Before the advent of Cloud Computing, owning all your servers and keeping them in a server room or a leased datacenter was the norm if not the only game in town. But despite The Cloud having turned into The Hyperscalers, owning your platform from the switch plane on up is still available... and it rocks!
I am going to take you on a little tour through a platform stack.
At my workplace we own and manage the full stack of our computing platform from booting, OS install, software, networking, service mesh, to our end-user facing application software. We’ve been building this since 1999 on standard Linux foundations with some enterprise-scale solutions judiciously sprinkled in, and we keep it connected to the world with Wireguard and BGP.
We do this with 4 people, and we’re having a good time! If you’re sick of Terraform state conflicts, cloud provisioners that never converge, and PAAS offerings that are built for nobody’s real-world requirements, consider joining us on the hand-cranked side of building platforms.
Luke has been a platform and solutions engineer for all of their professional life, starting off at a university, doing a stint in cloud consulting, and now back to on-prem platform engineering as the Lead Engineer on the Platform Engineering team at Fastmail.
They run arch linux btw and overall make life way too hard for themselves, both at work and at their hobbies - amateur radio, electronics, running, cycling, to name a few.
They have been a Pythonista for a long time, reaching for Python as their default choice for projects small and large.
