Screaming In The Cloud

Years ago, if you wanted to launch an Internet company or Web application, you had to own necessary hardware. Now, the economics have changed drastically with the ease of Cloud computing. It’s still a new industry that people are trying to figure out, especially when it comes to cost and optimization. Today, we’re talking to Dann Berg, a Cloud ops analyst at Datadog. He helps others understand and lower the cost of Cloud operations. Dann is a detective who is dedicated to figuring out why a company’s Cloud bill is so high. Some of the highlights of the show include: Companies struggle with field of Cloud economics; can be overwhelming because there’s so much to learn about products and implementation Companies use the Cloud to grow quickly, which makes their Cloud costs grow quickly and more than expected Only access to full list of every resource being used is the Cloud bill; there’s no comprehensive inventory service available Companies need to offer visibility to Cloud bill; not everyone has access to und

If you use MongoDB, then you may be feeling ecstatic right now. Why? Amazon Web Services (AWS) just released DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility. Users who switch from MongoDB to DocumentDB can expect improved speed, scalability, and availability. Today, we’re talking to Shawn Bice, vice president of non-relational databases at AWS, and Rahul Pathak, general manager of big data, data lakes, and blockchain at AWS . They share AWS’ overall database strategy and how to choose the best tool for what you want to build. Some of the highlights of the show include: Database Categories: Relational, key value, document, graph, in memory, ledger, and time series AWS database strategy is to have the most popular and best APIs to sustain functionality, performance, and scale Many database tools are available; pick based on use case and access pattern Product recommendations feature highly connected data - who do you know who bought what and when? Analytics Architecture: Use S3 as data lake, put in data via open-data f

Does operating system (OS) choice even matter anymore to most people? Especially with the emergence of serverless and containers? Debian may not see its name up in lights much these days, but it’s still very much front, center, and relevant to what people are doing in Cloud environments. Today, we’re talking to Elana Hashman, a Python packager and Debian developer. Everything inside a base operating system may not be interesting to end users, but such a collection of components is necessary to create a functioning Linux system. Some of the highlights of the show include: Alternative Linux operating systems, including Amazon Linux 2 Level of awareness about free software when choosing and distributing an OS What is a Python packager? How do you become one? Python is the new default language due to growth and adoption of its ecosystem Packaging community off-putting to beginners; find someone who understands the system to guide you Links: Elana Hashman Elana Hashman on Twitter Elana Hashman on Mastodon A

Companies can find working in the Cloud quite complicated. However, it’s a lot easier than it used to be, especially when trying to comply with regulations. That’s because Cloud providers have evolved and now offer more out-of-the-box services that focus on regulation requirements and compliance. Today, we’re talking to Elliot Murphy. He’s the founder of Kindly Ops, which provides consulting advice to companies dealing with regulated workloads in the Cloud. Some of the highlights of the show include: Technical controls are easier, but requirements are stricter Risk Analysis: Putting locks on things to thinking about risks to customers Building governance and controls; making data available and removable Secondary Losses: Scrub services to make scope and magnitude of loss smaller Computing became ubiquitous and affordable; people started collecting data to utilize later - nobody gets rid of anything General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set of regulations apply to marketing technology stacks to manage s

More and more enterprises and on-prem applications are moving to the Cloud. Therefore, flexibility, agility, time-to-market, and cost effectiveness need to be created to address a lack of visibility and control. Today, we’re talking to Archana Kesavan, senior product marketing manager at ThousandEyes. The company offers a network intelligence platform that provides visibility to Internet-centric, SaaS, or Cloud-based enterprise environments. Our discussion focuses on ThousandEyes’ 2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report. Some of the highlights of the show include: Purpose of Report: Reveals network performance and architecture connectivity for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud (GCP), and Microsoft Azure Report gathered more than 160 million data points by leveraging ThousandEyes’ global fleet of agents that simulate users’ application traffic Data collected during four-week period was ran through ThousandEyes’ global inference engine to identify trends and detect anomalies Internet X factor when

