Last week I had the opportunity to attend Hashiconf ‘17 in Austin, Texas. I loved the atmosphere at the event and the city. I met some interesting people and learned how they use Hashicorp products to solve their problems. Here is a brief summary of my favorite talks and experiences.

Front row #Hashiconf keynote pic.twitter.com/QDSWUTRBns

— Crismar Mejia (@CrismarMOz) September 19, 2017

How to Build Reusable, Composable, Battle-tested Terraform Modules by Yevgeniy Brikman

The Terraform series of post I’ve talked about in my last post were written by Yevgeniy. So, of course, I attended his talk to learn more about Terraform. Thankfully for me, the talk centered around modules which I’ve not had the chance to study in depth.

Your Secret’s Safe with Me – Securing Container Secrets with Vault by Liz Rice

I watched one of Liz’s previous talks on containers and learned a lot. This talk was also very instructive and served as an introduction to secrets for me. Most important lesson I learned was not to put secrets in environment variables and why. Also learned how cool Hashicorp’s Vault is and the status of secrets managements in K8s, Nomad, and Docker Compose.

Health-Checking as a Service with Serf by Lorenzo Saino

Lorenzo had a tall order, close day 1;  he delivered big time. His talk was about how fastly designed their health-checking system under constraints using Hashicorp’s Serf. My favorite part was when he explained how they use digital signal processing and control theory in the system. Turns out each node health check data is, in fact, a discrete signal! This talk really hit home and brought me back to my college days as a computer engineer.

#Hashinetes by Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey delivered a great keynote on Day 2. He talked about Kubernetes + Hashicorp(Nomad, Consul, Vault) = Hashinetes. At some point, he even used voice commands to control the cluster.  Two schedulers! Extra dope.

Practical Distributed Consensus using HashiCorp/raft by James Nugent

I’ve been interested in studying Raft for a while. This talk was a great intro and gave me a new idea on how to approach the learning experience. Rather than implementing the algorithm myself, I could use the already existing Hashicorp library to learn in a practical approach.

Digital Ocean Brunch

On Thursday morning I attended a brunch sponsored by DigitalOcean to conference attendees and local users of their product. I enjoyed this event as it allowed me to unwind and connect with the local developer scene and people from the company.

Austin, Texas

It was my first time in Austin so after the conference, I stayed two more nights to explore. I visited the Blanton Museum of Art and was impressed by the variety of the permanent collection. They have art from North America, Latin America, and Europe, from various periods. I learned some Texas history on a tour of the capitol. At sunset, I was able to see the see the bats under the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge, over a million bats!

Conclusion

I had a great conference experience and a great mini-vacation in Austin. I was able to learn new things and meet interesting people. I feel refreshed and inspired to keep diving deeper and learning new things. So stay put and expect more posts!