Welcome back to another engaging episode of Top End Devs. In this episode, our hosts Will Button, Warren Parad, and Jillian are joined by guest Matt Gowey from Masterpoint. Together, they delve into the complex world of infrastructure as code, discussing best practices, challenges, and the human side of consulting in the DevOps space. Matt shares his journey from software development to running his own consulting agency focused on Terraform and OpenTofu. The conversation covers everything from the nuances of using Terraform workspaces, the implications of large-scale infrastructure management, to the critical soft skills needed for a successful consulting career. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just venturing into DevOps, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice for navigating the ever-evolving landscape of technology.

Will Button [00:00:01]:
Alright. What's going on? Let's do another episode of Adventures in DevOps. Warren, how's it going?

Warren Parad [00:00:07]:
It's it's, pretty good. And, I actually, have a a fact all prepared this week, and that is we've got an upgrade to our website adventuresindevops.com. So if you're listening to the podcast, via a different source, you probably don't never see it. You know, here's your opportunity. You know, don't pay too much attention to it, but I think it's much better than where we were at before.

Will Button [00:00:29]:
Awesome. That's cool.

Jillian [00:00:30]:
And Did you make the new website? I had a part of the the dev chat.

Will Button [00:00:34]:
Had a hand in it. Website.

Jillian [00:00:38]:
The website.

Will Button [00:00:40]:
Hi, Jillian. Welcome back.

Jillian [00:00:41]:
Hello. Thank you for having me back.

Will Button [00:00:44]:
Yeah. How's it been going?

Jillian [00:00:46]:
It's good. It's good. We have, like, the snow apocalypse here last week, but this week, we're good. We're back to to snow.

Will Button [00:00:54]:
Right on.

Jillian [00:00:54]:
Yeah.

Will Button [00:00:55]:
I, this is my first year living up north, and I've been so happy with the fact that I bought a snowblower. That's been so much fun. But,

Jillian [00:01:06]:
keep up getting one for the driveway, but I haven't I haven't quite done it yet because there's guys that come to plow. So I don't know. I don't know.

Will Button [00:01:14]:
Yeah. Highly recommended. It's just a great feeling just chugging along behind it, blasting the snow. So, Matt Gowey, welcome. Happy to have you on the show.

Matt Gowey [00:01:27]:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet y'all, be here.

Will Button [00:01:31]:
Yeah. So, Matt, you are you own Masterpoint, consulting company. Right?

Matt Gowey [00:01:39]:
Mhmm.

Will Button [00:01:39]:
So give us a little bit of, the background on that. Yeah.

Matt Gowey [00:01:45]:
I've run Masterpoint since the February. For a long time, it was me as a solo, consultant. And then around very beginning of twenty twenty two, I kinda started to build a team. So we're a boutique consulting shop. We're entirely focused on infrastructure as code nowadays. What that means is particularly Terraform and OpenTofu because those are the market winners in infrastructure as code today. And then, we do a little bit of work with Pulumi. And, yeah, we help our clients automate, migrate, implement best practices, and really help them build the right workflows on infrastructure so that they don't have that as a bottleneck, and they can help their application engineers move fast.

Warren Parad [00:02:29]:
Yeah. I mean, that's, like, almost a decade. Right?

Matt Gowey [00:02:32]:
It's close.

Warren Parad [00:02:33]:
You must have seen some wild changes that have occurred in the space over that time.

Matt Gowey [00:02:38]:
Yeah. It's been fun. I got into you know, I I always had a background in, DevOps. I started in startups where you just, hey, wear 15 different hats and you do whatever you can, to help the team move forward. But I didn't get into infrastructure as go as code specifically. I was really big into Ansible until, like, 02/2017 and 02/2018 maybe. And then I around zero dot eleven is when I got into Terraform specifically, and I was like, light bulb. Gotta gotta get into this more.

Matt Gowey [00:03:13]:
This is the way to do things.

Will Button [00:03:15]:
For sure. So I know that, like, consultant is, like, one of the common career paths for people in our industry. And the the big challenge there is always, how do you find clients, you know, and is this a consulting arrangement where I'm technically a full time employee, but I don't get any of the benefits? So how how does it look from your perspective? Like, what do you look for in a client? How do you approach this whole problem? Yeah.

Matt Gowey [00:03:50]:
I think being solo is very different than running an agency, but, I think, one truism, one, you know, fact of life, that I've found is that, you know, people do business with who they know and who they trust. So, referrals are always king, within consulting. You know, you'll get a referral from a previous client or colleague who knows you well and can speak to, hey. Matt and his team do really good work. And that client, that referral, that prospect is 90% more likely to, you know, sign on the dotted line and trust that, hey. We're gonna do a great job for them than somebody who finds us through SEO. Or, I've never done, outbound email marketing because I don't believe in that as a viable business. But, you know, that type of stuff is not the approach that I take.

Matt Gowey [00:04:44]:
I take a very, like, human approach to it where I go out and network a bunch. I try and be a good person within my community, and that is the means by which I, like, really work to, try and bring in business for my company. For some people, hey. If you're just getting into consulting, maybe that sounds awful to you. Maybe you just wanna be heads down writing code. You can go and join a consulting shop. We're hiring every once in a while, so reach out.

Will Button [00:05:12]:
For sure. I think that's one of the, big surprises for people who take on the the consulting route is understanding that you are leaving your one job to take on three jobs because now you have job number one as a consultant where you're generating the billable hours, but then job number two is you're an accountant because now you have to do all the taxes and the legal paperwork and the bookkeeping. And job number three is you are in marketing because you always have to be recruiting and finding your next, job once this one wraps up.

Warren Parad [00:05:49]:
Yeah. I mean, I'm with I'm with Matt that I don't believe in the cold calling. I I don't think those emails working yet. I still see like, I probably get five to six a day from random people on LinkedIn saying, hey. You know, can we sell you our services? Whatever it is, they don't even know what my company is doing, and yet they're already like, oh, we know we could help you.

Matt Gowey [00:06:12]:
It's just constant. I think if you have any c suite level title in your name, I think we all get a insane amount of of both spam email and, you know, the the the LinkedIn messages, and it's just it just piles up. It's kind of insane. That's true. And I still don't understand how people do it because I I can't think of a worse like, I, you know, get 10,000 emails a year. You know, maybe that's high, but, like, I've never responded to one. So yeah.

Warren Parad [00:06:48]:
Oh, you're you're missing out your opportunity here. I respond to every single one of them with a vengeance. Like, like, I'm curious. Like, I really wanna know, like, is this person, you know, do they have a competency? You know, are they looking for something special? I really care about my, like, LinkedIn network. So I I'm always looking to see, you know, making a connection with an initial person. Is is it worthwhile for them and for me? And so, like, I'll try to dive into that. And some of them, you know, actually do turn it around and be and, you know, are able to talk about the the subject or the topic. But a lot of times, they're just the partner portal expert or marketing manager or account account manager, and they have no idea of the thing that they're even selling in the first place.

Warren Parad [00:07:30]:
And I'm like, why like, how did you think this was going to go? Like, like, just walk me through your process here. Step one, connect with me on LinkedIn. Step two, dot dot dot. Step three, profit. Like, I like, I don't know how else it is.

Matt Gowey [00:07:43]:
That's pretty good.

Jillian [00:07:44]:
I would like to invite you to have a conversation with, like, some teenagers. It goes it goes exactly the same. Exactly the same.

Will Button [00:07:55]:
So do you find that a lot of your, you know, you talked about your your network and, everything's coming to you or your your most likely sources through referrals. Is that within your community, or is that online? Does that include digital connections?

Matt Gowey [00:08:12]:
Yeah. So, yes, it does. I mean, of course. I think that, you know, we're myself and, a number of members on my team are big contributors, maintainers of, our own open source as well as, like, one of the larger open source infrastructure as code, Terraform libraries. So we have a bunch of connections in that world. I have CTO online communities I'm involved in. I have, a bunch of, like, volunteer with other external organizations that I'm involved in, and I think we try and pretty be pretty involved in, like, different slacks. And I think that things come from those all the time.

Matt Gowey [00:08:55]:
So, yeah, it's not just, you have to be going out and shaking hands and kissing babies. It's also some level of online, you know, presence is really important. I personally am posting on LinkedIn three times a week. I have a lot of really good, colleagues, people that are I like a lot and highly respect their opinion. They are you know, people I've met through LinkedIn and just, like, posting content. So I think that there's a lot of different avenues how that networking happens, but it all, you know, kinda leads to a similar, end result.

