Guest: Kendall Nelson (LinkedIn)
Foundation: OpenInfra Foundation (Twitter)
Show: T3M

The Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation) is an open source foundation that supports a global community focused on building and managing open infrastructure. In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Kendall Nelson, Senior Upstream Developer Advocate at OpenInfra Foundation, talks about the benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and the key drivers behind adopting it. She goes on to share advice for people getting started in their IaC journey.

What does Nelson’s role with OpenInfra Foundation involve?

• Nelson’s key focuses involve bridging the communities for Kubernetes and OpenStack and collaborating with universities to get more students involved with open source projects.

What are the key drivers for open source infrastructure?

• Historically, open source infrastructure technologies and tools were built in-house or by a mega-scaler. However, many organizations are looking to embrace open source infrastructure due to the community and knowledge sharing around open source projects.

Defining IaC:

• Infrastructure as Code or IaC is the programmatic way of managing infrastructure, that includes automating the process of spinning up the infrastructure, configuring it, and doing the operation management. Furthermore, all the scripts and configuration files can be managed to ensure the stability of the infrastructure.

What are the key benefits of IaC?

• Relying on IaC and managing code in a code-focused way lessens the load of the infrastructure team. It also enables developers to run tests in an automated way, which would not be possible at the scale they need to run them.

What role does culture play in infrastructure as code?

• People already embracing the DevOps mindset have seen the value of IaC from the start. However, newcomers can also see IaC as a natural extension of how to do code development and the review process.

What is the state of adoption for IaC?

• Even though OpenStack uses Zuul for testing and Kubernetes uses Prow, both communities have reached a similar point being able to run all their infrastructure with just a few people.
• The bigger the community you have, the more important it is to work programmatically and utilize IaC, so it is applicable to other open source communities too.

Advice to teams embarking on their IaC journey:

• Start small and focus on reliability since you can always add complexity further down the road. Make sure to document everything as effectively as possible to ensure that it is repeatable.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.