Screaming in the Cloud

About Richard CampbellRichard 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: richcampbellLinkedIn URL: www.linkedin.com/in/richjcampbellPersonal site: https://rcampbell.me/Company site: http://runasradio.com

About Mike WarrenMike 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@m_warrenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-warren-3a0439b1/https://lightstep.com/

About Chris VickeryChris 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: https://www.upguard.com/Twitter: @VickerySec

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 Referencedhttps://lightstep.com/https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/iot/https://twitter.com/tarawhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/taraewalker/

About Ken CollinsKen 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: Twitter: @metaskillsCustom Ink

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 Referencedhttps://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-sphere/https://twitter.com/galen_hunt

About Christina WarrenChristina 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 ReferencedTwitter: @film_girl http://christina.is/Rocket on Relay FM

About Mitchell HashimotoMitchell 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

About Sean O'DellSean 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: Twitter: @theseanodellVMware

About Corey SandersCorey 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 ReferencedTwitter: @CoreySandersWA Microsoft Azure

About Austen CollinsAusten 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 ReferencedServerless.comtwitter.com/austencollins

About Emily FreemanEmily 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: @editingemilyemilyfreeman.io

About Anna SpyszAnna 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: https://www.stackery.iohttps://medium.com/@annaspies

About Scott GuthrieAs 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 Referencedhttps://azure.microsoft.com/

About Omer Levi HevroniOmer 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.Linkshttps://twitter.com/omerlhhttps://www.asurion.com/about/smb/who-we-are/https://github.com/Soluto/kamushttps://omerlh.info

About Valentino VolonghiValentino 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: https://twitter.com/dialtone_Adroll.comTech.adroll.com

About Richard BoydRichard 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 Referencedhttps://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/https://aws.amazon.com/api-gatewayhttps://aws.amazon.com/lambda/https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformationhttps://twitter.com/cloudtrekau/status/936300151005626368https://twitter.com/rchrdbydhttp://rboyd.devhttps://richardhboyd.comhttps://linkedin.com/in/richard-h-boyd

About Richard HartmannRichard "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 CommunicationCongress. Links Referenced: https://velocityconf.com/cloudhttps://prometheus.iohttps://www.debian.orghttps://promcon.iohttps://fosdem.orghttps://cloud.withgoogle.com/nexthttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/buildhttps://reinvent.awsevents.comhttps://twitter.com/twitchih

About Jess FrazelleJessie 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: twitter.com/jessfrazgithub.commicrosoft.comgoogle.comdocker.comcontained.afcncf.iosummerofcode.withgoogle.comJoe.devSoul of a New Machinegithub.com/Gazler/githug

About Maureen LonerganMaureen 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 cloudThe variety of AWS certifications offeredWhy certifications are valuable for job prospectsThe work that goes into designing the AWS training coursesSome partners where you can access trainingLinks:https://www.aws.traininghttps://aws.amazon.comhttps://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/https://aws.amazon.com/training/learning-paths/https://www.coursera.org/awshttps://aws.amazon.com/training/path-cloudpractitioner/https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/certifications/expert/ccie-routing-switching.htmlhttps://www.edx.org/school/awshttps://www.coursera.org/aws

Some of the highlights of the show include: The benefits of RoboMaker in code deploymentHow cloud computation frees up local resources Using machine learning to improve robot reactionHow great a name RoboMaker isAmazon’s commitment to the enduring APILinks:https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker/http://www.ros.orghttps://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/

Some of the highlights of the show include: Implications for migrating to AWSWhy and how for using Amazon vs hardwareThe positive effects of mentoring for both the mentor and menteeTechnical vs Management tracks at a software companyCareer advice for women in the tech fieldLinks:https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://sendgrid.com/DO.co/screaming http://blog.dbsmasher.com/https://github.com/

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: https://www.jeffersonfrank.com https://www.jeffersonfrank.com/aws-salary-survey/ https://twitter.com/_JeffersonFrank https://www.linkedin.com/company/jefferson-frank/ https://www.facebook.com/JeffersonFrank.AWS .

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: Dann Berg on Twitter Datadog re:Invent AWS Cost Explorer CloudHealth CloudCheckr Cloudability Lambda EC2 GCP Azure CHAOSSEARCH .

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: Amazon DocumentDB MongoDB Amazon RDS React Aurora re:Invent DynamoDB Amazon Neptune Amazon Elasti-Cache Amazon Quantum Ledger Database Amazon Timestream Amazon S3 Amazon EMR Amazon Athena Amazon Redshift Amazon Managed Blockchain Amazon EC2 Amazon Lake Formation Perl CHAOSSEARCH .

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: Elana Hashman Elana Hashman on Twitter Elana Hashman on Mastodon A tale of three Debian build tools Python Python Packaging Authority PyCon Debian The Debian Women Project Docker Red Hat Fortran Amazon Linux 2 Go Perl SaltStack OpenHatch SCALE Jordan Sissel on Twitter DigitalOcean .

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: Kindly Ops Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Azure Relational Database Service (RDS) Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Nist Cybersecurity Framework GDPR Day People-Centric Security by Lance Hayden Stripe Society of Information Risk Analysts (SIRA) DigitalOcean .

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: ThousandEyes ThousandEyes on Twitter ThousandEyes’ Blog 2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report Amazon Web Services (AWS) Google Cloud Microsoft Azure AWS Global Accelerator for Availability and Performance re:Invent DigitalOcean .

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: re:Invent AWS S3 Amazon SQS AWS Glacier Lambda CHAOSSEARCH .

