Screaming in the Cloud

The Power of Saying No: Growing by Narrowing Your Focus with Corey Quinn

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:00:00 -0700

What happens when you stop trying to serve everyone, and start focusing on the right customers?

In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Corey Quinn (yes, really) to talk about specialization, scaling service businesses, and the power of saying no. From growing a digital agency from $20M to $200M to escaping founder-led sales, this conversation dives into practical lessons for founders, marketers, and leaders looking to scale with intention.

Show highlights:

(00:00) Specialization Mindset

(00:21) Show Intro and Sponsor

(01:18) Two Corey Quinns

(02:39) Guest Background and Book

(04:41) Scaling a Service Agency

(06:28) Inbound Limits and Outbound Shift

(10:21) Cookie Gifting Breakthrough

(12:12) Making Gifting Work

(19:09) Retention Through Specialization

(25:20) Founder Bottlenecks and Wrap Up

Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyquinn/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Build vs Buy: The Hidden Costs of “Just Building It” with Ahmed Bebars

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:00:00 -0700

Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should. In this episode, Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer at The New York Times, joins Corey Quinn to talk about real-world cloud decisions, Kubernetes complexity, and the constant trade-off between building your own solutions and buying existing ones. From home labs to enterprise architecture, they unpack what actually works, and what engineers often get wrong.

Show Highlights:
(00:19) Intro
(01:09) From Imposter Syndrome
(06:34) Honest Community Feedback
(09:29) EKS Versus ECS Debate
(21:32) Home Lab Reality Check
(22:40) Build vs Buy Long Game
(28:04) Focus on Core Business
(34:35) Uptime Tradeoffs and Standards
(39:41) Networking and IPv6 Debate
(41:28) Wrap Up and Where to Find

Links:
Ahmed's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmedbebars

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

FinOps, AI, and the Cost of Cloud Chaos with J.R. Storment

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:00:00 -0700

What happens when cloud economics meets the messy reality of business, AI, and human behavior?

Corey and J.R. Storment unpack why cloud cost management is less about math and more about psychology, the real difference between FinOps for AI vs. AI for FinOps, and why automation still struggles with edge cases (despite all the hype). Along the way, they explore multi-cloud complexity, the rise of consumption-based pricing, and how businesses are navigating massive, unpredictable spend across cloud, SaaS, and AI platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered why your cloud bill feels like chaos, or how to actually get value from it, this episode pulls back the curtain.

Show Highlights:
(00:00) FinOps Royalty Reunion

(03:06) Origin Stories and Naming FinOps

(06:32) AI for FinOps vs FinOps for AI

(11:05) Automation Hype and Human Psychology

(22:16) Contracts Multi Cloud and Commitments

(24:26) Context Beats Optimization

(26:06) Trust and Billing Clarity

(28:14) Focus Standard Flywheel

(30:11) SaaS Coverage and Conformance

(34:06) Contracts Multi-cloud and Wrap Up

Links:
FinOps: https://www.finops.org/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Everything Is a Graph (Even Your Dad Jokes) with Roi Lipman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:00:00 -0800

In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, host Corey Quinn sits down with Roi Lipman, CTO and co-founder of Falco DB, to unpack the evolving role of graph databases in a world overflowing with data stores. Roi shares his journey from building RedisGraph at Redis to spinning it out into Falco DB, along with his enduring love of the C programming language (dad jokes included). The conversation explores why graph databases remain niche, but powerful, especially for pathfinding problems like supply chains and access management, how vector search became a feature rather than a standalone database, and what AI-assisted development means for modern engineering. Along the way, they tackle open source sustainability, Rust rewrites, AI-generated pull request chaos, and the looming question of where the next generation of senior engineers will come from.

Highlights:

(00:00) C Language

(00:27) Welcome

(01:18) Database Landscape Overview

(03:17) Why Graph Databases Matter

(07:25) AI Built Apps and Data Choices

(10:29) How FalcoDB Fits In

(12:20) Vector Search as a Feature

(16:48) FalcoDB Origin Story

(19:54) Open Source Business and Rust Rewrite

(25:23) Toy Graph Problems and Closing Thoughts

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

AI, Authenticity, and the Future of Podcasting with Chris Hill

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:00:00 -0800

This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey sits down with Chris Hill, CEO of Humble Pod, to talk about the messy, nuanced reality of AI in media. From secretly cloning Corey’s voice for an ad using ElevenLabs (and almost getting away with it) to the growing tension between polished production and authentic content, they unpack what AI can actually do versus what it claims to do.

They explore the shifting economics of podcasting, the rise of video-first formats, Netflix’s entrance into the space, and why “good enough” production often beats expensive studio perfection. It’s a candid conversation about trust, automation, creative integrity, and why sometimes the most dangerous AI use case is the one no one notices.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) The AI Voice Clone Ad Nobody Noticed

(00:44) 700 Episodes In: Catching Up with Humble Pod’s Chris Hill

(01:16) New Studio, New Vibes: Building a Podcast Space in Tennessee

(01:51) AI in Podcasting Workflows: Riverside, Editing Promises & Human Judgment

(07:50) Authenticity vs Production Value + Duckbill Hiring & Product Shift

(14:05) Renewals, churn, and why point solutions fail

(14:15) The Doc Tools saga: building the wrong thing (and Disney lawyers)

(15:15) Bahamas studio build: consulting where quality really matters

(16:34) Gear talk & pro tips: teleprompters, cameras, and looking at the lens

(18:50) Podcasting goes video-first: clips, discovery, TikTok, and the wrap-up

About Chris Hill:
Chris Hill is a Knoxville, TN native and founder of Humble Pod, where he helps brands, startups, and thought leaders develop, launch, and grow podcasts across the U.S. and beyond. He works with clients ranging from local Knoxville businesses to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world.

Chris is the co-host and producer of Our Humble Beer Podcast and lectures on podcasting and marketing at the University of Tennessee. He earned his undergraduate degree in Marketing & Entrepreneurship from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and later received his MBA from King University.

He currently serves as President of the American Marketing Association Knoxville chapter and enjoys supporting the local craft beer community, traveling internationally, and exploring the outdoors.

Links:
Humblepod: https://www.humblepod.com/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Coding Agents and the Inevitable AI Bubble with Eric Anderson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Eric Anderson, partner at VC firm Scale, talks about why coding agents changed software forever and why the AI bubble can't be avoided. Eric worked on Spot Instances at AWS and data products at Google before becoming a VC. He explains how companies can still compete against Anthropic and OpenAI by staying laser-focused instead of fighting on every front.

Corey and Eric discuss why AWS didn’t kill all startups even when they launched competing products, why the AI bubble can't be avoided when companies go from $1 billion to $7 billion in revenue in one year, and why the best AI products don't scream “AI” everywhere in their marketing.

Show Highlights:

(02:30) Building Spot Instances at AWS

(07:41) Why Coding Agents Changed Everything

(10:35) Agents Doing Code Review Now

(13:53) Competing with Frontier Labs

(17:05) Why AWS Didn’t Kill All Startups

(19:01) Finding the Right Front to Fight On

(22:20) Why the Bubble Is Inevitable

(23:36) AI Pricing Will Eventually Crash

(26:33) Honeycomb’s AI Done Right

(28:04) Where to Find Eric

Links:
Scale: https://www.scalevp.com/

Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmand/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Fixing Shadow AI and Surviving re:Invent with Chase Douglas

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Chase Douglas, CEO at Archodex, talks about AI security problems and why re:Invent has become a nightmare. Chase helps companies capture every AI interaction so they don't get in trouble with compliance. Corey and Chase discuss Shadow AI, why Corey runs Claude Code in an account called “Superfund,” and how re:Invent put metal spikes on benches so people couldn't sit down. They also talk about why AWS released fewer announcement than before, and why Chase is finally optimistic about AI coding tools after months of frustration.

Show Highlights:

(01:51) What Archodex Does

(07:00) The Superfund Account for AI

(08:19) Shadow AI Problem

(11:41) What Happened at re:Invent

(14:59) Sponsorship Costs at re:Invent

(17:00) Metal Spikes on Benches

(21:39) AWS Releases Declining

(25:24) Why Chase Is Finally Optimistic About AI Coding

(27:13) Code Review Changed with AI

(31:22) Where to Find Chase

Links:
Archodex: https://archodex.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedouglas/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Building Software While Keeping Humans in Charge

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Alyss Noland, who works on Cloud Dev Ecosystem at Nvidia, is back on the show to talk about building software with AI when you're not a real developer. Alyss runs a program that gives AI startups access to Nvidia GPUs and uses AI tools herself to build production software at Nvidia. Corey and Alyss discuss using AI to help curate newsletters without actually writing them, why humans still need to check everything, and the weird reality of people developing relationships with chatbots.

Show Highlights:

(01:34) What Alyss Does at Nvidia

(05:44) When AI First Worked for Corey

(07:34) Building Internal Tools vs Using AI

(10:39) Using AI to Help Write Last Week in AWS

(13:43) DGX Cloud Innovation Lab

(17:11) Building Production Software with AI

(20:48) The Future of SEO

(25:24) Using AI as a Writing Assistant

(29:51) closing remarks

Links:

Alyss’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssnoland/

Alyss’s Personal Website: https://dev.to/preciselyalyss

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

How Homebrew Became Mac's Package Manager with Mike McQuaid

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Mike McQuaid, Project Leader of Homebrew, joins Corey Quinn to share how a package manager conceived in a London pub became essential for 10 million Mac users. Homebrew lets you install software with one command instead of downloading files and clicking through installers, maintained by just 30 people who each get $300 a month.
Mike shares the origin story from a drunken conversation about package management, explains how Homebrew Bundle can set up a new Mac with one command, and why Homebrew refuses to package software with fake open source licenses like Terraform's new versions.

Show Highlights:

(01:44) Why Homebrew Works on Linux

(04:02) The Curl Bash Security Problem

(05:02) Homebrew Was Conceived in a London Pub

(06:42) Apps That Auto-Update Four Times a Day

(08:43) Brew Bundle

(14:00) Why Homebrew Auto-Updates Itself

(18:18) Homebrew Maintainers Get $300 a Month

(22:19) The Brew Doctor Command

(29:10) Why Homebrew Doesn't Package Fake Open Source

(32:05) Open Source Is Not a Career

(35:27) When Someone Blamed Homebrew for Breaking Their Business

(37:39) Auto-Update Options for Homebrew

(39:40) Where to Find Mike

Links:

Website: https://mikemcquaid.com

Homebrew: https://brew.sh

GitHub: https://github.com/homebrew

Sponsored by:

duckbillhq.com

Is It Broken Everywhere or Just for Me with Omri Sass

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

When your website stops working at 3 AM, you need to answer one question fast: Is it my code or is a big cloud provider having problems? Omri Sass from Datadog explains updog.ai, a tool that monitors whether major services like AWS, CloudFlare, and others are actually working. Instead of asking people to report problems like Down Detector does, updog uses real data from thousands of computers to detect when services go down. Omri shares why this took 6 years to build, how they process massive amounts of data with machine learning, and why cloud providers have been strangely upset about these tools existing.

About Omri:

Omri Sass is a Director of Product Management at Datadog, where he leads and supports a team of 25+ product managers driving initiatives across Bits AI SRE, Data Observability, Service Management, and most recently, the launch of updog.ai. Outside of work, Omri is an avid sci-fi reader, a dedicated yoga practitioner, and happily outmatched by his cat.

Show Highlights:

(02:12) What is Updog and How Does It Work

(03:38) Why Knowing If It's a Global Problem Matters

(04:01) The Problem With Testing Every Endpoint Yourself

(05:52) How Datadog Discovered EC2 Outages From Their Own Systems

(10:38) When AWS Regions Go Down and Cascade Failures

(13:13) What Happens When Services Rebuild Completely
(16:29) The Most Important Learning During a 3 AM Incident
(20:11) Why This Took So Long to Build
(23:40) When Datadog Going Down Isn't Critical Path
(25:22) How They Picked Which AWS Services to Monitor
(27:07) What Comes Next for Updog
(30:11) Where to Find Omri and Updog

Links:

Datadog: datadoghq.com

Omir’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omri-sass-65632a14/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Solving the 20-Year S3 File System Problem with Hunter Leath

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, spent 8 years building Amazon's EFS file storage system, learning exactly why making cloud storage act like a hard drive always fails. Old programs need hard drives, but cloud storage doesn't work like hard drives—a problem that's existed for 20 years.

Now Hunter's building Archil, which puts super-fast storage between programs and S3 so they can finally work together. Your programs think they're talking to a regular disk while your data lives safely in the cloud.

Hunter explains how they're doing what others couldn't, why it costs less than Amazon's own solutions, and why file systems suddenly matter again in the AI era.

Show Highlights:

(01:37) What Archil Does and Why It Exists

(02:26) Why Mounting S3 as a File System Has Always Failed

(03:07) What Building EFS Taught Hunter

(06:55) Using Fast SSDs as a Cache Layer for S3

(09:45) Attaching Archil to Your Existing S3 Buckets

(15:08) Why Archil Costs Less Than EBS When You Do the Math

(17:56) What Happens If Amazon Builds This Feature

(19:20) Competing With EBS Performance on GP3 Volumes

(21:43) Raising $6.7 Million Without an AI Pitch

(23:46) What Customers Get Wrong About Archil

(28:07) Accessing Data Stored in Glacier Deep Archive

(29:24) The Plan to Get Into the Linux Kernel

(30:51) Where to Find Hunter

About Hunter Leath:

Hunter is the founder and CEO of Archil, which transforms S3 buckets into infinite, local file systems that provide instant access to massive data sets. Prior to Archill, Hunter spent the last ten years in the cloud storage industry, including 8 years building Amazon's Elastic File System product and one year on Netflix's core storage team.

Links:
Hunter Leath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hleath/

Hunter Leath on X: https://x.com/jhleath/

Archil’s Website: https://archil.com

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Building Systems That Work Even When Everything Breaks with Ben Hartshorne

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

When AWS has a major outage, what actually happens behind the scenes? Ben Hartshorne, a principal engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey Quinn to discuss a recent AWS outage and how they kept customer data safe even when their systems couldn't fully work. Ben explains why building services that expect things to break is the only way to survive these outages. Ben also shares how Honeycomb used its own tools to cut their AWS Lambda costs in half by tracking five different things in a spreadsheet and making small changes to all of them.

About Ben Hartshorne:

Ben has spent much of his career setting up monitoring systems for startups and now is thrilled to help the industry see a better way. He is always eager to find the right graph to understand a service and will look for every excuse to include a whiteboard in the discussion.

Show highlights:

(02:41)Two Stories About Cost Optimization

(04:20) Cutting Lambda Costs by 50%

(08:01) Surviving the AWS Outage

(09:20) Preserving Customer Data During the Outage

(13:08) Should You Leave AWS After an Outage?

(15:09) Multi-Region Costs 10x More

(18:10) Vendor Dependencies

(22:06) How LaunchDarkly's SDK Handles Outages

(24:40) Rate Limiting Yourself

(29:00) How Much Instrumentation Is Too Much?

(34:28) Where to Find Ben

Links:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benhartshorne/

GitHub: https://github.com/maplebed

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Engineering Around Extreme S3 Scale with R. Tyler Croy

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

R. Tyler Croy, a principal engineer at Scribd, joins Corey Quinn to explain what happens when simple tasks cost $100,000. Checking if files are damaged? $100K. Using newer S3 tools? Way too expensive. Normal solutions don't work anymore. Tyler shares how with this much data, you can't just throw money at the problem, but rather you have to engineer your way out.

About R. Tyler:

R. Tyler Croy leads infrastructure architecture at Scribd and has been an open source developer for over 14 years. His work spans the FreeBSD, Python, Ruby, Puppet, Jenkins, and Delta Lake communities. Under his leadership, Scribd’s Infrastructure Engineering team built Delta Lake for Rust to support a wide variety of high performance data processing systems. That experience led to Tyler developing the next big iteration of storage architecture to power large-scale fulltext compute challenges facing the organization.

Show Highlights:
01:48 Scribd's 18-Year History

04:00 One Document Becomes Billions of Files

05:47 When Normal Physics Stop Working

08:02 Why S3 Metadata Costs Too Much

10:50 How AI Made Old Documents Valuable

13:30 From 100 Billion to 100 Million Objects

15:05 The Curse of Retail Pricing

19:17 How Data Scientists Create Growth

21:18 De-Normalizing Data Problems

25:29 Evolving Old Systems

27:45 Billions Added Since Summer

29:29 Underused S3 Features

31:48 Where to Find Tyler

Links:

Scribd: https://tech.scribd.com
Mastodon: https://hacky.town/@rtyler
GitHub: https://github.com/rtyler

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Avery Pennarun on Tailscale's Evolution: From Mesh VPN to AI Security Gateway

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn sits down with Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, for a deep dive into how the company is reinventing networking for the modern era. From finally making VPNs behave the way they should to tackling AI security with zero-click authentication, Avery shares candid insights on building infrastructure people actually love using, and love talking about.

They get into everything: surviving 100% year-over-year growth, why running on two tailnets at once is pure chaos, and how Tailscale makes “secure by default” feel effortless. Plus, they dig into why FreeBSD firewalls needed some tough love, the uncomfortable truth behind POCs, and even the surprisingly useful trick of turning your Apple TV into an exit node.

About Avery:
Avery Pennarun is the co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, where he’s redefining secure networking with a simple, Zero Trust approach. A veteran software engineer with experience ranging from startups to Google, he’s known for turning complex systems into approachable, user-friendly tools. His contributions to projects like wvdial, bup, and sshuttle reflect his belief that great technology should be both powerful and easy to use. With a mix of technical depth and dry humor, Avery shares insights on modern networking, internet evolution, and the realities of scaling a startup.

Highlights:
(0:00) Introduction to Tailscale and Security

(00:52) Sponsorship and Personal Experiences

(02:07) Technical Deep Dive into Tail Scale

(06:10) Challenges and Future of Tail Scale

(22:45) Building the Tail Net's API

(23:54) Connecting Cloud Providers with Tailscale

(25:22) Tailscale as a Security Solution

(26:44) Innovations and Future of Tailscale

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

How Grokability Built a Profitable Open Source Business with Jeremy Price

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:30:00 -0800

Most open source companies do the same thing. They take investor money, lock their best features behind paywalls, sell the company, and disappoint everyone. Grokability did something different.

Jeremy Price, VP of Technology at Grokability talks with Corey Quinn about how they built a business that makes enough money without chasing endless growth. From why they use simple technology to how they run thousands of separate installations for customers, Jeremy explains what happens when you care more about making a good product than explosive growth.

Show Highlights:

(00:51) Welcoming Jeremy Price from Grokability

(03:34) How Snipe-IT Started With a Bet

(05:30) Paying for Software Can Change Everything

(07:40) When AWS Competes With Open Source

(10:10) Boring Businesses Make Money

(15:30) Balancing Hosting Needs and Product Quality

(18:00) Pricing That Avoids Big Customer Problems

(21:06) Better Than a Google Sheet

(27:02) The Psychology of Buying

(29:33) Where to Find Jeremy and Grokability

Links:

https://jermops.com/about/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygprice/

https://snipeitapp.com/company

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

The AI Productivity Gap with Keith Townsend

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:53:51 -0800

Corey Quinn reconnects with Keith Townsend, founder of The CTO Advisor, for a candid conversation about the massive gap between AI hype and enterprise reality. Keith shares why a biopharma company gave Microsoft Copilot a hard no, and why AI has genuinely 10x’d his personal productivity while Fortune 500 companies treat it like radioactive material. From building apps with Cursor to watching enterprises freeze in fear of being the next AI disaster in the news, Keith and Corey dig into why the tools transforming solo founders and small teams are dead on arrival in the enterprise, and what it'll actually take to bridge that gap.

About Keith Townsend
Keith Townsend is an enterprise technologist and founder of The Advisor Bench LLC, where he helps major IT vendors refine their go-to-market strategies through practitioner-driven insights from CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects. Known as “The CTO Advisor,” Keith blends deep expertise in IT infrastructure, AI, and cloud with a talent for translating complex technology into clear business strategy.
With more than 20 years of experience, including roles as a systems engineer, enterprise architect, and PwC consultant, Keith has advised clients such as HPE, Google Cloud, Adobe, Intel, and AWS. His content series, 100 Days of AI and CloudEveryday.dev, provide practical, plainspoken guidance for IT leaders. A frequent speaker at VMware Explore, Interop, and Tech Field Day, Keith is a trusted voice on cloud and infrastructure transformation.

Show Highlights
(01:25) Life After the Futurum Group Acquisition

(03:56) Building Apps You're Not Qualified to Build with Cursor

(05:45)Creating an AI-Powered RSS Reader

(09:01) Why AI is Great at Language But Not Intelligence

(11:39) Are You Looking for Advice or Just Validation?

(13:49) Why Startups Can Risk AI Disasters and AWS Can't

(17:28) You Can't Outsource Responsibility

(19:52) Business Users Are Scared of AI Too

(23:00) LinkedIn's AI Writing Tool Misses the Point

(26:42) Private AI is Starting to Look Appealing

(29:00) Never Going Back to Pre-AI Development

(34:27) AI for Jobs You'd Never Hire Someone to Do

(39:09) Where to Find Keith and Closing Thoughts

Links

The CTO Advisor: https://thectoadvisor.com

Sponsor:
https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/dojo-ai
https://wiz.io/crying-out-cloud

AI Agents, Enterprise Risk, and the Future of Recovery: Rubrik’s Vision with Dev Rishi

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 03:00:00 -0800

In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Rubrik’s GM of AI, Dev Rishi, to unpack the real story behind enterprise AI adoption, the rise of agentic systems, and why most organizations are still stuck in read-only mode. Dev breaks down how Rubrik’s Agent Rewind brings safety, observability, and resilience to AI-driven actions, solving the “Oh no, the agent deleted production data” problem before it happens. From deep learning’s evolution to the massive gap between consumer AI enthusiasm and enterprise risk posture, this conversation is a candid, insightful look at the AI future Global 2000 companies are racing toward… or cautiously tiptoeing into.

Show Highlights

(00:25) Understanding Rubrik and Agent Rewind

(00:50) Challenges in AI and Disaster Recovery

(01:27) Guest Introduction: Dev Rishi from Rubrik

(01:44) The Evolution of AI in Enterprises

(02:33) Starting an AI Company: The Backstory

(05:10) Generative AI and Its Impact

(07:15) Enterprise AI Trends and Challenges

(08:56) The Future of Agentic AI

(18:03) AI in Customer Support

(22:03) Rubrik's Acquisition and AI Strategy

(29:30) Launching Rubrik Agent Cloud

(31:26) Lessons from Starting a Machine Learning Company

(35:25) Conclusion and Contact Information

Sponsor:
Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/sitc

From Code to Cash: How André Arko Builds Better Tools and Gets Paid for Open Source

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:00:00 -0800

André Arko, CEO of Spinel Cooperative and longtime Bundler maintainer, joins Corey Quinn to introduce RV, a new Ruby tool that installs Ruby in one second instead of 10-40 minutes by using precompiled binaries. Inspired by Python's UV, RV aims to simplify Ruby dependency management without the complexity of older tools like RVM and rbenv. They talk about why Ruby isn't actually dead, Apple's problem with shipping a five-year-old end-of-life Ruby in macOS, and the challenges of writing dependency managers in the language they manage. André also shares how he transitioned from a struggling nonprofit model to a cooperative that charges companies for expertise, proving that open source maintainers can build sustainable businesses without relying on donations.

Show Highlights:

(03:50) Introducing RV

(05:12) The RVM vs rbenv Wars and Why They All Break Bundler

(09:00) Why Your Mac Still Shows Ruby 3.0.0 in Your Prompt

(11:00) The Chef vs Puppet Philosophy Divide

(16:30) Installing Ruby in One Second vs 40 Minutes

(18:13) Apple’s Ancient System Ruby Problem

(22:20) RV’s Incremental Approach

(24:23) Is Ruby Dead?

(28:44) Why RV Is Written in Rust, Not Ruby

(31:10) The Bundler Problem

(32:15) The Financial Reality

(38:00) Spinel’s Plans to Make Money

(39:23) How to Stay In Contact with André

Links:

André Arko: https://arko.net
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/indirect.io
Spinel Cooperative: https://spinel.coop

Sponsor:
Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/sitc

Cyber Resilience Beyond Prevention with Anneka Gupta

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 03:00:00 -0700

When attackers are smart enough to hit your backups, recovery becomes your best defense. Rubrik’s Chief Product Officer, Anneka Gupta, joins host Corey Quinn to break down what true cyber resilience looks like in today’s multi-cloud world. From AI-driven recovery to surviving ransomware with your data (and reputation) intact, this episode covers what it really takes to bounce back when everything goes sideways.

Show Highlights

(00:00) Introduction to Ransomware and Backups

(00:25) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud

(00:32) Introducing Rubrik and Annika Gupta

(01:26) What Does Rubrik Do?

(02:18) Evolution of Backup and Recovery

(03:37) Challenges in Cyber Recovery

(05:33) Rubrik's Approach to Cyber Resilience

(08:44) Importance of Cyber Recovery Simulations

(09:40) Security vs. Operational Recovery

(11:28) Assume Breach: A New Security Paradigm

(14:29) Multi-Cloud Complexities and Security

(27:45) Hybrid Cloud and Cyber Resilience

(29:25) AI in Cyber Resilience

(33:09) Conclusion and Contact Information

About Anneka Gupta
Anneka Gupta is a senior executive leader with a proven track record of scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses from the ground up. She’s led across product, tech, go-to-market, and operations, always with a customer-first mindset. Known for turning complex challenges into big wins, Anneka brings energy, innovation, and real-world results to every team she leads.

She’s been recognized as one of San Francisco Business Times’ Most Influential Women in Business and 40 Under 40, as well as a Rising Star by AdExchanger and Marketing EDGE. Oh, and AdAge once named her one of the Top 10 Digital Marketing Innovators.

Links
rubrik.com/sitc
https://www.linkedin.com/in/annekagupta/

Sponsor:
Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/sitc

Cloud Repatriation: Because Conspiracy Theories Are Cheaper with Deana Solis

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 03:00:00 -0700

Deana Solis, 2022 FinOps Foundation Evangelist of the Year, joins Corey Quinn to discuss her winding career path from electrical engineering to healthcare IT to FinOps. She shares why certifications are "largely performative," warns that AI can turn your AWS bill into "a telephone number," and explains why NAT Gateway costs hit everyone from hobbyists to enterprises. The episode covers cloud repatriation conspiracy theories, translating between engineering and finance teams, and why good FinOps work is really just getting humans in a room to talk.

Show Highlights:

(02:36) FinOps Foundation

(03:15) FinOps as Marriage Counseling Between Engineering and Finance

(06:00) Deana’s Journey From Electrical Engineering to FinOps

(12:41) The Performative Nature of Certifications

(16:22) AI as Both a Threat and Tool in FinOps

(20:41) Why AI Is Flooding the Job Market with Noise

(25:09) Why FinOps Is Never Boring Despite Sounding Like It

(29:10) The NAT Gateway Problem

(33:09) The Generational Divide in Cloud Platform Preferences

(37:23) Stay In Contact With Deana Solis

About Deana Solis:

Deana Solis is a senior FinOps engineer with more than 20 years of infrastructure management experience. Recognized as the FinOps Evangelist of the Year by the FinOps Foundation in 2022, she has become a leading voice in driving cloud financial accountability and culture.

Beyond her technical expertise, Deana is passionate about humanizing technology. She serves as a FinOps Foundation ambassador and mentor, using her voice to elevate Women in FinOps and underrepresented folks in technology.

Her unique journey, from electrical engineering to liberal studies to FinOps, embodies both analytical rigor and emotional intelligence. Deana isn’t just shaping the way organizations think about cloud costs; she’s helping reshape the culture of technology itself.

Sponsor: https://www.wiz.io/

Five Slot Machines at Once: Chris Weichel on the Future of Software Development

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 03:00:00 -0700

On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey welcomes back Chris Weichel, CTO of Ona (formerly Gitpod). Chris explains the rebrand and why Ona is building for a future where coding agents, not just humans, write software.
They discuss what changes when agents spin up environments, why multi-agent workflows feel addictive, and how Ona is solving the scaling and safety challenges behind it.
If you’re curious about the next wave of software engineering and how AI will reshape developer tools, this episode is for you.

About Chris: Chris Weichel is the Chief Technology Officer at Ona (formerly Gitpod), where he leads the engineering team behind the company’s cloud-native development platform. With more than two decades of experience spanning software engineering and human–computer interaction, Chris brings a rare combination of technical depth and user-centered perspective to the systems he helps design and build.

He is passionate about creating technology that empowers people and tackling complex engineering challenges. His expertise in cloud-native architecture, programming, and digital fabrication has earned him multiple publications, patents, and industry awards. Chris is continually exploring new opportunities to apply his broad skill set and enthusiasm for building transformative technology in both commercial and research settings.

Show Highlights
(00:00) Introduction to Modern Software Interfaces

(00:55) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud

(01:02) Introducing Chris Weichel and Ona

(02:23) The Evolution from Git Pod to Ona

(03:26) Challenges and Insights on Company Renaming

(05:16) The Changing Landscape of Software Engineering

(05:54) The Role of AI in Code Generation

(12:04) The Importance of Development Environments

(15:44) The Future of Software Development with Ona

(21:31) Practical Applications and Challenges of AI Agents

(30:01) The Economics of AI in Software Development

(38:11) The Future Vision for Ona

(39:41) Conclusion and Contact Information

Links:
Christian Weichel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-weichel-740b4224/?originalSubdomain=de

Ona: https://ona.com/

https://csweichel.de/

Sponsor: Ona: https://ona.com/

From Aurora to PlanetScale: Intercom’s Database Evolution with Brian Scanlan

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 03:00:00 -0700

Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, the company building Fin.ai, joins Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Intercom’s move from AWS Aurora to PlanetScale’s managed Vitess after years of scaling challenges with their Ruby on Rails monolith. He explains how 13 Aurora clusters created operational pain and why PlanetScale’s white-glove, partnership-driven model won out over Amazon’s building-block approach.

The discussion also covers Intercom’s volunteer-based on-call system, their pivot to AI agents after ChatGPT’s launch, concerns about the shrinking pipeline of systems engineers, and how companies like PlanetScale and Snowflake are outpacing AWS by delivering superior user experiences.

About Brian: Brian is an engineer based in Intercom’s Dublin office. He fixes problems, builds things, and grows people.

Show Highlights

(01:34) The Digital Clippy Rant

(2:16) The Good Chatbot vs. Bad Chatbot

(03:51) The AI Chatbot Revolution

(04:33) Unexpected Consequences of Good Chatbots

(05:42) AI Support vs. Human Support

(05:59) The Alexa Problem and Feature Discoverability

(19:03) Amazon's Struggles Moving Up the Stack

(26:55) The Unix Networking Society Origins

(34:43) The Global On-Call Challenge

(42:09) LinkedIn: The World's Largest Porn Site

Links

Intercom: intercom.com

Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/

Brian on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bscanlan.bsky.social

Sponsor
Wiz - Listen to Crying Out Cloud: wiz.io/crying-out-cloud

Conversations at the Intersection of AI and Code with Harjot Gill

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0700

AI is rewriting the rules of code review and CodeRabbit is leading the charge. In this featured episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Harjot Gill shares with Corey Quinn how his team built the most-installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab, nailed positive unit economics, and turned code review into a powerful guardrail for the AI era.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Entrepreneurial Journey and Code Rabbit's Origin

(3:06) The Broken Nature of Code Reviews

(5:47) Developer Feedback and the Future of Code Review

(9:50) AI-Generated Code and the Code Review Burden

(11:46) Traditional Tools vs. AI in Code Review

(13:41) Keeping Up with State-of-the-Art Models

(16:16) Cloud Architecture and Google Cloud Run

(18:21) Context Engineering for Large Codebases

(20:52) Taming LLMs and Balancing Feedback
(22:30) Business Model and Open Source Strategy

About Harjot Gill

Harjot is the CEO of CodeRabbit, a leading AI-first developer tools company.

Links

Harjot on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harjotsgill/

Sponsor
CodeRabbit: https://coderabbit.link/corey

The Transformation Trap: Why Software Modernization Is Harder Than It Looks

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 06:00:00 -0700

In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Jonathan Schneider, CEO of Moderne and author on Java microservices and automated code remediation. They explore why upgrading legacy systems is so hard, Schneider’s journey from Netflix to building large-scale code transformation tools like OpenRewrite, and how major companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft use it.

They also discuss AI in software development, cutting through the hype to show where it genuinely helps, and the human and technical challenges of modernization. The conversation offers a practical look at how AI and automation can boost productivity without replacing the need for expert oversight.

Show Highlights

(2:07) Book Writing and the Pain of Documentation

(4:03) Why Software Modernization Is So Hard

(6:53) Automating Software Modernization at Netflix

(8:07) Culture and Modernization: Netflix vs. Google vs. JP Morgan

(10:40) Social Engineering Problems in Software Modernization

(13:20) The Geometric Explosion of Software Complexity

(17:57) The Foundation for LLMs in Software Modernization

(21:16) AI Coding Assistants: Confidence, Fallibility, and Collaboration

(22:37) The Python 2 to 3 Migration: Lessons for Modernization

(27:56) The Human Element: Responsibility, Skepticism, and the Future of Work

Links

Crying Out Cloud Podcast & Newsletter: https://www.wiz.io/crying-out-cloud
Modern (Jonathan Schneider's company): https://modern.ai
LinkedIn (Jonathan Schneider): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanschneider/

AI's Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:00:00 -0700

On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and creator of LLM CLI about AI’s realities versus the hype. They dive into Simon’s “lethal trifecta” of AI security risks, his prediction of a major breach within six months, and real-world use cases of his open source tools, from investigative journalism to OSINT sleuthing. Simon shares grounded insights on coding with AI, the real environmental impact, AGI skepticism, and why human expertise still matters. A candid, hype-free take from someone who truly knows the space.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction and Security Concerns
02:32 Conversations and Kindness
04:56 Niche Museums and Collecting
06:52 Blogging as a Superpower
08:01 Challenges of Writing and AI
15:08 Unique Use Cases of Dataset
19:33 The Evolution of Open Source
21:09 Security Vulnerabilities in AI
32:18 Future of AI and AGI Concerns
37:10 Learning Programming with AI
39:12 Vibe Coding and Its Risks
41:49 Environmental Impact of AI
46:34 AI in Legal and Creative Fields
54:20 Voice AI and Ethical Concerns
01:00:07 Monetizing Content Creatively

Links:

Sponsor
Augment Code: https://www.augmentcode.com/

Betting on AI: The Delusion Driving Big Tech

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 06:05:25 -0700

In this deep-dive episode, Corey Quinn and Ed Zitron break down the complex and often murky world of AI and the tech giants fueling today’s rapid innovation. From Nvidia’s soaring valuations to OpenAI’s shaky finances and Microsoft’s high-stakes gambles, they reveal the cracks hidden beneath all the hype.

They navigate the tangled web of corporate finance, big investments, and what could happen if the AI boom falters whether it reshapes the economy or crashes spectacularly.

With sharp takes on the crossroads of AI, crypto hype, SaaS economics, and enterprise software, Cory and Ed cut through the noise to separate myth from reality. They ask: Is today’s tech gold rush truly transformative, or just another bubble pumped up by money, media, and wishful thinking?

If you’re into tech or investing, this episode challenges you to look past the buzzwords and understand the real forces shaping the future of technology.

Highlights
(00:00) Introduction and Initial Thoughts on AI
(00:53) AI Skepticism and Financial Realities
(03:01) Economic Analysis of AI Companies
(07:44) Microsoft and OpenAI: A Complex Relationship
(11:23) The Broader AI Market and Its Challenges
(16:49) Comparing AI to Other Technological Innovations
(34:45) The Salesforce AI Buzzword Craze
(35:09) The Disconnect Between Business Press and Valuations
(36:37) Google's AI Economics and TPU Insights
(39:34) Meta's Midlife Crisis and AI Investments
(47:11) The Nvidia GPU Dependency
(58:40) OpenAI's Financial Struggles

About Ed Zitron
Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national public relations agency focused on technology and business. He writes the popular tech and culture newsletter Where’s Your Ed At and is the author of two books: This Is How You Pitch: How To Kick Ass In Your First Years of PR and Fire Your Publicist. Ed has been named one of Insider’s Top 50 Best Public Relations People in Tech four times.

Links:

Where's your ed at
https://www.ezpr.com/about-us
Better off Line
Snark bot https://bsky.app/profile/aws-snarkbot.lastweekinaws.com

Sponsor
Augment Code: https://www.augmentcode.com/

Reliable Software by Default with Jeremy Edberg

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 03:00:00 -0700

Reliable software shouldn't be an accident, but for most developers it is. Jeremy Edberg, CEO of DBOS and the guy who scaled Reddit and Netflix, joins Corey Quinn to talk about his wild idea of saving your entire app into a database so it can never really break. They chat about Jeremy's "build for three" rule, a plan for scale without going crazy, why he set Reddit's servers to Arizona time to dodge daylight saving time, and how DBOS makes your app as tough as your data. Plus, Jeremy shares his brutally honest take on distributed systems cargo cult, autonomous AI testing, and why making it easy for customers to leave actually keeps them around.

Public Bio:
Jeremy is an angel investor and advisor for various incubators and startups, and the CEO of DBOS. He was the founding Reliability Engineer for Netflix and before that he ran ops for reddit as its first engineering hire. Jeremy also tech-edited the highly acclaimed AWS for Dummies, and he is one of the six original AWS Heroes. He is a noted speaker in serverless computing, distributed computing, availability, rapid scaling, and cloud computing, and holds a Cognitive Science degree from UC Berkeley.

Show Highlights

(02:08) - What DBOS actually does

(04:08) - "Everything as a database" philosophy and why it works

(08:26) - "95% of people will never outgrow one Postgres machine"

(10:13) - Jeremy's Arizona time zone hack at Reddit (and whether it still exists)

(11:22) - "Build for three" philosophy without over-engineering

(17:16) - Extracting data from mainframes older than the founders

(19:00) - Autonomous testing with AI trained on your app's history

(20:07) - The hardest part of dev tools

(22:00) - Corey's brutal pricing page audit methodology

(27:15) - Why making it easy to leave keeps customers around

(34:11) - Learn more about DBOS

Links
DBOS website: https://dbos.dev

DBOS documentation: https://docs.dbos.dev

DBOS GitHub: https://github.com/dbos-inc

DBOS Discord community: https://discord.gg/fMqo9kD

Jeremy Edberg on Twitter: https://x.com/jedberg?lang=en

AWS Heroes program: https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/heroes/

Sponsor
https://wiz.io/scream

See Why GenAI Workloads Are Breaking Observability with Wayne Segar

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 03:00:00 -0700

What happens when you try to monitor something fundamentally unpredictable? In this featured guest episode, Wayne Segar from Dynatrace joins Corey Quinn to tackle the messy reality of observing AI workloads in enterprise environments. They explore why traditional monitoring breaks down with non-deterministic AI systems, how AI Centers of Excellence are helping overcome compliance roadblocks, and why “human in the loop” beats full automation in most real-world scenarios.

From Cursor’s AI-driven customer service fail to why enterprises are consolidating from 15+ observability vendors, this conversation dives into the gap between AI hype and operational reality, and why the companies not shouting the loudest about AI might be the ones actually using it best.

Show Highlights

(00:00) - Cold Open
(00:48) – Introductions and what Dynatrace actually does

(03:28) – Who Dynatrace serves

(04:55) – Why AI isn't prominently featured on Dynatrace's homepage

(05:41) – How Dynatrace built AI into its platform 10 years ago

(07:32) – Observability for GenAI workloads and their complexity

(08:00) – Why AI workloads are "non-deterministic" and what that means for monitoring

(12:00) – When AI goes wrong

(13:35) – “Human in the loop”: Why the smartest companies keep people in control

(16:00) – How AI Centers of Excellence are solving the compliance bottleneck

(18:00) – Are enterprises too paranoid about their data?

(21:00) – Why startups can innovate faster than enterprises

(26:00) – The "multi-function printer problem" plaguing observability platforms

(29:00) – Why you rarely hear customers complain about Dynatrace

(31:28) – Free trials and playground environments

About Wayne Segar

Wayne Segar is Director of Global Field CTOs at Dynatrace and part of the Global Center of Excellence where he focuses on cutting-edge cloud technologies and enabling the adoption of Dynatrace at large enterprise customers. Prior to joining Dynatrace, Wayne was a Dynatrace customer where he was responsible for performance and customer experience at a large financial institution.

Links

Dynatrace website: https://dynatrace.com

Dynatrace free trial: https://dynatrace.com/trial

Dynatrace AI observability: https://dynatrace.com/platform/artificial-intelligence/

Wayne Segar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wayne-segar/

Sponsor

Dynatrace: http://www.dynatrace.com

Presenting at re:Invent with Matt Berk and Bowen Wang

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 07:24:44 -0700

How do you wrangle the chaos of AWS cost tools and live presentations? In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by AWS’s Bowen Wang and Matt Berk to break down their re:Invent talk and everything that almost went off the rails. From surprise tsunami alerts to last-minute feature changes, they explore the anxiety and art behind presenting at scale. They also look at how power user feedback shapes tools like the AWS Pricing Calculator, why storytelling matters more than specs, and what it’s like co-presenting with notes that say “make the rabbit joke.” They also discuss AWS’s internal planning process, how customers can get involved in talks, and where to catch them next.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:38) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(2:35) The importance of collecting feedback before launching a product

(4:52) The difference between the intended use of a product and how it’s actually used

(8:52) How Bowen and Matt were able to be so prepared for their presentation

(13:01) What many people don’t realize goes into practicing for a presentation

(17:14) How having a storyline helped Bowen and Matt facilitate better breakout sessions

(18:26) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(21:02) The importance of being able to go with the flow during presentations

(22:42) Why knowing your audience is essential for having a good presentation

(24:32) Choosing between breadth and depth when giving presentations

(25:05) Bowen and Matt’s advice for people who want to have their opportunity to give a talk with an AWS service team

(34:22) How to keep up with Matt and Bowen

About Matt Berk

Matt Berk is an AWS Principal Technical Account Manager at based in Brooklyn who's passionate about storytelling, cloud technologies, and FinOps. When he's not solving customer issues, Matt can be either be found in nature with his dog Ollie, at popular NYC restaurants, or at home planning his next trip to a theme park.

About Bowen Wang

Bowen Wang is a Principal Product Marketing Manager for AWS Billing and Cost Management Services, where she focuses on enabling finance and business leaders to better understand the value of the cloud and ways to optimize their cloud financial management. In her previous career, she helped a tech start-up enter the Chinese market. When she's not helping customers optimize their cloud costs, you can find her cheering for F1 races with her husband or juggling life as a mom to an energetic toddler and a playful poodle.

Links

AWS Cloud Financial Management Blog Channel: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/
AWS Twitch Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/aws
AWS Tech Tales: https://community.aws/livestreams/aws-tech-tales
The authenticated AWS Pricing Calculator is now generally available: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/the-authenticated-aws-pricing-calculator-is-now-generally-available/

The Latest State of IaC with Ido Neeman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 May 2025 03:00:00 -0700

What’s going on with Infrastructure as Code? On this episode, Corey is joined by Firefly CEO and Co-Founder Ido Neeman to discuss the findings of the State of IaC 2025 report. Throughout their chat, Corey and Ido discuss the evolution of IaC adoption in enterprises, the challenges of managing multi-cloud and multi-IaC environments, and the importance of disaster recovery as code. The conversation also touches on the rise of open-source projects like Open Tofu and the significant role of automation in cloud cost optimization. This episode not only reflects on recent trends, but highlights the importance of robust cloud governance and the continuous need for innovation amidst increasing cloud complexity.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:59) Firefly sponsor read

(1:29) Firefly's semi-pivot to AI

(2:54) The findings of the State of IaC 2025 survey

(5:40) How are people working in multi-cloud environments

(8:14) Is there a responsible way to use Helm charts?

(11:21) The currrent state of Pulumi

(12:46) Problems that can be encountered with large enterprises

(18:07) The continuum between innovation and optimization

(21:51) Firefly sponsor read

(22:31) Are companies actually adopting infrastructure as code?

(28:49) The most interesting ways that Ido has seen enterprises use IaC in production

(33:40) What's stopping companies from fully leveraging IaC?

(41:06) Where you can find more from Ido and Firefly

About Ido Neeman

Ido Neeman is CEO and co-founder of Firefly, and the former CEO and co-founder of Nuweba, the fast and secure serverless platform. To the diversity of roles he has held, he brings more than a decade's experience in the elite Israeli intelligence corps, and later led the technology portfolio at a hedge fund. Today, he is focusing on helping organizations tackle cloud chaos through Infrastructure as Code.

Links

Firefly’s website: https://www.firefly.ai/
The State of IaC 2025: https://www.firefly.ai/state-of-iac-2025
Ido on Twitter: https://x.com/idoneeman?lang=en
Ido on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ido-neeman/?originalSubdomain=il

Sponsor

Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/

Opening the Managed NAT Gateway with Malith Rajapakse

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 May 2025 03:00:00 -0700

How does one manage to simplify the complexities of the NAT Gateway? In this episode of "Screaming in the Cloud," Corey Quinn interviews Malith Rajapakse, a DevOps engineer who has recently received acclaim for his blog post discussing the Managed NAT Gateway. Where AWS lacks in its documentation, Malith is a NATural at breaking things down. He’s so great at it that Corey had to invite him on the show! Malith shares the story behind his popular post, his creative process, and his use of interactive diagrams and engaging content. He and Corey also discuss the challenges of documentation and making technical subjects more appealing. Thankfully, Malith has already done that in written form, so enjoy this episode as he speaks it into the world!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:24) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:58) Malith's background before his blog post

(4:21) Why Malith wrote about the Managed NAT Gateway

(5:38) Corey's problems with Managed NAT Gateway and why Malith's blog post impressed him

(10:05) The interactive elements of Malith's blog post and how they were made

(12:21) Maltih's front-end experience

(14:47) Transitioning from front-end to DevOps through JavaScript

(16:20) The juxtaposition of Malith's blog post vs. AWS's official documentation

(18:05) How AWS's documentation of the managed NAT gateway isn't user-friendly

(22:27) Why Malith went all out for his first blog post

(23:17) Corey's constructive feedback for Malith

(26:05) Where you can find more from Malith

About Malith Rajapakse

Malith is a Devops engineer creating visualisations at https://malithr.com/.

Links

Malith’s blog: https://malithr.com/
Interactive AWS NAT Gateway: https://malithr.com/aws/natgateway/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malith-rajapakse/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/malithr.com
Twitter: https://x.com/malithraj
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/mdilraj/
Sam Rose’s blog: https://samwho.dev/
Benjamin Dicken’s blog post on IO devices and latency: https://planetscale.com/blog/io-devices-and-latency
Josh W Comeau’s blog: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/
Killed By Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

The Latest on Microsoft Security with Ann Johnson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 May 2025 03:00:00 -0700

Microsoft has its fingers in a lot of pots, but just how secure are said pots? On this episode, Corey is joined by Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President and Deputy CISO of Microsoft's Customer Security Management Office. Ann talks about her 40-year professional journey and how it's culminated in her current role. Corey is known to “punch up” at the big guys in the tech industry, but he and Ann talk about the challenges of corporate leadership and being a public face in such a prominent company. Since it’s 2025, of course, they’re going to talk about AI’s pros and cons (and why it shouldn’t be used to make art).

Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(0:51) The Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:25) What Ann's been up to since she and Corey last spoke
(2:29) The makeup of Microsoft Security
(4:28) The unique company culture at Microsoft
(8:42) What's going on with Microsoft Azure
(10:31) How Ann handles the immense pressure of working in Microsoft Security
(14:13) The toxic nature of online criticism
(19:57) The Duckbill Group sponsor read
(20:24) The value of telling your leaders the truth
(23:31) Ann's thoughts on the current state of AI
(28:44) Properly defining what AI can and can't do
(30:54) Why Ann helps fund multiple STEM scholarships
(32:16) The need for the humanities alongside tech
(33:38) Where you can find more from Ann Johnson

About Ann Johnson
Ann Johnson is Corporate Vice President and Deputy CISO at Microsoft. In this role, Ann drives all external engagement for the Microsoft Office of the CISO. She is a long-tenured, recognized thought leader on cybersecurity, published author, and a sought-after global speaker and digital author specializing in cyber resilience, online fraud, cyberattacks, compliance, and security. 

Ann challenges traditional schools of thought and cyber-norms–from the way the tech industry tackles cyber threats to the language it uses to communicate–and encourages the industry to get outside its comfort zones and expand how it addresses the evolving threat landscape with the power of technology and people. As a global cybersecurity leader and strategist, she is looking ahead at how today’s cybersecurity investments will impact tomorrow’s cybersecurity reality.  

Ann currently serves on the Board of Directors of N-Able, Human Security, Datavant, and is Member of the Board of Advisors for Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, WA and the Signal Cyber Museum Society. Ann is also an Executive Sponsor of the Microsoft Women in Cybersecurity Group.

Links

Ann Johnson’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-johnsons/
Microsoft Security: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security
Afternoon Cyber Tea: afternooncybertea.com

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Finding Engineers with Empathy with Lili Rogowsky

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 03:00:00 -0700

If you believed, they put a data center on the moon. No, for real, they did, and it’s partially thanks to Lili Rogowsky, partner at Atypical Ventures. Lili joins Corey to discuss her unconventional leap from law to venture capital. Although she made a sharp turn career-wise, Lili remains grounded in the often heartless world of venture capital—highlighting the importance of empathy and technical prowess in founding successful enterprises. Out of all resources, time carries the heftiest price tag, and this half-hour episode is a low-risk, high-yield investment.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:12) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:46) How Corey (kinda) met Lili

(3:38) What attracted Corey to Atypical Ventures

(5:58) How Atypical helped put a data center on the moon

(8:34) VC “done right”

(9:59) What led Lili to run a VC firm

(13:43) Quitting jobs until you find something you like

(16:28) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(16:54) The value of sharing your time

(21:44) Risk assessment, well-dressed horses, and punching up in comedy

(24:44) The importance of humility in life and business

(29:15) Where you can find more from Lili and Atypical Ventures

About Lili Rogowsky

Lili is a dynamic investor, attorney, advisor, and entrepreneur. She is a partner at Atypical Ventures, an early-stage fund that identifies and invests in “engineers with empathy” working on plausible science fiction.

A voracious reader driven by her curiosity and love of type 2 fun, Lili’s experience includes (in no particular order) mountaineering, visual arts, marine science, founding a law firm, cave/ shark diving (not necessarily at the same time), data privacy/ security, gardening, recruiting, battling NYC rats that eat her car, and interplanetary internet.

Links

Atypical Ventures: atypical.com
Email Lili: lili@atypical.vc

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Making Dropping and Sharing Easy with Timo Josten

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 03:00:00 -0700

Dropping and sharing files should be easy. What a novel idea. On this episode, Corey speaks with Timo Josten, the sole developer behind Dropshare. We bring up the fact that he’s the only guy working on it because the tool is quite impressive! Corey loves it and so does an entire community of folks on Github! Together, they discuss the evolution and functionality of Dropshare. Timo also shares how he balance of enhancing Dropshare, emphasizing user feedback, and customization options, all while offering feature updates and maintaining sustainability.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:06) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:39) What does Dropshare do?

(6:10) Dropshare's impressive flexibility and dedicated community

(10:27) How Timo landed on Dropshare's business model

(12:38) What's new in Dropshare 6?

(16:09) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(16:36) Determining what should be an update or part of the next version of Dropshare

(18:30) Dropshare’s iOS app

(21:04) The perks of being able to configure deletion in Dropshare

(25:45) Dropshare's thriving GitHub community

(29:26) Where you can find more from Timo and Dropshare

About Timo Josten

Timo Josten is the developer of Dropshare, the macOS and iOS app to upload anything anywhere.

Links

Timo’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timo-josten-493962185/
Timo’s personal website: https://josten.io
Dropshare: https://dropshare.app/
shitposting.pictures

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

“Just in Case” vs. “Just in Time” with Aditya Bhargava

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 03:00:00 -0700

How you learn is important. Corey Quinn is joined by Aditya Bhargava, a Staff Software Engineer at Etsy and the author of Grokking Algorithms. They talk about the nuances of technical learning and the contrasting philosophies of "just in time" versus "just in case" learning. In this episode, Aditya emphasizes the importance of effective teaching methods and the value of incorporating fun things like drawings into technical explanations. This approach also bleeds into his illustrated Substack, DuckTypes. As Corey and Aditya discuss, a good, informative book doesn’t need to drag on, and this quick, insightful, 30-minute conversation is no different.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:24) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:58) Corey's admiration for Aditya's writing

(5:40) How Aditya clearly explains AWS networking

(8:06) “Just in case” vs. “just in time”

(10:15) Why business books don't need to be hundreds of pages long

(14:19) Reading for pleasure vs. reading for work

(16:57) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(17:24) Explaining Aditya's book on algorithms

(20:07) The great editor behind Aditya's book

(22:20) DuckTyped and how Aditya got into AWS networking

(25:16) Where networking folks fall in the era of the cloud

(28:12) The importance of staying up-to-date in your field

(31:46) Where you can find more from Aditya

About Aditya Bhargava

Aditya Bhargava is a Software Engineer with a dual background in Computer Science and Fine Arts. He blogs on programming at adit.io.

Links

Aditya’s blog: https://www.adit.io/
Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition: https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-algorithms-second-edition
DuckTyped: https://www.ducktyped.org/
Last Skeet in AWS: https://lastskeetinaws.com/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

The Current State of Cloud Security with Crystal Morin

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 03:00:00 -0700

Sysdig’s 2025 Cloud-Native and Security Usage Report is hot off the presses, and Corey has questions. On this episode, he’s joined by Crystal Morin, a Cybersecurity Strategist at Sysdig, to break down the trends of the past year. They discuss Sysdig’s approach to detecting and responding to security and the success the company has seen with the rollout of Sysdig Sage (an AI product that Corey thinks is actually useful). They also chat about what’s driving a spike in machine identities, practical hygiene in cloud environments, and the crucial importance of automated responses to maintain robust security in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:39) Sysdig sponsor read

(2:22) Explaining Sysdig's 5/5/5 Benchmark

(4:06) What does Sysdig's work entail?

(10:03) Cloud security trends that have changed over the last year

(14:30) Sysdig sponsor read

(15:16) How Sysdig is using AI in its security products

(19:09) How many users are adopting AI tools like Sysdig Sage

(25:51) The reality behind the recent spike of machine identities in security

(29:24) Handling the scaling of machine identities

(35:37) Where you can find Sysdig's 2025 Cloud-Native and Security Usage Report

About Crystal Morin

Crystal Morin is a Cybersecurity Strategist with more than 10 years of experience in threat analysis and research. Crystal started her career as both a Cryptologic Language Analyst and Intelligence Analyst in the United States Air Force and as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, where she helped develop and evolve their cyber threat intelligence community and threat-hunting capabilities. In 2022, Crystal joined Sysdig as a Threat Research Engineer on the Sysdig Threat Research Team, where she worked to discover and analyze cyber threat actors taking advantage of the cloud. Today, Crystal bridges the gap between business and security through cloud-focused content for leaders and practitioners alike. Crystal’s thought leadership has been foundational for pieces such as the “2024 Cloud-Native Security and Usage Report” and “Cloud vs. On-Premises: Unraveling the Mystery of the Dwell Time Disparity,” among others.

Links

Sysdig’s 2025 Cloud-Native and Security Usage Report: https://sysdig.com/2025-cloud-native-security-and-usage-report/
Sysdig on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sysdig/
Crystal’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crystal-morin/

Sponsor

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/

The Difference Between Marketing and BS with Jonathan Cowperthwait

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 03:00:00 -0700

What’s the difference between marketing and BS? On this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Jonathan Cowperthwait, Duckbill’s brand-new Head of Marketing. Jonathan's career path is a bit unconventional. After all, not everyone can say their professional journey was influenced by The West Wing. Even though he’s a marketer by trade, Jonathan still has the technical know-how needed to work in the often expensive world of cloud economics. Have you ever wanted to know what The Duckbill Group’s relationship with AWS is really like? How fun is it to sit on domains like “oldmanstartup?” Is there a similarity between clouds and butts? This interview is the inside scoop on The Duckbill Group that you never knew you needed.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:11) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:45) Acquiring the Duckbill Group office post-pandemic

(2:52) Keeping your pants on during a pandemic so you can officiate your nanny's wedding

(6:07) Jonathan's background prior to joining The Duckbill Group

(11:29) What Duckbill was looking for when they hired Jonathan

(14:54) When marketing begins to feel like spam

(15:40) The fun of having disposable domains and email addresses

(18:20) The importance of a good name for a product

(19:38) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(20:07) The Duckbill Group isn't just Corey Quinn

(21:03) The "Cloud to Butt" extension

(24:01) Corey's beef with Google's AI search engine

(24:57) What can people expect from the Duckbill Group's new marketing effort

(30:58) Where you can find more from Jonathan

About Jonathan Cowperthwait

Jonathan Cowperthwait does positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy to maximize awareness and revenue for technology brands of all sizes.

He prides himself on being a slow runner, fast talker, and good writer.

Links

Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cowperthwait/
Jonathan on Bluesky: https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/cowp.co
Email Jonathan: offmylawn@oldmanstartup.com
Email Corey: corey@shitposting.monster

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Kicking Off a Tech Career as a Preteen with Alex Zenla

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 03:00:00 -0800

What were you doing at the age of 12? We’d wager to bet you weren’t getting invited to Google I/O. On this episode, Corey chats with Alex Zenla, the founder and CTO of Edera. Only in her mid-20s, Alex already has more than a decade’s worth of professional experience working in the tech industry. They discuss how Alex found her way into programming at a young age, her experiences with open source projects like the Dart Project and Chromium OS, and getting contacted by Google’s lawyers as a preteen. You’ll also get to learn about Alex’s company, Edera, and their creative approaches to Kubernetes container security using Xen hypervisors. Did we forget to mention that there are multiple sidebars about Minecraft in this one? So grab your pick axe, put on your headphones, and a Google legal will be at your door by the time we wrap up this conversation.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:54) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:28) What is Edera?

(2:18) Who is the target customer for Edera's product

(7:50) Breaking down the overhead makeup of Edera

(10:28) How Edera sidesteps the problems with container isolation

(13:20) Alex's history working with tech

(15:40) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(16:23) How a phone call with a lawyer helped get Alex to Google I/O at the age of 12

(18:55) Starting Alex's proper tech career thanks to a Dart library

(21:24) The important role of Minecraft in Alex's life and career

(23:40) The value of good networking

(28:15) What it's been like for Alex to raise a Series A

(29:56) Where you can find more from Alex

About Alex Zenla

Alex Zenla is a technologist that has 10+ years experience in the full-time corporate world who is rebuilding the foundations of infrastructure to be secure-by-design.

Alex grew an interest in computers at the age of 7, learning about hypervisors and hardware technologies. At the age of 11, she was inspired by the concept of Chrome OS to get involved in low level systems, where she contributed to the Chromium and Chromium OS projects. This led to being invited to Google I/O 2012 by the Chrome OS team at just the age of 12. Eventually, the Dart programming language came along, and Alex got deeply involved in the ecosystem, contributing to the language and standard library, and building core open source technologies. At the age of 14, she was hired by an IoT company called DGLogik to build an IoT platform that could scale across complex networks, launching my career in IoT. At DGLogik, Alex became deeply involved in Google's IoT technologies across multiple divisions, ultimately ending up working at Google on their IoT platform for their internal Real Estate. In 2024, she retired from the IoT data sphere and started Edera, a company that is making computing secure-by-design.

Links

Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alex.zenla.io

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

S3 and the Evolution of Storage with Andy Warfield

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 03:00:00 -0800

Andy Warfield joins Corey in this episode to discuss the evolution of storage technology at Amazon. This includes the evolution of S3 from archival storage to supporting modern AI and analytics. As Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, Andy is able to explain performance-enhancing innovations like S3 Tables and Common Runtime (CRT). On the other hand, challenges like compaction and namespace structuring are discussed. Reflecting on his journey from working on the Xen hypervisor to AWS, Andy shares insights into scaling S3, including buckets spanning millions of hard disks.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:09) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:43) Andy’s background

(3:38) How AWS envisioned services being used vs. what customers actually do with them

(6:54) The frustration of legacy applications not keeping up with the times

(10:14) Why S3 is so accurate

(15:29) S3 as a role model for how a service should be run

(18:04) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(18:46) Why AWS made Iceberg into a native offering

(23:50) Why S3 Tables is slightly more expensive

(28:23) How Andy handled the transition from Zen to Nitro

(32:22) What Andy is currently excited about

About Andy Warfield

Andrew Warfield is a VP / Distinguished Engineer at Amazon. As a senior technical leader at one of the world's largest technology companies, he plays a crucial role in shaping Amazon's engineering strategies and initiatives.

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andywarfield/
Email: warfield@Amazon.com

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Evolving, Adapting, and Staying Prepared with Brian Weber

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

Ever wondered how Corey got to where he is today? You have Brian Weber to partially thank for that. On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey catches up with his old friend and mentor to talk about the ever-evolving world of tech. Brian’s been around the block a time or two having done significant stints at Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter (during the Elon acquisition no less)! As Corey and Brian catch up, you’ll hear them chat about the importance of empathy, coaching the next generation of tech workers, and their conspiracies surrounding Google and Kubernetes. So grab your tinfoil hats, it’s time to go Screaming!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:53) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:27) When Brian took Corey under his win

(3:21) Brian's experience coming to the cloud as an engineer

(7:24) Why it's important to reinvent yourself in tech

(8:54) How Brian reacted to the industry adopting Kubernetes over Mesos Marathon

(10:31) Kubernetes conspiracy theories

(12:30) The importance of empathy in tech

(15:46) Trying to advise younger generations entering tech

(19:19) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(20:02) Working at Twitter when jobs started getting cut and the site frequently went down

(22:41) The best way to navigate certification expiration

(26:08) Talking about "The Golden Path”

(28:52) Why you should always plan ahead in tech (and life)

(34:21) Where you can find more from Brian

About Brian Weber

Brian is a former FedRAMP DevOps Engineer for Coralogix. He’s also been a Site Reliability Engineer at Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, where he has maintained large installations on-premises, building reliability, security, and developer efficiency. In my spare time, Brian skis, knits, cycles, bakes, and tries to spend as much time outdoors as possible.

Links

Brian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-weber-2423b55/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay- A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we look back at our conversation with Amy Negrette. Before she joined DigitalOcean Senior Development Advocate, she was a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. Prior to that, Amy worked as a cloud architect at Trek10, Inc., a cloud software engineer lead at Cloudreach, a software developer at ASRC Research and Technology Solutions, and a software engineer at Yahoo, among other positions. She’s also an organizer of Write/Speak/Code, an organization committed to helping Under Represented Genders sharpen their technical speaking and writing capabilities. Join Corey and Amy as they discuss the pros and cons of remote work, what Duckbill’s organizational structure is like, remote work during the pandemic vs. remote work during the before times, why it’s nice to be able to work whenever you want to work instead of during fixed hours, why the future of travel in the tech industry should change, how Corey and Amy met, what makes cloud economics come natural to Amy, a tool that helps recreate physical events online more effectively than Zoom, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:57) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:30) Amy’s experience working with The Duckbill Group during the pandemic

(7:20) When Amy was the only cloud economist with a background in software engineering

(12:36) Is it antiquated to go on-site to meet with clients?

(16:23) Amy’s time spent working at NASA

(17:55) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(18:38) What it’s like working IT for NASA

(20:28) Amy’s background prior to cloud consulting

(24:15) Amy’s view on public speaking events coming out of the pandemic

(29:21) Corey’s qualms with re:Invent

(31:51) Where you can find more from Amy

About Amy Arambulo Negrette

With over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. Amy believe that strong and consistent communication can produce the best product and overall customer experience, whether it's in gaming, educational outreach, or internal tools. Her long term goal is to lead people and have creative control over my projects.

Links

The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/
Amy’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/a-conversation-between-cloud-economists-with-amy-arambulo-negrette/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - Inspiring the Next Generation of Devs with Scott Hanselman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by Microsoft's current Vice President of Developer Community, Scott Hanselman. They talk about how Scott is selling enthusiasm around free and open source software to empower the next generation of programmers, how technology can help you escape a suboptimal position in life, moving a blog that was hosted on a Windows Server 2008 server to Azure, using TikTok to encourage younger folks to get into coding, why there isn’t a wrong programming language to learn and why you should learn JavaScript, how the rise of SaaS and cloud computing has made Microsoft a “simpler” company, convincing banks to use open source in the 2000s, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:29) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:13) What Scott did as Microsoft’s Partner Program Manager

(2:05) Scott’s various passions and projects

(4:37) Changes at Microsoft since Corey last kept track of the company

(10:15) Why Corey struggles to get back into the Windows ecosystem

(17:45) The convenience of having everything more accessible and hosted in Azure

(24:36) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(25:19) The importance of the struggle when starting out in tech

(30:55) Microsoft’s cultural transformation

(34:32) Why Scott has turned to social media to reach the next generation of engineers

(39:18) Where you can find more from Scott

About Scott Hanselman

Scott has been a developer for 30 years and has been blogging at https://hanselman.com for 20 years! He works in Open Source on .NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has been podcasting for over 950 episodes of http://hanselminutes.com over 18 years and over 750 episodes of http://www.azurefriday.com. He's written a number of technical books and spoken in person to over one million developers worldwide! He's also on TikTok, which was very likely a huge mistake.

Links

Hanselminutes Podcast: https://www.hanselminutes.com/
Personal website: https://hanselman.com

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/inspiring-the-next-generation-of-devs-on-tiktok-with-scott-hanselman/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - Analyzing Analysts with James Governor

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. In this throwback, they discuss how RedMonk is different from traditional analyst firms. You’ll also learn how Corey and James met, how James credentialed Corey as a bona fide industry analyst on Twitter, and how anyone can be an analyst in theory. Beyond that, James explains the mindset required to give advice as an analyst, what attracted him to becoming an analyst in the first place, and why RedMonk focuses on the qualitative instead of the quantitative.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:29) The Wiz sponsor read

(1:31) What lead James to become an analyst and founding RedMonk

(4:36) Why James believes developers are the “ new monarchmakers”

(10:06) Recounting the time James credentialed Corey as an analyst on Twitter

(12:24) Who and what are analysts?

(17:44) The woes of rage-driven development

(21:01) The Wiz sponsor read

(21:55) Why Corey thinks James is a model Twitter user and advocate

(25:23) What makes RedMonk’s industry events stick out from everyone else

(35:15) Why James habitually changes his name on Twitter

(36:45) Where you can find more from James

About James Governor

James Governor founded RedMonk in 2002 with Stephen O'Grady. They focus on developers as the real key influencers in tech. Understanding that people choose technology because of gut instincts not facts per se. As an ex-journalist, James has managed teams and news agendas in the weekly publication grind. He has also been IBM and MS watcher since 1995.

Links

RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/
James’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/MonkChips
Monktoberfest: https://monktoberfest.com/
Monki Gras: https://monkigras.com/

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/analyzing-analysts-with-james-governor/

Sponsor

The Wiz: wiz.io/scream

Replay - Changing the Way We Interview with Emma Bostian

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by Emma Bostian, an Engineering Manager at Spotify in Stockholm. Emma is also an author, co-host of the Ladybug Podcast, and has a strong following on social media. She goes into the details on her podcast and the varied nature of her and her co-hosts, she also discusses her book Decoding the Technical Interview Process, in which she breaks down the seemingly esoteric nature of interviewing for these highly technical jobs—but her focus is on the frontend. She and Corey discuss the general banality of these interviews and the direction they can, and should, go in to improve. Emma also loves to teach, to add even more to her portfolio! She goes into the five w’s of her work with LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters. Emma also has some excellent insights into her sizable Twitter presence. Tune in for Emma’s variegated offerings!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:58) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:31) Hosting the Ladybug Podcast and teaching online courses

(3:13) Why Emma wrote Decoding the Technical Interview Process

(7:01) Corey’s qualms with how people interview in tech

(12:03) Why Corey appreciates Emma's guidance on how to interview

(14:50) Bizarre hiring practices that some interviewers use

(18:20) Passion, work/life balance, and seeking out new employees

(19:41) Turning side projects into revenue streams

(22:23) Seeking out sponsors instead of monetizing your audience

(26:06) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(26:49) Balancing customer service with piracy

(29:35) Letting your online following become your resume

(36:01) Where you can find more from Emma

About Emma Bostian

Emma Bostian is an Engineering Manager at Spotify in Stockholm. She is also a co-host of the Ladybug Podcast, author of Decoding The Technical Interview Process, and an instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters.

Links

Ladybug Podcast: https://www.ladybug.dev
LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/emma-bostian
Frontend Masters: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/emma-bostian/
Decoding the Technical Interview Process: https://technicalinterviews.dev
Emma's Twitter: https://twitter.com/emmabostian

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/changing-the-way-we-interview-with-emma-bostian/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Heroku’s Resurgence with Adam Zimman

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn welcomes Adam Zimman back to Screaming in the Cloud for a sponsored episode featuring Heroku by Salesforce. As Head of Product Marketing, Adam discusses after years of stagnation following its Salesforce acquisition. Recent investments and a dedicated team signal a renewed focus on developer experience. The duo explores Heroku's impact on modern app development, its role in popularizing the 12-Factor App model, and the decision to retire its free tier. Adam highlights key updates, including Kubernetes replatforming, .NET support, and AI tools for managed inference and agents. He also teases his upcoming book, Progressive Delivery, set for release next year.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:01) Heroku sponsor read

(1:39) How Heroku became resurgent

(5:46) Heroku’s legacy

(9:53) Adam’s thoughts on people’s response to the free tier going away

(10:55) Heroku’s target customer(s)

(13:51) Heroku sponsor read

(14:19) How Heroku saves organizations money and developed over time

(20:08) Heroku’s re:Invent announcements

(24:53) How modern-day developers have reacted to Heroku’s resurgence

(27:47) Where people can learn more about Heroku

About Adam Zimman

Adam Zimman is Technologist and Author currently serving as the Head of Product Marketing at Heroku by SalesForce. Previously, he was a Venture Capital Advisor providing guidance on leadership, platform architecture, product marketing, and GTM strategy. He has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and consumer companies such as VMware, EMC, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly.

Adam is driven by a passion for inclusive leadership and solving problems with technology. He is a co-author of Progressive Delivery: Build the right thing, for the right people, at the right time. His perspective has been shaped by a degree (AB) from Bowdoin College with a dual-focus in Physics and Visual Art, an ongoing adventure as a husband and father, and a childhood career as a fire juggler.

Links

Heroku’s website: https://www.heroku.com/
Adam’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/azimman.bsky.social
Adam’s Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@az
Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamzimman/
Personal site: https://progressivedelivery.com/

Sponsor
Heroku: http://heroku.com/

Replay - Speaking Truth to Power in Tech with Dai Wakabayashi

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by accomplished tech journalist Daisuke Wakabayashi to explore the world of tech reporting. The pair discuss Dai’s 2019 article on AWS while touching on a number of topics, including how AWS evolved from a platform everyone built on top of to one that runs everything built on top of it. Both explore why it’s incredibly difficult to capture all the nuances of the world of open source in a single article, the collaborative nature of writing the news, and how a journalist can tell when they’ve written a story that doesn’t have mistakes. Dai and Corey also unpack why Amazon as a trillion-dollar company should expect more scrutiny, what it was like to try to get people to go on the record talking about AWS, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:29) The Duckbill Group Sponsor read

(1:02) A brief look at Dai’s background as a journalist

(2:00) Dai’s article covering AWS’s business practices

(3:47) Unpacking the discussion around Dai’s article

(6:09) The careful thought and nuance that goes into writing an investigative news article

(8:59) How AWS insiders are responding to Dai’s article

(11:50) The importance of disclosures in journalism

(14:32) AWS’s blog post responding to Dai

(18:41) The Duckbill Group Sponsor read

(19:24) How criticism affects relationships with AWS

(23:36) Corey’s reaction to getting mentioned in Dai’s article and the NYT style guide

(27:18) Why it’s still important for journalists to speak truth to power

(32:22) Where you can find more from Dai

About Dai Wakabayashi
Daisuke Wakabayashi was born in Singapore, lived in Tokyo, and spent the bulk of his childhood in New Jersey. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. Daisuke’s journalism career started at Reuters in Tokyo. He also worked for Reuters in Boston and Seattle, covering everything from industrial conglomerates to natural disasters. He returned to Japan with The Wall Street Journal covering technology and then returned to the United States to cover Apple. Wakabayashi joined The New York Times in 2016 and covered Google from the paper’s San Francisco bureau. In 2022, he moved with my family to Seoul to take his current job as an Asia business correspondent for The Times.

Links

Dai’s 2019 article “Prime Leverage: How Amazon Wields Power in the Technology World”: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html
Twitter: @daiwaka
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwakabayashi/
Personal site: https://www.nytimes.com/by/daisuke-wakabayashi
Company site: nytimes.com

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/speaking-truth-to-power-in-tech-with-dai-wakabayashi/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - Helping Avoid the Kubernetes Hiccups with Rich Burroughs

Corey Quinn — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by Rich Burroughs, a former Staff Developer Advocate at Loft Labs. Rich is a great resource for all things Kubernetes, and he even hosts his own podcast (link in the description below) where he interviews people in the community. Rich and Corey discuss learning to work well with ADHD, which he has launched into the Twitter-verse for the sake of advocacy. Rich offers his perspective on how to do so, and to do it well. Rich talks about working at large companies, versus small and the various responsibilities of working with the latter. Tune in for Rich’s take!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:50) The Duckbill Group Sponsor read

(1:23) Loft Labs’s work with Kubernetes

(3:15) Doing developer advocacy with Kubernetes

(7:01) Is developer advocacy repetitive for Rich?

(12:06) Going in-depth about Loft Labs

(16:40) The Duckbill Group Sponsor read

(17:22) The blessing (and curse) of being great at your job

(24:38) Learning to live with ADHD

(32:15) Where you can find more from Rich

About Rich Burroughs
Rich Burroughs is a tech professional focused on improving workflows for developers and platform engineers using Kubernetes. He's the creator and host of the Kube Cuddle podcast where he interviews members of the Kubernetes community. He is one of the founding organizers of DevOpsDays Portland, and he's helped organize other community events. Rich has a strong interest in how working in tech impacts mental health. He has ADHD and has documented his journey on Twitter since being diagnosed.

Links

Kube Cuddle Podcast: https://kubecuddle.transistor.fm
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richburroughs/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/richburroughs
Polywork: https://www.polywork.com/richburroughs

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/helping-avoid-the-kubernetes-hiccups-with-rich-burroughs/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - Hacking AWS in Good Faith with Nick Frichette

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we’re taking you back to our chat with Nick Frichette. He’s the maintainer of hackingthe.cloud, and holds security and solutions architect AWS certifications, and in his spare time, he conducts vulnerability research at Hacking the Cloud. Join Corey and Nick as they talk about the various kinds of cloud security researchers and touch upon offensive security, why Nick decided to create Hacking the Cloud, how AWS lets security researchers conduct penetration testing in good faith, some of the more interesting AWS exploits Nick has discovered, how it’s fun to play keep-away with incident response, why you need to get legal approval before conducting penetration testing, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:42) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:15) What is a Cloud Security Researcher?

(3:49) Nick’s work with Hacking the Cloud

(5:24) Building relationships with cloud providers

(7:34) Nick’s security findings through cloud logs

(13:05) How Nick finds security flaws

(15:31) Reporting vulnerabilities to AWS and “bug bounty” programs

(18:41) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(19:24) How to report vulnerabilities ethically

(21:52) Good disclosure programs vs. bad ones

(28:23) What’s next for Nick

(31:27) Where you can find more from Nick

About Nick Frichette

Nick Frichette is a Staff Security Researcher at Datadog, specializing in offensive security within AWS environments. His focus is on discovering new attack vectors targeting AWS services, environments, and applications. From his research, Nick develops detection methods and preventive measures to secure these systems. Nick’s work often leads to the discovery of vulnerabilities within AWS itself, and he collaborates closely with Amazon to ensure they are remediated.

Nick has also presented his research at major industry conferences, including Black Hat USA, DEF CON, fwd:cloudsec, and others.

Links

Hacking the Cloud: https://hackingthe.cloud/
Determine the account ID that owned an S3 bucket vulnerability: https://hackingthe.cloud/aws/enumeration/account_id_from_s3_bucket/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/frichette_n
Personal website:https://frichetten.com

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/hacking-aws-in-good-faith-with-nick-frichette/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by Nipun Agarwal, Senior Vice President of MySQL HeatWave Development at Oracle, to discuss the release of MySQL HeatWave and how it will benefit users among the sea of database offerings on AWS. Nipun reveals why Oracle decided to develop HeatWave, how HeatWave is providing meaningful cost savings to users, and how HeatWave has been optimized for the cloud. Nipun explains how they’ve lowered the barriers to entry for new users of HeatWave, and Oracle’s focus on implementing customer feedback when developing new offerings.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:55) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:28) The significance of HeatWave coming to AWS

(2:20) What is MySQL HeatWave?

(5:13) What jumped out to Corey during his conversations with Nipun on Oracle

(8:40) What’s “under the hood” of MySQL HeatWave

(14:12) How Oracle built out its pricing for MySQL HeatWave

(16:41) Why MySQL HeatWave doesn’t show up on AWS bills

(21:27) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(22:09) Oracle’s historical customer base and the company’s credit system

(24:30) The point behind MySQL HeatWave

(27:51) How MySQL HeatWave runs

(33:53) Where you can find more from Nipun and Oracle

About Nipun Agarwal

Nipun Agarwal is a Senior Vice President, MySQL HeatWave and Advanced Development, Oracle. His interests include distributed data processing, machine learning, cloud technologies and security. Nipun was part of the Oracle Database team where he introduced a number of new features. He has been awarded over 170 patents., Nipun Agarwal is Senior Vice President of MySQL Database & HeatWave Development. He leads a global engineering organization responsible for Oracle’s MySQL innovations that enable organizations to use a single database for both transactional and analytical workloads. His interests include data processing, distributed systems, machine learning, cloud computing and security. Prior to his current position, Nipun was with Oracle Labs and the Oracle Database team, where he introduced a number of new features. He has been awarded over 175 patents.

