What's the best stack available today?
Viktor Farcic: You're a very technically oriented, hands-on person. All of your books, at least those that I've read, are highly technical, which gets me wondering whether you have a favorite stack. I saw that you wrote a lot about Puppet and Terraform. Is one replacing another? Moreover, where do you see the industry moving to now?
James Turnbull: I'm probably less technical than I used to be. I've moved between a lot of different roles; these days, I'm primarily a people leader. I'm a CTO, and I've been a VP of engineering for a number of years, so I dabble in this space in my spare time, but I wouldn't consider myself a practicing SRE or a practicing Systems Engineer anymore.
In terms of things like Puppet and Terraform, I think they do different things. Terraform is clearly an infrastructure build tool, and if you want to build a virtual private cloud (VPC) and a bunch of Amazon EC2 instances...