I have a passion for learning new things and developing and sharing creative solutions to real-world and challenging problems, especially the topics of cloud-native technology, software development, and problem-solving.
I haven't been very active on LinkedIn before. The thought has recently occurred to me that this is a fantastic place to share some of the content that I've found extremely beneficial to changing my way of thinking and to better understand modern design patterns, problems, and solutions.
I hope that sharing and discussing with my network and the community will help make an impact on others that are eager to learn but maybe struggling against the learning curve and solving complex problems. I want to contribute to a positive community that can collaborate and share knowledge for mutual benefit and to progress technology and society.
For my first post, I want to share a couple of videos that had a significant impact on me and inspired the curiosity and passion that drives me every day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ3wIuvmHeM
Josh gives a fantastic conference talk about his tenure during Netflix's transition from a DVD shipping business to the world's largest streaming video service provider. He discusses how systems were architected at Netflix and the evolution as they experienced rapid growth and scale. He highlights how catastrophic failures illustrated how poorly suited their traditional monolithic application and infrastructure was for hyper-scale and a cloud-like environment.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL81sUbsFNc5bT9C9ZZxg4biWcwzkPGEfk
This whiteboarding video playlist from HashiCorp's Armon Dadgar is extremely helpful to learn about new approaches for managing infrastructure and security in a cloud-native way. I've seen Armon whiteboard and present ideas in person; I think he has an exceptional talent to describe and relate many of the concepts I've been learning over the past five or so years so that anyone can understand. I also recommend checking out HashiCorp's YouTube channel and blog. You'll learn a lot and be surprised at the new ways of thinking technology problems and their solutions.
Armon walks us through the traditional approach and mindset used by security for on-premises environments and perimeter-based architectures. Cloud environments are fundamentally different because we can't define and use a perimeter the way we did in the past - it's a concept that doesn't translate or even make sense. A lot of the institutional security minds will try to bludgeon this way of thinking into working (cough, cough, looking at you, network security vendors).
Does that mean we're defenseless or less secure? Absolutely not. We can do better! We can achieve security objectives, visibility, and controls that we could only dream of in our on-prem, traditional systems environments. Armon moves on to introduce the Zero-Trust concept, which uses identity and trust to grant or deny access instead of IP addresses.
He discusses:
One of my favorite pieces is when he proposes Vault uses cases far beyond a passive store for secrets: