Screaming in the Cloud

Raj Bala, Founder of Perspect, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to chat about his experiences working in the world of cloud and why he made the shift from Gartner Analyst to Founder. Raj asks the question, “Is AWS truly customer-obsessed?” in the face of their business practices, and challenges the common notion that analysts don’t need to have lived experience with a product to criticize it. Raj and Corey also explore the absurdity of Azure naming conventions, how cloud providers are creating roadblocks to multi-cloud, and the response of the greater public as cloud providers become more and more powerful. About RajRaj Bala, formerly a VP, Analyst at Gartner, led the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services since its inception and led the Magic Quadrant for IaaS before that.  He is deeply in-tune with market dynamics both in the US and Europe, but also extending to China, Africa and Latin America.  Raj is also a software developer and is capable of building and deploying scalable services on the cloud providers to which he wrote about as a Gartner analyst.  As such, Raj is now building Perspect, which is a SaaS offering at the intersection of AI and E-commerce.Raj's favorite language is Python and he is obsessed with making pizza and ice cream. Links Referenced:Perspect: https://perspect.comformer2.com: https://former2.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/raj

Wayne Duso, VP of Storage, Edge and Data Governance Services at AWS and Nancy Wang, GM of AWS Data Protection, both join Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss data protection and analysis at AWS. Wayne and Nancy describe how AWS Backup has scaled to protect over 90% of the data stored on AWS today. Nancy explains how her team specializes in helping AWS customers develop custom solutions for their specific data needs, and the way that AWS has built out new tools and services to accommodate that customization. Wayne also reveals how important data analysis is to the AWS team when it comes to improving services and developing ground-breaking new innovations. About WayneProfessionally, Wayne is a Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he leads a set of businesses delivering cloud infrastructure services. In 2013, he founded and continues to lead the AWS Boston regional development center. Wayne is an always-curious entrepreneur who is passionate about building innovative teams and businesses that deliver highly disruptive value to customers. He loves engaging people who build and deliver customer-obsessed solutions, as well as customers wanting to realize value from those solutions. Wayne also holds over 40 patents in distributed and highly-available computer systems, digital video processing, and file systems. Personally, Wayne is a proud dad to great people, and loves to cook and grow things, it relaxes and grounds him, and he cherishes finding adventure in the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.About NancyNancy is a product & engineering executive, advisor, and investor with significant experience in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and SaaS. Nancy advises Fortune 10 companies on accelerating revenue growth, and she advises startups on attracting their first 100K enterprise customers.  Currently, Nancy is the Director of Product & Engineering and General Manager at Amazon Web Services, where she leads P&L, product, engineering, and design for its data protection and data security businesses. Prior to Amazon, she led SaaS product development at Rubrik, the fastest-growing enterprise software unicorn, and built healthdata.gov for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Passionate about growing early-stage startups, Nancy is a Venture Partner for Felicis Ventures, where she works with early-stage data infra and security companies on their product-market fit, market segmentation, and product scaling. Excited to advance more women into technical roles, Nancy is the founder & board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has already informed and educated 30,000 Coursera learners worldwide on how to get their first, or next, tech leadership role.  She earned a Bachelors of Applied Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves on the Board of Directors for the UPenn School of Engineering Online. Links Referenced:re:Invent talk with Nancy and Neha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELSm3WgR8RE