Warren Parad [00:09:32]:
Well, let's let's plug your your Terraform, open source library. Well, like, what is that?

Matt Gowey [00:09:38]:
So we are maintainers of Cloud Posse. Have you folks ever heard of them?

Jillian [00:09:43]:
I have. So you're that person? I steal your code, like, all the time. Like, all the time.

Matt Gowey [00:09:47]:
See, they're the best.

Jillian [00:09:47]:
Right. So

Matt Gowey [00:09:48]:
so when I originally got

Jillian [00:09:50]:
into you on the show before. I didn't know this. This is, like, the best hot so for event for a Tuesday morning ever.

Matt Gowey [00:09:56]:
Yeah. They're they're not my company. Eric's a a good friend. I really respect the hell out of what that guy is doing. But when I initially got into infrastructure as code, they were the community that I found personally. And I was just like, hey. These folks are doing this sensibly. Like, this is one infrastructure is not load balancer.

Matt Gowey [00:10:20]:
We're shipping the same certificate. We're shipping the same, Postgres instance. Why do we need to re

Warren Parad [00:10:29]:
yeah. Mine's a special note, Blake. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Jillian [00:10:33]:
My load balancers are so special.

Warren Parad [00:10:34]:
I don't know.

Matt Gowey [00:10:37]:
Anyway, they they do it right. And when I found their modules, I was really excited. I was contributing a bunch. And then as part of that, I ended up on their, like, maintainer team. So we're helping them get PRs tested and merged and complying with all the best practices that, those folks have set out. And I have multiple of my team have now joined that that organization. And, yeah, that's the I really believe in open source infrastructure as code. I think there's, like, interesting discussions there.

Matt Gowey [00:11:09]:
Some people do not. Some people think that we should be copying and pasting and writing little snowflakes all over the place. But, that's, you know, the difference in opinion that happens.

Warren Parad [00:11:19]:
I actually wanna get into that because one of the my questions that I had thought up that I really wanted to ask you is what is the real impact of and I know someone's gonna be kicking me for bringing this topic up, at only whatever, like, the ten minute point. And that's, realistically, any sort of LLM integration here. Because, like, I I really do feel like that okay. We'll laugh it out. That

Matt Gowey [00:11:41]:
there's

Warren Parad [00:11:41]:
a lot like, this is exactly the sort of thing that I think LLMs are very good at generating. But at the same time, it's the worst place to have those little mistakes that will cost you, you know, huge production incidents.

Matt Gowey [00:11:56]:
Yeah. So I will say that we don't typically generate a ton of infrastructure as code. You know, we'll do it for new resources that we haven't seen maybe sometimes. But for the most part, you know, I'm I have a very serious talk with my team that, like, hey. You need to understand how all these things come together. This can't be, LLM generate, you know, git commit and ship it. Because, yeah, there's a lot of nuances in that one flag that might be a security loophole, that might cause you to overprovision, something along those lines. And, I don't know.

Matt Gowey [00:12:32]:
We see it a lot, where people are generating a ton of code and then they don't really have a good handle on, hey, what all of this is doing. And I think that's usually where I'm a proponent of open source because, hey, you could probably get that same use case that you were looking for. You know, you're trying to deploy a bunch of Datadog monitors and instead of generating code around them and creating a, you know, yeah, it'll get the job done for today, but for day two operations, is it better to have a small open source module that provides that same monitor that provides a spec, provides you something that you can upgrade in the future, provides something that's already tested and already secure? There's a lot of benefits to at least doing the search beforehand to go for open source, I think, than just saying, hey. We can generate the hell out of this code. Alright. Yeah.

Warren Parad [00:13:27]:
Are are the open source modules showing up in the LM results, or is it pure, like, underlying HCL?

Matt Gowey [00:13:35]:
Not that I've seen. And, you know, we haven't done a good test of, hey. Let's use an LLM that we've given, like, a lot of really good instructions to read through the 300 open source modules that we typically use. But I think that that's a good question. I haven't seen anybody who's you like, using a trained model to say, hey. These are our approved module libraries.

Warren Parad [00:13:58]:
I mean, I wasn't even stressing that, but because I remember there was, like, a pretty huge scandal with Pulumi where they tried to do something similar to this. And the l m that they were featuring on their website just, like, could not provide more wrong information. So that, like, is certainly a a data point there.

Matt Gowey [00:14:16]:
Yeah. That's interesting. Pulumi's try always trying to do some something new, and I applaud them for innovation. You're gonna get it wrong sometimes. Right? You gotta try. It's good.

Will Button [00:14:30]:
For sure. Fell fast. So whenever you start working with a new client, do you have, like, a a particular vertical or size of company that you work really well with and have isolated on that intentionally?

Matt Gowey [00:14:45]:
Yeah. We used to love startups and, you know, it's sad that the VC market is no good. But, I still still love startups. We just have moved further up funnel in terms of we usually talk to the series c and above, you know, the the folks who are well established and they're trying to scale. Because that's really where a lot of our expertise comes in handy is, hey. You have, an organization that has grown organically. You've been trying to grow fast, and you've made some mistakes, and we can kinda come in and dig you out of your hole. So, yeah, that that realm is is where we really like to engage is the mid market to, like, late stage series of funding start ups.

Matt Gowey [00:15:29]:
We have an anchor client who's a large enterprise. They're, you know, a, Fortune 500 car manufacturer. And but, really, I love the those those later stage startup clients because they have the most fun problems. They usually have great engineers that are just like, we need to be pointed in the right direction. And, hey, we can do that. So it's fun.

Warren Parad [00:15:52]:
Are you seeing the same holes at each of your clients, or is it like everyone have their own special set of problems?

Matt Gowey [00:16:00]:
I think that there's a, you know, there's always some combination of similar problems. You know, there there's a really common problem that we've written a bunch about on our blog, and we we have another blog post coming out really soon. That's, you know, the terralyth problem. Have y'all ever heard of that term?

Warren Parad [00:16:19]:
This one's new for me.

Matt Gowey [00:16:21]:
Okay. It's basically when you build a infrastructure as code root module that's too big. So it's storing too many, resources in state, and then it becomes slow to apply. It has blast radius issues, and you, you know, can't really do role based access control in your team because, hey, you're managing your network alongside your database, alongside your application cluster. So we've seen that a ton. And, you know, that comes in all different shapes and sizes. It's very unique to the organization. We we know how to break those up really well.

Matt Gowey [00:16:54]:
So that's that's an easy one. We'll have a post on that on the blog very soon that talks about how teams can break it up themselves. Give it away for free. You know, the other thing I think is there's still a lot of organizations who are applying locally and they don't they haven't figured out automation. And then on the opposite side of the coin, there's a bunch of organizations who have built their own automation around infrastructure as code, and they've found out the hard way that that's not a good route. And they, you know, are really, you know, continuing to toil in the details of, like, hey. How do we, you know, make this scalable for our organization? And it's it's kind of a bad rabbit hole. We always suggest, hey.

Matt Gowey [00:17:35]:
Either go again open source or pick one of the really awesome vendors in the space. But, yeah, those are those are some of the, like, high level problems. There's a lot of, like, nuanced, like, code level details that I think we see a lot that we we have strong opinions on. But, yeah, those are the the 10,000 foot ones.

Warren Parad [00:17:54]:
See, I saw Will laughing here sort of like the villain at the end of a movie that is having some sort of psychological breakdown. And I just I have to I have to wonder what was going through his head at that moment.

Will Button [00:18:06]:
Just reliving some past trauma, I think.

Matt Gowey [00:18:12]:
Those make the most of the drama. Yeah.

Jillian [00:18:15]:
This whole show is just, like, PTSD induced. You know? Right. Rambling.

Will Button [00:18:20]:
No. I I can totally relate to that, especially in the the stage of company that you're you're focused on, you know, the late late stage series startup. Because early on, I've been guilty of this many times. You know, early in the startup stage, you would think about your past experiences, and you're like, I'm not gonna do do that again. We're going with I see from the very beginning, and so you start building all of these processes and controls. And the flaw with that is you don't actually have a product for your company yet. You know? Because for every start up, there's always the there's the product that you launched, and then there's the product that your customers actually wanted. And never in the history of startups have those two been the same thing.

