Curtis Vanzandt
Developer, Azure Specialist, Educator
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
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Curtis Vanzandt is a full-stack software engineer with the National Basketball Association. After several years (and an advanced degree) studying classical music, he discovered an appreciation for technology and began working in the field shortly after. He enjoys the convergence of his experience in music, education, and software, and spends the majority of his time researching and teaching concepts around cloud, developer experience, and agile. Curtis loves working with Terraform, Azure, and Kafka and enjoys a very healthy and normal amount of coffee.
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Topics
10 Things I Wish I Knew About Terraform Earlier
A few years into my career, I began working in an Azure environment and quickly learned about Terraform. I quickly started working with Terraform and grew into a grizzled veteran. After deleting my first cloud database by accident, I started compiling a list of things I wish I had learned more thoroughly when picking up this exciting tool. Terraform is the most popular tool for infrastructure-as-code in the market but it comes with risks and pitfalls that are not just technology-related but also people-related. We will discuss these pitfalls and how best to remediate them.
Terraform: Extreme Ownership and Application Infrastructure
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin wrote “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win” in 2015 in an attempt to summarize the lessons they learned as followers and leaders in the United States Navy SEAL program and apply them to business. The idea is simple - exercise ownership over everything you do. In software development, one of the areas we can exercise this level of ownership is our application infrastructure. Enter Terraform: an open-source tool that has become the industry standard for infrastructure-as-code. You can write Azure, AWS, or GCP infrastructure. You can create feature flags or message queues. You can even use Terraform to order a pizza! It’s a dynamic tool that allows us to manage infrastructure at the most granular level possible. We will dive into Terraform and explain the concepts of state, providers, and write real-life examples, all tying back to the concept of extreme ownership and how managing our cloud infrastructure allows us to succeed in business
ELI5: Cloud Nativity for Junior Developers
Trends have begun to emerge over the last decade in software development: lightweight microservices, hosting applications in the cloud, containerization, etc. Out of these trends has come one of technology's biggest buzzwords: "cloud-native", and the definition changes depends on who you ask. Today, as junior developers enter the field, they are closer to the infrastructure and operations side of things than ever, so it's important for them to know what this term means and how to build cloud-native applications. In this session, we will try to break down the definition, touching on 12 Factor Development, Containerization, Container Orchestration, and how it affects the agile workspace.
Curtis Vanzandt
Developer, Azure Specialist, Educator
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Actions
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