August 2021 Summaries

In an episode of the "Break Things on Purpose" podcast, Ana Medina speaks with Carmen Saenz, a Senior DevOps Engineer at Apex Clearing, about her experiences transitioning from on-premises systems to cloud environments and her journey in chaos engineering. Carmen recounts a critical incident from her early career involving configuration management errors at a high-frequency trading firm and how chaos engineering practices were later implemented to prevent similar issues. She discusses the challenges of adapting to cloud-native systems, including the abstraction of networking and the importance of understanding fundamental concepts that can be overlooked in cloud environments. Carmen also shares insights into her passion for teaching and her pursuit of a Ph.D. at DePaul University, where she aims to integrate her industry knowledge with academia and bring more representation to the field. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, asking questions, and leveraging community resources to navigate the evolving landscape of technology.

In a podcast episode featuring Zack Butcher, a founding engineer at Tetrate, the discussion delves into the origins and evolution of Istio, an open-source service mesh project initially developed at Google to address various API-serving challenges such as shared outages, noisy neighbors, and cost accounting. The conversation highlights Istio's journey from its beginnings as a solution to internal Google issues to a broader open-source project aimed at solving complex networking problems in the community. Butcher emphasizes the importance of focusing on a single problem when implementing Istio, suggesting incremental adoption to manage its complexity effectively and advising users to plan for ongoing operations, including upgrades. He also touches on the value of managed Istio services to reduce operational burdens, and suggests leveraging resources like Tetrate Labs for further guidance.