Links

Oracle: https://oracle.com
MySQL HeatWave info: https://www.oracle.com/mysql/
MySQL Service on AWS and OCI login (Oracle account required): https://cloud.mysql.com

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/heatwave-and-the-latest-evolution-of-mysql-with-nipun-agarwal/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - Learning to Give in the Cloud with Andrew Brown

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

The tech industry is getting long enough in the teeth that now there are some bonafide old fogeys. Nevertheless there, fortunately, are plenty of younger tech folks out there pushing the thought and mentality of the industry forward. Andrew Brown, Co-Founder and Cloud Instructor at ExamPro Training Inc certainly is, but his presence in the community is so much more! On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Andrew talks about the various internet platforms that he stays active on, and his mission to provide education on the cloud. Importantly so, Andrew does so with an immense amount of generosity. As he puts it, he couldn’t imagine taking money for the courses that he has created. Andrew and Corey discuss at length their thoughts on cloud certifications, the worth of multicloud, and much more!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:41) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:15) Why Corey struggles to keep up with Andrew’s impressive online presence

(2:47) Explaining ExamPro

(6:39) The troubles of online “experts”

(13:01) Andrew’s thoughts on using certifications as proxies

(18:14) The value of certification vs. your level of experience

(22:47) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(23:30) Should engineers learn more than one cloud provider?

(27:10) Is multi-cloud actually the way to go?

(34:31) Where you can find more from Andrew

About Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown has been working in tech 15 years. Today, he creates free cloud certification courses where he teaches people Cloud, DevOps, Data, ML, Security, K8s and Serverless.

Links

ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/
PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown
Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/learning-to-give-in-the-cloud-with-andrew-brown/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Creating the Foundation for a New Home Assistant with Paulus Schoutsen

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn is joined by Paulus Schoutsen, creator of Home Assistant and president of the Open Home Foundation. What started as a Python script to control Hue lights is now a leading open-source smart home platform with 1.6M users. Unlike ad-driven devices, Home Assistant prioritizes privacy, user control, and customization. Backed by the Open Home Foundation, it stays independent from corporate influence. Paulus highlights their community-driven approach, with users sharing automations online. By focusing on open standards, privacy, and user-first development, Home Assistant empowers smarter, more sustainable home automation.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:33) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:45) What inspired Paulus to create Home Assistant

(6:54) How Home Assistant developed from text files to its current incarnation

(12:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(13:42) How Home Assistant is able to detect different IoT devices

(16:06) Why not having investors is a strength for Home Assistant

(21:11) How Home Assistant acts as a unifier for communications protocols

(24:22) Why Big Tech doesn’t have a lot of interest in Home Assistant

(30:45) How to learn more about Home Assistant

About Paulus Schoutsen

Paulus Schoutsen is the creator of Home Assistant, the world’s most active open-source smart home platform, and president of the Open Home Foundation. What started as a Python script to control Philips Hue lights has grown into a global community of over 1.6 million users. Home Assistant stands out for its dedication to privacy, sustainability, and user control, offering a stable, customizable platform free from the ad-driven models of big tech. Paulus also leads Nabucasa, the commercial arm of Home Assistant, and champions the platform’s independence and community-driven ethos, ensuring long-term focus on open standards and user empowerment.

Links

Home Assistant website https://www.home-assistant.io/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Replay - Multi-Cloud is the Future with Tobi Knaup

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Tobi Knaup, the current VP & General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. At the time this first aired, Tobi was the co-founder and CTO of D2iQ before the company was acquired by Nutanix. In this blast from the past, Corey and Tobi discuss why Mesosphere rebranded as D2iQ and why the Kubernetes community deserves the credit for the widespread adoption of the container orchestration platform. Many people assume Kubernetes is all they need, but that’s a mistake, and Tobi explains what other tools they end up having to use. We’ll also hear why Tobi thinks that multi-cloud is the future (it is the title of the episode after all).

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:28) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:01) Memosphere rebranding to D2iQ

(4:34) The strength of the Kubernetes community

(7:43) Is open-source a bad business model?

(10:19) Why you need more than just Kubernetes

(13:13) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(13:55) Is multi-cloud the best practice?

(17:31) Creating a consistent experience between two providers

(19:05) Tobi’s background story

(24:24) Memories of the days of physical data centers

(28:00) How long will Kubernetes be relevant

(30:18) Where you can find more from Tobi

About Tobi Knaup

Tobi Knaup is the VP & General Manager of Cloud Native at Nunatix. Previously, he was the Co-Founder and CTO of D2iQ Kubernetes Platform before Nutanix acquired the company. Knaup is an experienced software engineer focusing on large scale systems and machine learning. Tobi’s research work is on Internet-scale sentiment analysis using online knowledge, linguistic analysis, and machine learning. Outside of his tech work, he enjoys making cocktails and has collected his favorite recipes on his cocktail website.

Links

Tobi’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/superguenter
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiasknaup/
Personal site: https://tobi.knaup.me/

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/multi-cloud-is-the-future-with-tobi-knaup/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Looking at the Current State of Resilience with Spencer Kimball

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, joins Corey Quinn to discuss the evolving challenges of database resilience in 2025. They discuss the State of Resilience 2025 report, revealing widespread operational concerns, costly outages, and gaps in failover preparedness. Modern resilience strategies, like active-active configurations and consensus replication, reduce risks but require expertise and investment. Spencer highlights growing regulatory pressures, such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, and the rising complexity of distributed systems. Despite challenges, Cockroach Labs aims to simplify resilience, enabling organizations to modernize while balancing risk, cost, and customer trust.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:36) Cockroach Labs sponsor read

(3:14) The foundational nature of databases

(3:55) Cockroach Labs’ State of Resilience 2025 report

(8:55) CrowdStrike as an example of why database resilience is so important

(11:04) What Spencer found most surprising in the report’s results

(15:13) Understanding the multi-cloud strategy as safety in numbers

(18:29) Cockroach Labs sponsor read

(19:23) Why cost isn’t the Achilles’ heel of the multi-cloud strategy that some people think

(23:52) Executives are blaming IT people for outages as much

(28:21) The importance of active-active configurations

(32:01) Why anxiety about operational resiliency will never fully go away

(37:52) How to access the State of Resilience 2025 report

About Spencer Kimball

Spencer Kimball is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, a company dedicated to building resilient, cloud-native databases. Before founding Cockroach Labs, Spencer had a distinguished career in technology, including contributions to Google’s Colossus file system. Alongside co-founders Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell, he launched CockroachDB, a globally distributed SQL database designed to handle modern data challenges like resilience, multi-cloud deployment, and compliance with evolving data sovereignty laws. CockroachDB is renowned for its innovative architecture, enabling consistent and scalable database performance across regions and clouds. Under Spencer’s leadership, the company continues to redefine operational resilience for enterprises worldwide.

Links

Cockroach Labs: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
The State of Resilience 2025 report https://www.cockroachlabs.com/guides/the-state-of-resilience-2025/

Sponsor
Cockroach Labs: cockroachlabs.com/lastweek

Helping Securing the Python with Mike Fiedler

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by AWS container hero and security engineer at the Python Software Foundation, Mike Fiedler. They delve into the intricacies of Python's ecosystem, discussing the evolution of PyPI, its significance, and the ongoing battles against security threats like account takeover attacks and typo-squatting. Mike sheds light on his role in maintaining the security and reliability of the Python Package Index, the importance of 2FA, and the collaborative efforts with security researchers. Corey and Mike also explore the challenges and philosophies surrounding legacy systems versus greenfield development, with insights on maintaining critical infrastructure and the often-overlooked aspects of social engineering.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Introduction

(0:47) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:21) Breaking down the Python nomenclature and its usability

(5:49) Figuring out how Boto3 is one of the most downloaded packages

(6:43) Why Mike is the only full-time security and safety engineer at the Python Software Foundation

(9:53) How the Python Software Foundation affords to operate

(14:17) Mike's stack security work

(16:14) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(16:57) Having the "impossible job" of stopping supply chain attacks

(21:00) The dangers of social engineering attacks

(24:44) Why Mike prefers to work on legacy systems

(33:30) Where you can find more from Mike

About Mike Fiedler

Mike Fiedler is a highly analytical, forward-thinking Information Technology professional. His broad-based background includes systems administration and engineering in global environments. Mike is technically astute and versatile with ability to quickly learn, master, and leverage new technologies to meet business needs and has a track record of success in improving performance, stability, and security for all infrastructure and product initiatives.

Mike is also bilingual, speaks English and Hebrew, and he loves solving puzzling problems.

Links

Mike’s Mastadon: https://hachyderm.io/@miketheman
Mike’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/miketheman.com
Mike’s Python Software Foundation blog posts: https://blog.pypi.org/
The Python Package Index Safety & Security Engineer: First Year in Review: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-08-16-safety-and-security-engineer-year-in-review/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Replay - Serverless Hero, Got Servers in His Eyes with Ant Stanley

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Co-Founder of Senzo, Ant Stanley. Ant sits down with Corey to do so. He offers up his history which has lead to his time as “Serverless Hero” to landing on the line that “serverless sucks.” Lend us your ears to see how that transition happened! Ant goes into detail on JeffConf (not the of the Bezos nomen), and working with servers and what to put where and why. Ant and Corey talk over the plague of AWS services where Ant offers his perspective how to trim the fat and keep things simple to make long-term objectives more attainable. They discuss the importance of training, the role of certifications for better and worse, and more. Tune in for his take!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro
(0:51) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:24) What does it mean to be an AWS Serverless Hero?
(3:13) Why Ant and Corey are critical of the state of serverless
(7:53) Woes with Lambda and CloudFront
(10:12) The never-ending stream of new AWS services
(13:36) Hurdles ahead of going serverless
(17:33) Struggles of getting customers to understand a newly built service
(21:31) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(22:14) Pros and cons of certifications
(32:17) Where you can find more from Ant

About Ant Stanley

Ant Stanley is a community focused technologist with a passion for enabling better outcomes for society through technology. He is an AWS Serverless Hero, runs the Serverless London User Group, co-runs ServerlessDays London and is part of the ServerlessDays Global team.

Links

A Cloud Guru: https://acloudguru.com
homeschool.dev: https://homeschool.dev
aws.training: https://aws.training
learn.microsoft.com: https://learn.microsoft.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamstan

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/serverless-hero-got-servers-in-his-eyes-with-ant-stanley/

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Best Practices for Securing AWS Cloud with Eric Carter

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Eric Carter of Sysdig joins Corey to tackle the evolving landscape of cloud security, particularly in AWS environments. As attackers leverage automation to strike within minutes, Sysdig focuses on real-time threat detection and rapid response. Tools like Runtime Insights and open-source Falco help teams identify and mitigate misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and stealthy attacks, while Kubernetes aids in limiting lateral movement. Eric introduced the “10-minute benchmark” for defense, combining automation and human oversight. Adapting to constant change, Sysdig integrates frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to stay ahead of threats. Corey and Eric also discuss Sysdig’s conversational AI security analyst, which simplifies decision-making.

Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(0:32) Sysdig sponsor read
(0:51) What they do at Sysdig
(3:28) When you need a human in the loop vs when AI is useful
(5:12) How AI may affect career progression for cloud security analysts
(8:18) The importance of security for AI
(12:18) Sysdig sponsor read
(12:39) Security practices in AWS
(15:19) How Sysdig’s security reports have shaped Corey’s thinking
(18:10) Where the cloud security industry is headed
(20:03) Cloud security increasingly feeling like an arms race between attackers and defenders
(23:33) Frustrations with properly configuring leased permissions
(28:17) How to keep up with Eric and Sysdig

About Eric Carter
Eric is an AWS Cloud Partner Advocate focused on cultivating Sysdig’s technology cloud and container partner ecosystem. Eric has spearheaded marketing efforts for enterprise technology solutions across various domains, such as security, monitoring, storage, and backup. He is passionate about working with Sysdig's alliance partners, and outside of work, enjoys performing as a guitarist in local cover bands.

Links

Sysdig's website: https://sysdig.com/
Sysdig's AWS Cloud Security: https://sysdig.com/ecosystem/aws/
Sysdig’s 5 Steps to Securing AWS Cloud Infrastructure: https://sysdig.com/content/c/pf-5-steps-to-securing-aws-cloud-infrastructure?x=Xx8NSJ

Sponsor

Sysdig: https://www.sysdig.com

Replay - Finding a Common Language for Incidents with John Allspaw

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, Corey is joined by John Allspaw, Founder/Principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John was foundational in the DevOps movement, but he’s continued to bring much more to the table. He’s written multiple books and seems to always be at the forefront. Which is why he is now at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John tells us what exactly Adaptive Capacity Labs does and how it works and how he convinced some heroes to get behind it. John brings a much-needed insight into how to get multiple people in an organization on the same level when it comes to dealing with incidents. Engineers and non. John points out the issues surrounding public vs. private write-ups and the roadblocks they may prop up. Adaptive Capacity Labs is working towards bringing those roadblocks down, tune in for how!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Introduction

(0:59) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:33) What is Adaptive Capacity Labs and the work that they do?

(3:00) How to effectively learn from incidents

(7:33) What is the root of confusion in incident analysis

(13:20) Identifying if an organization has truly learned from their incidents

(18:23) Gitpod sponsor read

(19:35) Adaptive Capacity Lab’s reputation for positively shifting company culture

(24:22) What the tech industry is missing when it comes to learning effectively from the incidents

(28:44) Where you can find more from John and Adaptive Capacity Labs

About John Allspaw

John Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. John’s publications include the books The Art of Capacity Planning (2009) and Web Operations (2010) as well as the forward to “The DevOps Handbook.” His 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” helped start the DevOps movement.

John served as CTO at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University

Links

The Art of Capacity Planning: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Capacity-Planning-Scaling-Resources/dp/1491939206/
Web Operations: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data-Time/dp/1449377440/
The DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/
Adaptive Capacity Labs: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com
John Allspaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/allspaw
Richard Cook Twitter: https://twitter.com/ri_cook
Dave Woods Twitter: https://twitter.com/ddwoods2

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/finding-a-common-language-for-incidents-with-john-allspaw/

Sponsors

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Gitpod: http://www.gitpod.io/

Replay - Keep on Rockin’ in the Server-Free World with Michael Garski

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Michael Garski, the director of software engineering at famed electrical guitar manufacturer, Fender. Prior to this position, he worked as a principal software architect at Viant, a principal software architect at MySpace, a manager of internet development at Countrywide Financial, and a manager of system architecture at Fandango, among other positions. He also had a four-year stint in the US Navy, working as an engineering laboratory technician. Join Corey and Michael as they talk about how artists are angels and Fender’s job is to give them wings, how Fender has diversified its offerings in recent years, how serverless is a mindset and how Fender approach serverless technology, how Fender’s traffic surged during the pandemic and how everything mostly scaled up without a hitch, the challenges of teaching students to play instruments over the internet, the vendor lock-in boogeyman, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Introduction

(0:42) Dragonfly sponsor read

(1:25) How does Michael describe Fender’s work

(2:08) Fender’s work to go serverless

(4:13) The impact of COVID on Fender

(6:19) Explaining Fender Play and how it works on the backend

(9:44) Working with MediaConvert

(11:30) Experiences with scaling and hitting AWS service limits

(12:52) Why Michael prefers working on the customer side

(15:33) The Duckbill Group sponsor read

(16:15) Frustrations with gateways and third-party apps

(19:03) Managing a massive influx of users during COVID

(21:13) The vendor lock-in boogeyman

(23:19) Cloud costs vs. saving time

(24:49) Walking the fine line of criticism as a director

(28:09) Enforcing consistency across services

(31:52) Where you can find more from Michael

About Michael Garski

Michael Garski has worked in the Los Angeles tech industry for over 20 years, across companies including Fandango, Countrywide Home Loans, MySpace, Viant, and is currently at Fender Musical Instruments as the Director of Platform engineering were he leads the devops, data, and api engineering teams. His focus currently is on building the platform to support the consumer facing digital products for Fender. The most prominent application he supports is Fender Play, a web and mobile application that provides video-based instruction for guitar, bass, and ukulele for more than a quarter-million subscribers.

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgarski/

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/keep-on-rockin-in-the-server-free-world/

Sponsors

Dragonfly: dragonflydb.io

The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com

Standardizing Developer Freedom with Chris Weichel

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Whether remote or local, Gitpod Co-Founder and CTO Chris Weichel thinks there’s a clear benefit to standardizing automated development environments. On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Chris joins Corey to chat about the inception and progression of Gitpod, highlighting the company’s mission to streamline development workflows, improve security, and enhance developer productivity. They also discuss the hurdles and solutions that come with balancing organizational standardization with individual developer preferences. You’ll also get the inside scoop on why Gitpod is transitioning away from Kubernetes and the innovative aspects of Gitpod Flex!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Introduction

(0:27) Gitpod sponsor read

(1:39) What is Gitpod in the modern era?

(3:07) The debate of local vs. remote development

(4:57) Explaining Gitpod's target customers

(9:36) Clarifying Corey's misconceptions about Gitpod

(12:42) Building between developer environments

(15:23) Is something inherently bad if your employer forces you to use it

(17:49) Gitpod sponsor read

(19:01) Deploying local development tools at large scale

(21:16) Launching Gitpod Flex

(22:54) Creating a separate product based on feedback

(24:58) Gitpod's decision to leave Kubernetes

(28:16) Where you can find more from Chris and Gitpod

About Chris Weichel

Chris Weichel is the Chief Technology Officer at Gitpod, where he leads the engineering team that builds and maintains the cloud-native platform for software development. With over 20 years of experience in software engineering and human-computer interaction, he has a comprehensive view of the systems Gitpod creates, from the user experience to the underlying technology.

Chris is passionate about creating technology that empowers users, and solving complex engineering problems. His expertise in cloud-native architecture, programming, and digital fabrication has resulted in multiple publications, patents, and awards. Chris is always looking for new opportunities to apply my broad skill-set and excitement for creating technology in a commercial or research context.

Links

Chris’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-weichel-740b4224/
Chris’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/csweichel
Gitpod: https://www.gitpod.io/
Why Gitpod is leaving Kubernetes: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/we-are-leaving-kubernetes

Sponsor

Gitpod: https://www.gitpod.io/

Learning the Joys of Reading and Writing with Laura Brief

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Before cloud economics entered his life, Corey’s first true love was a good book. On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, he’s joined by Laura Brief, the CEO of nonprofit 826 National. The organization is the largest youth writing network in the country, something that’s near and dear to our hearts at The Duckbill Group. Corey and Laura talk about why having a deep appreciation for reading and writing is vital no matter what career path you take. From offering a creative escape for kids to moonlighting as a “pirate supply company,” 826 National helps children realize that there’s an author inside all of us. So check out this great conversation, and be sure to buy one of our shirts while you’re at it!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Introduction

(1:02) Gitpod sponsor read

(2:14) The Duckbill Group's history working with 826 National

(3:01) What is 826 National?

(4:43) Corey's love of reading, writing, and how it correlates with 826 National's mission

(10:11) The rise of ChatGPT and its impact on reading and writing

(13:49) Why GenAI fails to capture the feeling of writing

(22:30) Why writing education is important

(24:54) The benefits of reading and writing for kids

(31:39) 826 Valencia: the Pirate Supply Company

(35:24) Buy a shirt benefiting 826 National!

(37:15) Where you can find more from Laura Brief and 826 National

About Laura Brief

Laura Brief is the CEO of 826 National. Prior to joining the nonprofit, Laura held leadership positions at high achieving youth organizations including Build, First Graduate, Juma Ventures, and The Posse Foundation, where she developed the organization’s first national career, corporate engagement, and alumni programs. She holds a Master’s in Education and a Master’s in Counseling Psychology from Columbia University, and is the Chair of the Board of Directors at Youth Speaks.

Links

826 National: https://826national.org/
Reach out to Laura: laura@826national.org
Buy our charity shirt to help support 826 National: shitposting.fashion

Sponsor

Gitpod: gitpod.io

Burnout and Breaking the Internet with Serena DiPenti

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn talks with Serena DiPenti, aka “SheNetworks,” about her career from Cisco to Black Hills Information Security and her challenges in content creation. Serena reflects on starting at Cisco, where her role as a tech engineer required deep expertise and navigating rigid, high-pressure situations that led to burnout and limited growth opportunities. Now at Black Hills, she enjoys the hands-on work in security analysis and network-based penetration testing. Serena finds content creation more demanding than her cybersecurity work, often facing audience skepticism and burnout. However, her podcast Breaking the Internet provides a rewarding, conversational outlet for sharing insights.

Show Highlights

(00:00) Introduction

(00:37) Dragonfly sponsor read
(1:20) Catching up with Serena since she was last on the show

(2:34) Serena’s experience at CISCO

(8:00) How Serena got stuck in her TAC role

(11:06) Serena’s pivot to her new role at Black Hills Information Security

(14:10) When Serena finds time to sleep during her busy schedule

(16:43) Corey’s short-lived attempt at YouTube

(20:28) The importance of conversational content

(21:43) Serena’s plans for naming and branding

(25:49) Where Serena sees herself aiming next

(31:18) How to follow Serena’s work

About Serena

Serena DiPenti is an offensive security professional who shares her experiences and expertise through her Shenetworks educational content on platforms like TikTok, Twitter (X), YouTube, and Twitch. Her focus includes topics related to penetration testing, ethical hacking, and other areas of cybersecurity. She's passionate about helping others break into the cybersecurity field, offering tips, guidance, and career advice.

Serena’s work includes creating accessible and engaging content that demystifies complex cybersecurity concepts, making the industry more inclusive and approachable for beginners and professionals alike.

Links

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@shenetworks
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shenetworks?lang=en
Twitter: https://x.com/shenetworks

Buy our charity shirt to help support 826 National!

https://store.lastweekinaws.com/

Sponsor
Dragonfly: dragonflydb.io

Finding a Fix for the Cloud with Stephen Barr

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn sits down with Stephen Barr, Chief Evangelist of CloudFix. With his extensive history in the cloud, the pair delve into Stephen's journey with AWS, relatable anecdotes on optimizing cloud costs, and the complex role of tech evangelists in fostering better communication between engineering and finance teams. Corey and Stephen also weigh the pitfalls of early AI adoption, how to come up with effective content creation strategies, and even postulate a hopeful vision of a tech-driven future (from a Trekkie’s point of view at least).

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:40) Gitpod sponsor read

(1:52) How Stephen defines his role

(4:26) Breaking down recent shakeups at AWS and the ever-growing promotion of AI

(9:36) How will AI impact how we teach younger people about coding?

(13:45) AI marketing, crypto, and other professional grifts

(16:56) Stephen's history with AWS and the cloud ecosystem

(20:42) Wiz sponsor read

(21:30)Oversights that can easily inflate a cloud bill

(25:32) Acting as a marriage counselor between engineering and finance

(30:09 Stephen's creative process as a Chief Evangelist

(33:54) Stephen's thoughts on the future of technology

(35:28) Where you can find more from Stephen

About Stephen Barr

Stephen Barr, Principal Architect and Technical Evangelist at CloudFix, is known throughout the technology industry for his joyful frame of mind and deep expertise in data engineering, machine learning, LLMs, systems architecture, and all things AWS.

Even as a teenager, Stephen’s digital curiosity and drive landed him at an email hosting startup working on network administration. He also worked at Microsoft while still a high school student.

After graduating from the University of Washington, he continued graduate studies at the University of Rochester and Washington. Stephen has also worked as a data scientist, software developer, technical consultant and more.

When he’s not researching or communicating about the power of AWS, Stephen enjoys spending time with his family at home in Seattle. His interests outside of work include science fiction, 3D printing, and the outdoors., Stephen Barr, Principal Architect and Technical Evangelist at CloudFix, is known throughout the technology industry for his joyful frame of mind and deep expertise in data engineering, machine learning, LLMs, systems architecture, and all things AWS.

Even as a teenager, Stephen’s digital curiosity and drive landed him at an email hosting startup working on network administration. He also worked at Microsoft while still a high school student.

Links Referenced

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenjbarr/
AWS Made Easy: https://awsmadeeasy.com/

Sponsors

Gitpod: gitpod.io
Wiz: https://www.wiz.io/scream

Sleuthing Out the Key to Teamwork with Dylan Etkin

Corey Quinn — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn chats with Dylan Etkin, CEO and co-founder of Sleuth. He joins this episode of Screaming Into the Cloud to share his insights on reshaping engineering metrics to prioritize team success. Sleuth emphasizes team-level productivity over individual output, sidestepping controversial metrics like lines of code and focusing on alignment and iterative improvement. By aggregating data from tools like GitHub, Jira, and Datadog, Sleuth provides actionable insights, helping leaders reallocate resources for optimal impact without disrupting unique team workflows. Designed for collaborative review, Sleuth’s slide deck-like interface supports meaningful discussions around DORA metrics and deploy tracking.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:51) Sleuth sponsor read

(1:12) What Sleuth is

(2:02) How Sleuth evaluates engineers’ work

(5:41) The value that evaluations brings to a business

(9:34) Who Dylan usually discusses results with

(11:04) Sleuth sponsor read

(11:30) The day-to-day experience of using Sleuth

(14:23) The importance of meeting people where they are

(18:21) The actual outcome of implementing Sleuth

(20:27) Why engineering teams should care about metrics

(24:27) The interface that people have when they're working with Sleuth

(26:23) Where you can find more from Sleuth

About Dylan Etkin
Dylan was one of the first twenty employees of Atlassian, and a founding engineer and the first architect of Jira. He has led engineering at scale for Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a Master's in Computer Science from ASU. Dylan is a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around the inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.

Sponsor
Sleuth: https://www.sleuth.io/

Replay - Chaos Engineering for Gremlins with Jason Yee

Corey Quinn — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Jason Yee, Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog. At the time of this recording, he was the Director of Advocacy at Gremlin, an enterprise-grade chaos engineering platform. Join Corey and Jason as they talk about what Gremlin is and what a director of advocacy does, making chaos engineering more accessible for the masses, how it’s hard to calculate ROI for developer advocates, how developer advocacy and DevRel changes from one company to the next, why developer advocates need to focus on meaningful connections, why you should start chaos engineering as a mental game, qualities to look for in good developer advocates, the Break Things On Purpose podcast, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:31) Blackblaze sponsor read

(0:58) The role of a Director of Advocacy

(3:34) DevRel and twisting job definitions

(5:50) How DevRel confusion manifests into marketing

(11:37) Being able to measure and define a team’s success

(13:42) Building respect and a community in tech

(15:22) Effectively courting a community

(18:02) The challenges of Jason’s job

(21:06) Planning for failure modes

(22:30) Determining your value in tech

(25:41) The growth of Gremlin

(30:16) Where you can find more from Jason

About Jason Yee

Jason Yee is Staff Technical Avdocate at Datadog, where he works to inspire developers and ops engineers with the power of metrics and monitoring. Previously, he was the community manager for DevOps & Performance at O’Reilly Media and a software engineer at MongoDB.

Links

Break Things On Purpose podcast: https://www.gremlin.com/podcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitbisect

Original episode
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/chaos-engineering-for-gremlins-with-jason-yee/

Sponsor

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Disclosing Vulnerabilities in the Cloud with Ryan Nolette

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode of "Screaming in the Cloud," we’re making sure things are nice and secure thanks to Ryan Nolette, Senior Security Engineer at AWS Outreach. As a part of the Outreach team, he’s responsible for making everyone understand the nuances of AWS's Vulnerability Disclosure Program. Corey and Ryan explore the intricacies of AWS's approach to security, including the emphasis on communication with researchers. You’ll also get an overview of what goes into Vulnerability Disclosure Programs and how it courts security researchers over “security researchers.” If there’s anything you can take away from this episode, it’s that Ryan takes great pride in AWS's commitment to transparency and collaboration when it comes to resolving potential security flaws.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:38) Blackblaze sponsor read

(1:06) The role of AWS' security team outreach group

(2:21) The nuance of the Vulnerability Disclosure Program

(4:05) Will the VDP program replace human interactions

(10:08) Response disclosure vs. coordinated disclosure

(15:26) The high-quality communication of the AWS security team

(17:33) Gitpod sponsor read

(18:45) Security researchers vs. "security researchers"

(25:54) What's next for the VDP Program?

(29:26) Avoiding "security by obscurity"

(32:08) Being intentional with security messaging

(36:16) Where you can find more from Ryan

About Ryan Nolette

Ryan is AWS's Senior Security Engineer for the Outreach Team and CoAuthor of AWS Detective. He has previously held a variety of roles including threat research, incident response consulting, and every level of security operations. With almost 2 decades in the infosec field, Ryan has been on the development and operations side of companies such as Postman, Sqrrl, Carbon Black, Crossbeam Systems, SecureWorks and Fidelity Investments. Ryan has been an active speaker and writer on threat hunting and endpoint security

Links

AWS VDP on HackerOne: hackerone.com/aws_vdp
AWS VDP inbox: aws-security@amazon.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-security
AWS Vulnerability Reporting site: https://aws.amazon.com/security/vulnerability-reporting/
Give your feedback on the recently expanded VDP program: https://pulse.aws/survey/MOOFGRLM

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Gitpod: gitpod.io

Replay - Creatively Giving Back to the Cloud Community with Forrest Brazeal

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we revisit our chat with Forrest Brazeal. When this episode first aired, Forrest was the Head of Content at Google Cloud, but today, he helps run Freeman & Forrest, an influencer marketing service focused on enterprise tech. In this trip down memory lane, Forrest goes into detail on how he is working to give back to the cloud community. Forrest discusses his time at A Cloud Guru, his time as an AWS Serverless Hero, and the technical excellence he brings to his vast-ranging and prolific content. Forrest is also a successful author of a newsletter and multiple books, including a children's book about the cloud! Needless to say, Forrest is an incredibly varied personality in the cloud community, tune in for a chance to get to know him better!

Show Highlights

(00:00) Intro

(1:10) Backblaze sponsor read

(1:36) Starting a new job as the Head of Content for Google Cloud

(2:32) Forrest’s background as a cloud consultant

(3:57) Writing endeavors and The Cloud Resume Challenge

(6:30) Being authentic and helpful in the cloud

(11:43) Forrest’s experiences with Google Cloud

(13:18) Being a thought leader in the cloud community

(16:44) The interview process for Google Cloud

(20:24) Creating online cloud content

(25:51) Having creative freedom at Google

(29:07) The viability of Google Cloud

(31:52) Where you can find more from Forrest

About Forrest Brazeal

Forrest is a cloud educator, cartoonist, author, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He’s also led some of the world's most innovative developer content and community teams at companies like Google and A Cloud Guru.

Links

The Cloud Bard Speaks: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/the-cloud-bard-speaks-with-forrest-brazeal/
The Read Aloud Cloud: https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/1119677629
The Cloud Resume Challenge Book: https://forrestbrazeal.gumroad.com/l/cloud-resume-challenge-book/launch-deal
The Cloud Resume Challenge: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev
Twitter: https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal

Original Episode
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/creatively-giving-back-to-the-cloud-community-with-forrest-brazeal/

Sponsor
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Tackling AI, Cloud Costs, and Legacy Systems with Miles Ward

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Corey Quinn chats with Miles Ward, CTO of SADA, about SADA’s recent acquisition by Insight and its impact on scaling the company’s cloud services. Ward explains how Insight’s backing allows SADA to take on more complex projects, such as multi-cloud migrations and data center transitions. They also discuss AI’s growing role in business, the challenges of optimizing cloud AI costs, and the differences between cloud-to-cloud and data center migrations. Corey and Miles also share their takes on domain registrars and Corey gives a glimpse into his Raspberry Pi Kubernetes setup.

Show Highlights

(00:00) Intro

(00:48) Backblaze sponsor read

(2:04) Google’s support of SADA being acquired by Insight

(2:44) How the skills SADA invested in affects the cases they accept

(5:14) Why it’s easier to migrate from one cloud to another than from data center to cloud

(7:06) Customer impact from the Broadcom pricing changes

(10:40) The current cost of AI

(13:55) Why the scale of AI makes it difficult to understand its current business impact

(15:43) The challenges of monetizing AI

(17:31) Micro and macro scale perspectives of AI

(21:16) Amazon’s new habit of slowly killing of services

(26:55) Corey’s policy to never use a domain registrar with the word “daddy” in their name

(32:46) Where to find more from Miles and SADA

About Miles Ward

As Chief Technology Officer at SADA, Miles Ward leads SADA’s cloud strategy and solutions capabilities. His remit includes delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization; reinforcing our engineering culture; and engaging with customers on their most complex and ambitious plans around Google Cloud.

Previously, Miles served as Director and Global Lead for Solutions at Google Cloud. He founded the Google Cloud’s Solutions Architecture practice, launched hundreds of solutions, built Style-Detection and Hummus AI APIs, built CloudHero, designed the pricing and TCO calculators, and helped thousands of customers like Twitter who migrated the world’s largest Hadoop cluster to public cloud and Audi USA who re-platformed to k8s before it was out of alpha, and helped Banco Itau design the intercloud architecture for the bank of the future.

Before Google, Miles helped build the AWS Solutions Architecture team. He wrote the first AWS Well-Architected framework, proposed Trusted Advisor and the Snowmobile, invented GameDay, worked as a core part of the Obama for America 2012 “tech” team, helped NASA stream the Curiosity Mars Rover landing, and rebooted Skype in a pinch.

Earning his Bachelor of Science in Rhetoric and Media Studies from Willamette University, Miles is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur who also plays a mean electric sousaphone.

Links

Professional site: https://sada.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesward/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/milesward

Sponsor

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Cloud Resilience Strategies with Seth Eliot

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Seth Eliot, Principal Resilience Architect at Arpio, and former Global Reliability Lead at AWS, joins Corey to discuss cloud resilience. He emphasizes that Multi-AZ setups are typically sufficient, with multi-region configurations only necessary for specific risks. Seth highlights the importance of balancing cost and resilience based on business needs, while cautioning against making resilience a mere checkbox exercise. Together, they explore disaster recovery challenges, noting that many companies fail to account for real-world complexities during testing. Seth also stresses the importance of avoiding control plane dependencies and warns that poorly designed multi-cloud setups can introduce additional risks.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:12) Backblaze sponsor read

(1:40) Seth’s involvement in the Well-Architected sphere of AWS

(4:43) Well-Architected as a maturity model

(6:46) Cost vs. resilience

(10:37) The tension between resiliency and the cost pillar

(13:26) Legitimate reasons to go multi-region

(18:31) Mistakes people make when trying to avoid an AWS outage

(24:07) The challenges of control planes

(25:04) What people are getting wrong about the resiliency landscape in 2024

(26:31) Where you can find more from Seth

About Seth Eliot

Currently Principal Resilience Architect at Arpio, and ex-Amazon, ex-AWS, ex-Microsoft… Seth has spent years knee-deep in the tech trenches, figuring out how to design, implement, and launch software that's not just fast but also bulletproof. He thrives on helping teams tackle those "make or break" technical, process, or culture challenges—then partners up to solve them. As the Global Reliability Lead for AWS Well-Architected, Seth didn’t just work with customers; he scaled his insights via workshops, presentations, and blog posts, benefiting thousands. Before that, as one of the rare AWS-dedicated Principal Solutions Architects at Amazon.com (yep, not AWS, but the mothership itself), he rolled up his sleeves with engineers to fine-tune the AWS magic powering Amazon.com’s immense stack. Earlier? He led as Principal Engineer for Amazon Fresh and International Tech, and before that, helped bring Prime Video into homes everywhere.

Links

Personal site: https://linktr.ee/setheliot
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/setheliot/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/setheliot

Sponsor
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Replay - Memes, Streams & Software with Cassidy Williams

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this Screaming in the Cloud replay, we’re looking back to our conversation with Cassidy Williams, a Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub and the co-founder and chief product officer of Cosynd, Inc. Prior to these positions, she worked as the principal developer experience engineer at Netlify, an instructor and senior engineer at React Training, director of outreach at cKeys, a senior software engineer at CodePen, head of developer voice programs at Amazon, and a software engineer at Venmo, among other positions. Join Corey and Cassidy as they reflect on what Netlify is and what a developer experience engineer does, how JavaScript started off as a toy language and why everything that can be built with JavaScript will be moving forward, the benefits of using low-code development tools, how discovering TikTok helped Cassidy drum up a major following on social media, how Cassidy's humor is never directed at people or organizations and why that's the case, the differences between recording a podcast and live streaming on Twitch from the speaker's point of view, and more.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:22) Backblaze sponsor read

(0:49) What is Netlify and its role of a principal developer experience engineer

(2:50) Is JavaScript the future?

(7:46) Using low-code tools for web development

(12:12) Having a goofy internet presence in a serious field

(17:23) Social platforms as a means to teach

(24:50) Twitch streaming and its inherent challenges

(28:16) Cassidy’s online coursework and how she answers, “So, what do you do?”

(32:12) Unique ways of tracking Twitter followers

(37:15) Where you can find more from Cassidy

About Cassidy Williams

Cassidy is a Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub. She's worked for several other places, including Netlify, CodePen, Amazon, and Venmo, and she's had the honor of working with various non-profits, including cKeys and Hacker Fund as their Director of Outreach. She's active in the developer community, and was one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry and LinkedIn's Top Professionals 35 & Under. As an avid speaker, Cassidy has participated in several events including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, TEDx, the United Nations, and dozens of other technical events. She wants to inspire generations of STEM students to be the best they can be, and her favorite quote is from Helen Keller: "One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." She loves mechanical keyboards and karaoke.

Links

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cassidoo
Newsletter: https://cassidoo.co/newsletter/
Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/teachers/cassidoo
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/cassidywilliams/
Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/user/cassidoo
O’Reilly: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/6339
Personal website: https://cassidoo.co
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cassidoo
GitHub: https://github.com/cassidoo
CodePen: https://codepen.io/cassidoo/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassidoo

Original Episode

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/memes-streams-software-with-cassidy-williams/

Sponsor
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Replay - Breaking the Tech Mold with Stephanie Wong

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Stephanie Wong. When she first sat down with Corey, she was the Head of Developer Engagement at Google, but today, she serves as the company’s Head of Technical Storytelling. While Stephanie is certainly a key player at such a massive company, her passion lies in her own advocacy for women in tech as well as making tech more approachable to larger audiences. Stephanie is not one to put her job title first. Her bio covers the spread from dancer, to hip-hop medalist, to podcast host. Stephanie gives us the birds eye view on her own non-traditional and interdisciplinary path that led to her work both in and outside of Google. Stephanie’s focus on producing content that reaches across a wide spectrum of participants is crucial to how she has broken the mold on what tech can do, and her lessons are ones we can all learn from.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(1:06) Backblaze sponsor read

(1:32) Explaining the Head of Developer Engagement

(2:13) Stephanie’s background and authenticity in tech

(7:11) Approaching developer relations from a non-”traditional” tech background

(11:04) Building a personal and company online presence

(14:41) Corey’s perceived contradictions with Google Cloud

(22:29) Through engaging your audience through media and storytelling

(27:23) Helping find the next generation of tech talent

(29:23) The cloud and the inflection of tech

(38:51) Where you can find more from Stephanie

About Stephanie Wong:

Stephanie Wong is an award-winning speaker, engineer, pageant queen, and hip hop medalist. She is a leader at Google with a mission to blend storytelling and technology to create remarkable developer content. At Google, she's created 100s of videos, blogs, courses, and podcasts that have helped developers globally. Stephanie is active in her community, fiercely supporting women in tech and mentoring students.

Links:

Personal Website: https://stephrwong.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephr_wong

Original Episode
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/breaking-the-tech-mold-with-stephanie-wong/

Sponsor
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Navigating the Cloud-First World with Eric Pullen

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Corey is joined by cloud economist Eric Pullen to discuss Eric’s journey at AWS that led to his current role as a cloud economist at Duckbill Group. They explore Eric’s early career building data centers and learning IT finance, highlighting how today’s cloud-first world has transformed career paths. The conversation also addresses the hype around cloud repatriation, with Eric arguing that enterprises are unlikely to return to on-prem due to the efficiency of cloud solutions. Additionally, they touch on cloud cost optimization, AWS service deprecation, and the importance of aligning cloud spending with business value rather than cutting costs blindly.

Show Highlights:

(1:35) Eric Pullen’s background before joining The Duckbill Group

(3:22) What’s going on with cloud repatriation

(6:39) Eric’s advice for getting into the IT industry

(7:08) How Eric got involved with AWS

(10:51) Different aspects of Eric’s time at AWS, including Well-Architected

(15:02) The rise of service deprecation in AWS

(17:47) Why Eric joined The Duckbill Group

(22:42) Eric’s concept of consulting at scale

(26:23) How cost can affect performance

(32:32) Problems with standardization in enterprises

(39:10) Where to learn more about Eric and his work

About Eric Pullen
I'm Eric Pullen, and I live just outside of Louisville, Kentucky. I've been following Duckbill Group for a while now, and when I saw an opportunity to join as a Cloud Economist, I couldn't pass it up. Before AWS, I worked at Appriss, Inc. for over 14 years, where I was the Director of IT and helped grow several SaaS products, including VINE, JusticeXchange, and MethCheck. In 2015 I joined AWS, where I worked as a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect, the Global Performance Efficiency Pillar Lead for the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and most recently as a Global Solutions Architect in their Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) division. During my time at AWS, I had the chance to work with some of their biggest customers, including GE, Siemens, and AstraZeneca.

Outside of work, I've been married to Kelly for almost 19 years, and we have two daughters: Jordan, who is 26 and fully embracing adulthood, and Myia, who is 15. We also have two pets: Rocky, my charcoal Lab, and Turbo, our Lionhead bunny.

Links

Personal site: https://www.ericpullen.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericpullen/
Twitter: https://x.com/ericpullen

Sponsors
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Replay - Security Challenges and Working for President Biden with Jackie Singh

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, we revisit our inspiring conversation with Jackie Singh. At the time, she had recently served as a senior cybersecurity staffer at the Biden campaign. But her venerated career is considerably more than that alone. Jackie’s time spent in the Army, at the DoD, and eventually at work in the commercial world allows her to bring an adroit sensibility to her work and to this episode. Jackie goes into detail on her time spent at the Biden campaign and the intricacies of working in such highly politicized, and short term, environment. The cyber security threats she faced there were paramount, to downplay it, and have given Jackie a rich and constantly developing perspective on security. That in combination with her career has helped her develop a perspective that she has kindly discussed in detail during this episode! Tune in for the whole story.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(1:16) Backblaze sponsor read

(1:42) Working for the 2020 Biden Campaign

(4:45) The high-stakes world of political information security

(10:08) Breaking down Jackie’s impressive resume

(12:38) Being the target of a far-right tabloid hit piece

(16:24) Contemporary politics, bad faith discourse, and its role in tech

(23:34) Common Fate sponsor read

(24:03) The ethics of reporting InfoSec vulnerabilities

(31:13) Explaining “threat modeling”

(36:49) Where you can find more from Jackie

About Jackie Singh

Jackie Singh is an Information Security professional with more than 20 years of hacking experience, beginning in her preteen. She began her career in the US Army, and deployed to Iraq in 2003. Jackie subsequently spent several years in Iraq in cleared roles for the Department of Defense.

She is now an independent consultant. Her passion extends to evangelizing best practices, writing and research for her blog, tweeting informative content, speaking at conferences, contributing to podcasts, and collaborating with fellow journalists and security professionals.

Links:

Disclose.io: https://disclose.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hackingbutlegal

Original Episode:
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/security-challenges-and-working-for-president-biden-with-jackie-singh/

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Common Fate: http://commonfate.io/

How Revenue Heals All Sins with Xe Iaso

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Xe Iaso returns to Screaming in the Cloud, and it’s been quite an interesting few months for them. They’re now the CEO of Techaro and are back for a discussion that spans career trials, the peculiarities of AI, and the intricacies of video production. Xe shares candid insights about being laid off multiple times and how it paradoxically led to career growth (and the tricks to resume-building). Xe also highlights the nuanced world of video editing and they’re learning tools like DaVinci Resolve.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Intro

(00:50) Backblaze sponsor read

(0:52) Xe’s transparency with their layoffs over the past couple of years

(04:39) What Xe has been up to with their coding lately

(05:05) Xe’s method of addressing AI models’ Strawberry Problem

(10:44) Xe’s use of prompt injection attacks in their resume

(13:23) Why Xe has been embracing independent contracting

(15:20) How Xe has been working with video

(18:10) Common Fate sponsor read

(19:56) The shifting nature of content creation and the need for practice

(24:23) The importance of having audio backups for presentations

(26:17) What Xe is building toward as a contractor

(28:50) Where you can find more from Xe

About Xe Iaso

Xe Iaso is a top voice on cloud computing, developer marketing, and shitposting. They focus on making computers easier to understand and entertaining people in the process. They also use satire as a way to cope with the surreal madness that is the technology industry these days.

Links

Xe’s blog: https://xeiaso.net/
Friend pendant ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Common Fate: https://www.commonfate.io/

Politely Asking for Permissions in the Cloud with Sandy Bird

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Do we have your permission to share this episode of Screaming in the Cloud with you? Sonrai CTO and Co-Founder Sandy Bird is back on the show to help Corey break down the woes that come with granting permissions in the world of cloud security. As they catch up, the pair touch base on how automation can create major headaches, what goes into navigating the minefield of granting permissions, and if the future of adoption patterns is as grim as Corey predicts. Sandy also answers one of Corey’s long-time questions: how do you pronounce “Sonrai?” Who knows? Maybe Corey will finally learn how to say it properly...

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:30) Breaking down Sonrai’s name
(1:45) Sonrai sponsor read

(2:25) Getting alerts vs. fixing the root of the problem

(4:50) The problems with granting permissions

(7:34) The dangers of automating permissions

(10:10) "Where do I make this change, and how do I enforce it?"

(13:46) The security concerns that come with tagging automation
(16:12) Sonrai sponsor read

(16:53) Properly deploying permissions access

(21:16) Woes of running reporting in the middle of the night

(23:21) Are adoption patterns getting worse?

(29:01) Where you can find more from Sonrai Security

About Sandy Bird
Sandy Bird is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai Security, helping enterprises protect their data by securing cloud identities and access. Sandy was the co-founder and CTO of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011. At IBM, Sandy became the CTO for the global security business and worked closely with research, development, marketing and sales to develop new and innovative solutions to help the IBM Security business grow to ~$2B in annual revenue. He is a trusted and experienced cloud security expert., Sandy Bird is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai Security, helping enterprises protect their data by securing cloud identities and access. Sandy was the co-founder and CTO of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011. At IBM, Sandy became the CTO for the global security business and worked closely with research, development, marketing and sales to develop new and innovative solutions to help the IBM Security business grow to ~$2B in annual revenue. He is a trusted and experienced cloud security expert.

Links

Sonrai Security: https://sonraisecurity.com/
Sonrai Security free trial: https://sonraisecurity.com/trial/
Sonrai Security demos: https://sonraisecurity.com/demo/
Sonrai Security learning resources: https://sonraisecurity.com/resource-library/
Sonrai Security blog: https://sonraisecurity.com/blog/
Sonrai Security ACCESS Virtual Summit: sonrai.co/access-on-demand

Sponsor

Sonrai Security: https://sonraisecurity.com/

How to Responsibly Automate Your Home with Mike Gray

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

From elementary school music teacher to a Senior Cloud Engineer at Defiance Digital, Mike Gray has lived quite a few lives. He hit it off with Corey during the AWS New York Summit this past summer. What brought them together? Their mutual frustration at what dominated the discourse of the event: the current fascination with GenAI. Although Mike has his qualms with AI, he also enjoys working with it quite a bit. As a matter of fact, he uses it to help automate his home and appliances! From exploring what goes into consulting customers on cloud products, to the nightmare of having your kids hijacking your Alexa with an endless stream of children’s music, this episode features twists and turns, leaving no stone unturned.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:40) Chronosphere sponsor read

(1:14) The responsibilities of a Senior Cloud Engineer at Defiance Digital

(2:07) Cloud product consulting

(3:27) The challenges of working with Kubernetes

(7:50) Mike's problems with AI

(9:33) Challenges with home automation

(15:38) Chronosphere sponsor read

(16:13) The joys of home automation

(18:34) Prefered hardware for home automation

(20:10) Home automation and the impact on your relationships and kids

(23:43) Going from teaching kids to the world of tech

(28:42) Where you can find more from Mike

About Mike Gray
Mike Gray is a technologist, currently employed as a Senior Cloud Engineer, with a focus on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

In previous roles, he has worked with companies of every size, from single-digit employee startups to Fortune 500 companies. In a past life, Mike has worked as a professional musician and music educator.

Mike is also an active open source contributor, splitting time between OpenVoiceOS and Neon AI. Think of it as open source Alexa, but all your data stays at home.

Links

Mike's website: https://graywind.org
Mike’s email: mike@graywind.org
Mike’s Twitter: https://x.com/saxmanmike

Sponsor

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast

Insights from a Vendor Insider with Ian Smith

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

It turns out, you don’t need to step outside to observe the clouds. On this episode, we’re joined by Chronosphere Field CTO Ian Smith. He and Corey delve into the innovative solutions Chronosphere offers, share insights from Ian’s experience in the industry, and discuss the future of cloud-native technologies. Whether you're a seasoned cloud professional or new to the field, this conversation with Ian Smith is packed with valuable perspectives and actionable takeaways.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:42) Chronosphere sponsor read

(1:53) The role of Chief of Staff at Chronosphere

(2:45) Getting recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant

(4:42) Talking about the buying process

(8:26) The importance of observability

(10:18) Guiding customers as a vendor

(12:19) Chronosphere sponsor read

(12:46) What should you do as an observability buyer

(16:01) Helping orgs understand observability

(19:56) Avoiding toxicly positive endorsements

(24:15) Being transparent as a vendor

(27:43) The myth of "winner take all"

(30:02) Short term fixes vs. long term solutions

(33:54) Where you can find more from Ian and Chronosphere

About Ian Smith
Ian Smith is Field CTO at Chronosphere where he works across sales, marketing, engineering and product to deliver better insights and outcomes to observability teams supporting high-scale cloud-native environments. Previously, he worked with observability teams across the software industry in pre-sales roles at New Relic, Wavefront, PagerDuty and Lightstep.

Links

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast
Ian’s Twitter: https://x.com/datasmithing
Ian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismith314159/

Sponsor

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast

Replay - GCP’s Many Profundities with Miles Ward

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 07:43:01 -0700

In this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Miles War — perhaps the closest thing Google Cloud has to Corey Quinn. With a wit and sharpness at hand, and an entire backup retinue of trumpets, trombones, and various brass horns, Miles is here to join the conversation about what all is going on at Google Cloud. Miles breaks down SADA and their partnership with Google Cloud. He goes into some details on what GCP has been up to, and talks about the various areas they are capitulating forward. Miles talks about working with Thomas Kurian, who is the only who counts since he follows Corey on Twitter, and the various profundities that GCP has at hand.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(1:38) Sonrai Security sponsor read

(2:40) Reliving Google Cloud Next 2021

(7:24) Unlikable, yet necessary change at Google

(11:41) Lack of Focus in the Cloud

(18:03) Google releases benefitting developers

(20:57) The rise of distributed databases

(24:12) Backblaze sponsor read

(24:41) Arguments for (and against) going multi-cloud

(26:49) The problem with Google Cloud outages

(33:01) Data transfer fees

(37:49) Where you can find more from Miles

About Miles Ward

Earning his Bachelor of Science in Rhetoric and Media Studies from Willamette University, Miles is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur who also plays a mean electric sousaphone.

Links:

SADA.com: https://sada.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/milesward
Email: miles@sada.com

Original episode:
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/gcp-s-many-profundities-with-miles-ward/

Sponsors

Sonrai Security: sonrai.co/access24

Backblaze: backblaze.com

Keeping the Cloud Reasonable with Shlomo Dubrowin

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

After years of trying, Corey has finally convinced a TAM to come on the show! In this lively episode, AWS Senior Technical Account Manager Shlomo Dubrowin takes the mic to share his fascinating experiences dealing with cloud complexities. Listen in as Shlomo recounts building AWS Reasonable Account Defaults from scratch, stresses the importance of writing a solid application, and shares the benefits of leveraging GenAI to help maintain his work. Don't miss this entertaining and insightful conversation that could save you a few bucks!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:42) Chronosphere sponsor read

(1:15) Finally getting a TAM on the show

(2:24) Providing quality customer service as a TAM

(5:31) AWS Reasonable Account Defaults

(11:01) What went into crafting AWS Reasonable Accounts Defaults

(12:20) Chronosphere sponsor read

(12:54) Writing a program that won't break easily

(17:25) Optimizing billing data

(19:53) Transparency in costs

(21:27) Expanding AWS Reasonable Account Defaults

(23:34) Further optimizing AWS Reasonable Account Defaults in the future

(26:18) Building with GenAI

(29:01) Where you can find more from Shlomo

About Shlomo Dubrowin

Shlomo Dubrowin has been a TAM for over 6 years supporting AWS customers from startups through to Fortune 100 companies. He has spoken at re:Invent twice and has specialized in Cost Optimization. Shlomo has been in the tech industry since 1994. And he lives with his wife, son and 2 dogs.

Links

Clouded Torah: https://www.clouded-torah.org/

Sponsor

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast

Replay - Letting the Dust Settle on Job Hopping with Brian Hall

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we revisit a spirited debated between Corey and the VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud, Brian Hall. The topic — How much time should one spend in a job? But thankfully, their conversation doesn’t limit itself to just that! Corey and Brian chat about how social media’s failure to capture nuance and context can lead to some unfortunate misinterpretations. Brian offers some insight on his significant amount of time spent at Microsoft under various roles. He gives his perspective on how one should optimize their career path for where they want to go, and not just follow the money. Tune in to see how Corey and Brian let the dust settle, and develop what was a disagreement into a well-rounded conversation.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(1:02) Chronosphere sponsor read

(1:36) Job hopping vs. job loyalty

(6:14) Being in the right place at the right time

(9:57) Investing in the job vs. the job investing in you

(13:31) Weighing the cost of job hopping

(20:14) Chronosphere sponsor read

(20:47) Changing jobs to get a raise

(24:02) How to attract people as a cloud employer

(26:31) Changing paths into the industry

(30:14) What's ahead for Brian

(32:33) Where you can find more from Brian

About Brian Hall

Brian Hall leads the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team - focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud. Before joining Google, he spent more than 25 years in different forms of product marketing or engineering.

Brian is the father of three children who are all named after trees in different ways. He met his wife Edie at the beginning of their first year at Yale University, where he studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team my senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. They love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in Brian's 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is his first and only car, that he can’t bring myself to get rid of.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/IsForAt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/
Episode 10: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-10-education-is-not-ready-for-teacherless/

Original Episode:
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/letting-the-dust-settle-on-job-hopping-with-brian-hall/

Sponsor

https://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast

Replay - Navigating the Morass of the Internet with Chloe Condon

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 07:00:00 -0700

On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we revisit our fall of 2021 conversation with Chloe Condon. At the time of recording, Chloe was a Senior Cloud Advocate for Microsoft, and today, she works for Google as a Senior Developer Relations Engineer. When we spoke to her, Chloe had recently started the Master Creep Theatre (yes, with the British spelling) which is a project to bring some more creative and artistic efforts into the tech world! Given Chloe’s non-traditional background she’s able to bring a lot of great perspective to weaving these two worlds together. Chloe also discusses the politics of navigating DMs as a woman on the internet, fun. Her and Corey discuss internet culture in general and how to make the most of it, in spite of all the baggage. Tune in for Chloe's take!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:47) Sonrai sponsor read
(1:48) Master Creep Theatre
(6:16) The wide world of creepy DMs
(12:21) What's the root of the creep behavior?
(15:52) Harassment and privilege in tech
(20:00) The fight for privacy

(27:58) Backblaze sponsor read
(28:24) Designing things to be more inclusive and "jerk-free"
(37:49) Where you can find more from Chloe

About Chloe Condon:
Chloe is a Bay Area based Developer Advocate for Google Cloud and AI. Previously, she worked at Microsoft, as well as Sentry.io where she created the award winning Sentry Scouts program (a camp themed meet-up ft. patches, s’mores, giant squirrel costumes, and hot chocolate), and was featured in the Grace Hopper Conference 2018 gallery featuring 15 influential women in STEM by AnitaB.org. Her projects and work with Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart 'astrology', and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, and is likely one of the only engineers who has played an ogre, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage. She hopes to bring more artists into tech, and more engineers into the arts.

Featured in the Grace Hopper Conference 2018 gallery featuring 15 influential women in STEM by AnitaB.org: https://vimeo.com/289762602/30c246c503

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gitforked/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChloeCondonVideos

Sponsors
Sonrai: http://sonrai.co/zombie
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

Creating GenAI Teammates with Amit Eyal Govrin

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Much of the discourse surrounding GenAI has centered on replacement, but what if tools focused on harmony instead? In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Kubiya CEO Amit Eyal Govrin explains why his company is flipping the script on AI. Amit and Corey discuss the perks and shortcomings of today’s automation, how Kubiya functions as a teammate alongside its human counterparts, and the GenAI trends that aren’t getting the attention they deserve. If you’re worrying about your job security in the current AI climate, this discussion may help put your fears at ease.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:47) Chronosphere sponsor read

(1:21) What Amit and Kubiya are building

(5:34) Pros and cons of automation

(9:10) Building a virtual teammate

(12:39) Implementing AI with nuance

(16:16) Real world applications of the tech

(18:09) Firefly ad read

(18:43) The value of human review in the world of AI

(21:10) Complexities (or lack thereof) of GenAI

(24:36) What people are sleeping on when it comes to GenAI

(28:08) Where you can learn more about Kubiya

About Amit Eyal Govrin:

Amit is the CEO of Kubiya, helping the industry Break through the Time-To-Automation Paradox. As an early pioneer in the FinOps domain - executive position at Cloudyn (currently Azure Cost Manager), Zesty (advisor, early investor) and leading DevOps partnerships at AWS.

Links Referenced:

Kubiya: kubiya.ai

Sponsor
Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/?utm_source=duckbill-group&utm_medium=podcast

The Power of Networking in the Cloud with Tom Scholl

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

A cloud service is only as good as the team of network engineers who keep it up and running. In this episode, AWS Vice President and Distinguished Engineer Tom Scholl breaks down the importance of security and legwork needed to support the company’s massive infrastructure. Corey picks Tom’s brain while singing the praises of the AWS DDoS Protection Team, marveling at the scale of the modern internet, and looking ahead to the next generation of network engineers that could land at AWS. If you’ve ever wondered about the inner workings of the AWS cloud, then this is the discussion for you.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(1:09) The Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:42) The importance of a good network for AWS
(3:38) Evolution of networking
(6:03) Efficiency of the AWS DDoS Protection Team
(7:29) AWS Cloud and weathering DDoS attacks
(10:03) Policing network abuse
(12:08) Walking the SES tightrope and network attacks
(15:00) Ensuring the security of the internet
(17:53) The Duckbill Group sponsor read
(18:37) Scale of the modern internet
(20:47) Migrating the AWS network firewall
(21:54) Internal network scaling
(24:27) Preparing for DDoS disruption
(29:14) Finding the next generation of network engineers
(32:15) Where to learn more about AWS cloud security

About Tom Scholl:

Tom Scholl is a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the infrastructure organization. His role includes working on AWS’s global network backbone, as well as focusing on denial of service detection and mitigation systems. He has been with AWS for over 13 years.

Prior to AWS, Tom was a Principal Network Engineer at nLayer and AT&T Labs (formerly SBC Telecom). He also previously held network engineering roles at OptimalPATH Digital Network and ANET Internet Services.

Links Referenced:

AWS Security Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/
How AWS threat intelligence deters threat actors: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-aws-threat-intelligence-deters-threat-actors/
Using AWS Shield Advanced protection groups to improve DDoS detection and mitigation: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/using-aws-shield-advanced-protection-groups-to-improve-ddos-detection-and-mitigation/
AWS re:Inforce 2024 presentation on Sonaris and MadPot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38Z9csvyFDg
NANOG 2023 presentation on AWS networking infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tcR-iQce7s
AWS re:Invent 2022 presentation on AWS networking infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJNR_dX8g8c
AWS re:Invent 2022 presentation on Scaling network performance on next-gen Amazon EC2 instances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNYpWa7gf1A&t=1373s
IEEE paper on Scalable Relatable Diagram (SRD): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9167399

Sponsor
The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Battling Back Against Data Breaches with Maya Levine

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Data breaches can throw countless lives into disarray. With massive leaks and compromises happening on what feels like a daily basis, what can be done to protect people and services? On this episode, Sysdig Product Manager Maya Levine joins us for a discussion on the current state of affairs in the world of cybersecurity. Why do these attacks keep happening? Are they becoming too frequent? What can we do to prevent them? Maya has all the answers as well as tips to help keep you and your organization safe.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(0:37) Sysdig sponsor read
(0:58) Product management at Sysdig
(2:09) Are cyber attacks becoming more frequent in the cloud?
(5:58) Urgency (or lack thereof) while under attack
(10:37) Motives and methods in modern data breaches
(15:57) Sysdig sponsor read
(16:20) The cost (and necessity) of audit logging
(18:46) “If breach is inevitable, what can people do?”
(22:36) Maya’s “I am Confused” talk
(25:40) Stopping attacks before they spiral out of control
(32:32) Where can find more from Maya and Sysdig

About Maya Levine:

Maya Levine is a Product Manager for Sysdig. Previously she worked at Check Point Software Technologies as a Security Engineer and later a Technical Marketing Engineer, focusing on cloud security. Her earnest and concise communication style connects to both technical and business audiences. She has presented at many industry conferences, including AWS re:Invent and AnsibleFest. She has also been regularly interviewed on television news channels, written publications, and podcasts about cybersecurity.

Links:

Maya’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maya-levine/
Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/

Sponsor

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/

Summer Replay - Innovations and the Changing DevOps Tides of Tech with Nigel Kersten

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our discussion with Nigel Kersten. When we spoke to him in 2021, he was the Field CTO at Puppet. Today, he works as the Chief Product Officer for Platform.sh. In this trip down memory, Nigel joins Corey to reflect on his time spent as a traveling contract trainer for Puppet, dive into the changes in DevOps since, and look back at how Docker handed over the keys and some of the attachments we have to a techno-social system. Nigel speaks on the innovations that have changed along the way and the impact they’ve had in the industry. Especially those who have a tendency to cling to “legacy.”

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(1:18) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:52) Corey's Puppet experience
(3:49) What is Puppet?
(5:04) Puppet’s role in DevOps
(8:12) Challenges in technology adoption
(12:36) Issues with legacy in tech
(18:26) The misconception of “limited” skilled workers
(23:16) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(24:00) Corporate communication breakdowns
(25:22) State of DevOps Report
(32:02) Cloud adoption and missteps
(37:46) More from the report and Nigel

About Nigel Kersten:

Nigel is a technical leader with 13 years of experience building teams and growing B2B startups as a CTO, VP of Engineering, and Head of Product, with substantial experience working with enterprise customers. Prior to that, he was recruited into the Google SRE org to develop an industry-leading infrastructure-as-code system.

Links:

Puppet: https://puppet.com
2020 State of DevOps Report: https://puppet.com/resources/report/2020-state-of-devops-report/

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/innovations-and-the-changing-devops-tides-of-tech-with-nigel-kersten/

Sponsor:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Summer Replay - Building a User-Friendly Product with Aparna Sinha

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Aparna Sinha, the Head of AI Product at Capital One. As a former Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, Aparan joins Corey to talk about GCP and how Corey was surprised to find that, in some ways, it was “its own universe.” She offers up why folks can expect a developer user-friendly experience when using GCP, and how it differentiates them from the litany of cloud providers out there. From focusing on developing, to a vast array of customers, GCP is bringing their best forward. Check out their conversation on how GCP is keeping its focus on the user!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(0:48) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:21) Role of a Director of Outbound Product Management

(2:43) Developer experiences on Google Cloud

(8:47) The philosophy of courting developers

(11:38) The shift to serverless

(17:17) Cloud Run observations

(22:59) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(23:43) Customer involvement with Google Cloud

(28:55) Cloud Build vs. Cloud Deploy

(32:50) Google and cloud security

(38:45) Where you can find Aparna

About Aparna

Aparna Sinha is Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise AI/ML products at Capital One. She is also a startup investor / advisor at PearVC. Aparna has a track record of successful P&L ownership, creating new revenue streams and building $B+ businesses through technical and go-to-market innovation.

She was Sr. Director of Developer Products at Google Cloud leading a 100+ member PM, UX, and DevRel Engineering team responsible for >40 cloud services and open source tools. She was an early contributor to Kubernetes, built the team and grew Google Kubernetes Engine 100x into a Top 3 revenue generator for Cloud. Prior to Cloud Aparna worked on Android, ChromeOS and Play. Previously at McKinsey & Company she was a leader in the business technology office, working with CIOs on server virtualization strategy, pricing, and SaaS.

Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, and a patent from Google. She served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Links:

DevOps Research Report: https://www.devops-research.com/research.html
Twitter: https://x.com/aparnabsinha

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/building-a-user-friendly-product-with-aparna-sinha/

Sponsor:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Summer Replay - That Datadog Will Hunt with Dann Berg

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Dann Berg. At the time, he was a Senior Cloud Analyst at Datadog, but he now provides community support for the FinOps Foundation. Dann and Corey go into the weeds of cost optimization, and each of them bring their respective experiences forward. Dann’s offers his take on multi-cloud and how Datadog is tackling its customer needs there. But the talent doesn’t end there, Dann is also an emerging thinker and influencer in the space, and to boot, an accomplished writer and playwright. Two of his plays have been produced in NYC and China. Check out their conversation!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(1:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(1:36) Transitioning to Senior Cloud Ops Analyst

(5:12) The composition of Dann's team

(6:54) Cloud cost optimization in the regular business cycle

(10:43) Helping customers understand their cloud bills

(17:42) Paying attention to pricing changes

(21:06) The psychology of cloud economics

(23:20) Working with multiple clouds

(25:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read

(25:46) Spending too much money to save too little money

(31:12) The dangers of relying on third-party tools

(34:01) Pricing woes

(36:25) Where you can find Dann

About Dann Berg

Dann Berg currently works part-time with FinOps after spending more than a decade in the industry. He is also an active member of the larger technical community, hosting the monthly New York City FinOps Meetup, and has been published multiple times in places such as MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others. When he’s not saving companies millions of dollars, he’s writing plays, and has had two full-lengh plays produced in New York City and China., Dann is the Director of Community at Vantage. Previously, first FinOps Practitioner at Datadog and FullStory. Host of the NYC FinOps Meetup for almost three years. He also writes plays.

Links:

Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com
Personal Website: https://dannb.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannberg
Monthly newsletter: https://dannb.org/newsletter/
Previous SITC episode with Dann Berg, Episode 51: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-51-size-of-cloud-bill-not-about-number-of-customers-but-number-of-engineers-you-ve-hired/

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/that-datadog-will-hunt-with-dann-berg/

Sponsor:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Summer Replay - Heresy in the Church of Docker Desktop with Scott Johnston

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Scott Johnston, CEO of (the church) of Docker. Docker’s community and their fervor is well known, and Scott has much to say about it! Join the discussion as Scott goes into how he left Puppet after some exposure to Corey to become the CEO at Docker. Scott tells us what exactly Docker is, and where it starts, which is the community around it. Scott talks about the reset that Docker went through in November of 2019, where they decided to make the developer the focus of their mission. He also dives into Docker Desktop, which Scott goes into the details of. Check out this episode for more!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(1:15) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:48) What is Docker?
(4:03) Returning to being a developer tool
(5:56) Docker’s pricing changes and Docker Desktop
(11:47) Community reaction to the pricing change
(13:57) Building customer confidence
(18:52) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(19:36) Putting trust into user
(22:04) Docker’s monetization strategy
(29:28) Embracing change
(32:16) Where to learn more about Scott and Docker

About Scott Johnston

Scott first typed ‘docker run’ in 2013 and hasn't looked back. He’s been with Docker since 2014 in a variety of leadership roles and currently serves as CEO. His experience previous to Docker includes Sun Microsystems, Puppet, Netscape, Cisco, and Loudcloud (parent of Opsware). When not fussing with computers he spends time with his three kids fussing with computers.

Links:

Docker: https://www.docker.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/heresy-in-the-church-of-docker-desktop-with-scott-johnston/

Sponsor:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Summer Replay - Spreading the Networking Vibes with Serena (@shenetworks)

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Summer Replay, look back on Serena a.ka. @shenetworks’ mark on the digital sphere! Serena’s work on the social end of the spectrum is only a facet of her work. As a network engineer in the age of cloud, Serena has much to say about the work of data centers. Corey and Serena talk datacenters, cybersecurity, and the role that her social media presence plays into her work in that typically curmudgeonly world. She traces the rise of her content and how she intends to utilize that previously untapped space to spread the network “vibes”!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(0:50) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:24) Data centers in the era of the cloud
(3:46) Establishing an online presence
(7:00) Misconceptions of the industry and engaging content
(11:12) Modern marketing campaigns
(13:43) What data centers look like today
(18:53) Today’s entry path in tech
(20:58) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(21:42) Is the future solely in the cloud?
(26:00) Ramifications of putting all the eggs in the AWS basket
(29:52) Aiming content at beginners
(33:56) Where you can find Serena

About Serena

Serena is a Network Engineer who specializes in Data Center Compute and Virtualization. She has degrees in Computer Information Systems with a concentration on networking and information security. She is most known for her content on TikTok and Twitter as Shenetworks. Serena’s content focuses on networking and security for beginners which has included popular videos on bug bounties, switch spoofing, VLAN hoping, and passing the Security+ certification in 24 hours.

Links:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shenetworks
Twitter: https://x.com/shenetworks

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/spreading-the-networking-vibes-with-serena-shenetworks/

Sponsor:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Summer Replay - What GitHub Can Give to Microsoft with Jason Warner

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Jason Warner, where he explained to us how to “Git” on it. Since this episode’s original airdate, Jason has since went on to become the CEO and co-founder at poolside, but his time at GitHub has given him the expertise to inform folks about all the exciting things GitHub has going on. Listen as Jason offers insight into GitHub’s successes which have led to their acquisition by Microsoft. He breaks down his own history at GitHub and its vision to become the “worlds most important software company.” Jason dives into some of the details of GitHub acquisition and the possibilities for what they want to achieve, and where they expect to go within Microsoft. Jason and Corey discuss how to talk about the cloud for its current, and importantly, future clients. Jason talks about what GitHub will bring to Microsoft, and perhaps how it’ll be for the better. Tune in, because the getting is about to “git” good.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(0:27) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:01) The role of GitHub
(4:46) How GitHub and Azure can coexist
(7:08) When to adopt to the cloud
(9:55) GitHub’s impact on Microsoft
(13:24) Experiencing acquisition
(19:34) Misconceptions of GitHub
(21:36) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(22:20) Practicality of Codespaces
(25:34) Designing software with a purpose
(28:40) Dispelling nerd culture in software
(30:55) Starting in a non-technical direction
(33:52) Where you can find more about Jason

About Jason Warner:

Jason Warner is the co-founder and CEO of poolside. He serves on the operating board of Bridgewater Associates. He has previously worked at GitHub as their CTO.

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/
@jasoncwarner: https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner
GitHub: https://github.com/jasoncwarner
Jasoncwarner/ama: https://github.com/jasoncwarner/ama

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/

Sponsor:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Summer Replay - Breaking Down Productivity Engineering with Micheal Benedict

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Summer Replay, we revisit our 2021 conversation Micheal Benedict. At the time, he was the Head of Engineering Productivity at Pinterest, and today, he’s Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Airtable. Micheal tells us what exactly it means to lead engineering productivity and divulges more details on productivity engineering. He traces the history of productivity engineering at Pinterest and offers some distinct observations on building out internal teams. Micheal talks about what it is like in his day-to-day complexities of working in AWS. Tune in for Micheal’s take on the specific details of productivity and the cloud.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(0:55) Panoptica sponsor read
(1:36) What is product engineering?
(2:44) The effectiveness of internal platforms
(7:46) Solving AMI problems
(10:23) Building foundations and learning woes
(13:06) Micheal’s day-to-day at Pinterest
(15:31) When engineering productivity starts to make sense
(18:58) Changes Micheal would've made at Pinterest
(20:56) Panoptica sponsor read
(21:19) Biggest mistakes at Pinterest
(23:46) Navigating outages in the cloud
(30:51) Corey’s personal experiences with Pinterest
(36:20) The legacy of code
(40:31) Where you can find more from Micheal

About Micheal Benedict:

Micheal Benedict is an engineering leader with a decade of experience in building and scaling infrastructure for consumer and enterprise companies.

He currently heads Infrastructure Engineering at Airtable. Previously, he led teams at Databricks, Pinterest, and Twitter, enhancing developer productivity, scaling infrastructure, and driving efficient use of multi-million $ cloud budgets.

Micheal holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo.

Links:

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michealb/

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/breaking-down-productivity-engineering-with-micheal-benedict/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Summer Replay - Cutting Cloud Costs at Cloudflare with Matthew Prince

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Summer Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. In this cost-cutting conversation from 2021, Matthew breaks down what exactly Cloudflare is up to, and how they are handling their clients' cloud cost needs. The pair focus on Cloudflare as a company and the options they are bringing to their clients. They discuss their mutual concerns with some AWS costs and why Cloudflare’s suite of tools has slowly been made available over time. Turn back the clock with this fan-favorite episode for more insight.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(0:53) Backblaze sponsor read
(1:20) Origins of Cloudflare
(5:55) The Achilles Heel of the AWS cloud
(10:09) What is Cloudflare R2?
(12:26) Pricing philosophies in the cloud
(17:35) Egress cost of the “static” internet
(19:48) How Amazon’s pricing harms the overall market
(24:34) Firefly sponsor read
(25:10) Cloudflare’s endgame
(28:32) Staying focused as a business
(33:35) The value of providing a valuable service
(37:17) “The internet is a fad.”
(42:19) The strength of admitting you’re wrong
(43:04) Where you can find out more about Cloudflare

About Matthew Prince:

Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks, which spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.

Links Referenced:

The Cloudflare Blog: blogs.cloudflare.com

Sponsors:

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/

Generating AI Laughs with Daniel Feldman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Social media snark and rightfully criticizing industry trends? This episode of Screaming featuring Daniel Feldman must be a match made in heaven for Corey. Daniel’s wit is only matched by his engineering expertise, and his insights help us examine the current state of GenAI. This conversation breaks down how you can have fun with today’s AI tools, why product excitement can often hinder advancement, and even carries a tune with a bit of karaoke. As a bonus, Daniel indulges Corey about his signature conference attire. If you ever wanted to learn more about Mr. Quinn’s suit game, then this is the episode for you!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro to episode
(0:48) Who is Daniel Feldman
(1:25) Backblaze sponsor read
(1:51) Sounding off on social media
(3:13) Having fun with AI
(5:27) The origins of quackernews.com
(6:36) Practical uses of AI
(8:40) Enthusiasm vs. progress
(12:30) AI’s online backlash
(15:45) AI, slideshows, and karaoke
(18:14) Firefly sponsor read
(18:50) Tricks to prompting DALL-E
(21:32) Markdown and software update naming
(25:13) Exclusionary humor in tech
(26:19) reInvent and Corey’s sense of fashion
(28:32) Getting publicly recognized for Twitter posts
(30:43) Where to find Daniel

About Daniel Feldman:

Daniel Feldman is working on new projects in the service identity space. He previously was an early engineer at Scytale and deployed SPIFFE service identity at over a dozen companies. Before that, he was a principal software engineer at Veritas.

Links Referenced:

quakernews.com
Twitter: https://x.com/d_feldman
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dfeldman.bsky.social
Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@dfeldman
SPIFFE: https://spiffe.io/
Solving the Bottom Turtle: https://spiffe.io/book/

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/

Piledriving the GenAI Grift with Nikhil Suresh

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

While we can’t repeat the title of his blog post here, Nikhil Suresh recently gained notoriety for his scathing takedown of the hype surrounding GenAI. On the surface, it appears his anger lies with the tech, but that’s not the case. In this episode, Nikhil explains to Corey why his frustrations are targeted at a predatory bubble swindling young professionals and investors. You’ll hear their thoughts on the correlation between AI and crypto grifts, why most tech keynotes are just fluff and buzzwords, and when industry catch-all terms start to lose meaning. While GenAI may still show some promise, this week’s episode breaks down why you shouldn’t believe the hype.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro to episode
(0:41) Backblaze sponsor read
(1:08) The origins of Nikhil’s viral article
(4:20) The disconnect between buzzwords and work
(5:26) Throwing money at AI
(7:17) AI vs. craftsmanship
(13:36) The rush to get AI tools out the door
(16:12) The telltale signs of bad AI content
(18:50) AI, crypto, and GPU grifts
(20:33) The fallout of Nikhil’s blog post
(22:34) Firefly sponsor read
(23:10) The practicality of GenAI
(26:24) GenAI presentations vs. reality
(29:07) Predatory hiring practices and tech’s current barrier for entry
(32:03) Sturgeon’s Law in the industry
(35:22) Consequences of the hype cycle
(38:48) The fantasy land of “conferenceware”
(42:01) Where you can find Nikhil

About Nikhil Suresh:

Nikhil is one of the directors at an Australian data consultancy named Hermit Tech, though he’s probably most well-known for writing a blog titled Ludicity. Nikhil has a background in psychology and data science.

