Screaming In The Cloud

Have you ever been on-call duty as an IT person or otherwise? Woken up at 3 a.m. to solve a problem? Did you have to go through log files or look at a dashboard to figure out what was going on? Did you think there has got to be a better way to troubleshoot and solve problems? Today, we’re talking to Sam Bashton, who previously ran a premiere consulting partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Recently, he started runbook.cloud, which is a tool built on top of serverless technology that helps people find and troubleshoot problems within their AWS environment. Some of the highlights of the show include: Runbook.cloud looks at metrics to generate machine learning (ML) intelligence to pinpoint issues and present users with a pre-written set of solutions Runbook.cloud looks at all potential problems that can be detected in context with how the infrastructure is being used without being annoying and useless ML is used to do trend analysis and understand how a specific customer is using a service for a specific au

Trying to figure out if Amazon Web Services (AWS) is right for you? Use the “quadrant of doom” to determine your answer. When designing a Cloud architecture, there are factors to consider. Any system you design exists for one reason - support a business. Think about services and their features to make sure they’re right for your implementation. Today, we’re talking to Ernesto Marquez, owner and project director at Concurrency Labs. He helps startups launch and grow their applications on AWS. Ernesto especially enjoys building serverless architectures, automating everything, and helping customers cut their AWS costs. Some of the highlights of the show include: Amazon’s level of discipline, process, and willingness to recognize issues and fix them changed the way Ernesto sees how a system should be operated Specialize on a specific service within AWS, such as S3 and EC2, because there are principles that need to be applied when designing an architecture Sales and Delivery Cycle: Ernesto has a conversation wit

Are you a blogger? Engineer? Web guru? What do you do? If you ask Yan Cui that question, be prepared for several different answers. Today, we’re talking to Yan, who is a principal engineer at DAZN. Also, he writes blog posts and is a course developer. His insightful, engaging, and understandable content resonates with various audiences. And, he’s an AWS serverless hero! Some of the highlights of the show include: Some people get tripped up because they don’t bring microservice practices they learned into the new world of serverless; face many challenges Educate others and share your knowledge; Yan does, as an AWS hero Chaos Engineering Meeting Serverless: Figuring out what types of failures to practice for depends on what services you are using Environment predicated on specific behaviors may mean enumerating bad things that could happen, instead of building a resilient system that works as planned API Gateway: Confusing for users because it can do so many different things; what is the right thing to do, gi

Is your company thinking about adopting serverless and running with it? Is there a profitable opportunity hidden in it? Ready to go on that journey? Today, we’re talking to Rowan Udell, who works for Versent, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) consulting partner in Australia. Versent focuses on specific practices, including helping customers with rapid migrations to the Clouds and going serverless. Some of the highlights of the show include: Australia is experiencing an increase in developers using serverless tool services and serverless being used for operational purposes Serverless seems to be either a brilliant fit or not quite ready for prime time Misconceptions include keeping functions warm, setting up scheduled indications Simon Wardley talked about how the flow of capital can be traced through an organization that has converted to serverless Concept of paying thousands of dollars up front for a server is going away Spend whatever you want, but be able to explain where the money is going (dev vs. prod); co

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) turned off a customer that it thought was doing something out of bounds. This led to an Internet outrage, and GCP tried to explain itself and prevent the problem in the future. Today, we’re talking to Daniel Compton, an independent software consultant who focuses on Clojure and large-scale systems. He’s currently building Deps, a private Maven repository service. As a third-party observer, we pick Daniel’s brain about the GCP issue, especially because he wrote a post called, Google Cloud Platform - The Good, Bad, and Ugly (It’s Mostly Good). Some of the highlights of the show include: Recommendations: Use enterprise billing - costs thousands of dollars; add phone number and extra credit card to Google account; get support contract Google describing what happened and how it plans to prevent it in the future seemed reasonable; but why did it take this for Google to make changes? GCP has inherited cultural issues that don’t work in the enterprise market; GCP is painfully learning th