Will Button [00:19:06]:
So you make all of these process and design and architectural decisions around this product that now no longer exists, And it takes someone like like yourself, Matt, from an outside perspective to come in and say, you know, you're you're holding on to these little nuggets here hoping that they're gold and and they're not. Just let them go.

Warren Parad [00:19:34]:
Sound advice. I I I think there's a huge problem there, though, which is that

Jillian [00:19:37]:
those processes are sort of coupled to the culture of your organization. So, like,

Warren Parad [00:19:37]:
you almost need processes are sort of coupled to the culture of your organization. So, like, you almost need to, like, actually start a new company to get rid like, actually eliminate all of that tech debt in some ways. You you've you've built it up. You've built up expectations on how that works. Like, maybe you are, career ladder is is somehow hooked to the types of tasks and responsibilities. I mean, no one's got it that bad, but there there's a lot that needs to be thought about other than just, like, you can't just click a couple of buttons and delete their code.

Will Button [00:20:08]:
I call it the polished turd syndrome because you start with this turd and you just keep polishing it and polishing it, and then, eventually, it starts to get some shine to it. And so now you're really emotionally invested in making this turd nice and shiny, and you need someone to come in and say, dude, it's it's just a turd. Let it go.

Warren Parad [00:20:27]:
They have to they have to want to listen, though. And I think that's part of the problem is that often you see, like, the, maybe, operations division or sales or marketing who are like, we're actually making a lot of money from that thing. It's not like as much money as we should be making, but we're making, you know, a million, 10 million a year, and we just need to keep the lights on. And they don't understand how much toil and complexity is actually involved to just keeping the lights on for that. And so I actually think I've seen this way more often than the other side where an engineering team doesn't want to own it. They don't wanna do anything with it, except someone keeps on telling them, oh, yeah. You know, you have to keep it working, but you're not allowed to spend any time doing that.

Matt Gowey [00:21:06]:
I've seen that. And I think that, you know, a part of what you folks are are talking about I mean, yeah. At at the level at the stage of company that we usually engage with, there's always some level of, like, some cost fallacy. Right? There's some group within the organization who's wrapped up in the idea that, hey. We've invested so much in this tooling. Why why would we get rid of it? What do you mean? And, yeah, it does it does sometimes take a third party, like my company that comes in and says, hey. Here's the reasoning. You know? We're we're the outside eyes.

Matt Gowey [00:21:42]:
We're we're giving you this this perspective because, honestly, your workflow is not great. You're you're not, you know, doing yourself favors here, by continuing to polish this, so to speak. So, yeah, I I agree with what you folks are are getting at. It is it always comes down to people problems, in one way or another. And I think that, luckily, I've been in consulting long enough where I, like, can navigate those well. And, yeah, it's fun.

Warren Parad [00:22:11]:
Who who are the decision makers that end up signing off on needing to pull in a third party for you?

Matt Gowey [00:22:17]:
It usually comes down to the director level or above. So it's usually director of engineering, director of DevOps, infrastructure, the VP, the CTO. It's somewhere along that chain. Sometimes it starts with an engineer where the engineer will be like, hey. We have this horrible problem. We're not dealing with it. Like, we gotta we gotta do something. And that it can go bottom up, but it's not typical.

Matt Gowey [00:22:42]:
It's more, hey. A yeah. Some somebody in engineering leadership realizes they they gotta make a change, and they're reaching out to to kind of talk through, hey. What does this look like? How can we, you know, actually benefit? So yeah.

Will Button [00:22:58]:
How often, I I think this is like a nontechnical component of the job, so I'm interested in your your take on it. How often is it that the problem that you're really trying to solve is the cost of scalability where, like, the company's doing well and they're scaling and they're growing, but the infrastructure costs are are growing quicker than revenue.

Matt Gowey [00:23:25]:
So I don't think it's the actual cloud costs. That it's not that's not actually typically a problem. It's the maintenance cost for engineers and the amount of time that they're spending to feed the system that they've built in in one way or another, and that's the thing that's slowing them down. Basically, they've made some bad decisions along the line that is causing their organization to overall have them be a bottleneck, whether that's that's their infrastructure workflow as a whole. Maybe it's because they, you know, need to hire an entire security team to make sure that things are not, you know, going to cause a, you know, critical CVE and, you know, day day five of new application launch or something. Those are the problems we more typically see. So it's less actual, hey. Our cloud costs are are growing astronomically, and more, hey.

Matt Gowey [00:24:21]:
We're we're spending too much time here. Like, why is this why is my team telling me we need three more engineers? That's that seems like madness, when, you know, we're not we're not really doing doing all that much crazy stuff here. We should be more we should be faster. We should be more streamlined. Yeah.

Warren Parad [00:24:40]:
Maybe I actually sort of wanna flip this question around because I really like it, and I think there's a different perspective here that really gets me thinking is you're not you're not solving technical problems, are you? Like, I I I I get the sense that, you know, you're coming in. It's not that the organization is missing two more engineers to, oh, we only had these two people who understood Terraform better. We would solve all our problems. I mean, is that really it? I I get the sense that probably you could do that, and they may be missing technology. But they're probably missing something like a better strategy for on a personal level, like, their how they're approaching problems or how they're prioritizing work or something like that. And maybe before I ask the next question, I'll I'll give you a moment to

Matt Gowey [00:25:22]:
Yeah. I think it's interesting because it's multifaceted. Right? It's sometimes they've I like the, this is my new joke, where, you know, what why do, Masterpoint clients reach out to us? Oh, because they applied themselves into a corner? I don't know if it's a good joke. You folks are the second person I'm trying it trying it out on. But, yeah, they they back themselves into a corner. They they they, you know, they go about things in from an infrastructure as code perspective, we're we're still young. Right? It's still a really early days. We might be 10 years old, but HashiCorp, when they came out with Terraform and Terraform, I see as, like, that's what mainstreamed, infrastructure as code.

Matt Gowey [00:26:09]:
They came out with that in 02/2014, '2 thousand '15, and it was really early, and it was just it was way more config than it was code. And it's slowly grown, and it's gotten better. And the the reality is they didn't put out many best practices. So you have a ton of organizations, a ton, who have just gone and built whatever the hell they wanted, and it has turned into a mess. And that can be a such a operational detriment to their organization that we're coming in and we're providing some of those best practices on how to, like, do things streamlined, that it is a technical problem, and they do need expertise. The other side of it is kind of what we were talking about before, you know, the cultural, you know, hey. Some cost fallacy trying to guard like, trying to direct them in a direction that's gonna be, you know, operationally efficient. There's a bunch of other things too, but, like, that's what it usually comes down to is, like, those two side sides of the coin.

Matt Gowey [00:27:17]:
Yeah. Does that make sense to answer your question?

Warren Parad [00:27:20]:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I I mean, I I there's some fundamental problem here, and I really like the perspective of they didn't think enough about what the future was going to look like for them. And they may not have the right people on the team to I mean, you don't fix a problem with the same initial conditions still in play. You you need to change something to have a different outcome. I you I feel like you keep on bringing up potential, perspectives that Masterpoint have that may be highly controversial, and I I wanna get those on the record in a way. And, like, one of them is, like, one Terraform repository for your whole organization, or do you, like, merge it with the individual application code? So, like, code and infrastructure as code next to each other in the same repo or one centralized location?

Matt Gowey [00:28:10]:
That's one we don't have as much of a strong opinion on. Well, I I will say that we do have a strong opinion on there should be an infrastructure monorepo for your organization. I think that that's just like there's there's beyond just environmental, infrastructure, there's a lot of infrastructure that is global. Right? If you're managing GitHub, if you're managing if you're doing observability as code and you're managing monitors and SLOs and dashboards and things like that within a tool like Datadog or Honeycomb, you want those to be in a centralized location. They shouldn't be scattered into 15 different repositories. But even when it comes down to environmental infrastructure. So, hey. We have a VPC.

Matt Gowey [00:28:56]:
We've got a load balancer. We've got a a Postgres database. If a client wants to do a hey. They want their let's say they're shipping on Kubernetes. They want their Kubernetes infrastructure to live alongside the application that it is. You know, the repository that it's managed in. That's totally fine. But we would say, hey.

