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INSIGHTS
3 min read
Published on 04/12/2021
Last updated on 06/18/2024
Towards More Inclusive Infrastructure
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This post will be short, because it really is that simple.
My team builds platform services that underlie the multiple projects within the Emerging Technology and Incubation team at Cisco. Our mission is to build 'paved roads' for developers; we create common reusable patterns and services that any engineer or venture needs to deliver an application.
Recently, one of my peers pinged me via WebEx Teams and pointed out that someone on my team had just announced the expansion of our CI build environment with the addition of "slaves 10-15". She inquired about the use of the term “slave” and I immediately knew she was pointing to a form of microaggression in code and something not in line with our values.
She is right. It's not only inappropriate to perpetuate the use of terms that are harmful to our diverse employees, it's also specifically against Cisco Policy to do so:
Since these hosts had been created via "infrastructure as code", it was a simple matter to send a pull request to the repo containing that code with more inclusive - and indeed more descriptive - names, and re-deploy.
But, since we are an SRE team, we are conditioned to ask "how could we prevent this from happening again?" Policy is fine as far as it goes, but we like to fix things in code. We enforce computer language standards and security policies via "linters" in our pipelines, so why not insensitive language?
Again, it really is this simple. To make our platform more inclusive:
rules + audit = change + progress
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