text stringlengths 0 2.67k |
|---|
**Justin Garrison:** To this day, the single best alert I ever set up in my life was before I went to bed, the night Disney Plus launched, and I put a "if this, then that" alert on Twitter to say \#DisneyPlus is down. And that woke me up before my alerts did. |
**Autumn Nash:** But that's what I'm trying to say, though... Go get an RSS feed. You can take that data from Stack Overflow. There's so many ways to understand where your customers are struggling... And half the time we work on things that aren't even that impactful to our customers, because you're not getting the rig... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Well, and that was one of the things that was so difficult about this. So bringing it back to public safety, all of the public safety people that we work with, if it's something that is really life or death, they have manual fallbacks, and they're trained that if the technology doesn't work, don't ... |
\[20:03\] So our feedback -- like, you would think we would know immediately that "Oh, we can't get into the thing." Well, no. They just switched over to the manual, and then \*bleep\* to the CIO at the weekly meeting a week later. So we don't actually find out there was a problem sometimes until like a week after it h... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. They worked around the issue. They needed to get something done, and they're like "I don't have time for this. Someone is in danger", right? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Yeah. So it became imperative for us not just to -- from a convenience standpoint, but sometimes we didn't even know if there was a problem. Like, if we weren't running synthetic transactions to make sure what was happening, we wouldn't even know that there was a problem. |
**Justin Garrison:** Was this application in -- was this in the hot path for like 911 calls, or was this a dispatch afterwards? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** No, no, no. |
**Justin Garrison:** Okay. |
**Autumn Nash:** That's just such an interesting use case, because sometimes -- I love technology, and sometimes we get excited about solving problems that are some random problems that I don't know if anyone really asked for it... But that is such a cool use case because you're really impacting, making things better f... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Thank you. I really appreciate that. So the theme with public safety is that they very siloed industry. I mean, even more than a lot of enterprise tech that you're used to, it's not used to working with other systems. It's not designed to work with other systems. |
**Justin Garrison:** I mean, they built a whole internet for it. It's a private fiber network that no one else is allowed to use, so that we can... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Well, and even then, you're dealing with an industry that's just very used to one being very slow for updates, and slow for changes. I'm not going to shame the big giant company that does this. It's a company that if I told you who they were, and showed you where they are, you'd be like "Oh, that's... |
And then because we deal with the feds, federal standards for security -- I always like to say in the battle between compliance and security, compliance wins every time. Like, it always wins. Security never wins in that battle. |
**Autumn Nash:** Shouldn't they almost go hand in hand, though? It's so weird to me that they are always treated as two separate issues. I know logically we know that, but they're just so separated... You would think that a lot of compliance would also be like, I don't know, mandating or influencing because of security... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Well, perfect example. So CJIS, the Criminal Justice Information System - this is the IT security standard that the FBI puts out. So if you're going to work with their systems, you have to comply with this set of features. So here in the DC region you get arrested, your picture goes into a database... |
\[24:07\] So instead of us handing you off to the ADFS running inside of the corporate network, we started handing everybody off to Entra, and Azure AD. So Azure AD is now rebranded Entra, if anybody is listening and hasn't caught the new documentation. |
**Justin Garrison:** I was not up to date on that, thank you. |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Yeah, that's only like six months old. So most clouds - and I will shame Microsoft on this one... Most clouds have some kind of direct connect. I forget what AWS calls it. So you don't go out to the public internet. Large enterprises don't go out to the public internet to get to their EC2 instances... |
**Justin Garrison:** It's either a direct fiber, or even like a virtual appliance VPN, something like that. |
3:Right. Microsoft has this for Azure, but not for Entra. You have to go to the public internet in order to authenticate to Entra. There is no way to bypass that, which is bonkers to me on multiple levels. But that's the way that they set it up. So now I'm explaining to these cops, "Hey, you need to open up all these f... |