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: Rubrik Chris Wahl on Twitter Chris Wahl on LinkedIn Ken Hui on Twitter Ken Hui on Medium Amazon S3 IBM AS/400 Amazon EC2 Instances Azure Virtual Machine Instances re:Invent DigitalOcean .

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: Ian Mckay on Twitter AWS Console Recorder Kablamo AWS CloudFormation Terraform MediaLive Jeff Barr re:Invent CDK Google Cloud Platform AWS Management Console AWS RDS AWS Lambda DigitalOcean .

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: Matt Newkirk Matt Newkirk on LinkedIn Matt Newkirk on Twitter Share your Manager README Etsy Etsy’s Job Openings Shane Garoutte on LinkedIn Kubernetes Everbridge Digital Ocean .

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: Pete Cheslock on Twitter Pete Cheslock on LinkedIn CHAOSSEARCH Threat Stack AWS Amazon S3 Amazon Elasticsearch re:Invent Corey Quinn’s Newsletter Corey Quinn on Twitter Corey Quinn’s Email Sonian Acloud.guru Densify Oracle Apache Cassandra DigitalOcean AWS re:Invent 2018 - Keynote with Andy Jassy AWS re:Invent 2018 - Keynote with Werner Vogels AWS re:Inforce VMware Dreamforce Kubernetes Datadog .

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: Andrew Clay Shafer on Twitter Andrew Clay Shafer on LinkedIn Puppet Re:invent OpenStack Eucalyptus Docker Redis MongoDB Confluent Kubernetes AWS Outposts AWS Ground Station AmazonBasics Simon Wardley Maslach Burnout Inventory Datadog .

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: Joseph Ruscio on Twitter High Leverage Podcast Heavybit Industries Heavybit Library Serverless Framework Pagerduty Stripe Circle Lightstep LaunchDarkly Treasure Data Replicated AWS Twilio Librato re:Invent MongoDB Kubernetes Rackspace New Relic SolarWinds CloudWatch GCP Azure SimpleBB Datadog Digital Ocean .

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: Matty Stratton’s Presentations Matty Stratton on Twitter PagerDuty Arrested DevOps Hot Takes, Myths, And Fake News—Why Everyone Is Wrong About DevOps, Except For Me DevOps Dispatch LastWeekinAWS Jez Humble Robert Rodriguez Rebel Without A Crew Adam Jacob from Chef Terrible Ideas in Git Azure DevOps Emily Freeman Decker Communications Don't You Know Who I Am?! Datadog .

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: Stackery JSON AWS Lambda Aurora Serverless Data API Hype Cycle Secrets Manager YAML S3 GitHub GitLab AWS Codecommit Node.js WordPress re:Invent Ruby on Rails Kinesis Streams DynamoDB Docker Simon Wardley Datadog .

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: Don O’Neill on Twitter Articulate Hangops.slack.com CoffeeOps AWS Azure Docker Terraform Elastic Beanstalk Autoscan Marchex Apex Learning Dice Monster Indeed Switch App (Tinder for Jobs) Kubernetes Spotify in Stockholm CrowdStrike re:Invent AWS Summits Digital Ocean .

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: Johnny Sheeley's Email Johnny Sheeley on Twitter Rands Leadership Slack Hangops.slack.com Fanatics Kubernetes Azure Lambda RDS Getafix: How Facebook Tools Learn to Fix Bugs Automatically Accidentally Quadratic Blog re:Invent Jeff Barr’s AWS News Blog Amazon SimpleDB Lots of Amazon's projects have failed...and that's ok, says Amazon's Andy Jassy Digital Ocean .

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: IOpipe Episode 16: There are Still Servers, but We Don't Care About Them Lambda Google App Engine Python Node.js Kubernetes Simon Wardley DynamoDB re:Invent Perl PowerShell Digital Ocean .

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: Holly Allen on Twitter 18F Slack Freenode IRC HipChat AWS Kubernetes Terraform Chef QCon Datadog .

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: Fatema Boxwala Fatema Boxwala on Twitter Jackie Luo on Twitter Julia Evans Zines on Twitter SREcon MEA Digital Ocean .

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: Lambda School Ben Nelson on Twitter Y Combinator Wealthfront Datadog .

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: Sam Bashton on Twitter runbook.cloud How We Massively Reduced Our AWS Lambda Bill with Go AWS AWS Lambda Microsoft Clippy Honeycomb AWS X-Ray Kubernetes Simon Wardley Go Secrets Manager DynamoDB EFS Digital Ocean .

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: Concurrency Labs Ernesto Marquez on Twitter How to Know if an AWS is Right for You MiserBot AWS RDS Lambda Digital Ocean .

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: Yan Cui on Twitter DAZN Production-Ready Serverless Theburningmonk.com Applying Principles of Chaos Engineering to Serverless AWS Heroes re:Invent Lambda Amazon S3 Service Disruption API Gateway Ben Kehoe Digital Ocean .

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: Rowan Udell’s Blog Rowan Udell on Twitter Versent on Twitter Lambda Simon Wardley Open Guide to AWS Slack Channel Kubernetes Aurora Digital Ocean .

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 Links: Daniel Compton Daniel Compton on Twitter Google Cloud Platform - The Good, Bad, and Ugly (It’s Mostly Good) Deps The REPL Postmortem for GCP Load Balancer Outage AWS Athena Digital Ocean .

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: Veritone Christopher Stobie on LinkedIn Building Real Time AI with AWS Fargate SageMaker Fargate Docker Kafka Digital Ocean .

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: Adam Seligman on Twitter 12-Factor App I Want to Build a World Spanning Search Engine on Top of GCP DevFest Kubernetes Docker Heroku Google Next Google Reader .