Day Two Cloud 108: Putting The Dev In DevOps

Today’s Day Two Cloud podcast dives into Cloud Development Kits (CDKs), including how CDKs differ from tools such as Terraform, and the selling points for CDKs for infrastructure and development professionals. Our guest is Michael Levan, Researcher and Consultant at GigaOM. We discuss: * Advantages and drawbacks of CDKs * If you’re well-versed in Terraform or another tool, is it a difficult leap to a CDK? * The relationship between CDKs and formal programming languages * CDKs and code testing * CDKs and code repositories * How CDKs integrate with CI/CD pipelines * More Sponsor: Zesty Zesty provides an autonomous cloud experience by leveraging advanced AI technology to manage the cloud for you. Our AI reacts in real-time to capacity changes and enables companies to maximize cloud efficiency, reduce AWS bill by more than 50%, completely hands-free. It’s cloud on auto-pilot. Find out how to spend less and do more at zesty.co. Show Links: @TheNJDevOpsGuy – Michael Levan on Twitter michaellevan.net – Michael’s blog Cloud Dev Engineering – YouTube Michael Levan on LinkedIn Transcript: [00:00:00.210] – Ned [AD] Zesty provides an autonomous cloud experience by leveraging advanced A.I. technology to manage the cloud for you. Their A.I. reacts in real time to capacity changes and enables companies to maximize cloud efficiency and reduce their AWS bill by more than 50 percent, completely hands free. Cloud on autopilot with Zesty companies can spend less and do more. Check them out at Zesty DOT CO. [/AD] [00:00:32.660] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today, we are talking about infrastructure as code and cloud development kits with Michael Levan and man, he really he really helped clarify some things for me around what a CDK even is. And maybe he gave me a little push in the ribs to actually start learning a programing language instead of just doing everything in Terraform. What about you, Ethan? [00:00:55.820] – Ethan He demystified CDKs for me enormously. Any time I’ve heard in the dev world something about a development kit it just it’s always sounded intimidating to me like, oh, it’s this big, complicated thing. And unless I’ve had years of training and practice as a developer, I’m not going to even understand what this whole development kit thing is. I’m not going to tell you how you’ll get it when you listen. But he really demystified it and made it very straightforward for me to get my head around what a development kit is. [00:01:19.910] – Ethan And even not as a full time developer, as an ops infrastructure person, I’m keen to get stuck into a CDK and maybe do something with it. [00:01:28.250] – Ned Yeah, it actually drove me to want to use it. So enjoy this episode with Michael Levan. [00:01:34.610] – Ned Well, Michael, welcome to Day Two Cloud. Before we get into the tech and the topic of this episode, first I got to talk about your Twitter handle, man,