**Justin Garrison:** Here's the Microsoft block of IPs... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Justin Garrison:** I think Microsoft still has the /8, right? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Exactly. But in that particular instance, I was like "Look, you can either hand everybody their own username or password, or you've got to get an exception to this rule." That was the one instance where security won out. But Autumn, to your point about security versus compliance, why is this a thin... |
And so that's been a big part of our fight, when we work with the Feds especially... We had one federal agency - that'll go unnamed - that they were originally going to integrate us as an identity provider to make it easier for the localities to access their systems. So we have federal users that access locality system... |
**Break**: \[27:22\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Going back to the infrastructure you're setting up, because basically, you stopped selling most of it like 2019, or whatever. You had all this automated and you were starting to go into like this open source. But previously, you were setting up a lot of stuff there, it's all AD integration, it's ad... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** COVID was -- I don't want to say COVID was good in any way, shape or form. It really accelerated the understanding of the need for identity infrastructure, because everybody switched to work from home. So I'll give you an example... So our primary customer for the caretakers of the system is Fairfa... |
**Justin Garrison:** And all of that identity still is based on network access. Even the VPN is like "Oh, you have one of our IP addresses? We trust you. You're good." |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Yeah. And so COVID happens, work from home happens, and all of a sudden, identity matters. And they're getting rid of ADFS, they're moving up to Entra... They're building out that identity infrastructure. And so that gave us the ability to be a lot more flexible, because we could ditch our legacy v... |
So that happened. The other thing that happened was Kubernetes. We had tried to do Docker containers in 2015, and it was one of the most beautiful failures I've ever seen. It was such a cluster that we were like "Okay, you know what? We're not touching this Kubernetes thing until we can use a managed service." And I've... |
**Justin Garrison:** The data center contract? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** \[32:03\] The data center. Yeah. The data center contract with the county had expired. So we kind of did a lift and shift, where we got everything into Azure, where it was still running on VMs. And then at that point, when we were on Azure, it was like "Okay, well, we can Kubernetes now." So we got... |
**Justin Garrison:** This is still Windows and .NET, or...? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** No, no. This is all entirely Java at this point. There's no .NET anymore. |
**Autumn Nash:** When did you switch from .NET to Java? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** So our backend was always Java. The only part that we had that was a frontend was a .NET frontend. So that switched over to Java in about 2017, 2018. And then we actually got rid of a separate portal application. The original architecture was the portal application, was a J2EE web app that communic... |
And then we moved over to Kubernetes in 2021. We went live with that. And that was great, because we had automated the heck out of everything. Like, even to the point where we had a system in place that if Ubuntu patched a library that was on a source container, that would trigger the rebuild, get it deployed into dev.... |
**Autumn Nash:** Can you tell us more about how you automated it? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Yeah, so almost everything was Azure DevOps. So Azure DevOps is Azure's GitHub Actions, basically. And so we were able to put in place a combination... I mean, it was a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, but it worked beautifully... Because we're the vendor, right? Because we're a software vendor. We'... |
Then when we were happy with everything, we just had a simple script that would run, that would take the version that was running inside of dev, and patch all the manifests in prod to move everything over. And so it was all very clean, very easy. |
**Justin Garrison:** Is the backend of Azure DevOps like an open source tool? It's not just like Jenkins, or Spinnaker, or something like that. Like, it's a custom thing, or...? |
**Marc Boorshtein:** I don't know. |
**Justin Garrison:** Okay. I wasn't sure. I don't know, I've never used it, so I was kind of curious there. |
**Marc Boorshtein:** Our stuff is all a YAML/Bash amalgamation. But yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if it's an open source backend. I don't think it is. |
**Justin Garrison:** I think it's something custom, but I never actually looked into it, so I was kind of curious if you know. |
**Marc Boorshtein:** \[36:17\] Yeah... |
**Justin Garrison:** The second question there is the move here from -- we have this push-based pipeline, to a pull-based controller, right? A GitOps controller versus... You could still store manifests in Git, in Azure DevOps, you could still do a lot of the same things, but the push versus pull is a difference. Why d... |
**Marc Boorshtein:** So there was actually a really specific reason that triggered it. It was one of these things that we always wanted to do as long as we had time and budget... But what the actual thing that triggered it was we wanted to have a secondary instance. So when everything started, we were very heavily focu... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.