Matt Gowey [00:29:20]:
Put your put the environmental infrastructure that actually supports that application in the infrastructure monorepo and really have it be a a single point over off in its own LAN so that you can, like, scalably duplicate that repo. So as you add more services, as you add more components to the overall system, then then there's it makes sense there. And then you don't need to have those engine application engineers, doing pull requests to some infrastructure monorepo that they may or may not have any clue about what's going on. So I look I

Warren Parad [00:29:53]:
mean, it's it's always great when the answer is, you know, it depends. Right? You know, that's

Matt Gowey [00:29:56]:
It always depends. Yeah. Yeah. Particularly as a consultant, it always depends.

Warren Parad [00:30:00]:
Yeah. Jillian, what was that?

Jillian [00:30:04]:
I said everybody's favorite answer is it depends.

Warren Parad [00:30:07]:
Yeah. I mean, there are some things that, you know, I just sort of want the canonical, like, it's always gonna be this. And, you know, one of them is, TF workspaces. What is that? Is that yes or no?

Jillian [00:30:19]:
I don't like workspaces. I like I like directories. I wanna be able to run tree on a directory, like, you know, and and kick it old school here in workspaces. Nobody ever remembers to change the workspaces. Okay. Now now everybody else can have an opinion.

Matt Gowey [00:30:32]:
So that is this is it. This is like the you've you've now nailed the one, which is this is the biggest divide within infrastructure as code, is we have people who look at infrastructure as this is config that should be copy and pasted, and we have people that look at infrastructure as this is more like code that should be you know, there should be one instance of this thing, and then we should deploy that instance many times. WER of the camp. I disagree with Jillian, but I, you know, do respect that, hey. There's a thousand different ways to do this, and people have their own way.

Jillian [00:31:08]:
Oh, it's okay. I like it when we can fight on the show. It makes

Matt Gowey [00:31:11]:
it more Yeah. Yeah. Make it more It's just good. Even if you're not allowed. Immediately came in. But, yeah, we use TF Workspaces. A lot of people rag on Workspaces. I think that, you can do them wrong.

Matt Gowey [00:31:25]:
They are kind of a very light abstraction layer. There's a really

Jillian [00:31:29]:
cool exist. That tends to be my problem.

Matt Gowey [00:31:33]:
That is a thing that plenty of people do, is forget that they exist. There is a really great issue in the OpenTofu, GitHub organization right now, where Martin Atkins, one of the biggest, original implementers, and biggest contributors to Terraform core for for many years now. He has now switched over to the open Tofu team, and one of the things that he did within his first, like, month or so was put up an issue about deprecating workspaces. And now that issue has yeah. Jillian's laughing.

Jillian [00:32:07]:
Well, I'm not, like, opposed to workspaces in theory. It's just that every time I've tried to use them in practice, me or somebody else forgets they exist and, like and then that's a problem.

Warren Parad [00:32:16]:
Yeah. It could be worse, though. You they could be having separate Git branches for each environment. Okay? You guys are in the I see branch. I see that one.

Jillian [00:32:26]:
Workflow. That's totally reasonable. What are you talking about? No. I'm sorry. I know I know that's not reasonable.

Warren Parad [00:32:32]:
There's only one main line in in a Git repository, and I will die on this hill.

Matt Gowey [00:32:37]:
Yeah. I will die on that hill as well. Particularly in infrastructure as code, particularly in infrastructure as code. Because you're you're not dealing with 12 factor apps in infrastructure as code. Right? You don't have a separation of the config that drives that infrastructure as code like you do with a application that could be in a Gitflow model. So you're then if you wanna make a change to a production config setting, you have to do it in the the prod branch, and that might mean that you're you just get into branch nonsense. And I just posted this recently of, like, my favorite one of my favorite sayings is, you know, more branches, more problems. I think it's way

Warren Parad [00:33:16]:
worse sec.

Matt Gowey [00:33:18]:
I think it's way worse in infrastructure as code world if you are doing a branch based workflow.

Warren Parad [00:33:24]:
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense from a Git standpoint because these are become separate trees. And if the servers are separate trees, why are they even in the same repository? You're not gonna really do anything effective. I mean, someone may say, oh, well, you can cherry pick some diffs from one to another one. But, I mean, realistically

Matt Gowey [00:33:40]:
That's a nightmare. That's yes.

Will Button [00:33:43]:
Is that your billing model, Matt? Your your hourly rate is based on the number of branches they have in their repo?

Matt Gowey [00:33:51]:
Oh, I hope we don't have a client that's still done a branch based workflow, the amount of work. Yeah. Maybe our hourly rate doubles. Yeah. That would be good. Maybe the I haven't had to do it yet, but, we've only heard about those those clients, or heard about those setups. Yeah. Not yet.

Warren Parad [00:34:11]:
So another one is you mentioned early on in the episode, public versus private modules. And, at least from my understanding, I I think this is one of those areas where if your core competency isn't building open TOEFL, HCL models, you're probably gonna get it wrong. And I believe it's a huge challenge to undo that mistake and using the either raw resources or what's come before you out there in the world, is way more valuable, than what you'll ever be able to do. But, you know, I wanna hear I wanna hear the expert's perspective on this.

Matt Gowey [00:34:48]:
Yeah. We view it as, hey. These the open source world, as long as you're correctly evaluating your the open source modules that you are using, you're you're getting one, a community. You're getting tested code. You're getting best practices in terms of naming, tagging, and potentially security, or not potentially, but, you know, more likely security. And then you're you're getting something that when you go to, let's say, add a new feature, you can always check if that module has been updated recently by somebody else who's doing that same exact feature. Maybe they're adding I p v six support. I don't we don't support I p v six for all of our clients.

Matt Gowey [00:35:35]:
Right? I know that some of the modules that we use do, and if we had built those modules ourselves in house for our clients, then they would have to go in and find all the places to add I p v six support. Right? So what we typically tell clients is, hey. If you're if you wanna encode conventions for your larger organization and you wanna make sure that, hey. The the number of variables and the, you know, the the best practices that you see your fit, wrap open source with your own small layer on top of that child module. You can do a smaller child module that just consumes another child module, and that that bottom layer child module can be a, open source, and you can really, I think, still get a lot of the benefits and create a lot of the flexibility that you want for your organization. So that's usually what our recommendation is.

Will Button [00:36:30]:
So what's your background before DevOps, Matt? Were you in infrastructure or software development?

Matt Gowey [00:36:38]:
Software development. I, yeah, did CS, in university. Luckily went to a co op school. So I started working at startups when I was still in school. I did two stints at two awesome startups. They taught me a thousand things not to do, which was great. And, one of those startups hired me, before I even left. And I moved to Philadelphia and was doing full stack.

Matt Gowey [00:37:07]:
You know, I started mobile development, did a bunch of back end rails work, did a bunch of front end stuff. I was really big into Amber. Js back in the day. Wow. And then got into infrastructure, and and AWS specifically, during that second startup experience.

Will Button [00:37:23]:
Right on. Cool. The reason I asked that is because of your approach to this. Like, throughout my career, I've seen, like, two philosophies in doing this, and I think they they sort of resonate with what you were just talking about. Like, you have people who have written code in the past, and they understand, you know, like, abstraction and wrappers and and things like that. Then you have, like, your your old school knuckle dragger IT guys who would, you know, drag the rack in. And if you needed more network port network ports, you would drag another network switch in, and you would do it in the rack, and you would crawl under the floor to wire it up and stuff. And I think depending on what your early part of your career looks like greatly influences how you solve IAC problems.

Matt Gowey [00:38:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. I, strongly agree, and I think it's one of the things that I get confused about. With within the infrastructure as code space, why are we all doing it so differently? And I think it's an interesting space because we do have the sysadmin folks who were just awesome at Linux, and they, you know, could one line bash themselves out of any any hole that they were in. And, you know, we have people that are coming from application engineering that are, you know, coming from, hey. I'm gonna pick up modern practices, and I learned Python, but now I'm switching over into into writing code, or writing infrastructure because that's what the organization needed today. And I think that it's this weird it's not a traditional software path. So, you know, you have all these different ways of thinking about it.

Matt Gowey [00:39:04]:
But when it comes down to it a lot of the time, I I ask the question, why do we not treat infrastructure as code as code? Like, that that is, like, a core principle, a core, like, issue that I have with a lot of people's setups. And

Will Button [00:39:22]:
It seems obvious when you phrase it that way. Yeah.