Links Referenced:

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/

Summer Replay - The Future of Kubernetes with Bryan Liles

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Is there true value in using cloud optimization tools when they may be phased out in the near future? You may be surprised. In this Summer Replay of Screaming of the Cloud, Corey is joined by former VMware Senior Staff Engineer Bryan Liles. Since this episode was originally released, Bryan wasn’t just promoted to the Vice President of Principal Engineering at VMware, he’s also transitioned to a new role as a Senior Principal Engineer with AWS! Listen as the pair talk about the long-term viability of Kubernetes, what’s in a tech company’s name, flipping the script surrounding the discussion of diversity in the field, and why the words you use matter the most in criticism. If anything, this throwback will show the value of intention, whether in the tech industry or your everyday life.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro to episode
(0:30) Backblaze sponsor read
(0:56) The struggles of setting up interview times
(2:22) What Bryan does at VMware
(4:14) What Kubernetes has accomplished
(5:39) Corey’s qualms with Kubernetes
(8:16) The shelf life of Kubernetes
(10:36) Optimizing Kubernetes in the cloud
(13:25) What is Project Pacific?
(15:28) Firefly sponsor read
(16:04) Woes of the multicloud
(19:09) VMware’s branding and Tanzu
(21:00) Mispronouncing company names
(22:07) Punching down and diversity discourse in tech
(25:18) Intentional language in company critiques
(28:50) Learning lessons from getting fired
(30:36) Where you can find Bryan

About Bryan Liles

Bryan Liles is a Senior Principal Engineer with AWS where his team oversees all of S3. When not working, Bryan builds and races cars and drones.

Over the past 20 years, Bryan has worked around cloud technology and distributed systems. His approaches to technology are: simplify with fidelity and technology should give access to all.

Links Referenced:

https://vmware.com

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/

Summer Replay - Optimizing Cloud Spend at Airbnb with Melanie Cebula

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Just because the AWS Cloud hangs above our heads, doesn’t mean your bill needs to be just as sky-high. In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, Corey is joined by Airbnb Staff Software Engineer Melanie Cebula. Her job is to ensure they keep their monthly cloud bill low, and that the cost isn’t just there for a temporary stay. Hear Melanie and Corey chat about the vital role engineers play in helping balance the company books, tricks to optimizing your organization’s cloud spending, how inexperience can have a dangerous effect on cost-cutting, and the growing pains facing today’s world of data infrastructure. We hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane (just be sure you checkout on time to avoid any fees).

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro to episode
(0:27) Backblaze sponsor read
(0:54) The role of a Staff Engineer
(2:09) Working for a large company reliant on the cloud
(3:59) Melanie’s Area of Expertise
(5:58) Efficiently Managing AWS Bills
(11:33) Optimizing cloud spend
(14:50) The harmful hesitancy to turn things off
(18:17) Inexperience and cost-saving measures
(21:17) Firefly sponsor read
(21:53) How to avoid snowballing cloud bills
(23:40) Kubernetes and cloud billing
(27:12) The perks of compounding microservices
(29:19) Misconceptions about Kubernetes
(31:10) Growing pains of data infrastructure
(34:44) Where you can find Melanie

About Melanie Cebula

Melanie Cebula is an expert in Cloud Infrastructure, where she is recognized worldwide for explaining radically new ways of thinking about cloud efficiency and usability. She is an international keynote speaker, presenting complex technical topics to a broad range of audiences, both international and domestic. Melanie is a staff engineer at Airbnb, where she has experience building a scalable modern architecture on top of cloud-native technologies.

Besides her expertise in the online world, Melanie spends her time offline on the “sharp end” of rock climbing. An adventure athlete setting new personal records in challenging conditions, she appreciates all aspects of the journey, including the triumph of reaching ever higher destinations.

On and off the wall, Melanie focuses on building reliability into critical systems, and making informed decisions in difficult situations. In her personal time, Melanie hand whisks matcha tea, enjoys costuming and dancing at EDM festivals, and she is a triplet.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/melaniecebula
Melanie Cebula’s website: https://melaniecebula.com/

Sponsors

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/

Summer Replay - Ironing out the BGP Ruffles with Ivan Pepelnjak

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

If you need a point of contact for all things networking, then look no further than Ivan Pepelnjak. Ivan is the webinar author at ipSpace.net where he is working on making networking an approachable subject for everyone. From teaching to writing books, Ivan has been at it for a long and storied career, and as a de facto go-to for networking knowledge, you can’t beat him. In this Summer Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, Ivan and Corey discuss Ivan’s status as a CCIE Emeritus and the old days of Cisco. Ivan also levels his network engineering expertise and helps Corey answer some questions about BGP and its implementation. Ivan aptly narrows it down into “layers” that he kindly runs us through. So tune in for a Dante-esque descent into BGP, DNS and Facebook, seeing out the graybeards of tech, and more!

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro to episode
(1:23) Panoptica sponsor read
(2:04) The world of VaxVMS
(2:39) The significance of being a CCIE emeritus
(5:02) The value of certification in the modern tech world
(7:37) BGP and networking
(12:41) Internal vs. external BGPs
(15:23) “Unfair criticisms” of BGP
(17:35) Differences between BGP and DNS
(23:19) Cloud growth vs. loss of networking engineers
(24:57) Panoptica sponsor read
(25:20) Outsourcing admin work
(27:45) Breaking down the Facebook DNS outage
(31:37) Disconnect at the data center
(37:06) Where you can find Ivan

About Guest:

Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354 Emeritus, is an independent network architect, blogger, and webinar author at ipSpace.net. He's been designing and implementing large-scale service provider and enterprise networks as well as teaching and writing books about advanced internetworking technologies since 1990.

Links Referenced:

ipSpace.net: https://ipspace.net
Original Episode: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/ironing-out-the-bgp-ruffles-with-ivan-pepelnjak/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Summer Replay - Building and Maintaining Cultures of Innovation with Francessca Vasquez

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Relishing in your company’s current successes is important, but planning for the future of your business (and the wider industry) is equally vital. In this Summer Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, we’re taking you back to the post-pandemic climate of tech with the Global Vice President of the AWS Professional Services and GenAI Innovation Center Francessca Vasquez. With 20+ years of experience under her belt and thousands of customers, she knows a thing or two about thriving in the cloud. You’ll get Francessca’s insights into why companies struggle to maintain a cutting-edge work environment, the rapid pivot to the cloud amid a global pandemic, the importance of courting different backgrounds in your organization, and why the next generation of tech workers could spur unprecedented innovation. Even though COVID is seemingly in our rearview mirror, this discussion still holds weight in today.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro to episode
(0:49) Panoptica sponsor read
(1:30) Francessca’s role as AWS Vice President of Technology
(2:56) Challenges of shifting company culture
(5:38) Customer service and cloud adoption
(9:46) The importance of legacy companies as clients
(11:55) The pandemic’s role in cloud migration
(14:39) Finding “untapped talent” during the pandemic
(16:45) Courting people breaking into the industry
(20:19) Panoptica sponsor read
(20:42) Toxic gatekeeping in tech
(24:29) The “real world” versus the realities of tech
(26:43) Excitement for the next generation in tech
(29:15) Diversity, equity, and excellence
(32:20) How to communicate with your customers
(40:00) Where you can find Francessca

About Guest:

Francessca is the leader of the AWS Technology Worldwide Commercial Operations organization. She is recognized as a thought leader of business technology cloud transformations and digital innovation, advising thousands of startups, small-midsize businesses, and enterprises. She is also the co-founder of AWS workforce transformation initiatives that inspire inclusion, diversity, and equity to foster more careers in science and technology.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Francessca_V
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesscavasquez/
Original Episode: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/building-and-maintaining-cultures-of-innovation-with-francessca-vasquez/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Summer Replay - An Enterprise Level View of Cloud Architecture with Levi McCormick

Corey Quinn — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

When you hear a name like “Jamf,” you aren’t likely to think of cloud architecture, but for Levi McCormick, it’s his bread and butter. On this Summer Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey and Levi chat about how Jamf’s business approach benefits both their clients and their development team. Levi gives his take on the relationship between software development and personal ownership, how he gamified learning for young engineers, the economic challenges presented to professionals trying to break into the cloud, and how AWS can improve its rollout of new products. Seeing as Levi McCormick is now Jamf’s Director of Engineering, those insights have seemingly paid dividends! You can check out this blast from the past (as well as Corey’s usual wit and hot takes) right now!

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro to the episode

(0:58) Panoptica sponsor read

(1:49) Levi’s role as a Cloud Architect

(2:41) The history of Jamf and the services they provide

(5:58) Breaking down the cloud for customers

(8:18) Services, development, and ownership

(11:44) Identity and assumed roles in software engineering

(14:41) The woes of mismanagement in the field

(17:03) Pantoptica sponsor read

(17:26) Explaining the Cloud Resume Challenge

(20:11) Hesitancy to take the challenge wider

(21:26) Economic barriers for young engineers

(26:00) Thoughts on reInvent 2021

(28:45) What’s ahead for Levi McCormick

(29:33) Where you can find Levi

About Levi

Levi's passion lies in helping others learn to cloud better.

Links Referenced

Jamf: https://www.jamf.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/levi_mccormick
Original Episode: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/an-enterprise-level-view-of-cloud-architecture-with-levi-mccormick/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Helping Each Other and Growing Together with Matt Coulter

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Matt Coulter returns to share his latest endeavors as he makes a comeback in community work, especially within DevTools and serverless circles. In this episode, he and Corey discuss the significance of the Cloud Development Kit (CDK), CDK Community Day, and CDK Patterns. Matt reflects on his journey into community work and contrasts the challenges of virtual versus in-person events, highlighting Belfast's burgeoning tech scene and his aim to amplify its presence globally. Additionally, Matt discusses Teach Me AWS, his new venture designed to simplify AWS tools and foster practical problem-solving skills.

Show Highlights:

(0:26) What Matt’s been up to since the last time he was on the show
(2:04) How Matt got started with community work
(6:09) Learning about the Belfast community
(9:57) How technologies are maturing and empowering users to do more
(14:51) Matt’s latest endeavor, Teach Me AWS
(19:25) How Teach Me AWS educates users
(23:02) Big opportunities for Teach Me AWS in the day two experience
(30:32) The thread that ties all of Matt’s interests and projects together

About Matt:

Matt is an AWS DevTools Hero, Serverless Architect, Author and conference speaker.

He is focused on creating the right environment for empowered teams to rapidly deliver business value in a well-architected, sustainable and serverless-first way.

You can usually find him sharing reusable, well architected, serverless patterns over at cdkpatterns.com or behind the scenes bringing CDK Day to life., Sr. Architect in Belfast. AWS DevTools Hero and @BelfAWSt_Meetup organiser loving #Serverless so I created @cdkpatterns / @cdkday. Co-Author @thecdkbook. he/him, Matt is an AWS DevTools Hero, Serverless Architect, Author and conference speaker/organiser.

He is focused on creating the right environment for empowered teams to rapidly deliver business value in a well-architected, sustainable and serverless-first way.

These days you can usually find him behind the scenes running the official Belfast AWS User Group and organising the Belfast AWS Community Day!!!

Links Referenced:

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/nideveloper
Belfast User Group Twitter: https://x.com/BelfAWSt_UG
Teach Me AWS website: https://teachmeaws.com/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Summer Replay - The Evolution of DevRel with Jeremy Meiss

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Developer relations have gone through quite an evolution over the years. In this reissued episode, Corey talks with Jeremy Meiss, former Director of DevRel and Community at CircleCI, about how DevRel has transitioned from a focus on conference appearances to a more strategic alignment with business objectives. Corey and Jeremy also discuss navigating career complexities during economic downturns, emphasizing the importance of maintaining relevance. They also touch on fostering open communication within organizations and the enduring value of personal interactions in professional communities.

Show Highlights:

(1:39) How CircleCI is using DevRel to helping clients go from developer’s laptops to production safely and sanely
(6:23) What DevRel means to Jeremy and why it’s a problem that most people can’t define it
(12:40) Why saying DevRel is part of product ignores much of what makes both roles unique
(15:36) Combating burnout from being able to perform you’re role but not feeling connected to what the company actually does
(21:30) How Jeremy sees DevRel evolving

About Jeremy:

Jeremy is the former Director of DevRel & Community at CircleCI, formerly at Solace, Auth0, and XDA. He is active in the DevRel Community, and is a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymeiss/
Twitter: IAmJerdog - Jeremy’s @DevOpsAms https://twitter.com/iamjerdog?lang=en

Sponsor:

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Complex Tech, Public Learning, & Impostor Syndrome with Kyler Middleton

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Kyler Middleton, a Senior Principal Engineer at Veradigm and co-host of the Day Two Cloud podcast, joins Corey in this Screaming in the Cloud episode to talk about how tech careers are changing and the big impact of AI on starting in tech. Kyler, who once wanted to be a librarian, tells her story of becoming a tech pro. She highlights the importance of learning and sharing what you know, especially in tech. Corey and Kyler also get into how AI is changing the game for new techies and what that means if you're starting. Kyler's take on using and teaching tech offers some really helpful tips for anyone looking to get into or move up in the tech world.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:49) - Kyler describes her multiple roles

(03:21) - Discussion on the realities of 'Day Two' operations in cloud environments

(07:38) - Insights into technical debt and the concept of 'Day Two' in DevOps

(13:54) - The importance of sharing knowledge and learning in public to benefit others in the tech community

(20:07) - The use and limitations of AI in professional settings

(26:41) - Debate on the overreliance on AI technology in decision-making processes and its potential consequences

(32:05) - Closing remarks & where listeners can connect with Kyler

About Kyler:

Kyler grew up in rural Western Nebraska, fixing neighboring farmers’ computers in exchange for brownies and Rice Krispies. Then she was going to be a librarian to help people find the information they need. Then she discovered computers were a real job, and more than just a fix for her munchies, and she's now been a systems, network, call center, and security engineer, and is now a DevOps lead, and software engineer. She speaks at any conference that will have her, hosts Day Two Cloud podcast from Packet Pushers, and writes up cool projects with approachable language and pictures as part of her Medium series, Let's Do DevOps, with the intention to upskill anyone of any skill level. I have an insatiable curiosity and desire to help the folks around me succeed and grow. So - Let's Do DevOps.

Links Referenced:

Day Two Cloud Podcast: https://packetpushers.net/podcast/day-two-cloud/

Kyler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylermiddleton/

Kyler's Blog on Medium: https://kymidd.medium.com/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Navigating Legal Risk and Compliance with Alex King

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Alex King is a key player at the Duckbill Group as our legal counsel, as well as the founder of his own law firm, Archetype Legal. In this episode, Alex shares insights on his role in helping startups and small businesses navigate legal complexities, emphasizing the importance of risk analysis and compliance. He explains that attorneys highlight risks, allowing business leaders to make informed decisions. Alex recounts his experiences guiding clients through various legal challenges, from hiring decisions to office leases. Corey discusses the unique legal scenarios faced by the Duckbill Group and highlights the benefits of Alex's unique approach.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction
(02:10) What Alex does for the Duckbill Group as legal counsel
(02:42) The role of an attorney for startups and established businesses
(07:20) Similarities and differences between what the advisers at Duckbill Group do and what Alex does as a lawyer
(11:56) Alex’s ability to provide context to legal decisions that would otherwise be missing
(22:07) How negotiating hiring contracts can work out if done wisely
(25:09) What Alex wishes people knew to make interacting with attorneys easier

About Alex:

Alex King is an attorney and the founder of Archetype Legal PC, a law firm dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses take practical legal steps to achieve their business goals. In addition, he is a Business Advisor for Pacific Community Ventures, a nonprofit supporting small business growth and job creation in low-income communities. His experience includes corporate law, business operations, and strategic planning.

Links Referenced:

Website: https://www.archetypelegal.com/
Email: alex@archetypelegal.com

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

S3's Hidden Features and Quirks with Daniel Grzelak

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Corey Quinn and Daniel Grzelak take you on a journey through the wild and wonderful world of Amazon S3 in this episode. They explore the fun quirks and hidden surprises of S3, like the mysterious "Schrodinger's Objects" from incomplete uploads and the head-scratching differences between S3 bucket commands and the S3 API. Daniel and Corey break down common misunderstandings about S3 encryption and IAM policies, sharing stories of misconfigurations and security pitfalls.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(03:49) - Schrodinger's Objects

(05:23) - S3 Permissions and Security

(06:44) - Incomplete Multipart Uploads Causing Unexpected Billing Issues

(10:28) - Historical Oddities and Unexpected Behaviors of S3

(12:00) - Encryption Misconceptions

(15:17) - Durability and Reliability of S3

(17:49) - AWS Security and Trust

(21:01) - Practical Tips for S3 Users

(26:10) - Compliance Locks and Data Management

(29:13) - Closing Thoughts

About Daniel:

Daniel Grzelak is a 20-year cybersecurity industry veteran, currently working as Chief Innovation Officer at Plerion. He is no longer the CISO at Linktree nor the Head of Security at Atlassian, but he tries to stay relevant by hacking AWS and Cloud in general.

Links Referenced:

Personal Website: https://dagrz.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgrzelak/

Things you wish you didn't need to know about S3: https://blog.plerion.com/things-you-wish-you-didnt-need-to-know-about-s3/

S3 Bucket Encryption Doesn't Work The Way You Think It Works: https://blog.plerion.com/s3-bucket-encryption-doesnt-work-the-way-you-think-it-works/

*Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Steering Through Open Source Waters with Madelyn Olson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This episode features Madelyn Olson, maintainer for the open-source project Valkey, to discuss the growth and impact of open-source projects in the tech industry. Corey and Madelyn explore the transformations within these projects, particularly the challenges and shifts in governance and licensing practices that affect how companies like AWS contribute to and utilize open-source software. Furthermore, Madelyn shares insights into the motivations behind Valkey, its differentiation from Redis, and the broader implications for open-source sustainability and corporate involvement.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction and discussion on AWS's approach to open-source

(01:41) Recap of the Redis controversy and licensing changes

(02:35) Madelyn's role at AWS and her work on ElastiCache and MemoryDB

(04:11) The enduring relevance and importance of open source in solving global technology problems

(06:15) The freedoms of open source and the broad implications for software development

(08:19) The evolution of governance and project management in the Valkey project

(09:53) The full transition of Madelyn's efforts from Redis to Valkey

(17:27) Why Valkey was created and its future direction

(24:57) The separation of duties between Madelyn's roles at AWS and the Valkey project

(32:34) Closing thoughts and where to find more information on Valkey

About Madelyn:

Madelyn Olson is a co-creator and maintainer of Valkey, a high-performance kev-value data store and Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She focuses on building secure and highly reliable features, with a passion for working with open-source communities.

Links Referenced:

Website: https://valkey.io/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madelyn-olson-valkey/

GitHub: https://github.com/madolson

Twitter: https://x.com/reconditerose

*Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

AI, Privacy, and User Control with Paul Harrison

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Senior Security Engineering Lead at Mattermost Paul Harrison in a discussion on the often-overlooked ethical implications of artificial intelligence in technology. They discuss how the rapid adoption of AI technologies might compromise user privacy and consent, reflecting on instances where companies may prioritize innovation at the expense of these core values. Their conversation highlights Mattermost's dedication to data privacy and user control, positioning the company as a privacy-centric alternative in the tech landscape.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction to the episode

(01:50) How companies compromise privacy in the rush to adopt AI

(04:10) What is Mattermost? Paul explains the self-hostable, privacy-focused

communication platform

(06:00) The evolution of chat platforms and Mattermost's unique position compared to Slack

(10:01) Paul elaborates on how Mattermost enables user control over data and customization

(14:23) Discuss the implications of integrating AI in everyday applications and its challenges

(20:35) AI’s potential risks and unintended consequences, particularly in data management and security

(25:14) Paul and Corey critique tech companies’ approach to AI and data privacy

(28:59) Closing remarks and where to find more information about Paul Harrison and Mattermost

About Paul:

Paul Harrison is a Senior Security Engineering Lead at Mattermost, responsible for their Security Operations team. Prior to this he led Security Operations at GitLib, and several other emerging tech companies. Paul has specialized in building security operations and infrastructure security programs, enabling companies to have a secure footing as they grow.

Links Referenced:

Mattermost Community: https://community.mattermost.com/landing#/

*Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

The Pros of On-Prem Kubernetes with Justin Garrison

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Justin Garrison, Director of Developer Relations at Sidero, joins Corey to discuss Justin's experience transitioning from large companies like AWS and Disney to a more agile company like Sidero, the benefits of using simplified Linux distributions like Talos OS for running Kubernetes, and the pros of on-premises setups for certain workloads. The conversation touches upon challenges with cloud provider limitations, the impacts of computing power on both an economic and environmental scale and Corey and Justin’s frustration with businesses touting their use of AI when they’ve already abandoned those projects.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:09) - Justin’s Background and Career Journey

(02:39) - Transition to Sidero

(03:51) - Using Personal Devices for Work

(08:09) - Talos Linux and Kubernetes

(15:19) - Kubernetes Upgrades and On-Prem Challenges

(19:21) - Building Your Own Cloud Platform

(21:52) - Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud

(25:15) - Scaling and Resource Management

(28:02) - Gaming and Cloud Bursting

(32:46) - AI and GPU Challenges

(34:54) - Balancing On-Prem and Cloud Solutions

(40:49) - Final Thoughts and Contact

About Justin:

Justin is a historian living in the future. Lucky enough to play with cool technologies and hopeful enough to bring others along for the ride.

Links Referenced:

Justin’s Website: http://justingarrison.com

Justin on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/justingarrison.com

Justin Garrison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justingarrison/

*Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

Building Smarter Authorization Systems with Sam Scott

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This episode explores the intricacies of authorization in software development with Sam Scott, CTO and co-founder of Oso. This conversation highlights the subtle yet critical differences between authentication and authorization, and why understanding these distinctions is pivotal for securing applications effectively. Sam shares his journey from a cryptography PhD to tackling real-world software security problems, emphasizing Oso's mission to streamline authorization for developers. The episode is rich with insights on how fine-grained authorization can significantly improve security posture and user experience, drawing on examples from prominent tech companies like AWS and Google Cloud. Sam also introduces Oso's innovative approach to authorization, simplifying permission management without sacrificing flexibility or control, making it an indispensable tool for developers navigating the complex landscape of modern software security.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction

(01:49) Insights from Sam's PhD in cryptography

(01:56) Understanding the difference between authentication and authorization

(04:05) The real-world implications of key management and the role of authorization in security

(06:02) Explaining role-based access control and its practical applications in cloud environments

(10:47) The complexities of managing access controls in microservices architectures

(15:37) How Oso simplifies the implementation of authorization for developers

(19:21) Discussion on the importance of consistent authorization practices across internal and external applications

(25:14) Sam explains the challenges and necessity of implementing user impersonation features in authorization systems

(31:12) The future of authorization technologies and integrating them into business practices

(35:38) Where to find more resources about Oso and get involved with their community

About Sam:

Sam is the cofounder/CTO at Oso, working on making security and authorization more accessible for developers. Sam previously got a PhD in Cryptography and was a contributor to TLS 1.3

Links referenced:

Oso Website: https://www.osohq.com/

Oso’s Authorization Academy: https://www.osohq.com/academy/authorization-academy

Oso Community:

https://join-slack.osohq.com/

https://oso-oss.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1ygg193va-UTUiT7Gwt7DjZGgF96Ze~w#/shared-invite/email

* Sponsor

Oso: https://www.osohq.com/

Uwubernetes with Kat Cosgrove

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by Kat Cosgrove, Lead Open Source Advocate for Dell Technologies. Kat catches Corey up to speed on the newest version of Kubernetes that Kat was the release lead for. The two discuss its unconventional name: Uwubernetes, what goes into creating and implementing a new version of the world’s second biggest open-source project, and which of Kat’s changes will be her legacy to Kubernetes. Kat also shares how she handles running a team that essentially works for free and what her Kubernetes role will be moving forward.

Show Highlights:

00:00 - Introduction and Welcome

00:28 - Meet Kat Cosgrove

01:46 - Kubernetes Release Management Insights

02:43 - Naming the Kubernetes Release: Uwubernetes

06:19 - Roles and Responsibilities in Kubernetes Releases

11:18 - Enhancements and Deadlines in Kubernetes Releases

14:22 - Kubernetes Incentive to Upgrade & Support Policies

18:26 - Running Old Versions of Kubernetes

20:17 - Challenges with Using Outdated Software Versions

22:15 - Best Practices for Version Releases

24:36 - Release Team Cycles

26:00 - Kat’s Release Legacy

31:58 - Kat’s Responsibilities Post-Release

33:04 - Future Plans and Contact Information

About Kat Cosgrove
Kat is a Lead Open Source Advocate at Dell focused on the growth and nurturing of open source through authentic contribution. In particular, her specialties are approachable 101-level content and deep dives on the history of technology, with a focus on DevOps and cloud native. She was the Kubernetes Release Lead for 1.30 Uwubernetes, and currently serves as both a Release Team subproject owner and SIG Docs tech lead.

When she’s not at a conference, she spends her time playing video games, watching horror movies, or reading science fiction, but her current hyperfixation is film photography. She lives in Scotland with her cat, Espresso, who is the real brains behind the operation and actually ghostwriting all of her tweets.

Links Referenced
Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/
Kat Cosgrove on Twitter: https://x.com/Dixie3Flatline
Kat Cosgrove on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katcosgrove/
Email Kat: kat.cosgrove@gmail.com

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Slide Into The Future Of Presentations with Anthony Fu

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Welcome to another episode of Screaming in the Cloud, where we're joined by Anthony Fu, a framework developer at Nuxt Labs and the creator of Slidev. Anthony has diversified the way presentations are crafted by integrating coding directly into slide development. In this episode, Corey and Anthony discuss the benefits of using markdown to craft slides, the challenges associated with traditional presentation tools like Keynote, and the open-source contributions that have propelled the development of this innovative software. Anthony also shares his inspiration for creating a tool that streamlines and enhances the presentation creation process for both developers and non-developers.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:13) The origins of Slidev

(04:47) The challenges with traditional presentation tools and the advantages of using Markdown for slides

(06:04) How Slidev simplifies slide creation for presentations

(07:01) Corey shares his surprise at the utility of Slidev for non-frontend developers

(09:56) Addressing the challenges of aligning text and images in presentations

(11:09) Anthony discusses his design philosophy for Slidev

(15:14) Balancing feature requests and maintaining simplicity for Slidev

(16:38) Anthony explains the importance of community contributions to Slidev

(20:13) They discuss implementing new features into Slidev's evolution

(24:15) Anthony’s insights into the open-source philosophy behind Slidev

(27:09) Slidev's approach to redistributing sponsorships to support its dependencies through Open Collective

(31:46) Corey mentions contributing to Slidev's documentation to make it more accessible

(33:41) Closing remarks & where to connect with Anthony

About Anthony Fu:

Anthony is a fanatical open sourceror. Core team member of Vue, Nuxt, and Vite. Creator of Vitest, Slidev, VueUse, UnoCSS and Elk. Working at NuxtLabs.

Links referenced:

Slidev: https://sli.dev/
Slidev Github: https://github.com/slidevjs/slidev
Anthony Fu’s Personal Website: https://antfu.me/

Anthony Fu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antfu/?originalSubdomain=fr

Anthony Fu on Twitter: https://x.com/antfu7

NuxtLabs: https://nuxtlabs.com

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Teaching a Stanford Cloud Course with Aditya Saligrama

Corey Quinn — Thu, 23 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Stanford computer science student Aditya Saligrama, who recently taught a Stanford course on cloud infrastructure. Aditya shares his unique perspective on various topics, including how higher education approaches teaching computer science in a rapidly evolving landscape, why he chose cloud security to begin with instead of tacking it on at the end, and what his plans are for the rest of school and beyond. Corey and Aditya lament the lack of real-world skills taught by universities. Aditya shares with the audience just how much work goes into being an effective undergraduate-level teacher while being an undergraduate student himself.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:57) - Exploring CS40: cloud infrastructure and scalable application deployment
(03:46) - The evolution of computer science education
(05:09) - Bridging the gap between academia and industry
(09:05) - Aditya's journey into security and cloud infrastructure
(13:09) - The Stanford security clinic: red teaming for startups
(14:09) - Internship insights and cloudflare's upcoming role
(16:06) - The challenge of cloud account management for students
(17:59) - Improving cloud education and accessibility
(22:10) - The technical and educational challenges of CS40
(29:29) - Final thoughts and where to find Aditya

About Aditya Saligrama:

Aditya Saligrama is an undergraduate and graduate student at Stanford University studying computer science, focusing on systems and security. In the Winter of 2024, Aditya taught CS 40 (Cloud Infrastructure and Scalable Application Deployment) at Stanford, the first university course ever to teach the fundamentals of deploying apps on the cloud hands-on using infrastructure as code. Aditya also leads the Applied Cyber student group at Stanford, winning first place in a national cyber defense competition in 2023 and second place in a global penetration testing competition in 2024, and advises early-stage startups on their security needs and posture through the Stanford Security Clinic. Aditya enjoys hiking, photography, and ping pong in his free time.

Links referenced:

Aditya’s Twitter: @saligrama_a

Aditya’s Website: https://saligrama.io

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Generative AI, Tech Innovations, & Evolving Perspectives with Randall Hunt

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode, we chat with Randall Hunt, the VP of Technology at Caylent, about the world of generative AI and how it's changing industries. Randall talks about his journey from being an AWS critic to leading tech projects at Caylent. He shares cool insights into the latest tech innovations, the challenges and opportunities in AI, and his vision for the future. Randall also explains how AI is used in healthcare, finance, and more, and gives advice for those interested in tech.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(00:28) - Randall talks about his job at Caylent and the projects he's working on

(01:35) - Randall explains his honest and evolving perspective on Amazon Bedrock after working with it hands-on

(03:35) - Randall breaks down the components and improvements of AWS Bedrock

(06:08) - Improvements in AWS Bedrock's preview announcements and API functionality

(08:05) - Randall's predictions on the future of generative AI models and their cost efficiency

(10:00) - Randall shares practical use cases using distilled models and older GPUs

(12:12) - Corey shares his experience with GPT-4 and the importance of prompt engineering

(17:21) - Bedrock console features for comparing and contrasting AI models

(21:02) - enterprise applications of generative AI and building reliable AI infrastructures

(28:13) - Randall and Corey delve into the costs of training large AI models

(36:37) - Randall talks about real-world applications of Bedrock in industries like HVAC management

(39:40) - Closing thoughts and where to connect with Randall

About Randall Hunt:

Randall Hunt is a Software Engineer and Open Source Developer Advocate at Facebook. Previously of AWS, SpaceX, MongoDB, and NASA., Randall Hunt, VP of Cloud Strategy and Solutions at Caylent, is a technology leader, investor, and hands-on-keyboard coder based in Los Angeles, CA. Previously, Randall led software and developer relations teams at Facebook, SpaceX, AWS, MongoDB, and NASA. Randall spends most of his time listening to customers, building demos, writing blog posts, and mentoring junior engineers. Python and C++ are his favorite programming languages, but he begrudgingly admits that Javascript rules the world. Outside of work, Randall loves to read science fiction, advise startups, travel, and ski., Randall is the coder in the boardroom.

Links referenced:

Randall Hunt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranman/

Caylent: https://caylent.com/

Caylent on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/caylent/

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Challenges of AI in Cloud Computing with Justin Brodley

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn reconnects with Justin Brodley, Senior Vice President of Cloud and Technology at Blackline and host of the CloudPod podcast, to discuss the ongoing changes within cloud computing, specifically the intense focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and its repercussions on traditional cloud infrastructure. Justin shares insights from his recent experience at Google Cloud Next, discussing how the AI hype is reshaping cloud service strategies. Additionally, their conversation explores the cultural and strategic shifts within Google and Microsoft, examining their impact on the broader cloud computing landscape.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:45) - Justin's take on Google Cloud Next

(03:56) - The investor-focused nature of the recent Google Cloud Next conference

(06:16) - How multi-cloud strategies are forming enterprise tech decisions

(08:18) - Over-reliance on AI in critical business functions

(15:08) - The lack of foundational cloud services and the risk of overemphasizing AI

(19:36) - Leadership changes at Amazon and their impact on the company's direction

(21:50) - Growth of Amazon's ad revenue

(27:16) - The importance of cloud services in today’s tech world

(30:51) - Concerns about security practices and responsiveness in cloud services

(37:19) - The need for Security in user training and corporate policies

(41:13) - Closing remarks and where to find Justin

About Justin:

Justin Brodley is the Senior Vice President of Cloud and Technology at Blackline and the host of the CloudPod podcast. With a strong background in building innovative DevOps teams and enhancing revenue growth through strategic compliance and innovation, Justin is adept at driving customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. He has extensive experience designing and deploying scalable systems, managing costs effectively, and implementing positive cultural changes across various sectors, including cloud computing, ITIL, infrastructure, and more. Justin is also an engaging mentor and a recognized voice in the cloud community through his podcast, found at www.thecloudpod.net.

Links referenced:

The CloudPod Podcast: https://www.thecloudpod.net/
Justin’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jbrodley
Justin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbrodley/

Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Google’s Graveyard and Lack of Hunger with Cody Ogden

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with the incredible Cody Odgen, software developer and creator of Killed by Google. Corey and Cody discuss Google’s graveyard of products, how discontinuing offerings creates a feeling of distrust amongst your customers, and why Google lacks the hunger needed to create an amazing generative AI tool. Corey shares his take on killed products from an AWS perspective while Cody draws comparisons between late’90s Microsoft and today’s Google, suggesting a decline in quality could be on the horizon for the cloud giant.

Highlights

(00:00) Intro

(00:36) Ad - Panoptica

(01:17) The Google Graveyard: Discussing Killed Services

(02:11) AWS vs. Google: Service Termination Practices

(03:17) AI Overload at Google Cloud Next

(05:44) The Impact of Google's Decisions on Trust and Business

(11:26) The Stadia Shutdown: A Case Study in Trust Erosion

(14:11) Ad - Panoptica

(14:34) The Ripple Effects of Google's Service Closures

(18:50) The Importance of Longevity and Trust in Tech

(23:25) Comparing Cloud Giants: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft

(27:54) Closing Thoughts on Corporate Responsibility and Culture

(28:48) Wrapping Up and Where to Find More

Links:
Website: Killedbygoogle.com

Twitter/X: @killedbygoogle

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Inside Amazon’s Quest For Global Dominance With Dana Mattioli

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this Screaming in the Cloud episode, Corey welcomes Dana Mattioli, author of 'The Everything War: Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power.' Together, they discuss the themes of her book, exploring Amazon's extensive reach and influence across multiple sectors, its profound impact on competition, and the ethical concerns surrounding its aggressive business practices. They also discuss Amazon's internal culture, intricate relationships with government entities, and strategic maneuvers within the corporate world.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:39) - The vast expansion of Amazon and its impact on modern society and corporate strategy

(05:31) - Amazon's internal profit strategies

(07:04) - Amazon's growth: Intentional strategy or opportunistic expansion?

(13:51) - Amazon’s competitive and controversial tactics against startups and innovators

(16:25) - Amazon's workplace culture and systemic issues leading to unethical practices

(20:49) - How Amazon leverages customer data to maintain competitive advantages

(25:17) - Amazon's interactions with the government and its public relations strategy

(29:28) - Amazon's ethical practices and the real-world impacts

(32:00) - Amazon’s use of algorithms like Project Nessie to manipulate market pricing

(36:28) - Corey critiques Amazon’s internal product strategies

(38:29) - Amazon’s market dominance across various sectors

(40:57) - Antitrust enforcement and their effects on modern digital monopolies

(44:04) - Potential critical responses from Amazon insiders about Dana’s book

(45:50) - Closing thoughts and where to find Dana

About Dana:

Dana Mattioli is a Wall Street Journal reporter based in New York, focusing on Amazon's business practices, market power, and antitrust issues. She authored "The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power" and was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her investigative work on Amazon. Dana won the 2021 Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting and the WERT Prize for business journalism. Previously, she covered mergers & acquisitions, including Pfizer’s $150 billion Allergan deal and the Dow-DuPont merger, which won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2016. Dana began her career at the Journal in 2006 after graduating from American University with degrees in journalism and literature.

Links referenced:

Dana’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-mattioli-7b09779/

Dana’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanaMattioli

Dana’s Book, The Everything War: Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-everything-war-amazon-s-ruthless-quest-to-own-the-world-and-remake-corporate-power-dana-mattioli/20335592

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

AI's Impact on the Future of Tech with Rachel Stephens

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by Rachel Stephens, a Senior Analyst at RedMonk, for an engaging conversation about the profound impact of AI on software development. Rachel provides her expert insights on programming language trends and the shifts in the tech landscape driven by AI. They look into how AI has reshaped coding practices by automating mundane tasks and offering real-time assistance, altering how developers work. Furthermore, Corey and Rachel examine the economic and practical challenges of incorporating AI into business operations, aiming to strip away the hype and highlight AI technology’s capabilities and constraints.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introducing Rachel Stephens, Senior Analyst at RedMonk

(00:28) - The Humorous Nemesis Backstory

(03:42) - AI, focusing on its broad impact and current trends in technology

(04:54) - Corey discusses practical applications of AI in his work

(06:00) - Rachel discusses how AI tools have revolutionized her workflow

(08:12) - RedMonk's approach to tracking language rankings

(10:29) - Public vs. Internal Use of Programming Languages

(13:09) - Rachel and Corey discuss how AI coding assistants are improving coding consistency and efficiency

(15:55) - Corey challenges the purpose of language rankings

(20:51) - AI tools affecting traditional data sources like Stack Overflow

(26:28) - The challenges of measuring productivity in the AI era

(29:21) - The macroeconomic impacts on tech employment and the role of AI in workforce management

(36:33) - Rachel and Corey share their personal uses and preferences for AI tools

(39:25) - Closing Remarks and where to reach Rachel

About Rachel:

Rachel Stephens is a Senior Analyst with RedMonk, a developer-focused industry analyst firm. She focuses on helping clients understand and contextualize technology adoption trends, particularly from the lens of the practitioner. Her research covers a broad range of developer and infrastructure products., Rachel Stephens is a Senior Analyst with RedMonk, a developer-focused industry analyst firm. She focuses on helping clients understand and contextualize technology adoption trends, particularly from the lens of the practitioner. Her research covers a broad range of developer and infrastructure products.

Links Referenced:

RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/

Rachel Stephens LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelstephens/

* Sponsor

Prowler: https://prowler.com

Firewalls, Zombies, and Cloud Permissions Security with Sandy Bird

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 May 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this Featured Guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Sandy Bird, Co-Founder and CTO of Sonrai Security. The two discuss the current state of cloud permissions security, and Sandy details the company’s breakthrough Cloud Permissions Firewall which promises fast and scalable cloud least privilege all with one click. Corey and Sandy also talk about bunk AWS tools in this space, the insanely high “zombie” population in the cloud, and how Sonrai works for companies of all sizes.

Highlights:

(00:00) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn

(00:50) Sponsored Ad

(01:32) Exploring Sonrai Security's Mission and Challenges

(03:38) Introducing the Cloud Permissions Firewall Concept

(05:59) Comparing Cloud Providers' Permissions Models

(09:49) Sponsored Ad

(10:12) Addressing the Zombie Identity Problem

(16:44) Scaling Solutions for Different Company Sizes

(20:10) Navigating Cloud Security Challenges

(23:38) Innovative Approaches to Permission Management

(25:27) Optimizing Permission Requests with Statistics

(27:04) Improving Cloud Security with Permissions on Demand

(35:15) Concluding Thoughts and Contact

About Sandy:

Sandy Bird is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai Security, helping enterprises protect their data by securing cloud identities and access. Sandy was the co-founder and CTO of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011. At IBM, Sandy became the CTO for the global security business and worked closely with research, development, marketing and sales to develop new and innovative solutions to help the IBM Security business grow to ~$2B in annual revenue. He is a trusted and experienced cloud security expert.

Links referenced:

Sonrai Security Website: https://sonrai.co/screaming-cloud

Free 14-Day Trial: https://sonrai.co/screaming-trial

Sandy’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-bird-835b5576/

* Sponsor

Sonrai Security: https://sonrai.co/screaming-cloud

AWS, Venture Capital, & Global Entrepreneurship with Nancy Wang

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode of Screaming In The Cloud, we're joined by Nancy Wang, Venture Partner at Felicis Ventures, who discusses her exciting career shift from AWS to venture capital. Nancy shares the role of a venture partner and her focus on investing in infrastructure, platforms, and security from an operational perspective. Corey and Nancy talk about primary investment and the impact of market trend cycles on venture capital. Nancy’s work with the U.S. State Department is also highlighted in this episode, which promotes global entrepreneurship, especially for women in challenging environments.

Show Highlights

(00:00) - Introduction

(02:00) - What a venture partner does

(03:42) - Nancy shares how she differentiates herself in her role and experience

(07:07) - Insights on selecting companies to invest In

(09:18) - The differences between working at Amazon vs. the VC and startup world

(12:09) - Investing in infrastructure and security startups

(17:09) - The balance between supporting established services and investing In new

(19:18) - Exploring how different sectors influence venture capital investments

(23:50) - AI and current investment trends in shaping venture capital decisions

(26:06) - Timing of investments, and the concept of 'entry points' for success

(27:22) - Nancy shares her work with the state department

(30:44) - Closing thoughts and where to find Nancy

About Nancy:

Nancy is a product & engineering executive, advisor, and investor with significant experience in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and SaaS. Nancy advises Fortune 10 companies on accelerating revenue growth, and she advises startups on attracting their first 100K enterprise customers. She is a Venture Partner with Felicis Ventures, where she invests in early-stage startups in cybersecurity, enterprise infrastructure, and B2B SaaS. Previously, Nancy was the Director of Product & Engineering and General Manager at Amazon Web Services, where she leads P&L, product, engineering, and design for its data protection and security businesses - and currently serves as the technical advisor to Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT) on its Cyber Resilience Council. Prior to Amazon, she led SaaS product development at Rubrik, the fastest-growing enterprise software unicorn, and built healthdata.gov for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Excited to advance more women into technical roles, Nancy is the founder & board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has already informed and educated 35,000 Coursera learners worldwide on how to get their first, or next, tech leadership role and partners with the U.S. State Department.

Links referenced:

Nancy’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wangnancy/
Felicis Venture’s Website: https://www.felicis.com/

Sponsor:

Panoptica Academy: https://panoptica.app/lastweekinaws

Merging Vision, Community, and Technology With Anil Dash

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This episode features Anil Dash, VP of Developer Experience at Fastly, who returns to the podcast to share the integration of Glitch within Fastly post-acquisition. Anil shares how Glitch has continued flourishing under Fastly's umbrella, highlighting both platforms’ seamless acquisition and mutual growth. Anil shares the technical and cultural collaboration that has allowed Glitch to maintain its identity and mission while contributing to Fastly's broader goals. The episode highlights the power of community in tech, the importance of maintaining core values in mergers and acquisitions, and the advancements both Glitch and Fastly are making in the developer space.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction.

(01:59) - Glitch's role within Fastly's infrastructure and services.

(02:16) - Comparison of AWS and Glitch’s approach to community building.

(05:40) - Anil’s ongoing enthusiasm for Glitch beyond typical post-acquisition experiences.

(08:53) - Fastly’s unique capabilities and impact on the internet.

(14:35) - Fastly’s technical infrastructure and its performance advantages.

(20:42) - WebAssembly’s implementation and significance at Fastly.

(23:59) - Comparison of Glitch and Fastly’s developer engagement and pricing models

(25:18) - Ethical responsibilities and building a healthy tech ecosystem are important.

(27:50) - Importance of creating lasting and sustainable technologies.

(30:24) - Anil discusses Fastly's work culture and its influence on employee innovation and engagement.

(34:26) - Anil discusses Glitch's thriving post-acquisition integration into Fastly.

(38:26) - The critical role of Fastly's infrastructure in supporting major open-source platforms and decentralized networks.

(39:26) - Closing remarks and where to find more about Anil’s work.

About Anil:

Anil Dash is the vice president of developer experience at Fastly, where he leads the team behind Glitch, the friendly developer community where coders have collaborated to create and share millions of web apps. Anil advises startups and nonprofits, including Medium and the Lower East Side Girls Club. An accomplished writer and artist, Dash has contributed to Wired and The Atlantic and collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists in 2018.

Links referenced:

Anil’s Personal Website: https://www.anildash.com/

Glitch’s website: https://preview.glitch.com/

Sponsor:

Panoptica Academy: https://panoptica.app/lastweekinaws

Securing Sensitive Data Against Modern Threats With Pranava Adduri

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This episode of Screaming in the Cloud focuses on keeping critical data safe and organized, especially when there's a lot of it. Pranava Adduri, the CEO of Bedrock Security, shares the tools and methods Bedrock uses to help other businesses protect their essential information. They discuss how new technologies like AI can help manage vast amounts of data and ensure only the right people can access it.

About Pranava:

Pranava has worked in data protection and security for more than a decade. Before becoming an Entrepreneur In Residence at Greylock Partners in 2020, he was a Software Development Manager for AWS, where he worked with Fortune 500 CISOs to develop innovative products for data risk and compliance. Before that, he was a founding engineer at Rubrik, a SaaS data protection platform. Pranava graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley with a triple-major B.S. in Computer Science, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, and Economics, then obtained an M.S. from Berkeley in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

Show highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:36) - Overview of Bedrock Security's solutions for large-scale data protection

(03:04) - The importance of data classification and access control was discussed

(04:47) - Exploring the limitations of current data governance

(05:22) - Pranava details how data is managed in cloud environments

(09:39) - Evolving strategies in data lake management and data volume growth

(12:36) - Impact of generative AI on data creation and the need for retention

(15:50) - Discussion on cost-effective data management solutions

(23:45) - The role of AI in enhancing data security measures at Bedrock

(25:42) - How customer feedback shapes Bedrock’s AI security technology

(27:19) - The growing necessity for sophisticated data security systems

(29:22) - Upcoming events and where to find more about Bedrock Security and Pranava

Links:

Bedrock Security: https://www.bedrock.security/
Bedrock Security X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/bedrocksec
Bedrock Security LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bedrocksec/
Pranava’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/padduri/
Pranava’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/thenava?lang=en
Innovation Sandbox 2024: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240402284910/en/Bedrock-Security-Named-RSA-Conference-2024-Innovation-Sandbox-Finalist

Sponsor
Panoptica Academy: https://panoptica.app/lastweekinaws

Behind The Tech Event Marketing Scene With Katie Reese

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This episode of Screaming in the Cloud features Katie Reese, an experienced events producer at Tailscale, who walks us through the ins and outs of event marketing within the tech industry. Katie shares insights on effective swag management and event planning to create memorable experiences that drive product adoption. Additionally, Katie and Corey discuss the challenges and strategies of marketing in a post-pandemic, budget-conscious world and explore how remote-first companies have adapted to these changes.

Show Highlights:

00:00 - Intro
00:19 - Welcome Katie Reese, discussing life in sunny Mexico City and her work at Tailscale
03:03 - How Tailscale's product-led growth feels like magic
05:08 - Success stories from the Tailscale Up conference
06:25 - Event strategies in the post-pandemic, budget-conscious era
09:04 - The benefits of remote-first companies and changes in the event landscape
10:36 - Katie's career journey and the value of networking at events
14:34 - The thoughtful approach to swag and reducing event waste
20:14 - How bad marketing can ruin customer interactions
25:40 - Ensuring swag runs out at the right time at conferences
28:10 - Discussion on ethical event practices and avoiding waste
32:04 - Closing thoughts and where to find Katie online

About Katie:

Katie leads field events at Tailscale and, when she is not traveling, splits her time between small-town Tennessee and Mexico City because it's all about balance.

Links referenced:

*Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/
*Katie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-reese/
*Katie’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/katiereese317?lang=en

Sponsor
*Panoptica Academy: https://panoptica.app/lastweekinaws

Mastering Kubernetes for Multi-Cloud Efficiency With Nick Eberts

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Corey chats with Google's Nick Eberts about how Kubernetes helps manage applications across different cloud environments. They cover the benefits and challenges of using Kubernetes, especially in Google's cloud (GKE), and discuss its role in making applications more flexible and scalable. The conversation also touches on how Kubernetes supports a multi-cloud approach, simplifies the deployment process, and can potentially save costs while avoiding being tied down to one cloud provider. They wrap up by talking about best practices in cloud infrastructure and the future of cloud-native technologies.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction to the episode

(03:28) - Google Cloud's approach to egress charges and its impact on Kubernetes

(04:33) - Data transfer costs and Kubernetes' verbose telemetry

(07:23) - The nature of Kubernetes and its relationship with cloud-native principles.

(11:14) - Challenges Nick faced managing a Kubernetes cluster in a home lab setting

(13:25) - Simplifying Kubernetes with Google's Fleets

(17:34) - Introduction to GKE Fleets for managing Kubernetes clusters

(20:39) - Building Kubernetes-like systems for complex application portfolios

(24:06) - Internal company platforms and the utility of Kubernetes for CI/CD

(27:49) - Challenges and strategies of updating old systems for today's cloud environment

(32:43) - The dividing line between Kubernetes and GKE from a product perspective.

(35:07) - Where to find Nick

(36:48) - Closing remarks

About Nick:

Nick is an absolute geek who would prefer to spend his time building systems, but he has succumbed to capitalism and moved into product management at Google. For the last 20 years, he has worked as a systems engineer, solution architect, and outbound product manager. He is currently the product manager for GKE Fleets & Teams, focusing on multi-cluster capabilities that streamline GCP customers' experience while building platforms on GKE.

Links referenced:

Duck Bill Group's website:http://www.duckbillgroup.com
Nick on Twitter/X : @nicholaseberts
Nicholas Eberts on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neberts1/
Nick on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaseberts/

Sponsor

Panoptica Academy: https://panoptica.app/lastweekinaws

Crafting Tech Success from Bad Ideas with Xe Iaso

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Xe Iaso, the Senior Technophilosopher at Fly.io, joins Corey to explore the world of unconventional thinking in technology. They discuss the magic of embracing bad ideas as stepping stones to innovation, the simplicity and power of deploying applications globally with a single command, and the humorous yet insightful take on using old tech in new, imaginative ways. Along the way, they tackle the importance of clear communication in tech, the challenges and rewards of making technology accessible, and how to creatively navigate the tech industry's evolving landscape. Join us for an enlightening conversation that challenges the conventional path to tech success.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Intro

(02:08) - The ease of deploying apps across data centers with Fly.io

(04:33) - From Python to Go, Xe shares their programming journey

(07:26) - Using S3 as a message queue for cross AZ data transfer

(10:57) - How unconventional ideas can lead to tech breakthroughs

(14:50) - The dangers of being too close to a product and the importance of a broader perspective

(19:15) - The challenge of making complex tech accessible to newcomers

(23:40) - Voice Coding in tech

(28:33) - The pioneering tech developments driven by the adult entertainment industry

(31:22) - The ethical implications and personal impacts of AI in creative fields

(36:22) - Xe's multi-faceted approach to creativity and tech

(38:55) - Closing remarks

About Xe Iaso

I'm Xe Iaso, a technical educator, twitch streamer, vtuber, and philosopher that focuses on ways to help make technology easier to understand and do cursed things in the process. I live in Ottawa with my husband and I do developer relations professionally. I am an avid writer for my blog xeiaso.net, where I have over 400 articles. I regularly experiment with new technologies and find ways to mash them up with old technologies for my own amusement.

Links referenced:

Fly.io: https://fly.io
Xe Iaso's Blog: https://xeiaso.net

Sponsor

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

The Intersection of AI, Security, and Cloud with Alyssa Miller

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Corey sits down with Alyssa Miller, the CISO at Epic Global, for a discussion that cuts through the noise of the technology world in this episode of Screaming in The Cloud. Alyssa celebrates her personal journey to becoming a licensed pilot and invaluable insights into the current state and future of AI, cloud computing, and security. This episode ventures beyond the typical tech hype, offering a critical look at the realities of AI, the strategic considerations behind cloud computing at Epic Global, and the importance of explainability in AI within regulated industries. Additionally, Alyssa and Corey highlight the cyclical nature of tech hype, the misconceptions surrounding AI's capabilities, and the impact of startup culture on genuine innovation.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction

(01:33) Corey celebrates Alyssa Miller getting her general aviation license.

(04:10) Considerations of cloud computing at Epic Global.

(06:45) The hype and reality of AI in today's tech landscape.

(11:49) Alyssa on the importance of explainability in AI within regulated industries.

(14:21) Debunking myths about AI surpassing human intelligence.

(19:30) The cyclical nature of tech hype, exemplified by blockchain and AI.

(24:58) Critique of startup culture and its influence on technology adoption.

(29:01) Alyssa and Corey discuss how tech trends often fail to meet their initial hype.

(31:57) Where to find Alyssa Miller online for more insights.

About Alyssa:

Alyssa directs the security strategy for S&P Global Ratings as Business Information Security Officer (BISO), connecting corporate security objectives to business initiatives. Additionally, she shares her message about evolving the way people think about and approach security, privacy and trust through speaking engagements at various conferences and other events. When not engaged in security research and advocacy, she is also an accomplished soccer referee, guitarist and photographer.

Links referenced:

Alyssa Miller’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssam-infosec/
Epic Global's Website: https://www.epiqglobal.com/en-us
Alyssa’s Aviation Journey: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alyssam-infosec_i-landed-at-ohare-kord-in-my-cherokee-activity-7079088781575811074-ZsSx?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Shifting from Observability 1.0 to 2.0 with Charity Majors

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 03:00:00 -0700

This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by good friend and colleague, Charity Majors. Charity is the CTO and Co-founder of Honeycomb.io, the widely popular observability platform. Corey and Charity discuss the ins and outs of observability 1.0 vs. 2.0, why you should never underestimate the power of software to get worse over time, and the hidden costs of observability that could be plaguing your monthly bill right now. The pair also shares secrets on why speeches get better the more you give them and the basic role they hope AI plays in the future of computing. Check it out!

Show Highlights:

(00:00 - Reuniting with Charity Majors: A Warm Welcome

(03:47) - Navigating the Observability Landscape: From 1.0 to 2.0

(04:19) - The Evolution of Observability and Its Impact

(05:46) - The Technical and Cultural Shift to Observability 2.0

(10:34) - The Log Dilemma: Balancing Cost and Utility

(15:21) - The Cost Crisis in Observability

(22:39) - The Future of Observability and AI's Role

(26:41) - The Challenge of Modern Observability Tools

(29:05) - Simplifying Observability for the Modern Developer

(30:42) - Final Thoughts and Where to Find More

About Charity

Charity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.

Links:

https://charity.wtf/
Honeycomb Blog: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog
Twitter: @mipsytipsy

The Current State of Serverless with Kristi Perreault

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 03:00:00 -0700

On this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Kristi Perreault. Given Kristi’s title of AWS Serverless Hero, Corey and Kristi discuss the origins and current state of the serverless world, the similarities between AI and serverless as the tech world moves into this next era, and why she emphasizes that serverless is not always the right solution for every issue. Kristi also opens up about her role as Principal Software Engineer at Liberty Mutual, and what she enjoys most about jet setting around the globe giving speeches.

Highlights:

(00:00) - Introducing Kristi Perreault

(00:39) - The Unconventional Path to Becoming an AWS Serverless Hero

(05:05) - Exploring the Boundaries of Cloud Education

(10:53) - The Challenges of Keeping Up with Rapid Tech Changes

(11:51) - Redefining Serverless: Beyond the Hype

(13:12) - The Evolution of Serverless and Its Impact

(21:55) - Staying Grounded Amidst Technological Zealotry

(27:18) - Python Development in the Cloud

(29:31) - Upcoming Talks and Where to Connect with Kristi

About Kristi

Kristi Perreault is an AWS Serverless Hero and a Principal Software Engineer at Liberty Mutual Insurance, where her focus is serverless-first cloud enablement. She has over 5 years of industry experience, holds an M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, and is very passionate about promoting women in technology. She is an established speaker, appearing in over 35 conferences, podcasts, panels, and more. Kristi founded the Serverless Denver meetup, and currently co-organizes the Portsmouth, NH AWS User Group and CDK Day. Outside of work and the serverless tech space, Kristi can be found reading a good book in her tiny home, enjoying a good poke bowl, or jet setting all over the world.

Links:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristi-perreault/
Twitter: @kperreault95
AWS Portsmouth User Group: https://www.meetup.com/aws-portsmouth-user-group/
AWS Usergroup Belfast: https://www.meetup.com/aws-usergroup-belfast/

Networks and Sustainability in Computing with George Porter

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 03:00:00 -0700

George Porter, a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego, talks to us about advanced networking and the effects of computing on the environment In this episode of Screaming in the cloud. George explores the shift towards optical networking in data centers to meet growing bandwidth needs and discusses the significant carbon footprint associated with computing, from data centers to device production. In addition to providing a look into the future of scalable, sustainable computing systems, George mentions the difficulties and benefits of incorporating cloud computing into academic research.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction

(03:15) - The Shift to Optical Networking

(07:50) - The Efficiency of Cloud Networks

(12:06) - Adaptable Networks for Different Uses

(16:19) - Reducing Computing's Carbon Footprint

(20:25) - Highlighting Computing's Environmental Impact Through Art

(26:51) - Cloud Computing Challenges in Academia

(31:18) - The benefits of cloud computing for academic research

(34:14) - Closing thoughts

About George:
A Computer Science Professor at UC San Diego focusing on high-performance and sustainable computer systems

Links:

Center for Network Systems at UCSD: https://cns.ucsd.edu/
Low Carbon Computing and Collaboration with the University of San Diego: https://c3lab.net/

Open Source, AI, and Business Insights with AB Periasamy

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Join Corey Quinn and MinIO's co-founder and CEO, AB Periasamy, for a look into MinIO's strategic approach to integrating open-source contributions with its business objectives amidst the AI evolution. They discuss the effect of AI on data management, highlight the critical role of data replication, and advocate for the adoption of cloud-native architecture. Their conversation examines the insights of data replication, mentioning its pivotal role in ensuring efficient data management and storage. Overall, a recurring theme throughout the episode is the importance of simplifying technology to catalyze a broader understanding and utilization that can remain accessible and beneficial to all.

Show Highlights:
(00:00) - Intro

(03:40) - MinIO's evolution and commitment to simplicity and scalability.

(07:25) - The significance of data replication and object storage's versatility.

(12:12) - Challenges and innovations in data backup and disaster recovery.
(15:21) - Launch of MinIO's Enterprise Object Store and its comprehensive features.
(20:50) - Balancing open-source contributions and commercial objectives.

(30:32) - AI's growing influence on data storage strategies and MinIO's role.

(34:33) - The shift towards software-defined data infrastructure driven by AI and cloud technologies.

(39:40) - Resources and the future of tech

(43:31) - Closing thoughts

About A.B Periasamy:

AB Periasamy is the CEO and co-founder of MinIO. One of the leading thinkers and technologists in the open source software movement, AB was a co-founder and CTO of GlusterFS which was acquired by RedHat in 2011. Following the acquisition, he served in the office of the CTO at RedHat prior to founding MinIO in late 2015. AB is an active angel investor and serves on the board of H2O.ai and the Free Software Foundation of India. He earned his BE in Computer Science and Engineering from Annamalai University.

Links:

MinIO: https://min.io/
Kubernetes:https://kubernetes.io/
AWS (Amazon Web Services): https://aws.amazon.com/
Twitter: @abperiasamy

A Beginner's Guide to Surviving AWS re:Invent with Chris Hill

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn is joined by HumblePod CEO Chris Hill to dissect Chris's debut experience at AWS re:Invent. Together, they tackle the challenges of attending one of the biggest conferences in the IT industry, discussing its immense reach, logistical hurdles, and invaluable insights for anyone considering attending in the future. Beyond the event itself, Chris provides an intimate glimpse into the crucial behind-the-scenes efforts involved in producing exceptional content amid the chaos of AWS re:Invent, emphasizing the importance of kindness, professionalism, and superior audio quality. Discover how partnering with an experienced podcast production team can elevate any content to new heights of polish and engagement.

Full Description / Show Notes

(00:00) - Introduction to the Episode

(01:25) - Chris's First Impressions of AWS re:Invent

(02:09) - The Surprising Scale of AWS re:Invent

(04:13) - Lessons Learned and Things Chris Would Do Differently at Future AWS re:Invent Events

(07:52) - Balancing Content Creation, Networking, and Professionalism Under Stress

(13:42) - Chris and Corey’s Humorous Encounters with Security While Filming at AWS re:Invent

(15:35) - Exploring AWS Services and Billing Surprises

(21:12) - Significance of Professional Podcast Production

(25:04) - Closing Thoughts & HumblePod Contact Information

(26:19) - Closing Thoughts

About Chris:

Chris Hill is a Knoxville, TN native and owner of the podcast production company, HumblePod. He helps his customers create, develop, and produce podcasts and is working with clients in Knoxville as well as startups and entrepreneurs across the United States, Silicon Valley, and the world.In addition to producing podcasts for nationally-recognized thought leaders, Chris is the co-host and producer of the award-winning Our Humble Beer Podcast.

He also lectures at the University of Tennessee, where he leads non-credit courses on podcasts and marketing. He received his undergraduate degree in business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he majored in Marketing & Entrepreneurship, and he later received his MBA from King University.

Chris currently serves his community as the President of the American Marketing Association in Knoxville. In his spare time, he enjoys hanging out with the local craft beer community, international travel, exploring the great outdoors, and his many creative pursuits.

Links:

HumblePod: https://www.humblepod.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HumblePod
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdhill1/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thechristopholies
WBTB TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@webuiltthisbrand
HumblePod IG: https://www.instagram.com/humblepod/?hl=en

The Nuanced Power of Headless Browsers with Joel Griffith

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by Joel Griffith. Joel is the CEO of Browserless.io, a company focused on providing headless browser automation without the pains of hosting. Corey and Joel discuss the most common use cases for headless browsers, the spectrum of web scraping ethics over the last decade, and why it’s so important to always do what you are passionate about no matter how high you climb on the corporate ladder. Joel also gives us his insight into why so many engineers come from creative backgrounds and shares his story of moving from jazz trumpet player to CEO.

Full Description / Show Notes

(00:00) - Intro
(00:53) - Guest Introduction: Joel Griffith
(02:51) - The Genesis of Browserless.io
(05:21) - Use Cases of Browserless.io
(07:19) -The Potential for Abuse of Web Scraping
(08:37) - The Legitimate Use Cases of Web Scraping
(11:17) - The Power of the Right License Type
(13:55) - The Value of Open Source and Charging for Software
(14:13) - The Journey to Starting a Business
(24:00) - Joel’s Emphasis on Quality of Life
(27:43) - Staying Focused on the Work You’re Passionate About
(30:00) - Conclusion and Final Thoughts

About Joel

Master of puppets and the browsers they run! I'm Joel Griffith, and for over a decade I've helped run, destroy, and make manageable things related to browser automation. I've had the pleasure of working on this in big companies and small, and more recently started Browserless to bring the power of automation to teams of all sizes.

Links:

Github: https://github.com/joelgriffith
Twitter: @browserless https://twitter.com/browserless

The Complexities of Cloud Networking with William Collins

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey is joined by William Collins, Alkira's head cloud architect, to discuss the obstacles and possibilities of cloud networking. They discuss the evolution, challenges, and necessity of cloud networking, highlighting why this fundamental part of cloud design often goes unrecognized yet truly deserves attention. From William's early days of cloud skepticism to the incredible influence of services such as AWS Transit Gateway, William shares his experiences and insights into how network planning can make a big difference in cloud installations in this episode of Screaming in the Cloud.

Show Notes:

About William Collins:

William Collins is a principal cloud architect at Alkira, where he plays a pivotal role in evangelizing the company's vision, building customer relationships, and leading thought in the network, security, and automation spaces within the cloud ecosystem. With a rich background in enterprise technology across financial services and healthcare, including a significant tenure as Director of Cloud Architecture at Humana, William has made substantial contributions to cloud adoption and network modernization. Beyond his professional pursuits, William is passionate about content creation, hosting The Cloud Gambit Podcast, and teaching as a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. His expertise spans automation, cloud computing, and network engineering. An advocate for continuous learning and innovation, William's outside interests include woodworking, playing ice hockey, and guitar. While his insights are influential, they reflect his personal views and not those of his employer.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:24) William Collins shares his initial skepticism towards cloud computing

(07:28) The evolution of cloud networking

(13:50) The role of upfront planning in cloud network deployment to avoid scalability and complexity issues.

(21:10) The shift from complicated, manual network setups to simple, effective cloud systems .

(24:13) William uses Netflix's network design as an example of how cloud networking powers seamless user experiences

(27:44) The future of cloud networking and the ongoing need for innovation

(30:23) Closing remarks

Links:

Alkira's Website: https://www.alkira.com/
The Cloud Gambit Podcast: https://www.thecloudgambit.com/
William Collins on X (Twitter) https://twitter.com/WCollins502
AWS Transit Gateway https://aws.amazon.com/transit-gateway/
William Collins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-collins-

The Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing with Jack Ellis

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

On this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by Jack Ellis. He is the technical co-founder of Fathom Analytics, a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. Corey and Jack talk in-depth about a wide variety of AWS services, which ones have a habit of subtly hiking the monthly bill, and why Jack has moved towards working with consultants instead of hiring a costly DevOps team. This episode is truly a deep dive into everything AWS and billing-related led by one of the best in the industry. Tune in.

Show Highlights

(00:00) - Introduction and Background
(00:31) - The Birth of Fathom Analytics
(03:35) - The Surprising Cost Drivers: Lambda and CloudWatch
(05:27) - The New Infrastructure Plan: CloudFront and WAF Logs
(08:10) - The Unexpected Costs of CloudWatch and NAT Gateways
(10:37) - The Importance of Efficient Data Movement
(12:54) - The Hidden Costs of S3 Versioning
(14:33) - The Benefits of AWS Compute Optimizer
(17:38) - The Implications of AWS's New IPv4 Address Charges
(18:57) - Considering On-Premise Data Centers
(21:05) - The Economics of Cloud vs On-Premise
(24:05) - The Role of Consultants in Cloud Management
(31:05) - The Future of Cloud Management
(33:20) - Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

About Jack Ellis

Technical co-founder of Fathom Analytics, the simple, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics.

Links:

Twitter: @JackEllis
Website: https://usefathom.com/
Blog Post: An alterNAT Future: We Now Have a NAT Gateway Replacement
Sponsor: Oso - osohq.com

How Scaling Turns Rare Occurrences Into Common Ones with Jason Cohen

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Today Corey Quinn is joined by Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at WP Engine, Jason Cohen. Jason breaks down the biggest issues he has seen throughout his career hosting millions of websites including why seemingly rare problems should be expected at scale, how moving on after attaining a “good enough” metric can save time and money, and what it means to be proud of your work in the world of cybersecurity. Check it out!

Show Highlights

(00:00) - WordPress popularity and outsourcing engineering tasks
(07:28) - Web hosting and scalability
(11:01) - Server reliability and quality control
(14:18) - Scaling infrastructure and prioritizing customer value
(26:20) - Website speed and optimization
(28:17) - WordPress scalability and deployment in a cloud environment
(36:14) - Customer profitability and service limitations
(38:54) - Security measures for ethical decision-making
(47:19) - Balancing free speech and decision-making in online content moderation

About Jason

Founder of unicorn WP Engine (200,000 customers, 1,200 employees). Previously founder of bootstrapped Smart Bear (sold 2008; re-sold in 2021 at ~$2B) and ITWatchDogs (sold 2004). Original mentor and angel investor with Austin-based Capital Factory since 2009.

Written about startups for seventeen years, most recently at https://longform.asmartbear.com; Twitter: @asmartbear.

Links Referenced:

Personal Website: https://longform.asmartbear.com/
WP Engine: https://wpengine.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncohen/

Overcoming Cloud Development Obstacles with Elad Ben-Israel

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Corey Quinn talks with Elad Ben-Israel, CEO and Co-founder of Wing Cloud, about the creation of Wing, a revolutionary programming language designed to simplify cloud application development. Elad shares his experiences at AWS and the journey to developing Wing Cloud, highlighting the challenges developers face with existing cloud paradigms and how Wing aims to seamlessly integrate infrastructure and application code. The conversation goes further into Wing's open-source nature, its design philosophy focused on making cloud development more accessible, and the delicate balance between commercial interests and open-source contributions.

Show highlights:

(00:17) - Corey Quinn introduces Elad Ben-Israel

(02:27) - Elad Ben-Israel discusses the motivation behind creating Wing,

(06:28) - Elad presents Wing as a programming language designed to add an architectural dimension to cloud programming

(09:45) - The demarcation between application and platform is explored

(13:27) - Introduction of the "platform provider" within Wing

(22:18) - The Importance of Choice in Cloud Development

(31:22) - Getting started on Wing

(33:14) - Closing remarks

About Elad Ben-Israel:
Elad has been coding since he remembers himself, which is quite a long time ago, and always had an unexplained attraction to developer tools. He created the AWS CDK when working at AWS and is now the co-founder and CEO of Wing Cloud, which is building Winglang, a programming language for the cloud.

Links Referenced:

Winglang.io
Winglang on GitHub - https://github.com/winglang/wing
Winglang Slack Community - https://winglang.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-23emj8uue-ZF4ijRNtdDOLO5F7iIz~NA#/shared-invite/email
Elad Ben-Israel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hackingonstuff/

A Conversation on Cloud WAN with Kris Gillespie

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Kris Gillespie, lead platform engineer for Silverflow, joins Corey Quinn on "Screaming in the Cloud" to talk about Cloud WAN's exciting new role in cloud networking. Kris explains Silverflow's journey, from the original problems with network scalability and the resolution of IP conflicts, to fully utilizing Cloud WAN for global connectivity and easier network management. Kris, who enjoys simplifying complex network architectures, discusses how Cloud WAN has enabled Silverflow to seamlessly integrate between regions and cloud providers, meeting their mission-critical needs for low latency and reliable transaction processing. Listen in to see how Cloud WAN has transformed the approach to solving fundamental network problems, demonstrating the importance for companies and engineers of knowing how to navigate the constantly evolving cloud landscape.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction to the show
(01:57) Kris recounts the initial challenges Silverflowy and the discovery of Cloud WAN
(04:15) The advantages of Cloud WAN over traditional transit gateways
(08:35) Infrastructure management with OrgFormation
(12:15) Insights into the use of historical and current networking technologies
(21:13) challenges and implications of transitioning to IPv6
(33:10) Kris highlights the real need for Cloud WAN
(37:50) Closing remarks

About Kris

Kris is a 28-year industry veteran. He started in '95 back in Australia on the help desk for the first ISP in the country. Since then has moved to the Netherlands, switching roles between network, systems and storage engineering. During this time has been involved in developing certifications for both IBM and (the now defunct) EMC, among others. Worked heavily in the finance/banking sector. The last 10 years has been keenly focused on the cloud space and as is the term these days, combined these skills into what's popularly coined, a "Platform Engineer"

Currently works for a payments processing startup, Silverflow, as their Principal Platform Engineer, leading their Platform team and ensuring the platform can scale globally.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisgillespie/
blog: https://blog.viking-ops.io/

Understanding the Future of Cloud Technology with Anthony Esper

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

From a systems admin to a cloud computing pioneer, Anthony Esper illustrates the dynamic landscape of cloud technology and its impact on businesses in this episode of Screaming in the Cloud. Using his vast experience and extensive expertise, Anthony shares his insights on developing the Golden VPC module, the intricacies of cloud consulting across various industries, and the pivotal role of strategic planning in cloud adoption. Tune in for practical advice and expert insights!

About Anthony

Anthony Esper is a seasoned Chief Technology Officer with over two decades in technology consulting. His pioneering work includes developing self-showing real estate technology with Occupi Inc and leading over 20 AWS projects across major US corporations. Esper's expertise spans cloud computing, security, and big data, contributing to his reputation as a tech industry influencer.

Show highlights:

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:07) - Backstory of the Golden VPC Module Creation
(05:13) - The Realities of Cloud Consulting
(09:52) - AWS Operational Challenges and Solutions
(19:30) - Significance of Strategic Cloud Adoption
(28:42) - Closing Remarks

Links Referenced:

Golden VPC Module video: https://youtu.be/fHGO03piySM?si=2NAFRPCBN-VwJPCP
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-esper-9182441

SmugMug's Cloud Adventure with Andrew Shieh

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Andrew Shieh shares the thrilling story of SmugMug’s bold leap into AWS’s cloud technology, marking it as one of the pioneering companies to harness the cloud for digital photography storage. This episode offers a unique perspective into the type of strategy and groundbreaking tech advancements that catapulted SmugMug’s success. Listen to the full episode for a masterclass in innovation and adaptation!

Show highlights:

(00:00) Corey introduces the show & Guest Andrew Shieh

(00:54)Andrew shares the story of how SmugMug became AWS's first enterprise customer.

(02:17) Discussion on the evolution of AWS's customer service

(04:31) Reflections on the expansion of AWS services.

(06:08) The critical role of Amazon S3 in SmugMug's operations

(12:24) AWS's interest in unique customer stories and feedback

(09:32) SmugMug's cloud strategy and optimization

(13:50) Andrew discusses challenges and solutions in cloud adoption

(17:38) Andrew shares his experiences at AWS re:Invent, offering thoughts on the conference's evolution

(21:09) A look into AWS's pricing formulas and business insights

(31:55) Closing thoughts

About Andrew

Andrew "shandrew" Shieh is a multidisciplinary engineer, focused today on making the AWS cloud do what it promises to. Andrew started as an environmental engineer, focused on energy efficiency and air pollution modeling, but quickly got dragged into tech after spending most of college at the help desk of the Unix computer cluster.

Andrew's current interests include sustainability, cost efficiency, and economics. Most AWS service teams are his friends and he enjoys (a bit too much) talking to his SmugMug and Flickr coworkers about AWS. He recently spoke at AWS re:Invent about how his children (9 and 11) helped to teach him the value of trivia as a means of learning backwards. He also wrote a keynote for re:Invent's pandemic year, and has rescued billions of precious photos from extinction.

Links Referenced:

SmugMug: https://www.smugmug.com/
S3 Intelligent Tiering blog post on Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/s3-intelligent-tiering-what-it-takes-to-actually-break-even/
Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@shandrew
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shandrew/
Flickr: https://flickr.com/photos/shandrew
Andrew's talk on "Learning Backwards" at re:Invent 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od09dD7mc6k

Exploring Advanced Cybersecurity with Michael Isbitski

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Cybersecurity leader Mike Isbitski explores the intricacies of cloud-native security and vulnerability management in today's technological landscape. With over 25 years of experience, he provides valuable insights into the challenges and complexities organizations face in securing ephemeral infrastructure and machine identities in the cloud. This episode also explores the cautious adoption of AI in cybersecurity, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that maintains operational functionality while addressing evolving security concerns.

Key Points with Timestamp

Security through Obscurity (00:00:00) - Mike discusses common security practices.
Cloud-Native Technology Explained (00:01:30) - Unpacking the meaning of cloud-native tech.
Evolving Vulnerability Management (00:03:38) - Insights on how vulnerability management has improved.
AI in Cybersecurity (00:21:20) - Discussion on the slow but growing adoption of AI in cybersecurity.
Challenges of Permissions and Identity (00:29:29) - The complexities of permissions in the cloud environment.
Future Trends in Cybersecurity (00:34:11) - Predictions for changes and advancements in the cybersecurity landscape.

About Michael

Michael Isbitski is a former Gartner analyst, cybersecurity leader, and practitioner with more than 25 years of experience, specializing in application, cloud, and container security. Michael learned many hard lessons on the front lines of IT working on application security, vulnerability management, enterprise architecture, and systems engineering. He's guided countless organizations globally in their security initiatives as they support their businesses.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
Sysdig 2024 Cloud-Native Security and Usage Report: www.sysdig.com/SITC

Empowering Economic Growth Through Tech Innovations with Angie Jones

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Technology meets economic empowerment in this episode featuring Angie Jones, Global Vice President of Developer Relations at TBD, a Block division. Angie sheds light on the role of decentralized technologies in shaping the future of digital identity and cross-border payments. Her journey from software engineering to a leadership role in tech innovation illustrates her profound impact on the industry. This episode offers valuable insights into how technological advancements are driving economic growth and changing the financial landscape. Angie's expertise and unique perspective make this a must-listen for anyone interested in the cutting-edge intersection of technology, finance, and innovation.

About Angie

Angie Jones is the Global Vice President of Developer Relations for TBD, Block’s new business unit focused on decentralized technologies. She is an award-winning teacher and international keynote speaker who shares her wealth of knowledge at software companies and conferences all over the world.

As a Master Inventor, Angie is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in 27 patented inventions in the areas of metaverses, collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet, and software development processes.

Show notes:

(00:25) Introduction to Angie Jones and Her Role at TBD

(01:25) Angie’s Recognition in a USA Today Crossword

(02:50) Career Journey and Transition into Developer Relations

(06:04) Block’s Mission and Services in Economic Empowerment

(10:09) Convenience vs. Decentralization in Technology

(16:49) Innovations in Cross-Border Payments

(25:01) Decentralized Tech Stories and Reflections on Tech Innovation

(30:22) Challenging Tech Industry Norms and Global Perspectives

Links Referenced:

TBD: https://www.tbd.website/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/techgirl1908
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angiejones/

Mastering Tech Transitions with Ceora Ford

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Join us for a fascinating talk with Ceora Ford, a Developer Advocate at Okta, as she explores the changing world of tech. Ceora shares her unique journey through different tech roles and talks about the importance of keeping technical skills sharp, even when focusing on advocacy. She also gives us a sneak peek into the exciting AI developments happening at Okta. Tune in to this episode to get a better understanding of the fast-paced tech industry and what's coming next.

