Matt Gowie

The one that always comes to mind happened while I was camping at Smith Rock, Oregon. I was primary on-call—probably shouldn’t have been camping—but as the lead of a small team, I was almost always on-call.

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Our HBase primary node went down, causing a cascade of failures in our data warehouse. Of course, this happened at 2 a.m. in freezing temperatures. I spent 20 hours working from a bench near the campsite bathroom, plugged into a pole for power and using a phone hotspot. When it got too cold, I moved to my car just to warm up enough to type. We had customers calling throughout the incident, and it was a debacle. While it was one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had, I learned a lot from it.

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Looking back, it’s the kind of story you can laugh about—over a beer—with teammates who were in the trenches with you.

Infrastructure as Code allows you to manage infrastructure by writing code instead of manually configuring resources in the cloud or on prem. This means you can automate provisioning, reduce human error, and create repeatable systems.

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From a reliability perspective, IaC is really important. If your infrastructure is defined in code, you don’t have to rely on one person’s knowledge or manually retrace configuration steps in an emergency. Instead, you can recreate your entire environment with a simple command.

Ideally, way earlier than they think. Even at a small scale, using IaC creates documentation and reduces the "bus factor."

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That said, if you’re a startup in the proof-of-concept phase, you’re probably fine using platforms like Heroku. But once you step into cloud ecosystems like AWS, GCP, or Azure, IaC becomes essential because you're creating the documentation and repeatability you need for your product long term.

This question comes up a lot. OpenTofu has become increasingly relevant as the project has grown significantly. They have a solid team, good funding, and are committed to maintaining a consistent release cadence while building new features. They are proving their capabilities and keeping up well with Terraform.

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Ultimately, it’s about optionality. If you value tools that are truly open-source and don’t lock you into proprietary ecosystems, OpenTofu is worth considering. For new projects, starting with OpenTofu might even save you headaches down the line.

I really love alpine climbing. I’ve had incredible climbs in places like Rocky Mountain National Park, the Pacific Northwest, and Wyoming.

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As for bucket list climbs, there's a route in Patagonia that I would really love to go and do. It would require a lot of work, so maybe one day. I’ve never climbed in South America, so that’s definitely on my radar.

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👉 Where to Find Matt

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You can learn more about Masterpoint at masterpoint.io, where you’ll find insights into IaC. If you’re dealing with IaC challenges, Matt’s team is happy to chat, offer advice, or assist with migrations and implementations.