Sure. Metaparticle is actually an independent open source project at Metaparticle.io. It’s really trying to, I would say, bring distributed systems to people who might not otherwise be distributed systems developers. Another way that I’ve said it before is like “Visual Basic for the cloud.” How do you have an experience where you can think about the concepts of cloud-native computing, but not necessarily the details of “Hey, there’s this YAML file here, and there’s this Kubernetes object…”

[ ] Maybe I just describe my system as having four replicas, and I want you to take care of ensuring that – you know, in code I’ll say I want four replicas, and you take care of figuring out how to deploy it, how to put a load balancer in front of it, and stuff like that.

I think that there’s always been this inevitable trend in configuration management - and actually, we talked about this a lot with the Helm team - around like… Configuration management gets more and more programmatic, and eventually it turns into like a bad programming language, and I think that at some level we should just admit that (as some people said) configuration is code, and I think we should admit that like “Well, if configuration is code, maybe you should just write it in a real programming language.” There’s all of this tooling around unit testing that we’ve built, all of these practices around writing software code, that don’t extend into the way we configure and deploy our applications at all. I don’t think that anybody – someone pinged me and said “I was just starting to think about what it meant to unit-test a Kubernetes config”, right?

It’s kind of crazy that we have 20 years of people thinking about unit-testing code, and yet we’re having to reinvent it for configs… Like, why? We should just go to a place where there’s frameworks, there’s UI, there’s all of the kind of stuff that we expect - code conventions, all of this stuff - and then we can express that in code.

I think if you do that, not only do you end up with a better system with one source of truth, but you actually also build a more accessible system. You can have people who might otherwise just be front-end JavaScript programmers, who are starting to think about deploying distributed systems. I think it’s the only way that we scale the industry to the number of systems that need to be built.

So I think it’s maybe like Kubernetes at the beginning, it’s an experiment, it’s an idea; I wanna start a conversation, start a community. I don’t know that it will be the one, but I think something like it will be the way that we build systems in the future.