Day Two DevOps

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.

Multi-cloud services are an emerging category of software designed to make your Dev and Ops teams' multi-cloud reality easier to cope with. Sponsor VMware stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to talk about how the operational challenges of running workloads in a mix of public and private clouds and how its multi-cloud services initiative can help.

On today's Day Two Cloud we dive into Istio with Kevin Davin, a senior back end engineer who works deeply with Istio. We discuss Istio's promises, balancing its complexity with the capabilities it enables, understanding when and when not to use it, and more.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast, we talk DevSecOps and how it's more than just a marketing term. We also discuss Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and IT as Code and what that actually means for operations folks. It doesn't mean you have to write code all day, but we make an effort to put some specifics around what an Ops person should know when it comes to code.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast we have a frank discussion about tech marketing. Why? Because engineers are a target of marketing, so it's helpful to know how marketing works, what's trying to be communicated, and how it could be better. We also discuss whether the tech industry has over-committed on chasing developers while ignoring operations and sysadmins, why ops and sysadmins shouldn't be ignored, and more. Our guest is Gina Rosenthal, founder of Digital Sunshine Solutions.

In this Day Two Cloud episode, Ned and Ethan discuss the tradeoffs of mental health and professional achievement. Maybe you spend a lot of extra hours at work for your employer. Perhaps you focus on certifications after work and on the weekends. Maybe you say “yes” to more than you should, because you’re scared you’ll lose it all if you don’t. The tradeoffs are in your personal relationships. Your mental health. You suffer from burnout, anxiety, and stress. Is it all worth it? Ned and Ethan don't have all the answers, but they share their experiences and perspectives.

Tech marketing is often terrible. The problem is that marketers tend to develop material aimed at "C-level" or executive audiences, which doesn't resonate with developers and engineers who influence buying decisions and actually use products. Today's Day Two Cloud podcast examines how to improve tech marketing, and why communication is a good skill for technologists themselves.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast we go deep on the Cilium service mesh, including a packet walk that takes us from packet ingestion all the way through a Kubernetes cluster. We also talk about how Cilium eBPF differs from other sidecar proxies and the potential performance and observability gains. Strap on your propeller beanie as we try to keep up with guest is Thomas Graf, a co-creator of Cilium and CTO of Isovalent.

DevOps originated as a cultural movement to try and get developers and infrastructure operators to better work together to support applications in production. According to our guest Lee Briggs, that movement has failed. We discuss this premise on today's Day Two Cloud podcast.

According to Chris Wahl, everyone in an organization can lead--not just those with "chief" or "manager" in their job title. Leadership isn't about telling everyone else what to do. Not at all. Have a listen as Chris explains what it is to lead, and how you can do so yourself while enabling others around you to do the same.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast brings you highlights from Cloud Field Day 14, where Day Two Cloud's Ned Bellavance was a delegate. The Field Day event brings together cloud vendors and tech bloggers for in-depth presentations. Ned will share highlights and impressions from presentations from companies including Weka, Alkira, and Morpheus Data.