Day Two DevOps

It's hard to guarantee quality of experience for users accessing cloud applications. The users are connected via networks we don’t own, and the apps are hosted on networks we don’t own. So what can a network operations team do about quality of experience in a world of cloud-hosted apps and cloud-connected users? Sponsor Broadcom Software is here to help us answer this question.

Today on Day Two Cloud, we talk about why Terraform stinks. OK, maybe it doesn't stink, but just because everyone seems to love a particular tool doesn't make it right for you. We talk with Dan Moore, a developer advocate at FusionAuth, who tried to use Terraform and just couldn't get behind it. This episode is based on a presentation Dan gave at Gluecon in May 2022.

Today's Day Two Cloud turns the nerd knob to eleven as we delve into kernels, eBPF, sidecar proxies, and service meshes. If you're an old-school engineer used to working with load balancers and proxies, this show looks at new ways to do application delivery in the Kubernetes world.

On Day Two Cloud we’ve had a lot of conversations about using infrastructure as code. We’ve looked at solutions like Ansible, Terraform, the AWS CDK, and Pulumi. Which begs the question, which IaC solution should you learn? A Domain Specific Language (DSL)? A General Purpose Programming Language (GPPL)? Something else? We discuss.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud. In this episode we take on the problem of over-provisioning access to resources. Sponsor strongDM joins the conversation to share how to properly manage roles and access in our IT systems, focusing heavily on the process of discovery. Who has access to what, and why do they have that access? Our guest from strongDM is Britt Crawford, Director of Product.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast gets into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how to evaluate it so that IaC practices fit your organization, your processes, the infrastructure you're trying to support, and so on. Our guest lays out some guideposts to help you understand if IaC is working for you.

Sponsor and startup Augtera Networks joins Day Two Cloud to discuss Augtera's proactive network analysis and operations product, which is meant to make you aware of problems before they become…problems. Augtera brings together traditional network sources such as flows and SNMP, plus telemetry and metadata to provide actionable information across networks you own and networks you don't.

Today's Day Two Cloud sponsor Netris promises to deliver a cloud-like experience for running your physical network. Netris software lets you build a private cloud on premises, and integrates with Terraform and Kubernetes. Our guest is Alex Saroyan, Netris CEO and founder.

If you're a security or network professional wondering if your skills aren't as applicable or useful when it comes to public cloud, don't worry: they are very, very useful. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk with Brandon Carroll on how to properly map traditional infrastructure and network security to public cloud deployments.

Today on Day Two Cloud we peel back the curtains on Google Cloud with a GCP insider to find out how Google Cloud differentiates itself, its embrace of a multi-cloud approach, and more. Our guest is Richard Seroter, Director of Outbound Product Management at Google Cloud. This is not a sponsored episode.

Today's Day Two Cloud digs into an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform called Pulumi. Pulumi can be used to build, deploy, and manage cloud applications using familiar languages such as .Net and Java, as well as well-known tools and practices.

Today's Day Two Cloud explores the Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open-source project that serves as a policy engine for cloud-native environments. According to the OPA Web site, you can use OPA to "enforce policies in microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, API gateways, and more." Guest Anders Eknert walks through how it works, use cases, and more.

Today's Day Two Cloud explores the vastness of IPv6 and public cloud. IPv6 provides so much address space that you can use an address once for one connection and never use it again, and it isn't wasteful. The abundance of IPv6 may influence how you approach cloud applications and networks.

Today's Day Two Cloud gets into application security and working with developers to make sure code is sanitized and tested. Writing secure code at the outset can dramatically reduce risk and help simplify operations and security. Our guest is Tanya Janca, founder of We Hack Purple. We Hack Purple offers free training courses for people who want to get into security.

Today's Day Two Cloud episode bites into OpenZiti, an open-source project that brings zero trust principles to networks and applications. OpenZiti builds an overlay network to enforce zero trust. It has several moving parts including edge routers, a controller, and SDKs. OpenZiti was created by NetFoundry, our sponsor for this episode. Guest Clint Dovholuk takes us through the nitty-gritty of how it works.

Today's Day Two Cloud is a discussion about how to build your multicloud fluency. That is, having knowledge of, and competence in, more than one cloud. The short answer? Learn to code. That's the position of our guest Forrest Brazeal, and he brings his justifications.

