Episode 108: Sarah Gran and Josh Aas: Sustainable Digital Infrastructure with Memory Safe Code

Guest Sarah Gran | Josh Aas Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are super excited to have two guests today, Sarah Gran and Josh Aas, who both work for ISRG, the Internet Security Research Group which consists of three projects: Let’s Encrypt, Divvi Up, and Prossimo. Sarah is a VP of Communication and fundraising for ISRG, and Josh is the Executive Director at ISRG. They are both working on Prossimo to bring memory safe code to critical digital infrastructure, which they will explain more in depth today. We also learn about some other projects they are investing in this year, and Sarah and Josh share some positive things they’re really excited about happening in 2022 with Prossimo. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more! [00:02:03] We find out what ISRG is and how they choose which projects to focus on. [00:04:53] Josh explains the difference between Prossimo and Rust. [00:07:07] Josh and Sarah explain why memory allocation is so important. [00:10:33] Justin wonders if Log4j is on their radar in terms of funding, if that’s something ISRG can help them with, and how that has brought more attention to memory safe languages. [00:13:03] We hear about the relationship ISRG has with the Linux Foundation. [00:15:21] Sarah shares what they’ve done so far to make the Prossimo project sustainable. [00:18:21] We find out what the budget is for running ISRG, and how they make that budget for what they are trying to accomplish. [00:22:40] Josh tells us about using Linkerd if you’re looking for memory safety in that space. [00:24:40] Besides working on major projects that have had massive impacts like he had with Let’s Encrypt, Josh shares things that have been difficult for him this year. [00:27:02] Josh explains how Cloudflare deals with DDoS attacks, and if there’s been any open line of communication with NginX. [00:29:55] Josh and Sarah detail what they’re doing to get the wor