Do you deal with a lot of data? Do you need to analyze and interpret data? Veritone’s platform is designed to ingest audio, video, and other data through batch processes to process the media and attach output, such as transcripts or facial recognition data. Today, we’re talking to Christopher Stobie, a DevOps professional with more than seven years of experience building and managing applications. Currently, he is the director of site reliability engineering at Veritone in Costa Mesa, Calif. Veritone positions itself as a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to help other companies analyze and organize unstructured data. Previously, Christopher was a technical account manager (TAM) at Amazon Web Services (AWS); lead DevOps engineer at Clear Capital; lead DevOps engineer at ESI; Cloud consultant at Credera; and Patriot/THAAD Missile Fire Control in the U.S. Army. Besides staying busy with DevOps and missiles, he enjoys playing racquetball in short shorts and drinking good (not great) wine. S

Google builds platforms for developers and strives to make them happy. There's a team at Google that wakes up every day to make sure developers have great outcomes with its services and products. The team listens to the developers and brings all feedback back into Google. It also spends a lot of time all over the world talking to and connecting with developer communities and showing stuff being worked on. It doesn't do the team any good to build developer products that developers don’t love. Today, we’re talking to Adam Seligman, vice president of developer relations at Google, where he is responsible for the global developer community across product areas. He is the ears and voice for customers. Some of the highlights of the show include: Google tackles everything in an open source way: Shipping feedback, iteration, and building communities Storytelling - the Tale of Kubernetes: in a short period of time, gone from being open source that Google spearheaded to something sweeping the industry Rise of containe

What is serverless? What do people want it to be? Serverless is when you write your software, deploy it to a Cloud vendor that will scale and run it, and you receive a pay-for-use bill. It’s not necessarily a function of a service, but a concept. Today, we’re talking to Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, which brings observability to serverless Cloud applications by using distributed tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a software engineer with experience in software development, cyber security, reverse engineering, and machine learning. Some of the highlights of the show include: Modern renaissance of “functions as a service” compared to past history; is as abstracted as it can be, which means almost no constraints If you write your own software, ship it, and deploy it - it counts as serverless Some treat serverless as event-driven architecture where code swings into action When being strategic to make it more efficient, plan and develop an application with specific and c

It is easy to pick apart the general premise of Cloud agnosticism being a myth. What about reasonable use cases? Well, generally, when you have a workload that you want to put on multiple Cloud providers, it is a bad idea. It’s difficult to build and maintain. Providers change, some more than others. The ability to work with them becomes more complex. Yet, Cloud providers rarely disappoint you enough to make you hurry and go to another provider. Today, we’re talking to Jay Gordon, Cloud developer advocate for MongoDB, about databases, distribution of databases, and multi-Cloud strategies. MongoDB is a good option for people who want to build applications quicker and faster but not do a lot of infrastructural work. Some of the highlights of the show include: Easier to consider distributed data to be something reliable and available, than not being reliable and available People spend time buying an option that doesn’t work, at the cost of feature velocity If Cloud provider goes down, is it the end of the wor

Trying to convince a company to embrace the theory and idea of Chaos Engineering is an uphill battle. When a site keeps breaking, Gremlin’s plan involves breaking things intentionally. How do you introduce chaos as a step toward making things better? Today, we’re talking to Ho Ming Li, lead solutions architect at Gremlin. He takes a strategic approach to deliver holistic solutions, often diving into the intersection of people, process, business, and technology. His goal is to enable everyone to build more resilient software by means of Chaos Engineering practices. Some of the highlights of the show include: Ho Ming Li previously worked as a technical account manager (TAM) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer guidance on architectural/operational best practices Difference between and transition to solutions architect and TAM at AWS Role of TAM as the voice and face of AWS for customers Ultimate goal is to bring services back up and make sure customers are happy Amazon Leadership Principles: Mutually benefic