Warren Parad [00:39:25]:
Well, I I think there was a fight in one of the online communities I'm in, whether or not, configuration that lives in a YAML file counts as programming, like, if you go and change that. And, you know, for me, it's just a DSL, and every DSL is programming language. So whether or not it's Turing complete is sort of irrelevant, and I'm sure someone's gonna be like, YAML is Turing complete. I don't know that it is, but I'm sure someone will make that comment, in which case, yeah, for sure. But, I mean, you're changing something, you know, what you're impacting here. And, you know, I do I do think that there is this fundamental disagreement on how people really think about the world and their internal values and their own perspectives influence how they think about the infrastructure that they write, or what they create?

Will Button [00:40:14]:
The psychology of DevOps.

Matt Gowey [00:40:17]:
Yeah. We have

Jillian [00:40:18]:
a lot of people problems. Like, that's right. We have a lot more people problems than we do technical problems.

Matt Gowey [00:40:24]:
Yeah. It's never a technical problem.

Jillian [00:40:27]:
I

Matt Gowey [00:40:27]:
mean, it is. It is. But If

Jillian [00:40:28]:
you go work with, like, the techy people, I would just I would get so annoyed so fast because the people that I work with, they don't, like, really care about, like, the nitty gritty of what I'm doing. They prefer not to know. They would prefer if they never had to deal with me at all is, like, what they really want. But if they can't do that, like, they want me in and out as quickly as possible and have no idea what I'm doing, and that's that's, like, their wish list. So I can't imagine working with people who I don't know. I think I had, like, one client nitpick at me about, like, a load balance the type of load balancer that I was using, and I was just like, oh, I'm not doing this again.

Matt Gowey [00:41:05]:
Yeah. I hear you. Yeah. It I think particularly at the larger organization level, a lot of people want, you know, infrastructure and DevOps is not a driver for success. Right? It's a requirement. It needs to be part of the, like, pyramid that builds up to, you know, profit at the end of the day. But people want it to be a really small piece, and they want it to be quiet, and they, you know, want to build that upper application piece that actually drives dollars. And it's a frustrating place to be in.

Matt Gowey [00:41:42]:
In terms of psychology and DevOps, like, as you just mentioned, well, like, that is, when I when I talk to a lot of DevOps engineers, platform engineers, whatever you wanna call them, it's like, you know, they're always just struggling with they have a ton of work. They have a huge backlog. They don't have budget. Like, they don't have a big enough team. And I think that's really consistent.

Warren Parad [00:42:07]:
I think part of it comes from the fact someone was was saying this recently to me that they think the next innovation in DevOps will be where the DevOps teams and the platform and the, platform engineering teams and the product engineering teams will come and work together. And I'm like, I don't I think you misunderstood what DevOps means if you think that that's that's a future we haven't reached yet. But I think, you know, organizations definitely, you know, it swapped out whatever the what they were calling release engineering or infrastructure management. They just gave it a new name. And so, of course, we're gonna see those problems in organizations where they are stuck there, where they they don't see a solution, where they they don't see anything as different, and they need someone to come in and help them. I got I got another controversial one. Here we go. Crossplane.

Matt Gowey [00:42:57]:
Oh, have you read our blog post?

Will Button [00:43:00]:
I have not.

Matt Gowey [00:43:01]:
Okay. We've got a great blog post on it. I I share it out all the time because it's,

Jillian [00:43:08]:
I

Matt Gowey [00:43:08]:
don't know. It just feels, it's a shame. I so back when, I kinda started to build my team and started to transition from solo to agency, I had been really stoked on Kubernetes for a long time, and, you know, really thought it was the the Swiss army knife to solve all the problems. I I think about that less now. Wow. But

Will Button [00:43:34]:
Oh, episode over. Sorry. Thank you.

Matt Gowey [00:43:38]:
I still think it's a great tool. Don't get me wrong.

Jillian [00:43:40]:
Oh, I'm

Matt Gowey [00:43:40]:
just kidding. So, anyway, I, you know, I was thinking Crossplane was the next thing. I was, like, really excited. I had my senior engineer, Veronica, on my team. We we did her and I, like, collaborated on a long term proof of concept to build a bunch of infrastructure in Crossplane. And I was just bullheaded. I was really, really excited. And then just as we got through this proof of concept, we had just thing after thing were just too painful.

Matt Gowey [00:44:12]:
It's just not there was things that were missing that I was like, wait. We can't do that? There aren't data sources? And they did they have some of those things now. But I still think that overall, there's a huge chicken and egg problem. Like, where do you get that Kubernetes cluster? So you have to kinda solve that differently all the time, and there is a bunch of of problems around ergonomics of that tool. And I I just talked to somebody, somebody who worked at Fairwinds. She you know, they they had gone all in on Crossplane, and then they ended up pulling it out and going back to Terraform. And our blog post kinda shares all our thoughts on that. But, yeah, Crossplane is it was exciting as an idea.

Matt Gowey [00:44:55]:
I don't think it I don't think it delivered on the promise, sadly.

Warren Parad [00:44:58]:
Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm really with you here. I I don't I don't know what the best way of summing it up is. Like, imagine if Kubernetes deployed all of your infrastructure. And, you know, I don't I don't love that because I just don't like these two things coupled together, and I feel like it's taking one very complex thing and throwing yet, like, a second aspect, to it where people are already overusing Kubernetes in a lot of places where it may or may not need to actually be utilized and then to throw this on top. I'm really glad there is a an article out there that discusses these because I definitely would have wanted to throw it at some of my past clients and customers who

Matt Gowey [00:45:34]:
I'll share

Warren Parad [00:45:35]:
it. Work. Yeah. You know, I think there's one of these problems, though, where if you find yourself in an organization that has those problematic patterns in place, how do you

Matt Gowey [00:45:45]:
fix that? Problematic patterns in places and, like,

Warren Parad [00:45:47]:
Like, you know, you come in an organization and they are using crossplane. And you're like, okay, you know, they're prob I've been called in because they know that there are issues. And you can look at it and be like, okay, I bet one of the issues is how is the fact you're using crossplane. You didn't think about what the implication of that was going to be. You're pretty much stuck on Kubernetes full on there. And it's the same teams and organizations that don't have Kubernetes experience, but somehow have cross plane experience. And they also don't have infrastructure experience outside of Kubernetes or outside of cross plane. I just I fear I fear those organizations.

Matt Gowey [00:46:22]:
Yeah. And I I think there isn't a great answer there. Right? It's like, hey. Either you continue down that path and you upscale. You you try and make it as little as painful as possible. I think one of the things is, like, probably there's a there's a new pricing model with, that upbound has introduced where Crossplane is now if you want access to their providers, like, the then you need to pay at least a thousand dollars a month. I think that's, like, newer versions of their providers, like, maybe three or six months or something like that, which was kinda mind boggling to me. So I think you need to be, you know, you need to accept that, hey.

Matt Gowey [00:47:00]:
If you've made that poor technology decision, you you either need to learn you need to migrate away from it or you need to, like, go further into it. You know? You need to lean into it, which would, if you have the expertise, maybe you can make that work. I think that it's still probably gonna be painful, but I think you could probably continue to polish, to bring that bring it back to our earlier conversation.

Warren Parad [00:47:25]:
I I like I like that perspective. I think that's a good one. It's that you're in a problematic spot. You there is no there's no world where you don't spend more resources. It doesn't just magically get better, and you can either go deeper on it, you know, level up your team's experience, utilize the technology the way it's supposed to, or pick a better pick a better answer. And I I think a lot of people don't wanna hear hear that answer.

Matt Gowey [00:47:47]:
Yeah. We had a client. They had built their huge wrapper, a TypeScript wrapper. They were they were TypeScript shop. They had a huge monorepo. It was kind of a thing of beauty. I think they were in the hundred thousand plus pull request count. But the the thing they had done was they built a big TypeScript wrapper around Terraform, and it got complex.

Matt Gowey [00:48:15]:
They were doing a ton of code generation. They were doing a ton of stuff that I was like, guys, come on. And they knew it too. They knew it was painful to them. They like they were like, hey, what do we do with this? Do we keep going? And I and our advice, you know, after we did an audit for them and then, kind of just did some guidance sessions for a few months later. And, our our advice was like, no. You need to pull everything out. Like, we need to get away from this because you're just gonna keep building complexity, and your engineers that you're hiring are not gonna know that complexity.

