Mark Tinderholt joins us to talk through practical cloud decision-making, why he prefers Terraform in multi-cloud setups, and the realities of working with Azure policies, Bicep, ARM templates, and more.

Mark is an experienced technologist whose journey began in application development, spanning web and client-server applications to sophisticated distributed systems and microservices. Along this path, he developed deep expertise in automation and DevOps, leading diverse project teams and guiding organizations through strategic, operational, and pre-sales leadership roles. Currently, Mark holds a hands-on engineering position at Microsoft, contributing directly to the Microsoft Azure platform.

Beyond his professional work, Mark shares his passion for cloud computing through his YouTube channel, "The Azure Terraformer." He is also the author of "Mastering Terraform," a practical, multi-cloud guide to Cloud Architecture and Infrastructure-as-Code covering AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and has created the Udemy course "Terraform 101.”

Nana Janashia, the force behind TechWorld with Nana, has helped millions learn DevOps. In this episode, we explore how DevOps has evolved from scripting and configuration management to platform engineering, the growing role of AI in cloud infrastructure, and the challenges engineers face in keeping up with rapidly changing technologies.

Nana Janashia is a self-taught DevOps Engineer, instructor, and tech entrepreneur. As the Co-Founder of TechWorld with Nana, she has taught in-demand DevOps skills to millions worldwide through her YouTube channel and online courses. In just four years, her channel has grown to over 1,2 million subscribers, establishing her as a trusted source for high-quality DevOps education. Nana also collaborates with leading tech companies and startups globally, sharing her expertise in Cloud and DevOps technologies.

Thomas Hatch has spent years building and scaling infrastructure, from the early days of SaltStack to watching Kubernetes and microservices reshape the industry. In this episode, he shares how automation has changed operations at scale and why some companies are rethinking their cloud strategy.

About the Guest

Thomas is currently the CEO of a stealth startup developing the next generation infrastructure management platform. He is the creator of the Salt open source software project and founded the company SaltStack which he sold to VMware in 2020. He has spent his career writing software to orchestrate and automate the work of securing and maintaining enterprise IT infrastructure from core data center systems to the very edge of the network and IoT.

Thomas built fully automated, secure IT environments for the U.S. intelligence community in addition to decades of experience implementing global infrastructures for the largest businesses in the world. He has shared his knowledge of IT security and management automation with tens of thousands of practitioners at more than 100 industry events. Thomas and SaltStack have been recognized with numerous awards ranging from open source community growth to innovation in automation and cybersecurity.

For his work on Salt, in 2012 Tom received the Black Duck “Rookie of the Year” award and was named to the GitHub Octoverse list in both 2012 and 2013 for leading a project with the highest number of unique contributors, rubbing shoulders with projects from Android, Mozilla, and OpenStack. More recently, SaltStack SecOps was chosen by CSO Magazine as one of the hottest new products at RSA Conference 2019.