Jul 1, 2026 · 48 min · 12 segments
Malcolm Matalka joins William and Eyvonne to challenge the narrative that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is dead. Malcolm argues that the real value of IaC was never the syntax, but state and…
Malcolm MatalkaGuestWilliam CollinsHost
Eyvonne SharpHostSo, reading the next wave of hot takes out there might have you believe that this is actually true.
The value was never this DSL thing that people see that we call HCL or Terraform Configuration Language.
And for like over a very long time, over a decade, we've been storing that state in a flat JSON file protected by a single lock.
And then when it tips over at like broader scale, we feign surprise and pain like all the soccer players you see when you watch the World Cup, you know, when someone makes like hardly any contact, minimal contact, and they go diving with like these theatrics, you know, similar to what you might see in Hollywood.
What if state was never a file problem at all? But more of a distributed systems problem, you know, kind of dressed up in some JSON costume.
What if? To talk about this and to unpack a lot of things around this, we are welcoming back to the podcast, Malcolm Matalka.
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So, reading the next wave of hot takes out there might have you believe that this is actually true.
The value was never this DSL thing that people see that we call HCL or Terraform Configuration Language.
And for like over a very long time, over a decade, we've been storing that state in a flat JSON file protected by a single lock.
And then when it tips over at like broader scale, we feign surprise and pain like all the soccer players you see when you watch the World Cup, you know, when someone makes like hardly any contact, minimal contact, and they go diving with like these theatrics, you know, similar to what you might see in Hollywood.
What if state was never a file problem at all? But more of a distributed systems problem, you know, kind of dressed up in some JSON costume.
What if? To talk about this and to unpack a lot of things around this, we are welcoming back to the podcast, Malcolm Matalka.