Matt Gowey [00:48:46]:
They're They're gonna come in and say, hey. I know Terraform. I can do this. And then, no, they don't. That because there's so many devils in the details. You've built so many layers of abstraction. A lot of the time is keep it simple stupid is a beautiful saying to continue to repeat. So yeah.

Jillian [00:49:04]:
Yeah. I like that. I don't know.

Matt Gowey [00:49:04]:
That made me think about that stuff.

Jillian [00:49:06]:
Lot of silly things, but, like, I don't know. The thing that I like about Terraform is that it's just a fancy make file. So I can't imagine throwing anything else on top of that besides making it, like, a git template. Like, I do that a lot where it's it's like my template repo where I'll use, like, cookie cutter or something to generate the TF bars file. But that's

Warren Parad [00:49:25]:
Well That's it. So I so I sort of get it. And I I think where it came from for me is that originally things like TeraGrunt needed to exist because of lack of workspace support or lack of environmental variable support or lack of good loop support within and I hesitate to call it Terraform because now we have openTOFU. And I'm now I need something that groups all the HCL language support together so I don't have to pick one word over the other one. I mean, I just want to say OpenTofu. Terraform's done for me.

Matt Gowey [00:49:54]:
Yeah. Agreed.

Warren Parad [00:49:56]:
And maybe I want to get your opinion on that too because I think that's a good perspective there. I sort of get it. And actually, with Terraform, with TF, now you have the CDK as well, which is at least blessed version. But at least for me, I prefer the thing that's more declarative. I feel like that's sort of the point, is declarative infrastructure rather than programmatic infrastructure creation. Because we had that with things like Puppet and Chef, and it did not it did not go over well.

Matt Gowey [00:50:25]:
Yeah.

Warren Parad [00:50:25]:
But so I'll ask you, Matt. You know, open tofu or tower form?

Matt Gowey [00:50:30]:
We're if you see any of my content, if you see our blog posts, we're big OpenTofu folks. I have talked at OpenTofu North America. We've migrated five clients to OpenTofu, six. And we're I honestly believe in the whole thing. Not only just from the open source perspective and the fact that HashiCorp did a rug pull, but because they're they're innovating maybe a bit better. Right? Like, they they have new features that I'm, like, pretty excited about. And I like that they have a Slack community and people are really active in it. I like that they are supporting their their community and and being really on top of it.

Matt Gowey [00:51:18]:
There's a lot of really good engineers on that team. I've gotten to, you know, go out and have have a beer with with Christian, who's the the team lead, and I really like the guy. So I think that outside of even the license change, I would say I'd be going towards OpenTofu. But if you're on Terraform today, the biggest thing I always say this. It comes down to optionality. When you want to go and automate your Terraform, you either have on Terraform, you have the option of open source tools like Atlantis. You have the option of writing your own pipes, which we highly recommend or highly don't recommend, recommend against. And then finally, you have Terraform Cloud.

Matt Gowey [00:52:01]:
Terraform Cloud, not a bad product. It does what it needs to do, but it is five to 10 times more expensive than its competitors, and that is the big rub. Right? You you have a product in the space, and it's the only product you can choose and pay for and say, hey. We have a vendor that helps us manage the complexity of all of our infrastructure, but it's five to 10 times more expensive than everybody else. Like, that's it's a really hard pill to swallow. So I think that OpenTofu gives you a way out of that. And it's it's that's the one of the main reasons that we tell people to to go that route.

Warren Parad [00:52:36]:
See, I have my fingers crossed that we'll finally get a switch, for every single resource that allows us to turn it on or off without abusing the count variable.

Matt Gowey [00:52:47]:
Interesting. Why why do you dislike count?

Warren Parad [00:52:51]:
Well Do

Will Button [00:52:51]:
you just

Matt Gowey [00:52:51]:
want, like, an enabled flag?

Warren Parad [00:52:53]:
Yeah. I do just want an enabled flag. The the number one reason I I dislike it, is besides all the linting problems is it converts your resources from a singleton into an array with a single object. And and then if you wanna turn it off, you can't, like, remove the count once it's true. Like, you can't pull that out and just have everything

Matt Gowey [00:53:12]:
work. I get what you're saying. Yeah. So there is now the moved block, which allows you to, like, change the path of something within the state file, which can save you there. You know, it can make it so that, hey. You can add count to a resource even if it didn't have it before and not have it destroy and then recreate that resource. Still a pain. I get what you're saying.

Matt Gowey [00:53:32]:
Maybe there should be some, you know, smarts that gets built into that. But, that's what you want.

Warren Parad [00:53:38]:
Yeah. I mean, you real you really want your tools to enable a pit of success. And I feel like this is one of the things that is, for sure, a pit of failure, and and tricks people up and yeah, there's ways around it for sure. But the last thing I want to do is like you're oh, yeah. Let let me put an extra ticket on our board for every single, infrastructure change just so someone can go back and write a move block and then delete the move block when they don't need it anymore. It's Yeah. No one's gonna do that work.

Matt Gowey [00:54:05]:
I hear you. So And I wonder if they could build that.

Jillian [00:54:09]:
I

Matt Gowey [00:54:09]:
don't know. I'm gonna look up if there's an issue in the OpenTofu repository for this.

Warren Parad [00:54:13]:
I will put my thumbs up on it. I'm not gonna do that software development myself, but I'm happy to, use my very expensive thumbs up button, to So expensive.

Jillian [00:54:24]:
Yeah.

Matt Gowey [00:54:24]:
I know. Yeah. And I I think one of the great things about OpenTofu is that they are being very community driven in terms of what they work on. So those thumbs up matter a lot, where they have a board, an issue that's, like, the top of their issue list that just lists all the issues that have gotten a certain number of thumbs up, and they're saying, hey. We're gonna work on the top one. And that is that's really cool because, hey. We have a say. I think a lot of the a lot of the problems with Terraform too were around we, as a community, were, you know, banging the gavel.

Matt Gowey [00:54:58]:
Like, hey. We need this thing. We need this thing. We need this thing, and just weren't getting anywhere with it. And OpenTofu has just kinda flipped that. So For sure. Yeah.

Will Button [00:55:06]:
No. I think that the key driver behind that is HashiCorp had to satisfy the the board, you know, whereas OpenTofu has to satisfy the end users.

Matt Gowey [00:55:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a shame that HashiCorp went public. I I think they had some great leadership, and, they they did what companies do, which is you get to a certain point and everybody wants to make money, off of, your hard work. And I don't blame them for that. I really don't. But I think being a public company is brutal, and, you know, it's just rough. It's a shame.

Will Button [00:55:56]:
No. It is. Having spent my career in start ups, I can't imagine in 2025 why anyone would take their company public. If if you really believe in the mission of your company and the end users who are supporting your product. If that's your focus, there's I don't see a valid argument to take the company public.

Warren Parad [00:56:18]:
I have to imagine that it's not usually from, like, totally private to IPO. Like, it's usually through the VC chain, which is all about extracting the most money out of that thing, and scamming the most number of people in that pyramid scheme until, you know, you can get it out to the public. And then from there, shareholders are very myopic focused on just the next quarter and don't realize that having huge impacts on how the business actually works and the perception of the brand has a long lasting impact to the the bottom line. I I do have I do have a question of my own. Maybe just something that you you've thought about a little bit. One of the problems that we have in our space, so for our product, it's login and access control, that we provide for our customers, and there's a white labeling experience. Now there's a whole part of the infrastructure which is shared, but then there's a bunch of pieces which are per customer, per account, for each one of our customers. And sometimes they have more than one.

Warren Parad [00:57:21]:
And we're in this weird area where we don't know whether or not infrastructure as code makes sense for that and whether or not we should be rolling out either I mean, for this, we're actually using CloudFormation templates in AWS, but we could just easily switch over to OpenTofu. Whether or not that even makes sense or whether or not running through this list of resources that a new account needs is a programmatic process or whether or not it should be declarative and, infrastructure. And I I know we're not the only company with this problem. We're not a special snowflake here. So I don't know if this is something you've seen before and have some wisdom to share.

