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\[32:05\] AWS has what they're calling the ALB (application load balancer), which is different from their classic elastic load balancer. The ALB has a capability to route the traffic to the different services that it is aware of within your cluster. I haven't played around too much with that, but it does sound like it ... |
So there's lots of options out there, but obviously you find the one that works in your environment. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Cool. Speaking of HashiCorp's tools, because you mentioned [Vault](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault), and the one that you've just mentioned... Anybody here play around with [Terraform](https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform)? |
**Erik St. Martin:** I haven't, no. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Okay. It's another HashiCorp tool that is pretty magical... |
**Erik St. Martin:** A lot of the HashiCorp tools are magical... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I know, I'm a big fan of those folks there. They come out with some really good tools. Kavya, do you wanna talk a little bit about what the tool does, for those who don't know? |
**Kavya Joshi:** Sure. Terraform basically is a tool that helps you manage your infrastructure - manage and bring up infrastructure. The cool thing about it is you specify the infrastructure you want as configuration, so it's declarative. Terraform looks at the state of your existing infrastructure, looks at the config... |
Things can happen in parallel (modifications), it figures out what dependencies are, so it ends up being a very fast and easy way to specify changes to your infrastructure. We just started to use Terraform, so I'm a little taken by it right now. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** On the AWS stack - not sure if you've played around with that, but the counterpart to that is cloud formation, which once I discovered -- in the beginning I kind of baulked at specifying my architecture through JSON and YAML, but once you kind of dive in a little bit and look at cloud formation f... |
It's easy to just say, "Hey, I want the same exact stack in a different availability zone or a different region altogether" and then basically things just happen magically. It's really awesome to use. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah. So Terraform works with - or you can use it with - things like Chef and Puppet for the provisioning stuff. What Terraform does really well is just specifying the infrastructure, the instances, the load balancers, whatever you want, to provide that specification. |
\[36:00\] How we tend to use it is we do the provisioning off instances to actually like installing software and all of that separately, but we use Terraform just to bring up the new infrastructure. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, that's very different from -- you wouldn't use that as part of your typical development workflow. It's not like your typical CI/CD pipeline. This is more like for standing up your infrastructure that first time, or if you need to reproduce it again at a later date, or if you need to modify ... |
You can easily change that... It's just infrastructure as code, so you just commit that, you make AWS aware of it, and all of a sudden the state machine kicks in to say "Okay, this is now the desired state for your infrastructure." If it needs to, it spins down resources, deletes things that are no longer needed, and i... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yup. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I think we're geeking out on infras-- |
**Carlisia Thompson:** --changing subjects... \[laughter\] Are you guys ready to talk about something else? I wanted to ask Kavya about how interested in firmware -- \[laughter\] you mentioned that you have the interest... It's something like you haven't necessarily started doing anything...? I'm super curious to know ... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah, gosh... So the startup I work at does firmware, because there's a hardware engineering team - we make the hardware... There's a firmware team, and the firmware team actually does use Go. We have sensors, and the sensors don't run Go - it's all embedded C - but the gateways which run [yocto Linux]... |
I started at this company as like a backend assistant, some infrastructure, and that sort of role... But the more I learned about the firmware side of things, I'm growing increasingly fascinated with writing firmware code. It's cool that you can run Go on firmware, so in terms of what I'd do with that - oh, gosh... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** It's alright, why don't you share -- I'd love to hear from you what makes firmware code interesting to you? I sort of have the opposite reaction whenever I program for hardware, because I worked for three years at a company doing just C code for - or mostly C code - for hardware. It's sort of a p... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Well, again, with the caveat that I haven't written much, I've only tinkered a little bit, I think the tradeoffs are somewhat fascinating. The firmware team has to think about power consumption, which is not something as like a backend or traditional software programmer you ever have to think about, ri... |
\[40:18\] Obviously, you optimize your code and all of that, but it's very easy; you're not dealing with hard constraints... Whereas when you're talking about firmware programming, or programming on a device, those are all very real and very hard constraints, and a new constraint that you don't even have to think about... |
The set of constraints you're dealing with is very different, and I think that's what makes it interesting. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So are you interested in writing this firmware in Go, or just in general? |