If you’re looking for older services at AWS, there really aren’t any. For example, Simple Storage Service (S3) has been with us since the beginning. It was the first publicly launched service that was quickly followed by Simple Queue Service (SQS). Still today, when it comes to these services, simplicity is key! Today, we’re talking to Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of S3 at AWS. Many people use S3 the same way that they have for years, such as for backups in the Cloud. However, others have taken S3 and ran with it to find a myriad of different use cases. Some of the highlights of the show include: Data: Where do I put it? What do I do with it? S3 Select and Cross-Region Replication (CRR) make it easier and cheaper to use and manage data Customer feedback drives AWS S3 price options and tiers Using Glacier and S3 together for archive data storage; decisions and constraints that affect people’s use and storage of data Feature requests should meet customers where they are, rather than having to invest

Do you have to deal with data protection? Do you usually mess it up? Some people think data protection architecture is broken and requires too many dependencies. By the time a business needs to backup a lot of data, it’s a complex problem to go back in time to retrofit a backup solution for an existing infrastructure. Fortunately, Rubrik found a way to streamline data protection components. Today, we’re talking to Chris Wahl and Ken Hui of Rubrik. Some of the highlights of the show include: Transform backup and recovery to send data to a public Cloud and convert it to native format   Add value and expand what can be done with data - rather than let it sit idle Easy way for customers to start putting data into the Cloud is to replace their tape environment; people hate tape infrastructure more than their backups Necessity to backup virtual machines (VMs) probably won’t go away because of challenges; Clouds and computers break Customers leaving the data center and exploring the Cloud to improve operations, u

Do you have some spare time? Can you figure out an easier way to do something? Then, why not build some software?! Today, we’re talking to Ian Mckay of Kablamo, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) consultancy. He is the author of Console Recorder, which is a browser extension that records your actions in the Management Console to convert them into SDK code and infrastructure as code templates. Some of the highlights of the show include: Timeline to build Console Recorder Infrastructure as Code: How to code repeatedly without starting over and take ownership of what you built by hand AWS vs. Individual Achievements: People asked AWS for years to create something to record console click-throughs that Ian did in his spare time Console Recorder support for any browser that exports Web extensions Sharp edges of what’s expected of Console Recorder to speed up development Management Console’s unreadable responses require reverse engineering Console Recorder: Recommended use cases and areas How to alleviate security conc

A Manager README is a document designed to establish clarity between a manager and those who report to them. These documents are especially useful for onboarding content. For example, if you have someone new starting on your team, there's so many things you need to share with them - pieces of advice and guidance that help them to make the best decision about what to do in specific situations. A Manager README sets some expectations in advance to make things easier and reduce friction and anxiety for team members. Today, we’re talking to Matt Newkirk, who manages Etsy’s localization and translation group. He explains that even if your company has an intensive onboarding program and review process, some things are still left out. A Manager README is a helpful and proactive piece of content that prompts conversations about how people perceive things. Some of the highlights of the show include: Avoid writing READMEs that are extremely self-centered/arrogant READMEs clarify what to do until a relationship is est

Would you like access to unlimited retention of your data within your Amazon S3, which costs far less than online storage on disc? Well, the next time you’re at re:Invent, visit CHAOSSEARCH’s booth. Today, we’re talking to Pete Cheslock, vice president of products at CHAOSSEARCH and former vice president of operations at Threat Stack. CHAOSSEARCH helps people get access to their login event data using Amazon S3. Some of the highlights of the show include: re:Invent - Year of the Pin: People go nuts for conference swag and were collecting pins as if they were gold Scan Your Badge and Drip Emails: Annoying and passive-aggressive marketing trends meant to be spontaneous and interesting Need a job? Corey’s looking to hire a “Quinntern” to use a tag email address to gather conference swag at the next re:invent; if interested, contact him    Corey and Pete’s Swag Rules: Something you want or can use, continues to be valuable, no sizes, no socks Densify Drama: Conference flyer to generate leads failed, created comp

