Recent content on William Collins
On July 28th, the MCP maintainers shipped the 2026-07-28 revision . No more initialize . No more initialized . No more Mcp-Session-Id . David Soria Parra called it “MCP’s most important release since remote MCP first launched over a year ago,” and I couldn’t agree more. In the weeks leading up to the release, I had the opportunity to have Angie Jones on the podcast to talk…
The discourse on platform engineering Twitter and Reddit has been pretty consistent for months now: Terraform is dead, HCL is dead, the entire Infrastructure as Code stack is about to get vaporized by autonomous agents that translate intent directly into cloud provider API calls. The 24-month clock is ticking. Pack up your .tfstate and go home. Another DEAD DEAD DEAD narrative emerges.
Open up the claude_desktop_config.json or mcp.json of the average AI tinkerer right now and tell me you don’t flinch. API keys sitting in plaintext. GitHub PATs with repo scope pasted next to a GitLab token that somebody will forget about in six months. A Slack bot token that absolutely should not be in a file backed up to iCloud. We collectively spent a decade teaching engineers not to do…
Here’s a question I got asked recently: If a skill can already call a REST API using Bash, why bother with MCP? The surface-level answer is “MCP is cleaner.” That’s not wrong, but it undersells what’s actually different - and I think it’s a genuinely useful distinction to understand if you’re serious about building reliable agent workflows. Also,…
Let me paint you a picture. It’s 2025. You’ve discovered that you can describe a feature in plain English and an LLM will just… build it. The dopamine hit rivals or even eclipses social media. You feel as if you’re shipping things in an afternoon that used to take a week. You’re not reading diffs. You’re not understanding the internals. You’re just vibing…
If you’ve spent any time building with MCP servers, you know the drill. You start with one server, maybe two. Then suddenly you’re juggling a dozen configurations across three different LLM clients, and your claude_desktop_config.json looks like it was written during a caffeine-fueled fever dream. That’s roughly where I was when I started building gridctl .
As AI dominates tech headlines and corporate strategies in 2024, an important distinction is being blurred - the difference between developing AI versus consuming AI services. This mischaracterization risks confusing the market and overselling capabilities, but that isn’t anything new right? Take zero-trust, cloud computing, or even take a look back at the early-2000s with the web…
The foundation of high-performance computing that powers artificial intelligence lies not just in powerful GPUs, but in the intricate web of connections between them. As models grow exponentially in size and complexity, the networking infrastructure that facilitates their training has become a critical bottleneck. This has sparked a fascinating race to develop networking solutions tailored for…
In my previous blog on Dilution of Ownership , I explored how startup funding rounds impact equity. Now, let’s dive into a hot-button, highly-debated, and dramatically misunderstood matter of policy - taxing unrealized capital gains (or the wealth tax) . Could this policy drastically alter the startup landscape? Would there be a tangible impact on founders, investors, and the innovation…
There is a lot of confusion surrounding the dilution of ownership , especially in the tech startup space. What does this mean in layman’s terms ? Who does it impact? And most importantly, why you should care if you plan to work for a startup. This is a topic I have discussed with many new (and even some seasoned) engineers over the past few years. I recently had this very discussion with a…
Sometimes, especially if you aren’t a developer by trade, you can get stuck on something small that will find you banging your forehead on your desk (figuratively, of course) . Most of the time, it is easy enough to find an answer online or even from ChatGPT . Other times, you may not be so lucky. The other day, I fell victim to a TWE or time wasting event that I thought was worth writing…
For many moons, importing existing infrastructure (that is to say, infrastructure running outside of Terraform state) , has not been a trivial task. Historically, Terraform did not generate any configuration. You would have to write the infrastructure-as-code in a manner that reflects how it was deployed. Then, to make matters not easier, you would fetch the ‘ol shovel and dig out the unique…
What fits somewhere in between re:Invent and Community Day events? That would be the AWS Summits ! This year, I got to experience a double dose of fun by representing Alkira at our booth and presenting at the AWS Community Developer Lounge . I may be biased, but I believe the Alkira team is the best in the world.
I recently wrote a blog about generating Terraform with ChatGPT. In that experiment, I was using GPT-3.5 . It didn’t take much to trip up the galactic AI in many of the experiments I did with Terraform and beyond. According to OpenAI GPT-4 soars past its predecessor in its advanced reasoning capabilities. Let’s use this model to build code in Python and Go . How will the super titan…
Usually, when it comes to technology , my grandmother doesn’t know much because she doesn’t care. What is the cloud? How to install a new browser on her laptop? What is 2FA? I might be speaking French to her as I discuss these things. Yet, she knows what ChatGPT is. This shows the vast amount of publicity, hype, and polarization that has ensued since November 2022 . I tend to avoid AI…
In Part 1 , we talked about the origins of the Site-to-Site VPN Service in AWS. As consumers began to scale in the early days, they faced tunnel sprawl, performance constraints, and the need for a simplified design. AWS responded with Transit Gateway . How did Transit Gateway simplify architecture leading to smoother operations, better network performance, and a scalable blueprint for the future…
At the end of each year, I take some time for self-reflection . Looking back through 2022 gave me a colossal reminder of how vital teams, communities, and leaders are. Take hockey for instance. You have certain athletes, often referred to as generational players that carry unmatched individual talent and get selected first overall in the NHL Draft.