Are you about to head off to college? Interested in DevOps and the Cloud? Is there a good way for someone like you who is starting out in the world of technology to absorb the necessary skills? The Open Source Lab (OSL) at Oregon State University (OSU) is one program that helps students and serves as a career accelerator. OSL is a unicorn because OSU is willing to invest in open source. Today, we’re talking to Lance Albertson, director of OSL at OSU. OSL does a variety of projects to provide private Clouds that are neutrally hosted on its premises. The lab also gives undergraduate students hands-on experience with DevOps skills, including dealing with configuration management, deploying applications, learning how applications deploy, working with projects, and troubleshooting issues. OSL is for any student who has a general interest or passion for it, and a willingness to learn. Some of the highlights of the show include: Workflow focuses on what students need to learn about Linux and giving access to variou

Today, we’re talking to Jeff Barr, vice president and chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He founded the AWS Blog in 2004 and has written more than 2,900 posts for it and another 1,100 for his personal blog. As chief evangelist, Jeff strives to explain the benefits of Cloud computing and Web services to anyone who will listen. Jeff is the voice of AWS. He does what he does best - exploits his superpower of explaining technology in ways that people can understand it. Jeff tries to be the same person all the time. He loves to meet people and go out of his way to say “Hello.” So, if you see him at re:Invent, say “Cheese” and take a selfie with him! Some of the highlights of the show include: Jeff uses AWS Workspaces for his blog; one of Jeff’s blogging principles is to not take anybody else's word for anything to the absolute best of his technical ability Zero Client: Jeff has no rotating hardware, disk drives, just a zero client; wherever he is, it's the same workspace AWS has something for everyone

Some companies that offer services expect you to do things their way or take the highway. However, Google expects people to simply adapt the tech company’s suggestions and best practices for their specific context. This is how things are done at Google, but this may not work in your environment. Today, we’re talking to Liz Fong-Jones, a Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Google. Liz works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team and enjoys helping people adapt reliability practices in a way that makes sense for their companies. Some of the highlights of the show include: Liz figures out an appropriate level of reliability for a service and how a service is engineered to meet that target Staff SRE involves implementation, and then identifying and solving problems Google’s CRE team makes sure Google Cloud customers can build seamless services on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Service Level Objectives (SLOs) include error budgets, service level indicators, and key metrics to

What’s serverless? Are you serverless now? Is going from enterprise to serverless a natural evolution? Or, is it a “that was fun, now let’s go ride our bikes” moment? Is serverless “just a toy?” Is it a wide and varied ecosystem, or is it Lambda plus some other randos? What's up with serverless vs. containers? Today, Forrest Brazeal is here to answer those questions and discuss pros and cons of serverless. He was a senior Cloud architect prior to joining Trek10. Forrest spent several years leading AWS and serverless engineering projects at Infor. He understands the challenges faced by enterprises moving to the Cloud and enjoys building solutions that provide maximum business value at a minimal cost.  Some of the highlights of the show include: Bimodality: Backend development going away and being replaced by managed services; undifferentiated items are being moved to the Cloud Serverless is application designs with “Backend as a Service” (BaaS) and/or “Functions as a Service” (FaaS) platforms; everything is m

DevOps as a service describes what Reactive Ops is trying to do, who it’s trying to help, and what problems it’s trying to solve. It’s passion to deliver service where human beings help other human beings is done through a group of engineers who are extremely good at solving problems. Sarah Zelechoski is the vice president of engineering at Reactive Ops, which defines the world’s problems and solves them by pouring Kubernetes on top of them. The team focuses on providing expert-level guidance and a curated framework using Kubernetes and other open source tools. Sarah's greatest passion is helping others, which encompasses advocating for engineers and rekindling interest in the lost art of service in the tech space. Some of the highlights of the show include: Kubernetes is changing the way people work; it offers a way to release a product, provide access to it, and behaviors when you deploy it Any person/business can use Kubernetes to mold their workflow Kubernetes is complex and has sharp edges; it has

