Day Two Cloud 111: Infrastructure As Software With Kris Nóva

Kris Nóva, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Twilio, claims that managing infrastructure using tools like Terraform isn’t that far away from just writing your own code to do the job yourself. Kris joins co-hosts Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks to challenge the notion that ops folks can’t become developers. Kris says they can. What’s more, Kris thinks they should become devs. Give this episode a listen to understand why she feels that way. Follow Kris Blog https://nivenly.com/ Twitter https://twitter.com/krisnova LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kris-nova/ Sponsor: CBT Nuggets CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills. If you want to make fully operational your networking, security, cloud, automation, or DevOps battle station visit cbtnuggets.com/cloud. Transcript: [00:00:00.000] – Ethan [AD] Sponsor CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills? If you want to make fully operational your networking, cloud security, automation or DevOps battlestation, visit CBT Nuggets com Cloud. That’s CBT Nuggets com Cloud.[/AD] [00:00:23.730] – Ned Welcome to Day two Cloud. Today’s topic is Infrastructure as software. And why you, yes you, listener right there, sitting right there listening to my voice. You’re a programmer. You might not think you’re a programmer, but we are here to change your mind. Our guest today is Kris Nova. She is the senior principal software engineer at Twilio, and she has some really interesting thoughts about what the difference is between configuration management and writing software. And it’s not as different as you might think, right Ethan? [00:00:53.460] – Ethan Oh basically, it’s not different from her point of view. And we’re going to get into something that. Ned, for me, this I feel at this moment that my mind has been changed based on the arguments that Kris made saying that, hey, why make this big dividing line as an Ops person between these special tools you use and domain specific languages such as you might encounter with Terraform, let’s say, and being an actual developer with a general purpose language, because it’s not that different. And I walked away fairly convinced, Ned. [00:01:24.270] – Ned Yes, it was very convincing and just very thought provoking. So enjoy this episode with Kris Nova. [00:01:31.340] – Ned Well, Kris, welcome to Day two Cloud. And what we’re here to talk about today is Infrastructure as code and maybe infrastructure as software. But let’s level set for people who might be familiar with Infrastructure as code, but everybody kind of has a different idea of what that is, what it means. So could you define how you think of infrastructure as code? [00:01:51.960] – Kris Oh, wow. Starting off with easy questions. Yeah. Let’s talk infrastructure as code. Yeah. So infrastructure is like I’ll do real quick. We’ll do a red first approach with us. Infrastructure, to me, is everything below what I would say an application team consumes right? It’s always been that point in solving technical problems. Where you go, this should just be solved. And as an application engineer, I shouldn’t have to deal with it. And of course, that line means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. [00:02:22.280] – Kris And different teams have different concerns. But if we can make the assumption that that’s infrastructure, infrastructure as code is just bundling that up in a way that you can reproduce it right?