Fouad Matin, Co-founder & CEO of Indent, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how to get data security right without creating unnecessary barriers for your development team. Fouad and Corey discuss how getting admin access as a developer can be time consuming and vague, when it should be efficient and come with an easily defined reason for granting access. Fouad also explains why he feels most breaches are due to not getting the basics right, and why he feels storing customer and sensitive data should be done with the same principles as dealing with hazardous waste.About FouadFouad Matin is the co-founder and CEO of Indent, a security company that enables teams to perform mission-critical operations faster and more securely. With Indent, organizations like HackerOne, Modern Treasury, Vercel, and PlanetScale are able to grant secure, time-bound user and admin permissions for cloud apps and infrastructure through Slack.Prior to Indent, Fouad worked as an engineer at Segment, a customer data platform helping companies secure their pipelines for handling customer data. He co-founded a non-partisan non-profit in 2016 to help people register and get out to vote through easy-to-use, privacy preserving tools. In 2018, while validating Indent’s mission, partnered with Vote.org to build tools for users to find their polling place and preview their ballot using client-side encryption.Links Referenced:Indent: https://indent.comNobody Should Have Production Access: https://indent.com/blog/productionFouad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fouadmatinIndent on Twitter: https://twitter.com/indentUnplanned Maintenance: https://unplannedmaintenance.comLeast Privilege in Practice Blog Post from Indent: https://indent.com/blog/least-privilegeAdditional Links Referenced:Email: mailto:fouad@indent.comFouad LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/indentinc/Indent LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fouadmatin/

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Foundational Data Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her technique for spending time intentionally and prioritizing work-life balance called balcony-hopping. Mai-Lan explains how she created the concept of balcony-hopping and how it has helped her to be a better leader, mother, wife, and boxer. Corey and Mai-Lan discuss how in today’s age, attention is a form of currency and why it’s so important to be intentional with how and where you spend your attention. Mai-Lan also offers practical insights to anyone seeking to feel more productive, present, and balanced. About Mai-LanMai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec is Vice President, Foundational Data Services (FDS) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leads a number of high-scale AWS cloud services that provide storage and streaming of petabytes or exabytes of data and essential building blocks for modern application architecture like queuing and notifications, monitoring, alarming, logging and reliability validation. Mai-Lan’s teams include some of AWS’ first and largest-scale services like Amazon S3 and Simple Queue Service (SQS) to more recent and fast-growing services like managed open source streaming (Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka).Prior to joining Amazon, Mai-Lan spent almost 15 years in engineering and product leadership roles at technology companies including Microsoft and early stage startups. She began her technology career after serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Mopti region of Africa as a Forestry volunteer after earning her degree from University of California, San Diego.At Amazon, Mai-Lan is an advisor to Asians@Amazon, creator and sponsor of internal leadership development programs for Amazon employees, and is passionate about AWS initiatives and cloud services that maximize human potential everywhere.Mai-Lan has three children and lives in Seattle with her family. When she is not working on Amazon cloud services and spending time with her husband and kids, Mai-Lan trains primarily in boxing with additional practice in the martial art Savate.Links Referenced:LinkedIn post “Live Your Best Life Through Balcony Hopping”: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/live-your-best-life-through-balcony-hopping-mai-lan-tomsen-bukovec/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mailan/

Kannan Solaiappan, Head of Reliability and Data Engineering at Circles Life, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss building a team in a start-up environment and the complexities of balancing reliability and security with scale. Kannan describes the challenges of building a semi-platform multiple instances model and how products like Severalnines have helped identify and optimize potential problems before they affect customers. Kannan and Corey also discuss the impact that major outages had on the world at large when it came to fault-tolerance on entry points, and Kannan explains how guardrails can improve reliability without creating the same resistance from engineers that governance can. About KannanWith over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Kannan Solaiappan is a highly motivated and passionate leader with a track record of driving results. With a background in software development, operations, architecture, security, and Agile transformation, Kannan has served as a Head of DevOps/Reliability/Data Engineering & Architecture, managing budgets of over 10 million dollars. Kannan has successfully led teams of up to 80 members and has a strong background in building and maintaining world-class organizational structures and cultures.Currently, Kannan is leading a team of SRE, DevOps, and Data Engineering professionals at Circles Life, Asia’s first fully digital telco, where Kannan  is working towards building the world’s best Telco SAAS platform with a focus on CiCD, observability, reliability, resilience, and security.Kannan has a diverse set of skills including IT Service Management, team management, IT strategy, vendor management, site reliability engineering, Architecture and leadership.Links Referenced:Severalnines: https://severalnines.com/Circles.Life: https://circles.lifeCircles.Life Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/circleslifesg/Circles.Life Twitter: https://twitter.com/circleslifesgCircles.Life Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CirclesLifeSG/