On today’s sponsored Day Two Cloud episode with Cisco ThousandEyes, we discuss how to monitor what’s broken in public cloud services. With the right information, you can offer a nuanced, knowledgeable answer when executives want to know when the company’s crucial customer-facing app hosted on a bunch of cloud services is coming back online.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast gets into Azure Bicep, a language that IT teams can use to deploy Azure resources in a consistent manner. While Bicep is Azure-specific, it can be useful as part of an Infrastructure-as-Code initiative. Guests Ben Weissman and Rob Sewell explore how Bicep works, discuss use cases, compare it to Terraform, and more.

VMware is our sponsor today for a Day Two Cloud episode about logging. Specifically, we're talking about vRealize Log Insight Cloud. It’s not just about collecting logs and events, and it's not just for VMware products. What do you get out of the data being logged? That’s what’s interesting. This is much more than a pile of syslogs with a search engine dropped on top.

Today's Day Two Cloud gets into the weeds of a real-world project build around Windows containers. Windows containers? Yes, the goal was to run a particular job and deploy it on Kubernetes using Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Our guest is Sai Gunaranjan, Principal Architect for a large healthcare company.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast we examine the role and responsibilities of Kubernetes operators; that is, the humans in charge of running Kubernetes. Kubernetes operators have to support application and security teams, handle capacity planning, keep an eye on versioning, and more. This episode is sponsored by F5's NGINX team. Our guests are Jenn Gile, Sr Manager of Product Marketing; and Brian Ehlert, Sr Product Manager.

On today's Day Two Cloud we examine why Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is about more than the just the tools that enable it. Guest Rob Hirschfeld puts forth the notion that while the tools are there for a reason, those tools have to serve a purpose: supporting collaboration, re-use, and efficient operations.

Today's Day Two Cloud is a sponsored episode with StrongDM, which helps engineers and IT professionals get access to databases, servers, Kubernetes clusters, switches, Web apps, and more from a desktop or laptop. We dive into StrongDM's proxy model, integrations with directories and ID stores, audit features, and more.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast we offer tips and advice for those on the job market, from finding new opportunities, building a professional network, prepping for interviews, handling curve-ball interview questions, managing nerves, and more.

Web3 is the term for an emerging technology movement that aims to create a more decentralized Internet and put more ownership in the hands of individual users and consumers. At present Web3 is associated with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, but it's worth understanding the technological underpinnings of Web3, particularly blockchain and its broader applications. Our guide to Web3 infrastructure is Josh Neuroth.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast delves into issues about monitoring all the things, including the notion of monitoring the cloud...from the cloud. Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks discuss the pros and cons of DIY vs. using a service, differences between monitoring infrastructure stacks and applications, what to monitor and why, how to deal with all that data, the necessity of alerting, constructing meaningful dashboards, and more.

On today's Day Two Cloud we have a career conversation with Angela Andrews, a Solution Architect at Red Hat. Angela provides an introduction to OpenShift, a cloud-based offering for running and orchestrating Kubernetes containers in public clouds and on premises from Red Hat. We also discuss how to integrate communication skills with technical knowledge, the role of a Solution Architect, how to stay on top of new and changing technologies, and more.

Optimizing cloud costs means more than looking at your bill and hunting down unused instances. It's about understanding the full lifecycle of cloud workloads, dealing with management that wants predictable spending even as your actual usage varies, and setting up repeatable processes. Guests Fred Chagnon and Jeremy Roberts, both at Info-Tech Research Group, offer practical advice for optimizing your cloud spending.

Today is a deeply technical episode on DevOps, Azure, Docker, Terraform, and more. Our guest is Kyler Middleton, Principal DevOps Network Architect. Kyler is also a Pluralsight author and blogger.

There are a lot of good things you can do with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for automation, repeatability, and ease of operations and development. But there are also code and infrastructure pitfalls where you can tumble into a hole, break your leg, and get eaten by spiders. OK, maybe not that bad, but on today's episode we talk about potential IaC pitfalls and how to avoid them with guest Tim Davis.

On today's Day Two Cloud, we dig into Azure Arc and the construction of hybrid clouds with guest Ben Weissman, a consultant, author, and Pluralsight creator.

It's always better to catch misconfigurations and security issues earlier in your pipeline rather than later. That's especially true for cloud services where a simple configuration error can expose sensitive assets to the entire Internet. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we discuss how to incorporate security checks into your Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows. Our guest is Christophe Tafani-Dereeper, a cloud security engineer.

