25,000+ resources, 65,000+ lines of Python, two engineers.
Five years ago we made a commitment to automating (almost) everything we could about our platform. Deployments, Guardrails, Observability, Identity, and everything between. So far we have been seeing that through with extensive use of Infrastructure as Software.
Five years later, I have regrets.
Solving complex problems with Infrastructure as Software is a great way to create complex problems with Infrastructure as Software.
x-RD’s platform secd3v hosts isolated services for customers. Every tenant is encapsulated within it’s own AWS account. We heavilty use Pulumi to manage nearly every aspect of this environment, our internal environments, and the stacks we use for development. This automation is powered from a shared Python codebase; skywater (so named for the 1964 cloud-seeding projects).
Building this level of automation is not exactly simple, and we’ve made and re-made lots of decisions along the way.
We will broadly discuss some context around Infrastructure and Software and x-RD’s approach to building a model that maps to our environment. Then we will examine major challenges we faced and the decisions they forced from the early days of development through to running the platform in the present.
The juicy technical content of this talk includes:
Alisdair likes fixing problems, optimising systems, and automating the boring stuff. Working for x-RD gives him plenty of opportunity to make problems for himself. He maintains that writing code was never the hard part — the friction stopped you building the wrong thing twice.
For the last five years Alisdair’s life has (mostly) revolved around this talk’s subject matter. He has a B.Eng in Network & Software Engineering (First Class Honours) and over a decade of immersion in the world of DevOps and platform engineering.
Despite being bitten by many a Python (language versions and species), he still enjoys working with them. He automates everything he can, which is why his electric blankets are voice controlled. Canberra based, currently planning a motorcycle trip around Tasmania.