Matt Gowey [00:57:54]:
Yeah. I I have some wisdom. You know, we had a our our most recent case study, was with a a company called Power Digital. For each of their, customers, they're basically spinning up a small data warehouse in Snowflake that connected to AWS and a new GitHub repository and, like, did a bunch of things. Cool. And they had 500 customers. Right? So they were doing this constantly. And really what it comes down to is you you you do probably want that in infrastructure as code because you wanna manage the life cycle of that.

Matt Gowey [00:58:29]:
Right? You might change that that architecture for that client, infrastructure that you're, like, just stamping out every time you get a new one, you might change a little thing. Right? You might you might do something to it, you know, new tomorrow, and you wanna roll that out across everyone. Infrastructure as code is great for that. You also might you know, if there's any cost associated with those resources, you might want to destroy that infrastructure when that client goes away or customer goes away. I think that infrastructure as code makes sense. The point problem is is that you just want that to be a highly automated, low touch workflow. And that is the point that becomes a rub is that you need to kinda come at it from this perspective of, alright. We need to be we need to have our infrastructure as code to be on such rails that it needs to get into Git, and it needs to apply automatically, and it needs to do all of that very seamlessly so that we're not needing to think about it too much.

Matt Gowey [00:59:28]:
We built that for our other clients. So if you wanna talk, one on one afterwards, more than happy to give you all the the info on how that that worked. But, yeah, I think that infrastructure should be a thing that we create provision. We can change if we need to, and we can destroy it if we need to. And if we just do that with, you know, calling the AWS SDK or we, you know, do something that that's the AWS CLI bash script or whatever it is. Those types of things, they can be a they feel very programmatic, and they feel like a really good solution at the time, but then you don't have as much control in the long term. So, yeah, that's my thought. Cool.

Jillian [01:00:13]:
Yeah.

Will Button [01:00:16]:
I wanna switch topics just a little bit or not topics, but switch trajectory maybe is a better word. For someone who's listening to the podcast, considering the consultant versus career DevOps approach, what's your your bullet list of pros and cons of each?

Matt Gowey [01:00:40]:
The the pros list is high, is long, in terms of just, like, you know, being a consultant, particularly owning my own business, is very, very, advantageous to the rest of my life in terms of I set my own schedule, I decide who I work with, you know, I get to build a team, which is really nice. And it's you know, they're they're my people and, you know, I enjoy helping them grow as engineers and, you know, in their career. There's there's a lot of things on the the pros list. What's more interesting probably is the cons list. The the cons, I think, come from you know, there's always gonna be some level of, like, feast or famine. You know, I've been doing this for a long time, and I still, you know, find myself in, are we gonna get a new client next quarter? And usually, it all works out. Right? Like, you know, there there's some, you know, serendipitous occasion. I've never, you know, had to let anybody go because we didn't have enough work.

Matt Gowey [01:01:42]:
I've never had to, you know, be out of work for for many months at a time. You know, I've had it well. But, like, hey. If you're just starting and you don't have a network, you might go for a certain six months without, you know, picking up a client and and actually having work. So I think that understanding that you're you're on your own and, you know, your your livelihood can depend on that is its own, like, source of stress. And I think that there's something there. I think you also really need to be able to talk to people problems. A lot of the times I'm talking to clients and letting them know that I'm I'm there as an individual to to help them, and I can see that they're stressed.

Matt Gowey [01:02:28]:
I can see that we are are trying to solve some, like, deeper, emotional need, and you need to have those, like, soft skills at a at a deep level to help them navigate the right decision and get that stress off their plate. And I think those are two things that a lot of people that are, like, really excited about consulting, they don't think about those two things. Consultants are not the best engineers. I'll tell you that. I think that the, you know, I I definitely wouldn't consider myself a, you know, a wizard coder. I think I can write clean code, and, that that's, like, part of a craft that I really love. But I definitely have worked with a lot of smarter people in my career, and they're off being, you know, senior engineers, or above elsewhere at companies that just tell them, hey. We need to build this thing.

Matt Gowey [01:03:27]:
They're they're not trying to solve those people problems. They're not trying to navigate those, you know, the intricacies of, hey. This client, you know, consultant relationship. So I don't know. Does that answer your question?

Will Button [01:03:39]:
It does. Yeah. And I think it highlights one of the things that there's almost like a translator skill required to be a successful consultant because your clients typically don't come to you describing a technical problem. They come to you describing some impact that's happening to their business, and you have to be able to translate that, talk with them, ask follow-up questions, and then translate that into a technical problem that you can solve.

Matt Gowey [01:04:10]:
For sure. Yeah. A lot of it is like, can I repeat that back to you? Like, this is what I'm hearing. Right?

Warren Parad [01:04:19]:
And and

Matt Gowey [01:04:19]:
a lot of things come back to that. You have to be able to read between those lines and kinda understand at a root level, like, what's the actual issue here? They're telling you one thing, but it's something else. And and that's a skill. Yeah.

Will Button [01:04:32]:
Yeah. Can I can I repeat that back to you? It's probably gotta be one of the most valuable phrases in humanity. Yeah.

Matt Gowey [01:04:40]:
Let's make sure we're on the same page here. That's Yeah. That's that's the way it goes.

Warren Parad [01:04:44]:
I think there's a maybe a an additional connection here, which, you brought up earlier on who your decision makers are. If you're a consultant, you're selling your services to someone, they have to have money. Like, an engineer probably isn't going to make the decision on paying you to to come in and help, which means you're talking to the, like you said, directors of technology and higher. And what problems do they think they have? Right? And they're not like, oh, well, you know, we have some Terraform modules that don't work. Right. You know, it's probably not what they're coming and saying.

Matt Gowey [01:05:13]:
No. Never. Yeah. And and the way we approach that is that, hey. I wanna we wanna come in and we wanna solve both problems. Right? We wanna solve the leadership's problems that are typically around scale, workflow, decreasing, you know, engineering costs or maintainability costs. We also wanna solve the ergonomic problems that the, you know, actual people who are writing the infrastructure as code or the application engineers are are dealing with. So what we do is we'll typically we have an audit and, you know, more and more, we're we're we're selling that audit, as, like, our our way to really help understand an organization and get them the right prescriptive guidance that they need.

Matt Gowey [01:05:54]:
And as part of that, we and we, you know, interview engineering leadership. We also engine interview a bunch of the infrastructure engineers and application engineers. We make sure that we're kind of holistic in approaching the problem, not just from what we're being told, but making sure we're uncovering what else is there because we don't wanna, you know, leave any turn like, rock unturned.

Will Button [01:06:17]:
It's important. Right on. Does this feel like a good time to move on to picks? Yeah.

Warren Parad [01:06:20]:
I think so. Let's do it.

Will Button [01:06:21]:
Alright. Cool. Jillian, you've been out for a couple weeks, so I can only assume that you have been diligently researching your next pick. So I'm excited to hear what you got this time.

Jillian [01:06:32]:
I'm just gonna keep going with the shameless self promotion until I get more clients. That's what I'm gonna be doing since, you know, that's a bit on topic of the show. So, you know, if you've been listening to the show lately, you know I really like AI and LLMs and all of those kind of tools. I do have, a service to get all of that set up for you on your own AWS account. This is mostly geared towards data science companies because if you're not a data science company, I don't really, like, know what to do with you, frankly. But if you need kind of a junior, maybe grad student level research assistant to go, querying your papers, querying structured and unstructured datasets. We've got more datasets being added every day. So far, the top one is open targets for drug discovery.

Jillian [01:07:16]:
But I've had a whole bunch of single cell spatial transcriptomics. Like, there's just people are starting to do some pretty, like, cool and wild things with it, which is exciting. So if you're interested in that, you can go to my website. It's, dabbleofdevops.com/ai, and you'll see that there's an LLM data discovery tool. This week, the page isn't backed up. Last time, it may or may not have been. I'm not sure, but this this week gets up. Okay? There.

Jillian [01:07:41]:
It exists.

Will Button [01:07:43]:
Open research for DUG discovery sounds like my time in high school.

Jillian [01:07:48]:
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. That's good. That's a little bit too real for me to say, Will, and my and my teenagers. So we're just we're not gonna be brown over that. Alright. I can't do that this morning.

Jillian [01:08:01]:
I think do it.

Warren Parad [01:08:03]:
I I think that part may actually have to be cut from the from the episode before Possibly. Possibly. I'm not

Jillian [01:08:10]:
sure if, like, anything gets cut from these episodes. I don't know. I've always wondered if the things that we can say and still have sponsors or do we just have sponsors at all for this show?