As far as tech conferences are concerned, it’s hard to find one as exciting as AWS re:Invent . Whether it’s anticipation for new product announcements or connecting in person with the community, there is something electrifying about being at ground zero . And if you can make the trip, you will get a lot of great exercise too! I hit close to 100K steps or approx. 43 miles according to…
The necessity for protocols to keep communication secure has been around since the dawn of the internet. The first ever VPN was jointly developed by a vendor consortium (which included Microsoft) in 1996 , and came in the form of Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol . Although many are skeptical about the value of VPNs in 2022 and beyond, customer consumption of cloud provider VPN services have paved…
Blowing out cloud spend is an easy thing to do. This McKinsey Report notes that 80% of enterprises consider managing cloud spend a challenge . I recently presented at the Cloud Security Alliance in Kansas City and had the opportunity to network with some tremendous DevOps and Security professionals. One excellent side conversation somehow transitioned to a deep discussion on better ways to…
Optional attributes for object type constraints is almost here! I’ve been waiting for this feature to come along for a while. I have tested it extensively in -alpha , and I can confidently confirm that it is a game changer . This feature is long in the making, being discussed as far back as this thread in 2018 . Today, it is now in beta , so the official release could be any day now.…
There is a reason why enterprises prefer the best-of-breed approach to connect and secure their network and intellectual property. Alkira announced its integration with Fortinet at AWS re:Inforce in July, and this is a perfect example of the best in action. As anyone that reads my blog knows, I have an automation first approach to everything. Alkira’s Terraform Provider is Fortinet ready ,…
I had the opportunity to present at the 4th annual AWS Community Day for the Midwest in June. This event was planned, organized, and delivered by AWS user group leaders and was an absolute blast. I got to catch up with a few remarkable individuals I haven’t talked to since pre-pandemic , and I got to meet many new people and listen to their stories of transformation in their respective…
Zero Trust is all the rage lately, and traditional VPNs are getting a lot of scrutiny since they essentially add and remove encryption at the firewall. This means bad actors can skip off into the sunset (laterally) and gain access to those legacy systems with less effort. Another challenge with using a traditional VPN is scaling with the dramatic shift to hybrid work . ZeroTier is an interesting…
Anyone that has worked in tech knows that building greenfield is much easier than dragging along brownfield environments through a roller-coaster they aren’t ready for. Tools like Terraform make infrastructure-as-code a breeze, but what about all that infrastructure you already have provisioned? April Edwards, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, recently posted a blog about Azure Terrafy , a new…
The year is 2022 , and Kubernetes is wreaking havoc on software delivery as we know it. Applications are going through modernization programs so they can be converted into microservices , but they are coming out the other end as distributed monoliths . Next thing you know, services exist across several clouds and even in your data centers. And, of course, the large majority of enterprises…
The public cloud continued to dominate spending in 2021. Gartner forecasts worldwide end-user spending for public cloud to reach $397.4 billion by 2022. With increased velocity; automation continues to be a critical business imperative for the enterprise. Getting automation right means getting all the appropriate teams pulled into the process early on (shift left) . Lightlytics is a new SaaS…
New to cryptocurrency ? Check this out for a quick primer. One of the giant debates, often a significant source of criticism, is Bitcoin’s energy efficiency (or lack thereof) . This criticism may also be expanded to any other currency, or blockchain backed technology that leverages proof-of-work as a consensus mechanism. Innovation is inherent in technology. New ideas, methods, and…
In Part 1 , we laid out our foundation. In Part 2 and Part 3 we connected various networks (both cloud and on-premises) and provisioned NGFWs that scale to real-time capacity. By default, networks connected to our corporate segment have full-mesh connectivity to each other. Let’s build some policies in code that can work with the groups we created to produce logical micro-segmentation that…
Check out Part 1 and Part 2 where we put together a scalable foundation and connect cloud networks from AWS, Azure, and GCP. For Part 3 , we will bring on-premises back into the spotlight and connect some sites over Cisco SD-WAN and IPSEC.
In Part 1 , we started with a scalable foundation that can adapt over time as the business grows and adjusts to changing markets. With Alkira’s Network Cloud , we take a cloud native approach in enabling our customer’s transformation. No appliances need to be provisioned in remote VPCs or VNets, and no agents need to be installed on workloads. Getting started is as easy as kicking off…
HashiCorp’s Terraform needs no introduction. It is all but the de facto vehicle for delivering cloud infrastructure, and for a good reason. What Terraform did for Multi-Cloud Infrastructure as Code , is precisely what Alkira does for the network. What happens when you use these two platforms together to deliver networking in and across clouds? If providing network services in code faster…
Effectively automating infrastructure is no longer a luxury but a staple in the enterprise move through future transformation. I wrote a blog recently about using Terraform with Packer together , and wanted to take this thought further with breaking down Terraform Modules and getting well connected with Terraform Cloud . I recently put together a simple module for building base infrastructure in…