Day Two DevOps

Today's Day Two Cloud covers highlights from a recent Edge Field Day event. Ned Bellavance was a delegate at the event and will share perceptions and insights based on presentations from the event. Topics include a working definition of edge, the constraints of hosting infrastructure in edge locations (power, space, network connectivity and others), and operational models for running software and services in these environments.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud. If you want your journey to infrastructure automation to be successful, you have to prepare for that journey. On today's show we talk about how to lay the groundwork for infrastructure automation or Infrastructure as Code (IaC). And this isn't just about tools and training (though we do also discuss these). There are organizational, team, and personal elements required to help people to incorporate automation into their daily work.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud! Today we talk with sponsor Mirantis about Lens AppIQ. If you've started using Kuberentes and you've got multiple clusters supporting many applications, Lens AppIQ help you get visibility into what's going on. Lens AppIQ is a SaaS service that provides app-centric visibility, policy management, and governance. It's targeted at developers and DevOps teams.

Day Two Cloud continues the Cloud Essentials series with cloud storage. We focus specifically on AWS's offering, which include object, file, and block storage options. We also discuss special file systems, file caching, instance stores, and more. We cover use cases for the major storage options and their costs. We also touch briefly on storage services including data migration, hybrid cloud storage, and disaster recovery and backup.

Today on Day Two Cloud we go deep on new areas of cloud security that you may not be familiar with. There are forces out there that are driving the rise of new security tools and processes, and we bring back guest Jo Peterson to help us make sense of it all.

On today's Day Two Cloud we discuss the state of network automation and whether and how it can catch up to automation in the public cloud. We look at network automation challenges, define boundaries with other elements of the infrastructure stack, the impact of cloud networking, whether AI and ML can help, and more. Our guests are Chris Grundemann and Scott Robohn, co-founders of the Network Automation Forum (NAF).

Today's Day Two Cloud kicks off an occasional series on cloud essentials. For the first episode we discuss the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC is an fundamental construct of a public cloud. It's essentially your slice of the shared cloud infrastructure, and you can launch and run other elements within a VPC to support your workload. Ned Bellavance walks through key VPC components including regions and AZs, networking and IP addressing, paid add-ons, data egress and associated charges, monitoring and troubleshooting, and basic security controls.

Today on Day Two Cloud we dive into the implications of licensing changes that HashiCorp has made to its popular Terraform software. In short, the company has switched from an open source to a business source license. HashiCorp says it felt compelled to make the change to ensure that some other business entity doesn't take the open-source software and turn it into a competing product (looking at you, AWS). Will the licensing change have a significant impact? For 99% of users probably not, but there are caveats and concerns to discuss. Today's show is a crossover with Chaos Lever, a weekly podcast co-hosted by Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner that covers IT news.

On today's Day Two Cloud we examine the similarities and differences among SSE and SASE, which provide cloud-delivered security; and SD-WAN, which can provide connections to these services. We also discuss the drivers for cloud-delivered security, the role of networking, where and how zero trust can come into play, some of the big players in these spaces, and more.

Red teams attack a customer's security systems. The idea of a red team, whether consultants or in-house, is to approach the target like an attacker would. A red team includes technical and human-based exploit and attempts to test defenses, probe for weaknesses, and identify vulnerable systems and processes. On today's episode we look at how to get the most out of a red team engagement--it's much more than just an attack and a report.

Today's Day Two Cloud peers inside the box of quantum computing. We explore how it works, what qbits are and why they matter, the current state of quantum computing hardware, what problems could be solved with quantum computing, and how you can get involved with it via the Qiskit open-source project. Our guest is Abby Mitchell, Quantum Developer Advocate at IBM.

On today's Day Two Cloud we get inside Cisco Secure Access, a new set of cloud-delivered security services from Cisco. We discuss the security capabilities on offer, the service's architecture and components, how Cisco addresses concerns around user experience and performance, and more. This is a sponsored episode.

If you want to be a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) you need strong software skills. You also have to be versed in observability, incident response, capacity planning, change management, performance, even security. But wait, there's more! Our guest on today's Day Two Cloud argues you need strong communication skills, emotional intelligence, personal resilience, and the ability to work with a team. Our guest is Amin Astaneh.

On today's Day Two Cloud, we talk with Microsoft about how it's embracing Terraform to make it Azure-friendly, including the Terraform Export Tool, the AzAPI Provider, and a Terraform on Azure community. This is not a sponsored episode.

Today we talk about Large Language Models (LLMs) and writing products and applications that use LLMs. Our guest is Phillip Carter, Principal PM at Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb makes an observability tool for site reliability engineers, and Carter worked on a project called Query Assistant that helps Honeycomb users get answers to questions about how to use the product and get insights from it. We discuss taking natural language input and turning it into outputs to help SREs do their jobs.

Going from a tech role to manager is more than just a new gig---it's a full-blown career change. On today's Day Two Cloud we talk with management coach Steve Dwire about a manager's primary responsibilities, what new managers usually get wrong, management education vs. experience, and how to get better at the job. This episode goes places we didn't expect, so come along for the ride.