Episode SummaryFloor Drees, Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her journey into the world of open source and the opportunities she sees to improve developer relations. Floor and Corey dive into the pitfalls and opportunities of being a frequent speaker at events, and Floor shares some best practices to help be prepared for those opportunities. Floor also shares why she feels events should include hybrid remote attendance options, and the benefits of hosting local events to breathe life into new relationships within the developer community. Floor and Corey also discuss the complexities of maintaining an open-source project and what goes into keeping an open-source community healthy and thriving. About FloorFloor is a Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven, a company that manages your favorite open source data tools for you without exploiting the projects and their maintainers. Previously Floor worked in DevRel at Grafana Labs and Microsoft. She is a Devopsdays Core member, and organizes the Devopsdays Amsterdam and Eindhoven chapters. She is a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, and organizes a bunch of meetups, including-but-not-limited-to contributing.today, DevRel Salon Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam Ruby Meetup. Floor is also an art school graduate, who stumbled into tech face-first.Links Referenced:Aiven: https://aiven.iofloor.dev: https://floor.devMastodon: https://mastodon.lol/@floordTwitter: https://twitter.com/floordreesdev.to: https://dev.to/floord

Álvaro Hernandez, Founder of OnGres, joins Corey on Screaming in the cloud to discuss his hobby project Dyna53, the balkanization of AWS services, and all things Postgres. Álvaro and Corey discuss what it means to be an AWS Community Hero these days, and Álvaro shares some of his experiences as being one of the first Heroes to provide feedback on AWS services. Álvaro also shares his thoughts on why people shouldn’t underestimate the importance of selecting the right database, why he feels Postgres and Kubernetes work so well together, and the ever-growing ecosystem of Postgres.About ÁlvaroÁlvaro is a passionate database and software developer. Founder of OnGres ("ON postGRES"), he has been dedicated to Postgres and R&D in databases for more than two decades.Álvaro is at heart an open source advocate and developer. He has created software like StackGres, a Platform for running Postgres on Kubernetes or ToroDB (MongoDB on top of Postgres). As a well-known member of the PostgreSQL Community, Álvaro founded the non-profit Fundación PostgreSQL and the Spanish PostgreSQL User Group. He has contributed, among others, the SCRAM authentication library to the Postgres JDBC driver.You can find him frequently speaking at PostgreSQL, database, cloud (becoming an AWS Data Hero in 2019), and Java conferences. In the last 10 years, Álvaro has completed more than 120 tech talks (https://aht.es).Links Referenced:OnGres: https://ongres.com/Dyna53: https://dyna53.io/Personal Website: https://aht.esTwitter: https://twitter.com/ahacheteLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahachete/

About CatherineCatharine brings more than fifteen years of experience building global networks and large scale data center infrastructure to the challenge of scaling quickly and safely.  She loves building engaged and curious teams, providing insightful forecasting tools, and thinking about how to build to scale in a sustainable way to preserve a humane quality of life on this swiftly tilting planet. When not trying to predict the future as a capacity planner, she’s often knitting extremely complicated sweaters and coming up with ridiculous puns.

About JeremyJeremy is the Director of DevRel & Community at CircleCI, formerly at Solace, Auth0, and XDA. He is active in the DevRel Community, and is a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.Links Referenced:CircleCI: https://circleci.com/DevOps Party Games: https://devopspartygames.com/Twitter: IamjerdogLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymeiss/

About EmilyEmily Ruppe is a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io whose greatest accomplishment was once being referred to as “the Bob Ross of incident reviews.” Previously Emily has written hundreds of status posts, incident timelines and analyses at SendGrid, and was a founding member of the Incident Command team at Twilio. She’s written on human centered incident management and facilitating incident reviews. Emily believes the most important thing in both life and incidents is having enough snacks.Links Referenced:Jeli.io: https://jeli.ioTwitter: https://twitter.com/themortalemilyHowie Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie/welcome