to the input data I was writing queries for.

I was using gatekeeper, a tool for enforcing policies on Kubernetes objects, and the "debug" constraint template helped me extract the input data so I could study it. open-policy-agent.github.io/gatekeeper/web…