About our guest:

Riaan has worked for Multi-National companies in Portugal, Germany, China, United States, South Africa and Australia.

• Certified Hashicorp Terraform Instructor
• HashiCorp Ambassador 2021, 2022, 2023
• Creator of Hashiqube - The best DevOps Lab running all the Hashicorp products
• HashiCorp Vault and Terraform Certified
• Certified Hashicorp Vault Implementation Partner
• 10+ years relevant DevOps experience with a strong focus on Automation and Infrastructure / Configuration in Code.

Find our guest on:

• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• GitHub
• Blog

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• Versent
• Telstra
• Ubuntu Linux
• Installing Ubuntu on Macbook Pro
• Mark Shuttleworth
• VSCode Dev Containers
• HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)
• AWS Cloudformation
• Puppet
• Magento%20and%20Symfony.)
• systemd
• HashiQube
• 12 Rule for Life, by Jordan Peterson
• Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within, by David Goggins
• NSW Maritime and Road Services
• HashiCorp Ambassador
• Wipro
• HashiTalks 2024
• Vagrant
• Terraform
• Vault
• RedHat Ansible Tower
• Apache Airflow with DBT
• Servian
• Vault Associate
• Terraform AWS EKS Blueprints
• HashiCorp Core Contributor
• Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder)
• Armon Dadgar (HashiCorp co-founder)
• HashiCorp BUSL
• HashiTalks Deploy 2023
• Terragrunt
• OpenTofu
• Azure Bicep
• Hira
• (HashiCorp) Boundary
• (HashiCorp) Waypoint
• (Windows) NT 4
• Gentoo Linux
• Vagrant Docker Provider
• Ansible AWX

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today is Riaan Nolan.

RIAAN: Good morning, Adriana. How are you? It's good to see you. Happy Australia day. It's Australia day in Australia, so happy Australia day. At the moment, I'm working for a consultancy in Australia called Versent, and they've recently been bought by Australia's biggest telco, Telstra. So I'm a consultant for them. I do DevOps and HashiCorp stuff.

ADRIANA: Amazing. So you said you're calling from Australia? Where in Australia are you calling from?

RIAAN: I'm on the east coast in Brisbane. Brisbane, Australia, in Queensland. The state is called Queensland.

ADRIANA: Awesome. And significantly hotter than the crappy rainy weather of Toronto today. We are at a balmy 3C. And you are at what temperature right now?

RIAAN: Oh, my goodness. I'll tell you right now, weather. It's 25 degrees C right now...26 degrees C. It's 7:00 in the morning and it is going to go up to 30 degrees C today.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow. Hey, my kind of weather, it's lovely.

RIAAN: I tell you, it is so beautiful. We've got so many birds here, and thankfully I've got a pool here where I rent this property.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's nice.

RIAAN: If it gets too hot, I just jump in the pool.

ADRIANA: That is very nice. Super jelly. Super jelly. That's cool. Well, are you ready for our lightning round questions?

RIAAN: Yeah, sure. Let's see what you got.

ADRIANA: All right. Yes. This is a get to know you better icebreaker sort of thing. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

RIAAN: I'm right handed.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

RIAAN: I am on Android. I prefer Android.

ADRIANA: All right. And do you prefer Mac, Linux or windows?

RIAAN: Strangely, I'm the type of guy that used to run Linux on a Mac on my MacBook air. Yeah, Ubuntu.

ADRIANA: Nice.

RIAAN: Made by Mark Shuttleworth, who's from South Africa. But it just became a little bit difficult with all the changes. Work takes over. And so I've recently, well, not recently, about five years ago, switched to MacOS on a Mac.

ADRIANA: Oh, nice. So you were running like Ubuntu natively on a Mac. It wasn't a VM, it was like...actually...

RIAAN: I can't sometimes with the new stuff that doesn't work. But my old little MacBook Air that I got from Germany runs Ubuntu dual boot.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, how cool is that. That's amazing.

RIAAN: Because KDE is just such a great desktop. And it's got so many customizations and Windows gestures that it just makes your day to day and your working incredibly easy.

ADRIANA: Very cool. And now you're like, no, now it's MacOS on the Mac.

RIAAN: Now I've become not lazy, but when something breaks on my Mac because I work as a consultant, so I get a company PC and then sometimes I'm on Windows, sometimes I'm on Linux, sometimes on a cloud thing. So now I'm just the default OS with dev containers. So I use VSCode's dev containers, which means I just need VSCode and Docker and the rest I do inside of the container.

ADRIANA: Nice.

RIAAN: I really keep it so simple and so easy nowadays.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Hey, that is the way to do it. To keep it simple. We overcomplicate our lives. So, awesome.

RIAAN: Yes.

ADRIANA: Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

RIAAN: Listen man, I must come from systems administration. So I like Python and I like Bash and scripting. And then of course HCL is my favorite. And I used to start off with PHP back in the day on PHP, but I've since moved away from it. I used to do a little bit of PHP in Magento, but I'm just really in love with the infrastructure stuff and the DevOps. So I don't even know if you can call YAML and Cloudformation and HCL programming languages. You probably can't. So I'm a script kitty. Let's call me a script kitty, you know.

ADRIANA: All right, I love it. Okay, next question. Related. Do you prefer dev or ops?

RIAAN: I love both. And I really like the synergy. I used to do Puppet stuff, and when I discovered Puppet, I was like, wow, this is incredible. And then along came Cloudformation and I could just code something in Cloudformation and in the user data, pass it o