About Ceora

Ceora Ford is a Developer Advocate from Philadelphia, renowned for her expertise in making complex computer science concepts accessible to a broad audience. With a rich history of creating educational content, she has significantly contributed to the tech community, working with leading companies like CodeSandbox, DigitalOcean, egghead.io, and Apollo GraphQL. Ceora's career is marked by her unique ability to simplify technical topics, making them understandable for everyone, from students to professionals in tech-adjacent roles. Her non-traditional path into tech and her current role at Okta showcase her commitment to making the tech industry more inclusive and approachable for all.

Links Referenced:

Okta: https://www.okta.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ceeoreo_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ceeoreo/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ceeoreo
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@ceeoreo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceora-ford/
Personal website: https://ceora.dev

Working to Live Instead of Living to Work with Jeremy Tanner

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Jeremy Tanner joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why his career in tech is the least interesting thing about himself, and why he feels everyone should be able to say the same thing. Corey and Jeremy discuss raising kids, their antics on motorcycles, and much more throughout this episode. Jeremy reveals what truly gives his life fulfillment, meaning, and what drives him in his career. Jeremy and Corey also discuss the importance of engaging your online audience the right way.

About Jeremy

Jeremy is a motorcyclist. An advocate (Developer, Community, BBQ). Not Questlove.

Links Referenced:

Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@penguin
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
Uses This: https://usesthis.com/

How Snyk Gets Buy-In to Improve Security with Chen Gour Arie

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Chen Gour Arie, Director of Engineering at Snyk, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how his company, Enso Security, got acquired by Snyk and what drew him to Snyk’s mission as a partner. Chen expands on the challenges currently facing the security space, and shares what he feels are likely outcomes for challenges like improving compliance across value-add on security tools and the increasing scope of cybersecurity at such a relatively early phase of the industry’s development. Corey and Chen also discuss what makes Snyk so appealing to developers and why that was an important part of their growth strategy, as well as Chen’s take on recent security incidents that have hit the news.

About Chen

Chen is the Co-founder of Enso Security (part of Snyk) - the world's 1st ASPM platform. With decades of hands-on experience in cybersecurity and software development, Chen has focused his career on building effective application security tools and practices.

Links Referenced:

Snyk: https://snyk.io
Snyk AppRisk: https://snyk.io/product/snyk-apprisk/

Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Snyk, and as a part of that they have given me someone rather distinct as far as career paths and trajectories go. Chen Gour Arie is currently a director of engineering over at Snyk, but in a previous life—read as about six months or so ago—he was a co-founder of Enso Security, which got acquired. Chen, thank you for joining me.

Chen: Thank you for having me, Corey.

Corey: So, I guess an interesting place to begin is, what has the past couple of years been like? And let’s dive in with, what is or was Enso Security?

Chen: Yeah. So, Enso started for me first as friendship because I joined the team that I was working with as a contractor for a while. There was such an excellent and interesting team with a very interesting environment. And then after a while, they asked me to join that team, and then I became part of the security team of a company called Wix.com.

It’s quite a large company, web do-it-yourself kind of platform, that you can build your own website with a presentation style kind of interface, and our job was to secure that. And we formed a very, very nice friendship throughout it, but we also gained a lot of experience because you work with such a large company, and you experience many challenges, including real-time attempts to penetrate, and the complexity of social engineering at large scale. You go through a lot of things. So, this was the start. And after a couple of years, we decided that we have some interesting ideas that can do good to the community in the cybersecurity industry, and we embarked on a new journey together to start Enso.

Corey: I can see why you aligned with Snyk. It sounds like a lot of what you were aimed at is very much in step with how they tend to approach things. I have a number of sponsors that I can say this about, but Snyk is a particularly fun one, in that, obviously, you folks pay me to run advertisements and featured guest episodes like this, which is appreciated, but we also pay you as a customer of Snyk because it does a lot of things that we find both incredibly useful and incredibly valuable. The thread that I’ve seen running through everything coming out of Snyk has been this concept of, I think, what some folks would say shifting left, but it comes down to the idea of flagging issues as early in the process as possible rather than trying to get someone to remember what they did three months ago, and oh, yeah, go back and address that. That alone has made it one of the best approaches to things that are truly important—and yes, I consider security to be one of those things—that I’ve seen in a while on the dev tool space.

Chen: Yeah, and this has been the mission of Snyk for a very long time. And when we started Enso, our mission was to help in some additional elements of the same problem space in introducing additional tools to help drive this shift left, this democratization of the security effort around and in the organization, and resolving some of the friction that is created with the, kind of, confusing ownership of security and software development. So, this was kind of the mission of Enso. The category introduced by it and the ASPM category to bring the notion of postural security, postural management to applications. And it really is a huge fit with the journey of Snyk, and we were very excited to be approached by them to join their journey and help them do further shift left and extend on problem space on the complexity of this collaboration between security and developers.

Corey: A question I have around this is that it seems to me that viewing security posture management from an application perspective, and then viewing other parts of it from a cloud provider perspective and other parts of it from a variety of different things—you know, go to RSA and walk up and down the endless rows of booths, and you know, look at the 12 different things that they’re all selling because it’s all the same stuff around 12 categories or so, with different companies and logos and the rest—it feels like, on some level, that can lead very quickly to a fractured security posture where, well this is the app side of the security, and then we have the infrastructure security folks, but those groups don’t really collaborate because they’re separate and distinct. How do you square that circle?

Chen: Yeah, it’s not an easy problem, and I think that the North Star of many vendors exists this notion of sometimes I think we call it CNAP or something that will unify all of it. Cloud as a solution, and the offering that exists with cloud computing enables a lot of it, enables a lot of this unification, but we have to remember that the industry is young. The software security industry in general is young. If we will look at any other industry with that size, all of them have much more history and time to mature. And inside this industry, the security itself is even younger.

It has become a real problem much later than then when software started. It has become a huge problem when cloud emerged and became, like, the huge deal that it is now. And when more and more businesses are based on digital services, and more people are writing software, a lot of it is young, and it needs time to mature, and it’s time to get to—to accomplish some big parts like this unification that you are pointing out missing.

Corey: I have to confess my own bias here. A lot of the stuff that I build is very small-scale, leverages serverless technologies heavily, and even when I’m dealing with things like the CDK, where I start to have my application and the infrastructure that powers it coalesce into the same sort of thing, it becomes increasingly difficult, if not outright impossible for some of these config...

Continuing to Market After the Product Has Sold with Kim Harrison

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Kim Harrison, a freelance content marketing strategist and author, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to talk about asking the right questions to find your target demographic, why she has such a deep love for story telling, and how marketing extends after the product has been sold. Kim shares her unique experiences with solving urgently painful problems that customers are experiencing and subsequently building a relationship with those customers that allows her to solve more pain points down the line.

About Kim

Kim is a professional storyteller focused on strategic communications. She translates complex ideas into compelling narratives, helping teams share their perspectives. She enjoys building impactful stories, and using a range of mediums and channels to reach specific audiences.

For 10+ years Kim has worked closely with teams focused on big data and developer tooling. They have brought new methodologies forward, impacted the language used to describe technologies, and even established new industry categories.

Links Referenced:

Personal/Company website: https://www.kimber.kim/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberh/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kittyriot

The Future of Entertaining Developer Content with Jason Lengstorf

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Jason Lengstorf, a developer media producer and host of the show Learn with Jason, joins Corey on this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud to layout his ideas for creative developer content. Jason explains how devTV can have way more reach than webinars, the lack of inspiration he experiences at conferences these days, and why companies should be focused on hiring specialists before putting DevRels on the payroll. Plus, Corey and Jason discuss walking the line between claiming you’re good at everything and not painting yourself into a corner as a DevRel and marketer.

About Jason

Jason Lengstorf helps tech companies connect with developer communities through better media. He advocates for continued learning through collaboration and play and regularly live streams coding with experts on his show, Learn With Jason. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Links Referenced:

Learn with Jason: https://www.learnwithjason.dev/
Personal Website Links: https://jason.energy/links

Championing CDK While Accepting the Limits of AWS with Matthew Bonig

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Matthew Bonig, Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experiences in CDK, why developers can’t be solely reliant on AI or coding tools to fill in the blanks, and his biggest grievances with AWS. Matthew gives an in-depth look at how and why CDK has been so influential for him, as well as the positive work that Defiance Digital is doing as a managed service provider. Corey and Matthew debate the need for AWS to focus on innovating instead of simply surviving off its existing customer base.

About Matthew

Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital. AWS DevTools Hero, co-author of The CDK Book, author of the Advanced CDK Course. All things CDK and Star Trek.

Links Referenced:

CDK Book: https://www.thecdkbook.com/
cdk.dev: https://cdk.dev
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattbonig
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbonig/
Personal website: https://matthewbonig.com
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

The Importance of the Platform-As-a-Product Mentality with Evelyn Osman

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Evelyn Osman, Platform Engineering Manager at AutoScout24, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the dire need for developers to agree on a standardized tool set in order to scale their projects and innovate quickly. Corey and Evelyn pick apart the new products being launched in cloud computing and discover a large disconnect between what the industry needs and what is actually being created. Evelyn shares her thoughts on why viewing platforms as products themselves forces developers to get into the minds of their users and produces a better end result.

About Evelyn

Evelyn is a recovering improviser currently role-playing as a Platform Engineering Manager at Autoscout24 in Munich, Germany. While she says she specializes in AWS architecture and integration after spending 11 years with it, in truth she spends her days convincing engineers that a product mindset will make them hate their product managers less.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyn-osman/

Benchmarking Security Attack Response Times in the Age of Automation with Anna Belak

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Anna Belak, Director of the Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the newest benchmark for responding to security threats, 5/5/5. Anna describes why it was necessary to set a new benchmark for responding to security threats in a timely manner, and how the Sysdig team did research to determine the best practices for detecting, correlating, and responding to potential attacks. Corey and Anna discuss the importance of focusing on improving your own benchmarks towards a goal, as well as how prevention and threat detection are both essential parts of a solid security program.

About Anna

Anna has nearly ten years of experience researching and advising organizations on cloud adoption with a focus on security best practices. As a Gartner Analyst, Anna spent six years helping more than 500 enterprises with vulnerability management, security monitoring, and DevSecOps initiatives. Anna's research and talks have been used to transform organizations' IT strategies and her research agenda helped to shape markets. Anna is the Director of Thought Leadership at Sysdig, using her deep understanding of the security industry to help IT professionals succeed in their cloud-native journey.

Anna holds a PhD in Materials Engineering from the University of Michigan, where she developed computational methods to study solar cells and rechargeable batteries.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
Sysdig 5/5/5 Benchmark: https://sysdig.com/555

The Fundamentals of Building Mission-Driven Technology with Danilo Campos

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 03:00:00 -0800

Danilo Campos, Proprietor of Antigravity, joins @quinnypig on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his philosophy behind building tools that not only enhance developer experience but also improve the future of our world. Danilo shares his thoughts on how economic factors have influenced tech companies and their strategies for product, open source, and more. He also shares what he thinks is another, better way to approach these strategies, without ignoring the economic element.

About Danilo

Danilo Campos wants a world where technology makes us more powerful and expressive versions of ourselves. He worked with GitHub and the White House to deliver coding platforms to public housing residents, supported Glitch.com in its last days as an independent, and developed products for multiple early-stage startups, including Hipmunk. Today Danilo offers freelance developer experience services for devtools firms through Antigravity DX.

Links Referenced:

Antigravity DX: https://antigravitydx.com/
Blog: https://redeem-tomorrow.com

How Vercel is Improving the Developer Experience on the Front End with Guillermo Rauch

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he decided to focus on building a front-end tool that is fast, reliable, and focuses on the developer experience. Guillermo explains how he discovered that Javascript was the language that set online offerings apart, and also reveals the advice he gives to founders on how to build an effective landing page. Corey and Guillermo discuss the effects of generative AI on developer experience, and Guillermo explains why Vercel had a higher standard for accuracy when rolling out their new AI product for developers, v0.

About Guillermo

Guillermo Rauch is Founder and CEO of Vercel, where he leads the company’s mission to enable developers to create at the moment of inspiration. Prior to founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup where he served the company as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013. Originally from Argentina,

Guillermo has been a developer since the age of ten and is passionate about contributing to the open source community. He has created a number of JavaScript projects including socket.io, Mongoose.js, Now, and Next.js.

Links Referenced:

Vercel: https://vercel.com/
v0.dev: https://v0.dev
Personal website: https://rauchg.com
Personal twitter: https://twitter.com/rauchg

How Tailscale Builds for Users of All Tiers with Maya Kaczorowski

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Maya Kaczorowski, Chief Product Officer at Tailscale, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what sets the Tailscale product approach apart, for users of their free tier all the way to enterprise. Maya shares insight on how she evaluates feature requests, and how Tailscale’s unique architecture sets them apart from competitors. Maya and Corey discuss the importance of transparency when building trust in security, as well as Tailscale’s approach to new feature roll-outs and change management.

About Maya

Maya is the Chief Product Officer at Tailscale, providing secure networking for the long tail. She was mostly recently at GitHub in software supply chain security, and previously at Google working on container security, encryption at rest and encryption key management. Prior to Google, she was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, working in IT security for large enterprises.

Maya completed her Master's in mathematics focusing on cryptography and game theory. She is bilingual in English and French.

Outside of work, Maya is passionate about ice cream, puzzling, running, and reading nonfiction.

Links Referenced:

Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/
Tailscale features:
- VS Code extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tailscale.vscode-tailscale
- Tailscale SSH: https://tailscale.com/kb/1193/tailscale-ssh
- Tailnet lock: https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock
- Auto updates: https://tailscale.com/kb/1067/update#auto-updates
- ACL tests: https://tailscale.com/kb/1018/acls#tests
- Kubernetes operator: https://tailscale.com/kb/1236/kubernetes-operator
- Log streaming: https://tailscale.com/kb/1255/log-streaming
Tailscale Security Bulletins: https://tailscale.com/security-bulletins
Blog post “How Our Free Plan Stays Free:” https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan
Tailscale on AWS Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-nd5zazsgvu6e6

Using DevOps to Ignite a Chain Reaction of Productivity and Happiness with Dave Mangot

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Dave Mangot, CEO and founder of Mangoteque, joins Coreyon Screaming in the Cloud to explain how leveraging DevOps improves the lives of engineers and results in stronger businesses. Dave talks about the importance of exclusively working for private equity firms that act ethically, the key difference between venture capital and private equity, and how conveying issues and ideas to your CEO using language he understands leads to faster results. Corey and Dave discuss why successful business are built on two things: infrastructure as code and monitoring.

About Dave

Dave Mangot, author of DevOps Patterns for Private Equity, helps portfolio companies get good at delivering software. He is a leading consultant, author, and speaker as the principal at Mangoteque. A DevOps veteran, Dave has successfully led digital, SRE, and DevOps transformations at companies such as Salesforce, SolarWinds, and Cable & Wireless. He has a proven track record of working with companies to quickly mature their existing culture to improve the speed, frequency, and resilience of their software service delivery.

Links Referenced:

Mangoteque: https://www.mangoteque.com
DevOps Patterns for Private Equity: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Patterns-Private-Equity-organization/dp/B0CHXVDX1K
“How to Talk Business: A Short Guide for Tech Leaders”: https://itrevolution.com/articles/how-to-talk-business-a-short-guide-for-tech-leaders/

Using SRE to Solve the Obvious Problems with Laura Nolan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Laura Nolan, Principal Software Engineer at Stanza, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to offer insights on how to use SRE to avoid disastrous and lengthy production delays. Laura gives a rich history of her work with SREcon, why her approach to SRE is about first identifying the biggest fire instead of toiling with day-to-day issues, and why the lack of transparency in systems today actually hurts new engineers entering the space. Plus, Laura explains to Corey why she dedicates time to work against companies like Google who are building systems to help the government (inefficiently) select targets during wars and conflicts.

About Laura

Laura Nolan is a software engineer and SRE. She has contributed to several books on SRE, such as the Site Reliability Engineering book, Seeking SRE, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know. Laura is a Principal Engineer at Stanza, where she is building software to help humans understand and control their production systems. Laura also serves as a member of the USENIX Association board of directors. In her copious spare time after that, she volunteers for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and is half-way through the MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. She lives in rural Ireland in a small village full of medieval ruins.

Links Referenced:

Company Website: https://www.stanza.systems/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lauralifts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-nolan-bb7429/

Terraform and The Art of Teaching Tech with Ned Bellavance

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 10:26:41 -0800

Ned Bellavance worked in the world of tech for more than a decade before joining the family profession as an educator. He joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his shift from engineer to educator and content creator, the intricacies of Terraform, and how changes in licensing affect the ecosystem.

About Ned

Ned is an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience in the field. He has been a helpdesk operator, systems administrator, cloud architect, and product manager. In 2019, Ned founded Ned in the Cloud LLC to work as an independent educator, creator, and consultant. In this new role, he develops courses for Pluralsight, runs multiple podcasts, writes books, and creates original content for technology vendors.

Ned is a Microsoft MVP since 2017 and a HashiCorp Ambassador since 2020.

Ned has three guiding principles: embrace discomfort, fail often, and be kind.

Links Referenced:

Ned in the Cloud: https://nedinthecloud.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ned-bellavance/

Creating Value in Incident Management with Robert Ross

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Robert Ross, CEO and Co-Founder at FireHydrant, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how being an on-call engineer fighting incidents inspired him to start his own company. Robert explains how FireHydrant does more than just notify engineers of an incident, but also helps them to be able to effectively put out the fire. Robert tells the story of how he “accidentally” started a company as a result of a particularly critical late-night incident, and why his end goal at FireHydrant has been and will continue to be solving the problem, not simply choosing an exit strategy. Corey and Robert also discuss the value and pricing models of other incident-reporting solutions and Robert shares why he feels surprised that nobody else has taken the same approach FireHydrant has.

About Robert

Robert Ross is a recovering on-call engineer, and the CEO and co-founder at FireHydrant. As the co-founder of FireHydrant, Robert plays a central role in optimizing incident response and ensuring software system reliability for customers. Prior to founding FireHydrant, Robert previously contributed his expertise to renowned companies like Namely and Digital Ocean.

Links Referenced:

FireHydrant: https://firehydrant.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bobbytables

How MongoDB is Paving The Way for Frictionless Innovation with Peder Ulander

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 07:00:00 -0800

Peder Ulander, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at MongoDB, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how MongoDB is paving the way for innovation. Corey and Peder discuss how Peder made the decision to go from working at Amazon to MongoDB, and Peder explains how MongoDB is seeking to differentiate itself by making it easier for developers to innovate without friction. Peder also describes why he feels databases are more ubiquitous than people realize, and what it truly takes to win the hearts and minds of developers.

About Peder

Peder Ulander, the maestro of marketing mayhem at MongoDB, juggles strategies like a tech wizard on caffeine. As the Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, he battles buzzwords, slays jargon dragons, and tends to developers with a wink. From pioneering Amazon's cloud heyday as Director of Enterprise and Developer Solutions Marketing to leading the brand behind cloud.com's insurgency, Peder's built a legacy as the swashbuckler of software, leaving a trail of market disruptions one vibrant outfit at a time. Peder is the Scarlett Johansson of tech marketing — always looking forward, always picking the edgy roles that drive what's next in technology.

Links Referenced:

MongoDB: https://mongodb.com

Taking a Hybrid AI Approach to Security at Snyk with Randall Degges

Corey Quinn — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 07:00:00 -0800

Randall Degges, Head of Developer Relations & Community at Snyk, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Snyk’s innovative AI strategy and why developers don’t need to be afraid of security. Randall explains the difference between Large Language Models and Symbolic AI, and how combining those two approaches creates more accurate security tooling. Corey and Randall also discuss the FUD phenomenon to selling security tools, and Randall expands on why Snyk doesn’t take that approach. Randall also shares some background on how he went from being a happy Snyk user to a full-time Snyk employee.

About Randall

Randall runs Developer Relations & Community at Snyk, where he works on security research, development, and education. In his spare time, Randall writes articles and gives talks advocating for security best practices. Randall also builds and contributes to various open-source security tools.

Randall's realms of expertise include Python, JavaScript, and Go development, web security, cryptography, and infrastructure security. Randall has been writing software for over 20 years and has built a number of popular API services and open-source tools.

Links Referenced:

Snyk: https://snyk.io/
Snyk blog: https://snyk.io/blog/

Chronosphere on Crafting a Cloud-Native Observability Strategy with Rachel Dines

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 07:00:00 -0800

Rachel Dines, Head of Product and Technical Marketing at Chronosphere, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why creating a cloud-native observability strategy is so critical, and the challenges that come with both defining and accomplishing that strategy to fit your current and future observability needs. Rachel explains how Chronosphere is taking an open-source approach to observability, and why it’s more important than ever to acknowledge that the stakes and costs are much higher when it comes to observability in the cloud.

About Rachel

Rachel leads product and technical marketing for Chronosphere. Previously, Rachel wore lots of marketing hats at CloudHealth (acquired by VMware), and before that, she led product marketing for cloud-integrated storage at NetApp. She also spent many years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Outside of work, Rachel tries to keep up with her young son and hyper-active dog, and when she has time, enjoys crafting and eating out at local restaurants in Boston where she’s based.

Links Referenced:

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdines/

Use Cases for Couchbase’s New Columnar Data Stores with Jeff Morris

Corey Quinn — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 11:49:48 -0800

Jeff Morris, VP of Product & Solutions Marketing at Couchbase, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Couchbase’s new columnar data store functionality, specific use cases for columnar data stores, and why AI gets better when it communicates with a cleaner pool of data. Jeff shares how more responsive databases could allow businesses like Dominos and United Airlines to create hyper-personalized experiences for their customers by utilizing more responsive databases. Jeff dives into the linked future of AI and data, and Corey learns about Couchbase’s plans for the re:Invent conference. If you’re attending re:Invent, you can visit Couchbase at booth 1095.

About Jeff

Jeff Morris is VP Product & Solutions Marketing at Couchbase (NASDAQ: BASE), a cloud database platform company that 30% of the Fortune 100 depend on.

Links Referenced:

Couchbase: https://www.couchbase.com/

The Man Behind the Cloud Curtain with Jeremy Tangren

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Jeremy Tangren, Director of Media Operations at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he went from being a Project Manager in IT to running Media Operations at a cloud costs consultancy. Jeremy provides insight into how his background as a Project Manager has helped him tackle everything that’s necessary in a media production environment, as well as what it was like to shift from a career on the IT side to working at a company that is purely cloud-focused. Corey and Jeremy also discuss the coordination of large events like re:Invent, and what attendance is really like when you’re producing the highlight reels that other people get to watch from the comfort of their own homes.

About Jeremy

With over 15 years of experience in big tech, Jeremy brings a unique perspective to The Duckbill Group and its Media Team. Jeremy handles all things Media Operations. From organizing the team and projects to making sure publications go out on time, Jeremy does a bit of everything!

Links Referenced:

duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
requinnvent.com: https://requinnvent.com

An Open-Source Mindset in Cloud Security with Alex Lawrence

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Alex Lawrence, Field CISO at Sysdig, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he went from studying bioluminescence and mycology to working in tech, and his stance on why open source is the future of cloud security. Alex draws an interesting parallel between the creative culture at companies like Pixar and the iterative and collaborative culture of open-source software development, and explains why iteration speed is crucial in cloud security. Corey and Alex also discuss the pros and cons of having so many specialized tools that tackle specific functions in cloud security, and the different postures companies take towards their cloud security practices.

About Alex

Alex Lawrence is a Field CISO at Sysdig. Alex has an extensive history working in the datacenter as well as with the world of DevOps. Prior to moving into a solutions role, Alex spent a majority of his time working in the world of OSS on identity, authentication, user management and security. Alex's educational background has nothing to do with his day-to-day career; however, if you'd like to have a spirited conversation on bioluminescence or fungus, he'd be happy to oblige.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
sysdig.com/opensource: https://sysdig.com/opensource
falco.org: https://falco.org

How Couchbase is Using AI to Enhance the User Experience with Laurent Doguin

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Laurent Doguin, Director of Developer Relations & Strategy at Couchbase, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to talk about the work that Couchbase is doing in the world of databases and developer relations, as well as the role of AI in their industry and beyond. Together, Corey and Laurent discuss Laurent’s many different roles throughout his career including what made him want to come back to a role at Couchbase after stepping away for 5 years. Corey and Laurent dig deep on how Couchbase has grown in recent years and how it’s using artificial intelligence to offer an even better experience to the end user.

About Laurent

Laurent Doguin is Director of Developer Relations & Strategy at Couchbase (NASDAQ: BASE), a cloud database platform company that 30% of the Fortune 100 depend on.

Links Referenced:

Couchbase: https://couchbase.com
XKCD #927: https://xkcd.com/927/
dbdb.io: https://dbdb.io
DB-Engines: https://db-engines.com/en/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldoguin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ldoguin/

Building a Strong Company Culture at Honeycomb with Mike Goldsmith

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Mike Goldsmith, Staff Software Engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to talk about Open Telemetry, company culture, and the pros and cons of Go vs. .NET. Corey and Mike discuss why OTel is such an important tool, while pointing out its double-edged sword of being fully open-source and community-driven. Opening up about Honeycomb’s company culture and how to find a work-life balance as a fully-remote employee, Mike points out how core-values and social interaction breathe life into a company like Honeycomb.

About Mike

Mike is an OpenSource focused software engineer that builds tools to help users create, shape and deliver system & application telemetry. Mike contributes to a number of OpenTelemetry initiatives including being a maintainer for Go Auto instrumentation agent, Go proto packages and an emeritus .NET SDK maintainer..

Links Referenced:

Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mike_Goldsmith
Honeycomb blog: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegoldsmith/

Learnings From A Lifelong Career in Open-Source with Amir Szekely

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Amir Szekely, Owner at CloudSnorkel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he got his start in the early days of cloud and his solo project, CloudSnorkel. Throughout this conversation, Corey and Amir discuss the importance of being pragmatic when moving to the cloud, and the different approaches they see in developers from the early days of cloud to now. Amir shares what motivates him to develop open-source projects, and why he finds fulfillment in fixing bugs and operating CloudSnorkel as a one-man show.

About Amir

Amir Szekely is a cloud consultant specializing in deployment automation, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and CI/CD. His background includes security, virtualization, and Windows development. Amir enjoys creating open-source projects like cdk-github-runners, cdk-turbo-layers, and NSIS.

Links Referenced:

CloudSnorkel: https://cloudsnorkel.com/
lasttootinaws.com: https://lasttootinaws.com
camelcamelcamel.com: https://camelcamelcamel.com
github.com/cloudsnorkel: https://github.com/cloudsnorkel
Personal website: https://kichik.com

How Tech Will Influence the Future of Podcasting with Chris Hill

Corey Quinn — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Chris Hill, owner of HumblePod and host of the We Built This Brand podcast, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the future of podcasting and the role emerging technologies will play in the podcasting space. Chris describes why AI is struggling to make a big impact in the world of podcasting, and also emphasizes the importance of authenticity and finding a niche when producing a show. Corey and Chris discuss where video podcasting works and where it doesn’t, and why it’s more important to focus on the content of your podcast than the technical specs of your gear. Chris also shares insight on how to gauge the health of your podcast audience with his Podcast Listener Lifecycle evaluation tool.

About Chris

In addition to producing podcasts for nationally-recognized thought leaders, Chris is the co-host and producer of the award-winning Our Humble Beer Podcast and the host of the newly-launched We Built This Brand podcast. He also lectures at the University of Tennessee, where he leads non-credit courses on podcasts and marketing. He received his undergraduate degree in business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he majored in Marketing & Entrepreneurship, and he later received his MBA from King University.

Links Referenced:

HumblePod: https://www.humblepod.com/
HumblePod Quick Edit: https://humblepod.com/services/quick-edit
Podcast Listener Lifecycle: https://www.humblepod.com/podcast/grow-your-podcast-with-the-listener-lifecycle/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/christopholies

Solving the Case of the Infinite Cloud Spend with John Wynkoop

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

John Wynkoop, Cloud Economist & Platypus Herder at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why he decided to make a career move and become an AWS billing consultant. Corey and John discuss how once you’re deeply familiar with one cloud provider, those skills become transferable to other cloud providers as well. John also shares the trends he has seen post-pandemic in the world of cloud, including the increased adoption of a multi-cloud strategy and the need for costs control even for VC-funded start-ups.

About John

With over 25 years in IT, John’s done almost every job in the industry, from running cable and answering helpdesk calls to leading engineering teams and advising the C-suite. Before joining The Duckbill Group, he worked across multiple industries including private sector, higher education, and national defense. Most recently he helped IGNW, an industry leading systems integration partner, get acquired by industry powerhouse CDW. When he’s not helping customers spend smarter on their cloud bill, you can find him enjoying time with his family in the beautiful Smoky Mountains near his home in Knoxville, TN.

Links Referenced:

The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlwynkoop/

Making an Affordable Event Data Solution with Seif Lotfy

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Seif Lotfy, Co-Founder and CTO at Axiom, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how and why Axiom has taken a low-cost approach to event data. Seif describes the events that led to him helping co-found a company, and explains why the team wrote all their code from scratch. Corey and Seif discuss their views on AWS pricing, and Seif shares his views on why AWS doesn’t have to compete on price. Seif also reveals some of the exciting new products and features that Axiom is currently working on.

About Seif

Seif is the bubbly Co-founder and CTO of Axiom where he has helped build the next generation of logging, tracing, and metrics. His background is at Xamarin, and Deutche Telekom and he is the kind of deep technical nerd that geeks out on white papers about emerging technology and then goes to see what he can build.

Links Referenced:

Axiom: https://axiom.co/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seiflotfy

Keeping Workflows Secure in an Ever-Changing Environment with Adnan Khan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Adnan Khan, Lead Security Engineer at Praetorian, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss software bill of materials and supply chain attacks. Adnan describes how simple pull requests can lead to major security breaches, and how to best avoid those vulnerabilities. Adnan and Corey also discuss the rapid innovation at Github Actions, and the pros and cons of having new features added so quickly when it comes to security. Adnan also discusses his view on the state of AI and its impact on cloud security.

About Adnan

Adnan is a Lead Security Engineer at Praetorian. He is responsible for executing on Red-Team Engagements as well as developing novel attack tooling in order to meet and exceed engagement objectives and provide maximum value for clients.

His past experience as a software engineer gives him a deep understanding of where developers are likely to make mistakes, and has applied this knowledge to become an expert in attacks on organization’s CI/CD systems.

Links Referenced:

Praetorian: https://www.praetorian.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adnanthekhan
Praetorian blog posts: https://www.praetorian.com/author/adnan-khan/

When Data is Your Brand and Your Job with Joe Karlsson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Joe Karlsson, Data Engineer at Tinybird, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it’s like working in the world of data right now and how he manages the overlap between his social media presence and career. Corey and Joe chat about the rise of AI and whether or not we’re truly seeing advancements in that realm or just trendy marketing plays, and Joe shares why he feels data is getting a lot more attention these days and what it’s like to work in data at this time. Joe also shares insights into how his mental health has been impacted by having a career and social media presence that overlaps, and what steps he’s taken to mitigate the negative impact.

About Joe

Joe Karlsson (He/They) is a Software Engineer turned Developer Advocate at Tinybird. He empowers developers to think creatively when building data intensive applications through demos, blogs, videos, or whatever else developers need.

Joe's career has taken him from building out database best practices and demos for MongoDB, architecting and building one of the largest eCommerce websites in North America at Best Buy, and teaching at one of the most highly-rated software development boot camps on Earth. Joe is also a TEDx Speaker, film buff, and avid TikToker and Tweeter.

Links Referenced:

Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/
Personal website: https://joekarlsson.com

Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/
Personal website: https://joekarlsson.com

Storytelling Over Feature Dumping with Jeff Geerling

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jeff Geerling, Owner of Midwestern Mac, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the importance of storytelling, problem-solving, and community in the world of cloud. Jeff shares how and why he creates content that can appeal to anybody, rather than focusing solely on the technical qualifications of his audience, and how that strategy has paid off for him. Corey and Jeff also discuss the impact of leading with storytelling as opposed to features in product launches, and what’s been going on in the Raspberry Pi space recently. Jeff also expresses the impact that community has on open-source companies, and reveals his take on the latest moves from Red Hat and Hashicorp.

About Jeff

Jeff is a father, author, developer, and maker. He is sometimes called "an inflammatory enigma".

Links Referenced:

Personal webpage: https://jeffgeerling.com/

Making a Difference Through Technology in the Public Sector with Dmitry Kagansky

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Dmitry Kagansky, State CTO and Deputy Executive Director for the Georgia Technology Authority, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he became the CTO for his home state and the nuances of working in the public sector. Dmitry describes his focus on security and reliability, and why they are both equally important when working with state government agencies. Corey and Dmitry describe AWS’s infamous GovCloud, and Dmitry explains why he’s employing a multi-cloud strategy but that it doesn’t work for all government agencies. Dmitry also talks about how he’s focusing on hiring and training for skills, and the collaborative approach he’s taking to working with various state agencies.

About Dmitry

Mr. Kagansky joined GTA in 2021 from Amazon Web Services where he worked for over four years helping state agencies across the country in their cloud implementations and migrations.

Prior to his time with AWS, he served as Executive Vice President of Development for Star2Star Communications, a cloud-based unified communications company. Previously, Mr. Kagansky was in many technical and leadership roles for different software vending companies. Most notably, he was Federal Chief Technology Officer for Quest Software, spending several years in Europe working with commercial and government customers.

Mr. Kagansky holds a BBA in finance from Hofstra University and an MBA in management of information systems and operations management from the University of Georgia.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dimikagi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimikagi/
GTA Website: https://gta.ga.gov

Ask Me Anything with Corey Quinn

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 03:00:00 -0700

In this special live-recorded episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey interviews himself— well, kind of. Corey hosts an AMA session, answering both live and previously submitted questions from his listeners. Throughout this episode, Corey discusses misconceptions about his public persona, the nature of consulting on AWS bills, why he focuses so heavily on AWS offerings, his favorite breakfast foods, and much, much more. Corey shares insights into how he monetizes his public persona without selling out his genuine opinions on the products he advertises, his favorite and least favorite AWS services, and some tips and tricks to get the most out of re:Invent.

About Corey

Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group. Corey’s unique brand of snark combines with a deep understanding of AWS’s offerings, unlocking a level of insight that’s both penetrating and hilarious. He lives in San Francisco with his spouse and daughters.

Links Referenced:

lastweekinaws.com/disclosures: https://lastweekinaws.com/disclosures
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Using Empathy to Solve Customer Challenges with David Colebatch

Corey Quinn — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

David Colebatch, CEO of Tidal, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Tidal’s recent shift to a product-led approach and why empathizing with customers is always their most important job. David describes what it was like to grow the company from scratch on a boot-strapped basis, and how customer feedback and challenges inform the company strategy. Corey and David discuss the cost-savings measures cloud customers are now embarking on, and David discusses how constant migrations are the new normal. Corey and David also discuss the impact that generative AI is having not just on tech, but also on creative content and interactions in our everyday lives.

About David

David is the CEO & Founder of Tidal. Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.

Links Referenced:

Company website: https://tidal.cloud
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-colebatch/

How AWS Educates Learners on Cloud Computing with Valerie Singer

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the vast array of cloud computing education programs AWS offers to people of all skill levels and backgrounds. Valerie explains how she manages such a large undertaking, and also sheds light on what AWS is doing to ensure their programs are truly valuable both to learners and to the broader market. Corey and Valerie discuss how generative AI is applicable to education, and Valerie explains how AWS’s education programs fit into a K-12 curriculum as well as job seekers looking to up-skill.

About Valerie

As General Manager for AWS’s Global Education team, Valerie is responsible for
leading strategy and initiatives for higher education, K-12, EdTechs, and outcome-
based education worldwide. Her Skills to Jobs team enables governments, education
systems, and collaborating organizations to deliver skills-based pathways to meet
the acute needs of employers around the globe, match skilled job seekers to good
paying jobs, and advance the adoption of cloud-based technology.

In her ten-year tenure at AWS, Valerie has held numerous leadership positions,
including driving strategic customer engagement within AWS’s Worldwide Public
Sector and Industries. Valerie established and led the AWS’s public sector global
partner team, AWS’s North American commercial partner team, was the leader for
teams managing AWS’s largest worldwide partnerships, and incubated AWS’s
Aerospace & Satellite Business Group. Valerie established AWS’s national systems
integrator program and promoted partner competency development and practice
expansion to migrate enterprise-class, large-scale workloads to AWS.

Valerie currently serves on the board of AFCEA DC where, as the Vice President of
Education, she oversees a yearly grant of $250,000 in annual STEM scholarships to
high school students with acute financial need.

Prior to joining AWS, Valerie held senior positions at Quest Software, Adobe
Systems, Oracle Corporation, BEA Systems, and Cisco Systems. She holds a B.S. in
Microbiology from the University of Maryland and a Master in Public Administration
from the George Washington University.

Links Referenced:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/
GetIT: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-getit/
Spark: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-spark/
Future Engineers: https://www.amazonfutureengineer.com/
code.org: https://code.org
Academy: https://aws.amazon.com/training/awsacademy/
Educate: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/
Skill Builder: https://skillbuilder.aws/
Labs: https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/aws-builder-labs/
re/Start: https://aws.amazon.com/training/restart/
AWS training and certification programs: https://www.aws.training/

Building Computers for the Cloud with Steve Tuck

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Steve Tuck, Co-Founder & CEO of Oxide Computer Company, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his work to make modern computers cloud-friendly. Steve describes what it was like going through early investment rounds, and the difficult but important decision he and his co-founder made to build their own switch. Corey and Steve discuss the demand for on-prem computers that are built for cloud capability, and Steve reveals how Oxide approaches their product builds to ensure the masses can adopt their technology wherever they are.

About Steve

Steve is the Co-founder & CEO of Oxide Computer Company. He previously was President & COO of Joyent, a cloud computing company acquired by Samsung. Before that, he spent 10 years at Dell in a number of different roles.

Links Referenced:

Oxide Computer Company: https://oxide.computer/
On The Metal Podcast: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal

The Complex World of Microsoft Licensing with Wes Miller

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the various intricacies and pitfalls of Microsoft licensing. Wes and Corey discuss what it’s like to work closely with a company like Microsoft in your day-to-day career, while also looking out for the best interest of your mutual customers. Wes explains his history of working both at and with Microsoft, and the changes he’s seen to their business models and the impact that has on their customers.

About Wes

Wes Miller analyzes and writes about Microsoft security, identity, and systems management technologies, as well as Microsoft product licensing.

Before joining Directions on Microsoft in 2010, Wes was a product manager and development manager for several Austin, TX, start-ups, including Winternals Software, acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Prior to that, Wes spent seven years at Microsoft working as a program manager in the Windows Core Operating System and MSN divisions.

Wes received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Links Referenced:

Directions on Microsoft Website: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/getwired
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmiller/
Directions on Microsoft Training: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/training

Using Data to Tell Stories with Thomas LaRock

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Thomas LaRock, Principal Developer Evangelist at Selector AI, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why he loves having a career in data and his most recent undertaking at Selector AI. Thomas explains how his new role aligned perfectly with his career goals in his recent job search, and why Selector AI is not in competition with other data analysis tools. Corey and Thomas discuss the benefits and drawbacks to going back to school for additional degrees, and why it’s important to maintain a healthy balance of education and practical experience. Thomas also highlights the impact that data can have on peoples’ lives, and why he finds his career in data so meaningful.

About Thomas

Thomas’ career and life experiences are best described as follows: he takes things that are hard and makes them simple for others to understand.

Thomas is a highly experienced data professional with over 25 years of expertise in diverse roles, from individual contributor to team lead. He is passionate about simplifying complex challenges for others and leading with empathy, challenging assumptions, and embracing a systems-thinking approach. Thomas has strong analytical reasoning skills and expertise to identify trends and opportunities for significant impact, and is a builder of cohesive teams by breaking down silos resulting in increased efficiencies and collective success. He has a track record of driving revenue growth, spearheading industry-leading events, and fostering valuable relationships with major tech players like Microsoft and VMware.

Links Referenced:

Selector: https://www.selector.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sqlrockstar/

Defining a Database with Tony Baer

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Tony Baer, Principal at dbInsight, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his definition of what is and isn’t a database, and the trends he’s seeing in the industry. Tony explains why it’s important to try and have an outsider’s perspective when evaluating new ideas, and the growing awareness of the impact data has on our daily lives. Corey and Tony discuss the importance of working towards true operational simplicity in the cloud, and Tony also shares why explainability in generative AI is so crucial as the technology advances.

About Tony

Tony Baer, the founder and CEO of dbInsight, is a recognized industry expert in extending data management practices, governance, and advanced analytics to address the desire of enterprises to generate meaningful value from data-driven transformation. His combined expertise in both legacy database technologies and emerging cloud and analytics technologies shapes how clients go to market in an industry undergoing significant transformation.

During his 10 years as a principal analyst at Ovum, he established successful research practices in the firm’s fastest growing categories, including big data, cloud data management, and product lifecycle management. He advised Ovum clients regarding product roadmap, positioning, and messaging and helped them understand how to evolve data management and analytic strategies as the cloud, big data, and AI moved the goal posts. Baer was one of Ovum’s most heavily-billed analysts and provided strategic counsel to enterprises spanning the Fortune 100 to fast-growing privately held companies.

With the cloud transforming the competitive landscape for database and analytics providers, Baer led deep dive research on the data platform portfolios of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, and on how cloud transformation changed the roadmaps for incumbents such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Teradata. While at Ovum, he originated the term “Fast Data” which has since become synonymous with real-time streaming analytics.

Baer’s thought leadership and broad market influence in big data and analytics has been formally recognized on numerous occasions. Analytics Insight named him one of the 2019 Top 100 Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Influencers. Previous citations include Onalytica, which named Baer as one of the world’s Top 20 thought leaders and influencers on Data Science; Analytics Week, which named him as one of 200 top thought leaders in Big Data and Analytics; and by KDnuggets, which listed Baer as one of the Top 12 top data analytics thought leaders on Twitter. While at Ovum, Baer was Ovum’s IT’s most visible and publicly quoted analyst, and was cited by Ovum’s parent company Informa as Brand Ambassador in 2017. In raw numbers, Baer has 14,000 followers on Twitter, and his ZDnet “Big on Data” posts are read 20,000 – 30,000 times monthly. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Strata Data and Spark Summit.

Links Referenced:

dbInsight: https://dbinsight.io/

Building a Community around Cloud-Native Content with Bret Fisher

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 04:30:25 -0700

Bret Fisher, DevOps Dude & Cloud-Native Trainer, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it’s like being a practitioner and a content creator in the world of cloud. Bret shares why he feels it’s so critical to get his hands dirty so his content remains relevant, and also how he has to choose where to focus his efforts to grow his community. Corey and Bret discuss the importance of finding the joy in your work, and also the advantages and downfalls of the latest AI advancements.

About Bret

For 25 years Bret has built and operated distributed systems, and helped over 350,000 people learn dev and ops topics. He's a freelance DevOps and Cloud Native consultant, trainer, speaker, and open source volunteer working from Virginia Beach, USA. Bret's also a Docker Captain and the author of the popular Docker Mastery and Kubernetes Mastery series on Udemy. He hosts a weekly DevOps YouTube Live Show, a container podcast, and runs the popular devops.fan Discord chat server.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BretFisher
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BretFisher
Website: https://www.bretfisher.com

The Evolution of OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Austin Parker, Community Maintainer at OpenTelemetry, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss OpenTelemetry’s mission in the world of observability. Austin explains how the OpenTelemetry community was able to scale the OpenTelemetry project to a commercial offering, and the way Open Telemetry is driving innovation in the data space. Corey and Austin also discuss why Austin decided to write a book on OpenTelemetry, and the book’s focus on the evergreen applications of the tool.

About Austin

Austin Parker is the OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, as well as an event organizer, public speaker, author, and general bon vivant. They've been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception in 2019.

Links Referenced:

OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
Learning OpenTelemetry early release: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-opentelemetry/9781098147174/
Page with Austin’s social links: https://social.ap2.io

How Redpanda Extracts Business Value from Data Events with Alex Gallego

Corey Quinn — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Alex Gallego, CEO & Founder of Redpanda, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experience founding and scaling a successful data streaming company over the past 4 years. Alex explains how it’s been a fun and humbling journey to go from being an engineer to being a founder, and how he’s built a team he trusts to hand the production off to. Corey and Alex discuss the benefits and various applications of Redpanda’s data streaming services, and Alex reveals why it was so important to him to focus on doing one thing really well when it comes to his product strategy. Alex also shares details on the Hack the Planet scholarship program he founded for individuals in underrepresented communities.

About Alex

Alex Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda, the streaming data platform for developers. Alex has spent his career immersed in deeply technical environments, and is passionate about finding and building solutions to the challenges of modern data streaming. Prior to Redpanda, Alex was a principal engineer at Akamai, as well as co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high-performance stream-processing engine acquired by Akamai in 2016. He has also engineered software at Factset Research Systems, Forex Capital Markets and Yieldmo; and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and cryptography from NYU.

Links Referenced:

Redpanda: https://redpanda.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/emaxerrno
Redpanda community Slack: https://redpandacommunity.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1xq6m0ucj-nI41I7dXWB13aQ2iKBDvDw
Hack The Planet Scholarship: https://redpanda.com/scholarship

Reflecting on a Legendary Tech Career with Kelsey Hightower

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Kelsey Hightower joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his reflections on how the tech industry is progressing. Kelsey describes what he’s been getting out of retirement so far, and reflects on what he learned throughout his high-profile career - including why feature sprawl is such a driving force behind the complexity of the cloud environment and the tactics he used to create demos that are engaging for the audience. Corey and Kelsey also discuss the importance of remaining authentic throughout your career, and what it means to truly have an authentic voice in tech.

About Kelsey

Kelsey Hightower is a former Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud, the co-chair of KubeCon, the world’s premier Kubernetes conference, and an open source enthusiast. He’s also the co-author of Kubernetes Up & Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure. Recently, Kelsey announced his retirement after a 25-year career in tech.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower

Cloud Compliance and the Ethics of AI with Levi McCormick

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Levi McCormick, Cloud Architect at Jamf, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his work modernizing baseline cloud infrastructure and his experience being on the compliance side of cloud engineering. Levi explains how he works to ensure the different departments he collaborates with are all on the same page so that different definitions don’t end up in miscommunications, and why he feels a sandbox environment is an important tool that leads to a successful production environment. Levi and Corey also explore the ethics behind the latest generative AI craze.

About Levi

Levi is an automation engineer, with a focus on scalable infrastructure and rapid development. He leverages deep understanding of DevOps culture and cloud technologies to build platforms that scale to millions of users. His passion lies in helping others learn to cloud better.

Links Referenced:

Jamf: https://www.jamf.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/levi_mccormick
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/levimccormick/

The Value of Good Editing in Content Creation with Alysha Love

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Alysha Love, Executive Editor and Co-Founder of Payette Media House, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her career journey going from journalism to editing and how she works with Corey on his content. Alysha describes why she feels it’s so important to capture the voice of the person you’re editing, and why editing your content makes a difference to those reading it. Corey and Alysha also explore the differences in editing for something that will be read silently versus something that will be read out loud, as well as the different styles of editing.

About Alysha

Alysha Love is executive editor and co-founder of Payette Media House, an editorial agency serving startups and tech companies. Alysha is the treasurer of ACES: The Society for Editing, the nation's largest editing organization, and trains editors and writers in digital best practices.

She was an editor at CNN and POLITICO during the Obama and Trump administrations. Alysha has a bachelor's in journalism from the University of Missouri and a master's in leadership and organizational development from the University of Texas. She's a big fan of the humble ampersand.

Links Referenced:

Company website: https://payettemediahouse.com

The Evolving Role of a Software Engineer with Forrest Brazeal

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Forrest Brazeal, Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how AI, current job markets, and more are impacting software engineers. Forrest and Corey explore whether AI helps or hurts developers, and what impact it has on the role of a junior developer and the rest of the development team. Forrest also shares his viewpoints on how he feels AI affects people in creative roles. Corey and Forrest discuss the pitfalls of a long career as a software developer, and how people can break into a career in cloud as well as the necessary pivots you may need to make along the way. Forrest then describes why he feels workers are currently staying put where they work, and how he predicts a major shift will happen when the markets shift.

About Forrest

Forrest is a cloud educator, cartoonist, author, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He currently leads the content marketing team at Google Cloud. You can buy his book, The Read Aloud Cloud, from Wiley Publishing or attend his talks at public and private events around the world.

Links Referenced:

Personal Website: https://goodtechthings.com
Newsletter signup: https://cloud.google.com/innovators

The Importance of Positivity in Negotiations with Josh Doody

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Josh Doody, Owner of Fearless Salary Negotiation, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how important tonality and communication is, both in salary negotiations and everyday life. Josh describes how important it is to have a positive padding to your communications in order to make the person on the other end of the negotiation feel like a collaborator rather than a combatant. Corey and Josh also describe scenarios where tonality made a huge difference in the outcome, and Josh gives some examples of where and when to be mindful of how you’re coming across in modern communication methods. Josh also reveals how negotiating with companies multiple times allows him to understand their recruiters more than a person who is encountering their negotiation process for the first time.

About Josh

Josh is a salary negotiation coach who works with senior software engineers and engineering managers to negotiate job offers with big tech companies. He also wrote Fearless Salary Negotiation: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Paid What You're Worth, and recently launched Salary Negotiation Mastery to help folks who aren't able to work with Josh 1-on-1.

Links Referenced:

Fearless Salary Negotiation website: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com
Fearless Salary Negotiation: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Salary-Negotiation-step-step/dp/0692568689/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshdoody
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdoody/

How Cloudflare is Working to Fix the Internet with Matthew Prince

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO at Cloudflare, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how and why Cloudflare is working to solve some of the Internet’s biggest problems. Matthew reveals some of his biggest issues with cloud providers, including the tendency to charge more for egress than ingress and the fact that the various clouds don’t compete on a feature vs. feature basis. Corey and Matthew also discuss how Cloudflare is working to change those issues so the Internet is a better and more secure place. Matthew also discusses how transparency has been key to winning trust in the community and among Cloudflare’s customers, and how he hopes the Internet and cloud providers will evolve over time.

About Matthew

Links Referenced:

Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eastdakota

The Role of DevRel at Google with Richard Seroter

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Richard Seroter, Director of Outbound Product Management at Google, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what’s new at Google. Corey and Richard discuss how AI can move from a novelty to truly providing value, as well as the importance of people maintaining their skills and abilities rather than using AI as a black box solution. Richard also discusses how he views the DevRel function, and why he feels it’s so critical to communicate expectations for product launches with customers.

About Richard

Richard Seroter is Director of Outbound Product Management at Google Cloud. He’s also an instructor at Pluralsight, a frequent public speaker, and the author of multiple books on software design and development. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog (seroter.com) on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.

Links Referenced:

Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com
Personal website: https://seroter.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rseroter
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seroter/

Exposing the Latest Cloud Threats with Anna Belak

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Anna Belak, Director of The Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the findings in this year’s newly-released Sysdig Global Cloud Threat Report. Anna explains the challenges that teams face in ensuring their cloud is truly secure, including quantity of data versus quality, automation, and more. Corey and Anna also discuss how much faster attacks are able to occur, and Anna gives practical insights into what can be done to make your cloud environment more secure.

About Anna

Anna has nearly ten years of experience researching and advising organizations on cloud adoption with a focus on security best practices. As a Gartner Analyst, Anna spent six years helping more than 500 enterprises with vulnerability management, security monitoring, and DevSecOps initiatives. Anna's research and talks have been used to transform organizations' IT strategies and her research agenda helped to shape markets. Anna is the Director of The Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig, using her deep understanding of the security industry to help IT professionals succeed in their cloud-native journey.

Anna holds a PhD in Materials Engineering from the University of Michigan, where she developed computational methods to study solar cells and rechargeable batteries.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
Sysdig Global Cloud Threat Report: https://www.sysdig.com/2023threatreport
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Storytelling and Relationship-Building in Tech with Colleen Coll

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Colleen Coll, Account Executive at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her journey of breaking into tech and why it’s so important to make your presence known. Colleen explains how she wound up working for The Duckbill Group after taking the initiative to go and meet Corey at a networking event, and what motivates her to take risks and do things that might feel intimidating in order to advance her career. Colleen and Corey also discuss the power of influencer marketing, as well as the focus The Duckbill Group has on setting a high standard for employee onboarding and culture.

About Colleen

Colleen Coll is a native of Pittsburgh and wannabe tech geek working in tech media sales, events, writing and marketing. She’s an advocate for women and underrepresented communities in tech and is extremely proud of her efforts to learn coding languages and engage and connect diversity in the open source circle! When she’s not geeking out and traveling the globe (and virtually) producing/ hosting tech podcasts and livestreams, she enjoys trips to local wineries, binging sci-fi, and hosting bolognese dinner parties.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/colleencoll
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-coll-b971505/
Last Week in AWS sponsorship form: https://lastweekinaws.com/sponsorship

The World of Salesforce Cloud Development with Evelyn Grizzle

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Evelyn Grizzle, Senior Salesforce Developer, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the often-misunderstood and always exciting world of Salesforce development. Evelyn explains why Salesforce Development is still seen as separate from traditional cloud development, and describes the work of breaking down barriers and silos between Salesforce developers and engineering departments. Corey and Evelyn discuss how a non-traditional background can benefit people who want to break into tech careers, and Evelyn reveals the best parts of joining the Salesforce community.

About Evelyn

Evelyn is a Salesforce Certified Developer and Application Architect and 2023 Salesforce MVP Nominee. They enjoy full stack Salesforce development, most recently having built a series of Lightning Web Components that utilize a REST callout to a governmental database to verify the licensure status of a cannabis dispensary. An aspiring Certified Technical Architect candidate, Evelyn prides themself on deploying secure and scalable architecture. With over ten years of customer service experience prior to becoming a Salesforce Developer, Evelyn is adept at communicating with both technical and non-technical internal and external stakeholders. When they are not writing code, Evelyn enjoys coaching for RADWomenCode, mentoring through the Trailblazer Mentorship Program, and rollerskating.

Links Referenced:

Another Salesforce Blog: https://anothersalesforceblog.com
RAD Women Code: https://radwomen.org/
Personal Website: https://evelyn.fyi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyngrizzle/

Making Data Migration to the Cloud Easy with Ricardo Gonzalez

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Ricardo Gonzalez, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his approach to Product Management and cloud migration. Ricardo explains how a chance conversation landed him a role at Oracle, and why he feels it’s so important to always bring your A-game in any conversation. Corey and Ricardo discuss why being a good Product Manager involves empathy for your customers and being able to speak their language as well as the language of your product and development team. Ricardo also explains how he’s seen the Oracle product suite grow, and why he feels more and more companies are seeing the value of migrating their data to the cloud.

About Ricardo

Ricardo is a Product Manager at Oracle, in charge of Database Migration to the Cloud, and the ZDM and ACFS products.

Ricardo is a native Costa Rican and has lived in Mexico, Italy and currently resides in the United States.

He is passionate about technology, education, photography, music and cooking. He loves languages and connecting with people from all over the world. In a future life, Ricardo wants to own a taco truck, and share taco happiness with everybody.

Links Referenced:

Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardogonzaleza/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/productmanaged

Elevating the SaaS Application Development Experience with Salman Paracha

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Salman Paracha, Founder & CEO at Katanemo Labs, joins Corey at Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his vision for the future of SaaS application development. Salman and Corey discuss what led him to take the leap into founding a start-up, and Salman shares how he believes the future of SaaS application development is at an inflection point. Salman also explains why it’s critical to focus on the outcome your customers experience over infrastructure, and shares his vision for future developers looking to build the next wave of SaaS applications.

About Salman

Building high-growth, high-tech software products that affect the lives of millions of customers. 15+ years of experience in building successful products and highly effective teams. I am deeply interested in bringing the power of the cloud to end customers, large scale data problems, and delivering scalable services on commodity hardware.

Links Referenced:

Katanemo: https://www.katanemo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salmanparacha/
Email: mailto:salman@katanemo.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/salman_paracha

Unpacking the Costs and Value of Observability with Martin Mao

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Martin Mao, CEO & Cofounder at Chronosphere, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the trends he sees in the observability industry. Martin explains why he feels measuring observability costs isn’t nearly as important as understanding the velocity of observability costs increasing, and why he feels efficiency is something that has to be built into processes as companies scale new functionality. Corey and Martin also explore how observability can now be used by business executives to provide top line visibility and value, as opposed to just seeing observability as a necessary cost.

About Martin

Martin is a technologist with a history of solving problems at the largest scale in the world and is passionate about helping enterprises use cloud native observability and open source technologies to succeed on their cloud native journey. He's now the Co-Founder & CEO of Chronosphere, a Series C startup with $255M in funding, backed by Greylock, Lux Capital, General Atlantic, Addition, and Founders Fund. He was previously at Uber, where he led the development and SRE teams that created and operated M3. Previously, he worked at AWS, Microsoft, and Google. He and his family are based in the Seattle area, and he enjoys playing soccer and eating meat pies in his spare time.

Links Referenced:

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinmao/

Writing New Editions and Ticking All the Boxes with Andreas Wittig

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Andreas Wittig, Co-Author of Amazon Web Services in Action and Co-Founder of marbot, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss ways to keep a book up to date in an ever-changing world, the advantages of working with a publisher, and how he began the journey of writing a book in the first place. Andreas also recalls how much he learned working on the third edition of Amazon Web Services in Action and how teaching can be an excellent tool for learning. Since writing the first edition, Adreas’s business has shifted from a consulting business to a B2B product business, so he and Corey also discuss how that change came about and the pros and cons of each business model.

About Andreas

Andreas is the Co-Author of Amazon Web Services in Action and Co-Founder of marbot - AWS Monitoring made simple! He is also known on the internet as cloudonaut through the popular blog, podcast, and youtube channel he created with his brother Michael.

Links Referenced:

Amazon Web Services in Action: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Services-Action-Third-depth/dp/163343916X/?
Rapid Docker on AWS: https://cloudonaut.io/rapid-docker-on-aws/
bucket/av: https://bucketav.com/
marbot: https://marbot.io/
cloudonaut.io: https://cloudonaut.io

Navigating Continuous Change in Cloud Security with Brandon Sherman

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Brandon Sherman, Cloud Security Engineer at Temporal Technologies Inc., joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experiences at recent cloud conferences and the ongoing changes in cloud computing. Brandon shares why he enjoyed fwd:cloudsec more than this year’s re:Inforce, and how he’s seen AWS events evolve over the years. Brandon and Corey also discuss how the cloud has matured and why Brandon feels ongoing change can be expected to be the continuing state of cloud. Brandon also shares insights on how his perspective on Google Cloud has changed, and why he’s excited about the future of Temporal.io.

About Brandon

Brandon is currently a Cloud Security Engineer at Temporal Technologies Inc. One of Temporal’s goals is to make our software as reliable as running water, but to stretch the metaphor it must also be *clean* water. He has stared into the abyss and it stared back, then bought it a beer before things got too awkward. When not at work, he can be found playing with his kids, working on his truck, or teaching his kids to work on his truck.

Links Referenced:

Temporal: https://temporal.io/
Personal website: https://brandonsherman.com

Best Practices in AWS Certificate Manager with Jonathan Kozolchyk

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jonathan (Koz) Kozolchyk, General Manager for Certificate Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the best practices he recommends around certificates. Jonathan walks through when and why he recommends private certs, and the use cases where he’d recommend longer or unusual expirations. Jonathan also highlights the importance of knowing who’s using what cert and why he believes in separating expiration from rotation. Corey and Jonathan also discuss their love of smart home devices as well as their security concerns around them and how they hope these concerns are addressed moving forward.

About Jonathan

Jonathan is General Manager of Certificate Services for AWS, leading the engineering, operations, and product management of AWS certificate offerings including AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) AWS Private CA, Code Signing, and Encryption in transit. Jonathan is an experienced leader of software organizations, with a focus on high availability distributed systems and PKI. Starting as an intern, he has built his career at Amazon, and has led development teams within our Consumer and AWS businesses, spanning from Fulfillment Center Software, Identity Services, Customer Protection Systems and Cryptography. Jonathan is passionate about building high performing teams, and working together to create solutions for our customers. He holds a BS in Computer Science from University of Illinois, and multiple patents for his work inventing for customers. When not at work you’ll find him with his wife and two kids or playing with hobbies that are hard to do well with limited upside, like roasting coffee.

Links Referenced:

AWS website: https://www.aws.com
Email: mailto:koz@amazon.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seakoz

Building Reliable Open-Source Social Media with Jake Gold

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jake Gold, Infrastructure Engineer at Bluesky, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experience helping to build Bluesky and why he’s so excited about it. Jake and Corey discuss the major differences when building a truly open-source social media platform, and Jake highlights his focus on reliability. Jake explains why he feels downtime can actually be a huge benefit to reliability engineers, and why how he views abstractions based on the size of the team he’s working on. Corey and Jake also discuss whether cloud is truly living up to its original promise of lowered costs.

About Jake

Jake Gold leads infrastructure at Bluesky, where the team is developing and deploying the decentralized social media protocol, ATP. Jake has previously managed infrastructure at companies such as Docker and Flipboard, and most recently, he was the founding leader of the Robot Reliability Team at Nuro, an autonomous delivery vehicle company.

Links Referenced:

Bluesky: https://blueskyweb.xyz/
Bluesky waitlist signup: https://bsky.app

Observing The Hidden Complexity Behind Simple Cloud Networks with Avi Freedman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Avi Freedman, CEO at Kentik, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the fun of solving for observability. Corey and Avi discuss how great simplicity can be deceiving, and Avi points out that with great simplicity comes great complexity. Avi discusses examples of this that he sees in Kentik customer environments, as well as the differences he sees in cloud environments from traditional data center environments. Avi also reveals his predictions for the future and how enterprise M&A will affect the way companies view data centers and VPCs.

About Avi

Avi Freedman is the co-founder and CEO of network observability company Kentik. He has decades of experience as a networking technologist and executive. As a network pioneer in 1992, Freedman started Philadelphia’s first ISP, known as netaxs. He went on to run network operations at Akamai for over a decade as VP of network infrastructure and then as chief network scientist. He also ran the network at AboveNet and was the CTO of ServerCentral.

Links Referenced:

Kentik: https://kentik.com
Email: avi@kentik.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/avifreedman
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avifreedman

Creating an API Security Solution at FireTail with Jeremy Snyder

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jeremy Snyder, Founder of FireTail, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his career journey and what led him to start FireTail. Jeremy reveals what’s changed in cloud since he was an AE and AWS, and walks through how the need for customization in cloud security has led to a boom in the number of security companies out there. Corey and Jeremy also discuss the costs of cloud security, and Jeremy points out some of his observations in the world of cloud security pricing and packaging.

About Jeremy

Jeremy is the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Prior to FireTail, Jeremy worked in M&A at Rapid7, a global cyber leader, where he worked on the acquisitions of 3 companies during the pandemic. Jeremy previously led sales at DivvyCloud, one of the earliest cloud security posture management companies, and also led AWS sales in southeast Asia. Jeremy started his career with 13 years in cyber and IT operations. Jeremy has an MBA from Mason, a BA in computational linguistics from UNC, and has completed additional studies in Finland at Aalto University. Jeremy speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 countries. Once, Jeremy went 5 days without seeing another human, but saw plenty of reindeer.

Links Referenced:

Firetail: https://firetail.io
Email: jeremy@firetail.io

OpsLevel and The Need for a Developer Portal with Kenneth Rose

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Kenneth Rose, CTO at OpsLevel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how OpsLevel is helping developer teams to scale effectively. Kenneth reveals what a developer portal is, how he thinks about the functionality of a developer portal, and the problems a developer portal solves for large developer teams. Corey and Kenneth discuss how to drive adoption of a developer portal, and Kenneth explains why it’s so necessary to have executive buy-in throughout that process. Kenneth also discusses how using their own portal internally along with seeking out customer feedback has allowed OpsLevel to make impactful innovations.

About Ken

Kenneth (Ken) Rose is the CTO and Co-Founder of OpsLevel. Ken has spent over 15 years scaling engineering teams as an early engineer at PagerDuty and Shopify. Having in-the-trenches experience has allowed Ken a unique perspective on how some of the best teams are built and scaled and lends this viewpoint to building products for OpsLevel, a service ownership platform built to turn chaos into consistency for engineering leaders.

Links Referenced:

OpsLevel: https://www.opslevel.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opslevel/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ

The True Spirit of Compliance with Nickolas Means

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Nickolas Means, VP Engineering at Sym, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how Sym is looking to solve the most common and most frustrating elements of compliance. Nick reveals why he finds it valuable to focus on making it easy for people to do the right thing over preventing them from doing the wrong thing, and why he feels the true spirit of compliance involves helping teams collaboratively come up with mutually beneficial solutions. Corey and Nick also dive into the common problems that engineers experience as a result of traditional compliance methods, and why historically the compliance industry has gotten a bad rap.

About Nickolas

Nickolas Means loves nothing more than a story of engineering triumph (except maybe a story of engineering disaster). When he’s not stuck in a Wikipedia loop reading about plane crashes, he leads the engineering team at Sym, helping create the building blocks engineering teams need to build delightful developer access and approval workflows.

Nick has been leading software engineering teams for more than a decade in the healthtech and devtools spaces. His focus is on building distributed organizations defined by their cultures of high trust and autonomy. He’s also an international keynote speaker, having shared his unique brand of storytelling with audiences around the world. He works remotely from Austin, TX, and spends his spare time going on adventures with his wife and kids, running very slowly, and trying to brew the perfect cup of coffee.

Links Referenced:

symops.com: https://symops.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nmeans

Centralizing Cloud Security Breach Information with Chris Farris

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Chris Farris, Cloud Security Nerd at PrimeHarbor Technologies, LLC, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his new project, breaches.cloud, and why he feels having a centralized location for cloud security breach information is so important. Corey and Chris also discuss what it means to dive into entrepreneurship, including both the benefits of not having to work within a corporate structure and the challenges that come with running your own business. Chris also reveals what led him to start breaches.cloud, and what he’s learned about some of the biggest cloud security breaches so far.

About Chris

Chris Farris is a highly experienced IT professional with a career spanning over 25 years. During this time, he has focused on various areas, including Linux, networking, and security. For the past eight years, he has been deeply involved in public-cloud and public-cloud security in media and entertainment, leveraging his expertise to build and evolve multiple cloud security programs.

Chris is passionate about enabling the broader security team’s objectives of secure design, incident response, and vulnerability management. He has developed cloud security standards and baselines to provide risk-based guidance to development and operations teams. As a practitioner, he has architected and implemented numerous serverless and traditional cloud applications, focusing on deployment, security, operations, and financial modeling.

He is one of the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference and presented at various AWS conferences and BSides events. Chris shares his insights on security and technology on social media platforms like Twitter, Mastodon and his website https://www.chrisfarris.com.

Links Referenced:

fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/
breaches.cloud: https://breaches.cloud
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcfarris
Company Site: https://www.primeharbor.com

Getting Paid What You’re Worth with Josh Doody

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Josh Doody, Owner of Fearless Salary Negotiation, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how to successfully negotiate your salary, and why it’s important to do so even in times of economic uncertainty. Corey and Josh chat about some of the hidden reasons why salary negotiation is critical to job seekers, and what goes into determining salary bands behind the scenes. Josh also reveals why he feels there’s some stagnancy in the big tech job market, and why it’s critical for job seekers to have a balanced view of the value that they provide to employers when negotiating salary. Josh also describes some of the unexpected ways salary negotiations can come up throughout the interview process, and how to best handle the discomfort of negotiation.

About Josh

Links Referenced:

Company website: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshdoody
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdoody/

A Renaissance Man in Cloud Security with Rich Mogull

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 07:30:00 -0700

Rich Mogull, SVP of Cloud Security at FireMon, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his career in cybersecurity going back to the early days of cloud. Rich describes how he identified that cloud security would become a huge opportunity in the early days of cloud, as well as how cybersecurity parallels his other jobs in aviation and emergency medicine. Rich and Corey also delve into the history of Rich’s involvement in the TidBITS newsletter, and Rich unveils some of his insights into the world of cloud security as a Gartner analyst.

About Rich

Rich is the SVP of Cloud Security at FireMon where he focuses on leading-edge cloud security research and implementation. Rich joined FireMon through the acquisition of DisruptOps, a cloud security automation platform based on his research while as CEO of Securosis. He has over 25 years of security experience and currently specializes in cloud security and DevSecOps, having starting working hands-on in cloud over 12 years ago. He is also the principle course designer of the Cloud Security Alliance training class, primary author of the latest version of the CSA Security Guidance, and actively works on developing hands-on cloud security techniques. Prior to founding Securosis and DisruptOps, Rich was a Research Vice President at Gartner on the security team. Prior to his seven years at Gartner, Rich worked as an independent consultant, web application developer, software development manager at the University of Colorado, and systems and network administrator.

Rich is the Security Editor of TidBITS and a frequent contributor to industry publications. He is a frequent industry speaker at events including the RSA Security Conference, Black Hat, and DefCon, and has spoken on every continent except Antarctica (where he's happy to speak for free -- assuming travel is covered).

Links Referenced:

FireMon: https://www.firemon.com/.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rmogull
Mastodon: [https://defcon.social/@rmogull](https://defcon.social/@rmogull)
FireMon Blogs: https://www.firemon.com/blogs/
Securosis Blogs: https://securosis.com/blog

Creating A Resilient Security Strategy Through Chaos Engineering with Kelly Shortridge

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Kelly Shortridge, Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss their recently released book, Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems. Kelly explains why a resilient strategy is far preferable to a bubble-wrapped approach to cybersecurity, and how developer teams can use evidence to mitigate security threats. Corey and Kelly discuss how the risks of working with complex systems is perfectly illustrated by Jurassic Park, and Kelly also highlights why it’s critical to address both system vulnerabilities and human vulnerabilities in your development environment rather than pointing fingers when something goes wrong.

About Kelly

Kelly Shortridge is a senior principal engineer at Fastly in the office of the CTO and lead author of "Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems" (O'Reilly Media). Shortridge is best known for their work on resilience in complex software systems, the application of behavioral economics to cybersecurity, and bringing security out of the dark ages. Shortridge has been a successful enterprise product leader as well as a startup founder (with an exit to CrowdStrike) and investment banker. Shortridge frequently advises Fortune 500s, investors, startups, and federal agencies and has spoken at major technology conferences internationally, including Black Hat USA, O'Reilly Velocity Conference, and SREcon. Shortridge's research has been featured in ACM, IEEE, and USENIX, spanning behavioral science in cybersecurity, deception strategies, and the ROI of software resilience. They also serve on the editorial board of ACM Queue.

Links Referenced:

Fastly: https://www.fastly.com/
Personal website: https://kellyshortridge.com
Book website: https://securitychaoseng.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyshortridge/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/swagitda_
Bluesky: https://shortridge.bsky.social

Honeycomb on Observability as Developer Self-Care with Brooke Sargent

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Brooke Sargent, Software Engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how she fell into the world of observability by adopting Honeycomb. Brooke explains how observability was new to her in her former role, but she quickly found it to enable faster learning and even a form of self care for herself as a developer. Corey and Brooke discuss the differences of working at a large company where observability is a new idea, versus an observability company like Honeycomb. Brooke also reveals the importance of helping people reach a personal understanding of what observability can do for them when trying to introduce it to a company for the first time.

About Brooke

Brooke Sargent is a Software Engineer at Honeycomb, working on APIs and integrations in the developer ecosystem. She previously worked on IoT devices at Procter and Gamble in both engineering and engineering management roles, which is where she discovered an interest in observability and the impact it can have on engineering teams.

Links Referenced:

Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/codegirlbrooke

Remote Versus Local Development with Mike Brevoort

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Mike Brevoort, Chief Product Officer at Gitpod, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss all the intricacies of remote development and how Gitpod is simplifying the process. Mike explains why he feels the infinite resources cloud provides can be overlooked when discussing remote versus local development environments, and how simplifying build abstractions is a fantastic goal, but that focusing on the tools you use in a build abstraction in the meantime can be valuable. Corey and Mike also dive into the security concerns that come with remote development, and Mike reveals the upcoming plans for Gitpod’s local conference environment, CDE Universe.

About Mike

Mike has a passion for empowering people to be creative and work together more effectively. He is the Chief Product Officer at Gitpod striving to remove the friction and drudgery from software development through Cloud Developer Environments. He spent the previous four years at Slack where he created Workflow Builder and “Platform 2.0” after his company Missions was acquired by Slack in 2018. Mike lives in Denver, Colorado and enjoys cycling, hiking and being outdoors.

Links Referenced:

Gitpod: https://www.gitpod.io/
CDE Universe: https://cdeuniverse.com/

Authenticity in Tech Journalism with Tom Krazit

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Tom Krazit, Editor in Chief at Runtime, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it’s like being a journalist in tech. Corey and Tom discuss how important it is to find your voice as a media personality, and Tom explains why he feels one should never compromise their voice for sponsor approval. Tom reveals how he’s covering tech news at his new publication, Runtime, and how he got his break in the tech journalism industry. Tom also talks about why he decided to build his own publication rather than seek out a corporate job, the value of digging deeper for stories, and why he feels it’s so valuable to be able to articulate the issues engineers care about in simple terms.

About Tom

Tom Krazit has written and edited stories about the information technology industry for over 20 years. For the last ten years he has focused specifically on enterprise technology, including all three as-a-service models developed around infrastructure, platform, and enterprise software technologies, security, software development techniques and practices, as well as hardware and chips.

Links Referenced:

Runtime: https://www.runtime.news/

Simplifying Cloud Migration Strategy at Tidal with David Colebatch

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

David Colebatch, CEO at Tidal.cloud, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how Tidal is demystifying cloud migration strategy. David and Corey discuss the pros and cons of a hybrid cloud migration strategy, and David reveals the approach that Tidal takes to ensure they’re setting their customers up for success. David also discusses the human element to cloud migration initiatives, and how to overcome roadblocks when handling the people side of migrations. Corey and David also expand on all the capabilities cloud migration unlocks, and David explains how that translates to a distributed product team approach.

About David

David is the CEO & Founder of Tidal. Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.

Links Referenced:

Tidal.cloud: https://tidal.cloud
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dcolebatch
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidcolebatch/

Doing What You Love in Cloud with Nate Avery

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Nate Avery, Outbound Product Manager at Google, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it’s like working in the world of tech, including the implications of AI technology on the workforce and the importance of doing what you love. Nate explains why he feels human ingenuity is so important in the age of AI, as well as why he feels AI will make humans better at the things they do. Nate and Corey also discuss the changing landscape of tech and development jobs, and why it’s important to help others throughout your career while doing something you love.

About Nate

Nate is an Outbound Product Manager at Google Cloud focused on our DevOps tools. Prior to this, Nate has 20 years of experience designing, planning, and implementing complex systems integrating custom-built and COTS applications. Throughout his career, he has managed diverse teams dedicated to meeting customer goals. With a background as a manager, engineer, Sys Admin, and DBA, Nate is currently working on ways to better build and use virtualized computer resources in both internal and external cloud environments. Nate was also named a Cisco Champion for Datacenter in 2015.

Links Referenced:

Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/devops
Not Your Dad’s IT: http://www.notyourdadsit.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nathaniel_avery
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathaniel-avery-2a43574/

Cutting Costs in Cloud with Everett Berry

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Everett Berry, Growth and Open Source at Vantage, joins Corey at Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the complex world of cloud costs. Everett describes how Vantage takes a broad approach to understanding and cutting cloud costs across a number of different providers, and reveals which providers he feels generate large costs quickly. Everett also explains some of his best practices for cutting costs on cloud providers, and explores what he feels the impact of AI will be on cloud providers. Corey and Everett also discuss the pros and cons of AWS savings plans, why AWS can’t be counted out when it comes to AI, and why there seems to be such a delay in upgrading instances despite the cost savings.

About Everett

Everett is the maintainer of ec2instances.info at Vantage. He also writes about cloud infrastructure and analyzes cloud spend. Prior to Vantage Everett was a developer advocate at Arctype, a collaborative SQL client acquired by ClickHouse. Before that, Everett was cofounder and CTO of Perceive, a computer vision company. In his spare time he enjoys playing golf, reading sci-fi, and scrolling Twitter.

Links Referenced:

Vantage: https://www.vantage.sh/
Vantage Cloud Cost Report: https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report
Everett Berry Twitter: https://twitter.com/retttx
Vantage Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoinVantage

Operating in the Kubernetes Cloud on Amazon EKS with Eswar Bala

Corey Quinn — Fri, 05 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Eswar Bala, Director of Amazon EKS at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how and why AWS built a Kubernetes solution, and what customers are looking for out of Amazon EKS. Eswar reveals the concerns he sees from customers about the cost of Kubernetes, as well as the reasons customers adopt EKS over ECS. Eswar gives his reasoning on why he feels Kubernetes is here to stay and not just hype, as well as how AWS is working to reduce the complexity of Kubernetes. Corey and Eswar also explore the competitive landscape of Amazon EKS, and the new product offering from Amazon called Karpenter.

About Eswar

Eswar Bala is a Director of Engineering at Amazon and is responsible for Engineering, Operations, and Product strategy for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Eswar leads the Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere teams that build, operate, and contribute to the services customers and partners use to deploy and operate Kubernetes and Kubernetes applications securely and at scale. With a 20+ year career in software , spanning multimedia, networking and container domains, he has built greenfield teams and launched new products multiple times.

Links Referenced:

Amazon EKS: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
kubernetesthemuchharderway.com: https://kubernetesthemuchharderway.com
kubernetestheeasyway.com: https://kubernetestheeasyway.com
EKS documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/
EKS newsletter: https://eks.news/
EKS GitHub: https://github.com/aws/eks-distro

Learning eBPF with Liz Rice

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 May 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the release of her newest book, Learning eBPF, and the exciting possibilities that come with eBPF technology. Liz explains what got her so excited about eBPF technology, and what it was like to write a book while also holding a full-time job. Corey and Liz also explore the learning curve that comes with kernel programming, and Liz illustrates why it’s so important to be able to explain complex technologies in simple terminology.

