Joe Freeman: Tech, Teams, Trade-offs

Modern software systems can be complicated with many moving parts.  Each of those parts can be updated, upgraded, or changed at any time.  We need the ability to understand which versions of each component or configuration are running in each environment at any time.   Smart designs, automation, and the appropriate metadata can set us up to understand the specific configurations and versions in each layer in every environment. We will attack this problem in the static / design phases and the dynamic run time phases. What versions do we have available? What versions are we running?

Asset Tagging is one of the best ways for providing run-time compliance and versioning information in cloud-based resources.  All of the major cloud providers provide the ability to annotate cloud resources with custom tags.  We reliably version/tag cloud resources if we follow the  Infrastructure as Code philosophy.  All our infrastructure is created using scripts that call cloud APIs, or resource templates that can be loaded by cloud APIs. Infrastructure versioning has both design time and run time components. The design-time pieces come into play at build and packaging time and when deploying.  The run time component is what lets us interrogate the component or the cloud metadata around that component.  Video Design-time infrastructure versions with IaC IaC uses code or configuration files to drive provisioning. Those files can be checked into source code management systems where they can be branched and versioned like any other code. We can always qu...