Warren Parad [01:08:21]:
Okay.

Will Button [01:08:22]:
We definitely have to cut that part.

Warren Parad [01:08:24]:
So, so I'm gonna mark the clip here, so I guess at this point.

Jillian [01:08:30]:
And It

Matt Gowey [01:08:30]:
was good, though. I I I once it clicked, I got it as a that that was a great one.

Will Button [01:08:36]:
It's like a it was a joke grenade where you pull a pin and throw it out, and it's three to five seconds before it actually lands.

Matt Gowey [01:08:42]:
Yeah. Alright,

Will Button [01:08:44]:
Warren. What'd you bring for a pick this week?

Warren Parad [01:08:46]:
Yeah. So I'm gonna be a shill for a conference. I absolutely love DevOps days. I think it's one of the best set of conferences anywhere in

Matt Gowey [01:08:54]:
the world.

Warren Parad [01:08:55]:
They're volunteer run, and my CEO will be giving the keynote speak talk at DevOps Day Zurich, this week. It's all about systems thinking at Autherus, and it's it's actually a great talk.

Will Button [01:09:09]:
Right on. Nice. Yeah. I agree with you on DevOpsDays. DevOpsDays Amsterdam is probably one of the best I've been to because those guys, they just go out of their way so that when you leave, all of your swag reminds you that you were in Amsterdam. You know, it's very, very, like, cultural and historic and authentic and and super cool and thoughtful.

Matt Gowey [01:09:36]:
Very cool. Yeah. And I'll I'll double plus one that with, saying that DevOps Days Denver has been there's a really good community behind it, really good group of folks, and, their talks are awesome, and it's just great community. If people have not been to their local chapters, DevOps days, they're they're missing out.

Will Button [01:09:57]:
Right on. Alright. Matt, what'd you bring for a pick?

Matt Gowey [01:10:01]:
I have a book. I had I had a hard time picking. But I am obsessed with, this series called Dungeon Crawler Carl. It is a fantasy sci fi series. They're on book seven now. And you might scoff at the name, and you might, think that that's not for you. And I will tell you that I'm nine for 10 on friends that I've recommended it to and had them go, wow. I now have a new favorite book.

Matt Gowey [01:10:32]:
That, you know, it's really consistent. Yeah. Yeah. That that guy in my life.

Jillian [01:10:36]:
It won him all.

Matt Gowey [01:10:40]:
Fantastic. Really witty. Really funny. There's a talking cat. You will enjoy it if you read it.

Will Button [01:10:47]:
Just the name dungeon crawler Carl sounds it sounds like, the hero from an eighties video game. That's such a cool name.

Matt Gowey [01:10:55]:
Yeah. It's goofy. I think that a lot of people have an issue with the name, but you read it, you'll enjoy it.

Warren Parad [01:11:03]:
Right on. It makes me think of this, like, the hardest video game I've ever played, and that's not Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden. It's something called, Lester the Unlikely for Super Nintendo. It's almost like an eighties game. You are literally playing just a regular human who has to navigate quite challenging, set of circumstances. Like, imagine you're in a fantasy world, and you don't have any superpowers, and you can't jump high. And if you fall off a rock, you will die. That that that is this game.

Warren Parad [01:11:31]:
And you get abducted by cannibals and have to, like, steal keys and unwiddle ropes in order to get out. And it's it's it's quite the challenge because there is no help at all, while you're playing. So you will die over and over again.

Will Button [01:11:44]:
Nice.

Matt Gowey [01:11:45]:
Those games were just brutal. Yeah. Right? I used to have a I forget what it was one of the handhelds back in, you know, when I was a a kid. I feel like it was made by, Sega.

Warren Parad [01:11:58]:
Game Gear.

Matt Gowey [01:11:59]:
Yeah. The Game Gear. Yeah. I had the Game Gear.

Warren Parad [01:12:01]:
I had no save. I would

Matt Gowey [01:12:03]:
play a game for ten hours, and I couldn't save it. And I was like, oh my god. I drove me insane. I think that things were a little bit different back then.

Jillian [01:12:13]:
I remember games with no save. But, see, this is why you just play cutesy sim games where you can't die. Like, if you guys are just playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, this is not a problem

Warren Parad [01:12:22]:
for you.

Will Button [01:12:23]:
That's gonna be Jevilyn's pick next week. Yeah.

Jillian [01:12:25]:
I think I've already picked it, but I I probably could because

Matt Gowey [01:12:29]:
I really double up. I wanna hear about this.

Jillian [01:12:30]:
It has, like, my favorite Disney ship. It's Melissa Maleficent and Hades, and I just I love that pairing. It's so great.

Will Button [01:12:41]:
Well so my pick's gonna be kind of a letdown after that conversation because, I'm picking seat covers. So

Jillian [01:12:50]:
I like seat covers.

Matt Gowey [01:12:51]:
I like seat covers. Yeah.

Will Button [01:12:53]:
So I just got a new set of seat covers from a company called Shear Comfort, s h e a r. So, like, shearing a sheep, but Shear Comfort. And they've got so many different choices for seat covers. And, you know, the seats in my truck, they were getting, like, mud and dirt and stuff on them, and I thought, I just can't do this to the seats. So bought these seat covers. They're super cool, really, really well made, pretty easy to put on, look great once they're on. And then it's got all, like, the the nice features. Like, they're specific to my model of truck.

Will Button [01:13:30]:
So, like, I've got a Ford truck, so it's got these little loop handles that you have to pull to get the seats to fold down. So it's got the cutouts for that so that that works natively, and it's got, you know, it's built so that the the cyberstrain airbags still work, which may or may be cool at some point in my life, but, a lot of little features like that and just really well built. So, yeah, sure comfort seat covers if you're looking for a set of seat covers. That's a good one. They sent with the box, they sent, like, a product catalog, which kinda shocked me, and it's a huge product catalog. So they also make, in addition to seat covers, they make, like, full I don't even want know what you call them. If you wanted a blanket for your car or truck, they have, like, shaped covers for those. Or if you have to put a cover on your RV, they make a full custom fit cover to fit your RV.

Will Button [01:14:28]:
Just a lot of things that I didn't even know existed that I found out because they included the catalog.

Warren Parad [01:14:32]:
I think, Will, your pick

Will Button [01:14:33]:
next week is, like, you're already thinking about the McMaster car, product catalog. Alright. Yeah. For sure. This is the master the McMaster car catalog of seat covers and car wraps.

Jillian [01:14:49]:
But are they wool if it's, like, sheer like, shearing a sheep?

Will Button [01:14:53]:
That is one of the options. You can get the, sheepskin seat covers. You know? Go straight back to the eighties and put them in your Camaro with the t tops. I I didn't go that route. I went with, it's like a almost like a neoprene thing that's not gonna show any mud or dirt or coffee that I spill on it.

Jillian [01:15:14]:
I didn't know people had, like, wool seat covers, and now that's new existential dread for me to have that anytime I get into somebody's car, I'm gonna wonder, oh, no. Is this woolen? Am I gonna die? But

Will Button [01:15:25]:
Well, I think you're pretty safe as long as whoever you're with isn't wearing, like, a mullet and a handlebar mustache and a Camaro, you're probably gonna be okay.

Jillian [01:15:34]:
That's true. I I can probably self select for these things.

Matt Gowey [01:15:36]:
Yeah. Can I

Will Button [01:15:37]:
I think so? I think it's pretty safe. Okay. Alright. Now that I finished offending everyone on the list, I think we've got ourselves an episode. Matt, thanks for joining us, man. It's been great talking to you.

Matt Gowey [01:15:52]:
Yeah. It's a really good conversation, folks. Appreciate it.

Will Button [01:15:55]:
Yeah. Some good questions. Good topics. Yeah. So be sure and check out Matt's website, Masterpoint. It's Masterpoint.io. Is that right?

Matt Gowey [01:16:02]:
Yes. It is. Yeah.

Will Button [01:16:03]:
So if you need consulting services or if you are, you know, wanting to try your career out, check it out and see if he's hiring. Warren, Jillian, thank you both for being on the show with me today.

Jillian [01:16:18]:
Thank you.

Will Button [01:16:19]:
And for everyone listening, thanks for listening, and I'll see everyone next week.