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**Justin Garrison:** 8 or 9, somewhere there. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** I usually think of them in terms of where the Scale events happened, what venue it was, and that's kind of how I gauge "Okay, that's how long ago it was, that's how long I've known this person." |
**Justin Garrison:** I was at the Westin, so I don't remember which version that was, but it was a while ago. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah, that was probably 9. It sounds about right. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, it was somewhere in there. And I don't that the Scale conferences don't line up with yours... That still always throws me off, that 9 wasn't in 2009... Because I always think of it as somewhere around that time. But it's one or two years off. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah. Originally, it was supposed to be -- so the very first Scale was in November, I want to say 2021. It was at the USC Davidson Conference Center. |
**Justin Garrison:** 2001. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** I believe it was 2001, yeah. But for whatever reason, we decided to shift to earlier in the year for the next one. So we basically had a year gap between the next one. So the next one I don't believe happened until possibly 2023... But it was early 2023. |
**Justin Garrison:** But you're saying extra 20s in there, because that was last year, 2023. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Oh, sorry. 2003. Yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** So let's start with what software are you responsible for, or have you been responsible for? |
**Gareth Greenaway:** So up until January of this year I was a member of the Salt core team. So previously -- a lot of people will probably notice SaltStack; that was the original name of the project and the company that was kind of behind the project. So I was working for SaltStack the company, and then we were acquir... |
**Justin Garrison:** How did you get involved? What started you going down -- why Salt? What were you doing? |
**Gareth Greenaway:** I was working for -- I was working as a DevOps engineer at a small company, and we were using Puppet for a lot of our automation and our deployments and whatnot... And a friend of mine had mentioned this new project that he was involved with, or had kind of started using, called Salt. And I kind o... |
So then fast-forward a few months, maybe six months later, I was actually one of the rotating co-hosts for a podcast called Floss Weekly. And we had two guests kind of back to back, that I was the co-host for. One of them was the founder, the guy that started Ansible. And so we did the interview, learned about Ansible,... |
\[11:57\] One of the things I noticed early on was that a particular -- I was running through the tutorial of how to use it, and one of the things that it walked you through initially was setting up networking, I think it was. And I was "Okay, let's walk through this." And it wasn't working, for whatever reason... And ... |
So once I discovered that, I was "Okay, what would it take to kind of add support for Ubuntu - or Debian it was - into Salt, in order to be able to do this?" So it turned out it was fairly easy. This was actually my first contribution to the project, and I believe when I left it still held the record for the most lint ... |
**Justin Garrison:** That's impressive, actually. |
**Autumn Nash:** Can you tell us more about what Salt is? Just a brief summary, in case somebody hasn't used it before? |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah, it's a good question. So Salt is often categorized -- like, I mentioned Ansible... It's put in the same categories as tools Ansible, and Chef, and Puppet... Or CFEngine, if you go way back. So those tools are often referred to as configuration management systems. So if you want to perform th... |
So Salt is a configuration management system, but it's also a remote execution system. So in addition to the configuration management, you can also run commands outside of configuration management. Salt uses YAML as its default - states, they're called. With Puppet it's manifests, and Chef it's recipes. Salt's are stat... |
**Justin Garrison:** And Ansible is YOLOs, right? |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Ansible is YOLOs, yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** Is it really called YOLOs? |
**Justin Garrison:** It should be... It feels it, everytime you -- |
**Autumn Nash:** See? One-liners. This proves that Justin -- |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Ansible's is playbooks. |
**Justin Garrison:** Playbooks, that's what it's called. That's right. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah. So beyond that configuration management, it's got the remote execution portion of it, which allows you to just run -- say you want to run an RM command, remove a particular file off 100 different servers. Rather than Go and "Okay, I wanted to find a YAML thing that runs this command", you ca... |
**Justin Garrison:** SSH and a for loop, baby. That's it. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** SSH and a for loop, exactly. |
**Autumn Nash:** End up in Bash hell forever... |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yes. |
**Justin Garrison:** I remember my exposure to it back in the day. I was looking at Puppet at my first sysadmin job, and I got Puppet-trained, and everything. I was deploying, and I was "I need to deploy this faster." And then I went with Ansible, because I'm "Oh, I can SSH into all these boxes and install Puppet." And... |
\[16:01\] And Ansible felt somewhere in the middle, where it was like "Oh, SSH is there. It's just kinda a convenience factor", that it was mainly remote execution over SSH, and you could shove these playbooks in. But it was super-slow. And once you'd get over a few hundred servers, you're kind of "I'm not waiting for ... |
At multiple jobs, I ended up doing -- I think I had Ansible deploy Puppet, and then Puppet deploy Salt, so I could do remote execution... Because EmCollective was terrible. And even at another job, we had Puppet in place, and we actually had Salt trigger a local-only -- what do they call it, the client-side only apply,... |
**Gareth Greenaway:** I had done a few little side projects using Python... Mostly just if I needed to to write some scripts, or write something like a simple tool, and kind of gone beyond the capabilities of Bash, I would turn to Python. But contributing to Salt was really my first kind of exposure to really writing l... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. There's a big difference once you're like "Oh, I have this script that's a few hundred lines" and then you're like "Oh, no, I'm already libraries that get imported and do all this other stuff and compile together." |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah. I mean, it's especially different too when you're writing stuff that you are the only consumer, versus you're writing stuff that hundreds and thousands of people are using and relying on. There was a moment - this was after I joined the company, and we used to do a yearly conference, hilario... |
**Autumn Nash:** It's a lot of pressure. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** Now, joining the company... Because pretty much every config management product started as like "I could do this thing, and we're going to open source it, and it's just going to be fun." And then people are like "I need to pay for support, because that my production is running on this." And so all ... |
**Gareth Greenaway:** I mean, before I joined, that really wasn't happening as much as it has recently. It's funny when you were describing kind of the progression of the various tools... I was thinking of the history a little different. The very first one I remember - I kind of mentioned it early on, it was CFEngine. ... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[20:05\] Well, it's the same way with Ansible. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Exactly, yes. |
**Justin Garrison:** Luke worked at Puppet, and I think Michael started Ansible. He was working at Puppet, and Luke was like "Oh, this is an SSH in a for loop." And he's like "Yes, it is. I'll show it to you." And Ansible was born. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Yeah. And the same thing happened with Salt as well. Tom Hatch, the person that created Salt originally, he was originally contributing to Puppet as well. And it was like "Oh, this isn't doing what I want it to do. I want a remote execution system", so he went off and wrote one. |
Back to your original question about the companies, the reason I joined was like "Hey, I have this opportunity to work on open source software, and contribute to a project that I use and love." And I wasn't even thinking of "Okay, at some point this company might get acquired by another company, that would basically ki... |
And even when originally no one bought Puppet, if I remember right, Puppet went public, so everyone celebrated, because it's like "Oh, the company went public. We made millions." And then later, someone bought it and was just kind of like "Okay, we're gonna do some nefarious things with this project, that are not so op... |
**Autumn Nash:** Usually, acquisitions pay off for small companies... But now we're kind of in this weird -- how do you think this affects open source going forward though, and how we get people to contribute and join these companies? Because about 70% of infrastructure is open source, and companies and teams need thes... |
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