About Liz

Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security and observability project. She sits on the CNCF Governing Board, and on the Board of OpenUK. She was Chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee in 2019-2022, and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, and Learning eBPF, both published by O'Reilly.

She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, competing in virtual races on Zwift, and making music under the pseudonym Insider Nine.

Links Referenced:

Isovalent: https://isovalent.com/
Learning eBPF: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-eBPF-Programming-Observability-Networking/dp/1098135121
Container Security: https://www.amazon.com/Container-Security-Fundamental-Containerized-Applications/dp/1492056707/
GitHub for Learning eBPF: https://github.com/lizRice/learning-eBPF

CloudDev for Retail Companies with John Mille

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

John Mille, Principal Cloud Engineer at Sainsbury's UK joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how retail companies are using cloud services. John describes the lessons he’s learned since joining the Sainsbury’s UK team, including why it’s important to share knowledge across your team if you don’t want to be on call 24/7, as well as why he doesn’t subscribe to the idea that every developer needs access to production. Corey and John also discuss an open-source project John created called ECS Compose-X.

About John

John is an AWS Community Builder (devtools), Open Source enthusiast, SysAdmin born in the cloud, and has worked with AWS since his very first job. He enjoys writing code and creating projects. John likes to focus on automation & architecture that delivers business value, and has been dabbling with data & the wonderful world of Kafka for the past 3 years.

Links Referenced:

AWS Open-Source Roundup newsletter blog post about ECS Compose-X: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/automating-your-ecs-container-architecture-deployments-with-ecs-composex/
ECS Compose-X: https://docs.compose-x.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-mille/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnPre32286850

Sysdig and Solving for Strategic Challenges in Cybersecurity with Michael Isbitski

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Michael Isbitski, Director of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the nuances of an effective cybersecurity strategy. Michael explains that many companies are caught between creating a strategy that’s truly secure and one that’s merely compliant and within the bounds of cost-effectiveness, and what can be done to help balance the two aims more effectively. Corey and Michael also explore what it means to hire for transferrable skills in the realm of cybersecurity and tech, and Michael reveals that while there’s no such thing as a silver-bullet solution for cybersecurity, Sysdig can help bridge many gaps in a company’s strategy.

About Michael

Mike has researched and advised on cybersecurity for over 5 years. He's versed in cloud security, container security, Kubernetes security, API security, security testing, mobile security, application protection, and secure continuous delivery. He's guided countless organizations globally in their security initiatives and supporting their business.

Prior to his research and advisory experience, Mike learned many hard lessons on the front lines of IT with over twenty years of practitioner and leadership experience focused on application security, vulnerability management, enterprise architecture, and systems engineering.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-isbitski/

Fixing What’s Broken in Monitoring and Observability with Jean Yang

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jean Yang, CEO of Akita Software, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how she went from academia to tech founder, and what her company is doing to improve monitoring and observability. Jean explains why Akita is different from other observability & monitoring solutions, and how it bridges the gap from what people know they should be doing and what they actually do in practice. Corey and Jean explore why the monitoring and observability space has been so broken, and why it’s important for people to see monitoring as a chore and not a hobby. Jean also reveals how she took a leap from being an academic professor to founding a tech start-up.

About Jean

Jean Yang is the founder and CEO of Akita Software, providing the fastest time-to-value for API monitoring. Jean was previously a tenure-track professor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Links Referenced:

Akita Software: https://www.akitasoftware.com/
Aki the dog chatbot: https://www.akitasoftware.com/blog-posts/we-built-an-exceedingly-polite-ai-dog-that-answers-questions-about-your-apis
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

Hacking Old Hardware and Developer Advocate Presentations with Darko Mesaroš

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Darko Mesaroš, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss all the weird and wonderful things that can be done with old hardware, as well as the necessary skills for being a successful Developer Advocate. Darko walks through how he managed to deploy Kubernetes on a computer from 1986, as well as the trade-offs we’ve made in computer technology as hardware has progressed. Corey and Darko also explore the forgotten art of optimizing when you’re developing, and how it can help to cut costs. Darko also shares what he feels is the key skill every Developer Advocate needs to have, and walks through how he has structured his presentations to ensure he is captivating and delivering value to his audience.

About Darko

Darko is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Seattle, WA. His goal is to share his passion and technological know-how with Engineers, Developers, Builders, and tech enthusiasts across the world. If it can be automated, Darko will definitely try to do so. Most of his focus is towards DevOps and Management Tools, where automation, pipelines, and efficient developer tools is the name of the game – click less and code more so you do not repeat yourself ! Darko also collects a lot of old technology and tries to make it do what it should not. Like deploy AWS infrastructure through a Commodore 64.

Links Referenced:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/
Blog post RE deploying Kubernetes on a TRS-80: https://www.buildon.aws/posts/i-deployed-kubernetes-with-a-1986-tandy-102-portable-computer
AWS Twitch: https://twitch.tv/aws
Twitter: https://twitter.com/darkosubotica
Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@darkosubotica

Viewing Security through an Operational Lens with Jess Dodson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jess Dodson, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss all things security. Corey and Jess discuss the phenomenon of companies that only care about security when reacting to a breach, and Jess highlights how important it is to have both a reactive and a proactive approach to security. Jess also shares her thoughts on why it’s valuable to get security and operations working well together, and why getting the basics right in security is still a more pressing priority than solving for level 10 security threats. Jess and Corey also reveal best practices when it comes to monitoring and revoking admin rights and much more.

About Jess

Chances are if you’ve run into “GirlGerms” online, you’ve spoken to Jess! Based in Brisbane, Jess joined Microsoft in 2019 and is now a Senior Cloud Solution in Cyber Security, after working in a mixture of both government and higher education industries for over 15 years. Jess regards herself as a 'recovering systems administrator' and still wears her operations hat when looking at security - doing REAL SecOps!

Outside of work, Jess is mum to a 5 year old daughter, a cat, 4 chickens and a hive of bees. In her downtime, she spends far too many hours building Lego, playing video games or doing random crafty projects.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/girlgerms
Mastodon:https://infosec.exchange/@girlgerms
DevNxt: https://devnxt.nz/

Uptycs and Security Awareness with Jack Roehrig

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at Uptycs, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for a conversation about security awareness, ChatGPT, and more. Jack describes some of the recent developments at Uptycs, which leads to fascinating insights about the paradox of scaling engineering teams large and small. Jack also shares how his prior experience working with AskJeeves.com has informed his perspective on ChatGPT and its potential threat to Google. Jack and Corey also discuss the evolution of Reddit, and the nuances of developing security awareness trainings that are approachable and effective.

About Jack

Jack has been passionate about (obsessed with) information security and privacy since he was a child. Attending 2600 meetings before reaching his teenage years, and DEF CON conferences shortly after, he quickly turned an obsession into a career. He began his first professional, full-time information-security role at the world's first internet privacy company; focusing on direct-to-consumer privacy.

After working the startup scene in the 90's, Jack realized that true growth required a renaissance education. He enrolled in college, completing almost six years of coursework in a two-year period. Studying a variety of disciplines, before focusing on obtaining his two computer science degrees. University taught humility, and empathy. These were key to pursuing and achieving a career as a CSO lasting over ten years.

Jack primarily focuses his efforts on mentoring his peers (as well as them mentoring him), advising young companies (especially in the information security and privacy space), and investing in businesses that he believes are both innovative, and ethical.

Links Referenced:

Uptycs: https://www.uptycs.com/
jack@jackroehrig.com: mailto:jack@jackroehrig.com
jroehrig@uptycs.com: mailto:jroehrig@uptycs.com

Improving the Developer Experience with Aja Hammerly

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Aja Hammerly, Developer Relations Manager at Google Cloud, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her unexpected career journey at Google and what she’s learned about improving the developer experience throughout her career. Aja and Corey discuss the importance of not only creating tools for developers that are intuitive and easy to adopt, but also cater to different learning styles. Aja describes why it’s so important to respond with curiosity when a user does something seemingly random within a piece of software, and also reveals why she feels so strongly about the principle of least surprise when it comes to the developer experience.

About Aja

Aja lives in Seattle where's she's a Developer Relations Manager at Google. She's currently excited about developer experience, software supply chain security, and becoming a better manager and mentor. In her free time she enjoys skiing, kayaking, cooking, knitting, and spending long hours in the garden.

Links Referenced:

Google Cloud: http://cloud.google.com/developers
Personal Website: https://www.thagomizer.com

The Rise of Generative AI with Raj Bala

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Raj Bala, Founder of Perspect, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss all things generative AI. Perspect is a new generative AI company that is democratizing the e-commerce space, by making it possible to place images of products in places that would previously require expensive photoshoots and editing. Throughout the conversation, Raj shares insights into the legal questions surrounding the rise of generative AI and potential ramifications of its widespread adoption. Raj and Corey also dig into the question, “Why were the big cloud providers beaten to the market by OpenAI?” Raj also shares his thoughts on why company culture has to be organic, and how he’s hoping generative AI will move the needle for mom-and-pop businesses.

About Raj

Raj Bala, formerly a VP, Analyst at Gartner, led the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services since its inception and led the Magic Quadrant for IaaS before that. He is deeply in-tune with market dynamics both in the US and Europe, but also extending to China, Africa and Latin America.

Raj is also a software developer and is capable of building and deploying scalable services on the cloud providers to which he wrote about as a Gartner analyst. As such, Raj is now building Perspect, which is a SaaS offering at the intersection of AI and E-commerce.

Raj's favorite language is Python and he is obsessed with making pizza and ice cream.

Links Referenced:

Perspect: https://perspect.com

The Benefits of Mocking Clouds Locally with Waldemar Hummer

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Waldemar Hummer, Co-Founder & CTO of LocalStack, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how LocalStack changed Corey’s mind on the futility of mocking clouds locally. Waldemar reveals why LocalStack appeals to both enterprise companies and digital nomads, and explains how both see improvements in their cost predictability as a result. Waldemar also discusses how LocalStack is an open-source company first and foremost, and how they’re working with their community to evolve their licensing model. Corey and Waldemar chat about the rising demand for esoteric services, and Waldemar explains how accommodating that has led to an increase of adoption from the big data space.

About Waldemar

Waldemar is Co-Founder and CTO of LocalStack, where he and his team are building the world-leading platform for local cloud development, based on the hugely popular open source framework with 45k+ stars on Github. Prior to founding LocalStack, Waldemar has held several engineering and management roles at startups as well as large international companies, including Atlassian (Sydney), IBM (New York), and Zurich Insurance. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from TU Vienna.

Links Referenced:

LocalStack website: https://localstack.cloud/
LocalStack Slack channel: https://slack.localstack.cloud
LocalStack Discourse forum: https://discuss.localstack.cloud
LocalStack GitHub repository: https://github.com/localstack/localstack

The Need for Reliability with Lex Neva

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:09:08 -0700

Lex Neva, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Honeycomb and Curator of SRE Weekly, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss reliability and the life of a newsletter curator. Lex shares some interesting insights on how he keeps his hobbies and side projects separate, as well as the intrusion that open-source projects can have on your time. Lex and Corey also discuss the phenomenon of newsletter curators being much more demanding of themselves than their audience typically is. Lex also shares his views on how far reliability has come, as well as how far we have to go, and the critical implications reliability has on our day-to-day lives.

About Lex

Lex Neva is interested in all things related to running large, massively multiuser online services. He has years of SRE, Systems Engineering, tinkering, and troubleshooting experience and perhaps loves incident response more than he ought to. He’s previously worked for Linden Lab, DeviantArt, Heroku, and Fastly, and currently works as an SRE at Honeycomb while also curating the SRE Weekly newsletter on the side.

Lex lives in Massachusetts with his family including 3 adorable children, 3 ridiculous cats, and assorted other awesome humans and animals. In his copious spare time he likes to garden, play tournament poker, tinker with machine embroidery, and mess around with Arduinos.

Links Referenced:

SRE Weekly: https://sreweekly.com/
Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/

Making Open-Source Multi-Cloud Truly Free with AB Periasamy

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0700

AB Periasamy, Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it means to be truly open source and the current and future state of multi-cloud. AB explains how MinIO was born from the idea that the world was going to produce a massive amount of data, and what it’s been like to see that come true and continue to be the future outlook. AB and Corey explore why some companies are hesitant to move to cloud, and AB describes why he feels the move is inevitable regardless of cost. AB also reveals how he has helped create a truly free open-source software, and how his partnership with Amazon has been beneficial.

About AB

AB Periasamy is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an open source provider of high performance, object storage software. In addition to this role, AB is an active investor and advisor to a wide range of technology companies, from H2O.ai and Manetu where he serves on the board to advisor or investor roles with Humio, Isovalent, Starburst, Yugabyte, Tetrate, Postman, Storj, Procurify, and Helpshift. Successful exits include Gitter.im (Gitlab), Treasure Data (ARM) and Fastor (SMART).

AB co-founded Gluster in 2005 to commoditize scalable storage systems. As CTO, he was the primary architect and strategist for the development of the Gluster file system, a pioneer in software defined storage. After the company was acquired by Red Hat in 2011, AB joined Red Hat’s Office of the CTO. Prior to Gluster, AB was CTO of California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. His work there resulted in the development of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s “Thunder” code, which, at the time was the second fastest in the world.

AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.

AB is one of the leading proponents and thinkers on the subject of open source software - articulating the difference between the philosophy and business model. An active contributor to a number of open source projects, he is a board member of India's Free Software Foundation.

Links Referenced:

MinIO: https://min.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/abperiasamy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abperiasamy/
Email: mailto:ab@min.io

Exciting Times in Cloud Security with Chris Farris

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Chris Farris, Cloud Security Nerd at Turbot, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the latest events in cloud security, which leads to an interesting analysis from Chris on how legal departments obscure valuable information that could lead to fewer security failures in the name of protecting company liability, and what the future of accountability for security failures looks like. Chris and Corey also discuss the newest dangers in cloud security and billing practices, and Chris describes his upcoming cloud security conference, fwd:cloudsec.

About Chris

Chris Farris has been in the IT field since 1994 primarily focused on Linux, networking, and security. For the last 8 years, he has focused on public-cloud and public-cloud security. He has built and evolved multiple cloud security programs for major media companies, focusing on enabling the broader security team’s objectives of secure design, incident response and vulnerability management. He has developed cloud security standards and baselines to provide risk-based guidance to development and operations teams. As a practitioner, he’s architected and implemented multiple serverless and traditional cloud applications focused on deployment, security, operations, and financial modeling.

Chris now does cloud security research for Turbot and evangelizes for the open source tool Steampipe. He is one of the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference (https://fwdcloudsec.org) and has given multiple presentations at AWS conferences and BSides events.

When not building things with AWS’s building blocks, he enjoys building Legos with his kid and figuring out what interesting part of the globe to travel to next. He opines on security and technology on Mastodon, Twitter and his website https://www.chrisfarris.com

Links Referenced:

Turbot: https://turbot.com/
fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/
Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@jcfarris
Personal website: https://chrisfarris.com

Combining Community and Company Employees with Matty Stratton

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Matty Stratton, Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for a friendly debate on whether or not company employees can still be considered community members. Corey says no, but opens up his position to the slings and arrows of Matty in an entertaining change of pace. Matty explains why he feels company employees can still be considered community members, and also explores how that should be done in a way that is transparent and helpful to everyone in the community. Matty and Corey also explore the benefits and drawbacks of talented community members becoming employees.

About Matty

Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

Matty has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.

He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke.

Links Referenced:

Aiven: https://aiven.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton
Mastodon: hackyderm.io/@mattstratton
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/

AWS and the Journey to Responsible AI with Diya Wynn

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0700

Diya Wynn, Senior Practice Manager in Responsible AI for AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her team’s efforts to study and implement responsible practices when developing AI technology. Corey and Diya explore the ethical challenges of AI, and why it’s so important to be looking ahead for potential issues before they arise. Diya explains why socially responsible AI is still a journey, and describes how her and her team at AWS are seeking to forge that path to help their customers implement the technology in a safe and ethical way. Diya also describes her approach to reducing human-caused bias in AI models.

About Diya

Diya Wynn is the Senior Practice Manager in Responsible AI for AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab. She leads the team that engages with customers globally to go from theory to practice - operationalizing standards for responsible Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and data. Diya leads discussions on taking intentional action to uncover potential unintended impacts, and mitigate risks related to the development, deployment and use of AI/ML systems. She leverages her more than 25 years of experience as a technologist scaling products for acquisition; driving inclusion, diversity & equity initiatives; leading operational transformation across industries and understanding of historical and systemic contexts to guide customers in establishing an AI/ML operating model that enables inclusive and responsible products. Additionally, she serves on non-profit boards including the AWS Health Equity Initiative Review Committee; mentors at Tulane University, Spelman College and GMI; was a mayoral appointee in Environment Affairs for 6 consecutive years and guest lectures regularly on responsible and inclusive technology. Diya studied Computer Science at Spelman College, the Management of Technology at New York University, and AI & Ethics at Harvard University Professional School and MIT Sloan School of Management.

Links Referenced:

Machine Learning is a Marvelously Executed Scam: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/machine-learning-is-a-marvelously-executed-scam/

Evolving Alongside Cloud Technology with Jason McKay

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Jason McKay, Chief Technology Officer at Logicworks, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how the cloud landscape has changed and what changes are picking up steam. Jason highlights the benefit of working in a consulting role, which provides a constant flow of interesting problems to solve. Corey and Jason also explore why cloud was positioned well for the current economic changes, and how Kubernetes is slowly but surely becoming more standardized. Jason also reveals some of his predictions for the future of cloud-based development.

About Jason

Jason is responsible for leading Logicworks’ technical strategy including its software and DevOps product roadmap. In this capacity, he works directly with Logicworks’ senior engineers and developers, technology vendors and partners, and R&D team to ensure that Logicworks service offerings meet and exceed the performance, compliance, automation, and security requirements of our clients. Prior to joining Logicworks in 2005, Jason worked in technology in the Unix support trenches at Panix (Public Access Networks). Jason graduated Bard College with a Bachelor of Arts and holds several AWS and Azure Professional certifications.

Links Referenced:

Logicworks: https://www.logicworks.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhmckay/

The Realities of Working in Data with Emily Gorcenski

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Emily Gorcenski, Data & AI Service Line Lead at Thoughtworks, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how big data is changing our lives - both for the better, and the challenges that come with it. Emily explains how data is only important if you know what to do with it and have a plan to work with it, and why it’s crucial to understand the use-by date on your data. Corey and Emily also discuss how big data problems aren’t universal problems for the rest of the data community, how to address the ethics around AI, and the barriers to entry when pursuing a career in data.

About Emily

Emily Gorcenski is a principal data scientist and the Data & AI Service Line Lead of ThoughtWorks Germany. Her background in computational mathematics and control systems engineering has given her the opportunity to work on data analysis and signal processing problems from a variety of complex and data intensive industries. In addition, she is a renowned data activist and has contributed to award-winning journalism through her use of data to combat extremist violence and terrorism. The opinions expressed are solely her own.

Links Referenced:

ThoughtWorks: https://www.thoughtworks.com/
Personal website: https://emilygorcenski.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski
Mastodon: https://mastodon.green/@emilygorcenski@indieweb.social

The Growing Dominion of Cloud Providers with Raj Bala

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Raj Bala, Founder of Perspect, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to chat about his experiences working in the world of cloud and why he made the shift from Gartner Analyst to Founder. Raj asks the question, “Is AWS truly customer-obsessed?” in the face of their business practices, and challenges the common notion that analysts don’t need to have lived experience with a product to criticize it. Raj and Corey also explore the absurdity of Azure naming conventions, how cloud providers are creating roadblocks to multi-cloud, and the response of the greater public as cloud providers become more and more powerful.

About Raj

Raj's favorite language is Python and he is obsessed with making pizza and ice cream.

Links Referenced:

Data Protection the AWS Way with Wayne Duso and Nancy Wang

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Wayne Duso, VP of Storage, Edge and Data Governance Services at AWS and Nancy Wang, GM of AWS Data Protection, both join Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss data protection and analysis at AWS. Wayne and Nancy describe how AWS Backup has scaled to protect over 90% of the data stored on AWS today. Nancy explains how her team specializes in helping AWS customers develop custom solutions for their specific data needs, and the way that AWS has built out new tools and services to accommodate that customization. Wayne also reveals how important data analysis is to the AWS team when it comes to improving services and developing ground-breaking new innovations.

About Wayne

Professionally, Wayne is a Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he leads a set of businesses delivering cloud infrastructure services. In 2013, he founded and continues to lead the AWS Boston regional development center. Wayne is an always-curious entrepreneur who is passionate about building innovative teams and businesses that deliver highly disruptive value to customers. He loves engaging people who build and deliver customer-obsessed solutions, as well as customers wanting to realize value from those solutions. Wayne also holds over 40 patents in distributed and highly-available computer systems, digital video processing, and file systems. Personally, Wayne is a proud dad to great people, and loves to cook and grow things, it relaxes and grounds him, and he cherishes finding adventure in the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.

About Nancy

Currently, Nancy is the Director of Product & Engineering and General Manager at Amazon Web Services, where she leads P&L, product, engineering, and design for its data protection and data security businesses. Prior to Amazon, she led SaaS product development at Rubrik, the fastest-growing enterprise software unicorn, and built healthdata.gov for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Passionate about growing early-stage startups, Nancy is a Venture Partner for Felicis Ventures, where she works with early-stage data infra and security companies on their product-market fit, market segmentation, and product scaling.

Excited to advance more women into technical roles, Nancy is the founder & board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has already informed and educated 30,000 Coursera learners worldwide on how to get their first, or next, tech leadership role.

She earned a Bachelors of Applied Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves on the Board of Directors for the UPenn School of Engineering Online.

Links Referenced:

re:Invent talk with Nancy and Neha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELSm3WgR8RE

Getting the Basics Right in Cloud Security with Fouad Matin

Corey Quinn — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 08:15:06 -0800

Fouad Matin, Co-founder & CEO of Indent, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how to get data security right without creating unnecessary barriers for your development team. Fouad and Corey discuss how getting admin access as a developer can be time consuming and vague, when it should be efficient and come with an easily defined reason for granting access. Fouad also explains why he feels most breaches are due to not getting the basics right, and why he feels storing customer and sensitive data should be done with the same principles as dealing with hazardous waste.

About Fouad

Fouad Matin is the co-founder and CEO of Indent, a security company that enables teams to perform mission-critical operations faster and more securely. With Indent, organizations like HackerOne, Modern Treasury, Vercel, and PlanetScale are able to grant secure, time-bound user and admin permissions for cloud apps and infrastructure through Slack.

Prior to Indent, Fouad worked as an engineer at Segment, a customer data platform helping companies secure their pipelines for handling customer data. He co-founded a non-partisan non-profit in 2016 to help people register and get out to vote through easy-to-use, privacy preserving tools. In 2018, while validating Indent’s mission, partnered with Vote.org to build tools for users to find their polling place and preview their ballot using client-side encryption.

Links Referenced:

Indent: https://indent.com
Nobody Should Have Production Access: https://indent.com/blog/production
Fouad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fouadmatin
Indent on Twitter: https://twitter.com/indent
Unplanned Maintenance: https://unplannedmaintenance.com
Least Privilege in Practice Blog Post from Indent: https://indent.com/blog/least-privilege

Additional Links Referenced:

Email: mailto:fouad@indent.com
Fouad LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/indentinc/
Indent LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fouadmatin/

Being Present in the Moment Through Balcony-Hopping with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Foundational Data Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her technique for spending time intentionally and prioritizing work-life balance called balcony-hopping. Mai-Lan explains how she created the concept of balcony-hopping and how it has helped her to be a better leader, mother, wife, and boxer. Corey and Mai-Lan discuss how in today’s age, attention is a form of currency and why it’s so important to be intentional with how and where you spend your attention. Mai-Lan also offers practical insights to anyone seeking to feel more productive, present, and balanced.

About Mai-Lan

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec is Vice President, Foundational Data Services (FDS) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leads a number of high-scale AWS cloud services that provide storage and streaming of petabytes or exabytes of data and essential building blocks for modern application architecture like queuing and notifications, monitoring, alarming, logging and reliability validation. Mai-Lan’s teams include some of AWS’ first and largest-scale services like Amazon S3 and Simple Queue Service (SQS) to more recent and fast-growing services like managed open source streaming (Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka).

Prior to joining Amazon, Mai-Lan spent almost 15 years in engineering and product leadership roles at technology companies including Microsoft and early stage startups. She began her technology career after serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Mopti region of Africa as a Forestry volunteer after earning her degree from University of California, San Diego.

At Amazon, Mai-Lan is an advisor to Asians@Amazon, creator and sponsor of internal leadership development programs for Amazon employees, and is passionate about AWS initiatives and cloud services that maximize human potential everywhere.

Mai-Lan has three children and lives in Seattle with her family. When she is not working on Amazon cloud services and spending time with her husband and kids, Mai-Lan trains primarily in boxing with additional practice in the martial art Savate.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn post “Live Your Best Life Through Balcony Hopping”: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/live-your-best-life-through-balcony-hopping-mai-lan-tomsen-bukovec/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mailan/

The Complexity and Value of Scaling Reliability with Kannan Solaiappan

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Kannan Solaiappan, Head of Reliability and Data Engineering at Circles Life, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss building a team in a start-up environment and the complexities of balancing reliability and security with scale. Kannan describes the challenges of building a semi-platform multiple instances model and how products like Severalnines have helped identify and optimize potential problems before they affect customers. Kannan and Corey also discuss the impact that major outages had on the world at large when it came to fault-tolerance on entry points, and Kannan explains how guardrails can improve reliability without creating the same resistance from engineers that governance can.

About Kannan

With over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Kannan Solaiappan is a highly motivated and passionate leader with a track record of driving results. With a background in software development, operations, architecture, security, and Agile transformation, Kannan has served as a Head of DevOps/Reliability/Data Engineering & Architecture, managing budgets of over 10 million dollars. Kannan has successfully led teams of up to 80 members and has a strong background in building and maintaining world-class organizational structures and cultures.

Currently, Kannan is leading a team of SRE, DevOps, and Data Engineering professionals at Circles Life, Asia’s first fully digital telco, where Kannan is working towards building the world’s best Telco SAAS platform with a focus on CiCD, observability, reliability, resilience, and security.

Kannan has a diverse set of skills including IT Service Management, team management, IT strategy, vendor management, site reliability engineering, Architecture and leadership.

Links Referenced:

Severalnines: https://severalnines.com/
Circles.Life: https://circles.life
Circles.Life Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/circleslifesg/
Circles.Life Twitter: https://twitter.com/circleslifesg
Circles.Life Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CirclesLifeSG/

Building Community in Open Source with Floor Drees

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Episode Summary

Floor Drees, Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her journey into the world of open source and the opportunities she sees to improve developer relations. Floor and Corey dive into the pitfalls and opportunities of being a frequent speaker at events, and Floor shares some best practices to help be prepared for those opportunities. Floor also shares why she feels events should include hybrid remote attendance options, and the benefits of hosting local events to breathe life into new relationships within the developer community. Floor and Corey also discuss the complexities of maintaining an open-source project and what goes into keeping an open-source community healthy and thriving.

About Floor

Floor is a Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven, a company that manages your favorite open source data tools for you without exploiting the projects and their maintainers. Previously Floor worked in DevRel at Grafana Labs and Microsoft. She is a Devopsdays Core member, and organizes the Devopsdays Amsterdam and Eindhoven chapters. She is a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, and organizes a bunch of meetups, including-but-not-limited-to contributing.today, DevRel Salon Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam Ruby Meetup. Floor is also an art school graduate, who stumbled into tech face-first.

Links Referenced:

The Ever-Growing Ecosystem of Postgres with Álvaro Hernandez

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

Álvaro Hernandez, Founder of OnGres, joins Corey on Screaming in the cloud to discuss his hobby project Dyna53, the balkanization of AWS services, and all things Postgres. Álvaro and Corey discuss what it means to be an AWS Community Hero these days, and Álvaro shares some of his experiences as being one of the first Heroes to provide feedback on AWS services. Álvaro also shares his thoughts on why people shouldn’t underestimate the importance of selecting the right database, why he feels Postgres and Kubernetes work so well together, and the ever-growing ecosystem of Postgres.

About Álvaro

Álvaro is a passionate database and software developer. Founder of OnGres ("ON postGRES"), he has been dedicated to Postgres and R&D in databases for more than two decades.

Álvaro is at heart an open source advocate and developer. He has created software like StackGres, a Platform for running Postgres on Kubernetes or ToroDB (MongoDB on top of Postgres). As a well-known member of the PostgreSQL Community, Álvaro founded the non-profit Fundación PostgreSQL and the Spanish PostgreSQL User Group. He has contributed, among others, the SCRAM authentication library to the Postgres JDBC driver.

You can find him frequently speaking at PostgreSQL, database, cloud (becoming an AWS Data Hero in 2019), and Java conferences. In the last 10 years, Álvaro has completed more than 120 tech talks (https://aht.es).

Links Referenced:

OnGres: https://ongres.com/
Dyna53: https://dyna53.io/
Personal Website: https://aht.es
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ahachete
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahachete/

The 4D Approach to Cloud Sustainability with Catharine Strauss

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Catherine

Catharine brings more than fifteen years of experience building global networks and large scale data center infrastructure to the challenge of scaling quickly and safely. She loves building engaged and curious teams, providing insightful forecasting tools, and thinking about how to build to scale in a sustainable way to preserve a humane quality of life on this swiftly tilting planet.

When not trying to predict the future as a capacity planner, she’s often knitting extremely complicated sweaters and coming up with ridiculous puns.

The Evolution of DevRel with Jeremy Meiss

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Jeremy

Jeremy is the Director of DevRel & Community at CircleCI, formerly at Solace, Auth0, and XDA. He is active in the DevRel Community, and is a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.

Links Referenced:

CircleCI: https://circleci.com/
DevOps Party Games: https://devopspartygames.com/
Twitter: Iamjerdog
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymeiss/

The Art of Effective Incident Response with Emily Ruppe

Corey Quinn — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Emily

Emily Ruppe is a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io whose greatest accomplishment was once being referred to as “the Bob Ross of incident reviews.” Previously Emily has written hundreds of status posts, incident timelines and analyses at SendGrid, and was a founding member of the Incident Command team at Twilio. She’s written on human centered incident management and facilitating incident reviews. Emily believes the most important thing in both life and incidents is having enough snacks.

Links Referenced:

Jeli.io: https://jeli.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/themortalemily
Howie Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie/welcome

Saving the World through Cloud Sustainability with Aerin Booth

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 09:38:30 -0800

About Aerin

Aerin is a Cloud Sustainability Advocate and neurodiverse founder in tech on a mission to help developers understand the real impact that cloud computing has on the world and reduce their carbon emissions in the cloud. Did you know that internet and cloud computing contribute over 4% of annual carbon emissions? Twice that of the airline industry!

Aerin also hosts "Public Cloud for Public Good," a podcast targeted towards developers and senior leaders in tech. Every episode, they also donate £500 to charities and highlight organisations that are working towards a better future. Listen and learn how you can contribute towards making the world a better place through the use of public cloud services.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aerincloud
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aerinb/
Public Cloud for Public Good: https://publicgood.cloud/
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Solving for Cloud Security at Scale with Chris Farris

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Chris

Chris now does cloud security research for Turbot and evangelizes for the open source tool Steampipe. He is one if the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference (https://fwdcloudsec.org) and has given multiple presentations at AWS conferences and BSides events.

When not building things with AWS’s building blocks, he enjoys building Legos with his kid and figuring out what interesting part of the globe to travel to next. He opines on security and technology on Twitter and his website https://www.chrisfarris.com

Links Referenced:

Turbot: https://turbot.com/
fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/
Steampipe: https://steampipe.io/
Steampipe block: https://steampipe.io/blog

Becoming a Rural Remote Worker with Chris Vermilion

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Chris

Chris is a mostly-backend mostly-engineer at Remix Labs, working on visual app development. He has been in software startups for ten years, but his first and unrequited love was particle physics. Before joining Remix Labs, he wrote numerical simulation and analysis tools for the Large Hadron Collider, then co-founded Roobiq, a clean and powerful mobile client for Salesforce back when the official ones were neither.

Links Referenced:

Remix Labs: https://remixlabs.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrisvermilion

Defining and Nurturing a Self-Supporting Community with Alyss Noland

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Alyss

Alyss Noland is the head of Developer Relations Relations and Product Marketing at Common Room, an intelligent community-led growth platform. She previously led product marketing for Developer Experience at GitHub where she focused on open source community investment and helping engineering teams find success through development metrics and developer-focused research. She’s been working in tech since 2012 in various roles from Sales Engineering and Developer Advocacy to Product Marketing with companies such as GitHub, Box, Atlassian, and BigCommerce, as well as being an advisor at Heavybit.

Links Referenced:

Common Room: https://www.commonroom.io/
Heavybit: https://www.heavybit.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PreciselyAlyss
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/PreciselyAlyss

The Return of re:Invent with Pete Cheslock

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Pete

Pete is currently the Head of Growth And Community for AppMap, the open source dynamic runtime code analyzer. Pete also works with early stage startups, helping them navigate the complex world of early stage new product development.

Pete also fully acknowledges his profile pic is slightly out of date, but has been too lazy to update it to reflect current hair growth trends.

Links:

AppMap: https://appmap.io/

Exposing Vulnerabilities in the World of Cloud Security with Tim Gonda

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Tim

Tim Gonda is a Cloud Security professional who has spent the last eight years securing and building Cloud workloads for commercial, non-profit, government, and national defense organizations. Tim currently serves as the Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian, influencing the direction of its offensive-security-focused Cloud Security practice and the Cloud features of Praetorian's flagship product, Chariot. He considers himself lucky to have the privilege of working with the talented cyber operators at Praetorian and considers it the highlight of his career.

Tim is highly passionate about helping organizations fix Cloud Security problems, as they are found, the first time, and most importantly, the People/Process/Technology challenges that cause them in the first place. In his spare time, he embarks on adventures with his wife and ensures that their two feline bundles of joy have the best playtime and dining experiences possible.

Links Referenced:

Praetorian: https://www.praetorian.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timgondajr/
Praetorian Blog: https://www.praetorian.com/blog/

Life of a Fellow Niche Internet Micro Celebrity with Matt Margolis

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Matt

Matt is the head of community at Lawtrades, a legal tech startup that connects busy in-house legal departments with flexible on-demand legal talent. Prior to this role, Matt was the director of legal and risk management at a private equity group down in Miami, Florida.

Links Referenced:

Lawtrades: https://www.lawtrades.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsmattslaw/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmattslaw
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ItsMattsLaw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/flattorney/
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Building Trust in the World of DevRel with Taylor Barnett

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 03:00:00 -0800

About Taylor

Taylor Barnett is a Staff Developer Advocate at PlanetScale. She is passionate about building great developer experiences emphasizing empathy within product, documentation, and other developer-facing projects. For the past decade, Taylor has worked at various data and API-focused startups in software development and developer relations. In her free time, as a firm believer in "touching grass," she's either gardening, taking long walks, climbing rocks with friends, trying to find the funkiest sour beers, or hanging out with her corgi, Yoda, and spouse in Austin, Texas.

Links Referenced:

Holiday Replay Edition - Inside the Mind of a DevOps Novelist with Gene Kim

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Gene

Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

Links:

The Phoenix Project: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/
The Unicorn Project: https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption-Thriving/dp/B0812C82T9
The DevOps Enterprise Summit: https://events.itrevolution.com/
@RealGeneKim

Holiday Replay Edition - Burnout Isn’t a Sign of Weakness with Dr. Christina Maslach, PhD

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Christina

Christina Maslach, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology (Emerita) and a researcher at the Healthy Workplaces Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her A.B. from Harvard, and her Ph.D. from Stanford. She is best known as the pioneering researcher on job burnout, producing the standard assessment tool (the Maslach Burnout Inventory, MBI), books, and award-winning articles. The impact of her work is reflected by the official recognition of burnout, as an occupational phenomenon with health consequences, by the World Health Organization in 2019. In 2020, she received the award for Scientific Reviewing, for her writing on burnout, from the National Academy of Sciences. Among her other honors are: Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1991 -- "For groundbreaking work on the application of social psychology to contemporary problems"), Professor of the Year (1997), and the 2017 Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award (for her research career on job burnout).

Links:

The Truth About Burnout: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Burnout-Organizations-Personal/dp/1118692136

Holiday Replay Edition - Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Made Easy with Rob Zuber

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Rob

Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a four-time founder, three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series B, Series C, and Series D funding and delivered on product innovation at scale. Rob leads a team of 150+ engineers who are distributed around the globe.

Prior to CircleCI, Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Distiller, a continuous integration and deployment platform for mobile applications acquired by CircleCI in 2014. Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace. Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Yoohoot, a technology company that enabled local businesses to connect with nearby consumers, which was acquired by Appconomy in 2011.

Links:

Twitter: @z00b
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robzuber/
Personal site: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/rob-zuber#section-overview
Company site: www.circleci.com

The Uptycs of Cybersecurity Requirements with Jack Roehrig

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Jack

Jack is Uptycs’ outspoken technology evangelist. Jack is a lifelong information security executive with over 25 years of professional experience. He started his career managing security and operations at the world's first Internet data privacy company. He has since led unified Security and DevOps organizations as Global CSO for large conglomerates. This role involved individually servicing dozens of industry-diverse, mid-market portfolio companies.

Jack's breadth of experience has given him a unique insight into leadership and mentorship. Most importantly, it fostered professional creativity, which he believes is direly needed in the security industry. Jack focuses his extra time mentoring, advising, and investing. He is an active leader in the ISLF, a partner in the SVCI, and an outspoken privacy activist.

Links Referenced:

UptycsSecretMenu.com: https://www.uptycssecretmenu.com
Jack’s email: jroehrig@uptycs.com

Holiday Replay Edition - The Staying Power of Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Kelsey

Kelsey Hightower is the Principal Developer Advocate at Google, the co-chair of KubeCon, the world’s premier Kubernetes conference, and an open source enthusiast. He’s also the co-author of Kubernetes Up & Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure.

Links:

Twitter: @kelseyhightower
Company site: Google.com
Book: Kubernetes Up & Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure

Winning Hearts and Minds in Cloud with Brian Hall

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Brian

Brian leads the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team. This team is focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud by establishing thought leadership, increasing demand and usage, enabling their sales teams and partners to tell their product stories with excellence, and helping their customers be the best advocates for them.

Before joining Google, Brian spent over 25 years in product marketing or engineering in different forms. He started his career at Microsoft and had a very non-traditional path for 20 years. Brian worked in every product division except for cloud. He did marketing, product management, and engineering roles. And, early on, he was the first speech writer for Steve Ballmer and worked on Bill Gates’ speeches too. His last role was building up the Microsoft Surface business from scratch as VP of the hardware businesses. After Microsoft, Brian spent a year as CEO at a hardware startup called Doppler Labs, where they made a run at transforming hearing, and then spent two years as VP at Amazon Web Services leading product marketing, developer advocacy, and a bunch more marketing teams.

Brian has three kids still at home, Barty, Noli, and Alder, who are all named after trees in different ways. His wife Edie and him met right at the beginning of their first year at Yale University, where Brian studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team his senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. As a family they love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in Brian’s 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is his first and only car, that he can’t bring himself to get rid of.

Links Referenced:

Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com
@isforat: https://twitter.com/IsForAt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/

Making Sense of Data with Harry Perks

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Harry

Harry has worked at Sysdig for over 6 years, helping organizations mature their journey to cloud native. He’s witnessed the evolution of bare metal, VMs, and finally Kubernetes establish itself as the de-facto for container orchestration. He is part of the product team building Sysdig’s troubleshooting and cost offering, helping customers increase their confidence operating and managing Kubernetes.

Previously, Harry ran, and later sold, a cloud hosting provider where he was working hands on with systems administration. He studied information security and lives in the UK.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/

Multi-Cloud in Sanity with Simen Svale Skogsrud

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Simen

Ever since he started programming simple games on his 8-bit computer back in the day, Simen has been passionate about how software can deliver powerful experiences. Throughout his career he has been a sought-after creator and collaborator for companies seeking to push the envelope with their digital end-user experiences.

He co-founded Sanity because the state of the art content tools were consistently holding him, his team and his customers back in delivering on their vision. He is now serving as the CTO of Sanity.

Simen loves mountain biking and rock climbing with child-like passion and unwarranted enthusiasm. Over the years he has gotten remarkably good at going over the bars without taking serious damage.

Links Referenced:

Sanity: https://www.sanity.io/
Semin’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/svale/
Slack community for Sanity: https://slack.sanity.io/

The Rapid Rise of Vector Databases with Ram Sriharsha

Corey Quinn — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Ram

Dr. Ram Sriharsha held engineering, product management, and VP roles at the likes of Yahoo, Databricks, and Splunk. At Yahoo, he was both a principal software engineer and then research scientist; at Databricks, he was the product and engineering lead for the unified analytics platform for genomics; and, in his three years at Splunk, he played multiple roles including Sr Principal Scientist, VP Engineering and Distinguished Engineer.

Links Referenced:

Pinecone: https://www.pinecone.io/
XKCD comic: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks

The Complexities of AWS Cost Optimization with Rick Ochs

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Rick

Rick is the Product Leader of the AWS Optimization team. He previously led the cloud optimization product organization at Turbonomic, and previously was the Microsoft Azure Resource Optimization program owner.

Links Referenced:

AWS: https://console.aws.amazon.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-ochs-06469833/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rickyo1138

Crafting a Modern Data Protection Strategy with Sam Nicholls

Corey Quinn — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Sam

Sam Nicholls: Veeam’s Director of Public Cloud Product Marketing, with 10+ years of sales, alliance management and product marketing experience in IT. Sam has evolved from his on-premises storage days and is now laser-focused on spreading the word about cloud-native backup and recovery, packing in thousands of viewers on his webinars, blogs and webpages.

Links Referenced:

Veeam AWS Backup: https://www.veeam.com/aws-backup.html
Veeam: https://veeam.com

The Need for Speed in Time-Series Data with Brian Mullen

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Brian

Brian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company’s infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company’s international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp’d Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.

Links Referenced:

InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com/

Couchbase and the Evolving World of Databases with Perry Krug

Corey Quinn — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Perry

Perry Krug currently leads the Shared Services team which is focused on building tools and managing infrastructure and data to increase the productivity of Couchbase’s Sales and Field organisations. Perry has been with Couchbase for over 12 years and has served in many customer-facing technical roles, helping hundreds of customers understand, deploy, and maintain Couchbase's NoSQL database technology. He has been working with high performance caching and database systems for over 15 years.

Links Referenced:

Couchbase: https://www.couchbase.com/
Perry’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrykrug/

The Art and Science of Database Innovation with Andi Gutmans

Corey Quinn — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Andi

Andi Gutmans is the General Manager and Vice President for Databases at Google. Andi’s focus is on building, managing and scaling the most innovative database services to deliver the industry’s leading data platform for businesses.

Before joining Google, Andi was VP Analytics at AWS running services such as Amazon Redshift. Before his tenure at AWS, Andi served as CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies, the commercial backer of open-source PHP.

Andi has over 20 years of experience as an open source contributor and leader. He co-authored open source PHP. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and served on the Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andigutmans/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/andigutmans

Security for Speed and Scale with Ashish Rajan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Ashish

Ashish has over 13+yrs experience in the Cybersecurity industry with the last 7 focusing primarily helping Enterprise with managing security risk at scale in cloud first world and was the CISO of a global Cloud First Tech company in his last role. Ashish is also a keynote speaker and host of the widely poplar Cloud Security Podcast, a SANS trainer for Cloud Security & DevSecOps. Ashish currently works at Snyk as a Principal Cloud Security Advocate. He is a frequent contributor on topics related to public cloud transformation, Cloud Security, DevSecOps, Security Leadership, future Tech and the associated security challenges for practitioners and CISOs.

Links Referenced:

Cloud Security Podcast: https://cloudsecuritypodcast.tv/
Personal website: https://www.ashishrajan.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishrajan/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashishrajan
Cloud Security Podcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CloudSecurityPodcast
Cloud Security Podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-security-podcast/

Snyk and the Complex World of Vulnerability Intelligence with Clinton Herget

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Clinton

Clinton Herget is Field CTO at Snyk, the leader is Developer Security. He focuses on helping Snyk's strategic customers on their journey to DevSecOps maturity. A seasoned technnologist, Cliton spent his 20-year career prior to Snyk as a web software developer, DevOps consultant, cloud solutions architect, and engineering director. Cluinton is passionate about empowering software engineering to do their best work in the chaotic cloud-native world, and is a frequent conference speaker, developer advocate, and technical thought leader.

Links Referenced:

Snyk: https://snyk.io/
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

The Non-Magical Approach to Cloud-Based Development with Chen Goldberg

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Chen

Chen Goldberg is GM and Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud, where she leads the Cloud Runtimes (CR) product area, helping customers deliver greater value, effortlessly. The CR portfolio includes both Serverless and Kubernetes based platforms on Google Cloud, private cloud and other public clouds. Chen is a strong advocate for customer empathy, building products and solutions that matter. Chen has been core to Google Cloud’s open core vision since she joined the company six years ago. During that time, she has led her team to focus on helping development teams increase their agility and modernize workloads. Prior to joining Google, Chen wore different hats in the tech industry including leadership positions in IT organizations, SI teams and SW product development, contributing to Chen’s broad enterprise perspective. She enjoys mentoring IT talent both in and outside of Google. Chen lives in Mountain View, California, with her husband and three kids. Outside of work she enjoys hiking and baking.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoldbergChen
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goldbergchen/

The Quest to Make Edge Computing a Reality with Andy Champagne

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Andy

Andy is on a lifelong journey to understand, invent, apply, and leverage technology in our world. Both personally and professionally technology is at the root of his interests and passions.

Andy has always had an interest in understanding how things work at their fundamental level. In addition to figuring out how something works, the recursive journey of learning about enabling technologies and underlying principles is a fascinating experience which he greatly enjoys.

The early Internet afforded tremendous opportunities for learning and discovery. Andy’s early work focused on network engineering and architecture for regional Internet service providers in the late 1990s – a time of fantastic expansion on the Internet.

Since joining Akamai in 2000, Akamai has afforded countless opportunities for learning and curiosity through its practically limitless globally distributed compute platform. Throughout his time at Akamai, Andy has held a variety of engineering and product leadership roles, resulting in the creation of many external and internal products, features, and intellectual property.

Andy’s role today at Akamai – Senior Vice President within the CTO Team - offers broad access and input to the full spectrum of Akamai’s applied operations – from detailed patent filings to strategic company direction. Working to grow and scale Akamai’s technology and business from a few hundred people to roughly 10,000 with a world-class team is an amazing environment for learning and creating connections.

Personally Andy is an avid adventurer, observer, and photographer of nature, marine, and astronomical subjects. Hiking, typically in the varied terrain of New England, with his family is a common endeavor. He enjoys compact/embedded systems development and networking with a view towards their applications in drone technology.

Links Referenced:

Macrometa: https://www.macrometa.com/
Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andychampagne/

A Cloud Economist is Born - The AlterNAT Origin Story

Corey Quinn — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Ben

Ben Whaley is a staff software engineer at Chime. Ben is co-author of the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, the de facto standard text on Linux administration, and is the author of two educational videos: Linux Web Operations and Linux System Administration. He is an AWS Community Hero since 2014. Ben has held Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certifications. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Univ. of Colorado, Boulder.

Links Referenced:

Chime Financial: https://www.chime.com/
alternat.cloud: https://alternat.cloud
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamthewhaley
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwhaley/

How To Effectively Manage Your Co-Founder with Mike Julian

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Mike

Besides his duties as The Duckbill Group’s CEO, Mike is the author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mike_Julian
mikejulian.com: https://mikejulian.com

Computing on the Edge with Macrometa’s Chetan Venkatesh

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Chetan

Chetan Venkatesh is a technology startup veteran focused on distributed data, edge computing, and software products for enterprises and developers. He has 20 years of experience in building primary data storage, databases, and data replication products. Chetan holds a dozen patents in the area of distributed computing and data storage.

Chetan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Macrometa – a Global Data Network featuring a Global Data Mesh, Edge Compute, and In-Region Data Protection. Macrometa helps enterprise developers build real-time apps and APIs in minutes – not months.

Links Referenced:

Macrometa: https://www.macrometa.com
Macrometa Developer Week: https://www.macrometa.com/developer-week

The Infinite Possibilities of Amazon S3 with Kevin Miller

Corey Quinn — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Kevin

Kevin Miller is currently the global General Manager for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Prior to this role, Kevin has had multiple leadership roles within AWS, including as the General Manager for Amazon S3 Glacier, Director of Engineering for AWS Virtual Private Cloud, and engineering leader for AWS Virtual Private Network and AWS Direct Connect. Kevin was also Technical Advisor to the Senior Vice President for AWS Utility Computing. Kevin is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

Links Referenced:

snark.cloud/shirt: https://snark.cloud/shirt
aws.amazon.com/s3: https://aws.amazon.com/s3

The Man Behind the Curtain at Zoph with Victor Grenu

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Victor

Victor is an Independent Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect working mainly on Amazon Web Services (AWS), designing: secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective cloud architectures, dealing with large-scale and mission-critical distributed systems. He also has a long experience in Cloud Operations, Security Advisory, Security Hardening (DevSecOps), Modern Applications Design, Micro-services and Serverless, Infrastructure Refactoring, Cost Saving (FinOps).

Links Referenced:

Zoph: https://zoph.io/
unusd.cloud: https://unusd.cloud
Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoph
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grenuv/

Consulting the Aspiring Consultant with Mike Julian

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Mike

Beside his duties as The Duckbill Group’s CEO, Mike is the author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.

Links Referenced:

@Mike_Julian: https://twitter.com/Mike_Julian
mikejulian.com: https://mikejulian.com
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

The Evolution of Cloud Services with Richard Hartmann

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Richard

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, CNCF Technical Advisory Group Observability chair, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, CNCF Governing Board member, and more. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TwitchiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.

Links Referenced:

Grafana Labs: https://grafana.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TwitchiH
Richard Hartmann list of talks: https://github.com/richih/talks

Raising Awareness on Cloud-Native Threats with Michael Clark

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Michael

Michael is the Director of Threat Research at Sysdig, managing a team of experts tasked with discovering and defending against novel security threats. Michael has more than 20 years of industry experience in many different roles, including incident response, threat intelligence, offensive security research, and software development at companies like Rapid7, ThreatQuotient, and Mantech. Prior to joining Sysdig, Michael worked as a Gartner analyst, advising enterprise clients on security operations topics.

Links Referenced:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
“2022 Sysdig Cloud-Native Threat Report”: https://sysdig.com/threatreport

Feature Flags & Dynamic Configuration Through AWS AppConfig with Steve Rice

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Steve:

Steve Rice is Principal Product Manager for AWS AppConfig. He is surprisingly passionate about feature flags and continuous configuration. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, 3 kids, and 2 incontinent dogs.

Links Referenced:

AWS AppConfig: https://go.aws/awsappconfig

HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Nipun

Nipun Agarwal is a Senior Vice President, MySQL HeatWave Development, Oracle. His interests include distributed data processing, machine learning, cloud technologies and security. Nipun was part of the Oracle Database team where he introduced a number of new features. He has been awarded over 170 patents.

Links Referenced:

Oracle: https://oracle.com
MySQL HeatWave info: https://www.oracle.com/mysql/
MySQL Service on AWS and OCI login (Oracle account required): https://cloud.mysql.com

ChaosSearch and the Evolving World of Data Analytics with Thomas Hazel

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Thomas

Thomas Hazel is Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist of ChaosSearch. He is a serial entrepreneur at the forefront of communication, virtualization, and database technology and the inventor of ChaosSearch's patented IP. Thomas has also patented several other technologies in the areas of distributed algorithms, virtualization and database science. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of New Hampshire, Hall of Fame Alumni Inductee, and founded both student & professional chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Links Referenced:

ChaosSearch: https://www.chaossearch.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChaosSearch
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CHAOSSEARCH/

The Unseen Impact of Cloud Migration with Donovan Brady

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Donovan

Donovan Brady is the Director of Solutions Architecture at Logicworks. He began his career at Logicworks six years ago as a Solutions Architect, fast forward to today, Donovan now manages a team of highly skilled and certified AWS and Azure Solutions Architects. During his time at Logicworks, Donovan has had the opportunity to work with companies in a variety of verticals to solve their most complex IT and business challenges. Donovan is originally from New York and has been a professional musician since the age of six. He is also a self-proclaimed 90’s video game nerd.

Links Referenced:

LogicWorks: https://www.logicworks.com/
Donovan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donovan-brady-9403a583/

The Controversy of Cloud Repatriation With Amy Tobey of Equinix

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Amy

Amy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.

Links Referenced:

Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey

How Data Discovery is Changing the Game with Shinji Kim

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Shinji

Shinji Kim is the Founder & CEO of Select Star, an automated data discovery platform that helps you to understand & manage your data. Previously, she was the Founder & CEO of Concord Systems, a NYC-based data infrastructure startup acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016. She led the strategy and execution of Akamai IoT Edge Connect, an IoT data platform for real-time communication and data processing of connected devices. Shinji studied Software Engineering at University of Waterloo and General Management at Stanford GSB.

Links Referenced:

Select Star: https://www.selectstar.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/selectstarhq/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/selectstarhq

Azul and the Current State of the Java Ecosystem with Scott Sellers

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Scott

With more than 28 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems.

Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles. Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different graphics processors. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation.

Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.

Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.

Links Referenced:

Azul: https://www.azul.com/

The Future of Serverless with Allen Helton

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Allen

Allen is a cloud architect at Tyler Technologies. He helps modernize government software by creating secure, highly scalable, and fault-tolerant serverless applications.

Allen publishes content regularly about serverless concepts and design on his blog - Ready, Set Cloud!

Links Referenced:

Ready, Set, Cloud blog: https://readysetcloud.io
Tyler Technologies: https://www.tylertech.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/allenheltondev
Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenheltondev/

The Ever-Changing World of Cloud Native Observability with Ian Smith

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Ian

Ian Smith is Field CTO at Chronosphere where he works across sales, marketing, engineering and product to deliver better insights and outcomes to observability teams supporting high-scale cloud-native environments. Previously, he worked with observability teams across the software industry in pre-sales roles at New Relic, Wavefront, PagerDuty and Lightstep.

Links Referenced:

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io
Last Tweet in AWS: lasttweetinaws.com

Authentication Matters with Dan Moore of FusionAuth

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Dan

Dan Moore is head of developer relations for FusionAuth, where he helps share information about authentication, authorization and security with developers building all kinds of applications.

A former CTO, AWS certification instructor, engineering manager and a longtime developer, he's been writing software for (checks watch) over 20 years.

Links Referenced:

FusionAuth: https://fusionauth.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mooreds

Trivy and Open Source Communities with Anaïs Urlichs

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Anaïs

Anaïs is a Developer Advocate at Aqua Security, where she contributes to Aqua’s cloud native open source projects. When she is not advocating DevOps best practices, she runs her own YouTube Channel centered around cloud native technologies. Before joining Aqua, Anais worked as SRE at Civo, a cloud native service provider, where she helped enhance the infrastructure for hundreds of tenant clusters. As CNCF ambassador of the year 2021, her passion lies in making tools and platforms more accessible to developers and community members.

Links Referenced:

Aqua Security: https://www.aquasec.com/
Aqua Open Source YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/AquaSecurityOpenSource
Personal blog: https://anaisurl.com

Third Wave Security with Alex Marshall of Twingate

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Alex

Alex is the Chief Product Officer of Twingate, which he cofounded in 2019. Alex has held a range of product leadership roles in the enterprise software market over the last 16 years, including at Dropbox, where he was the first enterprise hire in the company's transformation from consumer to enterprise business. A focus of his product career has been using the power of design thinking to make technically complex products intuitive and easy to use. Alex graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

Links Referenced:

twingate.com: https://twingate.com

The New Cloud War with Martin Casado

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Martin

Martin Casado is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing. He was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin was a fellow, and served as senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016.

Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also cofounded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006.

For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Martin serves on the board of ActionIQ, Ambient.ai, Astranis, dbt Labs, Fivetran, Imply, Isovalent, Kong, Material Security, Netlify, Orbit, Pindrop Security, Preset, RapidAPI, Rasa, Tackle, Tecton, and Yubico.

Links:

Yet Another Infra Group Discord Server: https://discord.gg/f3xnJzwbeQ
“The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox” - https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/

Understanding CDK and The Well Architected Framework with Matt Coulter

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Matt

Matt is a Sr. Architect in Belfast, an AWS DevTools Hero, Serverless Architect, Author and conference speaker.

He is focused on creating the right environment for empowered teams to rapidly deliver business value in a well-architected, sustainable and serverless-first way.

You can usually find him sharing reusable, well architected, serverless patterns over at cdkpatterns.com or behind the scenes bringing CDK Day to life.

Links Referenced:

Previous guest appearance: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/slinging-cdk-knowledge-with-matt-coulter/
The CDK Book: https://thecdkbook.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NIDeveloper

How to Leverage AWS for Web Developers with Adam Elmore

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Adam

Adam is an independent cloud consultant that helps startups build products on AWS. He’s also the host of AWS FM, a podcast with guests from around the AWS community, and an AWS DevTools Hero.

Adam is passionate about open source and has made a handful of contributions to the AWS CDK over the years. In 2020 he created Ness, an open source CLI tool for deploying web sites and apps to AWS.

Previously, Adam co-founded StatMuse—a Disney backed startup building technology that answers sports questions—and served as CTO for five years. He lives in Nixa, Missouri, with his wife and two children.

Links Referenced:

17 Ways to Run Containers On AWS: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-17-ways-to-run-containers-on-aws/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamdotdev
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/adamelmore

Invisible Infrastructure and Data Solutions with Alex Rasmussen

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Alex

Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he’s had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. He also had a brief stint as a Cloud Economist with the Duckbill Group, helping AWS customers save money on their AWS bills. He's currently a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage, and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Links Referenced:

Company website: https://bitsondisk.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexras/

Google Cloud Carbon Footprint with Steren Giannini

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Steren

Steren is a Group Product Manager at Google Cloud. He is part of the serverless team, leading Cloud Run. He is also working on sustainability, leading the Google Cloud Carbon Footprint product.

Steren is an engineer from École Centrale (France). Before joining Google, he was CTO of a startup building connected objects and multi device solutions.

Links Referenced:

previous episode: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/google-cloud-run-satisfaction-and-scalability-with-steren-giannini/
Google Cloud Carbon Footprint: https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint
Google Cloud Region Picker: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/region-picker/
Google Cloud regions: https://cloud.google.com/sustainability/region-carbon

Creating Conversations on TikTok with Alex Su

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Alex

Alex Su is a lawyer who's currently the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, the #1 contract lifecycle management technology company that's backed by Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator, and other leading investors. Prior to joining Ironclad, Alex sold cloud software to legal departments and law firms on behalf of early stage startups. Alex maintains an active presence on social media, with over 180,000 followers across Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Links Referenced:

Ironclad: https://ironcladapp.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-su/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyitsalexsu
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyitsalexsu/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@legaltechbro

Brand Relationships and Content Creation with Jon Myer

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Jon

A husband, father of 3 wonderful kids who turned Podcaster during the pandemic. If you told me in early 2020 I would be making content or doing a podcast, I probably would have said "Nah, I couldn't see myself making YouTube videos". In fact, I told my kids, no way am I going to make videos for YouTube. Well, a year later I'm over 100 uploads and my subscriber count is growing.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-myer/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_JonMyer
jonmyer.com: https://jonmyer.com

Empathy Driven Management and Engagement with Tim Banks

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Tim

Tim’s tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores.

Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe

Cloud Security and Cost with Anton Chuvakin

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Anton

Dr. Anton Chuvakin is now involved with security solution strategy at Google Cloud, where he arrived via Chronicle Security (an Alphabet company) acquisition in July 2019.

Anton was, until recently, a Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) Security and Risk Management Strategies team. (see chuvakin.org for more)

Links Referenced:

Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/
Cloud Security Podcast: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/cloudsecurity/podcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/anton_chuvakin
Medium blog: https://medium.com/@anton.chuvakin

Generating Demand and Building Trust with Anadelia Fadeev

Corey Quinn — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Anadelia

Anadelia is a B2B marketing leader passionate about building tech brands and growing revenue. She is currently the Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Teleport. In her spare time she enjoys live music and craft beer.

Links Referenced:

Teleport: https://goteleport.com/
@anadeliafadeev: https://twitter.com/anadeliafadeev
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anadeliafadeev/

Remote Work and Finding Your Voice with Jeff Smith

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Jeff

Jeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 20 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Director of Production Operations for Basis Technologies (formerly Centro), an advertising software company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Before that he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub.

Jeff is passionate about DevOps transformations in organizations large and small, with a particular interest in the psychological aspects of problems in companies. He lives in Chicago with his wife Stephanie and their two kids Ella and Xander.

Jeff is also the author of Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions with Manning publishing. (https://www.manning.com/books/operations-anti-patterns-devops-solutions)

Links Referenced:

Basis Technologies: https://basis.net/
Operations Anti-Patterns: https://attainabledevops.com/book
Personal Site: https://attainabledevops.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffery-smith-devops/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DarkAndNerdy
Medium: https://medium.com/@jefferysmith
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Cloud-Hosted Database Services with Benjamin Anderson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Benjamin

Benjamin Anderson is CTO, Cloud at EDB, where he is responsible for developing and driving strategy for the company’s Postgres-based cloud offerings. Ben brings over ten years’ experience building and running distributed database systems in the cloud for multiple startups and large enterprises. Prior to EDB, he served as chief architect of IBM’s Cloud Databases organization, built an SRE practice at database startup Cloudant, and founded a Y Combinator-funded hardware startup.

Links Referenced:

EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com/
BigAnimal: biganimal.com

Developer Advocacy, Empathy, and Imposter Syndrome with Brandon West

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Brandon

Brandon West was raised in part by video games and BBSes and has been working on web applications since 1999. He entered the world of Developer Relations in 2011 as an evangelist for a small startup called SendGrid and has since held leadership roles at companies like AWS. At Datadog, Brandon is focused on helping developers improve the performance and developer experience of the things they build. He lives in Seattle where enjoys paddle-boarding, fishing, and playing music.

Links Referenced:

Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwest

Kubernetes and OpenGitOps with Chris Short

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Chris

Chris Short has been a proponent of open source solutions throughout his over two decades in various IT disciplines, including systems, security, networks, DevOps management, and cloud native advocacy across the public and private sectors. He currently works on the Kubernetes team at Amazon Web Services and is an active Kubernetes contributor and Co-chair of OpenGitOps. Chris is a disabled US Air Force veteran living with his wife and son in Greater Metro Detroit. Chris writes about Cloud Native, DevOps, and other topics at ChrisShort.net. He also runs the Cloud Native, DevOps, GitOps, Open Source, industry news, and culture focused newsletter DevOps’ish.

Links Referenced:

DevOps’ish: https://devopsish.com/
EKS News: https://eks.news/
Containers from the Couch: https://containersfromthecouch.com
opengitops.dev: https://opengitops.dev
ChrisShort.net: https://chrisshort.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisShort

Technical Lineage and Careers in Tech with Sheeri Cabral

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Sheeri

After almost 2 decades as a database administrator and award-winning thought leader, Sheeri Cabral pivoted to technical product management. Her super power of “new customer” empathy informs her presentations and explanations. Sheeri has developed unique insights into working together and planning, having survived numerous reorganizations, “best practices”, and efficiency models. Her experience is the result of having worked at everything from scrappy startups such as Guardium – later bought by IBM – to influential tech companies like Mozilla and MongoDB, to large established organizations like Salesforce.

Links Referenced:

Collibra: https://www.collibra.com
WildAid GitHub: https://github.com/wildaid
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sheeri
Personal Blog: https://sheeri.org

Incidents, Solutions, and ChatOps Integration with Chris Evans

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Chris

Chris is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at incident.io, where they're building incident management products that people actually want to use. A software engineer by trade, Chris is no stranger to gnarly incidents, having participated (and caused!) them at everything from early stage startups through to enormous IT organizations.

Links Referenced:

incident.io: https://incident.io
Practical Guide to Incident Management: https://incident.io/guide/

Enterprise Developer Advocacy with Maish Saidel-Keesing

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Maish

Maish Saidel-Keesing is a Senior Enterprise Developer Advocate @AWS working on containers and has been working in IT for the past 20 years and with a stronger focus on cloud and automation for the past 7.

He has extensive experience with AWS Cloud technologies, DevOps and Agile practices and implementations, containers, Kubernetes, virtualization, and a number of fun things he has done along the way

He is constantly trying to bridge the gap between Developers and Operators to allow all of us provide a better service for our customers (and not wake up from pages in the middle of the night). He is an avid practitioner of dissolving silos - educating Ops how to code and explaining to Devs what the hell is Operations

Links Referenced:

@maishsk: https://twitter.com/maishsk
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Granted, Common Fate, and AWS Functionality with Chris Norman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Chris

Chris is a robotics engineer turned cloud security practitioner. From building origami robots for NASA, to neuroscience wearables, to enterprise software consulting, he is a passionate builder at heart. Chris is a cofounder of Common Fate, a company with a mission to make cloud access simple and secure.

Links:

TikTok and Short Form Content for Developers with Linda Vivah

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

Full Description / Show Notes

Corey and Linda talk about Tiktok and the online developer community (1:18)
Linda talks about what prompted her to want to work at AWS (5:29)
Linda discusses navigating the change from just being part of the developer community to being an employee of AWS (10:37)
Linda talks about moving AWS more in the direction of short form content, and Corey and Linda talk about the Tiktok algorithm (15:56)
Linda talks about the potential struggle of going from short form to long form content (25:21)

About Linda

Linda Vivah is a Site Reliability Engineer for a major media organization in NYC, a tech content creator, an AWS community builder member, a part-time wedding singer, and the founder of a STEM jewelry shop called Coding Crystals. At the time of this recording she was about to join AWS in her current position as a Developer Advocate.

Linda had an untraditional journey into tech. She was a Philosophy major in college and began her career in journalism. In 2015, she quit her tv job to attend The Flatiron School, a full stack web development immersive program in NYC. She worked as a full-stack developer building web applications for 5 years before shifting into SRE to work on the cloud end internally.

Throughout the years, she’s created tech content on platforms like TikTok & Instagram and believes that sometimes the best way to learn is to teach.

Links Referenced:

lindavivah.com: https://lindavivah.com

Google Cloud Run, Satisfaction, and Scalability with Steren Giannini

Corey Quinn — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

Full Description / Show Notes

Steren and Corey talk about how Google Cloud Run got its name (00:49)
Corey talks about his experiences using Google Cloud (2:42)
Corey and Steren discuss Google Cloud’s cloud run custom domains (10:01)
Steren talks about Cloud Run’s high developer satisfaction and scalability (15:54)
Corey and Steren talk about Cloud Run releases at Google I/O (23:21)
Steren discusses the majority of developer and customer interest in Google’s cloud product (25:33)
Steren talks about his 20% projects around sustainability (29:00)

About Steren

Steren is a Senior Product Manager at Google Cloud. He is part of the serverless team, leading Cloud Run. He is also working on sustainability, leading the Google Cloud Carbon Footprint product.

Steren is an engineer from École Centrale (France). Prior to joining Google, he was CTO of a startup building connected objects and multi device solutions.

Links Referenced:

Google Cloud Run: https://cloud.run
sheets-url-shortener: https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url-shortener
snark.cloud/run: https://snark.cloud/run
Twitter: https://twitter.com/steren

Transparency in Cloud Security with Gafnit Amiga

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

Full Description / Show Notes

Gafnit explains how she found a vulnerability in RDS, an Amazon database service (1:40)
Gafnit and Corey discuss the concept of not being able to win in cloud security (7:20)
Gafnit talks about transparency around security breaches (11:02)
Corey and Gafnit discuss effectively communicating with customers about security (13:00)
Gafnit answers the question “Did you come at the RDS vulnerability exploration from a perspective of being deeper on the Postgres side or deeper on the AWS side? (18:10)
Corey and Gafnit talk about the risk of taking a pre-existing open source solution and offering it as a managed service (19:07)
Security measures in cloud-native approaches versus cloud-hosted (22:41)
Gafnit and Corey discuss the security community (25:04)

About Gafnit

Gafnit Amiga is the Director of Security Research at Lightspin. Gafnit has 7 years of experience in Application Security and Cloud Security Research. Gafnit leads the Security Research Group at Lightspin, focused on developing new methods to conduct research for new cloud native services and Kubernetes. Previously, Gafnit was a lead product security engineer at Salesforce focused on their core platform and a security researcher at GE Digital. Gafnit holds a Bs.c in Computer Science from IDC Herzliya and a student for Ms.c in Data Science.

Links Referenced:

Lightspin: https://www.lightspin.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gafnitav
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gafnit-amiga-b1357b125/

Working Smarter with Oki Doki and Marie Poulin

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

Full Description / Show Notes

Marie talks about Oki Doki’s primary product, Notion Mastery (2:38)
Corey and Marie talk ADHD diagnosis and how it has impacted their lives and work (4:26)
Marie and Corey discuss techniques they’ve developed for coping with ADHD (11:22)
Corey and Marie talk about workarounds for people with ADHD who want to adopt something like Notion (16:13)
Marie discusses the importance of being excited about the tools you’re employing (18:54)
Corey and Marie talk about finding tools that work for you (26:43)
Marie and Corey discuss the unique challenge of teaching skills versus dumping knowledge (30:35)

About Marie Poulin

Marie teaches business owners to level up their digital systems, workflow, and knowledge management processes using Notion.

She’s the co-founder of Oki Doki and creator of Notion Mastery, an online program and community that helps creators, entrepreneurs and small teams tame their work + life chaos by building life and business management systems with Notion.

Diagnosed with ADHD at age 37, Marie is especially passionate about helping folks customize their workflows and workspaces to meet their unique needs and preferences.

She believes that Notion is especially powerful for neurodivergent folks who have long struggled to adhere to traditional or rigid project management processes, and may need a little extra customization and flexibility.

When she's not tinkering in Notion or doing live trainings, you can find her in the garden, playing video games, or cooking up some delicious vegetarian tacos.

Links Referenced:

Oki Doki: https://weareokidoki.com/
Personal website: https://mariepoulin.com
Notion Mastery: https://notionmastery.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mariepoulin

Not Just a Dinosaur with Guillermo Ruiz

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

Full Description / Show Notes

Guillermo talks about how he came to work at OCI and what it was like helping to pioneer Oracle’s cloud product (1:40)
Corey and Guillermo discuss the challenges and realities of multi-cloud (6:00)
Corey asks about OCI’s dedicated region approach (8:27)
Guillermo discusses the problem of awareness (12:40)
Corey and Guillermo talk cloud providers and cloud migration (14:40)
Guillermo shares about how OCI’s cost and customer service is unique among cloud providers (16:56)
Corey and Guillermo talk about IoT services and 5G (23:58)

About Guillermo Ruiz

Guillermo Ruiz gets into trouble more often than he would like. During his career Guillermo has seen many horror stories while building data centers worldwide. In 2007 he dreamed with space-based internet and direct routing between satellites, but he could only reach “the Cloud”. And there he is, helping customer build their business in someone else servers since 2011.

Beware of his sense of humor...If you ever see him in a tech event, run, he will get you in problems.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/IaaSgeek, https://twitter.com/OracleStartup
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gruizesteban/

Learning in Public with swyx

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About swyx

swyx has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS, and now serves as Head of Developer Experience at Airbyte. He has started and run communities for hundreds of thousands of developers, like Svelte Society, /r/reactjs, and the React TypeScript Cheatsheet. His nontechnical writing was recently published in the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developers.

Links Referenced:

“Learning Gears” blog post: https://www.swyx.io/learning-gears
The Coding Career Handbook: https://learninpublic.org
Personal Website: https://swyx.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx

Connecting Cybersecurity to the Whole Organization with Alyssa Miller

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Alyssa

Alyssa Miller, Business Information Security Officer (BISO) for S&P Global, is the global executive leader for cyber security across the Ratings division, connecting corporate security objectives to business initiatives. She blends a unique mix of technical expertise and executive presence to bridge the gap that can often form between security practitioners and business leaders. Her goal is to change how security professionals of all levels work with our non-security partners throughout the business.

A life-long hacker, Alyssa has a passion for technology and security. She bought her first computer herself at age 12 and quickly learned techniques for hacking modem communications and software. Her serendipitous career journey began as a software developer which enabled her to pivot into security roles. Beginning as a penetration tester, her last 16 years have seen her grow as a security leader with experience across a variety of organizations. She regularly advocates for improved security practices and shares her research with business leaders and industry audiences through her international public speaking engagements, online content, and other media appearances.

Links Referenced:

Cybersecurity Career Guide: https://alyssa.link/book
A-L-Y-S-S-A dot link—L-I-N-K slash book: https://alyssa.link/book
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlyssaM_InfoSec
alyssasec.com: https://alyssasec.com

Conveying Authenticity in Marketing with Sharone Zitzman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Sharone

I'm Sharone Zitzman, a marketing technologist and open source community builder, who likes to work with engineering teams that are building products that developers love. Having built both the DevOps Israel and Cloud Native Israel communities from the ground up, today I spend my time finding the places where technology and people intersect and ensuring that this is an excellent experience. You can find my talks, articles, and employment experience at rtfmplease.dev. Find me on Twitter or Github as @shar1z.

Links Referenced:

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/shar1z
Website: https://rtfmplease.dev
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonez/
@TLVCommunity: https://twitter.com/TLVcommunity
@DevOpsDaysTLV: https://twitter.com/devopsdaystlv

How Dynobase Makes DynamoDB Easier with Rafal Wilinksi

Corey Quinn — Tue, 31 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Rafal

Rafal is Serverless Engineer at Stedi by day, and Dynobase founder by night - a modern DynamoDB UI client. When he is not coding or answering support tickets, he loves climbing and tasting whiskey (not simultaneously).

Links Referenced:

Company Website: https://dynobase.dev

On the Corner of Broadway and Tech with Carla Stickler

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Carla

Carla Stickler is a professional multi-hyphenate advocating for the inclusion of artists in STEM. Currently, she works as a software engineer at G2 in Chicago. She loves chatting with folks interested in shifting gears from the arts to programming and especially hopes to get more women into the field. Carla spent over 10 years performing in Broadway musicals, most notably, “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and “The Sound of Music.” She recently made headlines for stepping back into the role of Elphaba on Broadway for a limited time to help out during the covid surge after not having performed the role for 7 years. Carla is passionate about reframing the narrative of the “starving artist” and states, “When we choose to walk away from a full-time pursuit of the arts, it does not make us failed artists. The possibilities for what we can do and who we can be are unlimited.”

Links Referenced:

G2: https://www.g2.com/
Personal website: https://carlastickler.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sticklercarla/

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I’ve got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it’s more than just hipster monitoring.

Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn, there seems to be a trope in our industry that the real engineers all follow what more or less looks like the exact same pattern, where it’s you wind up playing around with computers as a small child and then you wind up going to any college you want—as long as it’s Stanford—and getting a degree in anything under the sun—as long as it’s computer science—and then all of your next jobs are based upon how well you can re-implement algorithms on the whiteboard. A lot of us didn’t go through that path. We wound up finding our own ways to tech. My guest today has one of the more remarkable stories that I’ve come across. Carla Stickler is a software engineer at G2. Carla, thank you for agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows today. It’s appreciated.

Carla: Thanks so much for having me, Corey.

Corey: So, before you entered tech—I believe this is your first job as an engineer and as of the time we’re recording this, it’s been just shy of a year that you’ve done in the role. What were you doing before now?

Carla: Oh, boy, Corey. What was I doing? I definitely was not doing software engineering. I was a Broadway actress. So, I spent about 15 years in New York doing musical theater, touring around the country and Asia in big Broadway shows. And that was pretty much all I did.

I guess, I also was a teacher. I was a voice teacher and I taught voice lessons, and I had a studio and I taught it a couple of faculties in New York. But I was one hundred percent ride-or-die, like, all the way to the end musical theater or bust, from a very, very early age. So, it’s been kind of a crazy time changing careers. [laugh].

Corey: What inspired that? I mean, it doesn’t seem like it’s a common pattern of someone who had an established career as a Broadway actress to wake up one day and say, “You know what I don’t like anymore. That’s right being on stage, doing the thing that I spent 15 years doing. You know what I want to do instead? That’s right, be mad at computers all the time and angry because some of the stuff is freaking maddening.” What was the catalyst that—

Carla: Yeah, sounds crazy. [laugh].

Corey: —inspired you to move?

Carla: It sounds crazy. It was kind of a long time coming. I love performing; I do, and it’s like, my heart and soul is with performing. Nothing else in my life really can kind of replace that feeling I get when I’m on stage. But the one thing they don’t really talk about when you are growing up and dreaming of being a performer is how physically and emotionally taxing it is.

I think there’s, like, this narrative around, like, “Being an actor is really hard, and you should only do it if you can’t see yourself doing anything else,” but they don’t actually ever explain to you what hard means. You know, you expect that, oh, there’s going to be a lot of other people doing it in, I’m going to be auditioning all the time, and I’m going to have a lot of competition, but you never quite grasp the physical and emotional toll that it takes on your body and your—you know, just ongoing in auditions and getting rejections all the time. And then when you’re working in a show eight times a week and you’re wearing four-inch heels on a stage that is on a giant angle, and you’re wearing wigs that are, like, really, really massive, you don’t really—no one ever tells you how hard that is on your body. So, for me, I just hit a point where I was performing nonstop and I was so tired. I was, like, living at my physical therapist’s office, I was living at, like, my head therapist’s office.