Today on Day Two Cloud, we talk about new ways of thinking about security for cloud. As organizations adopt cloud services, they're applying on-prem security designs. Our guest Adeel Ahmad is here to argue that this doesn't work, and that you need a different approach.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud, where the topic is visibility. Hybrid cloud visibility with a side of Kubernetes, to be specific. VMware has come alongside as today’s sponsor for a discussion about vRealize Operations Cloud to give you that visibility into applications and infrastructure running in complex, multi-cloud environments.

Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance hosted a panel discussion at VMworld 2021 with two VMware customers using VMware Cloud---the University of Miami and Sterling National Bank. This discussion looks at what works, where the customers ran into issues, and how their cloud journeys are progressing.

Today's Day Two Cloud is a nerdy show on GraphQL and AWS AppSync and what you can do with these tools. Our guest is Amrut Patil, a senior software engineer using these tools.

On today's Day Two Cloud we talk trends and predictions in cloud computing, including emerging technologies such as Web assembly, rivals to Kubernetes, and the role of GitOps in infrastructure as code. Our guest is Adrian Mouat, Chief Scientist at Container Solutions. His blog post "10 Predictions for the Future of Computing or; the Inane Ramblings of our Chief Scientist" inspired this episode.

Ethan Banks & Ned Bellavance have a tech discussion with CEO Doug Murray and CTO Vishal Jain about multi-cloud security startup Valtix. Along the way, we find out that Valtix is a cloud-delivered security control-plane paired with a data-plane of enforcement points (sort of firewalls, but not exactly) delivered between any two points in the cloud you need them. Engineers should walk away from this chat with a solid idea of Valtix architecture and how it fits into their cloud design.

How does a company building a product from an open-source project get off the ground? How does it communicate its value, attract contributors, and develop a user base? And how does it spread the word without turning off engineers with typical tech marketing? Guest Emily Omier is a positioning consultant who helps companies and projects get it right.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast we have a sponsored show with Akamai and a customer, IBM Cloud. When IBM rebuilt its Cloud Console from a monolithic application to microservices, the company turned to Akamai to help improve application performance while also supporting routing, failover, and availability across six global data centers. We get details from Pavel Despot, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Akamai; and Tony Erwin, Senior Technical Staff Member/Architect at IBM.

Guest Shelley Benhoff stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to discuss essential skills for moving into tech management, and how to decide if management is the right career path for you. Shelley has twenty years' experience in IT as a developer and manager, runs a tech training company, and is a Pluralsight instructor.

Today's Day Two Cloud sponsored episode dives into software-defined interconnects. The big idea is that you go up to a Web browser, click a few times, and now you've got a circuit stood up between your data center and AWS, or between you and a business partner, and so on. We'll get into the details about how it's done with Console Connect, a PCCW Global company.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast topic is about moving from a tech role into management. Is it a good idea? Why might you want to make the change? How can you do it successfully? We speak with two guests who've made the leap.

Today's Day Two Cloud episode dives into multi-cloud networking with sponsor Aviatrix. Aviatrix offers a cloud network platform with a common data plane and operational model that works across public clouds and supports visibility and automation. We dig into the product with Aviatrix guests and a customer.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast discusses the challenges of stitching together a fabric across more than one public cloud. How do you architect a fabric given the constraints of each cloud? We also drill into the idea of API gateways. Our guest is Chris Oliver, a network architect at NI.

Kris Nóva, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Twilio, claims that managing infrastructure using tools like Terraform isn't that far away from just writing your own code to do the job yourself. Kris joins co-hosts Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks to challenge the notion that ops folks can't become developers. Kris says they can.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast walks through a massive outage that hit CDN provider Bunny.net. An automated update triggered cascading failures that essentially took the company offline for two frantic hours. The company shared a detailed postmortem of what happened, and we're joined by company founder Dejan Pelze to walk us through the issues and share lessons learned about infrastructure, automation, and dependencies.

Today's sponsored Day Two Cloud episode talks WAN networking with PacketFabric. PacketFabric lets you provision point-to-point and hybrid cloud connectivity as a service. Built on a private fiber network, the company's goal is to let you set up networking as if it was software. Our guest is Anna Claiborne, Co-Founder, CTO and CPO.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast dives into Cloud Development Kits (CDKs). How do CDKs differ from tools such as Terraform? What are the selling points for CDKs for infrastructure and development professionals? Our guest is Michael Levan, Researcher and Consultant at GigaOM.

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast, Ethan and Ned discuss two new AWS courses from Ned, and then tell stories about the time they took management jobs they shouldn't have. They share lessons learned about transitioning from technical to managerial roles and why it was the wrong move for them.