Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2020

Cloud infrastructure has made it more difficult to understand what's happening across multiple systems, how our systems interact, and even what we're running at this particular moment. More distributed systems have sprung up to help you manage that.

But sometimes setting up those tools is as complicated as the infrastructure you're running. Or they're not flexible in just the way you want. We still spend our days on the command-line, using a suite of tools that do similar things against similar types of infrastructure. But these tools are often inconsistent or inscrutable.

This talk reimagines how we build command-line tools for cloud infrastructure to make them more composable and transferable between systems. I will describe how the Wide-Area Shell (Wash) applies these ideas in designing a new shell experience. I will also share examples of how tools built around this idea can be used in novel ways to help understand your cloud infrastructure.

I've given a similar talk, but this will be longer and highlight more ways the shell design enhances usability.