I was just trying to, like, figure out why I was so miserable. And so, I actually left in 2015, performing full time. So, I went to get my Master’s in Education at NYU thinking that teaching was my way out of performing full-time.

Corey: It does seem that there’s some congruities—there’s some congruities there between your—instead of performing in front of a giant audience, you’re performing in front of a bunch of students. And whether it’s performing slash educating, well that comes down to almost stylistic differences. But I have a hard time imagining you just reading from your slides.

Carla: Y...

Let Your Backups Help you Sleep with Simon Bennett

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Simon

Founder and CEO of SnapShooter a backup company

Links Referenced:

SnapShooter.com: https://SnapShooter.com
MrSimonBennett: https://twitter.com/MrSimonBennett

At the Head of Community Development with Wesley Faulkner

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Wesley

Wesley Faulkner is a first-generation American, public speaker, and podcaster. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and a staunch supporter of racial justice, workplace equity, and neurodiversity. His professional experience spans technology from AMD, Atlassian, Dell, IBM, and MongoDB. Wesley currently works as a Developer Advocate, and in addition, co-hosts the developer relations focused podcast Community Pulse and serves on the board for SXSW.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/wesley83
Polywork: https://polywork.com/wesley83
Personal Website: https://www.wesleyfaulkner.com/

Stepping Onto the AWS Commerce Platform with James Greenfield

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About James

James has been part of AWS for over 15 years. During that time he's led software engineering for Amazon EC2 and more recently leads the AWS Commerce Platform group that runs some of the largest systems in the world, handling volumes of data and request rates that would make your eyes water. And AWS customers trust us to be right all the time so there's no room for error.

Links Referenced:

Email: jamesg@amazon.com

Making “Devrelopment” Your Own with Priyanka Vergadia

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Priyanka

Priyanka Vergadia is currently a Staff Developer Advocate at Google Cloud where she works with enterprises to build and architect their cloud platforms. She enjoys building engaging technical content and continuously experiments with new ways to tell stories and solve business problems using Google Cloud tools. You can check out some of the stories that she has created for the developer community on the Google Cloud Platform Youtube channel. These include "Deconstructing Chatbots", "Get Cooking in Cloud", "Pub/Sub Made Easy" and more. ..

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pvergadia/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pvergadia
Priyanka's book: https://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Google-Cloud-Illustrated-References/dp/1119816327

Reliability Starts in Cultural Change with Amy Tobey

Corey Quinn — Wed, 11 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Amy

Links Referenced:

Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com
Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey
Personal Blog: https://tobert.github.io/

Serverless Should be Simple with Tomasz Łakomy

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Tomasz

Tomasz is a Frontend Engineer at Stedi, Co-Founder/Head of React at Cloudash, egghead.io instructor with over 200 lessons published, a tech speaker, an AWS Community Hero and a lifelong learner.

Links Referenced:

Cloudash: https://cloudash.dev/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tlakomy

Automating in Pre-Container Times with Michael DeHaan

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Michael

Michael is the creator of IT automation platforms Cobbler and Ansible, the latter allegedly used by ~60% of the Fortune 500, and at one time one of the top 10 contributed to projects on GitHub.

Links Referenced:

Speaking Tech: https://michaeldehaan.substack.com/
michaeldehaan.net: https://michaeldehaan.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laserllama

The Magic of Tailscale with Avery Pennarun

Corey Quinn — Wed, 04 May 2022 06:00:00 -0700

About Avery

wvdial, bup, sshuttle, netselect, popularity-contest, redo, gfblip, GFiber, and now @Tailscale doing WireGuard mesh. Top search result for "epic treatise."

Links Referenced:

Webpage: https://tailscale.com
Tailscale Twitter: https://twitter.com/tailscale
Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/apenwarr

Leading the Cloud Security Pack with Yoav Alon

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 May 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Yoav

Yoav is a security veteran recognized on Microsoft Security Response Center’s Most Valuable Research List (BlackHat 2019). Prior to joining Orca Security, he was a Unit 8200 researcher and team leader, a chief architect at Hyperwise Security, and a security architect at Check Point Software Technologies. Yoav enjoys hunting for Linux and Windows vulnerabilities in his spare time.

Links Referenced:

Orca Security: https://orca.security
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yoavalon

Interlacing Literature, Academia, and Tech with Kate Holterhoff

Corey Quinn — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Kate

Kate Holterhoff, an industry analyst with RedMonk, has a background in frontend engineering, academic research, and technical communication. Kate comes to RedMonk from the digital marketing sector and brings with her expertise in frontend engineering, QA, accessibility, and scrum best practices.

Before pursuing a career in the tech industry Kate taught writing and communication courses at several East Coast universities. She earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 2016 and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship (2016-2018) at Georgia Tech, where she is currently an affiliated researcher.

Links:

RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/
Visual Haggard: https://visualhaggard.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kateholterhoff

Data Analytics in Real Time with Venkat Venkataramani

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Venkat

Venkat Venkataramani is CEO and co-founder of Rockset. In his role, Venkat helps organizations build, grow and compete with data by making real-time analytics accessible to developers and data teams everywhere. Prior to founding Rockset in 2016, he was an Engineering Director for the Facebook infrastructure team that managed online data services for 1.5 billion users. These systems scaled 1000x during Venkat's eight years at Facebook, serving five billion queries per second at single-digit millisecond latency and five 9's of reliability. Venkat and his team also created and contributed to many noted data technologies and open-source projects, including Facebook's TAO distributed data store, RocksDB, Memcached, MySQL, MongoRocks, and others. Prior to Facebook, Venkat worked on tools to make the Oracle database easier to manage. He has a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and bachelor’s in computer science from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli.

Links Referenced:

Company website: https://rockset.com
Company blog: https://rockset.com/blog

To SQL or noSQL, Why is that the Question with Chris Harris

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Chris

Chris Harris is Vice President, Global Field Engineering at Couchbase, a provider of a leading modern database for enterprise applications that 30% of the Fortune 100 depend on. With almost 20 years of technical field and professional services experience at early-stage, open source and growth technology companies, Chris held leadership roles at Cloudera, Hortonworks, MongoDB and others before joining Couchbase.

Links Referenced:

couchbase.com: https://couchbase.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-harris-5451953/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cj_harris5

Allowing Aspiration to Lead with Tom Totenberg

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Tom

Tom enjoys being a bridge between people and technology. When he's not thinking about ways to make enterprise demos less boring, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and dogs, reading, and gaming with friends.

Links Referenced:

LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com
Heidi Waterhouse Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiredferret

Creating “Quinntainers” with Casey Lee

Corey Quinn — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Casey

Casey spends his days leveraging AWS to help organizations improve the speed at which they deliver software. With a background in software development, he has spent the past 20 years architecting, building, and supporting software systems for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Links Referenced:

“17 Ways to Run Containers in AWS”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-17-ways-to-run-containers-on-aws/
“17 More Ways to Run Containers on AWS”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/17-more-ways-to-run-containers-on-aws/
kubernetestheeasyway.com: https://kubernetestheeasyway.com
snark.cloud/quinntainers: https://snark.cloud/quinntainers
ECS Chargeback: https://github.com/gaggle-net/ecs-chargeback
twitter.com/nektos: https://twitter.com/nektos

The Independent AWS Security Researcher with Scott Piper

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Scott

Cloud security historian.

Developed flaws.cloud, CloudMapper, and Parliament.

Founding team for fwd:cloudsec

Links:

Block: https://block.xyz/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xdabbad00

Web3 Ain’t All Its Cracked up to Be Molly White

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Molly

Molly White is a software engineer and team lead. She's also a longtime Wikipedia editor and advocate for free and open knowledge, and has more recently become an outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies and web3 more broadly.

Links:

web3isgoinggreat.com: https://web3isgoinggreat.com
lasttweetinaws.com: https://lasttweetinaws.com
mollywhite.net: https://mollywhite.net
@molly0xFFF: https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF
@web3isgreat: https://twitter.com/web3isgreat
ponzl: http://ponzl.com

The Anti-Entropy Agent with Johnny Podhradsky

Corey Quinn — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Johnny

Johnny was born in Cleveland, OH and graduated from the University of Toledo with a Bachelor's in Computer Science Engineering. He began his career as a software engineer focused on embedded device protocols and systems engineering. Eventually he realized that Program Management worked better with the grain of his brain, so he took his career in that direction.

In 2019, he was hired by Google Cloud to serve as a Communications Lead on their incident management teams. Most recently, he joined Waymo in November 2021 as a Technical Program Manager, acting as an anti-entropy agent for the self-driving car company's offboard infrastructure teams.

Outside his day job, Johnny enjoys mountain biking, playing piano and trumpet, personal finance, coaching, and studying complex systems. He currently lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife Emily, and is expecting their first child in April 2022!

Links:

Original Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1436129343399346184
Personal website: https://jmpod.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmpod
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gratitudeisfree/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gratitudeisfree/

Doing DevRel on Easy Mode with Matty Stratton

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About “Matty”

Matt Stratton is a Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

Matt has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.

He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke. Matt is the keeper of the Thought Leaderboard for the DevOps Party Games online game show and you can find him on Twitter at @mattstratton.

Links Referenced

Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/
Arrested DevOps: https://www.arresteddevops.com/
8bits.tv: https://8bits.tv
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/
speaking.mattstratton.com: https://speaking.mattstratton.com
twitch.tv/Pulumi: https://twitch.tv/Pulumi
8bit.tv: https://8bit.tv
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

An Honest Approach to Transformative Shifts with Joe Onisick

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Joe

Joe Onisick is a polarizing technologist with nearly 25 years’ experience architecting, building, operating complex IT systems and advising customers on the same. Onisick’s passion is marrying technology to a customer’s real-time business challenges and leading them through the entirety of the adoption curve. Onisick is a Principal and co-founder of Transformation Continuum (transformationcontinuum.com), and founder of Define the Cloud (definethecloud.net).

Links:

transformation CONTINUUM: https://transformationcontinuum.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeOnisick

Building a Healthier Sales Environment with Ashleigh Early

Corey Quinn — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Ashleigh

Ashleigh Early is a passionate advocate for sales people and through her consulting, coaching, and The Other Side of Sales, she is devoted to making B2B sales culture more inclusive so anyone can thrive. Over the past ten years Ashleigh has led, built, re-built, and consulted for 2 unicorns, 3 acquisitions, 1 abject failure and every step in between. She is also the Head of Sales at the Duckbill Group! You can find Ashleigh on Twitter @AshleighatWork and more about the Other Side of Sales at Othersideofsales.com

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashleighatwork
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighearly

The Multi-Cloud Counterculture with Tim Bray

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Tim

Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystemsand Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

Links Referenced:

Textuality Services: https://www.textuality.com/
laugh]. So, the impetus for having this conversation is, you had a [blog post: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/01/30/Cloud-Lock-In
@timbray: https://twitter.com/timbray
tbray.org: https://tbray.org
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Would You Kindly Remind with Peter Hamilton

Corey Quinn — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Peter

Peter's spent more than a decade building scalable and robust systems at startups across adtech and edtech. At Remind, where he's VP of Technology, Peter pushes for building a sustainable tech company with mature software engineering. He lives in Southern California and enjoys spending time at the beach with his family.

Links:

Redis: https://redis.com/
Remind: https://www.remind.com/
Remind Engineering Blog: https://engineering.remind.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamiltop
Email: peterh@remind101.com

The Demystification of Zero Trust with Philip Griffiths

Corey Quinn — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Philip

Philip Griffiths is VP Global Business Development and regularly speaks at events from DevOps to IoT to Cyber Security. Prior to this, he worked for Atos IT Services in various roles working with C-suit executives to realise their digital transformation. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two daughters.

Links:

NetFoundry: https://netfoundry.io/
Blog article: https://netfoundry.io/demystifying-the-magic-of-zero-trust-with-my-daughter-and-opensource/
netfoundry.io/screaminginthecloud: https://netfoundry.io/screaminginthecloud

It’s like a HeatWave, Burning in my Heart with Nipun Agarwal

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0700

About Nipun

Links:

Oracle: https://www.oracle.com

Throwing Houlihans at MongoDB with Rick Houlihan

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Rick
I lead the developer relations team for strategic accounts at MongoDB. My responsibilities include defining technical standards for the global strategic accounts team and consulting with the largest customers and opportunities for the business. My role spans technology sectors and as part of my engagements I routinely provide guidance on industry best practices, technology transformation, distributed systems implementation, cloud migration, and more. I led the architecture and design effort at Amazon for migrating thousands of relational workloads from RDBMS to NoSQL and built the center of excellence team responsible for defining the best practices and design patterns used today by thousands of Amazon internal service teams and AWS customers. I currently operate as the technical leader for our global strategic account teams to build the market for MongoDB technology by facilitating center of excellence capabilities within our customer organizations through training, evangelism, and direct design consultation activities.

30+ years of software and IT expertise.

9 patents in Cloud Virtualization, Complex Event Processing, Root Cause Analysis, Microprocessor Architecture, and NoSQL Database technology.

Links:

MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/houlihan_rick

The Multi-Colored Brick Road to the Cloud with Rachel Dines

Corey Quinn — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Rachel

Links:

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RachelDines
Email: rachel@chronosphere.io

Cribl Sharpens the Security Edge with Clint Sharp

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Clint

Clint is the CEO and a co-founder at Cribl, a company focused on making observability viable for any organization, giving customers visibility and control over their data while maximizing value from existing tools.

Prior to co-founding Cribl, Clint spent two decades leading product management and IT operations at technology and software companies, including Splunk and Cricket Communications. As a former practitioner, he has deep expertise in network issues, database administration, and security operations.

Links:

Cribl: https://cribl.io/
Cribl.io: https://cribl.io
Docs.cribl.io: https://docs.cribl.io
Sandbox.cribl.io: https://sandbox.cribl.io

Diving Duckbill First into the Depths of Data with Alex Rasmussen

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Alex

Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he’s had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. Prior to joining the Duckbill Group, Alex spent a few years as a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras/
Personal page: https://alexras.info
Old Consulting website with blog: https://bitsondisk.com

The Hari Seldon of Third Party Tooling with Aidan Steele

Corey Quinn — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About Aidan

Aidan is an AWS enthusiast, due in no small part to sharing initials with the cloud. He's been writing software for over 20 years and getting paid to do it for the last 10. He's still not sure what he wants to be when he grows up.

Links:

Stedi: https://www.stedi.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/aidansteele
Blog posts: https://awsteele.com/
Ipv6-ghost-ship: https://github.com/aidansteele/ipv6-ghost-ship
Twitter: https://twitter.com/__steele

Hard Charging Software onto the AWS Marketplace with David Gatti

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0700

About David

David is an AWS expert who likes to design and build scalable solutions that are fully automated and take care of themselves. Now he is focusing on selling his own products on the AWS Marketplace.

Links:

0x4447: https://0x4447.com/
Products page: https://products.0x4447.com

From A to Z in Alphabet’s Soup with Seth Vargo

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Seth

Seth Vargo is an engineer at Google. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and some Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. When he is not writing, working on open source, teaching, or speaking at conferences, Seth advises non-profits.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sethvargo

Creating Content that Sells Ideas with Brooke Jamieson

Corey Quinn — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Brooke

Brooke is the Head of Enablement - AI/ML and Data at Blackbook.ai, an Australian based consulting firm and AWS Partner. Brooke has degrees in Mathematics and Data Engineering and they specialise in developing technically robust solutions that help “non-data people” harness the power of AI for their industry, and communicate this effectively.

Outside of their 'day job', Brooke speaks at Data, AI, Software Engineering, UX and Business conferences and events to Australian and international audiences, and has guest lectured at the University of Queensland Business School and Griffith University. Brooke is proudly a volunteer member of the Queensland National Science Week Committee, and is always on the lookout for new ways to promote STEM pathways to young people, especially young women and members of the LGBTIQA+ community from regional Australia.

Links:

Blackbook: https://blackbook.ai/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/brooke_jamieson
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brookebytes
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookejamieson/

Siphoning through the Acronyms with Liz Rice

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Liz

Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with cloud native networking and security specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium eBPF-based networking project. She is chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee, and was Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O'Reilly.

Links:

Isovalent: https://isovalent.com/
Container Security: https://www.amazon.com/Container-Security-Fundamental-Containerized-Applications/dp/1492056707/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizrice
GitHub: https://github.com/lizrice
Cilium and eBPF Slack: http://slack.cilium.io/
CNCF Slack: https://cloud-native.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-11yzivnzq-hs12vUAYFZmnqE3r7ILz9A

Becoming a Pathfinder in Tech with Emily Kager

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Emily

Emily is an Android engineer by day, but makes tech jokes and satires videos by night. She lives in San Francisco with two ridiculously fluffy dogs.

Links:

Uber: https://eng.uber.com/
Blog: https://www.emilykager.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyKager
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shmemmmy

Into the Year of Documentation with Dr. KellyAnn Fitzpatrick

Corey Quinn — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Kelly

KellyAnn Fitzpatrick is a Senior Industry Analyst at RedMonk, the developer-focused industry analyst firm. Having previously worked as a QA analyst, test & release manager, and tech writer, she has experience with containers, CI/CD, testing frameworks, documentation, and training. She has also taught technical communication to computer science majors at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow.

Holding a Ph.D. in English from the University at Albany and a B.A. in English and Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame, KellyAnn’s side projects include teaching, speaking, and writing about medievalism (the ways that post-medieval societies reimagine or appropriate the Middle Ages), and running to/from donut shops.

Links:

RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/drkellyannfitz

Commanding the Council of the Lords of Thought with Anna Belak

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Anna

Anna holds a PhD in Materials Engineering from the University of Michigan, where she developed computational methods to study solar cells and rechargeable batteries.

How do I adapt my security practices for the cloud-native world?

How do I select and deploy appropriate tools and processes to address business needs?

How do I make sense of new technology trends like threat deception, machine learning, and containers?

Links:

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/
“2022 Cloud-Native Security and Usage Report”: https://sysdig.com/2022-cloud-native-security-and-usage-report/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aabelak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aabelak/
Email: anna.belak@sysdig.com

Quantum Leaps in Bioinformatics with Lynn Langit

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Lynn

Cloud Architect who codes, Angel Investor

Links:

Lynn Langit Consulting: https://lynnlangit.com/
Groove Capital: https://www.groovecap.com/groove-capital-minnesotas-first-check-fund
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lynnlangit
GitHub: https://github.com/lynnlangit

Communicating What an SDET Actually Is with Sean Corbett

Corey Quinn — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Sean

Sean is a senior software engineer at TheZebra, working to build developer experience tooling with a focus on application stability and scalability. Over the past seven years, they have helped create software and proprietary platforms that help teams understand and better their own work.

Links:

TheZebra: https://www.thezebra.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sc_codeUM
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-corbett-574a5321/
Email: scorbett@thezebra.com

Literally Working in the Cloud(s) with Tyler Slove

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Tyler

Lifelong learner, passionate coach, obsessed with continuous improvement, avid solver of people puzzles.

Links:

United Airlines: https://www.united.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerslove/

Caylent: From Etymology to Engineering with Randall Hunt

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Randall

Randall Hunt, VP of Cloud Strategy and Solutions at Caylent, is a technology leader, investor, and hands-on-keyboard coder based in Los Angeles, CA. Previously, Randall led software and developer relations teams at Facebook, SpaceX, AWS, MongoDB, and NASA. Randall spends most of his time listening to customers, building demos, writing blog posts, and mentoring junior engineers. Python and C++ are his favorite programming languages, but he begrudgingly admits that Javascript rules the world. Outside of work, Randall loves to read science fiction, advise startups, travel, and ski.

Links:

Caylent.com: https://caylent.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jrhunt
Riot Games Talk: https://youtu.be/oGK-ojM7ZMc
James Hamilton Talk: https://youtu.be/uj7Ting6Ckk

Keeping Life on the Internet Friction Free with Jason Frazier

Corey Quinn — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Jason

Jason Frazier is a Software Engineering Manager at Ekata, a Mastercard Company. Jason’s team is responsible for developing and maintaining Ekata’s product APIs. Previously, as a developer, Jason led the investigation and migration of Ekata’s Identity Graph from AWS Elasticache to Redis Enterprise Redis on Flash, which brought an average savings of $300,000/yr.

Links:

Ekata: https://ekata.com/
Email: jason.frazier@ekata.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonfrazier56

AWS Services that Age Well with Wayne Duso

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Wayne

Professionally, I'm a Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where I lead a set of businesses delivering cloud infrastructure services. In 2013, I founded and continue to lead the AWS Boston regional development center. I'm an always-curious entrepreneur who is passionate about building innovative teams and businesses that deliver highly disruptive value to customers. I love engaging people who build and deliver customer-obsessed solutions, as well as customers wanting to realize value from those solutions. I hold over 40 patents in distributed and highly-available computer systems, digital video processing, and file systems. Personally, I'm a proud dad to great people, I love to cook and grow things, it relaxes and grounds me, and I cherish finding adventure in the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.

Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wayneduso/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wayneduso

Merewif’s Mitigation of Risk with Ana Visneski

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Ana

Ana Visneski is the founder of Merewif, a crisis communications and management consulting firm. She is a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard where she was a first responder to major disasters from Hurricane Katrina to the BP Oil Spill, and various other incidents. After the USCG, Ana moved on to a whole new disaster that needed an experienced crisis operator - running Launch Operations for AWS. Following that she was the global lead for AWS Disaster Response, overseeing deploying AWS technology response to natural disasters and overseeing the response to COVID. She has a Master of Communication Digital Media and a Master of Communication in Networks from the University of Washington, where she currently teaching Crisis Communications.

Links:

Mirewif: https://www.themerewif.com/
Oracle HeatWave: https://www.oracle.com/mysql/heatwave/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/acvisneski
The—T-H-E—merewif—M-E-R-E-W-I-F dot com: https://www.themerewif.com/

The Redis Rebrand with Yiftach Shoolman

Corey Quinn — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Yiftach

Yiftach is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering.

Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.

Links:

Redis, Inc.: https://redis.com/
Redis open source project: https://redis.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yiftachshoolman/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yiftachsh

How to Investigate the Post-Incident Fallout with Laura Maguire, PhD

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Laura

Laura leads the research program at Jeli.io. She has a Master’s degree in Human Factors & Systems Safety and a PhD in Cognitive Systems Engineering. Her doctoral work focused on distributed incident response practices in DevOps teams responsible for critical digital services. She was a researcher with the SNAFU Catchers Consortium from 2017-2020 and her research interests lie in resilience engineering, coordination design and enabling adaptive capacity across distributed work teams. As a backcountry skier and alpine climber, she also studies cognition & resilient performance in high risk, high consequence mountain environments.

Links:

Howie: The Post-Incident Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie-the-post-incident-guide/
Jeli: https://www.jeli.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lauramdmaguire

The Proliferation of Ways to Learn with Serena (@shenetworks)

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Serena

Serena is a Network Engineer who specializes in Data Center Compute and Virtualization. She has degrees in Computer Information Systems with a concentration on networking and information security and is currently pursuing a master’s in Data Center Systems Engineering. She is most known for her content on TikTok and Twitter as Shenetworks. Serena’s content focuses on networking and security for beginners which has included popular videos on bug bounties, switch spoofing, VLAN hoping, and passing the Security+ certification in 24 hours.

Links:

Cisco cert Discord study group:https://discord.com/invite/uXQ8yWnN8a
Beacons:https://beacons.page/shenetworks
TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@shenetworks
sysengineer’s TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@sysengineer
Twitter:https://twitter.com/notshenetworks

Developing Storage Solutions Before the Rest with AB Periasamay

Corey Quinn — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About AB

AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.

Links:

MinIO: https://min.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/abperiasamy
MinIO Slack channel: https://minio.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-11qsphhj7-HpmNOaIh14LHGrmndrhocA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abperiasamy/

Tackling Tech Head-On with Natalie Davis

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Natalie

I'm interested in solving human problems through technology (she/her). Share your screen (or I'll share mine) and we'll figure this out!

Links:

Netlify: https://www.netlify.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/codeFreedomRitr

The Relevancy of Backups with Nancy Wang

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Nancy

Nancy Wang is a global product and technical leader at Amazon Web Services, where she leads P&L, product, engineering, and design for its data protection and governance businesses. Prior to Amazon, she led SaaS product development at Rubrik, the fastest-growing enterprise software unicorn and built healthdata.gov for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Passionate about advancing more women into technical roles, Nancy is the founder & CEO of Advancing Women in Tech, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit with 16,000+ members worldwide.

Nancy is an angel investor in data security and compliance companies, and an LP with several seed- and growth-stage funds such as Operator Collective and IVP. She earned a degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Links:

https://coursera.org/awit
Advancing Women in Technology: https://www.advancingwomenintech.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wangnancy/
Advancing Women in Technology LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/advancingwomenintech/

Walking the Arcane Halls of AWS with Rachel Kelly

Corey Quinn — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Rachel

Rachel Kelly is a Senior Engineer at Fastly in Infrastructure, and is a proud career-switcher over to tech as of about eight years ago. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and spends her time thinking about crafts, cycling, leadership, and ditching Google. Previously, she worked at Bright.md wrestling Ansible and Terraform into shape, and before then, a couple years at Puppet. You can reach Rachel on twitter @wholemilk, or at hello@rkode.com.

Links:

Drawing from the Depths of Experience with Deirdré Straughan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Deirdré

For over 35 years, Deirdré Straughan has been helping technologies grow and thrive through marketing and community. Her product experience spans consumer apps and devices, cloud services and technologies, and kernel features. Her toolkit includes words, websites, blogs, communities, events, video, social, marketing, and more. She has written and edited technical books and blog posts, filmed and produced videos, and organized meetups, conferences, and conference talks. She just started a new gig heading up open source community at Intel. You can find her @deirdres on Twitter, and she also shares her opinions on beginningwithi.com

Links:

“Marketing Your Tech Talent”: https://youtu.be/9pGSIE7grSs
Personal Webpage: https://beginningwithi.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/deirdres

Learning to Give in the Cloud with Andrew Brown

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Andrew

I create free cloud certification courses and somehow still make money.

Links:

ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/
PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown
Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown

Find, Fix and Eliminate Cloud Vulnerabilities with Shir Tamari and Company

Corey Quinn — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Shir

Shir Tamari is the Head of Research of Wiz, the cloud security company. He is an experienced security and technology researcher specializing in vulnerability research and practical hacking. In the past, he served as a consultant to a variety of security companies in the fields of research, development and product.

About Sagi

Sagi Tzadik is a security researcher in the Wiz Research Team. Sagi specializes in research and exploitation of web applications vulnerabilities, as well as network security and protocols. He is also a Game-Hacking and Reverse-Engineering enthusiast.

About Nir

Nir Ohfeld is a security researcher from Israel. Nir currently does cloud-related security research at Wiz. Nir specializes in the exploitation of web applications, application security and in finding vulnerabilities in complex high-level systems.

Links:

Wiz: https://www.wiz.io
Cloud CVE Slack channel: https://cloud-cve-db.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-y38smqmo-V~d4hEr_stQErVCNx1OkMA
Wiz Blog: https://wiz.io/blog
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiz_io

The re:Invent Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turning with Pete Cheslock

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Pete

I enjoy improving companies organizational structures, providing insight into building and growing autonomous high functioning, high performing technical teams. I'm fascinated by the dynamics of high performance, and take great pride in building and supporting those teams. I also enjoy the intricacies of Systems Architecture, Design, and Implementation work. I like to use modern tools to solve difficult technology problems. I'm most excited by Automation, Observability, Data Engineering.

I'm a product minded technologist. For the last 20 years working from Internet Service Providers and Hosting Companies to modern SaaS hosted on Cloud providers. I like to understand how people use the products that I build, and I like to build things that last a long time.

I consider product needs, business requirements, and technical capabilities when building products or planning new features. I work to understand the user and how and why they consume a service. All of our actions can impact many different ways, and I enjoy understanding how services, product teams, and business units work. I like to find ways to take one team's success and apply it more broadly, leveling up the entire business.

I like to get things done. I'm not too fond of unnecessary processes that slow down progress. I like iterative improvements, bringing new features into users' hands as quickly as possible, even if they are tiny changes. I want to share what I learn—both internal to a company and external to a broader community.

I enjoy the business side of technology as much as the technical side. I went back to school and received my MBA to understand the language of business. I enjoyed my product and finance classes the most. I like to understand the financial impact of product decisions. I don't like waste (in time or money), and I also believe premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Links:

Last Tweet in AWS: https://lasttweetinaws.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/petecheslock
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecheslock/

“Cloudash”ing onto Mac with Maciej Winnicki

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Maciej

Maciej Winnicki is a serverless enthusiast with over 6 years of experience in writing software with no servers whatsoever. Serverless Engineer at Stedi, Cloudash Founder, ex-Engineering Manager, and one of the early employees at Serverless Inc.

Links:

Cloudash: https://cloudash.dev
Maciej Winnicki Twitter: https://twitter.com/mthenw
Tomasz Łakomy Twitter: https://twitter.com/tlakomy
Cloudash email: hello@cloudash.dev

Slinging CDK Knowledge with Matt Coulter

Corey Quinn — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Matt

Matt is an AWS DevTools Hero, Serverless Architect, Author and conference speaker.

He is focused on creating the right environment for empowered teams to rapidly deliver business value in a well-architected, sustainable and serverless-first way.

You can usually find him sharing reusable, well architected, serverless patterns over at cdkpatterns.com or behind the scenes bringing CDK Day to life.

Links:

AWS CDK Patterns: https://cdkpatterns.com
The CDK Book: https://thecdkbook.com
CDK Day: https://www.cdkday.com

Transcript

Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn’t going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport’s unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn’t heard of before, but they’re doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they’re using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they’re able to wind up taking what you’re running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I’m somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that’s one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer’s problem and they get out there in public and say, “We’re solving a problem,” it’s very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it’s worth exploring. So, if you’re looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That’s risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I’m joined today by Matt Coulter, who is a Technical Architect at Liberty Mutual. You may have had the privilege of seeing him on the keynote stage at re:Invent last year—in Las Vegas or remotely—that last year of course being 2021. But if you make better choices than the two of us did, and found yourself not there, take the chance to go and watch that keynote. It’s really worth seeing.

Matt, first, thank you for joining me. I’m sorry, I don’t have 20,000 people here in the audience to clap this time. They’re here, but they’re all remote as opposed to sitting in the room behind me because you know, social distancing.

Matt: And this left earphone, I just have some applause going, just permanently, just to keep me going. [laugh].

Corey: That’s sort of my own internal laugh track going on. It’s basically whatever I say is hilarious, to that. So yeah, doesn’t really matter what I say, how I say it, my jokes are all for me. It’s fine. So, what was it like being on stage in front of that many people? It’s always been a wild experience to watch and for folks who haven’t spent time on the speaking circuit, I don’t think that there’s any real conception of what that’s like. Is this like giving a talk at work, where I just walk on stage randomly, whatever I happened to be wearing? And, oh, here’s a microphone, I’m going to say words. What is the process there?

Matt: It’s completely different. For context for everyone, before the pandemic, I would have pretty regularly talked in front of, I don’t know, maybe one, two hundred people in Liberty, in Belfast. So, I used to be able to just, sort of, walk in front of them, and lean against the pillar, and use my clicker, and click through, but the process for actually presenting something as big as a keynote and re:Invent is so different. For starters, you think that when you walk onto the stage, you’ll actually be able to see the audience, but the way the lights are set up, you can pretty much see about one row of people, and they’re not the front row, so anybody I knew, I couldn’t actually see.

And yeah, you can only see, sort of like, the from the void, and then you have your screens, so you’ve six sets of screens that tell you your notes as well as what slides you’re on, you know, so you can pivot. But other than that, I mean, it feels like you’re just talking to yourself outside of whenever people, thankfully, applause. It’s such a long process to get there.

Corey: I’ve always said that there are a few different transition stages as the audience size increases, but for me, the final stage is more or less anything above 750 people. Because as you say, you aren’t able to see that many beyond that point, and it doesn’t really change anything meaningfully. The most common example that you see in the wild is jokes that work super well with a small group of people fall completely flat to large audiences. It’s why so much corporate numerous cheesy because yeah, everyone in the rehearsals is sitting there laughing and the joke kills, but now you’ve got 5000 people sitting in a room and that joke just sounds strained and forced because there’s no longer a conversation, and no one has the shared context that—the humor has to change. So, in some cases when you’re telling a story about what you’re going to say on stage, during a rehearsal, they’re going to say, “Well, that joke sounds really corny and lame.” It’s, “Yeah, wait until you see it in front of an audience. It will land very differently.” And I’m usually right on that.

I would also advise, you know, doing what you do and having something important and useful to say, as opposed to just going up there to tell jokes the whole time. I wanted to talk about that because you talked about how you’re using various CDK and other serverless style patterns in your work at Liberty Mutual.

Matt: Yeah. So, we’ve been using CDK pretty extensively since it was, sort ...

GCP’s Many Profundities with Miles Ward

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Miles

Earning his Bachelor of Science in Rhetoric and Media Studies from Willamette University, Miles is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur who also plays a mean electric sousaphone.

Links:

SADA.com: https://sada.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/milesward
Email: miles@sada.com

An Enterprise Level View of Cloud Architecture with Levi McCormick

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Levi

Levi's passion lies in helping others learn to cloud better.

Links:

Jamf: https://www.jamf.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/levi_mccormick

Fear and Loathing on the re:Invent Show Floor of ‘21 with Aaron Booth

Corey Quinn — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Aaron

I am a Cloud Focused Product Management and Technical Product Ownership Consultant. I have worked on several Cloud Products & Services including resale, management & governance, cost optimisation, platform management, SaaS, PaaS. I am also recognised as a AWS Community Builder due to my work building cloud communities cross-government in the UK over the last 3 years.

I have extensive commercial experience dealing with Cloud Service Providers including AWS, Azure, GCP & UKCloud. I was the Single Point of Contact for Cloud at the UK Home Office and was the business representative for the Home Office's £120m contract with AWS. I have been involved in contract negotiation, supplier relationship management & financial planning such as business cases & cost management.

I run a IT Consultancy called Embue, specialising in Agile, Cloud & DevOps consulting, coaching and training.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AaronBoothUK
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronboothuk/
Embue: https://embue.co.uk
Publicgood.cloud: https://publicgood.cloud

Security Can Be More than Hues of Blue with Ell Marquez

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

About Ell

Ell, former SysAdmin, cloud builder, podcaster, and container advocate, has always been a security enthusiast. This enthusiasm and driven curiosity have helped her become an active member of the InfoSec community, leading her to explore the exciting world of Genetic Software Mapping at Intezer.

Links:

Intezer: https://www.intezer.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ell_o_Punk

Spreading the Networking Vibes with Serena (@shenetworks)

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Serena

Serena is a Network Engineer who specializes in Data Center Compute and Virtualization. She has degrees in Computer Information Systems with a concentration on networking and information security and is currently pursuing a master’s in Data Center Systems Engineering. She is most known for her content on TikTok and Twitter as Shenetworks. Serena’s content focuses on networking and security for beginners which has included popular videos on bug bounties, switch spoofing, VLAN hoping, and passing the Security+ certification in 24 hours.

Links:

Breaching the Coding Gates with Anil Dash

Corey Quinn — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Anil

Anil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly developer community where coders collaborate to create and share millions of web apps. He is a recognized advocate for more ethical tech through his work as an entrepreneur and writer. He serves as a board member for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy and expression, Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society, and The Markup, the nonprofit investigative newsroom that pushes for tech accountability. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world’s largest community for coders, and today advises key startups and non-profits including the Lower East Side Girls Club, Medium, The Human Utility, DonorsChoose and Project Include.

As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, written for publications like The Atlantic and Businessweek, co-created one of the first implementations of the blockchain technology now known as NFTs, had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018. Dash has also been a keynote speaker and guest in a broad range of media ranging from the Obama Foundation Summit to SXSW to Desus and Mero's late-night show.

Links:

Glitch: https://glitch.com
Web.dev: https://web.dev
Glitch Twitter: https://twitter.com/glitch
Anil Dash Twitter: https://twitter.com/anildash

President Biden’s Advice in Action with Dan Woods

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Dan

Dan is CISO and VP of Cybersecurity for Shipt, a Target subsidiary. He worked previously as a Distinguished Engineer on Target’s cloud infrastructure. He served as CTO for Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential campaign. Prior to that Dan worked with the Hillary for America tech team through the Groundwork, and contributed as a founding developer on Spinnaker while at Netflix. Dan is an O’Reilly published author and avid public speaker.

Links:

Shipt: https://www.shipt.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/danveloper
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danveloper

Into the Great Wide Open Source with Julia Ferraioli

Corey Quinn — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Julia

Julia Ferraioli calls herself an Open Source Archaeologist, focusing on sustainability, tooling, and research. Her background includes research in machine learning, robotics, HCI, and accessibility. Julia finds energy in developing creative demos, creating beautiful documents, and rainbow sprinkles. She’s also a fierce supporter of LaTeX, the Oxford comma, and small pull requests.

Links:

Open Source Stories: https://www.opensourcestories.org

Working the Weather in the Cloud with Jake Hendy

Corey Quinn — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Jake

Technical Lead by day at the Met Office in the UK, leading a team of software developers delivering services for the UK. By night, gamer and fitness instructor, attempting to get a home cinema and gaming setup whilst coralling 3 cats, 2 rabbits, 2 fish tanks, and my wonderful girlfriend.

Links:

Met Office: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jakehendy

Putting the “Fun” in Functional with Frank Chen

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Frank

Frank Chen is a maker. He develops products and leads software engineering teams with a background in behavior design, engineering leadership, systems reliability engineering, and resiliency research. At Slack, Frank focuses on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, in the Developer Productivity group. At Palantir, Frank has worked with customers in healthcare, finance, government, energy and consumer packaged goods to solve their hardest problems by transforming how they use data. At Amazon, Frank led a front-end team and infrastructure team to launch AWS WorkDocs, the first secure multi-platform service of its kind for enterprise customers. At Sandia National Labs, Frank researched resiliency and complexity analysis tooling with the Grid Resiliency group. He received a M.S. in Computer Science focused in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford. Frank's thesis studied how the design / psychology of exergaming interventions might produce efficacious health outcomes. With the Stanford Prevention Research Center, Frank developed health interventions rooted in behavioral theory to create new behaviors through mobile phones. He prototyped early builds of Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg and worked in the Persuasive Technology Lab. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA. Frank researched networked systems and image processing with the Center for embedded Networked Systems. With the Rand Corporation, he built research systems to support group decision-making.

Links:

Slack: https://slack.com
“Infrastructure Observability for Changing the Spend Curve”: https://slack.engineering/infrastructure-observability-for-changing-the-spend-curve/
“Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/right-sizing-your-instances-is-nonsense/
Personal webpage: https://frankc.net
Twitter: @frankc

“Liqui”fying the Database Bottleneck with Robert Reeves

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Robert

R2 advocates for Liquibase customers and provides technical architecture leadership. Prior to co-founding Datical (now Liquibase), Robert was a Director at the Austin Technology Incubator. Robert co-founded Phurnace Software in 2005. He invented and created the flagship product, Phurnace Deliver, which provides middleware infrastructure management to multiple Fortune 500 companies.

Links:

Liquibase: https://www.liquibase.com
Liquibase Community: https://www.liquibase.org
Liquibase AWS Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=7e70900d-dcb2-4ef6-adab-f64590f4a967
Github: https://github.com/liquibase
Twitter: https://twitter.com/liquibase

Find and Eject the Wizards with Danielle Baskin

Corey Quinn — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Danielle

Danielle Baskin is a serial entrepreneur and multimedia artist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, The New Yorker, WSJ, and more. She's also the CEO of Dialup, a globally acclaimed voice-chat app.

Links:

Dialup: https://dialup.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/djbaskin
Cofounder Quest: https://cofounder.quest
Personal Website: https://daniellebaskin.com

MongoDB’s Purposeful Application Data Platform with Sahir Azam

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Sahir

Sahir is responsible for product strategy across the MongoDB portfolio. He joined MongoDB in 2016 as SVP, Cloud Products & GTM to lead MongoDB’s cloud products and go-to-market strategy ahead of the launch of Atlas and helped grow the cloud business from zero to over $150 million annually. Sahir joined MongoDB from Sumo Logic, an SaaS machine-data analytics company, where he managed platform, pricing, packaging and technology partnerships. Before Sumo Logic, Sahir was the Director of Cloud Management Strategy & Evangelism at VMware, where he launched VMware’s first organically developed SaaS management product and helped grow the management tools business to over $1B in revenue. Earlier in his career, Sahir held a variety of technical and sales-focused roles at DynamicOps, BMC Software, and BladeLogic.

Links:

MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com

Building Distributed Cognition into Your Business with Sam Ramji

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Sam

A 25-year veteran of the Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes, Sam Ramji led Kubernetes and DevOps product management for Google Cloud, founded the Cloud Foundry foundation, has helped build two multi-billion dollar markets (API Management at Apigee and Enterprise Service Bus at BEA Systems) and redefined Microsoft’s open source and Linux strategy from “extinguish” to “embrace”.

He is nerdy about open source, platform economics, middleware, and cloud computing with emphasis on developer experience and enterprise software. He is an advisor to multiple companies including Dell Technologies, Accenture, Observable, Fletch, Orbit, OSS Capital, and the Linux Foundation.

Sam received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, the home of transdisciplinary innovation, in 1994 and is still excited about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.

Links:

DataStax: https://www.datastax.com
Sam Ramji Twitter: https://twitter.com/sramji
Open||Source||Data: https://www.datastax.com/resources/podcast/open-source-data
Screaming in the Cloud Episode 243 with Craig McLuckie: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/innovating-in-the-cloud-with-craig-mcluckie/
Screaming in the Cloud Episode 261 with Jason Warner: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/

Building a User-Friendly Product with Aparna Sinha

Corey Quinn — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Aparna

Aparna Sinha is Director of Product for Kubernetes and Anthos at Google Cloud. Her teams are focused on transforming the way we work through innovation in platforms. Before Anthos and Kubernetes, Aparna worked on the Android platform. She joined Google from NetApp where she was Director of Product for storage automation and private cloud. Prior to NetApp, Aparna was a leader in McKinsey and Company’s business transformation office working with CXOs on IT strategy, pricing, and M&A. Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and has authored several technical publications. She serves on the Governing Board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Links:

DevOps Research Report: https://www.devops-research.com/research.html
Twitter: https://twitter.com/apbhatnagar

Leveling Financial Brevity with Dan Shapiro

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Dan

After earning his CPA in New York, Dan dedicated his early career to education, helping to build eight schools across two continents. Three of those schools make up the charter school network Coney Island Prep, a 160-person, $20mm+ organization where Dan served as both CFO and COO.

He has served as CFO of many fast-growth start-ups, is a recurring guest lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is an avid adventurer and musician. But most importantly, he's a dedicated husband and an enamored father who, at this point, knows the lyrics to each and every Raffi song ever created.

Links:

Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Ironing out the BGP Ruffles with Ivan Pepelnjak

Corey Quinn — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 04:54:08 -0800

About Ivan

https://www.ipspace.net/About_Ivan_Pepelnjak

Links:

ipSpace.net: https://ipspace.net

“Snyk”ing into the Security Limelight with Clinton Herget

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Clinton

Clinton Herget is Principal Solutions Engineer at Snyk, where he focuses on helping our large enterprise and public sector clients on their journey to DevSecOps. A seasoned technologist, Clinton spent his 15+ year career prior to Snyk as a web software engineer, DevOps consultant, cloud solutions architect, and technical director in the systems integrator space, leading client delivery of complex agile technology solutions. Clinton is passionate about empowering software engineers and is a frequent conference speaker, developer advocate, and everything-as-code evangelist.

Links:

Try Snyk for free today at: https://snyk.co/Screaming-in-the-Cloud

Handling Time-Series Data with Brian Mullen

Corey Quinn — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 04:42:36 -0800

About Brian

Links:

InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com

Keeping the Chaos Searchable with Thomas Hazel

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Thomas

Links:

ChaosSearch: https://www.chaossearch.io

Striking a Balance on the Cloud with Rachel Stephens

Corey Quinn — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Rachel

Rachel Stephens is a Senior Analyst with RedMonk, a developer-focused industry analyst firm. RedMonk focuses on how practitioners drive technological adoption. Her research covers a broad range of developer and infrastructure products, with a particular focus on emerging growth technologies and markets. (But not crypto. Please don't talk to her about NFTs.)

Before joining RedMonk, Rachel worked as a database administrator and financial analyst. Rachel holds an MBA from Colorado State University and a BA in Finance from the University of Colorado.

Links:

RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/
Great analysis: https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/09/30/a-new-strategy-r2/
“Convergent Evolution of CDNs and Clouds”: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/06/10/convergent-evolution-cdns-cloud/
“Everything is Securities Fraud?”: https://cafe.com/stay-tuned/everything-is-securities-fraud-with-matt-levine/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rstephensme

The “Banksgiving” Special with Tim Banks

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Tim

Breaking the Tech Mold with Stephanie Wong

Corey Quinn — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Stephanie

Stephanie Wong is an award-winning speaker, engineer, pageant queen, and hip hop medalist. She is a leader at Google with a mission to blend storytelling and technology to create remarkable developer content. At Google, she's created over 400 videos, blogs, courses, and podcasts that have helped developers globally. You might recognize her as the host of the GCP Podcast. Stephanie is active in her community, fiercely supporting women in tech and mentoring students.

Links:

Personal Website: https://stephrwong.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephr_wong

Letting the Dust Settle on Job Hopping with Brian Hall

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Brian

I lead the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team. We’re focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud by establishing thought leadership, increasing demand and usage, enabling our sales teams and partners to tell our product stories with excellence, and helping our customers be the best advocates for us.

Before joining Google, I spent over 25 years in product marketing or engineering in different forms. I started my career at Microsoft and had a very non-traditional path for 20 years. I worked in every product division except for cloud. I did marketing, product management, and engineering roles. And, early on, I was the first speech writer for Steve Ballmer and worked on Bill Gates’ speeches too. My last role was building up the Microsoft Surface business from scratch and as VP of the hardware businesses. After Microsoft, I spent a year as CEO at a hardware startup called Doppler Labs, where we made a run at transforming hearing, and then two years as VP at Amazon Web Services leading product marketing, developer advocacy, and a bunch more marketing teams.

I have three kids still at home, Barty, Noli, and Alder, who are all named after trees in different ways. My wife Edie and I met right at the beginning of our first year at Yale University, where I studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team my senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. We love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in my 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is my first and only car, that I can’t bring myself to get rid of.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/IsForAt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/
Episode 10: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-10-education-is-not-ready-for-teacherless/

Breaking Down Productivity Engineering with Micheal Benedict

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Micheal Benedict

Micheal Benedict leads Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. He and his team focus on developer experience, building tools and platforms for over a thousand engineers to effectively code, build, deploy and operate workloads on the cloud. Mr. Benedict has also built Infrastructure and Cloud Governance programs at Pinterest and previously, at Twitter -- focussed on managing cloud vendor relationships, infrastructure budget management, cloud migration, capacity forecasting and planning and cloud cost attribution (chargeback).

Links:

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michealb/

Setting up Lattice Climbers to Succeed with Guang Ming Whitley

Corey Quinn — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Guang Ming

Guang Ming Whitley was elected to Mount Pleasant Town Council in 2017 and resides in Old Mount Pleasant with her husband, four children, and a dog.

She earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Southern California and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a member of Law Review and a moot court semi-finalist. After completing her law degree, Guang Ming taught at the University of Chicago and practiced intellectual property law in Los Angeles. She then retired from active practice to serve as Chief Operating Officer of the Whitley Household. In 2020, she cofounded Lattice Climbers, a company dedicated to teaching soft and life skills to young adults.

Guang Ming is also President of the Girls State Alumnae Foundation and attended the American Legion Auxiliary Girls State in 1996, where she was elected governor. She has volunteered with the ALA Girls State program in a variety of capacities since 2000.

Links:

Lattice Climbers: https://www.latticeclimbers.com

Cutting Cloud Costs at Cloudflare with Matthew Prince

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Matthew

Links:

Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com
Blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
Announcement of R2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/
Blog.cloudflare.com: https://blog.cloudflare.com
Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

The Future of Google Cloud with Richard Seroter

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Richard

He’s also an instructor at Pluralsight, a frequent public speaker, and the author of multiple books on software design and development. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog (seroter.com) on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rseroter
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seroter
Seroter.com: https://seroter.com

Building a Partnership with Your Cloud Provider with Micheal Benedict

Corey Quinn — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Micheal

Links:

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com
Teletraan: https://github.com/pinterest/teletraan
Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal
Pinterestcareers.com: https://pinterestcareers.com

Managing to Balance the Unicycle with Amy Chantasirivisal

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Amy

Amy (she/her) has spent the better part of the last 15 years in the tech start-up world, starting off as a front-end software engineer before transitioning into leadership. She has built and led teams across the software and product development spectrum, including web and mobile development, QA, operations and infrastructure, customer support, and IT.

These days, Amy is building the software engineering team at EdTech startup, Unicycle, and challenging the archetype of what a tech leader should be. She strives to be a real-life success story for other leaders who believe that safe, welcoming, and equitable environments can exist in tech.

Links:

Unicycle: https://www.unicycle.co
AmyChanta: https://twitter.com/AmyChanta

That Datadog Will Hunt with Dann Berg

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Dann

Dann Berg is a Senior CloudOps Analyst at Datadog, and has nearly a decade of experience working in the cloud and optimizing multi-million dollar budgets. He is also an active member of the larger technical community, hosting the monthly New York City FinOps Meetup, and has been published multiple times in places such as MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others. When he’s not saving companies millions of dollars, he’s writing plays, and has had two full-lengh plays produced in New York City and China.

Links:

Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com
Personal Website: https://dannb.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannberg
Monthly newsletter: https://dannb.org/newsletter/
Previous SITC episode with Dann Berg, Episode 51: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-51-size-of-cloud-bill-not-about-number-of-customers-but-number-of-engineers-you-ve-hired/

Making Multi-Cloud Waves with Betty Junod

Corey Quinn — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Betty

Betty Junod is the Senior Director of Multi-Cloud Solutions at VMware helping organizations along their journey to cloud. This is her second time at VMware, having previously led product marketing for end user computing products. Prior to VMware she held marketing leadership roles at Docker and solo.io in following the evolution of technology abstractions from virtualization, containers, to service mesh. She likes to hang out at the intersection of open source, distributed systems, and enterprise infrastructure software. @bettyjunod

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BettyJunod
Vmware.com/cloud: https://vmware.com/cloud

At the Helm of Starship EDB with Ed Boyajian

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Ed

Ed Boyajian, President and CEO of EDB, drives the development and execution of EDB’s strategic vision and growth strategy in the database industry, steering the company through 47 consecutive quarters of recurring revenue growth. He also led EDB’s acquisition of 2ndQuadrant, a deal that brought together the world’s top PostgreSQL experts and positioned EDB as the largest dedicated provider of PostgreSQL products and solutions worldwide. A 15+ year veteran of the open source software movement, Ed is a seasoned enterprise software executive who emphasizes that EDB must be a technology-first business in order to lead the open source data management ecosystem. Ed joined EDB in 2008 after serving at Red Hat, where he rose to Vice President and General Manager of North America. While there, he played a central leadership role in the development of the modern business model for bringing open source to enterprises.

Links:

EDB: https://enterprisedb.com

The Mayor of Wholesome Twitter with Mark Thompson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Mark

Mark loves to teach and code.

He is an award winning university instructor and engineer. He comes with a passion for creating meaningful learning experiences. With over a decade of developing solutions across the tech stack, speaking at conferences and mentoring developers he is excited to continue to make an impact in tech. Lately, Mark has been spending time as a Developer Relations Engineer on the Angular Team.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/marktechson

Teasing Out the Titular Titles with Chris Williams

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Chris

Chris Williams is a Enterprise Architect for World Wide Technology — a technology solution and service provider. There he helps customers design the next generation of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions, specializing in AWS and VMware. His first computer was a Commodore 64, and he’s been playing video games ever since.

Chris blogs about virtualization, technology, and design at Mistwire. He is an active community leader, co-organizing the AWS Portsmouth User Group, and both hosts and presents on vBrownBag. He is also an active mentor, helping students at the University of New Hampshire through Diversify Thinking—an initiative focused on empowering girls and women to pursue education and careers in STEM.

Chris is a certified AWS Hero as well as a VMware vExpert.

Fun fact that Chris doesn’t want you to know: he has a degree in psychology so you can totally talk to him about your feelings.

Links:

WWT: https://www.wwt.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mistwire
Personal site: https://mistwire.com
vBrownBag: https://vbrownbag.com/team/chris-williams/

Heresy in the Church of Docker Desktop with Scott Johnston

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Scott

Links:

Docker: https://www.docker.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston

Navigating the Morass of the Internet with Chloe Condon

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Chloe

Chloe is a Bay Area based Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. Previously, she worked at Sentry.io where she created the award winning Sentry Scouts program (a camp themed meet-up ft. patches, s’mores, giant squirrel costumes, and hot chocolate), and was featured in the Grace Hopper Conference 2018 gallery featuring 15 influential women in STEM by AnitaB.org. Her projects and work with Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart 'astrology', and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, and is likely one of the only engineers who has played an ogre, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage. She hopes to bring more artists into tech, and more engineers into the arts.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gitforked/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChloeCondonVideos

The Value of Analysts and Observability with Nick Heudecker

Corey Quinn — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Nick

Nick Heudecker leads market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl, the observability pipeline company. Prior to Cribl, Nick spent eight years as an industry analyst at Gartner, covering data and analytics. Before that, he led engineering and product teams at multiple startups, with a bias towards open source software and adoption, and served as a cryptologist in the US Navy. Join Corey and Nick as they discuss the differences between observability and monitoring, why organizations struggle to get value from observability data, why observability requires new data management approaches, how observability pipelines are creating opportunities for SRE and SecOps teams, the balance between budgets and insight, why goats are the world’s best mammal, and more.

Links:

Cribl: https://cribl.io/
Cribl Community: https://cribl.io/community
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nheudecker
Try Cribl hosted solution: https://cribl.cloud

Works Well with Others with Abby Kearns

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Abby

With over twenty years in the tech world, Abby Kearns is a true veteran of the technology industry. Her lengthy career has spanned product marketing, product management and consulting across Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. At Puppet, she leads the vision and direction of the current and future enterprise product portfolio. Prior to joining Puppet, Abby was the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation where she focused on driving the vision for the Foundation as well as growing the open source project and ecosystem. Her background also includes product management at companies such as Pivotal and Verizon, as well as infrastructure operations spanning companies such as Totality, EDS, and Sabre.

Links:

Cloud Foundry Foundation: https://www.cloudfoundry.org
Puppet: https://puppet.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ab415

Keeping the Cloudwatch with Ewere Diagboya

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Ewere

Cloud, DevOps Engineer, Blogger and Author

Links:

Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch: https://www.amazon.com/Infrastructure-Monitoring-Amazon-CloudWatch-infrastructure-ebook/dp/B08YS2PYKJ
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewere/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nimboya
Medium: https://medium.com/@nimboya
My Cloud Series: https://mycloudseries.com

Working on the Whiteboard from the Start with Tim Banks

Corey Quinn — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Tim
Tim’s tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for largeUnix-based datastores.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe
The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com

Changing the Way We Interview with Emma Bostian

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Emma

Emma Bostian is a Software Engineer at Spotify in Stockholm. She is also a co-host of the Ladybug Podcast, author of Decoding The Technical Interview Process, and an instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters.

Links:

Ladybug Podcast: https://www.ladybug.dev
LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/emma-bostian
Frontend Masters: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/emma-bostian/
Decoding the Technical Interview Process: https://technicalinterviews.dev
Twitter: https://twitter.com/emmabostian

What GitHub Can Give to Microsoft with Jason Warner

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Jason

Jason is now the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures.

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/
@jasoncwarner: https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner
GitHub: https://github.com/jasoncwarner
Jasoncwarner/ama: https://github.com/jasoncwarner/ama

DevelopHer and Creating Success for All in Tech with Lauren Hasson

Corey Quinn — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Lauren

Lauren Hasson is the Founder of DevelopHer, an award-winning career development platform that has empowered thousands of women in tech to get ahead, stand out, and earn more in their careers. She also works full-time on the frontlines of tech herself. By day, she is an accomplished software engineer at a leading Silicon Valley payments company where she is the architect of their voice payment system and messaging capabilities and is chiefly responsible for all of application security.

Through DevelopHer, she’s partnered with top tech companies like Google, Dell, Intuit, Armor, and more and has worked with top universities including Indiana and Tufts to bridge the gender gap in leadership, opportunity, and pay in tech for good. Additionally, she was invited to the United Nations to collaborate on the global EQUALS initiative to bridge the global gender divide in technology.

Sought after across the globe for her insight and passionate voice, Lauren has started a movement that inspires women around the world to seek an understanding of their true value and to learn and continually grow.

Her work has been featured by industry-leading publications like IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine and Thrive Global and her ground-breaking platform has been recognized with fourteen prestigious awards for entrepreneurship, product innovation, diversity and leadership including the Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley Diversity Initiative of the Year Award, three Female Executive of the Year Awards, and recognition as a Finalist for the United Nations WSIS Stakeholder Prize.

Links:

DevelopHer: https://developher.com
The DevelopHer Playbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevelopHer-Playbook-Simple-Advocate-Yourself-ebook/dp/B08SQM4P5J

Non-Incidentally Keeping Tabs on the Internet with Courtney Nash

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Courtney

Courtney Nash is a researcher focused on system safety and failures in complex sociotechnical systems. An erstwhile cognitive neuroscientist, she has always been fascinated by how people learn, and the ways memory influences how they solve problems. Over the past two decades, she’s held a variety of editorial, program management, research, and management roles at Holloway, Fastly, O’Reilly Media, Microsoft, and Amazon. She lives in the mountains where she skis, rides bikes, and herds dogs and kids.

Links:

Verica: https://www.verica.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/courtneynash
Email: courtney@verica.io

Security Challenges and Working for President Biden with Jackie Singh

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Jackie

Jackie Singh is an Information Security professional with more than 20 years of hacking experience, beginning in her preteen years. She began her career in the US Army, and deployed to Iraq in 2003. Jackie subsequently spent several years in Iraq and Africa in cleared roles for the Department of Defense.

Since making the shift to the commercial world in 2012, Jackie has held a number of significant roles in operational cybersecurity, including Principal Consultant at Mandiant and FireEye, Global Director of Incident Response at Intel Security and McAfee, and CEO/Cofounder of a boutique consultancy, Spyglass Security.

Jackie is currently Director of Technology and Operations at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a 501(C)(3), non-profit advocacy organization and legal services provider. S.T.O.P. litigates and advocates to abolish local governments' systems of mass surveillance.

Jackie lives in New York City with her partner, their daughters, and their dog Ziggy.

Links:

Disclose.io: https://disclose.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hackingbutlegal

Corey Screws Up Logstash For Everyone with Jordan Sissel

Corey Quinn — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Jordan

Jordan is a self proclaimed “hacker.”

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordansissel

The Maestro of the Keyboards with Jesse Vincent

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Jesse

Jesse Vincent is the cofounder and CTO of Keyboardio, where he designs and manufactures high-quality ergonomic mechanical keyboards. In previous lives, he served as the COO of VaccinateCA, volunteered as the project lead for the Perl programming language, created both the leading open source issue tracking system RT: Request tracker and K-9 Mail for Android.

Links:

Keyboardio: https://keyboard.io
Obra: https://twitter.com/obra

Cranking Up the Heatwave with Nipun Agarwal

Corey Quinn — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Nipun

Nipun Agarwal is Vice President, MySQL HeatWave and Advanced Development, Oracle. His interests include distributed data processing, machine learning, cloud technologies and security. Nipun was part of the Oracle Database team where he introduced a number of new features. He has been awarded over 170 patents.

Links:

HeatWave: https://oracle.com/heatwave

Molding Leadership Within Tech with Adam Zimman

Corey Quinn — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Adam

Adam Zimman is a start-up Advisor providing guidance on leadership, platform architecture, product marketing, and GTM strategy. He has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and consumer companies such as VMware, EMC, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly. Adam is driven by a passion for inclusive leadership and solving problems with technology. As an Advisor he works with a number of startups and nonprofits. His perspective on life has been shaped by a background in Physics and Visual Art, an ongoing adventure as a husband and father, and a childhood career as a fire juggler.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/azimman

Yugabyte and Database Innovations with Karthik Ranganathan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Karthik

Karthik was one of the original database engineers at Facebook responsible for building distributed databases including Cassandra and HBase. He is an Apache HBase committer, and also an early contributor to Cassandra, before it was open-sourced by Facebook. He is currently the co-founder and CTO of the company behind YugabyteDB, a fully open-source distributed SQL database for building cloud-native and geo-distributed applications.

Links:

Yugabyte community Slack channel: https://yugabyte-db.slack.com/
Distributed SQL Summit: https://distributedsql.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/YugaByte

The Sly Skill of the Subtle Tweet with Laurie Barth

Corey Quinn — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Laurie

Laurie is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. You can also find her creating content and educating the technology industry as an egghead instructor, member of the TC39 Educators committee, and technical blogger.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurieontech
Netflix: https://www.netflix.com
Egghead: https://egghead.io
The Art of the Subtle Subtweet: https://laurieontech.com/book-launch/

Security in the New Normal with Ev Kontsevoy

Corey Quinn — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Ev

Ev Kontsevoy is Co-Founder and CEO of Teleport. An engineer by training, Kontsevoy launched Teleport in 2015 to provide other engineers solutions that allow them to quickly access and run any computing resource anywhere on the planet without having to worry about security and compliance issues. A serial entrepreneur, Ev was CEO and co-founder of Mailgun, which he successfully sold to Rackspace. Prior to Mailgun, Ev has had a variety of engineering roles. He holds a BS degree in Mathematics from Siberian Federal University, and has a passion for trains and vintage-film cameras.

Links:

Teleport: https://goteleport.com
Teleport GitHub: https://github.com/gravitational/teleport
Teleport Slack: https://goteleport.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-midnn9bn-AQKcq5NNDs9ojELKlgwJUA
Previous episode with Ev Kontsevoy: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/the-gravitational-pull-of-simplicity-with-ev-kontsevoy/

Gitting After It with Katie Sylor-Miller

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Katie

Katie Sylor-Miller, Frontend Architect at Etsy, has a passion for design systems, web performance, accessibility, and frontend infrastructure. She co-authored the Design Systems Handbook to spread her love of reusable components to engineers and designers. She’s spoken at conferences like Smashing Conf, PerfMatters Conf, JamStack Conf, JSConf US, and FrontendConf.ch (to name a few). Her website ohshitgit.com (and the swear-free version dangitgit.com) has helped millions of people worldwide get out of their Git messes, and has been translated into 23 different languages and counting.

Links:

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/
Design Systems Handbook: https://www.designbetter.co/design-systems-handbook
Book of staff engineering stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RMSHYGG
staffeng.com: https://staffeng.com
ohshitgit.com: https://ohshitgit.com
dangitgit.com: https://dangitgit.com

Deftly Building for the Customer with Eric Dynowski

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Eric
Eric Dynowski, Managing Partner and Chief Solutions Officer at Deft, has been developing software, designing global infrastructures, and managing large technology installations for over 20 years. His background in complex infrastructure design and integration has helped him reduce customer budgets by millions.

Links:

Deft: https://www.deft.com

Building and Maintaining Cultures of Innovation with Francessca Vasquez

Corey Quinn — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Francesca

Francessca is the leader of the AWS Technology Worldwide Commercial Operations organization. She is recognized as a thought leader of business technology cloud transformations and digital innovation, advising thousands of startups, small-midsize businesses, and enterprises. She is also the cofounder of AWS workforce transformation initiatives that inspire inclusion, diversity, and equity to foster more careers in science and technology.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Francessca_V
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesscavasquez/

The Mythos of Testing with Angie Jones

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Angie

Angie Jones is a Java Champion and Senior Director who specializes in test automation strategies and techniques. She shares her wealth of knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world, writing tutorials and technical articles on angiejones.tech, and leading the online learning platform, Test Automation University.

As a Master Inventor, Angie is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in more than 25 patented inventions in the US and China. In her spare time, Angie volunteers with Black Girls Code to teach coding workshops to young girls in an effort to attract more women and minorities to tech.

Links:

Applitools: https://applitools.com
Black Girls Code: https://www.blackgirlscode.com
Test Automation University: https://testautomationu.applitools.com
Personal website: https://angiejones.tech
Twitter: https://twitter.com/techgirl1908

Focusing on the Humanity in Marketing with Natalie Williams

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Natalie

Natalie is the Director of Marketing at the Duckbill Group. Her background includes marketing roles in the localization and SaaS industries. In her free time, she teaches yoga, creates beadwork, and tries to keep up with her toddler. All of which impacts how she approaches growth and storytelling. Natalie resides in Missoula, Montana with her husband, daughter, and two wild corgis

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/natveiswilliams

Creatively Giving Back to the Cloud Community with Forrest Brazeal

Corey Quinn — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Forrest

Links:

The Cloud Bard Speaks: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/the-cloud-bard-speaks-with-forrest-brazeal/
The Read Aloud Cloud: https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/1119677629
The Cloud Resume Challenge Book: https://forrestbrazeal.gumroad.com/l/cloud-resume-challenge-book/launch-deal
The Cloud Resume Challenge: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev
Twitter: https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal

Serverless Hero, Got Servers in His Eyes with Ant Stanley

Corey Quinn — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Ant

Ant Co-founded A Cloud Guru, ServerlessConf, JeffConf, ServerlessDays and now running Senzo/Homeschool, in between other things. He needs to work on his decision making.

Links:

A Cloud Guru: https://acloudguru.com
homeschool.dev: https://homeschool.dev
aws.training: https://aws.training
learn.microsoft.com: https://learn.microsoft.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamstan

Innovating in the Cloud with Craig McLuckie

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Craig

Craig McLuckie is a VP of R&D at VMware in the Modern Applications Business Unit. He joined VMware through the Heptio acquisition where he was CEO and co-founder. Heptio was a startup that supported the enterprise adoption of open source technologies like Kubernetes. He previously worked at Google where he co-founded the Kubernetes project, was responsible for the formation of CNCF, and was the original product lead for Google Compute Engine.

Links:

VMware: https://www.vmware.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cmcluck
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcluckie/

Saving Vowels and Upping Security with Clint Sharp

Corey Quinn — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Clint

Links:

Helping Avoid the Kubernetes Hiccups with Rich Burroughs

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Rich

Rich Burroughs is a Senior Developer Advocate at Loft Labs where he's focused on improving workflows for developers and platform engineers using Kubernetes. He's the creator and host of the Kube Cuddle podcast where he interviews members of the Kubernetes community. He is one of the founding organizers of DevOpsDays Portland, and he's helped organize other community events. Rich has a strong interest in how working in tech impacts mental health. He has ADHD and has documented his journey on Twitter since being diagnosed.

Links:

Loft Labs: https://loft.sh
Kube Cuddle Podcast: https://kubecuddle.transistor.fm
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richburroughs/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/richburroughs
Polywork: https://www.polywork.com/richburroughs

The Security Coat of Many Colors with Will Gregorian

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Will

Will is recovering System Administrator with a decade's worth of experience in technology and management. He now embraces the never-ending wild and exciting world of Information Security.

Links:

Color Health: https://www.color.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/willgregorian

What an “Agilist” Brings to the Engineering Table with Cliff Moon

Corey Quinn — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Cliff

Cliff is an Agile Consultant and self proclaimed “computer botherer.”

Links:

Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/moonpolysoft

Finding a Common Language for Incidents with John Allspaw

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About John

John served as CTO at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University

Links:

The Art of Capacity Planning: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Capacity-Planning-Scaling-Resources/dp/1491939206/
Web Operations: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data-Time/dp/1449377440/
The DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/
Adaptive Capacity Labs: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com
John Allspaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/allspaw
Richard Cook Twitter: https://twitter.com/ri_cook
Dave Woods Twitter: https://twitter.com/ddwoods2

At the Cutting Edge & Node with Nader Dabit

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Nader

Currently working to help build the decentralized future at Edge and Node.
Previously led Developer Advocacy for Front End Web and Mobile at Amazon Web Services.
Specializing in GraphQL, cross platform, & cloud enabled web & mobile application development
Developing applications & reference architectures using a combination of GraphQL & serverless technologies built on AWS
4 years experience training fortune 500 companies on web & mobile application development, with the last two focused on React and React Native Training (clients include Microsoft, Amazon, US Army Corps of Engineers, Visa, ClassPass, American Express, Indeed, & Warner Bros).
Mobile consultant specializing in cross platform web & mobile application development
Author of React Native in Action (Manning Publications)
Author of Full Stack Serverless (O'Reilly Publications)
International speaker
Creator of React Native Elements
Creator of JAMstack CMS & JAMStack ECommerce

Links:

Edge & Node: https://edgeandnode.com
Js.la: https://js.la
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dabit3
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/naderdabit

A Non-Traditional Path into the SRE Folds with Serena Tiede

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Serena

Serena Tiede is a SRE at Optum, a healthcare technology company that manages everything from the delivery of care to the management of patient data. Prior to becoming an SRE they were a Kafka operator for real time security logging and ingestion. In their off time, they moonlight as the proud admin of an incredibly over engineered Minecraft server.

Links:

Optim: https://www.optum.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SerenaTiede
Personal Blog: https://blog.serenacodes.com

A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Amy

With over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. More recently, she built APIs for enterprise clients for a cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children.

Links:

The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/
@nerdypaws: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws

The Operations of Operations with Jesse DeRose

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Jesse

Jesse is a seasoned operations engineer with a deep passion for understanding complex technical and organizational systems. He's spent his career helping Engineering teams achieve their business goals by improving how they interact with their technical systems, and with each other. He's currently a Cloud Economist with Duckbill Group, guiding organizations along their journey of cloud cost optimization and management.

Links:

The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/
Jesse’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jesse_derose
AWS Morning Brief: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/

Analyzing Analysts with James Governor

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About James

James is the Redmonk co-founder, sunshine in a bag, industry analyst loves developers, "motivating in a surreal kind of way". Came up with "progressive delivery". He/Him

Links:

RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MonkChips
Monktoberfest: https://monktoberfest.com/
Monki Gras: https://monkigras.com/

11 Job Titles in 8 Years at 1 Company with Sean Kilgore

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Sean

Sean Kilgore is an Architect at Twilio, where he draws boxes, lighthouses and soapboxes. In Sean’s spare time, he enjoys reading, walking, gaming, and a well-made drink.

Links:

Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/
Silvia Botros's Twitter: https://twitter.com/dbsmasher
Sean's Twitter: https://twitter.com/log1kal

Innovations and the Changing DevOps Tides of Tech with Nigel Kersten

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Nigel

Nigel Kersten’s day job is Field CTO at Puppet where he leads a group of engineers who work with Puppet’s largest customers on cultural and organizational changes necessary for large-scale DevOps implementations - among other things. He’s a co-author of the industry-leading State Of DevOps Report and likes to evenly talk about what went right with DevOps and what went wrong based on this research and his experience in the field. He’s held multiple positions at Puppet across product and engineering and came to Puppet from the Google SRE organization, where he was responsible for one of the largest Puppet deployments in the world. Nigel is passionate about behavioral economics, electronic music, synthesizers, and Test cricket. Ask him about late-stage capitalism, and shoes.

Links:

Puppet: https://puppet.com
2020 State of DevOps Report: https://puppet.com/resources/report/2020-state-of-devops-report/

All Along the Shoreline.io of Automation with Anurag Gupta

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

This week Corey is joined by Anurag Gupta, founder and CEO of Shoreline.io. Anurag guides us through the large variety of services he helped launch to include RDS, Aurora, EMR, Redshift and other. The result? Running things almost like a start-up—but with some distinct differences.

Eventually Anurag ended up back in the testy waters of start-ups. He and Corey discuss the nature of that transition to get back to solving holistic problems, tapping into conveying those stories, and what Anurag was able to bring to his team at Shoreline.io where automation is king. Anurag goes into the details of what Shoreline is and what they do. Stay tuned for me.

Links:

Shoreline.io: https://shoreline.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awgupta/
Email: anurag@Shoreline.io

Keep on Rockin’ in the Server-Free World

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Michael

Michael Garski is the Director of Platform Engineering at Fender Musical Instruments, where he leads the teams responsible for service development & testing, devops, and data. He’s been with Fender for over 5 years and prior to that worked as a software engineer & architect on back-end systems at Viant, MySpace, Countrywide Home Loans & Fandango. He is passionate about application reliability and observability and their impact on customer satisfaction.

Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgarski/

Network Agility for the Cloud Era with Alkira

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

Links:

CTO Whitepaper: Reinventing Enterprise Networks for the Cloud Era
www.alkira.com

Chaos Engineering for Gremlins with Jason Yee

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 02:57:29 -0700

About Jason

Jason Yee is Director of Advocacy at Gremlin where he helps companies build more resilient systems by learning from how they fail. He also leads the internal Chaos Engineering practices to make Gremlin more reliable. Previously, he worked at Datadog, O’Reilly Media, and MongoDB. His pandemic-coping activities include drinking whiskey, cooking everything in a waffle iron, and making craft chocolate.

Links:

Break Things On Purpose podcast: https://www.gremlin.com/podcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitbisect

Memes, Streams & Software with Cassidy Williams

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Cassidy

Cassidy is a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. She's worked for several other places, including CodePen, Amazon, and Venmo, and she's had the honor of working with various non-profits, including cKeys and Hacker Fund as their Director of Outreach. She's active in the developer community, and one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry and LinkedIn's Top Professionals 35 & Under. As an avid speaker, Cassidy has participated in several events including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, TEDx, the United Nations, and dozens of other technical events. She wants to inspire generations of STEM students to be the best they can be, and her favorite quote is from Helen Keller: "One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." She loves mechanical keyboards and karaoke.

Links:

Netlify: https://www.netlify.com/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cassidoo
Newsletter: https://cassidoo.co/newsletter/
Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/teachers/cassidoo
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/cassidywilliams/
Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/user/cassidoo
O’Reilly: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/6339
Personal website: https://cassidoo.co
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cassidoo
GitHub: https://github.com/cassidoo
CodePen: https://codepen.io/cassidoo/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassidoo

Hacking AWS in Good Faith with Nick Frichette

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Nick

Nick Frichette is a Penetration Tester and Team Lead for State Farm. Outside of work he does vulnerability research. His current primary focus is developing techniques for AWS exploitation. Additionally he is the founder of hackingthe.cloud which is an open source encyclopedia of the attacks and techniques you can perform in cloud environments.

Links:

Hacking the Cloud: https://hackingthe.cloud/
Determine the account ID that owned an S3 bucket vulnerability: https://hackingthe.cloud/aws/enumeration/account_id_from_s3_bucket/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/frichette_n
Personal website:https://frichetten.com

Burnout Isn’t a Sign of Weakness with Dr. Christina Maslach, PhD

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Christina

Links:

The Truth About Burnout: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Burnout-Organizations-Personal/dp/1118692136

Inspiring the Next Generation of Devs on TikTok with Scott Hanselman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Scott

Scott is a web developer who has been blogging at https://hanselman.com for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has three podcasts, http://hanselminutes.com for tech talk, http://thisdeveloperslife.com on developers' lives and loves, and http://ratchetandthegeek.com for pop culture and tech media. He's written a number of books and spoken in person to almost a half million developers worldwide.

Links:

Hanselminutes Podcast: https://www.hanselminutes.com/
Personal website: https://hanselman.com

Open Core, Real-Time Observability Born in the Cloud with Martin Mao

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Martin

Martin Mao is the co-founder and CEO of Chronosphere. He was previously at Uber, where he led the development and SRE teams that created and operated M3. Prior to that, he was a technical lead on the EC2 team at AWS and has also worked for Microsoft and Google. He and his family are based in our Seattle hub and he enjoys playing soccer and eating meat pies in his spare time.

Links:

Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io/
Email: contact@chronosphere.io

Making Compliance Suck Less with AJ Yawn

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About AJ

AJ Yawn is a seasoned cloud security professional that possesses over a decade of senior information security experience with extensive experience managing a wide range of cybersecurity compliance assessments (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, etc.) for a variety of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS providers.

AJ advises startups on cloud security and serves on the Board of Directors of the ISC2 Miami chapter as the Education Chair, he is also a Founding Board member of the National Association of Black Compliance and Risk Management professions, regularly speaks on information security podcasts, events, and he contributes blogs and articles to the information security community including publications such as CISOMag, InfosecMag, HackerNoon, and ISC2.

Before Bytechek, AJ served as a senior member of national cybersecurity professional services firm SOC-ISO-Healthcare compliance practice. AJ helped grow the practice from a 9 person team to over 100 team members serving clients all over the world. AJ also spent over five years on active duty in the United States Army, earning the rank of Captain.

AJ is relentlessly committed to learning and encouraging others around him to improve themselves. He leads by example and has earned several industry-recognized certifications, including the AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Professional, CISSP, AWS Certified Security Specialty, AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate, and PMP. AJ is also involved with the AWS training and certification department, volunteering with the AWS Certification Examination Subject Matter Expert program.

AJ graduated from Georgetown University with a Master of Science in Technology Management and from Florida State University with a Bachelor of Science in Social Science. While at Florida State, AJ played on the Florida State University Men's basketball team participating in back to back trips to the NCAA tournament playing under Coach Leonard Hamilton.