Welcome to this episode of Day Two Cloud! Today, we'll be diving into the world of platform engineering and internal developer portals. Our special guest, Suzanne Daniels, Developer Relations Lead at Port, will be sharing her insights on how platform engineering can take your DevOps journey to the next level. With platform engineering, you can treat technology as a product and developers as customers, resulting in a more efficient and effective workflow.

Today's Day Two Cloud explores some design themes that emerged from the Cloud Field Day event. These themes include platform engineering, data protection and recovery, and how to deal with the fact that old technology never dies. Guest Michael Levan joins Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks to discuss these themes and their implications for cloud application builders and operators.

On today's Day Two Cloud we dive into Decentralized Identity, or DID. This W3C standard is a unique identifier, authenticated by cryptographic proofs, that individuals and organizations can generate themselves using systems they trust. A DID can be a person, an object, an organization, a data model, or other subject. We explore DIDs, how they work, and what they can be used for with Dr. Joanne Friedman.

Today's show gets behind the curtain of a cloud service called Podsqueeze. Podsqueeze is an application that ingests audio and video files and then produces text-based output including a show description, an episode transcript, suggested headlines, segment timestamps, suggested social media posts, and more. The Packet Pushers are experimenting with Podsqueeze as part of our own production. Being curious nerds, we thought this was a good opportunity to see how the service really works. Our guest is Tiago Ferreira, one of the entrepreneurs and developers of Podsqueeze.

Today's Day Two Cloud explores post-quantum cryptography and how to make your cryptographic secrets safe from quantum computers. We're looking at a time horizon of at least five or ten years, so this isn't an immediate threat, but it doesn't hurt to start thinking about it now. We dive into how quantum computing and quantum encryption work, their impact on cryptographic secrets, what it means for technologies such as IPSec VPNs, and more. Melchior Aelmans is our guest.

When you're deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it's helpful to step back and get a broader view of what's happening in the industry. On today's Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend.

On today's Day Two Cloud we explore cloud networking certifications. Who do these certs make sense for? Which clouds should you focus on? What do certifications typically cover? Where do third-party devices such as firewalls and load balancers fit into the certification picture? If you're an old-school CLI jockey coming into cloud networking, how should you approach concepts such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that brings together tools, SDKs, and APIs for collecting telemetry--that is, logs, metrics, and traces---in a standardized way. The goal of the project is to help developers and operators instrument highly distributed applications and services to understand dependencies, monitor performance, and quickly troubleshoot problems. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we explore OpenTelemetry and how it works. We also discuss the difference between visibility and observability, and why this matters. Our guest is Ben Hall.

Today's Day Two Cloud delves into cloud security and cloud cost optimization for SaaS and public clouds. Our guest is Jo Peterson. On the security front, we compare and contrast traditional on-prem and cloud security challenges, explore the shared responsibility model of cloud security, and more. For cost optimization we discuss the growing concern about cloud costs, why optimization tools still need humans, tips for tracking multicloud spending, and more.

On today's Day Two Cloud we dive into how the public clouds spend their money and what IT and engineering folks can learn from those spending patterns. We also look at the notion of cloud repatriation and how prevalent (or not) it is. Our guest is Charles Fitzgerald, a CapEx obsessive who writes the Platformonomics blog.

Today on Day Two Cloud we explore what it takes to transition from traditional networking to a career as a cloud network engineer. Guest Kam Agahian shares insights from his own career journey about what's the same and what's different between on-prem and cloud networking, what skills might you want to pick up to make the transition, recommended certifications, and more.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk through out-of-band management network design with sponsor ZPE Systems. If your idea of OOB management is a jump box and some terminal servers, there’s a lot more to the story when you bring automation tooling into the picture. We'll learn how ZPE gear works and talk with customer Vapor IO about using ZPE gear in its edge compute sites.

Today on Day Two Cloud we talk with developer Herman Martinus about his open-source blogging platform Bear. We talk about how a developer views infrastructure and operations, and how he went about building his platform.

Today's Day Two Cloud episode gets into sales engineering. IT pros may look down on sales for not being a strictly technical discipline, but it turns out there's more overlap between an engineer and a sales engineer than you might think. Both have to solve problems, understand requirements, and design and deliver outcomes. Our guest is Pete Robertson, a sales engineer for a value-added reseller.

Today on Day Two Cloud we engage in strategic thinking about cloud, workload repatriation, costs and spending, DevOps and Kubernetes, and more with guest Tim Banks. Tim is a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies and has done stints at AWS, Equinix, and the Duckbill Group. Besides being a techie, Tim Banks is also a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu champion and world-ranked competitor in his class.

Today on Day Two Cloud we put on our thinking caps about platforms, cloud, and multicloud. The last ten years or so has been a push for "cloud-first," but any wholesale approach to "X-first" (cloud, edge, digital, etc.) is problematic. We discuss why. We also explore strategies for CTOs, IT managers, and engineers on how to grapple with cloud strategy, implementation, and operation.

