Kief Morris, Principal Cloud Technologist, Thoughtworks

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The evolution of infrastructure tooling is reaching the point where we can move beyond automatically provisioning infrastructure from static definitions, to dynamically generating infrastructure to fulfill the requirements of the applications that run on it. This talk describes the evolution of infrastructure as code from scripting to current mainstream tooling like Terraform and CloudFormation, which use declarative languages that specify infrastructure at a granular level. We’ll then step up to application driven infrastructure as a strategy for planning and implementing cloud infrastructure as a part of system modernization. Rather than designing infrastructure in isolation, map the infrastructure requirements for applications and design infrastructure accordingly. Modern infrastructure technology can implement dynamic infrastructure provisioning systems that automatically generate infrastructure from application requirement descriptors. This aligns with Cloud Native software, but can help with organizations that aren’t able to rewrite their entire codebase to make it containerized, clusterized, service-meshed, and fully hipsterized.

Kief enjoys helping organisations adopt cloud age technologies and practices. This usually involves buzzwords like cloud, digital platforms, infrastructure automation, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery.

Originally from Tennessee, Kief has been been building teams to deliver software as a service in London since the dotcom days. He is the author of Infrastructure as Code, published by O’Reilly.