Links:

ByteChek: https://www.bytechek.com/
Blog post, Everything You Need to Know About SOC 2 Trust Service Criteria CC6.0 (Logical and Physical Access Controls): https://help.bytechek.com/en/articles/4567289-everything-you-need-to-know-about-soc-2-trust-service-criteria-cc6-0-logical-and-physical-access-controls
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajyawn/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AjYawn

Data Center War Stories with Mike Julian

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Mike

Links:

Software Engineering Daily podcast: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/all-episodes/exclusive-content/Podcast/
Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Secure Your Environment in One ExtraHop with Guy Raz

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Guy

Guy Raz is a Sr. Systems Engineer at ExtraHop with previous experience as a Network Engineer and Solution Architect. Guy is one of the SMEs leading the unique ExtraHop approach to cloud-native NDR for the hybrid multi-cloud enterprise. Before joining the Sales Engineer team, Guy was one of the ExtraHop Solution Architects, responsible for conducting deep technical and business discovery sessions, assisting in troubleshooting and problem resolution during war-room and security/network investigations, and developing strategies for acquiring high-value data from the wire; requiring in-depth technical understanding of L2-L7 networking principles.

Links:

Deserted Island DevOps with Austin Parker

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Austin

Austin makes problems with computers, and sometimes solves them. He’s an open source maintainer, observability nerd, devops junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring HN threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing.

Links:

Lightstep: https://lightstep.com/
Lightstep Sandbox: https://lightstep.com/sandbox
Desert Island DevOps: https://desertedislanddevops.com
lastweekinAWS.com Resources: https://lastweekinAWS.com/resources
Distributed Tracing in Practice: https://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Tracing-Practice-Instrumenting-Microservices/dp/1492056634
Twitter: https://twitter.com/austinlparker
Personal Blog: https://aparker.io

The New Docker with Donnie Berkholz

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Donnie

Donnie is VP of Products at Docker and leads product vision and strategy. He manages a holistic products team including product management, product design, documentation & analytics. Before joining Docker, Donnie was an executive in residence at Scale Venture Partners and VP of IT Service Delivery at CWT leading the DevOps transformation. Prior to those roles, he led a global team at 451 Research (acquired by S&P Global Market Intelligence), advised startups and Global 2000 enterprises at RedMonk and led more than 250 open-source contributors at Gentoo Linux. Donnie holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from Oregon State University, where he specialized in computational structural biology, and dual B.S. and B.A. degrees in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of Richmond.

Links:

Docker: https://www.docker.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dberkholz

The Law of Cloud Entropy with Owen Rogers

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Owen

Owen Rogers wears many hats at 451 Research; he’s research director of cloud transformation and digital economics and head of the quantum computing centre of excellence. Prior to these positions, Owen was a doctoral researcher in cloud computing at the University of Bristol, completing his PhD thesis in 2013; a product portfolio manager at Claranet; and an independent product management and cloud computing consultant, among other positions.

Join Corey and Owen as they talk about what it’s like when two cloud economists meet at an event but only one has a PhD, what exactly an industry analyst does, how 451 Research found that 53% of companies increased cloud spend during the pandemic and what resources they’re investing in, the Law of Cloud Entropy and why Owen believes the cloud will only get more disordered in the future, why it’s easy for cloud costs to spiral out of control, how organizations are trying to rein in cloud spend despite using more cloud services, why Owen doesn’t believe we’ll reach cloud commoditization anytime soon, and more.

Links:

451 Research: https://451research.com/
Cloud Price Index: https://451research.com/services/price-indexing-benchmarking/cloud-price-index
Twitter: https://twitter.com/owenrog

Bringing Visibility to Cloud Backups with Chadd Kenney

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Chadd

Chadd Kenney is the Vice President of Product at Clumio. Chadd has 20 years of experience in technology leadership roles, most recently as Vice President of Products and Solutions for Pure Storage. Prior to that role, he was the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Americas helping to grow the business from zero in revenue to over a billion. Chadd also spent 8 years at EMC in various roles from Field CTO to Principal Engineer. Chadd is a technologist at heart, who loves helping customers understand the true elegance of products through simple analogies, solutions use cases, and a view into the minds of the engineers that created the solution.

Links:

Clumio: https://clumio.com/
Clumio AWS Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ifixh6lnreang

Serverless Observerless with Aviad Mor

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Aviad

Aviad Mor is the Co-Founder & CTO at Lumigo. Lumigo’s SaaS platform helps companies monitor and troubleshoot serverless applications while providing actionable insights that prevent business disruptions. Aviad has over a decade of experience in technology leadership, heading the development of core products in Check Point from inception to wide adoption.

Links:

Lumigo: https://lumigo.io/

Driving State-of-the-Art DevOps with Nathen Harvey

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Nathen

Nathen Harvey, Cloud Developer Advocate at Google, helps the community understand and apply DevOps and SRE practices in the cloud.

Nathen formerly led the Chef community, co-hosted the Food Fight Show, and managed operations and infrastructure for a diverse range of web applications.

Links:

cloud.google.com/devops: https://cloud.google.com/devops
97 Things every Cloud Engineer Should Know: https://shop.aer.io/oreilly/p/97-things-every/9781492076735-9149
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nathenharvey

The Switzerland of the Cloud with Sanjay Poonen

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Sanjay

Sanjay Poonen is the former COO of VMware, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, services, support, marketing and alliances. He was also responsible for the Security strategy and business at VMware.

Prior to SAP, Poonen held executive roles at SAP, Symantec, VERITAS and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft, followed by Apple.

Poonen holds two patents as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he graduated a Baker Scholar; a master's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University; and a bachelor's degree in computer science, math and engineering from Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

Links:

VMware: https://www.vmware.com/
leadership values: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxkysDMBM0Q
Twitter: https://twitter.com/spoonen
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaypoonen/
spoonen@vmware.com: mailto:spoonen@vmware.com

Cloud Cost Management Starter Kit

Corey Quinn — Fri, 14 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

Join Jesse and Amy as they about the four-item cloud cost management starter kit, how to explain being a cloud economist to someone else, why you should turn on the AWS Cost and Usage Report immediately, why you need to get to know your account manager and build rapport with them, how that relationship is designed to be mutually beneficial, how it’s important to know about the contracts and reservations that exist across your organization (not just in your department), why you need to think about the non-technical parts of cloud projects (e.g., people and process costs), and more.

Open Sourcing GitHub with Denise Yu

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

Links:

Github main site: https://github.com/
The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services:https://github.com/QuinnyPig/og-aws
Slackhatesthe.cloud: slackhatesthe.cloud
Global Diversity CFP Day: https://www.globaldiversitycfpday.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/deniseyu21
Personal site: deniseyu.io

Writing the Book(s) on Amazon with Brad Stone

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Brad

Author and Senior Executive Editor, Bloomberg Technology

Brad Stone is the author of four books, including Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021. It traces the transformation of Amazon into one of the largest and most feared companies of the world and the accompanying emergence of Jeff Bezos as the richest man alive. Brad is also the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which chronicled the foundational early years of the company and its founder. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into more than 35 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In 2017, he also published The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley.

Brad is Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News

where he oversees a team of 65 reporters and editors that covers high-tech companies, startups, cyber security and internet trends around the world. Over the last ten years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he’s authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Softbank, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent and Baidu. He’s a regular contributor to Bloomberg’s technology newsletter Fully Charged, and to the daily Bloomberg TV news program, Bloomberg Technology. He was previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. A graduate of Columbia University, he is originally

from Cleveland, Ohio and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife

and three daughters

Links:

The Everything Store: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon/dp/0316219282/
Amazon Unbound: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Unbound-Invention-Global-Empire/dp/1982132612/
Andy Jassy book review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4CQQV1ALSN0/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00FJFJOLC

Neurodiversity as an Advantage with Wesley Faulkner

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Wesley

Wesley Faulkner is a first-generation American. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and ran for Austin City Council in 2016. His professional experience also includes work as a social media and community manager for the software company Atlassian, and various roles for the computer processor company AMD, Dell, and IBM. Wesley Faulkner serves as a board member for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and is a Developer Advocate for Daily.

Links:

Daily website: https://www.daily.co/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wesley83

Screaming in the Cloud Trailer

Corey Quinn — Wed, 05 May 2021 08:31:28 -0700

Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.

Cloud Therapy with Bobby Allen

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 May 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Bobby

Bobby Allen serves as VP of Strategic Alliances for Turbonomic. Bobby is a veteran of Intel, Bank of America, TIAA and multiple startups including one that was successfully acquired by the former CSC (now DXC). He went into corporate America after being an Intel fellow at the University of Michigan (MS in Computer Science and Engineering) and a Meyerhoff scholar at UMBC (BS in Computer Science). Bobby has been involved in cloud computing startups since 2012.

He frequently advises CXO’s on cloud strategy and logical equivalents in cloud technology. His goal is to provide data-driven output to move decision-makers from information to clarity to insight. Bobby has been a featured speaker in various events and digital formats including VMworld, AWS re:Invent, theCube, crowdchat, The CTOAdvisor and Gigaom’s Voices in the cloud. He’s equally skilled talking to analysts or technical teams but most enjoys helping customers separate fact from fiction.

Bobby also serves as Stewardship Pastor of Wellspring Church – a Gospel centered, multi-ethnic community in Charlotte, NC. Bobby is a member of the preaching team at Wellspring and is responsible for technology, finances and facilities. He’s grateful to be part of the team that helped complete a multi-year building purchase and remodeling project. Wellspring moved into their new home in December 2019.

Links:

turbonomic.com: https://turbonomic.com
bobbyjallen.me: https://bobbyjallen.me
@ballen_clt: https://twitter.com/ballen_clt

Splitballing on DevRel with Talia Nassi

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Talia

Talia Nassi is an international keynote speaker who delivers content on all things testing and quality. She is a developer advocate at Split.io where she works closely with engineering teams globally to ship software more efficiently. She is passionate about feature flagging, canary launches, CI/CD, testing in production, and A/B testing. She has spoken at countless conferences internationally, ranging from audiences of 100 to 4000!

Links:

Split Software: https://www.split.io/
Flagship Conference: https://flagshipconf.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/talia_nassi

When Two Clouds Isn’t Enough with Alan Raison

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Alan

Developer and DevOps-er; interested in all kinds of cloudy tech, especially deployment pipelines and infrastructure as code. Also building the DevOps capabilities at Hitachi Capital.

Links:

Hitachi Capital UK: https://www.hitachicapital.co.uk/
Accelerate book: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alanraison
GitHub: https://github.com/alanraison

re:Inventing re:Invent with Pete Cheslock

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Pete

Pete is a recovering system administrator who got his start with AWS services back in 2009 while at Sonian, the first cloud-based email archiving platform. As one of the earliest and largest users of AWS, Pete ran technical operations and brought DevOps theory into action. Pete has worked for other companies such as Dyn, Threat Stack, and CHAOSSEARCH, managing large scale AWS deployments. A frequent speaker at DevOps and Observability events, Pete brings a product mindset to SaaS operations. Outside of work he spends his free time smoking meats and tweeting about the results.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/petecheslock

S3: 15 Years and 100 Trillion Objects Later with Kevin Miller

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Kevin

Kevin Miller is currently the global General Manager for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Prior to this role, Kevin has had multiple leadership roles within AWS, including as the General Manager for Amazon S3 Glacier, Director of Engineering for AWS Virtual Private Cloud, and engineering leader for AWS Virtual Private Network and AWS Direct Connect. Kevin was also Technical Advisor to Charlie Bell, Senior Vice President for AWS Utility Computing. Kevin is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

Links:

AWS S3: https://aws.amazon.com/S3
AWS Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/aws
AWS YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices
AWS Pi Week: https://pages.awscloud.com/pi-week-2021.html

It’s Not a Data Science Problem, It’s a Data Engineering Problem with Laurie Voss

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Laurie

Laurie has been a web developer for 25 years and cares deeply about making the web bigger and better for everyone. He previously co-founded awe.sm and npm, and is currently a Senior Data Analyst at Netlify.

Links:

Security Made Simple in the Data Economy with Mark Curphey

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Mark

Mark Curphey is the co-founder at Open Raven, a cloud native data security company. Mark’s fingerprints can be found all over the security industry, but perhaps most visibly from his role as the founder of OWASP. His contributions range from his time as a hands-on application security director at Charles Schwab, Product Unit Manager of Microsoft’s MSDN program and his more recent role as founder and CEO of SourceClear. Mark’s obsessed with building elegant products that solve hard problems for discerning customers.

Links:

Open Raven: https://www.openraven.com/

Personalization, the Non-Creepy Way with Heidi Waterhouse

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Heidi

Heidi is a transformation advocate with LaunchDarkly. She delights in working at the intersection of usability, risk reduction, and cutting-edge technology. One of her favorite hobbies is talking to developers about things they already knew but had never thought of that way before. She sews all her presentation shirts so they match the pajama pants.

Links:

LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com/
Personal website: https://heidiwaterhouse.com
Blog: [https://medium.com/@wiredferret](https://medium.com/@wiredferret)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiredferret

All Roads Lead to Kubernetes with Kendall Miller

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Kendall

Kendall was the first hire at Fairwinds and has been in almost every role in the company. Today he works to establish Fairwinds as a essential name in kubernetes—offering software, services, and open source. Kendall has four kids, a dog, and three weasels. He also co-hosts a podcast on leadership with his friend Rachel at https://authorityissu.es.

Links:

Fairwinds: https://www.fairwinds.com/
kubernetestheeasyway.com: https://kubernetestheeasyway.com
Fairwinds Elements: https://www.fairwinds.com/elements
lastweekinaws.com: https://lastweekinaws.com
lastweekinazure.com: https://lastweekinazure.com
Fairwinds Insights: [Fairwinds Insights](https://www.fairwinds.com/insights)
blatanterror: https://twitter.com/blatanterror
Authority Issues: https://authorityissu.es/

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy with Laura Thomson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Laura

Laura Thomson is Vice President of Platform Engineering at Fastly. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. Previously, she spent more than a decade at Mozilla, leading engineering and operations teams, and was on the board of Let's Encrypt. Laura has spoken at many conferences worldwide over the last 20 years and is the author of best-selling software development books.

Links:

Fastly: https://www.fastly.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lxt

A Hop, Skip & a Jump to State-of-the-Art Network Analysis with Matt Cauthorn

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Matt

Matt Cauthorn oversees the ExtraHop Security Sales Engineering, and enjoys studying the intersection of business and technology. Prior to ExtraHop, Matt was a Sales Engineering Manager at F5. He’s a passionate technologist and evangelist. He holds an MBA from Georgia State University and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Florida. Matt speaks at industry events, has been featured on podcasts, and quoted in industry coverage.

Links:

ExtraHop cloud solutions
WEBINAR with ExtraHop and Corey: "Secure Your Cloud Against Advanced Attacks with Network Detection and Response"

Being Upfront on CloudFront with Katrina Bakas

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Katrina

Katrina Bakas is a Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon, working on CloudFront within AWS. She brings a lifetime of relentless curiosity to her role and a desire to simplify complex technologies to make them accessible for more folks. Previously, she brought the same inquisitiveness and desire to simplify to observability at Pivotal and VMware (upon acquisition), having spent time at start ups and in megacorporate Financial Services before that. She strongly believes the best tech is found at the intersection of psychological safety, Design, Engineering, and Product Management.

Links:

“What is a Cloud Platform? What is a Platform as a Service?”: https://medium.com/@kvbakas/what-is-a-cloud-platform-what-is-a-platform-as-a-service-eb2c33cfa38e
Twitter: https://twitter.com/katrinabakas

Making Machine Learning Invisible with Randall Hunt

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Randall

Randall is a Software Engineer and Open Source Developer Advocate at Facebook. Previously of AWS, SpaceX, MongoDB, and NASA.

Links:

Totes Not Amazon: totes-not-amazon.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jrhunt

The Darth Vader of AWS with Eric Brandwine

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0700

About Eric

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-security-profiles-eric-brandwine-vp-and-distinguished-engineer/

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ebrandwine
AWS Security Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/

The Digital Transformation of a Digital Transformation Consultancy with Dennis Gada

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Dennis

Dennis Gada is SVP and Head for Financial Services, North America at Infosys, where he has executive responsibility for all client relationships and new client acquisitions in the Financial Services sector. Dennis has significant Business Transformation, Innovation, and Financial Services Consulting experience. He is an industry leader in Financial Services with experience in partnering with clients to shape strategies and execute digital transformation programs leveraging business and technology services. Dennis is a frequent speaker at various industry events and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Links:

Infosys: https://www.infosys.com/
Email: dennis_gada@infosys.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dennisgada

ADHD as a Superpower with Jess Schalz

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Jess

Jess Schalz (she/they) is a computer gremlin multiclassing in software development and infosec. She’s a queer disability advocate, and this informs her empathy-based approach to technology. Her hobbies include watercolors and collecting human remains. Talk to her about weird medical history and cats.

Links:

Transposit: https://www.transposit.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessica_schalz

Meanwhile in ‘Meanwhile in Security’ with Jesse Trucks

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0800

Links:

Splunk: https://www.splunk.com/
Meanwhile in Security: https://meanwhileinsecurity.com/

The DuckTale of DuckTools with Kevin Kuchta

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Kevin

Kevin's the Lead Product Owner and Engineer on Ducktools, a recently-released set of AWS Cost Management power tools.

Links:

Stop Lying Cloud: https://stop.lying.cloud/
TabDB.io: https://tabdb.io/
Personal website: https://kevinkuchta.com/

The Concierge of DevRel with Jonan Scheffler

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Jonan

Jonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic. He has a long history of breaking things in public and occasionally putting them back together again. His interest in physical computing often leads him to experiment with robotics and microelectronics, though his professional experience is more closely tied to cloud services and modern application development. In order to break things more effectively he is particularly excited about observability lately, and he’s committed to helping developers around the world live happier lives by showing them how to keep their apps and their dreams alive through the night.

Links:

New Relic: https://newrelic.com/
The Relicans: https://www.therelicans.com/
New Relic Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/new_relic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejonanshow

One Keyboard Shortcut to Rule Them All with Tom Uebel

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Tom

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Command E, an app that provides blazing fast search across all your docs and records in G Suite, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and 20+ more tools via one easy keyboard shortcut.

Links:

Command E: https://getcommande.com/

Open Source Evangelism Before it Was Cool with Sarah Novotny

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

Links:

Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/
OpenJS Foundation: https://openjsf.org/
Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member:https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sarahnovotny
Website: https://sarahnovotny.com/

Flow Architectures & the Future of Streaming Data with James Urquhart

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About James

James Urquhart is a Strategic Executive Advisor for VMware Tanzu customers. Mr. Urquhart brings almost 30 years of experience in distributed applications development, deployment, and operations, focusing on software as a complex adaptive system, cloud native applications and platforms, and automation. Prior to joining VMware, via Pivotal, Mr. Urquhart ran product and engineering teams for AWS, SOASTA, and Dell (via Enstratius). Mr. Urquhart has also written and spoken extensively about cloud computing, software agility and the business opportunities they afford.

Mr. Urquhart was named one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing by both the MIT Technology Review and the Huffington Post, and is a former contributing author to GigaOm and CNET. He recently completed a book on event-driven integration for O'Reilly Publishing titled "Flow Architectures: The Future of Event-Driven Integration".

Mr. Urquhart graduated from Macalester College with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics.

Links:

VMWare: https://www.vmware.com/
Book: Flow Architectures: The Future of Streaming and Event-Driven integration: https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Architectures-Streaming-Event-Driven-Integration/dp/1492075892
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamesurquhart

A Chaos Engineering & Jeli Sandwich with Nora Jones

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Nora

Nora is the founder and CEO of Jeli. She is a dedicated and driven technology leader and software engineer with a passion for the intersection between how people and software work in practice in distributed systems. In November 2017 she keynoted at AWS re:Invent to share her experiences helping organizations large and small reach crucial availability with an audience of ~40,000 people, helping kick off the Chaos Engineering movement we see today. She created and founded the www.learningfromincidents.io movement to develop and open-source cross-organization learnings and analysis from reliability incidents across various organizations, and the business impacts of doing so.

Links:

Jeli main webpage: https://www.jeli.io/
Chaos Engineering Book: https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Engineering-System-Resiliency-Practice/dp/1492043869
Learning From Incidents: https://www.learningfromincidents.io/
Jeli contact us form: https://www.jeli.io/contact-us/

Making AI Like Water with Ana Visneski

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Ana Visneski

Ana Visneski is a Grandmaster of Disaster (responding to them more so than causing them). She has 15+ years of experience in communications and disaster response. Ana was an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard for 12 years responding to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oilspill. After leaving the service she was the Head of Launch, Blog, and Podcast Operations, before becoming the Head of Global Disaster Response. She is now the Sr. Director of Communications and Community for H2O.ai. She has a Master of Communication in Digital Media and a Master of Communication in Networks. She pronounces AMI the right way...as an acronym.

Links Referenced:

H2O.ai: https://www.h2o.ai/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/acvisneski

The Inevitability of Quantum Computing with Dr. Sarah Kaiser

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Sarah Kaiser

I use lasers to melt acrylic and the cisheteropatriarchy alike. Quantum Computing technologist/consultant by day, author and dog mom the rest of the time.

Links:

Unitary Fund: https://unitary.fund/
Sarah’s Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/crazy4pi314/
Learning Quantum Computing with Python and Q#: https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Quantum-Computing-Python-hands/dp/1617296139
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crazy4pi314
GitHub: https://github.com/crazy4pi314
Personal Website: https://www.sckaiser.com/

Learning to Code in a Foreign Language with Caroline Carter

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Caroline Carter
Caroline is our sponsorships manager at The Duckbill Group for our three media publications: Screaming in the Cloud, AWS Morning Brief, and Last Week in AWS. She also helped us create our first-ever re:Quinnvent digital conference in December of 2020. Before joining the Duckbill Group, Caroline sold market insights software to Fortune 500 companies at CB Insights and payment software to businesses at Square. Prior to her sales career, she worked in client operations at FutureAdvisor helping clients invest their money digitally. She lived in Paris for 3 years, which is where she caught the tech bug and did a coding boot camp.

Join Corey and Caroline as they discuss their mutual love of fintech, how learning to code in a foreign language can be tough, why people are reluctant to make changes in their careers, how to find better mentors, and more.

Links:

Caroline’s email: caroline@theduckbillgroup.com

Reconnecting with an Old Boss with Regis Wilson

Corey Quinn — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Regis Wilson
Regis Wilson is the founding engineer at Release, an environments as a service provider. Regis brings more than 25 years of tech experience to this position, having worked as an infrastructure architect and SRE at TrueCar, Inc. and a cloud systems architect at Live Nation, among several other positions.

Links Referenced:

Connect with Regis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/regis-wilson-a713609/
Personal Website: http://www.zennet.com/
Release: https://releaseapp.io/

The Rise of the Agile Data Center with Tim Banks

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About the Tim Banks
Tim Banks is currently with Packet, an Equinix Company, where he is a Principal Solutions Architect. His tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine, having originally joined the Marine Corps to be a musician. He was later reassigned into an avionics specialty based on the results of standardized testing. Upon leaving the Marine Corps, he went on to work for hardware manufacturers and defense contractors as a civilian. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores.

Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with engineering groups in his current role. Tim is also a husband and a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.

Links Referenced:

Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe

Defining Your Consultancy Niche Part 2 with Scott Piper

Corey Quinn — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

Links Referenced:

Company website: http://summitroute.com
flaws.cloud: http://flaws.cloud
fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xdabbad00

Talking Shop with a Unix Historian with Tabitha Sable

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About the Guest

Tabitha Sable has been a hacker and sysadmin since the turn of the century. She serves Kubernetes as co-chair of SIG Security and an associate member of the Product Security Committee. She loves to build tools and make friends, and puts those skills to work coordinating the efforts of the infrastructure, security, and product teams at Datadog. Outside of work, she can often be found organizing or participating in Capture the Flag contests and loves "pretty much anything with wheels."

Links Referenced:

Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/
“The Ironies of Automation”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0005109883900468
International Journal of Proof of Concept, or Get Out The [BLEEP] out: https://pocorgtfo.hacke.rs/
“Reliable Code Execution on a Tamagotchi”: https://doc8643.com/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo02.pdf
“What happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?": https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tabbysable

Best Practices for AWS Security - Part 1 with Scott Piper

Corey Quinn — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Scott Piper
Scott is an independent consultant helping companies secure their AWS environments through private trainings. He created the free training sites flaws.cloud and flaws2.cloud, along with the open-source projects CloudMapper, Parliament, and more.

Links Referenced:

Connect with Scott Piper on...
- LinkedIn
- Twitter: @0xdabbad00
Company website: Summit Route
flaws.cloud
flaws2.cloud
fwd:cloudsec

Forty-Five Years in Tech with Hal Berenson

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

Links Referenced:

Gaia Platform
Hal’s Blog
Follow Hal on Twitter

Weaseling into Tech with Kat Cosgrove

Corey Quinn — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

Links Referenced:

JFrog’s Website
Follow Kat on Twitter
Connect with Kat on LinkedIn
Email Kat at katc@jfrog.com

Best Practices Don’t Exist with Paul Osman

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 03:00:00 -0800

About Paul Osman
Paul Osman is a Software Engineer with 20 years of experience in the industry. He's the Lead Instrumentation Engineer at Honeycomb.io and is passionate about making production a less scary word. Having spent most of his career in the ill-defined space between software development and operations, Paul spends a lot of time thinking about making on-call experiences better, responding to and learning from incidents, and improving ways for software engineers to share knowledge. Before joining Honeycomb.io, Paul worked in Platform and SRE teams at Under Armour, PagerDuty, and SoundCloud.

Links Referenced:

Honeycomb.io
Follow Paul on Twitter
Paul’s Blog

26 Years of Corey Quinn with Brandon Shaw

Corey Quinn — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Brandon Shaw
Brandon Shaw is a senior program manager in security operations at Discovery, Inc., an entertainment company that owns several premium cable brands, including Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, and TLC. Previously, he worked as an applications manager at CRISP and a senior software applications engineer at CompuGroup Medical, among other positions. Brandon has a slew of certifications, including CISSP, CISM, CDPSE, CCSK, PMP, ITIL, and three from AWS.

Links Referenced:

Discovery, Inc. Website
Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn

Behold: The Block Button with Kylie Robison

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Kylie Robison
Kylie Robison is a California State University, Sacramento student studying business information systems, technology reporter for the State Hornet, and proud president of her school’s Ski & Snowboard Club. She’s hoping to break into the technology industry when she graduates in May of 2021.

Links Referenced:

Writing the Book on Service Level Objectives with Alex Hidalgo

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Alex Hidalgo
Alex Hidalgo is a Site Reliability Engineer and author of the upcoming Implementing Service Level Objectives (O'Reilly Media, September 2020). During his career he has developed a deep love for sustainable operations, proper observability, and using SLO data to drive discussions and make decisions. Alex's previous jobs have included IT support, network security, restaurant work, t-shirt design, and hosting game shows at bars. When not sharing his passion for technology with others, you can find him scuba diving or watching college basketball. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner Jen and a rescue dog named Taco. Alex has a BA in philosophy from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Links Referenced:

Buy Implementing Service Level Objectives on bookshop.org
Buy Implementing Service Level Objectives on Amazon
Follow Alex on Twitter
Alex’s personal site
Corey’s landing page for Implementing Service Level Objectives

Making Outages Boring with Danyel Fisher

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Danyel Fisher
Danyel Fisher is a Principal Design Researcher for Honeycomb.io. He focuses his passion for data visualization on helping SREs understand their complex systems quickly and clearly. Before he started at Honeycomb, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft Research, studying ways to help people gain insights faster from big data analytics.

Links Referenced:

Danyel’s section on Honeycomb’s website
Danyel’s Personal Site
Follow Danyel on Twitter

Eliminating Security Risks in Kubernetes with Chris Porter

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Chris Porter
Chris Porter is the Director of Solutions Engineering at StackRox, the leader in Kubernetes-native container security. Porter has more than 20 years of experience in pre-sales engineering roles, serving and advising customers on security for email, web, cloud, and now Kubernetes and containers. Porter is a certified AWS Solutions Architect and AWS Security Specialist, is the author of a Cisco Press book on Email Security, and holds a Master’s degree from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Linked Referenced:

StackRox
StackRox Blog
Email Chris directly at chris@stackrox.com
Follow Chris on Twitter
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn

D’oh! Memeing about DevOps with @SimpsonsOps

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Links Referenced:

Follow @SimpsonsOps on Twitter

DevRel Done Well with Matt Stratton

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Matt Stratton
Matt Stratton is a Transformation Specialist at Red Hat and a long-time member of the global DevOps community. Back in the day, his license plate actually said “DevOps”. Matt has over 20 years of experience in IT operations, ranging from large financial institutions such as JPMorganChase to internet firms including Apartments.com. He is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and ITSM focused events, including DevOps Enterprise Summit, DevOpsDays, Interop, PINK, and others worldwide. Matt is the founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, as well as the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.
He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Doctor Who. He is currently on a mission to discover the best phở in the world. You can find him on Twitter at @mattstratton.

Links Referenced:

Red Hat
Arrested DevOps
Arrested DevOps podcast about DevOpsDays Chicago
Follow Matt on Twitter
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
Speaking Events
DevOpsDay Chicago 2020

The Era of Virtual Events with Shelby Spees

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Shelby Spees
Shelby Spees has been developing software professionally since 2015 in a range of domains, which has made her appreciate the importance of learning how to learn and creating support systems for lifelong skill development. When she’s not helping teams level up their observability practice, you can find her at home playing on her Switch or singing karaoke with her rescue pitbull Nova.

Links Referenced

Follow Shelby on Twitter
Connect with Shelby on LinkedIn
Shelby’s Personal Site
Email Shelby directly at shelby@hey.com

Optimizing for Happiness with Alfonso Cabrera

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Alfonso Cabrera
Alfonso Cabrera is the Director of Platform Engineering at Red Ventures, where he helps manage and optimize the extensive AWS footprint. He also spent time at AWS as a Solutions Architect and worked as a DevOps Engineer at a few startups. Alfonso enjoys fostering community and has organized DevOpsDays Charlotte for the past 5 years. Outside of work, he tries to stay in shape by playing sports of all kinds, and gets his adrenaline fix by riding motorcycles.

Links Referenced

Red Ventures
Follow Alfonso on Twitter
Connect with Alfonso on LinkedIn

The New Google Cloud with Richard Seroter

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Richard Seroter
Richard Seroter is Director of Outbound Product Management at Google Cloud, with a master’s degree in Engineering from the University of Colorado. He’s also an instructor at Pluralsight, the lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, a frequent public speaker, the author of multiple books on software design and development, and a former 12-time Microsoft MVP for cloud. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.

Links Referenced

Connect with Richard on LinkedIn
Follow Richard on Twitter
Richard’s Personal Blog

Media as Table Stakes with Peter Cooper

Corey Quinn — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Peter Cooper
Founder and editor-in-chief of Cooper Press. Programmer, indexer of all the programming links, former O'Reilly conference chair, and general nerd.

Links Referenced

Cooper Press
JavaScript Weekly
Ruby Weekly
Article, “How to use AWS SimpleDB from Ruby”
Follow Peter on Twitter
Connect with Peter on LinkedIn

The Human Part of Automation with Divanny Lamas

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Divanny Lamas
Divanny Lamas is the CEO of Transposit, the DevOps automation company. Divanny and the Transposit team are creating a world where humans interact with machines successfully to manage today’s complex technology stacks. Divanny is also a managing director at leading venture capital firm Sutter Hill Ventures. She is passionate about working with entrepreneurs to tackle ambitious technical challenges. Prior to Transposit, she began her career at Google and spent seven years at Splunk, where she saw the rise of big data and was one of the early product managers working on building out visualizations and analytics. She was responsible for product strategy, roadmap, and execution for Splunk's marquee product, Splunk Enterprise. She also served as a senior director of customer success and the head of new product introduction at Splunk. Divanny obtained a bachelor’s degree in government and computer science at Harvard University.

Links Referenced

Transposit
Sutter Hill Ventures
Follow Divanny on Twitter
Connect with Divanny on LinkedIn

A Rising Star in Cloud with Brooke Mitchell

Corey Quinn — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Brooke Mitchell
Brooke is an analytical IT professional skilled at team building, data collection and evaluation, cloud computing as well as cross-functional collaboration. She is proficient at scripting and creating CI/CD pipelines to automate workflows to increase efficiency while reducing the chance of error.

Links Referenced

Connect with Brooke on LinkedIn
Follow Brooke on Twitter
A Cloud Guru Blog post, “Automating CI/CD With AWS CodePipeline”

Managing Access in Cloud Made Easy with Liz Zalman

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Liz Zalman
Liz Zalman is the Co-Founder & CEO of strongDM. Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of the cross-device profile company Media Armor. After its acquisition, she served as VP of Analytics at the acquirer, Nomi. With over 15 years of experience leading data-driven organizations, she is an expert in analytics, data privacy, and security.

Links Referenced

strongDM
Connect with Liz on LinkedIn

Writing Better Code to Optimyze Cloud Spend with Thomas Dullien

Corey Quinn — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Thomas Dullien
Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake is a security researcher / entrepreneur known for his contributions to the theory and practice of vulnerability development and software reverse engineering. He built and ran a company for reverse engineering tools that got acquired by Google; he also worked on a wide range of topics - like turning security patches into attacks turning physics-induced DRAM bitflips into useful attacks. After a few years of Google Project Zero, he is now co-founder of a startup called http://optimyze.cloud that focuses on efficient computation -- helping companies save money by wasting fewer cycles, and helping reduce energy waste in the process.

Links Referenced

optimyze.cloud
Quoted Tweet
Follow Thomas on Twitter
Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn
Thomas’ personal site

DevOpsy Security with Jam Leomi

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Jam Leomi
Jam Leomi is a penmaker who just so happens to computer. When not found ranting on equality and equity in #infosec and beyond on twitter, they're found doing their day job as Lead Security Engineer at Honeycomb.

Links Referenced

Honeycomb
Jam's Personal Blog
Follow Jam on Twitter
Connect with Jam on LinkedIn

The New Way to Become an Engineer with Christie Brandao

Corey Quinn — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Christie Brandao
Christie Brandao is a software engineer at Branch Insurance, a company utilizing a fully serverless infrastructure to sell home, auto, renters, and bundled insurance with just a name and address.

Links Referenced

Branch
Twitter
Christie's portfolio
Connect with Christie on LinkedIn

Great Managers Are Elastic with Courtney Wilburn

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Courtney Wilburn
Courtney's journey began in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, by hardware hacking on personal computers and lurking on Prince message boards. She loves finding unusual and efficient ways to solve problems (both human and technical alike), building tools, developing workflows, and building infrastructure almost as much as she enjoys finding ways to keep activists safe organizing online. When she’s away from her desk, she can be found running, hiking, or biking around Philadelphia, cooking, brewing beer, knitting, building keyboards, or singing karaoke duets with her wife.

Links Referenced

Elastic
Twitter
Connect with Courtney on LinkedIn
Courtney's personal site

Teaching the Cloud Forever with Jez Humble

Corey Quinn — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jez Humble
Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner Accelerate, The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and Jolt Award winner Continuous Delivery. He has spent his 20 year career in software tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, including working for the US Federal Government’s 18F team as part of the Obama Tech Surge, and co-founding startup DevOps Research and Assessment LLC, which was acquired by Google in December 2018. He works for Google Cloud as a technology advocate, and teaches classes on agile software engineering and product management at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Links Referenced

DORA: https://cloud.google.com/devops/
Cloud.gov: https://cloud.gov/
NIST Special Publication 800-145: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf
The Phoenix Project: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/
The Unicorn Project: https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption-Thriving/dp/1942788762/
Continuous Delivery: https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912/
The DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/
Accelerate: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jezhumble
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jez-humble/

Learning Tech in Public with Ceora Ford

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Ceora Ford

Ceora Ford is a digital marketer turned software engineer based in Philadelphia. She is really into Python, AWS, education and diversifying tech. She's had the pleasure of teaching with Kode With Klossy, BSD Education, and more recently, egghead.io. When she is not coding, she's usually watching movies and pretending to be a film critic.

Links

egghead.io: https://egghead.io/
Eight Resources for Learning Python blog post: https://www.ceoraford.com/posts/8-resources-you-can-use-to-learn-python/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ceeoreo_
Personal Blog: https://www.ceoraford.com/
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceora-ford/
Ceora’s Website: https://ceoraford.com/

The Democratization of Tech with Tim Banks

Corey Quinn — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Tim Banks
Tim started his 20+ year career in tech quite non-traditionally. After joining the US Marine Corps to be a musician, he was reassigned into an avionics specialty based on the results of standardized testing.

After learning about and working on electronic equipment in the military, Tim went on to work for hardware manufacturers and defense contractors as a civilian. Specializing in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores, Tim left the government contracting world for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and small startups.

Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with engineering groups as a Technical Account manager. Tim is also a husband and a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, and the reigning American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.

Links Referenced

Company Site: https://www.missioncloud.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe

Using the Cloud to Preserve the Future with Alex Chan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Alex Chan
Alex is a software developer at Wellcome Collection, a museum in London that explores the history of human health and medicine. Their role primarily focuses on preservation, and building systems to store the Collection’s digital archive. They also help to run the annual PyCon UK conference, with a particular interest in the event’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Links Referenced

Wellcome Collection: https://wellcomecollection.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexwlchan
Blog: https://alexwlchan.net/

Just Because You’re in the Cloud Doesn’t Mean You’re Netflix with Jason McKay

Corey Quinn — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jason McKay

Jason is responsible for leading Logicworks’ technical strategy including its software and

DevOps product roadmap. In this capacity, he works directly with Logicworks’ senior engineers and developers, technology vendors and partners, and R&D team to ensure that Logicworks service offerings meet and exceed the performance, compliance, automation, and security requirements of our clients. Prior to joining Logicworks in 2005, Jason worked in technology in the Unix support trenches at Panix (Public Access Networks). Jason graduated Bard College with a Bachelor of Art and holds several AWS and Azure Professional certifications.

Links Referenced:

Logicworks: http://logicworks.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhmckay/

Accelerating AWS Adoption in Africa with Veliswa Boya

Corey Quinn — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Veliswa Boya

Veliswa Boya is a 2x certified AWS Cloud Engineer currently working in financial services. She works with application teams on cloud migration strategies and cloud architecture designs. Veliswa has been in the IT industry for 20+ years, starting her career as a mainframe developer working on critical systems for car manufacturers, insurance companies, and banks.

Veliswa is a member of Indoni Developers, which is a platform for African women in coding/tech. She speaks at meetups and was one of the speakers at the inaugural AWS Community Day Cape Town in 2019. She especially enjoys speaking and connecting with those who are new to tech and specifically new to AWS.

Veliswa mentors young people who are looking to embark on AWS certification journeys, she shares her own experiences, gives guidance and support. Veliswa also likes to write about “what she’s learned so far on AWS” and publishes on her Medium blog.

For fun Veliswa enjoys the outdoors, she regularly goes hiking and loves road running.

Links Referenced:

AWS Community Hero: https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/heroes/veliswa-boya/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Vel12171
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veliswa-boya/
Dev.to blog: https://dev.to/vel12171

How to Conduct 470 Interviews in 365 Days with Stuart Miniman

Corey Quinn — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Stuart Miniman

Stuart Miniman has been an analyst and co-host of the online video interview program theCUBE for a decade. Stu's background is in networking and virtualization, he focuses on cloud and disruptive technologies. Stu has interviewed thousands of guests on theCUBE and written on wide variety of enterprise technology topics. His past positions, including sales, product management and strategic planning provides him with perspective on how to focus on the needs of customers. Stuart's previous employers include EMC (with a primary focus on storage networking and virtualization), Lucent Technologies (now Avaya) and American Power Conversion. Stuart holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Bryant University.

Links Referenced:

theCUBE: http://theCUBE.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stu
theCUBE Bio page: https://www.theCUBE.net/theCUBE-hosts

The Future of Education with Angela Andrews

Corey Quinn — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Angela Andrews
Angela Andrews is a solutions architect at Red Hat. Prior to that, she was a systems administrator in higher education for over 15 years. With many interested in technology, she’s dived into areas like cybersecurity, where she was a substitute teacher and teaching assistant (TA) for a cybersecurity boot camp. She attended a full-stack coding boot camp and also taught and TA’d classes teaching people how to code. Angela is the organizer for #PythonForAll, an online meetup called where people learn how to program in Python. She’s given talks on topics like self-care, WordPress, AWS, and also is a contributor to Women Techmakers YouTube video series.

Angela is married with two sons and a dog whom she adores, named Scout. In her spare time, she likes to read, lift weights, SPIN, swim, learn new technologies, and occasionally blog.

Links Referenced:

Connect with Angela
- Twitter: @scooterphoenix
- LinkedIn
Red Hat
Sponsors

Bespoke Cloud Contract Negotiation with Spencer Viernes

Corey Quinn — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Spencer Viernes

Spencer Viernes has been practicing law for over 15 years. His practice consists of local, national and international clients. He has advised clients regarding digital infrastructure, including cloud infrastructure, data centers and telecommunications infrastructure, technology transactions, energy and natural resources, and economic development initiatives. Spencer has provided strategic guidance, both legal and practical, related to diverse geographic business and legal issues.

With a practice that includes deals across almost most major continents, Spencer has a demonstrated track record of closing deals with a savvy business mind and a sharp legal perspective. He works side by side with business and project teams to drive results that benefit his clients in a meaningful way and allow room for mutual benefit that solidifies lasting successful business partnerships between otherwise opposing parties.

Links Referenced:

Vierness ESQ Website: http://www.viernesesq.com/
Spencer Viernes Email: sviernes@viernesesq.com

The Gravitational Pull of Simplicity with Ev Kontsevoy

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Ev Kontsevoy

Ev Kontsevoy is the CEO of Gravitational, where he and other engineers build open-source tools for other developers for securely delivering cloud apps to restricted and regulated environments. Besides computers, Ev’s obsessed with trains and old film cameras.

Links Referenced:

Gravitational website: https://gravitational.com/
Gravitational GitHub: https://github.com/gravitational
Teleport GitHub: https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

Celebrating Security with Fredrick ‘Flee’ Lee

Corey Quinn — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Fredick “Flee” Lee

Fredrick "Flee" Lee is the CSO at Gusto, the platform that helps 100,000+ small businesses nationwide pay, insure, and provide benefits for their teams. Flee has more than 15 years of experience leading global information security and privacy efforts at large financial services companies and technology startups, most recently as Square's head of information security. He previously held senior security and privacy roles at Bank of America, NetSuite, and Twilio.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredrickdlee/

Microsoft & the Next Level of Transformation with Corey Sanders

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Corey Sanders:

Corey Sanders is the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Solutions, an organization dedicated to partnering with customers as they transform into successful digital businesses.

He is responsible for sales strategy and corporate technical sales across Solution Areas and Teams that include Azure Applications & Infrastructure, Azure Data & AI, Business Applications, Cybersecurity Solutions Group, and Modern Workplace. His focus also includes selling the full value of Microsoft cross-cloud solutions and advancing the technical depth of the Microsoft Solutions team.

Prior to this role, Corey was Head of Product for Azure Compute and the founder of Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) business. During that time, he was responsible for products, strategy and technical vision aligned to core Azure compute services. He also previously led program management for multiple Azure services. Earlier in his career, Corey was a developer in the Windows Serviceability team with ownership across the networking and kernel stack for Windows.

Corey joined Microsoft in 2004 after graduating from Princeton University and resides in New Jersey.

Links Referenced:

Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreysanderswa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-sanders-842b72/

Managing Humans with Charity Majors

Corey Quinn — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

Links Referenced:

Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/
Personal Blog: https://charity.wtf/
Honeycomb Blog: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog

Microsoft’s New Edge with Stephanie Stimac

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Stephanie Stimac
Stephanie is a Design Technologist and Program Manager for Microsoft Edge Developer Experiences. She comes from a background in design and after initially spending 6 years focusing on a career in web design, has spent the last 4 years working on Microsoft Edge to improve developer tools and the browser. Currently she helps run an initiative called the Web We Want that focuses on identifying problems developers face in their day-to-day work and is passionate about HTML, CSS and inspiring a new generation to get involved in the web.

Links Referenced

Microsoft company website: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/
Corey’s websites https://gaslighting.me/ and https://stop.lying.cloud/
The Web We Want: https://webwewant.fyi/
Smashing Conference: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/events/
beyond tellerrand: https://beyondtellerrand.com/
An Event Apart: https://aneventapart.com/
webhint: https://webhint.io/
Stephanie’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/seaotta

Making the Cloud More Secure with Mark Nunnikhoven

Corey Quinn — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Mark Nunnikhoven
Is this system safe? Is my information protected? These are hard questions to answer. Mark Nunnikhoven works to make cybersecurity and privacy easier to understand.

A forensic scientist and security leader, Mark has spent more than 20 years helping to defend private and public systems from cybercriminals, hackers, and nation states. A sought after speaker, writer, and technology pundit, his message is simple: secure and private systems are a requirement in today’s world, not a luxury.

Links Referenced:

The Serverless Insurance Startup with Adithya Reddy

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Adithya Reddy

I do everything from web and mobile to backend architecture at Branch Insurance. I started out as a purely frontend developer but after joining Branch, which was 100% serverless from day 1, I expanded across the stack and probably write as much CloudFormation today as I do JavaScript.

Links Referenced:

Branch Insurance Main: https://ourbranch.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTallpants
GitHub: https://github.com/tallpants

We’re All AV Experts Now with Christina Warren

Corey Quinn — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Christina Warren

Christina Warren is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, where she helps shape the overall video and broader content strategy for Channel 9, Docs.Microsoft.com, and the greater CA team. In this role, she hosts shows on Channel 9, Microsoft’s video channel for developer content, creates technical content snd demos, speaks at events, and interviews people within the developer community. Prior to joining Microsoft, Christina spent a decade in digital media as an editor, senior reporter, and commentator, with a focus on technology, business, and, entertainment. As a journalist, she appeared as an expert or commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, Bloomberg, the BBC, Marketplace Radio, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and many more outlets. She also co-hosts Rocket, a popular tech news podcast, which has the distinction of being one of the only tech podcasts with an all-female hosting team.

Links:

No Cloud Unturned with Charles Fitzgerald

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Charles Fitzgerald

Charles Fitzgerald is a Seattle-based angel investor, with a focus on developer platforms and infrastructure. Previously, he spent 20+ years working on platform businesses at Microsoft and VMware. He can see the cloud from his house.

Links Referenced:

Main company site: https://www.platformonomics.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesfitz/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesfitz
Sponsors

The New New Relic with Bill Staples

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Bill Staples
Bill Staples is New Relic’s chief product officer, responsible for driving the company’s market-leading platform strategy and leading New Relic’s product management, engineering and design functions. Staples is an execution-focused product and engineering leader who loves to build and scale cloud-based businesses. Previously Staples was at Adobe, where he led the 1,500+ employee global engineering team behind Adobe’s market-leading Experience Cloud. Prior to Adobe, Staples spent 17 years at Microsoft, including his last role as vice president of Microsoft’s Application platform. At both Microsoft and Adobe, he successfully led transformative product, culture and technical innovation agendas, helping both companies expand multi-billion dollar cloud portfolios with developers and IT as the customer.

Links Referenced

Main company site: https://newrelic.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bstaples
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamstaples/

Billion-Line Cloud Bills with Rodrigo Flores

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Rodrigo Flores

Rodrigo Flores is Managing Director of the Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP) in charge of Architecture, Product Management and Engineering innovation. Currently he leads a team of 400 people delivering the service to 3000 clients and $400M of cloud spend. The Accenture Cloud Platform is a hybrid cloud service that delivers a variety of providers such as Amazon, Azure, Google, VMware and Microsoft-based private clouds. Additionally, Cloud Management Services such as patching, security, backup, hardening, monitoring and security. This includes cloud brokering, security and cloud optimization services.

Additionally, Rodrigo frequently works with Global 2000 enterprises to help them in their cloud transformation and migration projects. These engagements include DevOps, financial, security and program reviews as well as one-on-one coaching and consulting with C-suite executives.

Prior to Accenture, Rodrigo worked at Cisco in the cloud software business group as CTO. He founded newScale (acquired by Cisco) the service catalog and cloud management platform pioneer from 2000--2011.

Links Referenced:

Accenture main site: http://accenture.com/
Rodrigo’s blog “Working Class CTO”: https://workingclasscto.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roflores/
Twitter: @rfflores

HEY, We’re Building Better Email with Blake Stoddard

Corey Quinn — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Blake Stoddard

Blake is Senior System Administrator on Basecamp’s Operations team who spends most of his time working with Kubernetes, and AWS, in some capacity. When he’s not deep in YAML, he’s out mountain biking.

Links Referenced:

Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/t3rabytes
Signal v. Noise blog (author page): https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/blake/
Signal v. Noise blog (main site): signalvnoise.com

The Startup Inside IBM with Sachin Agarwal

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Sachin Agarwal

Sachin Agarwal is the Worldwide Product Management Lead at IBM Aspera where he is responsible for leading up the portfolio's strategy and roadmap. Prior to joining IBM, he held various product ownership positions including Principal Product Manager at LaunchDarkly, VP of Product and Operations at Nylas, and Director of Product Management at Oracle. Sachin's post-career goal is to retire in Hawai'i, where he plans to open a great Chicago-themed gastropub/cocktail bar.

Links Referenced:

IBM Aspera: https://www.ibm.com/products/aspera
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sachinag
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinag/

Building Taxpayer-Funded Cloud Services with Simon Elisha

Corey Quinn — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Simon Elisha

As Head of Technology and Transformation at Amazon Web Services, Simon Elisha is sought after by C-Level Executives who want deep insights into combining modern technology innovations with the pragmatic lessons learned from hard-earned experience. An expert in Cloud Computing and Organizational Change needed to get the most out of it; Simon is able to demystify how technology innovation is best applied to enable organisations improve customer experience, reduce costs and adapt quickly.

Simon was a leader in cloud well before it was mainstream. As the first technical staff member for Amazon Web Services in Australia, he led the charge to Public Cloud. Bringing over 30 years of industry experience in software, infrastructure and business consulting to the “brave new world”– he has guided start-ups, digital businesses, Government agencies and Enterprises alike on their journey to the cloud. He now leads the AWS Solutions Architecture team located in capital cities across Australia and New Zealand.

A noted industry speaker and communicator; as host of the AWS Podcast, Simon speaks to a global audience of technology leaders and practitioners on a weekly basis. Simon has held senior roles at organisations including Pivotal Software, Cisco, Hitachi Data Systems, VERITAS Software, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and EDS. In addition, Simon earned an Honors Degree in Information Technology from Monash University and holds eight patents.

Links Referenced:

AWS Podcast: https://aws.amazon.com/podcasts/aws-podcast/
Ensuring Rollback Safety During Deployments: https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ensuring-rollback-safety-during-deployments/

Spanning the Globe with Jaana Dogan

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jaana Dogan

Jaana Dogan is working on Spanner at Google to make state not your problem problem. She has 15+ years of experience in building infrastructure, developer platforms, and tools. Jaana's current work is focused on storage systems, observability and performance tools, and helping customers with architectural design tradeoffs.

Links Referenced:

Recommended book: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rakyll
https://jbd.dev/
https://rakyll.org/

The AWS Evangelist with Jon Myer

Corey Quinn — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jon Myer

A Partner Solutions Architect for Cloud Management Tools at AWS. Jon Myer is an evangelist for all things AWS and passionate about educating, teaching, and connecting with others about new or existing services AWS releases.

Links Referenced:

The AWS Blogger: https://www.theawsblogger.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_jonmyer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-myer/

Resigning from AWS on Ethical Grounds with Tim Bray

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 15:00:00 -0700

About Tim Bray:

Tim is a general-purpose Internet-software geek. He specializes in Web, search, writing, speaking, business. He founded Textuality in 1996. He is available for consulting on issues of technology leadership, software construction, and distributed systems. You can follow Tim's musings on his blog ongoing and on Twitter.

Links Referenced:

“Working Effectively with Legacy Code”: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Feathers/dp/0131177052
Twitter: https://twitter.com/timbray
Blog: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
Article Tim wrote about his PR FAQ: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/21/A-Cloud-PR-FAQ
Tim Bray’s “Split AWS from Amazon” PR FAQ he wrote: https://github.com/timbray/a-cloud-prfaq
Tim Bray’s “Break up Google” article: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/25/Break-Up-Google

Corey’s Fake PR FAQ: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/introducing-aws-elastic-beanstalker/

Cloud Education Made Easy with Katie Bullard

Corey Quinn — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 08:25:38 -0700

About Katie Bullard

As President of A Cloud Guru, Katie leads the sales, marketing, customer success, and partnership teams for the world's largest and most trusted cloud training platform.

Links Referenced:

Main company site: https://acloud.guru/ and https://acloudguru.com
A Cloud Guru Twitter: https://twitter.com/acloudguru
A Cloud Guru LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a-cloud-guru/

Building Ethical Tech Companies with Liz Fong-Jones

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Liz Fong-Jones

Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 16+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.

Links Referenced

Company Site: https://www.honeycomb.io/
The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/
Honeycomb Liz: https://www.honeycomb.io/liz
Personal site: https://www.lizthegrey.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizthegrey

The Cloud Bard Speaks with Forrest Brazeal

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Forrest Brazeal

Forrest is an enterprise cloud architect, speaker, and community advocate. Currently a senior manager at A Cloud Guru, he spent years designing applications for the cloud at Infor and Trek10. One of the original AWS Serverless Heroes, Forrest was also named one of Jefferson Frank's Top 7 Global AWS Experts in 2019. His first book, "The Read-Aloud Cloud", is coming from Wiley in September 2020.

Links Referenced

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/1119677629
Cloud Irregular: https://cloudirregular.substack.com/ works. Note that this is the link behind some text that is “forrestBrazeal.com/mailinglist” which was not a working link.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/forrestbrazeal/
Personal Website: https://forrestbrazeal.com/
Article “Why Central Cloud Teams Fail”: https://info.acloud.guru/resources/why-central-cloud-teams-fail-and-how-to-save-yours

Optimizing Cloud Spend at Airbnb with Melanie Cebula

Corey Quinn — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Melanie Cebula

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/melaniecebula
Melanie Cebula’s website: https://melaniecebula.com/

Bringing Empathy and Humility to Tech with Conrad Heiney

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 03:00:00 -0700

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/substitute

Digital Security for Humans with Jessy Irwin

Corey Quinn — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jessy Irwin

Jessy is Founder at Amulet. She enjoys the challenge of translating complex cybersecurity problems into relatable terms, and is responsible for developing, maintaining and delivering comprehensive ecosystem security strategy that supports and enables the needs of the people who depend on Tendermint and the CosmosSDK.

Links Referenced:

All Things Azure with Dwayne Monroe

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Dwayne Monroe

I've been a technologist, in some form, for most of my conscious life (starting with a Sinclair kit computer). I work as a cloud architect, focused on Azure and spend a lot of time thinking and writing about that (particularly controlling spend). Besides that, I enjoy a good Bordeaux or martini, travel and my life as a transplant to Amsterdam.

Links Referenced:

Untying the Gordian Knot of Cloud Spend with Wes Miller

Corey Quinn — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Wes Miller

Wes Miller analyzes and writes about Azure infrastructure services, including Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Active Directory, and Microsoft systems management technologies.

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Wes was a product manager and development manager for several Austin, TX, start-ups, including Winternals Software, acquired by

Microsoft in 2006. Prior to that, Wes spent seven years at Microsoft working as a program manager in the Windows Core Operating System and MSN divisions.

Wes received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Links

Cloud Governance Made Easy with David Boeke

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About David Boeke

David Boeke is the CTO and VP Services for Turbot. David has 25+ years of experience in IT and is recognized as a transformational leader that has enabled some of the world's largest enterprise organizations to make the transition to public cloud. Prior to joining Turbot, David was the Global Head of Enterprise Architecture and led the cloud transformation for a Fortune 50 life sciences company."

Links

Turbot: https://turbot.com/

Podcasting about Podcasts with Chris Hill

Corey Quinn — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Chris Hill

Chris is a Knoxville, TN native and owner of the podcast production company, HumblePod. In addition to producing podcasts for nationally-recognized thought leaders, Chris is the co-host and producer of the award-winning Our Humble Beer Podcast. He also lectures at the University of Tennessee, where he leads courses on podcasts and marketing. He received his undergraduate degree in business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he majored in Marketing & Entrepreneurship, and he later received his MBA from King University.

Chris currently serves his community the American Marketing Association in Knoxville, where he is currently the President-Elect. In his spare time, he enjoys hanging out with the local craft beer community, international travel, exploring the great outdoors, and his many creative pursuits.

Links

Google’s Biggest Partner with Miles Ward

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Miles Ward

Previously, Miles served as Director and Global Lead for Solutions at Google Cloud. He founded the Google Cloud’s Solutions Architecture practice, launched hundreds of solutions, built Style-Detection and Hummus AI APIs, built CloudHero, designed the pricing and TCO calculators, and helped thousands of customers like Twitter who migrated the world’s largest Hadoop cluster to public cloud and Audi USA who replatformed to k8s before it was out of alpha, and helped Banco Itau design the intercloud architecture for the bank of the future.

Before Google, Miles helped build the AWS Solutions Architecture team. He wrote the first AWS Well Architected framework, proposed Trusted Advisor and the Snowmobile, invented GameDay, worked as a core part of the Obama for America 2012 “tech” team, helped NASA stream the Curiosity Mars Rover landing, and rebooted Skype in a pinch.

Earning his Bachelors of Science in Rhetoric and Media Studies from Willamette University, Miles is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur who also plays a mean electric sousaphone.

Links

SADA.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesward/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/milesward
Cloud N Clear Podcast: https://sada.com/insights-events/video-podcasts/

DynamoDB The Database of Choice for Serverless Applications with Alex DeBrie

Corey Quinn — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Alex DeBrie

Alex is an author and self-employed AWS trainer and consultant focused on serverless & cloud-native technologies. He has been recognized as an AWS Data Hero for his community work with DynamoDB and other database technologies. In a previous job, he worked at Serverless, Inc., creators of the Serverless Framework. If you go even further back in his employment history, you'll see Alex had a brief stint as a corporate lawyer.

Links Referenced

The DynamoDB Book: https://www.dynamodbbook.com/
The DynamoDB Guide: https://www.dynamodbguide.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie
Blog: https://www.alexdebrie.com/

Becoming a RedMonk with Stephen O’Grady

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Stephen O’Grady

Stephen O'Grady is a Principal Analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, the open source industry analyst firm. He focuses on infrastructure software such as programming languages, operating systems and databases, as well as covering horizontal industry trends such as open source and cloud computing.

Before setting up RedMonk, Stephen worked as an analyst at Illuminata by drawing on his real world expertise in architecting and developing applications for leading systems integrators. Prior to joining Illuminata, Stephen served in various senior capacities with large systems integration firms like Keane and boutique consultancies like Blue Hammock.

Regularly cited in publications such as the New York Times, BusinessWeek, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal, and a popular speaker and moderator on the conference circuit, Stephen's advice and opinion is well respected throughout the industry.

Links Referenced

The New Kingmakers book: https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0097E4MEU/
RedMonk: redmonk.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sogrady

Chiming in on Slack with Sid Rao

Corey Quinn — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 15:00:00 -0700

About Sid Rao

Sid Rao is the GM of Amazon Chime. He has over 25 years of industry experience, having worked at Infosys, Nortel, Microsoft, and CTI Group.

Links Referenced

https://chime.aws
“Chime after Chime” by Tim Leehane and Spencer Johnson

Building a Developer-Focused Digital Event with Microsoft’s Jeff Sandquist

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jeff Sandquist

Jeff leads Developer Relations for the cloud at Microsoft, leading the team reinventing Microsoft's relationship with software developers around the globe. Their team is maniacal about making the world amazing for developers of all backgrounds.

They are excited to support and contribute to open source platforms, tools, and processes. As Developer Advocates, they’re spreading awareness of Azure and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn. Great online content (docs, demos, videos, code) is the foundation of everything they do.

They create global developer online experiences for Microsoft like docs.microsoft.com, Channel 9, and dev.microsoft.com. They connect with developer communities through their programs including Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Regional Director, their annual Build conference and third-party developer events around the globe.

Links Referenced

Bringing FreeBSD to EC2 with Colin Percival

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 May 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Colin Percival
Colin is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service which combines the flexibility and scriptability of the standard UNIX "tar" utility with strong encryption, deduplication, and the reliability of Amazon S3 storage. Having started work on Tarsnap in 2006, Colin is among the first generation of users of Amazon Web Services, and has written dozens of articles about his experiences with AWS on his blog.

Colin has been a member of the FreeBSD project for 15 years and has served in that time as the project Security Officer and a member of the Core team; starting in 2008 he led the efforts to bring FreeBSD to the Amazon EC2 platform, and for the past 7 years he has been maintaining this support, keeping FreeBSD up to date with all of the latest changes and functionality in Amazon EC2.

In his spare time, Colin serves as an alumni representative on the Senate of his alma mater, Simon Fraser University, where he frequently brings a perspective from the world of startups to the ivory tower.

Links Referenced

Company site: https://www.tarsnap.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cperciva
Blog: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva

Democratizing Software Development on Stack Overflow with Prashanth Chandrasekar

Corey Quinn — Wed, 20 May 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Prashanth Chandrasekar

Prashanth Chandrasekar is Chief Executive Officer of Stack Overflow and is responsible for driving Stack Overflow’s overall strategic direction and results. Prashanth is a proven technology executive with extensive experience leading and scaling high growth global organizations. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s Cloud & Infrastructure Services portfolio of businesses, including the Managed Public Clouds, Private Clouds, Colocation and Managed Security businesses. Before that, Prashanth held a range of senior leadership roles at Rackspace including Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s high growth, global business focused on the world's leading Public Clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, which became the fastest growing business in Rackspace’s history. Prior to joining Rackspace, Prashanth was a Vice President at Barclays Investment Bank, focused on providing Strategic and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) advice for clients in the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) industries. Prashanth was also a Manager at Capgemini Consulting where he managed Operations transformation engagements and consulting teams across the US. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng in Engineering Management from Cornell University and a B.S. in Computer Engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Maine. Prashanth is married and has two children.

Links Referenced

The Future of Kubernetes with Bryan Liles

Corey Quinn — Wed, 13 May 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Bryan Liles

Bryan Liles is a Senior Staff Engineer at VMware. He leads the Developer Experience group, which creates solutions to help developers be more productive in Kubernetes. When not working, Bryan builds and races cars and drones.

Over the past 20 years, Bryan has worked around cloud technology and distributed systems. His approaches to technology are: simplify with fidelity and technology should give access to all.

Links Referenced:

https://vmware.com

Open Source at Massive Scale with Jill Rouleau

Corey Quinn — Wed, 06 May 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Jill Rouleau

Jill Rouleau is a member of the Ansible engineering team, focused on maintaining AWS and other Cloud modules. Prior to Ansible, they worked on OpenStack, using more than a decade of operations and SRE experience to improve deployment tooling for cloud operators.

Links Referenced:

Overcoming Change Management Anti-Patterns through Automation with Jeffery Smith

Corey Quinn — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About the Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 15 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Director of Production Operations for Centro, an advertising software company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Before that he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub.

Jeff is currently writing a book “Operational Anti-Patterns with DevOps Solutions” with Manning publishing due out in Spring of 2020. He’s also the chapter president of Blacks in Technology

Links Referenced:

@DarkAndNerdy
Article: The First DevOps Hurdle
BITCon
Blacks in Technology
Jeff's Book: Operations Anti-Patterns with DevOps Solutions

Leaving Chemistry and Becoming a Data Nerd with Yulan Lin

Corey Quinn — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Yulan Lin

Yulan is a data nerd with experience in everything from bioinformatics to NLP. She’s currently working as a Developer Advocate for Google’s Data Studio. Prior to Google, she worked in research, event management, and government data science. When not computerating, she can be found reading, hosting dinner parties, and making music.

Links Referenced

DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/
CHAOSSEARCH.io
http://do.co/screaming
DataStax: http://www.datastax.com
https://www.datastax.com/accelerate
Twitter https://twitter.com/y3l2n

Learning How to Teach AWS to Newbies with Hiro Nishimura

Corey Quinn — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Hiro Nishimura
M.Ed. in Special Education from University of Maryland. Five years experience working as an IT Engineer in New York City. Now, a “Freepreneur” (Freelance Entrepreneur) in the DC suburbs.

Technical Course Instructor at LinkedIn Learning. Founder of AWS Newbies and Cloud Newbies. Founder and CEO of 24 Villages, LLC. – a Writing and Consulting company.

Links

DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/
http://do.co/screaming
http://CHAOSSEARCH.io
AWSNewbies.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hirokonishimura
Intro to AWS: IntroToAWS.com
Cloud Newbies: CloudNewbies.com
Screaming in the Cloud: ScreamingintheCloud.com

How to Get 75 Gigs of Free Storage in AWS with xssfox

Corey Quinn — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About xssfox

Just a dumb fox

Links Referenced:

DigitalOcean https://www.digitalocean.com/
CHAOSSEARCH http://CHAOSSEARCH.io
Big Buck AWS https://github.com/xssfox/bigbuckaws
Corey’s talk, “Terrible Ideas in Git” https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/terrible-ideas-in-git-by-corey-quinn/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/xssfox
Screaming in the Cloud http://ScreamingintheCloud.com

A Conversation with AWS’ Sandy Carter, One of the Busiest Women in Tech

Corey Quinn — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Sandy Carter
Sandy Carter is the AWS Vice President, Public Sector Partners and Programs. In her new role, she is responsible for driving next-generation partnering. Her responsibilities include evolving partner models to intensify partner innovation, AWS cloud adoption and creation of mission critical cloud solutions with partners across public sector. Her impact will be growing the partner ecosystem as a major driver for public sector and contributing significantly to the success of Public Sector customers.

Prior to this role, Sandy built an enterprise workload team as the Vice President of Windows and Enterprise Workloads at Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on helping companies innovate using their current technology and assets with migration and modernization through containers and serverless. She led the team to overall growth with AWS now hosting nearly two times as many Windows Server instances in the cloud as Microsoft, per IDC. She led her engineering team to optimize SQL Server on AWS which exhibited 2X+ better price/ performance than Azure per ZK Research. For her leadership on the VMware Cloud on AWS business, she led the team to deliver results of 4x the number of customers year over year, with those customers having deployed 9x the number of VMs now vs 1 year ago. Finally, she grew the number of competency partners by 3x and the number of ISV validated solutions by 4x in the last year.

She is the author of Extreme Innovation: Three Superpowers for Purpose and Profit, built on her research with Carnegie Mellon. Sandy was named Lifetime Achievement Winner, 'Excellence in Cloud Achievement' for 2019, AI Innovator of the Year Nominee in 2019, Top 10 AI Influencers for 2019, Top 10 Cloud Computing Influencer, Top 39 Engineers by Business Insider 2018, Top 50 AI influencer by Onalytica 2018, Top 10 Future of Work influencer in 2018, and Top 10 Women in Technology by CNN.

Sandy is the Chairman of the Board of Girls in Tech, and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. Last year, Girls in Tech had over 125K women participate in their “Hacking for Humanity” initiative, and trained over 90K women globally on coding through boot camps, and workshops. She was honored two times with the AIT United Nations Member of the Year award for helping developing countries with technology. She is an Advisor to startups in AI, IoT, and AR/VR.

Links Referenced

DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/, http://do.co/screaming
Observe 2020 Virtual Conference: snark.cloud/observe
re:Invent: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
ExtraHop: http://ExtraHop.com, http://ExtraHop.com/trial
Coding for America: https://www.codeforamerica.org/
Twitter, #techforgood: https://twitter.com/search?q=techforgood
Twitter, Sandy Carter: https://twitter.com/sandy_carter
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandyacarter/
Email: mailto:sandyct@amazon.com

The Joy of Building Enterprise Software with Ben Sigelman

Corey Quinn — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Ben Sigelman

Ben Sigelman is a co-founder and the CEO at LightStep, a co-creator of Dapper (Google’s distributed tracing system), and co-creator of the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects (both part of the CNCF). Ben's work and interests gravitate towards observability, especially where microservices, high transaction volumes, and large engineering organizations are involved.

Links Referenced

OpenTracing: https://opentracing.io/
OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/el_bhs
Email: bhs@gmail.com
This podcast: http://ScreamingintheCloud.com

Serverless Evangelism with Farrah Campbell

Corey Quinn — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Farrah Campbell

After 10 years of working in healthcare management, a serendipitous 20-minute car ride with Kara Swisher inspired Farrah to make the jump into technology. She has worked at multiple startups in many different capacities, eventually working her way to being the Ecosystems Director for Stackery in Portland, Oregon.

As the Stackery Ecosystems Director, Farrah has managed the Stackery relationship with AWS including Stackery as an Advanced Technology Partner, achieving the AWS DevOps Competency, a launch partner for Lambda Layers and is an AWS Serverless Hero. Farrah has cultivated the serverless community as an organizer of Portland Serverless Days, the Portland Serverless Meetup, along with numerous serverless workshops and the Portland tech community events from Techfest to bringing multiple luminaries to Portland.

Links Referenced

AD: DigitalOcean
AD: DataStax
Portland Serverless Days
Portland Serverless Meetup
Twitter: @FarrahC32
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farrahcampbell/
Email: farrah@stackery.io
Personal site: https://medium.com/@FarrahC32
Company site: www.stackery.io

Multi-Cloud is the Future with Tobi Knaup

Corey Quinn — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0700

About Tobi Knaup
Tobi Knaup is a Co-Founder & the Chief Technology Officer of D2iQ. Knaup is an experienced software engineer focusing on large scale systems and machine learning. Previously, he helped scale Airbnb to millions of users worldwide as technical lead. Tobi’s research work is on Internet-scale sentiment analysis using online knowledge, linguistic analysis, and machine learning. Tobi also co-founded his first company at the age of 15.

Headshot

Links Referenced

Twitter Username: superguenter
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiasknaup/
Personal site: https://tobi.knaup.me/
Company site: https://d2iq.com/

Inside the Mind of a DevOps Novelist with Gene Kim

Corey Quinn — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Gene Kim
Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

Links Referenced

The Phoenix Project: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/
The Unicorn Project: https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption-Thriving/dp/B0812C82T9
The DevOps Enterprise Summit: https://events.itrevolution.com/
@RealGeneKim

Engineering a Tech-Driven Newsroom with Jeremy Bowers

Corey Quinn — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Jeremy Bowers
Jeremy Bowers is an Engineering Director for the Newsroom Engineering team at The Washington Post. Previously, Jeremy was the Senior Editor for News Applications on the Interactive News Team of The New York Times, where he led a team focused on writing software for elections, Congress and the Supreme Court. Jeremy was also a news applications developer on the NPR Visuals team and a Senior Newsroom Developer at The Washington Post.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: @jeremybowers
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyjbowers/
Personal site: jeremybowers.com
Company site: https://www.washingtonpost.com/

The Staying Power of Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower

Corey Quinn — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower is a principal developer advocate at Google, the co-chair of KubeCon, the world’s premier Kubernetes conference, and an open source enthusiast. He’s also the co-author of Kubernetes Up & Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @kelseyhightower
Company site: Google.com
Book: Kubernetes Up & Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Made Easy with Rob Zuber

Corey Quinn — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Rob Zuber
Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a four-time founder, three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series B, Series C, and Series D funding and delivered on product innovation at scale. Rob leads a team of 150+ engineers who are distributed around the globe.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @z00b
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robzuber/
Personal site: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/rob-zuber#section-overview
Company site: www.circleci.com

The Wide World of AWS Consulting with Andreas Wittig

Corey Quinn — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Andreas Wittig
Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig are freelancers, entrepreneurs, and authors. As freelancers, they are training, coaching, and consulting their clients on all things Amazon Web Services (AWS). In their role as an entrepreneur, Andreas and Michael are building SaaS products. The brothers have published two books Amazon Web Services in Action and Rapid Docker on AWS and are blogging at cloudonaut.io.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @andreaswittig
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaswittig/
Company site: https://cloudonaut.io
Books:
- Rapid Docker on AWS
- Amazon Web Services in Action

SEARCHing in the CHAOS with Thomas Hazel

Corey Quinn — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Thomas Hazel
Thomas Hazel is Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist of CHAOSSEARCH. He is a serial entrepreneur at the forefront of communication, virtualization, and database technology and the inventor of CHAOSSEARCH's patent pending IP. Thomas has also patented several other technologies in the areas of distributed algorithms, virtualization and database science. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of New Hampshire, and founded both student & professional chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Links Referenced

Company site: http://chaossearch.io
Twitter: @ThomasHazel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomashazel/

Speaking Truth to Power in Tech with Dai Wakabayashi

Corey Quinn — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Dai Wakabayashi
Dai Wakabayashi is a tech reporter for the New York Times based in San Francisco whose primary focus is all things Google. Prior to joining the Times, Dai covered Apple and Japanese tech companies (e.g., Sony, Nintendo, Panasonic, and Sharp) for The Wall Street Journal for almost eight years. He also worked for Reuters for nine years, focusing on Microsoft during his time there.

Links Referenced:

Dai’s recent AWS article
NY Times hires Wakabayashi to cover tech
Twitter: @daiwaka
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwakabayashi/
Personal site: https://www.nytimes.com/by/daisuke-wakabayashi
Company site: nytimes.com

‘But in IT, oh, it's Tuesday. Everything's about to change again.’ with Leon Adato

Corey Quinn — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Leon Adato
Leon Adato is a Head Geek and technical evangelist at SolarWinds®, and is a Cisco® Certified Network Associate (CCNA), MCSE and SolarWinds Certified Professional. His experience spans financial, healthcare, food and beverage, and other industries.Before he was a SolarWinds Head Geek, Adato was a SolarWinds user for over a decade. His expertise in IT began in 1989 and has led him through roles in classroom training, desktop support, server support, and software distribution.Funny:In my sordid career, I have been an actor, bug exterminator and wild-animal remover (nothing crazy like pumas or wildebeasts. Just skunks and raccoons.), electrician, carpenter, stage-combat instructor, American Sign Language interpreter, and Sunday school teacher.Oh, and I work with computers.Since 1989 (when you got a free copy of Windows 286 on twelve 5¼” floppies when you bought a copy of Excel 1.0) I have worked as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, desktop support tech, server support engineer, and software distribution expert.Then about 16 years ago I got involved with systems monitoring. I've worked with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, Nagios, Patrol, ZenOss, OpenView, SiteScope, and of course SolarWinds. I've designed solutions for companies that were extremely modest (~10 systems) to those that were mind-bogglingly large (250,000 systems in 5,000 locations). During that time, I've had to chance to learn about monitoring all types of systems – routers, switches, load-balancers, and SAN fabric as well as windows, linux, and unix servers running on physical and virtual platforms.Full LengthLeon Adato is a Head Geek and technical evangelist at SolarWinds®, and is a Cisco® Certified Network Associate (CCNA), MCSE and SolarWinds Certified Professional (he was once a customer, after all). His 27years of network management experience spans financial, healthcare, food and beverage, and other industries.Before he was a SolarWinds Head Geek, Adato was a SolarWinds user for over a decade. His expertise in IT began in 1989 and has led him through roles as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, desktop support tech, server support engineer, and software distribution expert.In the early 2000s, Adato got involved with systems monitoring and has since worked with a wide range of tools including Tivoli®, Nagios®, Patrol, ZenOss®, OpenView, SiteScope, and of course SolarWinds. He has designed solutions for companies that were extremely modest (approx. 10 systems) to those that were mind-bogglingly large (250,000 systems in 5,000 locations), through which he gained experience monitoring all types of systems – routers, switches, load-balancers, and SAN fabric – as well as Windows®, Linux®, and UNIX® servers running on physical and virtual platforms.His career includes key roles at Rockwell Automation®, Nestle, PNC, and CardinalHealth providing server standardization, support, and network management and monitoring.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @leonadato
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adatole/
Personal site: www.adatosystems.com
Company site: www.solarwinds.com

Venture Capital Isn’t as Evil as Twitter Thinks with Adam Jacob

Corey Quinn — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About Adam Jacob
Adam Jacob is a co-founder of Chef Software and the creator of Chef. He has over a decade of experience designing, building, and managing large production systems. Adam is Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of The System Initiative.

Before Chef Software, he founded HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy where he built production cloud infrastructures. Adam has been responsible for large production systems, internal corporate automation, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @adamhjk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjacob/
Personal site: https://sfosc.org
Company site: https://www.systeminit.com

Hyperscaler Infrastructure for the Masses with Jessie Frazelle, Steve Tuck, and Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computing

Corey Quinn — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Links Referenced

Making Engineering and Finance Play Nice Together with Rachel Stephens

Corey Quinn — Wed, 25 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Rachel Stephens
Rachel Stephens is an industry analyst with RedMonk, the developer focused industry analyst firm, covering a broad range of developer and infrastructure products. At RedMonk she has worked with vendors such as Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft.

Rachel arrived at RedMonk with a background in finance, including an MBA with a Business Intelligence specialization, along with broad exposure to a variety of enterprise database systems. Her analysis and work leverages a variety of programming and statistical modeling languages including Python and R. At RedMonk she has covered everything from Infrastructure-as-a-Service pricing patterns and trends to explorations of serverless definitions and usage.

In her free time, Rachel enjoys skiing and spending time in the mountains of Colorado, where she lives with her family.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @rstephensme
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelstephens/
Company site: redmonk.com/rstephens

Optimizing the re:Invent Experience with Pete Cheslock

Corey Quinn — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Pete Cheslock
Pete is Professionally Unaffiliated, but spends his time consulting and advising companies such as CHAOSSEARCH and CloudTruth.