WebAssembly (Wasm) is an up-and-coming technology that's probably going to fall into the lap of operations folks. WebAssembly is basically a specification on how to compile things to a bytecode format and how to execute that bytecode. On today's Day Two Cloud we start to peel the onion on what WebAssembly, what it's used for, and why you might want to get your hands on it.

Today's Day Two Cloud assembles a panel to discuss the challenges of multicloud networking. We're sponsored by Prosimo, and the recording took place live at AWS re:Invent 2022. We discuss how and why an org goes multicloud, cloud networking issues, integrating ZTNA, and more.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, we speak with Jan Hofmeyr, a VP within Amazon Web Services (AWS). This show was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, and we discuss EC2 at the edge, AWS Outposts and how local zones work, connecting Outposts to the AWS cloud, and more.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Compute Express Link (CXL), a technology for composable infrastructure. The idea is to take all the peripherals in a system---network cards, memory, graphical processing units, and so on---and put them on a bus outside the chassis to share them among multiple hosts. Is this the dream of composable infrastructure coming true?

On today's sponsored Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about zero standing privilege with strongDM. Zero standing privilege goes beyond just-in-time credentials to a model where no credentials pre-exist, but are created in real-time and paired with appropriate permissions built from policy, also created in real-time. Can such a thing be accomplished technically---and without irritating all your end users? StrongDM's Sebastian Mankowski is here to make the case.

IT security is broken. Vendors ship insecure products, customers have to bolt on and then operate more and more security products, compliance and regulatory requirements don't necessarily make things safer, and getting business done always takes priority over securing systems and data. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, guest Mick Douglas shares ideas on how to make security less excruciating and more effective.

Today on Day Two Cloud we examine global network performance of some of the biggest public cloud providers. Sponsor ThousandEyes shares key findings and surprising data points from its 2022 Cloud Performance Report on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

On today's Day Two Cloud we continue our Kubernetes conversation with guest Michael Levan. Today's show focuses on Kubernetes deployments and managing clusters once they're up and running. We discuss whether Kubernetes is really more complex than traditional application infrastructure; examine management options such as GitOps, manifests, and Kubectl; share useful tools, and talk about why Kubernetes is all about APIs.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we walk through how to build a Kubernetes cluster to support a container-based application. We cover issues such as what constitutes a minimum viable cluster, rolling your own vs. Kubernetes-as-a-service, managing multiple clusters, pros and cons of bare metal vs. running clusters in VMs, design recommendations and gotchas using a cloud service, and more.

If you're headed to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, you can catch Ned & me recording a show live. On Wednesday, November 30, 2022, we’ll be at TopGolf with sponsor Prosimo from 4 to 7 pm. Join us to have some fun! Links and drinks, meet fellow engineers building clouds for their companies, and then watch us record the show. Space is limited, so register at prosimo.io. We’ll see you at TopGolf Las Vegas on Wednesday the 30th!

Today on Day Two Cloud we examine Istio Ambient Mesh, a new option for building service meshes in a microservices environment. Istio Ambient Mesh essentially brings the concept of a load balancer to a cluster of containers. Rather than run a sidecar proxy for each pod or container, you can run Ambient Mesh per node. Our guest and guide to this open source project is Christian Posta, Global Field CTO at Solo.io.

On today’s Day Two Cloud we talk through the idea of “zero standing privilege”. Zero standing privilege is an evolution of credentials management that goes beyond always-on usernames and passwords and more advanced forms of privileged access management to help lock down access to sensitive systems. Our sponsor is strongDM and our guest is Britt Crawford, Director of Product.

On today's Day Two Cloud we talk about testing. While developers do the testing, operators may be responsible for setting up testing environments, which can be a lot of work. That work increases with microservices because of all the complexities and dependencies that come with connecting and orchestrating microservices-based applications. Today we talk about how to address testing challenges with Arjun Iyer, and explore a solution he's developed for simplifying end-to-end microservices testing in a Kubernetes environment. This is not a sponsored show, but we do talk about Signadot, a startup Arjun founded in the testing space.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud! On today’s episode---databases. More specifically, controlling your databases. We’re discussing the database control plane company Severalnines with CEO Vinay Joosery. Severalnines is sponsoring today’s discussion about sovereign Databases as a Service (DBaaS).

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast we're going to talk with someone who was part of a DevOps teams deploying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and applications in the public cloud. This project ran into challenges around scaling, the environments they needed to support, how to store certain artifacts, working with pipeline, and breaking up a monolithic repo into smaller repos and the repercussions of that decision.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast, sponsored by AppDynamics, explores how AppDynamics Cloud brings observability to your Kubernetes deployments by ingesting and visualizing all metrics, events, log and trace data from across your cloud and on-prem landscapes.

On today's Day Two Cloud we talk about what it's like to interview for a job at a massive tech company. How do you get yourself in line? What can you expect from the interview? How do you prepare? How do you overcome your own imposter syndrome? Our guest is Nathaniel Avery, Outbound Product Manager at Google Cloud. He recently ran the gauntlet of the tech interview, and is here to share tips and insights on the process.