Cloud Unfiltered: The Automation Episode, feat. Alex Peay and Mike Place

What’s the automation situation at your company? Do you feel like you guys have a handle on it? Like you’re automating the right things and using the right tools? Like you know what you want to automate next?

I’m guessing that you probably do, but even so, I encourage you to tune in to this week’s episode of Cloud Unfiltered to hear what Alex Peay and Mike Place of SaltStack have to say about automation. Sure, they spend some time talking about what Salt is and does, and why it’s different from other products on the market, but they also get into some really cool bits of automation history and philosophy that I think you’ll enjoy regardless of your current position on the automation journey. Some of those cool bits include:

The difference between the third wave of automation software and those that preceded it

Whether or not the declarative approach vs. imperative approach to config management is a false dichotomy

The problem of “knowability”

Why we shouldn’t automate things we don’t completely understand

The next big opportunity for automation

Whether or not containerization is oppositional to config management

See? Deep stuff, right? And I’ll tell you, these guys had very interesting perspectives on all of it.

To hear the details straight from them, check out the full episode on: YouTube,  iTunes, or SoundCloud.

And if you’d like to check out past episodes of this podcast (we’ve got more than 40 of them!), just pop on over to the archive at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cloud/podcasts.html. Really. Do it. There’s so much valuable information in there.