Screaming in the Cloud

Alyss Noland, a cloud developer ecosystem problem-solver at NVIDIA who helps startups access GPUs, talks about building software with AI and enabling nontraditional developers. Conversation covers using AI as a curator and writing assistant, DGX Cloud Innovation Lab for startups, orchestration and safety of agents, and the weird social dynamics people form with chatbots.

Mike McQuaid, project leader of Homebrew and steward of the macOS/Linux package manager. He recounts Homebrew’s pub-born origin, the rise of Brew Bundle for one-command Mac setups, casks for GUI apps, auto-update tradeoffs that support millions of users, maintainer stipends and review-based security, and why Homebrew enforces strict open source rules.

Omri Sass, Director of Product Management at Datadog, delves into the innovative updog.ai, a tool revolutionizing outage detection using real-time data. He explains the significance of distinguishing between local issues and global outages at crucial times, like 3 AM. Omri discusses the challenges of synthetic testing and the importance of aggregate telemetry in spotting provider problems. He also shares insights on industry reactions to outage trackers and the engineering hurdles faced while building updog.ai, illustrating the ongoing evolution of cloud service monitoring.

Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil and former Amazon EFS engineer, shares revolutionary insights into cloud storage. He reveals the 20-year struggle of making S3 act like traditional file systems and how Archil bridges this gap. Discussing fast SSDs as a cache layer and seamless integration with existing S3 buckets, Hunter also dives into pricing strategies that can beat Amazon’s services. He emphasizes the resurgence of file systems in the AI age and explains how they can enhance model performance. Prepare for a gamechanger in storage solutions!

When AWS has a major outage, what actually happens behind the scenes? Ben Hartshorne, a principal engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey Quinn to discuss a recent AWS outage and how they kept customer data safe even when their systems couldn't fully work. Ben explains why building services that expect things to break is the only way to survive these outages. Ben also shares how Honeycomb used its own tools to cut their AWS Lambda costs in half by tracking five different things in a spreadsheet and making small changes to all of them.About Ben Hartshorne: Ben has spent much of his career setting up monitoring systems for startups and now is thrilled to help the industry see a better way. He is always eager to find the right graph to understand a service and will look for every excuse to include a whiteboard in the discussion.Show highlights: (02:41)Two Stories About Cost Optimization(04:20) Cutting Lambda Costs by 50%(08:01) Surviving the AWS Outage(09:20) Preserving Customer Data During the Outage(13:08) Should You Leave AWS After an Outage?(15:09) Multi-Region Costs 10x More(18:10) Vendor Dependencies(22:06) How LaunchDarkly's SDK Handles Outages(24:40) Rate Limiting Yourself(29:00) How Much Instrumentation Is Too Much?(34:28) Where to Find BenLinks: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benhartshorne/GitHub: https://github.com/maplebedSponsored by: duckbillhq.com

R. Tyler Croy, an infrastructure architect at Scribd and veteran open-source developer, discusses the staggering costs associated with managing billions of S3 objects. He reveals how normal assumptions break down under extreme scale and why engineering solutions are essential. Tyler emphasizes innovative data strategies, like packing files into Parquet, to minimize object counts and reduce expenses. He also explores how AI is transforming old documents into valuable assets, driving new storage priorities in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, is a veteran software engineer revolutionizing secure networking. He shares how Tailscale transforms VPNs into user-friendly tools and tackles AI security with zero-click authentication. Avery discusses the chaos of running multiple tailnets and the challenges of scaling during rapid growth. He introduces TSIDP for effortless OAuth and talks about bridging the gap between personal and corporate networks. Expect insights sprinkled with humor on making security both powerful and approachable.

Jeremy Price, VP of Technology at Grokability and key player behind the Snipe-IT open source project, shares insights on building a sustainable business model without VC pressure. He discusses how Grokability prioritizes product quality over explosive growth and the importance of customer relationships when they pay for software. Jeremy highlights the success of running thousands of separate installations and the joy of creating 'boring' yet profitable tools that meet real needs without succumbing to market hype.

In this engaging discussion, Keith Townsend, founder of The CTO Advisor and an expert in cloud and AI, reveals the stark contrast between AI hype and its real-world application. He shares a cautionary tale about a biopharma company's rejection of Microsoft Copilot, highlighting enterprise fear of reputational risk. Keith also explores how AI has boosted his personal productivity tenfold, while cautioning that enterprises treat powerful tools like 'radioactive material.' The conversation touches on AI’s strengths in productivity but warns of its limitations in judgment, underscoring the challenges enterprises face in adoption.

Dev Rishi, GM of AI at Rubrik and a former machine learning CEO, shares insights on enterprise AI adoption and the evolution of agentic systems. He discusses the challenges enterprises face with AI, emphasizing the gap between consumer excitement and organizational risk aversion. Dev introduces Rubrik's innovative Agent Rewind, a safety net for AI-driven actions, helping prevent costly data loss. The conversation also covers trends in AI support, the importance of observability, and the role of governance in ensuring resilience in this rapidly changing landscape.