Are you interested in going beyond basic monitoring and visibility? Need tools to build and operate serverless applications and extract business intelligence? IOpipe provides extended visibility and metrics around AWS Lambda, including profiling, core dumps, and incoming input events. Today, we’re talking to Erica Windisch, who is the founder and CTO of IOpipe. She brings her experience in building developer and operational tooling to serverless applications. Erica also has more than 17 years of experience designing and building Cloud infrastructure management solutions. She was an early and longtime contributor to OpenStack and maintainer of the Docker project. Some of the highlights of the show include: Nomenclature Battle: Serverless vs. stateless Building a window of visibility into Lambda: Talking to users and assessing needs/pain points Observability of the infrastructure: Necessary evil to get to automated healing Using Lambda at significant levels of scale; some companies grow usage, others go all i

Let’s chat about the Cloud and everything in between. The people in this world are pretty comfortable with not running physical servers on their own, but trusting someone else to run them. Yet, people suffer from the psychological barrier of thinking they need to build, design, and run their own monitoring system. Fortunately, more companies are turning to Datadog. Today, we’re talking to Ilan Rabinovitch, Datadog’s vice president of product and community. He spends his days diving into container monitoring metrics, collaborating with Datadog’s open source community, and evangelizing observability best practices. Previously, Ilan led infrastructure and reliability engineering teams at various organizations, including Ooyala and Edmunds.com. He’s active in the open source and DevOps communities, where he is a co-organizer of events, such as SCALE and Texas Linux Fest. Some of the highlights of the show include: Datadog is well-known, especially because it is a frequent sponsor More organizations know their co

Do you need data captured that let you know when things don’t look quite right? Need to identify issues before they become major problems for your organization? Turn to Threat Stack, which has Cloud issues of its own, and helps its customers with their Cloud issues. Today, I’m talking to Pete Cheslock, who runs technical operations at Threat Stack, which handles security monitoring, alerting, and remediation. The company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), but its customer base can run anywhere.   Some of the highlights of the show include: Challenges Threat Stack experienced with AWS and how it dealt with them Threat Stack helps companies improve their security posture in AWS Security shouldn’t be an issue, if providers do their job; shared responsibility Education is needed about what matters regarding security, avoiding mistakes Cloud is still so new; not many people have abroad experience managing it Scanning customer accounts against best practices to identify risks Threat Stack’s scanning tool is worthwhil

Aurora, from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a MySQL-compatible service for complex database structures. It offers capabilities and opportunities. But with Aurora, you’re putting a lot of trust in AWS to “just work” in ways not traditional to relational database services (RDS). David Torgerson, Principal DevOps Engineer at Lucidchart, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and virtually impossible to Google. He shares Lucidchart’s experience with migrating away from a traditional RDS to Aurora to free up developer time. Some of the highlights of the show include: Trade off of making someone else partially responsible for keeping your site up Lucidchart’s overall database costs decreased 25% after switching to Aurora Aurora unknowns: What is an I/Op in Aurora? When you write one piece of data, does it count as six I/Ops? Multi-master Aurora is coming for failover time and disaster recovery purposes Aurora drawbacks: No dedicated DevOps, increased failover time, and misleading performance speed Providers offer ways

Does your job challenge and motivate you? Does it utilize your skills? Or, are you ready to go job hunting? Do you want an awesome job that is a resume booster? Companies should be supportive of their employees finding a job that matches their skills and interests. Also, when hiring, companies should offer thoughtful processes for interviews.   Today, I’m talking to Sarah Withee, a polyglot software engineer, mentor, teacher, and robot tinkerer. Sarah went job hunting, and after several job interviews, she finally found a job that made her super happy at Arcadia Healthcare Solutions. Sarah compares the interview processes she experienced at big name tech companies that offer Cloud services. Some of the highlights of the show include: Companies sometimes lose sight that even interview interactions need to be a two-way sale Interviews often involve talking to many people; and if several are bad, that forms a negative impression of the company Companies need to provide interview training and follow the same st