Have you ever had high expectations about a new software product? Did you think it was going to be spectacular? Instead, did it become less about solving a problem for you and more about reaching a bunch of billable consultants? The dynamics of open source communities and the Cloud platform can make or break software products. Today, we’re talking to Andrew Clay Shafer, who was a notable voice during the days of OpenStack. He had high hopes for OpenStack, which was an effort to bring a democratized solution of Cloud computing to anyone’s data center. He describes the importance of understanding the challenges associated with open source projects in order for them to be successful. Some of the highlights of the show include: Open source is not a business model; capture value for customers, or they’ll go with a different solution Openness/Closure: Every open source project has its own community dynamics Losing sight of level of expertise for profitability and easy path to useage Whether to become a product or

You can't make money selling to developers! The bottleneck of getting business requirements and creating business value used to mean waiting for the next waterfall release. That’s not the case anymore in the venture community. There’s programmatic access to infrastructure and DevOps/agile developments that offer super-fast cycle times. Now, the bottleneck is about how fast your developers can move and how much they can get done. Today, we’re talking to Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit Industries, which is an accelerator for seed-stage companies and focuses on developer-first products. Tools and products that get you more leverage out of your developers are incredibly valuable. Some of the highlights of the show include: Measuring maturity of startups’ engineering teams by looking at SaaS list - what products they have in place and how many are using out-of-house vendors Customers don’t care how curated or artisan a piece of your stack is, they only care that it works Not all claims (scales infinit

Do you like to hear yourself talk? Especially while on a stage and in front of a lot of people? How do you come up with ideas to talk about? What process do you use to build a conference talk or presentation? Today, we’re talking to Matty Stratton of PagerDuty. His job involves building conference talks and finding ways to continuously improve them. Public speaking can be intimidating, so he shares some tips and tricks that have worked for him. Some of the highlights of the show include: Avoid creating something brand new for every event Don’t tell flattering stories about things that happened to you; may be uplifting, but doesn't resemble reality Failure stories are fantastic because people relate to making terrible decisions Everyone who gives a talk panics, gets nervous, and thinks they’re about a sentence away from stammering and falling off the stage; almost never happens Audience wants you to succeed because they're there to learn; no one is hoping a presenter messes up Preparation is key; could build

Do you understand how tabs work? How spaces work? Are you willing to defeat the JSON heretics? Most people understand the power of the serverless paradigm, but  need help to put it into a useful form. That’s where Stackery comes in to treat YAML as an assembly language. After all, no one programs processors like they did in the '80s with raw assembly routines and no one programs with C. Everyone is using a higher-level scripted or other programming language. Today, we’re talking to Chase Douglas, co-founder and CTO of Stackery, which is serverless acceleration software where levels of abstraction empower you to move quickly. Stackery has an intricate binding model that gives you a visual representation - at a human logical level - of the infrastructure you defined in your application. Some of the highlights of the show include: Stackery builds infrastructures by using best practices with security applications What's a VPC? Way to put resources into a Cloud account that aren’t accessible outside of that netw

What’s hiring in the world of Cloud like? What are companies looking for in possible employees? What kind of career trajectory should applicants display? Today, we’re talking to Don O’Neill, who has had an interesting career path and the archetype of who most companies want to hire. He’s been an independent contributor, platform leader, and Cloud consultant. Currently, Don is platform engineer manager at Articulate, an eLearning software solution for course authoring and eLearning development. He works with platform engineers to automate Blue Ocean pipelines with Docker, Terraform, and various Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, such as Elastic Beanstalk. Some of the highlights of the show include: Don reached out to his network to ask people that he had a professional relationship with about who was hiring and what challenges they faced Don’s “Therapy”: Go to meet-ups to talk about DevOps topics; serves as a “I’ve-got-to-get-my-hiney-out-of-the-house-and-get-some-social-time” Don’s journey from being a