Previous he was the VP of Product for CHAOSSEARCH, and before that he has been running large scale infrastructure on Amazon Web Services since 2009

Links Referenced

re:Invent Expo Nature Walk Twitter Thread
Twitter Username: @petecheslock
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecheslock/
Personal site: https://pete.wtf
Company site: https://pete.wtf
CHAOSSEARCH

The Power of Humor in Tech with Chloe Condon

Corey Quinn — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Chloe Condon
Chloe is a Bay Area based Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. Previously, she worked at Sentry.io where she was an advocate for their open-source & hosted error monitoring tool, and created the award winning "Sentry Scouts" program. Her unique demos and projects with Microsoft Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart "astrology", and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, is likely one of the only engineers you'll meet who has played an ogre princess, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage (a true "triple threat"), and is passionate about bringing folks with non-traditional backgrounds into tech.

Links

Twitter: @ChloeCondon
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloecondon/
Personal site: https://dev.to/chloecondon
Company site: https://azure.microsoft.com

Google Is Deprecating This Podcast with Cody Ogden

Corey Quinn — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Cody Ogden
A product designer at heart, Cody has been crafting experiences for the web since he was ten years old. He’s best known for his open source website and its cheeky Twitter account, Killed by Google, which Fast Company called “an informational fever dream,” and one netizen praised as “an ignorant meme.” His project tracks news of Google’s product decisions until they are laid to rest in the Google Graveyard.

Cody works remotely as a software engineer at Cannabiz Media. He's a fan of hard cider, winters in Minnesota, and sees himself moving into a product design role at some point in the future.

Links

Twitter: @killedbygoogle
LinkedIn URL: https://linkedin.com/in/codyogden
Personal site: https://codyogden.com
Company site: https://killedbygoogle.com

The Future Is Time Series Data with Russ Savage

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Russ Savage
Russ Savage is a Product Manager at InfluxData where he focuses on enabling DevOps for teams using InfluxDB and the TICK Stack. He has a background in computer engineering and has been focused on various aspects of enterprise data for the past 10 years. Russ has previously worked at Cask Data, Elastic, Box, and Amazon. When Russ is not working at InfluxData, he can be seen speeding down the slopes on a pair of skis.

Links Referenced

russ@influxdata.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/russellsavage/
https://www.influxdata.com/

Building Strong Open Source Communities in the Cloud Era with Tiffany Farriss

Corey Quinn — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Tiffany Farriss
Tiffany is the CEO and co-owner of Palantir.net. Along with George DeMet, she provides the vision and values for Palantir. She has over 20 years of internet consulting and development experience and extensive experience providing information architecture and usability consulting for a wide variety of clients. Tiffany has a BA in Mathematics from Northwestern University, where she focused on mathematical modeling and human-computer interaction, and was a member of the Drupal Association Board from 2009–2017.

Links Referenced

Sponsors
- AWS Solutions
- Influx Data
Twitter: @farriss
LinkedIn URL: www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanyfarriss
Company site: Palantir.net

A Day in the Life of Azure DevOps with Sasha Rosenbaum

Corey Quinn — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Sasha Rosenbaum
Sasha is a Program Manager on the Azure DevOps engineering team, focused on improving the alignment of the product with open-source software.

Sasha is a co-organizer of the DevOps Days Chicago and the DeliveryConf conferences, and recently published a book on Serverless computing in Azure with .NET.

Links Referenced:

Sponsor: Snark.cloud/AWSsolutions
Twitter Username: @DivineOps
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-rosenbaum/
Personal site: https://www.sasharosenbaum.com/
Youtube channel: Azure DevOps
Company site: microsoft.com

Building Secure Applications with Tanya Janca

Corey Quinn — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 03:00:00 -0800

About Tanya Janca
Tanya Janca is the co-founder and CEO of Security Sidekick. Her obsession with securing software runs deep, from starting her company, to running her own OWASP chapter for 4 years and founding the OWASP DevSlop open-source and education project. With her countless blog articles, workshops and talks, her focus is clear. Tanya is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion, co-founding the international women’s organization WoSEC, starting the online #MentoringMonday initiative, and personally mentoring, advocating for and enabling countless other women in her field. As a professional computer geek of 20+ years, she is a person who is truly fascinated by the ‘science’ of computer science.

Links

Twitter Username: @shehackspurple
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanya-janca-60ab0998/
Personal site: https://dev.to/shehackspurple
Company site: https://securitysidekick.dev
Sponsor: www.manifold.co

How Software Developers Can Negotiate Better Salaries with Josh Doody

Corey Quinn — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Josh Doody
Josh is a salary negotiation coach who helps experienced software developers negotiate job offers from big tech companies like Google and Amazon.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshdoody
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdoody/
Personal site: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/
My Coaching Site:: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/coach/
A detailed article on how to answer the salary expectations question: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/the-dreaded-salary-question/

The Power of Time Series Databases with Paul Dix

Corey Quinn — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Paul Dix
Paul Dix is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails for Addison Wesley’s. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.

Links Referenced:

Twitter Username: @pauldix
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauldix/
Personal site: pauldix.net
Company site: www.influxdata.com

How Nicolas Cage Taught Me How to Code with Paul Chin Jr.

Corey Quinn — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Paul Chin Jr.
Paul Chin Jr. is a curious human who likes to work with new technologies. His day job is at Cloudreach as a cloud solutions architect, working with enterprises to modernize their applications in the cloud. On the side, he’s a prophet for Nicolas Cage and is called to spread his message.

Links Referenced

Twitter Username: @paulchinjr
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulchinjr/
Personal site: https://www.paulchinjr.com
Company site: www.cloudreach.com
Talk hashtag: #praisecage

The Cloud & Climate Change with Paul Johnston

Corey Quinn — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Paul Johnston
Paul Johnston is an interim CTO, CTO and strategist who has particular interests in serverless, cloud, startups and climate change. Formerly, Paul served as a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS for Serverless and CTO of multiple startups, including one of the world’s first serverless startups. Paul’s also a keynote speaker, tweets a lot at @PaulDJohnston, and blogs a lot on Medium. Right now, he may also be working in stealth mode on something (it’s probably serverless)…

Links Referenced

Twitter Username: PaulDJohnston
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/padajo/
Personal site: https://medium.com/@PaulDJohnston
Company site: http://roundaboutlabs.com/
Sponsor: Manifold

Five Characteristics That Define the Cloud with Nicole Forsgren, PhD

Corey Quinn — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Nicole Forsgren, PhD
Dr. Nicole Forsgren does research and strategy at Google Cloud following the acquisition of her startup DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) by Google. She is co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, and is best known for her work measuring the technology process and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been an entrepreneur, professor, sysadmin, and performance engineer. Nicole’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Nicole earned her PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona, and is a Research Affiliate at Clemson University and Florida International University.

Links Referenced

Twitter Username: @nicolefv
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolefv/
Personal site: nicolefv.com
Company site: cloud.google.com/devops
Manifold: https://www.manifold.co/

The Future of Application Security with Andrew Peterson

Corey Quinn — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Andrew Peterson
Andrew Peterson is the CEO and Cofounder of Signal Sciences. Under Peterson’s leadership, Signal Sciences has become the #1 and most trusted provider of next-gen WAF and RASP technology and one of the fastest growing cybersecurity companies in the world. As CEO, Peterson is responsible for overseeing all business functions, go-to-market activities, and attainment of strategic, operational and financial goals.

Prior to founding Signal Sciences, Peterson has been building leading edge, high performing product and sales teams across five continents for over fifteen years with such companies as Etsy, Google, and the Clinton Foundation. In 2016, O’Reilly published his book Cracking Security Misconceptions to encourage non-security professionals to take part in organizational security. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Science, Technology, and Society.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @ampeters06
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmarshallpeterson Signal Sciences
Sponsor: X-Team

Going Serverless with AJ Stuyvenberg

Corey Quinn — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About AJ Stuyvenberg
Aaron Stuyvenberg (AJ) is a Senior Engineer at Serverless Inc, focused on creating the best possible Serverless developer experience. Before Serverless, he was a Lead Engineer at SportsEngine (an NBCUniversal company). When he's not busy writing software, you can find him skydiving, BASE jumping, biking, or fishing.

Links Referenced:

Reverse Engineering the Capital One Breach with Josh Stella

Corey Quinn — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Josh Stella

Josh Stella is co-founder and CTO of Fugue, the company delivering autonomous cloud infrastructure security and compliance. Previously, Josh was a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he supported customers in the area of national security. Prior to Fugue, Josh served as CTO for a technology startup and, for 25 years, in numerous other IT leadership and technical roles.

Links Referenced

Twitter: @joshstella
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/josh-stella-949a9711
www.fugue.co

The Anatomy of Developer Advocacy with Matt Broberg

Corey Quinn — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Matt Broberg

Matt loves working with technology communities to develop products and content that invite delightful engagement. He’s a serial podcaster, best known for the Geek Whisperers podcast, is on the board of the Influence Marketing Council, co-maintains the DevRel Collective, and often shares his thoughts on Twitter and GitHub @mbbroberg. He’s also a fan of tattoos and cats, though remains unsure of Schrödinger’s.

Links Referenced:

Twitter Username: Mbbroberg
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbbroberg/
Personal site: Mbbroberg.fun
X-Team
CHAOSSEARCH

How to Grade DevOps Teams with Nicole Forsgren, PhD

Corey Quinn — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Nicole Forsgren, PhD

Dr. Nicole Forsgren does research and strategy at Google Cloud following the acquisition of her startup DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) by Google. She is co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, and is best known for her work measuring the technology process and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been an entrepreneur, professor, sysadmin, and performance engineer. Nicole’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Nicole earned her PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona, and is a Research Affiliate at Clemson University and Florida International University.

Links Referenced:

Twitter Username: @nicolefv
LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolefv/
Personal site: nicolefv.com
Company site: cloud.google.com/devops
X-Team: x-team.com/cloud

Episode 74 - Podcasting about Podcasting with Richard Campbell

Corey Quinn — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Richard Campbell

Richard Campbell wrote his first line of code in 1977. His career has spanned the computing industry both on the hardware and software sides, development and operations. He was a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks, acquired by Radware in 2013 and was on the board of directors of Telerik which was acquired by Progress Software in 2014. Today he is a consultant and advisor to a number of successful technology firms and is the founder and chairman of Humanitarian Toolbox (www.htbox.org), a public charity that builds open source software for disaster relief. Richard is also the host of two podcasts: .NET Rocks! (www.dotnetrocks.com) the Internet Audio Talkshow for .NET developers and RunAs Radio (www.runasradio.com) which is a weekly show for IT Professionals.

Links Referenced:

Twitter Username: richcampbell
LinkedIn URL: www.linkedin.com/in/richjcampbell
Personal site: https://rcampbell.me/
Company site: http://runasradio.com

Episode 73 - Building a Cloud Supercomputer on AWS with Mike Warren

Corey Quinn — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 03:00:00 -0700

About Mike Warren

Mike Warren is cofounder and CTO of Descartes Labs. Mike’s past work spans a wide range of disciplines, with the recurring theme of developing and applying advanced software and computing technology to understand the physical and virtual world. He was a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years, and also worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Sandpiper Networks/Digital Island. His work has been recognized on multiple occasions, including the Gordon Bell prize for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. He has degrees in Physics and Engineering & Applied Science from Caltech, and he received a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Links Referenced

Episode 72: Data Security in AWS with Chris Vickery

Corey Quinn — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Chris Vickery

Chris Vickery is Director of Cyber Risk Research at UpGuard. His research has protected over two and a half billion private consumer and account records which would have otherwise remained at risk of malicious exploitation. He has been cited as a cyber security expert by The New York Times, Forbes, Reuters, BBC, LA Times, Washington Post, and many other publications. Some examples of his high profile data discoveries involve entities such as Verizon, Facebook, Viacom, Donald Trump’s campaign website, branches of the US Department of Defense, Tesla Motors, and many more.

Links Referenced:

Episode 71: Boomeranging Back into Microsoft with Tara Walker

Corey Quinn — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Tara Walker

Tara is a Principal Software Engineer on the Azure IoT product group primarily focused making services for IoT and Intelligent Edge great on Azure. While she now primarily focuses on IoT, Tara has additional expertise and interests in Serverless, Artificial Intelligence (AI) cloud services, and Mobile Development solutions. Over her 20-year career, she has been employed by Amazon Web Services, Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner, Georgia Pacific, and various other Fortune 500 companies.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Georgia State University, and currently working on her Master’s degree in Computer Science (MSCS) at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Tara is passionate about technologies including: Artificial Intelligence/ML services & Deep Learning frameworks, Mobile/Game development, Cross-Platform development, and proficient with different programming languages. While primarily focused on IoT services engineering, she also leverages her knowledge and expertise with the aforementioned topics in speaker engagements, as well as, engagements directly to developers & software engineers with OpenHacks and Engineering Code-With activities with Microsoft customers throughout the global community. Her self-imposed goal is to help developers of all walks of life realize they can leverage their tech skills to not only become great engineers but Inventors of the next "Big Thing" that may change the world.

Links Referenced

Episode 70: Creating Custom T-Shirts through the Cloud with Ken Collins

Corey Quinn — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Ken Collins

Ken Collins is a Staff Engineer at Custom Ink focusing on DevOps and eCommerce architecture with an emphasis on emerging opportunities. Custom Ink is approaching its 20th year in business and is entering its second phase in Cloud adoption where Ken helps an increasing growing engineering team succeed using AWS-first well-architected patterns. Ken lives near Norfolk, VA and organizes the area’s Ruby User Group.

Links Referenced:

Episode 69: On-Premise Nation-States with Dr. Galen Hunt

Corey Quinn — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0700

Dr. Galen Hunt founded and leads the Microsoft team responsible for Azure Sphere. The mission of his team is to ensure that every IoT device on the planet is secure and trustworthy. Previously, Dr. Hunt lead the Operating Systems Group at Microsoft Research and pioneered technologies ranging from confidential cloud computing to light-weight container virtualization, type-safe operating systems, and video streaming. Dr. Hunt was a member of Microsoft's founding cloud computing team and helped build Microsoft's first cloud operating system. Dr. Hunt holds 98 U.S. patents, a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of Utah, and Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rochester.

Links Referenced

Episode 68: The Rise of the Cloud-First Generation with Christina Warren

Corey Quinn — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Christina Warren

Christina Warren is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, where she helps shape the overall strategy for Developer Relations in Azure. As an advocate, she hosts shows on Channel 9, Microsoft’s video channel for developer content, speaks and creates content at events, conducts on-camera technical interviews within the developer community, and liaisons with product teams across the company.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Christina spent a decade in digital media as an editor, senior reporter, and commentator, with a focus on technology, business, and, entertainment. As a journalist, she appeared as an expert or commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, Bloomberg, the BBC, Marketplace Radio, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and many more outlets.

She also co-hosts Rocket, a popular tech news podcast, which has the distinction of being one of the only tech podcasts with an all-female hosting team.

Links Referenced

Episode 67: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Mitchell Hashimoto

Corey Quinn — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Mitchell Hashimoto

Mitchell Hashimoto is Founder and CTO of HashiCorp. He is the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault and Nomad - a set of open source tools that each individually are downloaded and used millions of times per year. At one point Mitchell was in the top 5 most active users on GitHub. At HashiCorp, Mitchell is helping define a remote-first culture with over 500 employees spanning dozens of countries. He loves open source, automation, and working from home.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: @MitchellH

Episode 66: VMware? VMhere with Sean O’Dell

Corey Quinn — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Sean O'Dell

Sean is a troublemaker living on the bleeding edge of technology and innovation. As a member of the VMware Cloud Services - Solution and Technology team, Sean is responsible for Evangelism, Developer Relations and assists in many GTM functions. Sean joined VCS in February of 2017 and helped shape and launch the set of SaaS solutions at VMworld 2017. Prior roles include Global Technical Lead for Network Insight (vRNI), Sales Engineer Leader for Arkin, VMware Cloud Management SE and CUSTOMER.

Links Referenced:

Episode 65: Cloud Coreyography Mark 2 with Azure’s Corey Sanders

Corey Quinn — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Corey Sanders

Corey Sanders has 15 years of experience at Microsoft with 13 years of managerial experience. In the last 9 years, Corey has been in the Azure team building the Azure Compute service, and he recently moved into a new role as Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Solutions.

Links Referenced

Episode 64: Serverless Runs on Serverless Framework with Austen Collins

Corey Quinn — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Austen Collins

Austen is an entrepreneur and software engineer located in Oakland, CA. He is also the founder and CEO of Serverless, Inc. and the creator of the Serverless Framework, an open source project and module ecosystem to help everyone build applications exclusively on Lambda, without the hassle and costs required by servers. He describes himself as a product-obsessed, software engineer who is focused on making meaning, business value and great customer experiences.

Links Referenced

Episode 63: DevOps for Dummies with Emily Freeman

Corey Quinn — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Emily Freeman

Emily Freeman grew up in the “swamp” as Trump lovingly refers to it. With politics in her blood, she chased after her dream of living out an episode of the West Wing. After four years of arguing — pretty much sums up a PoliSci degree — she left school disappointed that campaigns are more about recruiting 20-year-olds to live in poverty than it is to wine and dine Koch brothers.

Her dreams of Aaron Sorkin-level dialogue and Michelin-star dinners dashed, Emily took up ghostwriting. No, those bloggers you read with millions of followers don’t write their own articles. Sorry to disappoint.

After many years of typing, Emily had a slightly-older-than-quarterlife crisis and made the bold (insane?!) choice to switch careers into software engineering. With no experience at all, she packed her six-month-old daughter, blind dog and a few boxes into her anti-mom mobile of a sports car and drove across the country to attend a seven-month code school.

Emily completed seven grueling months of code reviews, pair programming and learning Ruby on Rails. After falling in love with Denver, a city as vibrant as she is, Emily decided to stay.

Emily is the author of DevOps for Dummies and the curator of JavaScript January — a collection of JavaScript articles which attracts 30,000 visitors in the month of January. To learn more about Emily's story, visit Growth in Fear.

Links Referenced:

Episode 62: Serverless Storytelling with Anna Spysz

Corey Quinn — Wed, 29 May 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Anna Spysz

Anna Spysz is a writer turned software engineer at Stackery in Portland. When not software engineering, she likes to travel, play music, and kung fu fight for fun and profit.

Links Referenced:

Episode 61: Building Microsoft Azure with Scott Guthrie

Corey Quinn — Wed, 22 May 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Scott Guthrie

As executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud + AI Group, Scott Guthrie is responsible for the company’s computing fabric (cloud and edge, including cloud infrastructure, server, database, CRM, ERP, management) and Artificial Intelligence platform (infrastructure, runtimes, frameworks, tools and higher-level services around perception, knowledge and cognition).

Prior to leading the Cloud + AI Group, Guthrie helped lead Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud platform. Since joining the company in 1997, he has made critical contributions to many of Microsoft’s key cloud, server and development technologies and was one of the original founders of the .NET project. Guthrie graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Duke University.

Links Referenced

https://azure.microsoft.com/

Episode 60: Managing Secrets for Kubernetes with Kamus with Omer Levi Hevroni

Corey Quinn — Wed, 15 May 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Omer Levi Hevroni

Omer has been coding since 4th grade when his dad taught him BASIC, and he got hooked. From that point, he learned to code in many programming languages (today his favorite is C#). Today he’s working at Soluto by Asurion, and coding is a huge part of his day job.

His passion for AppSec started by accident when he was offered the role of security champion. The AppSec journey was (and still is) fascinated, and taught him a lot. OWASP helped him a lot during this journey; This is why he decided to become a paying member and also leading OWASP Glue.

Omer’s current job is DevSecOps – helping the entire team to produce more secure software. Besides his job, he’s also giving a lot of talks all over the world, and heavy OSS contributor – mainly to Kamus, a secret encryption solution for Kubernetes platform.

When he’s not working – he’s enjoying the company of his two beloved kids and his wife.

Links

Episode 59: Rebuilding AWS S3 in a Weekend with Valentino Volonghi

Corey Quinn — Wed, 08 May 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Valentino Volonghi

Valentino currently designs and implements AdRoll's globally distributed architecture. He is the President and Founder of the Italian Python Association that runs PyCon Italy. Since 2000, Valentino has specialized in distributed systems and actively worked with several Open Source projects. In his free time, he shows off his biking skills on his Cervelo S2 on 50+ mile rides around the Bay.

Links Referenced:

Episode 58: The Cloud Is Great, But It Isn’t Perfect

Corey Quinn — Wed, 01 May 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Richard Boyd

Richard is a Cloud Data Engineer with the iRobot Corporation’s Cloud Data Platform where he builds tools and services to support the world’s most beloved vacuum cleaner. Before joining iRobot, Richard built discrete event simulators for Amazon’s automated fulfillment centers in Amazon Robotics, ensured your Alexa device had all the skills you could ever want on Amazon’s Alexa team, held test engineering lead roles at BAE, cyber warfare systems analyst roles at MIT, and research roles for the Center for Army Analysis. He holds advanced degrees in Applied Mathematics & Statistics.

Links Referenced

Episode 57: Building the Cloud: The logistics and practicality of going serverless in 2019

Corey Quinn — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Richard Hartmann

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Swiss Army Chainsaw at SpaceNet, leading both a greenfield datacenter build and monitoring. By night, he is involved in several FLOSS projects, a Prometheus team member, founder of OpenMetrics, and organizing various related conferences, including but not limited FOSDEM, DENOG, and Chaos Communication

Congress.

Links Referenced:

Episode 56: Bringing Open Source to the Cloud

Corey Quinn — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Jess Frazelle

Jessie Frazelle is a computer programmer who has worked at GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Docker and various companies, startups, even design agencies before that. She’s worked on a lot of the open source projects in the container ecosystem, she’s a top abuser of the GitHub api, and runs her own cloud from her apartment and a colo in NYC called jess cloud.

Links Referenced:

summerofcode.withgoogle.com

Joe.dev

Soul of a New Machine

github.com/Gazler/githug

Episode 55: Get More out of the Cloud with AWS Training and Certification

Corey Quinn — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 06:00:00 -0700

About Maureen Lonergan

Maureen Lonergan joined Amazon Web Services in March of 2012 as Director of Training and Certification. Since then, Maureen has worked to build a set of programs and offerings that offer a flexible path for learners to advance their careers and for organizations to enable their teams and get more out of the cloud. Her team is responsible for building, maintaining, and delivering both classroom and digital training courses alongside an AWS Certification program to validate cloud knowledge. Education programs, including AWS Academy, aim to build a pipeline of cloud talent for the future. Over the course of the last 7 years, the organization has delivered training in over 50 Countries and hundreds of thousands of learners. Prior to Amazon, Maureen was the Senior Director for Partner Enablement at VMware where she built training and enablement programs and delivered training to hundreds of thousands of individuals across a channel of 30,000 partners. She’s also served as the Director of Technical Training and Enablement at Symantec and the Director of Education Services at Ariba.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Where to get started learning about the cloud
The variety of AWS certifications offered
Why certifications are valuable for job prospects
The work that goes into designing the AWS training courses
Some partners where you can access training

Links:

Episode 54: Rethinking the Robot: How AWS Robotics is helping shape the future of domestic and commercial robotics

Corey Quinn — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 06:00:00 -0700

Some of the highlights of the show include:

The benefits of RoboMaker in code deployment
How cloud computation frees up local resources
Using machine learning to improve robot reaction
How great a name RoboMaker is
Amazon’s commitment to the enduring API

Links:

Episode 53: Company Migration On Two Fronts: AWS and the Career Paths of Software Engineers

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 03:00:00 -0700

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Implications for migrating to AWS
Why and how for using Amazon vs hardware
The positive effects of mentoring for both the mentor and mentee
Technical vs Management tracks at a software company
Career advice for women in the tech field

Links:

Episode 52: AWS as a Career Finding Clarity in the Ever-changing Job Market of the Cloud

Corey Quinn — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 03:43:00 -0700

The job market in the AWS world is complex and often confusing to both employers and employees. Wouldn’t it be great to have over 43,000 data points to draw a larger picture of the market and where you fall in line?

Today, we are talking to Kate Powers who walks us through the AWS Salary Survey from Jefferson Frank and discusses some interesting insights as well as real world examples of the findings.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

The AWS job market at large
Training Certificates: what’s their value
How much value is in a job title
Most desirable skills from employers
Gender representation in the industry
The discrepancy in compensation based on geography

Links:

Episode 51: Size of Cloud Bill: Not About Number of Customers, but Number of Engineers You've Hired

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 22:00:00 -0800

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 understand how their actions impact the bill
Cost of Cloud bill is dependant on different factors, including new features, new users, and cost of goods sold (COGS)
Scale and manage bill by using a platform app or hiring a consultant/team
Understand pricing of AWS and learn best practices for cost controls early on
Don’t leave money on the table by focusing on engineering time - not best use of resources; focus on the smallest things that have the biggest impact
Cost is important, but don’t slow down those developing in the Cloud; open lines of communication to create culture to understand cost, value what’s measured

Links:

Episode 50: If You Lose Data, Your Company is Having a Very Bad Day

Corey Quinn — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 09:34:00 -0800

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 format, and run multiple analyses using preferred tool at the same time on the same data
AWS offers Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Managed Blockchain to address use case and need for blockchain
Authenticity of data is a concern with traditional databases; consider a database tool or service that does not allow data to be changed
Lake Formation lets customers set up, build, and secure data lakes in less time
DocumentDB: Made as simple as possible to improve customer experience
AWS Culture: Awareness and recognition that it takes many to conceive, build, launch, and grow a product - acknowledge every participant, including customers

Links:

Episode 49: Open Source Software: Slipping Beneath the Surface of Awareness

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 22:00:00 -0800

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:

Episode 48: Nobody Gets Rid of Anything, Including Data

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 22:00:00 -0800

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 systems
Empathy building exercise and security culture diagnostic help companies understand compliance obligations
Security Culture: Beliefs and assumptions that drive decisions and actions
Evolution of understanding with public Cloud’s security and availability
Raise the bar and shift mindset from pure prevention to early detection/ mitigation; follow FAIR (factor analysis of information risk)

Links:

Episode 47: Racing the Clouds

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 22:00:00 -0800

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 calibrating network performance of public Cloud providers; best-effort medium that has no predictability and is vulnerable to attacks
AWS’ performance predictability was lower than GCP Cloud and Azure leveraged their own backbones to move user traffic
Certain regions, such as Asia, were handled better by GCP and Azure than AWS
Customers should understand value of long-distance Internet latency when selecting a Cloud provider
Determine what the report’s data means for your business; conduct customized measurements for your environment

Links:

Episode 46: Don't Be Afraid of the Bold Ask

Corey Quinn — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 09:17:00 -0800

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 in time and training
Different design patterns and best practices to use when building applications
Batch operations make it easier for customers to manage objects stored in S3
AWS considers compliance and retention when building features
Mentorship: Don’t be afraid of the bold ask

Links:

Episode 45: Everybody Needs Backup and Recovery

Corey Quinn — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 08:01:00 -0800

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, utilize automation
Business requirements for data to have a level of durability and availability
People vs. Technology: Which is the bottleneck when it comes to backups?
Words of Wisdom: Establish an end goal and workflow/pathway to get there

Links:

Episode 44: Disagree In Commits Console Recorder for AWS

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 22:00:00 -0800

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 concerns with Console Recorder
Changes to Management Console that may break things
Ian’s past, present, and future projects and products
Words of Wisdom: If you don’t like something, just fix it yourself

Links:

Episode 43: Here’s a Document on How to Best Deal with My Foibles

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 22:00:00 -0800

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 established between the manager and their employee
Get feedback early on to make sure that what you include in the document is helpful; it should reflect reality and be discussed
Share README with your manager to make sure you’re both on the same page about team philosophies and expectations
README is a living document that needs to be updated occasionally because things change
README adds context; it’s not designed to make employee feel like they’re back in school and panicking because they’re not prepared
Manager README - Not Matt’s best selection of terminology
Who’s the best boss you ever had? Why? They can be a force that shapes your life and career from the right perspective
Philosophy of Management: Don’t do what terrible managers have done; be transparent about strategic reasons for priorities changing

Links:

Episode 42: SCREAMING WITH CHAOSSEARCH: A reInvent reTrospective

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 22:00:00 -0800

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 complaints
Track and analyze data, but don’t use it to invade privacy or become creepy
Las Vegas: Right place for conferences, such as re:Invent?
Rather than focusing on going to conference sessions, make meeting and talking to people doing interesting things your priority
Midnight Madness Event: Only place Corey could do stand-up Cloud comedy
re:Invent 2019: Plan appropriately, identify what you want to get out of it, register ASAP to get a nearby hotel, and schedule meetings with AWS staff

Links:

Episode 41: Open Source is Not a Business Model

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 22:00:00 -0800

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 service company - difficult to be both effectively or go from being one to the other; build partner relationship, focus, and say “no”
Lack of awareness about AWS Outposts admitting public Cloud is no longer a viable business model
Amazon relentlessly focuses on what its customers want and tries to keep promises about what it can and can’t do
Cloud Native: Not where you run, but how you run; confining variables
Self-fulfilling prophecy to under deliver when you make the bad decision to under source IT across the board
Cloud Native, DevOps, SRE: Buzzwords that equal one thing and work together
Dilemma of not building everything and buying some things, but you can’t buy everything; humans like to shop and go with the easiest option

Links:

Episode 40: Wave of Innovation Breaking Ahead of the Bow of the Ship that is Amazon

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 22:00:00 -0800

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 infinitely or never fails) are true when it comes to products on the market, so people are skeptical
Heavybit focuses on helping businesses build a bottoms-up, grassroots community around its products and a disciplined inside/direct sales motion
Build vs. Buy: Whatever people try to do themselves is a costly, pale imitation of something they can buy
Advice for New Entrepreneurs: Never compete with AWS on hosting compute because it will obliterate and Amazon is great at plumbing, terrible at painting
AWS’s version of your product won't be as sophisticated; continually work on it to deliver a more seamless product and customer success experience
Measure downtime/outages in terms of dollars by using monitoring tools that deliver more holistic, integrated, comprehensive experience than CloudWatch
Starting a company is easier; even if you're the 800-pound gorilla in the category you created, keep innovating and building or Amazon’s coming after you
Azure, unlike GCP, has ability to meet customers where they are, rather than telling them where they should be
Understand the problem your customer is trying to solve and understand how far out of their current comfort zone they're willing to go to solve that problem
Software exists to create business value; it doesn't matter what it's written in or how it's hosted, so some systems will be around for a long time

Links:

Episode 39: Give 10 Bad Talks All in a Row and Then Get Fired

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 22:00:00 -0800

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 a talk at the last minute, but it would be much better, if you prepared for it
Don’t intentionally try to think of something; have conversations with people and listen to other talks to develop anecdotes, stories, and cold opens
Humor can be tricky; what you think is funny, other people might not
Make things memorable; show good ideas by showing bad ideas - it’s the ‘don't do this, do this instead’ model
Submit early and often, but submit appropriately; if you are always submitting stuff that’s inappropriate for an event, your stuff starts to be ignored
Sometimes, you may want to avoid slides that auto advance; if you trip over yourself: Stop, repeat, back up, take questions, etc.
Try not to read from notes or slides; takes the life and engagement out of the talk
People can only do one thing at a time - listen or read
Practice: Record yourself every time you practice and watch it; focus on blocking and tackling
You have about 45 seconds to grab people's interest before they look at their phone; get them engaged via a story, picture, or anecdote

Links:

Episode 38: Must be Willing to Defeat the JSON Heretics

Corey Quinn — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 09:45:00 -0800

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 network; anything in that network can talk to each other
Lambda layers let developers create one Git layer that includes multiple functionality and put it in all functions for consistency and management
Git is an open-source amalgam of different programming languages that has grown and changed over time, but it has its own build system
Stackery created a PHP runtime functionality for Lambda; you don't want to run your own runtime - leave that up to a Cloud service provider for security reasons
Should you refactor existing Lambda functions to leverage layers? No, rebuild everything already built before re-architecting everything to use serverless
Many companies find serverless to be useful for their types of workloads; about 95% of workloads can effectively be engineered on a serverless foundation
Trough of Disillusionment or Gartner Hype Cycle: Stackery wants to re-engage and help people who have had challenges with serverless
Is DynamoDB considered serverless? Yes, because it’s got global replication
Puritanical (being able to scale down to zero) and practical approaches to the definition of serverless

Links:

Episode 37: Hiring in the Cloud “I assume CrowdStrike makes drones”

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 22:00:00 -0800

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 “wee lad in the industry” to a senior member/leader and giving back as a way to recognize those who helped him along the way
Hiring Horror Stories: People going through borderline ridiculous levels of hiring games and terrible interview paradigms
Companies sometimes look for something too specific - exact match instead of fuzzy match; they never have time to train, but time to look for a perfect unicorn
Articulate’s Hiring Process: Day 1 - Slack interview; Day 2 - Technical pieces; and Day 3 - Pairing with others
Articulate looks for people enthusiastic about technology, able to learn, and with emotional intelligence; company values independence, autonomy, and respect
Companies that spend several hours to make a hiring decision tend to have less success with those they hire
Cloud Certificates/Certifications: Can be valuable for applicants with no real-world experience; they don’t indicate how they’re going to work or learn
Applicants need to demonstrate a base level of knowledge; if they don’t have a skill set, they should start a project to learn about something - learning is fun
If you’re established in your career, reach out to someone just starting out to guide them
If you’re starting out in your career, reach out to people to talk about the next steps to take in your career (contact Corey or Don)

Links:

Episode 36: I'm Not Here to Correct Your English, Just Cloud Bills

Corey Quinn — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:14:00 -0800

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 or down to select an instance type that calculates costs; remain flexible and be aware of what you pay
Natural instinct is to blame people; mistakes are made, especially when a human factor is introduced to an automated system
Creating a mindset that focuses on feature and detail-oriented is challenging
Cottage industry of code bases running in Big Data and other expensive realms
As a product continues to evolve and grow, governance comes along for the ride and AWS bills are streamlined
Will serverless, Lambda, and RDS change how Amazon charges in the future?
State of scale of AWS and developing a more palatable method for releases because people can’t keep up with them and stop paying attention
Two-Pizza Team: Amazon’s management philosophy that any team that works on a service should be able to be fed with two pizzas
Such small teams work quickly and have the freedom to fail, but Amazon has a reliability for the longevity of its different services

Links:

Episode 35: Metered Pricing: Everyone Hates That! Charge Based on Value

Corey Quinn — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 04:41:00 -0800

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 should choose today that’s going to be prominent in 3 years
Serverless empowers new billing models and traces the flow of capital; companies can choose to make pricing more complicated or simplified
What value are you providing? Serverless can offer flexible pricing foundation
When something breaks, you need to be made aware of such problems; Amazon bill doesn’t change based on what IOpipe does, which is not true with others
Developers are the ones woken up and on call, so IOpipe focuses on providing them value and help; they are not left alone to figure out and fix problems
Serverless and event-driven applications offer a new type of instrumentation and observability to collect telemetry on every event
For serverless to go mainstream, AWS needs to up its observability level to gather data to answer questions
AWS, in the serverless space, needs to make significant progress on cold starts in other languages, and offer more visibility and easier deployment out of the box

Links:

Episode 34: Slack and the Safety Dance of Chaos Engineering

Corey Quinn — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 is working on a multi-Cloud strategy because if AWS is down, Slack still needs to work
Slack has a close relationship with AWS and is a collaborative company; it has immediate access to AWS staff anytime there’s a problem
Slack uses Terraform and Chef and working to determine if its production workflows in Kubernetes would be worthwhile
Disasterpiece Theater: Real scenario that might happen and surmise what will happen; don’t cause production issues, but teach Slack employees
Slack hires collaborative, empathetic people to create a collaborative environment where everyone works together toward a goal
Slack was firmly in a centralized operations model, but is transforming toward development teams to increase responsibility and service ownership
Slack doesn’t encourage remote work because it’s not in a position to put in that investment; day-to-day work happens in hallways and between desks
Slack sees itself as an enterprise software company; an enterprise software company must have enterprise software reliability, stability, and processes
Slack has thousands of servers, so events and disruptions happen more often; system needs to respond, react, and repair itself without human intervention

Links:

Episode 33: The Worst Manager I Ever Had Spoke Only In Metaphor

Corey Quinn — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 and operations something she wanted to do
Academic paths don’t tend to focus on such fields as SRE, and interns tend to come exclusively from specific schools
Fatema’s school requires five internships to graduate and receive a degree; upper-year students are already very qualified professional software engineers
Companies don’t have time to train and want to find someone with an exact skill set; instead of hiring someone, they spend months with an unfilled position
Continuity Problem: You can’t train someone to be a systems administrator, if you aren’t willing to give them certain privileges due to inexperience
Use a low-stakes environment to train, where mistakes can be made; most systems aren’t on a critical path - don’t keep people away from contributing
If you have never broke production, that means either you’re lying or you’ve been in an environment that didn’t trust you to touch things that mattered
Internship should mimic the kind of work that everyone else is doing; give them responsibilities where their work has an impact
Bad mentors lead to bad internships; person in charge of your success doesn’t have the necessary skills; needs to be a good communicator, set expectations
As the intern, ask about possible outcomes of internship early on; mentors should be clear about expectations, feedback, and offers

Links:

Episode 32: Lambda School: A New Approach to “Hire Ed”

Corey Quinn — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 educational institutions by being mission-driven and knowing its investors want ROI
Lambda aligns its incentives with those of students; an income share agreement means the school doesn’t make money, unless students are successful
Lambda’s 7-month program is less of a risk for someone later in their career; some don't have capital to support their family while going to school for 4 years
Lambda incentivizes healthy financial habits; after two years of repayment, students can put that money into retirement, savings, and investments
5 Tracks Now Offered by Lambda: iOS development, UX, Full Stack Web development, data science, and Android development
Mastery Based Progression System: When you're learning something sequentially, where knowledge builds, you don't move on until you’ve mastered it
Lambda’s acceptance rate is around 5% and based on people who can keep up
Lambda works with different partner companies to help them find qualified graduates - people they want to hire

Links:

Episode 31: Hey Sam, wake up. It’s 3am, and time to solve a murder mystery!

Corey Quinn — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:28:00 -0700

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 auto scaling group or Lambda functions
Runbook.cloud takes all aggregate data to influence alerts; if there’s a problem in a specific region with a specific service, the tool is careful to caveat it
Various monitoring solutions are on the market; runbook.cloud is designed for a mass market environment; it takes metrics that AWS provides for free and makes it so you don’t need to worry about them
Will runbook.cloud compete with or sell out to AWS? Amazon wants to build underlying infrastructure, other people to use its APIs to build interfaces for users
Runbook.cloud is sold through AWS Marketplace; it’s a subscription service where you pay by the hour and the charges are added to your AWS bill
Amazon vs. Other Cloud Providers: Work is involved to detect problems that address multiple Clouds; it doesn’t make sense to branch out to other Clouds
Runbook.cloud was built on top of serverless technology for business financial reasons; way to align outlay and costs because you pay for exactly what you use
Analysis paralysis is real; it comes down to getting the emotional toil of making decisions down to as few decision points as possible
Save money on Lambda; instead of using several Lambda functions concurrently, put everything into a single function using Go
AWS responds to customers to discover how they use its services; it comes down to what customers need

Links:

Episode 30: How to Compete with Amazon

Corey Quinn — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 with a client to discuss their different needs
Vendor Lock-in: Customers concerned about moving application to Cloud provider and how difficult it will be to move code and design variables elsewhere
For every service you include in your architecture, evaluate the service within the context of a particular business case
Identify failure scenarios, what can go wrong, and if something goes wrong, how it’s going to be remediated
CloudWatching detects events that are going to happen, and you can trigger responses for those events
Partnering with Amazon: Companies are pushing a multi-Cloud narrative; you gain visibility and credibility, but it’s not essential to be successful
Can you compete against Amazon? Depends on which area you choose
Expand product selection to grow, focus on user experience, and improve performance to compete against Amazon
MiserBot: Don’t freak out about your bill because Ernesto created a Slack chatbot to monitor your AWS costs

Links:

Episode 29: Future of Serverless: A Toy that will Evolve and Offer Flexibility

Corey Quinn — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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, given a particular context, is not always clear
Now, serverless feels like a toy, but good enough to run production workflow; future of serverless - will continue to evolve and offer more flexibility
Serverless is used to build applications; DevOps/IOT teams and enterprises are adopting serverless because it makes solutions more cost effective

Links:

Episode 28: Serverless as a Consulting Cash Register (now accepting Bitcoin!)

Corey Quinn — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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); companies will re-evaluate how things get done
Serverless is either known as an evolution or revolution; transformative to a point
Winding up with a large number of shops where when something breaks, they don’t have the experience to fix it; gain practical experience through sharing
Seek developer feedback and perform testing, but know where and when to stop
With serverless, you have little control of the environment; focus on automated parts you do control
Serverless Movement: People have opinions and want you to know them
Understand continuum of options for running your application in the Cloud; learn pros and cons; and pick the right tool
Reconciliation between serverless and containers will need to play out; changes will come at some point
Blockchain + serverless + machine learning + Kubernetes + service mesh = raise entire seed round

Links:

Episode 27: What it Took for Google to Make Changes: Outages and Mean Tweets

Corey Quinn — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 that they need to change some things
Google tends to focus on writing services aimed purely at developers; it struggles to put itself in the shoes of corporate-enterprise IT shops
GCP has a few key design decisions that set it apart from AWS; focuses on global resources rather than regional resources
When picking a provider, is there a clear winner? AWS or GCP? Consider company’s values, internal capabilities, resources needed, and workload
GCP’s tendency to end service on something people are still using vs. AWS never ending a service tends to push people in one direction
GCP has built a smaller set of services that are easy to get started with, while AWS has an overwhelming number of services
Different Philosophies: Not every developer writes software as if they work at Google; AWS meets customers where they are, fixes issues, and drops prices
GCP understands where it needs to catch up and continues to iterate and release features

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Episode 26: I’m not a data scientist, but I work for an AI/ML startup building on Serverless Containers

Corey Quinn — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Various problems can be solved with AI; companies are spending time and money on AI
Tasks can be automated that are too intelligent to write around simple software
Machine learning (ML) models are applicable for many purposes; real people with real problems and who are not academics can use ML
Fargate is instant-on Docker containers as a service; handles infrastructure scaling, but involves management expense
Instant-on works with numerous containers, but there will probably be a time when it no longer delivers reasonable fleet performance on demand
Decision to use Kafka was based on workload, stream-based ingestion
Veritone’s writes code that tries to avoid provider lock-in; wants to make an integration as decoupled as possible
People spend too much time and energy being agnostic to their technology and giving up benefits
If you dream about seeing your name up in lights, Christopher describes the process of writing a post for AWS
Pain Points: Newness of Fargate and unfamiliarity with it; limit issues; unable to handle large containers

Links:

Episode 25: Kubernetes is Named After the Greek God of Spending Money on Cloud Services

Corey Quinn — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 containerization inside Linux Kernel is an opportunity for Google to share container management technology and philosophy with the world
Google Next: Knative journey toward lighter-weight serverless-based applications; and GKE On-Prem, customers and teams working with Kubernetes running on premise
Innovation: When logging into GCP console, you can terminate all billable resources assigned to project and access tab for building by hand
GCP's console development strategy includes hard work on documentation, making things easy to use, and building thoughtfulness in grouping services
Google is about design goals, tradeoffs, and metrics; it’s about hyper scale and global footprint of requirements, as well as supporting every developer
Conception 1: Google builds HyperScale Reid-Centric user partitioned apps and don't build globally consistent data driven apps
Conception 2: Software engineers at the top Internet companies do the code and write amazing things instantly
12-Factor App: Opinions of how to architect apps; developers should have choices, but take away some cognitive and operating load complexity
Businesses are running core workloads on Google, which had to put atomic clocks in data centers and private fiber networking to make it all work
Perception that Google focuses on new things, rather than supporting what's been released; industry is on a treadmill chasing shiny things and creating noise
Industry needs to be welcoming and inclusive; a demand for software, apps, and innovation, but number of developers remains because everyone’s not included
Human vs. Technology: More investment and easier onboarding with technology and an obligation to build local communities
Goal: Take database complexity and start removing it for lots of use cases and simplify things for users to deal with replication, charting, and consistency issues
DevFest: Google has about 800 Google developer groups that do a lot of things to build local communities and write code together

Links:

Episode 24: Serverless Observability via the bill is terrible

Corey Quinn — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 complicated functioning
Epsagon is a global observer for what the industry is doing and how it is implementing serverless as it evolves
Trends and use cases include focusing on serverless first instead of the Cloud
Economic Argument: Less expensive than running things all the time and offers ability to trace capital flow; but be cautious about unpredictable cost
Use bill to determine how much performance and flow time has been spent
Companies seem to be trying to support every vendor’s serverless offering; when it comes to serverless, AWS Lambda appears to be used most often
Not easy to move from one provider to another; on-premise misses the point
People starting with AWS Lambda need familiarity with other services, which can be a reasonable but difficult barrier that’s worth the effort
Managing serverless applications may have to be done through a third party
Systemic view of how applications work focuses on overall health of a system, not individual function
Epsagon is headquartered in Israel, along with other emerging serverless startups; Israeli culture fuels innovation

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Episode 23: Most Likely to be Misunderstood: The Myth of Cloud Agnosticism

Corey Quinn — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 world?
Cloud offers greater flexibility; but no matter what, there should be a secondary option when a critical path comes to a breaking point
Hand-off from one provider to another is more likely to cause an outage than a multi-region single provider failure
Exclusion of Cloud Agnostic Tooling: The more we create tools that do the same thing regardless of provider, there will be more agnosticism from implementers
Workload-dependent where data gravity dictates choices; bandwidth isn’t free
Certain services are only available on one Cloud due to licensing; but tools can help with migration
Major service providers handle persistent parts of architecture, and other companies offer database services and tools for those providers
Cost may/may not be a factor why businesses stay with 1 instead of multi-Cloud
How much RPO and RTO play into a multi-Cloud decision
Selecting a database/data store when building; consider security encryption

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Episode 22: The Chaos Engineering experiment that is us-east-1

Corey Quinn — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 beneficial to have the customer get what they want, be happy with the service, and achieve success with the customer
Chaos Engineering isn’t about breaking things to prove a point
Chaos Engineering takes a scientific approach
Other than during carefully staged DR exercises, DR plans usually don’t work
Availability Theater: A passive data center is not enough; exercise DR plan
Chaos Engineering is bringing it down to a level where you exercise it regularly to build resiliency
Start small when dealing with availability
Chaos Engineering is a journey of verifying, validating, and catching surprises in a safe environment
Get started with Chaos Engineering by asking: What could go wrong?
Embrace failure and prepare for it; business process resilience
Gremlin’s GameDay and Chaos Conf allows people to share experiences

Links:

Episode 21: Remember when RealNetworks used to-- BUFFERING

Corey Quinn — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 various repos; then they experience the lab’s configuration management suite
Interview Process: Put out a posting, student submits an application online, each candidate is reviewed, student is given a screening quiz,
If a student passes the screening process, they are brought in for an in-person interview for personality and technical questions
Students tend to initially have the least amount of experience and most difficulty with a repository that has multiple people committing to it and dealing with PRs
Spinning up VMs and understanding how configuration management is connected, how services communicate, and how to set up an application
Round-Robins and System Sprint Meetings: Focus on discussing and documenting processes, issues, suggestions, comments, and other information
Younger students are mentored by Lance and the older students; every generation has to evolve because the environment and industry evolve
OSL made OpenStack work on POWER8, PowerPC, and PowerPC little-endian; gateway into Cloud - having OpenStack instance to offer services
Vast majority of OSL’s revenue comes from donations; no direct support from the university; finding companies to serve as sponsors is beneficial to all
Future of OSL: Providing more Cloud-like services; creating a more internal, private Cloud’ and containerized ways of running or deploying applications

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Episode 20: The Wizard of AWS

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 23:58:00 -0700

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; it build things in response to customers’ questions, requests, and feedback
Naming Services and Products: Is it helpful? Is it descriptive? Does it have any hidden meanings?
Amazonian DNA and Dog Friendly Workspace: Jeff went from super fearful to accepting, to now thinking of dogs as incredible creations because they add fun and excitement to the office
As part of hiring, each interviewer is assigned Amazon leadership principles (LPs) to ask questions that measure a candidate against those LPs
What is the secret to getting hired at Amazon? Study the LPs to understand what they're about and be able to express your philosophies and history with LPs
re:Invent makes sure customers understand services - What is it? What does it do? How do they put it to work? What are the best use cases for it?
Things can never be too simple; you start from zero, put a lot of different things in there, and then you need the feedback to build in simplicity
AWS is following a more on-demand approach than traditional reserve instances; it opens the door to being used in a lot of ways
AWS does a lot of work before a launch to make sure it’s got infrastructure, scaling, monitoring, and capacity in place
If you are a customer, talk to AWS and let them know what they're doing right or wrong; write a blog post, tweet about it, share it with them in some way
Is the breadth of product offerings from AWS too vast? Is it offering too many things?
AWS was not explicit about where it was going with Cloud computing or do analyses or projections about it; it simply launched SQS and let it speak for itself
Customer feedback shapes what Amazon works on; customers share and then AWS re-prioritizes to make sure it’s delivering the right thing at the right time
Remember: It's not just bits and bytes, it's about the organic life form

Links:

Jeff Barr on Twitter

Jeff Barr on LinkedIn

AWS

AWS Blog

Jeff Barr’s Blog

Amazon Machine Images

Zero Client

AWS Workspaces

AWS Lambda

Amazon Leadership principles

re:Invent

The Robot Uprising Will Have Very Clean Floors

Serverlessly Storing My Dad Jokes in a Dadabase

Days Until re:Invent

Episode 19: I want to build a world spanning search engine on top of GCP

Corey Quinn — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 17:12:00 -0700

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 resolve issues when technology fails
Learn from failures through instant reports and shared post-mortems; be transparent with customers and yourself
GCP: Is it part of Google or not? It’s not a division between old and new.
Perceptions and misunderstandings of how Google does things and how it’s a different environment
Google’s efforts toward customer service and responsiveness to needs
Migrating between different Cloud providers vs. higher level services
How to use Cloud machine learning-based products
GCP needs to focus on usability to maintain a phase of growth
Offer sensible APIs; tear up, turn down, and update in a programmatic fashion
Promotion vs. Different Job: When you’ve learned as much as you can, look for another team to teach something new
What is Cloud and what isn’t? Cloud deployments require SRE to be successful but SREs can work on systems that do not necessarily run in the Cloud.

Links:

Episode 18: Sitting on the curb clapping as serverless superheroes go by

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 managed for you
AWS Lambda: Is it today’s trend or a bias that everyone is using it; Lambda makes up 80% of current FaaS adoption
Serverless Ecosystem: You can build it however you want, and you’re doing it right; but don’t take that at face-value; no two Lambda environments are alike
Cloud services at this scale have not been knitted together to form applications that are serving major workloads; best practices need to be established
Native Cloud providers will consolidate, and individual frameworks will be created with components of application stacks tied together to build systems
Serverless vs. Containers: No need for disparity - we can learn to get along; people use containers because it is easier than going serverless
Serverless Heroes series features people thinking out-of-the-box and helps identify emerging trends; serverless is growing, and it’s not just about startups
Went from working with a Sharpie to Procreate for the FaaS and Furious cartoon series; serverless component of process is for invoicing
Changes? Packaging to handle sharing; more knobs on console; unified process needed because too many building own workflow and tooling
Certification: Proof-positive that you know what you’re talking about or is it questionable value if not backing up expertise in the real world?

Links:

Episode 17: Pouring Kubernetes on things with reckless abandon

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 only recently become productive because of its community finding and reporting issues
Business value of deploying Kubernetes to a new environment: Flexibility and uniform system of management; and it can provide a context shift
Implementation Challenges with Workshops/Tutorials: Valuable entry level strategy for people learning Kubernetes; but the translation is not easy
About 85% of the work Reactive Ops does is helping its customers get on to Kubernetes is spent on application architecture
If thinking about moving to Kubernetes, how well will your current applications translate? Do you want to start over from scratch?
Value in paying someone to do something for you
Using Defaults: Try initially until you realize what you need; Kubernetes gives you options, but it’s a challenging path to go from defaults to advanced
Deploying a workload between all major Cloud providers is possible, but there are challenges in managing multiple regions or locations
Cluster Ops: Managed Kubernetes clusters where Reactive Ops stays on the map, watches them, and puts them on pager, so you can continue your work without having to worry

Links:

Episode 16: There are Still Servers, but We Don't Care About Them

Corey Quinn — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 in right away
Current state of Lambda ecosystem
Is Lambda stable? Indications and no formal SLA
How issues manifest and are exposed
Trends include cold starts, hours-long failures, and multiple function evokes
Infrastructure powering IOpipe: Lambda issues may impact performance of monitoring system, but IOpipe is not necessarily dependent on Lambda
Future of Lambda: Builds applications a specific way, but there are limitations
What would Erica change about Lambda? Run function and define handlers
Lambda functions can be difficult to understand; some developers do not have familiarity and create bottlenecks
Capacity limits around Lambda can be difficult to establish

Links:

Episode 15: Nagios was the Original Call of Duty

Corey Quinn — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 core competency is not monitoring or managing servers
Monitoring/metrics is a big data problem; Datadog takes monitoring off your plate
Alternate ways, other than using Nagios, to monitor instances and regenerate configurations
Datadog is first to identify patterns when there is a widespread underlying infrastructure issue
Trends of moving from on-premise to Cloud; serverless is on the horizon
How trends affect evolution of Datadog; adjusting tools to monitor customers’ environments
Datadog’s scope is enormous; the company tries to present relevant information as the scale of what it’s watching continues to grow
Datadog’s pricing is straightforward and simple to understand; how much Cloud providers charge to use Datadog is less clear
Single Pane of Glass: Too much data to gather in small areas (dashboards)
Why didn’t monitoring catch this? Alerts need to be actionable and relevant
How to use Datadog’s workflow for setting alerts and work metrics
Datadog’s first Dash user conference will be held in July in New York; addresses how to solve real business problems, how to scale/speed up your organization

Links:

Episode 14: Cheslocked and loaded

Corey Quinn — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 worthwhile, but most tools lack judgement and perspective
Threat Stack offers context between host- and Cloud-based events; tying data together is the secret sauce
You shouldn’t have to pay a bunch of money to have a robust security system
Good operations is good security; update, patch, track, and perform other tasks
Lack of validation about what services are going to be a successful or not
Vendor Lock-in: Understand your choices when building your system
Pervasiveness and challenge of containerization and Kubernetes
Cloud reduces cycle time and effort to bring a product to market
Amazon is a game changer with what it allows you to do and solve problems

Links:

Episode 13: Serverlessly Storing my Dad Jokes in a Dadabase

Corey Quinn — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 17:00:00 -0700

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 to simplify your business processes, but not ways to get out of using their products due to vendor and platform lock-in
Lucidchart is skeptical about Aurora Serverless; will use or not depending on performance

Links:

Episode 12: Like Normal Cloud Services, but More Depressing

Corey Quinn — Tue, 29 May 2018 23:00:00 -0700

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 standards
Don’t farm out challenging or unfamiliar issues when interviewing candidates
Sarah is very competent, but she is new to Cloud platforms; she is like a sponge, who enjoys learning and having a bare knowledge of new technology
How HIPAA regulations impact Sarah’s learning and software engineering work; she has to be more aware of security and safety of healthcare data
Being a teacher and mentor affects how Sarah learns new things; everybody learns slightly differently
In the Cloud space, know which direction you want to go and start with simpler things to learn the basics; focus on what is relevant to what you are working on

Links:

Episode 11: Hickory Dickory Docker

Corey Quinn — Tue, 22 May 2018 17:00:00 -0700

Docker went from being a small startup to an enterprise company that changed the way people think about their infrastructure to now, where its relevance is somewhat minimal. The conversation is no longer around the container level. Docker has become commonplace.

Today, we’re talking to Jérôme Petazzoni, formerly of Docker. While he was with the company for about 8 years, Docker definitely experienced a roller coaster ride.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Amount of work conducted on the enterprise vs. community editions
Docker was so widely adopted because its core technology was open source
Challenge is to build a viable business and revenue model for the long run
Similarities between Docker and Red Hat open source platforms
Docker went from six people working in a garage to having a few hundred employees and $1.3 billion valuation
Changes happened, but they were gradual; the changes were necessary to be a profitable and sustainable company
Contingent of internal and external people believed that Docker was the answer for whatever problem surfaced; Docker would save you, but not always
Balancing Act: Pushing forward with a correct message and regulating enthusiasm
Networking and Docker for dummies; confusion and problems of things not working as expected have been resolved
Things will continue to shift; Kubernetes and the orchestration battle
What was unthinkable, could happen by companies pushing the envelope and making progress
Will who you have as your Cloud provider stop mattering? It depends.
All major Cloud providers plan to offer managed Kubernetes services and what Jérôme thinks of them
Jérôme’s opinion on whether Kubernetes will follow this same path as Docker
What does the road ahead look like for infrastructure automation? There is potential and lots of best practices in Cloud environments.

Links:

Episode 10: Education is Not Ready for Teacherless

Corey Quinn — Tue, 15 May 2018 23:00:00 -0700

Like migrating caribou, you tend to follow the trends of what clients are doing, which dictates what you work on as a consultant.

Today, we’re talking to Lynn Langit, an independent Cloud architect. She is an AWS Community Hero, Google Cloud developer expert, and former Microsoft MVP. Lynn is a lifelong learner, and she has worked broad and deep across all three large providers. These days, she works mostly with Google Cloud and AWS, rather than Azure, because that’s what her clients are using.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Differences between the West Coast and global use of Cloud
Education is key; Lynn is th co-founder of Teachingkidsprogramming.org
Lynn helped create curriculum and resources for school-age children; even her young daughter taught classes on how to code
Training for teachers was also needed, so TKP Labs was formed to offer fee-based teacher and developer training
Lynn started with classroom training, but has transitioned to online learning
Lynn is focusing on Big Data projects and using tools to solve real-world problems
Pre-processing and batching data, but not streaming it
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are all coming out with Big Data-oriented tools
Companies need to understand when the market is ready to accept a new paradigm; in the data world, change is more slow than in the programming world
If you touch a database and get burned, you are not willing to use it again; or you may have never tried to archive your data; hire a consultant to help you
Machine learning APIs give customers value quickly; review them before building custom models
Migrating data can be a costly project and restricts where the data lives
As Cloud proliferates, how will that impact technical education? Lynn’s Cloud for College Students to the rescue!
Shift from interactive to unidirectional, one-to-many learning styles; the Cloud is ready for serverless, but education is not ready for teacherless
Road that many of us walked to get to technical skills no longer exists; how to become a modern technologist
Ageism: By age 40, you are considered a manager or useless; don’t be afraid to learn something new

Links:

Episode 9: Cloud Coreyography

Corey Quinn — Tue, 08 May 2018 23:00:00 -0700

Microsoft has experienced a renaissance. By everything that we've seen coming out of Microsoft over the past few years, it feels like the company is really walking the walk. Instead of just talking about how it’s innovative, it’s demonstrating that. Microsoft has been on an amazing journey, making the progression from telling customers what they need to listening to them and responding by building what they ask for.

Today, we’re talking to Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President of Azure Compute at Microsoft.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Customers are asking for Microsoft to help them through support and enabling platforms
Storytelling efforts through advocates, who play a double role – engaging and defending Microsoft
Customers moving to the Cloud are focused on a continuum and progression; they have stuff to move from one location to another and want all the benefits–better agility, faster startup time, etc.
Virtual serial console into existing VMs; this is how people are using this and Microsoft is going to, if not encourage this behavior, at least support it
Microsoft is the only Cloud with a single-instance SLA
Serial consoles: Windows' has seen less usage, partly due to operational aspects of Windows vs. Linux. It's not a GUI; it's scripting.
Does the operating system matter? From a Cloud perspective, it shouldn't have to matter; you should be able to deploy it the way you want
Edge enables much more complex and segregated scenarios; that combination with cognitive searches running locally will make it accessible anywhere
Branding challenge as customers start to notice that devices are smarter and more complex; will they lose awareness that Microsoft Azure is powering most of these things - they shouldn’t care
An awareness of not just what's possible, but what's coming; the democratization of AI
Education and fear gap of trying something new and taking that first step; make products and services stupid and simple to use
Customers return to add cognitive services and AI capabilities to existing, running deployments, environments, and applications
Multi-Cloud solutions can be successful, but there's a caveat; they’re actually built on a service-by-service perspective
Azure Stack, offers consistency, but some people may place blame on it for poor data center management practices; some expectations and regulations may be frustrating to some customers, but lets Microsoft offer a consistent experience
Freedom and flexibility have been challenges for Microsoft and other products for private Clouds
What people need to understand about Azure, including from a durability and reliability experience
To some extent, scale becomes a necessary prerequisite for some applications
Microsoft has taken many steps and is the leader in various areas

Links:

ReactiveOps
Microsoft Azure
Corey Sanders on Twitter
The Robot Uprising Will Have Very Clean Floors
Kubernetes
Cassandra
Azure Stack

Episode 8: A Corporate Prisoner's Dilemma

Corey Quinn — Tue, 01 May 2018 23:00:00 -0700

Have you dabbled with IT infrastructure in AWS? Have you been through the process of AWS partnership? Does being an AWS partner add value? Amazon seeks partners that helps drive its business, goals, and value.

Today, we’re talking to Justin Brodley, the vice president of Cloud engineering at Ellie Mae. He has been through the AWS partnership process and shares his thoughts about it. He encourages you to find the right partner for your business!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Different levels and types of AWS partnerships
Shakedown vs. opportunity method for new leads; lead generation expectations
Amazon’s improvements eroding business models
Partners trying to pivot, but not exclusive to AWS
Whether to invest in multi-Cloud
Amazon can’t scale its sales team to handle everybody; views partner program as an extension of its salesforce
Your company is important and you’re spending a lot of money, but Amazon may not care about you; partner market fills that gap and makes you feel important
Corporate prisoner’s dilemma: Your tech company offers something that Amazon doesn’t; but what about when Amazon does offer it?
Competitors’ horizontal move to become more diversified
Amazon expects partners to offer products and services that it cannot offer yet
If partners fail, Amazon decides to do it and do it better
Is Amazon’s best interest geared toward its partners or you and your customers?
Amazon needs to give incentives and support partners

Links:

Episode 7: The Exact Opposite of a Job Creator

Corey Quinn — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 17:00:00 -0700

Monitoring in the entire technical world is terrible and continues to be a giant, confusing mess. How do you monitor? Are you monitoring things the wrong way? Why not hire a monitoring consultant!

Today, we’re talking to monitoring consultant Mike Julian, who is the editor of the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring. He is the voice of monitoring.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Observability comes from control theory and monitoring is for what we can anticipate
Industry’s lack of interest and focus on monitoring
When there’s an outage, why doesn’t monitoring catch it?” Unforeseen things.
Cost and failure of running tools and systems that are obtuse to monitor
Outsource monitoring instead of devoting time, energy, and personnel to it
Outsourcing infrastructure means you give up some control; how you monitor and manage systems changes when on the Cloud
CloudWatch: Where metrics go to die
Distributed and Implemented Tracing: Tracing calls as they move through a system
Serverless Functions: Difficulties experienced and techniques to use
Warm vs. Cold Start: If a container isn't up and running, it has to set up database connections
Monitoring can't fix a bad architecture; it can't fix anything; improve the application architecture
Visibility of outages and pain perceived; different services have different availability levels

Links:

Episode 6: The Robot Uprising Will Have Very Clean Floors

Corey Quinn — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 23:00:00 -0700

How many of you are considered heroes? Specifically, in the serverless Cloud, Twitter, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) communities? Well, Ben Kehoe is a hero.

Ben is a Cloud robotics research scientist who makes serverless Roombas at iRobot. He was named an AWS Community Hero for his contributions that help expand the understanding, expertise, and engagement of people using AWS.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Ben’s path to becoming a vacuum salesman
History of Roomba and how AWS helps deliver current features
Roombas use AWS Internet of Things (IoT) for communication between the Cloud and robot
Boston is shaping up to be the birthplace of the robot overlords of the future
AWS IoT is serverless and features a number of pieces in one service
Robot rising of clean floors
AWS Greengrass, which deploys runtimes and manages connections for communication, should not be ignored
Creating robots that will make money and work well
Roomba’s autonomy to serve the customer and meet expectations
Robots with Cloud and network connections
Competitive Cloud providers were available, but AWS was the clear winner
Serverless approach and advantages for the intelligent vacuum cleaner
Future use of higher-level machine learning tools
Common concern of lock-in with AWS
Changing landscape of data governance and multi-Cloud
Preparing for migrations that don’t happen or change the world
Data gravity and saving vs. spending money

Links:

Episode 5: The Last Mainframe with a Kickstart and a Double Clutch

Corey Quinn — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 23:00:00 -0700

How are companies evolving in a world where Cloud is on the rise? Where Cloud providers are bought out and absorbed into other companies?

Today, we’re talking to Nell Shamrell-Harrington about Cloud infrastructure. She is a senior software engineer at Chef, CTO at Operation Code, and core maintainer of the the Habitat open source product. Nell has traveled the world to talk about Chef, Ruby, Rails, Rust, DevOps, and Regular Expressions.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Chef is a configuration management tool that handles instance, files, virtual machine container, and other items.
Immutable infrastructure has emerged as the best of practice approach.
Chef is moving into next gen through various projects, including one called, Compliance - a scanning tool.
Some people don’t trust virtualization.
Habitat is an open source project featuring software that allows you to use a universal packaging format.
Habitat is a run-time, so when you run a package on multiple virtual machines, they form a supervisor ring to communicate via leader/follower roles.
Deploying an application depends on several factors, including application and infrastructure needs.
It is possible to convert old systems with old deployment models to Habitat.
Habitat allows you to lift a legacy application and put it into that modern infrastructure without needing to rewrite the application.
You can ease in packages to Habitat, and then have Habitat manage pieces of the application.
Habitat is Cloud-agnostic and integrates with public and private Cloud providers by exporting an application as a container.
Chef is one of just a few third-party offerings marketed directly by AWS.
From inception to deployment, there is a place for large Cloud providers to parlay into language they already speak.
Operation Code is a non-profit that teaches software engineer skills to veterans. It helps veterans transition into high-paying engineering jobs.
The technology landscape is ever changing. What skills are most marketable?
Operation Code is a learning by experience type of organization and usually starts people on the front-end to immediately see results.

Links:

Nell Shamrell-Harrington

Nell Shamrell-Harrington on Twitter

Nell Shamrell-Harrington on GitHub

GorillaStack (use discount code: screaming)

Episode 4: It's a Data Lake, not a Data Public Swimming Pool

Corey Quinn — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 23:00:00 -0700

Open source activism tends to focus on running on hardware you can trust and avoiding Cloud computing. The problem with some Cloud providers has to do with a conflict of interest between serving customers and how they generate revenue. It’s important for the customer to have control of their computer and their data in the Cloud. But what about their security and privacy?

Today, we’re talking to Kyle Rankin, chief security officer at Purism and writer for Linux Journal. He is a Linux expert who decided to work at Purism because of the company’s belief in free software and the Linux community.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Cloud providers have faced challenges when it comes to data privacy and who owns what.
The word “Cloud” is overloaded, and it is unclear who is in control.
Cloud providers can sabotage efforts to make programs work together.
Cloud providers may not troll through data and exploit it. Yet, they develop tools for customers to be able to do that.
Even though Linux Journal stopped being printed and went digital, and was going under, it’s now back and taking a new approach.
What matters to new readers and Linux users is now different than what was important to original readers.
The more time you can spend to understand what’s happening behind the scenes will make you much more marketable and adaptable.
Kyle explains whether Amazon Linux is becoming a viable concern and if distribution matters anymore. Now, it’s about running an application, not thinking about what it’s running on.
Are there gangs of Cloud users? Do people look down on Azure users? The target is always moving and changing.
Check out Kyle’s book, Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks: Server Security from TLS to Tor.

Links:

Kyle Rankin on Twitter
Purism
Kyle Rankin’s book - Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks: Server Security from TLS to Tor
Linux Journal 2.0 FAQ
GorillaStack (use “screaming” for discount)

Episode 3: Turning Off Someone Else's Site as a Service

Corey Quinn — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:00:00 -0700

How do you encourage businesses to pick Google Cloud over Amazon and other providers? How do you advocate for selecting Google Cloud to be successful on that platform? Google Cloud is not just a toy with fun features, but is a a capable Cloud service.

Today, we’re talking to Seth Vargo, a Senior Staff Developer Advocate at Google. Previously, he worked at HashiCorp in a similar advocacy role and worked very closely with Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, and other tools. He left HashiCorp to join Google Cloud and talk about those tools and his experiences with Chef and Puppet, as well as communities surrounding them. He wants to share with you how to use these tools to integrate with Google Cloud and help drive product direction.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Strengths related to Google Cloud include its billing aspect. You can work on Cloud bills and terminate all billable resources. The button you click in the user interface to disable billing across an entire project and delete all billable resources has an API. You can build a chat bot or script, too. It presents anything you’ve done in the Consul by clicking and pointing, as well as gives you what that looks like in code form.
You can expose that from other people’s accounts because turning off someone else’s Website as a service can be beneficial. You can invite anyone with a Google account, not just ‘@gmail.com’ but ‘@’ any domain and give them admin or editor permissions across a project. They’re effectively part of your organization within the scope of that project. For example, this feature is useful for training or if a consultant needs to see all of your different clients in one dashboard, but your clients can’t see each other.
Google is a household name. However, it’s important to recognize that advocacy is not just external advocacy, there’s an internal component to it. There’s many parts of Google and many features of Google Cloud that people aren’t aware of. As an advocate, Seth’s job is to help people win.
Besides showing people how they can be successful on Google Cloud, Seth focuses on strategic complaining. He is deeply ingrained in several DevOps and configuration management communities, which provide him with positive and negative feedback. It’s his job to take that feedback and convert it into meaningful action items for product teams to prioritize and put on roadmaps. Then, the voice of the communities are echoed in the features and products being internally developed.
Amazon has been in the Cloud business for a long time. What took Google so long? For a long time, Google was perceived as being late to the party and not able to offer as comprehensive and experienced services as Amazon. Now, people view Google Cloud as not being substandard, but not where serious business happens. It’s a fully feature platform and it comes down to preferences and pre-existing features, not capability.
Small and mid-size companies typically pick a Cloud provider and stick with their choice. Larger companies and enterprises, such as Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies, pick multiple Clouds. This is usually due to some type of legal compliance issues, or there are Cloud providers that have specific features.
Externally at Google, there is the Deployment Manager tool at cloud.google.com. It’s the equivalent of CloudFormation, and teams at Google are staffed full time to perform engineering work on it. Every API that you get by clicking a button on cloud.google.com are viewing the API Docs accessible via the Deployment Manager.
Google Cloud also partners with open source tools and corresponding companies. There are people at Google who are paid by Google who work full time on open source tools, like Terraform, Chef, and Puppet. This allows you to provision Google Cloud resources using the tools that you prefer.
According to Seth, there’s five key pillars of DevOps: 1) Reduce organizational silos and break down barriers between teams; 2) Accept failures; 3) Implement gradual change; 4) Tooling and automation; and 5) Measure everything.
Think of DevOps as an interface in programming language, like Java, or a type of language where it doesn’t actually define what you do, but gives you a high level of what the function is supposed to implement.
With the SRE discipline, there’s a prescribed way for performing those five pillars of DevOps. Specific tools and technologies used within Google, some of which are exposed publicly as part of Google Cloud, enable the kind of DevOps culture and DevOps mindset that occur.
A reason why Google offers abstract classes in programming is that there’s more than one way to solve a problem, and SRE is just one of those ways. It’s the way that has worked best for Google, and it has worked best for a number of customers that Google is working with. But there are some other ways, too. Google supports those ways and recognizes that there isn’t just one path to operational success, but many ways to reach that prosperity.
The book, Site Reliability Engineering, describes how Google does SRE, which tried to be evangelized with the world because it can help people improve operations. The flip side of that is that organizations need to be cognizant of their own requirements.
Google has always held up along several other companies as a shining beacon of how infrastructure management could be. But some say there’s still problems with its infrastructure, even after 20-some years and billions invested.
Every company has problems, some of them technical, some cultural. Google is no exception. The one key difference is the way Google handles issues from a cultural perspective. It focuses on fixing the problem and making sure it doesn’t happen again. There’s a very blameless culture.
Conferences tend to include a lot of hand waving and storytelling. But as an industry, more war stories need to be told instead of pleasure stories. Conference organizers want to see sunshine and rainbows because that sells tickets and makes people happy. The systemic problem is how to talk about problems out in the open.
Becoming frustrated and trying to figure out why computers do certain things is a key component of the SRE discipline referred to as Toil - work tied to systems that either we don’t understand or don’t make sense to automate.
Those going to Google Cloud to ‘move and improve’ tend to be a mix of those from other Cloud providers and those from...

Episode 2: Shoving a SAN into us-east-1

Corey Quinn — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 17:00:00 -0700

When companies migrate to the Cloud, they are literally changing how they do everything in their IT department. If lots of customers exclusively rely on a service, like us-east-1, then they are directly impacted by outages. There is safety in a herd and in numbers because everybody sits there, down and out. But, you don’t engineer your application to be a little more less than a single point of failure. It’s a bad idea to use a sole backing service for something, and it’s unacceptable from a business perspective.

Today, we’re talking to Chris Short from the Cloud and DevOps space. Recently, he was recognized for his DevOps’ish newsletter and won the Opensource.com People’s Choice Award for his DevOps writing. He’s been blogging for years and writing about things that he does every day, such as tutorials, codes, and methods. Now, Chris, along with Jason Hibbets, run the DevOps team for Opensource.com

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Chris’ writing makes difficult topics understandable. He is frank and provides broad information. However, he admits when he is not sure about something.
SJ Technologies aims to help companies embrace a DevOps philosophy, while adapting their operations to a Cloud-native world. Companies want to take advantage of philosophies and tooling around being Cloud native.
Many companies consider a Cloud migration because they’ve got data centers across the globe. It’s active-passive backup with two data centers that are treated differently and cannot switch to easily.
Some companies do a Cloud migration to refactor and save money. A Cloud migration can result in you having to shove your SAN into the USC1. It can become a hybrid workflow.
Lift and shift is often considered the first legitimate step toward moving to the Cloud. However, know as much as you can about your applications and RAM and CPU allowances. Look at density when you’re lifting and shifting.
Know how your applications work and work together. Simplify a migration by knowing what size and instances to use and what monitoring to have in place.
Some do not support being on the Cloud due to a lack of understanding of business practices and how they are applied. But, most are no longer skeptical about moving to the Cloud. Now, instead of ‘why cloud,’ it becomes ‘why not.’

Don’t jump without looking. Planning phases are important, but there will be unknowns that you will have to face.
Downtime does cost money. Customers will go to other sites. They can find what they want and need somewhere else. There’s no longer a sole source of anything.
The DevOps journey is never finished, and you’re never done migrating. Embrace changes yourself to help organizations change.

Links:

Chris Short on Twitter

DevOps'ish

SJ Technologies

Amazon Web Services

Cloud Native Infrastructure

The Mythical Man-Month

Atlassian

BuzzFeed

Quotes by Chris:

“Let’s not say that they’re going whole hog Cloud Native or whole hog cloud for that matter but they wanna utilize some things.”

“They can never switch from one to the other very easily, but they want to be able to do that in the Cloud and you end up biting off a lot more than you can chew…”

“Create them in AWS. Go. They gladly slurp in all your VM where instances you can create a mapping of this sized thing to that sized thing and off you go. But it’s a good strategy to just get there.”

“We have to get better as technologists in making changes and helping people embrace change.”

Episode 1: Feature Flags with Heidi Waterhouse of LaunchDarkly

Corey Quinn — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 07:51:00 -0700

This podcast features people doing interesting work in the world of Cloud. What is the state of the technical world? Let’s first focus on the up or down, on or off function of feature flags.

Today, we’re talking to Heidi Waterhouse, a technical writer turned Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, which is a feature flag service - a way to wrap a snippet of code around your feature and make it into an instrument to turn on or off. It lets you turn things on and off in your codebase quickly without having to do several commits. However, it is difficult to track it when there are more than about a dozen flags. So, LaunchDarkly provides a way to manage your features at scale with a usable interface and API.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

A feature flag allows you to hide items before you want them to go live on your Website. You hide it behind a feature flag, doing all the work ahead of time. Then, at some point, you turn it all on instantly without the risk of pushing untested code into your production.
You can test at scale to gain authentic data. Test something with your team, your company’s employees, your customers, etc. However, no matter how good your integration tests are, there’s always wobbles to watch for in the system.
With implementation, there are a few paths that can work, such as the massive reorganization path. Or, you can just start incrementally with feature flags for new features.
LaunchDarkly thinks in the Cloud as the surface because it mostly works with people who are doing Web-based delivery of features.
Major companies, like Google and Facebook, offer services similar to feature flags for their own development. They’re operating on such a giant scale that they have internal teams doing it.
Companies use feature flags on the front-end and other purposes. It works through the whole stack from frontend page delivery, pricing tiers, white labeling, style sheets, to safer deployments.
Do not focus on documentation. You should not have to read documentation for anything that you don’t own. Every feature should have documentation tied to its code. Create a customized experience.
Feature flags effectively manage and minimize risk. There is always risk in the world, but what causes disaster is not just one failure. It is a multiplication of failures. This goes wrong and that goes wrong. Feature flagging breaks monolithic releases into tiny chunks that can go forward or backward.
LaunchDarkly holds monthly meet-ups called, Test and Production. People share their use case regarding continuous integration, continuous deployment, DevOps, etc.

Links:

Quotes by Heidi:

“What feature flags do is make it possible for you to push out a deployment with things hidden, we call it launching darkly.”

“We’re all about avoiding risk, I think this is our motto this year, eliminate risk…you can’t eliminate risk, but you can make it much less risky.”

“Go ahead and write your feature. You know that it’s hidden behind the magical feature flying curtain until you’re ready to turn it on.”

“If 20 years of technical writing taught me anything, it’s that nobody wants to be reading documentation.”