Rebooting…

We’re excited to announce the open source release of cztack (we pronounce it “stack”), a major tool in CZI’s infrastructure. cztack is a framework of Terraform modules that enables teams to build better, more robust cloud infrastructure with less pain. Along with fogg for managing Terraform infrastructure-as-code repositories, cztack provides a set of common building blocks that CZI engineers use to build infrastructure. To explain why this project exists, we’ll tell you a bit about how CZI works.

I came across Terraform soon after it was released in 2014 and it quite clearly fit a need in the world of cloud infrastructure engineering. As I worked with Terraform over the years, I’ve learned a lot, some by reading the experiences of others, but mostly by making mistakes. Terraform is a powerful tool, which makes it extremely useful, but also somewhat dangerous. You can use it to stand up seriously complex infrastructure, but if you are not careful you can also accidentally destroy all of that at 4:30pm on a Friday (learned that one the hard way).

Managers can’t help asking for status reports. It’s just one of the things we have to do when we’re asked a question we can’t answer with our brains or the tools at hand. We usually don’t think of them as status reports, we just ask a question like “Hey, Pat, when is Project X going to ship?” And that’s when the trouble begins. It turns out, asking for an unexpected status update for a project immediately increases the perceived priority of that project.

In high school, I took a class called “Computer Troubleshooting.” This may sound like a weird class for a 16-year-old to take or a high school to offer, but in practice it was savvy: the school netted a built-in, small workforce for IT support and repairs. Nothing like a little free labor to make things go. Going in, I didn’t think I’d learn anything and when I finished I felt the same way.