Do you enjoy watching sports? Wear your favorite team or player’s jersey? Are you a fan who has shopped at Fanatics on the Cloud? Today, we’re talking to Johnny Sheeley, director of Cloud engineering at Fanatics, which is a sports eCommerce business that manufactures and sells sports apparel. Fanatics runs Cloud engineering to provide a robust and reliable set of services by building and deploying applications on top of the Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) platform. Some of the highlights of the show include: If you compete with Amazon, be ready for it to come after you; some companies avoid its Cloud perspective or go multi-Cloud (paranoia-based movement) Focus on your ability to make your business function smoothly Transition, migration, and abstraction may be painful, but should not stop work; paying for Cloud-agnostic technology may not be worth it Challenges of governing use of Cloud resources to prevent mistakes/problems related to Fanatics’ security and budget Data collected focuses on what’s trending up

Did you know that you can now run Lambda functions for 15 minutes, instead of dealing with 5-minute timeouts? Although customers will probably never need that much time, it helps dispel the belief that serverless isn’t useful for some use cases because of such short time limits. Today, we’re talking to Adam Johnson, co-founder and CEO of IOpipe. He understands that some people may misuse the increased timeframe to implement things terribly. But he believes the responsibility of a framework, platform, or technology should not be to hinder certain use cases to make sure developers are working within narrow constraints. Substantial guardrails can make developers shy away. With Lambda, they can do what they want, which is good and bad. Some of the highlights of the show include: Companies are using serverless as a foundation and for critical functions Serverless can be painful in some areas, but gaps are going away Investing in the Future: Companies doing lift-and-shift to AWS are looking at technology they sho

In the early days, angry nerd corners on the Internet viewed Slack and some of its predecessors as, “Oh, it’s just IRC. Now, you pay someone for it.” Many fell into that trap of wondering about what value such systems offered.The big differentiator? Slack is built as a collaborative business tool. Today, we’re talking to Holly Allen, who helped make government software better while  serving as the director of engineering at 18F. Now, she’s a senior engineering manager at Slack, a collaborative chat program where you can do most of your work through a rich platform of integrations. Holly enjoys taking a weird set of skills that make a computer do things and convincing people who know how to make computers do things do things. Some of the highlights of the show include: Safety engineering brings chaos and resilience engineering, incident management, and post-mortem processes together for resiliency and reliability Slack strives to move really fast while being in complete control Slack is primarily on AWS, but

If you’ve been doing DevOps for the past 10-20 years, things have really changed in the industry. There’s no longer large pools of help desk support. People aren’t climbing around the data center and learning how to punch down cables and rack servers to gradually work their way up. Now, entry level DevOps jobs require about five years of experience. So, that’s where internships play a major role. But how can an internship program be set up for success? Where is the next generation of SREs or DevOps professionals coming from? Where do we find them? Today, we’re talking to Fatema Boxwala, who has been an intern at Rackspace, Yelp, and Facebook. She’s a computer science student at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where she’s involved with the Women in Computer Science Committee and Computer Science Club. Occasionally, she teaches people about Python, Git, and systems administration.   Some of the highlights of the show include: Mentors made Fatema’s intern experience positive for her; made site reliability

Are you interested in computer science? How would you like to go to school for free and learn what you need to in just a few months? Then, check out Lambda School! Today, we’re talking to Ben Nelson, co-founder and CTO of Lambda School, which is a 30-week online immersive computer science academy. Lambda School has more than 500 students and takes a share of future earnings instead of traditional debt. So, it's free until students get a job. Some of the highlights of the show include: Bootcamps were created to address engineering shortages and quickly move people into technical careers Lambda is not explicitly a bootcamp; its 30-week program gives students more instructions and more time spent on developing a portfolio Lambda also makes time to cover computer science fundamentals; teaches C, Python, Django, and relational database - not just JavaScript Employers appreciate the school’s in-depth and advanced approach, which results in repeat hires Lambda avoids the typical reputation of traditional for-profit