**Kavya Joshi:** In general, but Go sounds like a very convenient way to get started, with things like [Gobot](https://github.com/hybridgroup/gobot) and everything else that's coming out now. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think I kind of mirror the thoughts about the hardware... I'm not an electrical engineer, but I have piles of parts because I'm slowly learning. I think the fun part about learning firmware is 1) we write so much code that runs somewhere else, so writing code that you actually get to interact wit... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Concurrency is hard... \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, the memory constraints are interesting too, especially if you're working on a normal ARM tip or something like that, depending on what series... I mean, you're working with kilobytes of RAM, and even if you use a BUS, you use like an SBI bus or something to talk to an external RAM, you're sti... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** "It's their fault for only having eight gigs of RAM instead of 32!" \[laughter\] |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah... We recently switched to using a different chipset and a different board for the gateways, and the firmware engineers are like "Oh my god, we now have maybe like 150 megabytes of RAM available?" It's just like, "Um, okay... What are you gonna do with that?" \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Like, "Can you blink an LED with that?" \[laughter\] In distributed system in the cloud world and stuff like that, when you're thinking megs of RAM, you really are like "What are you gonna do with that!?" |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Boot VM, if you can! That's it. \[laughter\] I'm interested to understand... In the hardware world, do you have some sort of assurance that if you get it to work on the hardware when you're "developing", it'll sort of work every time consistently that same way? Do you have any such sort of guaran... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[44:18\] Yeah, so I can probably take this question... I think we should probably take our next sponsored break first, and then I'll come in with this, just because this might be a little bit more. So our second sponsor for today is DataDog. |
**Break:** \[44:34\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** So we are back. Before the break, Johnny, you had asked -- you're talking more like a testing scenario? |
**Kavya Joshi:** More even like running -- like, once you ship your hardware product... Are you pretty much guaranteed that the code that you worked while you were testing and developing it is pretty much gonna perform the same way consistently when it's in the consumer's hands? Do you have any such guarantees? |
**Erik St. Martin:** So there's a lot of testing that goes into the physical device to make sure that everything runs... Usually, there's a couple of test interfaces. Once the board is designed, some people use what's called a bed of nails, which is almost like another thing that comes down and makes contact points ont... |
I don't remember the year that this came out, but it's called the Joint Test Action Group, or JTAG - it's an interface out that a lot of microcontrollers implement, and it basically allows you to communicate with all the chips in almost like a shift register fashion, and you can communicate and apply voltage or read fr... |
Then as far as the firmware goes, a lot of things like QEMU and things like that, unit tests are written... And then almost in the same way we write crash-only software and things like that, a lot of firmware development people have to try to -- because you can actually have hard faults. If you have a stack overflow or... |
It's an interesting world... I don't develop firmware. I know an EE (Electrical Engineer) I've had an interest in learning more things about this... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** It sounds like you have a deep interest... \[laughter\] |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah! |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[48:15\] I'm always torn, because a part of me wants to take just like a single board computer, or like an Intel Edison and put Linux and Go on it, but a part of me really loves the Assembly and the C, and learning the guts of it... I've got some dev boards that are literally just like an ARM proc... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Do you think that working on systems with so little resources - compared to the really powerful servers that we're deploying stuff on in the cloud - teaches you to write code that is more performant, that is more conservative with resource utilization? |
**Erik St. Martin:** I guess you think about it a lot... I try to be cognizant of that whatever I write, but I guess you try to be more aware of it that way. Usually your compile tool tell you how much space it's gonna consume on flash, which is also a problem, right? The chip only has so much flash on it for you to ac... |
If you wrote a program so big it fills up your server's hard drive, you're fired immediately. \[laughter\]. So there's things like that... Or you have to write code that pulls more code from external flash... But I think it forces you to be more aware of how the processor works, and Assembly instructions, and the regis... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** So in the cases where you need to emit data, it sounds like you can have storage that gets shipped with the product, or you're sometimes emitting that stuff over a network. In the world of IoT that we're in, everything is gonna be able to talk with a network... How would you emit data that you ne... |
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