The Cloudcast

We’re at an interesting crossroads. Technology is becoming more distributed, and yet the teams managing it are having to become more integrated. For successful companies, this is creating a different way to think about “platform” services. SHOW: 599CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:BMC Wants to Know if your business is on it's A-GameBMC Autonomous Digital EnterprisePolyscale.ai - PolyScale solves global database latency and performance with intelligent serverless caching and compute at the edge.Check out PolyScale’s global edge data platform at www.polyscale.ai and sign up for a free account today. SHOW NOTES:DevOps, What’s in a Name? (The Cloudcast Eps.593 - Feb ‘22)SoloCon 2022 - Videos LOCATIONS, INFRASTRUCTURE AND APPLICATIONS ARE BECOMING MORE DISTRIBUTEDData Center to Cloud. Zero-Trust Networks. Users (internal and external) are everywhere. Application Services are managed, or reached via an API.  WHAT DOES THE LAYER ABOVE INFRASTRUCTURE LOOK LIKE NOW? We know that infrastructure is now “Cloud” and often managed by someone else, but what do we call the stuff about it? Some of it is Applications, some of it is Application-Services, and then there is a bunch of stuff that crosses boundaries between networking, security, API governance, application acceleration, etc.. FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Elliot Shmukler (@eshmu, Co-Founder/CEO @anomalo_hq) and Jeremy Stanley (@jeremystan, Co-Founder/CTO) talk about how data integrity and changes can impact both technology and business decisions. SHOW: 598CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Polyscale.ai - PolyScale solves global database latency and performance with intelligent serverless caching and compute at the edge.Check out PolyScale’s global edge data platform at www.polyscale.ai and sign up for a free account today.strongDM - Secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. Manage access to any server, database, or Kubernetes instance in minutes. Fully auditable, replayable, secure, and drag-and-drop easy. Try it free for 14 days - www.strongdm.com/signupCloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsSHOW NOTES:Anomalo (homepage)Anomalo raises 33M Series A (TechCrunch)Anomalo watches your data for weirdness (Forbes)Anomalo brings data quality platform to Snowflake (TechTarget)Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start with brief introductions and backgrounds. Elliot & Jeremy please introduce yourselves.Topic 2 - As mentioned you both met and worked together at Instacart. Let’s introduce the concept of data quality and integrity to those who may not be familiar. What patterns and problems did you see. Any possible horror stories you can share?Topic 3 - Up until now, I’ve seen big data often more about finding the needle in the haystack. It’s in there somewhere, you just have to find it. But, what if it is the wrong needle?Topic 4 - Are we also talking about data drift over time as the amount of data grows? As data is added to the pool, we may come to different conclusions. How do we know if the new conclusions are based on good data or bad data?Topic 5 - You recently announced a partnership with Snowflake. This makes sense, why build another data lake and that of course may be a barrier of entry to some, correct? Are we reaching a point with big data and data lakes that we can have one single source of truth? I know we are in early days but how do most customers approach big data today and how do they keep the data sets up to date.FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Sometimes change happens fast, and sometimes change happens over a long period of time. Today’s show tries to put a few things in perspective around tech and non-tech change. SHOW: 597CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:strongDM - Secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. Manage access to any server, database, or Kubernetes instance in minutes. Fully auditable, replayable, secure, and drag-and-drop easy. Try it free for 14 days - www.strongdm.com/signupDatadog Kubernetes Solution: Maximum Visibility into Container EnvironmentsStart monitoring the health and performance of your container environment with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.SHOW NOTES:WE WISH WE KNEW MORE ABOUT OUR AUDIENCE, AT A PERSONAL LEVELWe have listeners from 130+ countries. Unfortunately podcast tools don’t give us individualized information about our audience. Over the last 5 weeks, we had 19 listeners from Ukraine. This past week, we had 0. We hope that they are all safe. YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN A JOB WILL BE A GREAT JOB, GOOD JOB, OR BAD JOBOver the years, Aaron and I have changed jobs within the tech industry several times. Sometimes we stayed for a little while and sometimes much longer. You never know how a specific job will be going into it, and sometimes it’s hard to have perspective on it while you’re in the job. The best you can hope for is a few great teams, or great projects, or working with great people, to offset that lots of things in tech don’t pan out like they are expected.  FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Tim Prendergast (@auxome, CEO strongDM) talks about security access as code, the latest security trends including Zero Trust and taking a modern approach to security.SHOW: 596CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsDatadog Application Monitoring: Modern Application Performance MonitoringGet started monitoring service dependencies to eliminate latency and errors and enhance your users app experience with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.BMC Wants to Know if your business is on it's A-GameBMC Autonomous Digital EnterpriseSHOW NOTES:strongDM (homepage)strongDM raises $54M (VentureBeat)Year of Access Infographic (strongDM)Year of Access Full Report (strongDM)Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show! For those that don’t know, you were on the Cloudcast show #151 way back in the day and one of our first security guests. Hard to believe it has been almost 8 years since we’ve had you on the show. For those that don’t know, give everyone a brief introduction and what you’ve been up to since your evident.io days.Topic 2 - You introduced our listeners to the concepts of Continuous Security Monitoring and Shared Responsibility in the public cloud. Bring folks up to date, how have security models and concepts evolved?Topic 3 - Leading question for you Tim… as we know strongDM recently published some great reports on this, go check out the Infographic and Year of Access Reports linked in the show notes. Where do developers and more specifically where does DevOps or even DevSecOps fit into all of this? How do we “air gap” developers in public cloud while maintaining access to the tools and workflows they need. (i.e. ssh keys, AWS IAM keys, RDP logins, and database credentials)Topic 4 - Security to me has always been a tradeoff of convenience. But, we also have the rise of automation, which I would expect to be a big convenience vs. risk trade off, especially at scale.  Is this still true? Where does Zero Trust fit in?Topic 5 - Lets talk about strongDM specifically quickly. I’ve heard the term “access as code” thrown around. Is this a proxy, a VPN, tell us a bit about the tech and the implementation and use case and what changes.FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Kubernetes won the container wars and continues to grow in use across many industries. But how did something that was about Cloud-native Applications gain traction without a developer experience?SHOW: 595CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all your infrastructure Get started with Teleport CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsDatadog Kubernetes Solution: Maximum Visibility into Container EnvironmentsStart monitoring the health and performance of your container environment with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.SHOW NOTES:Kubernetes - The Documentary - Part 1Kubernetes - The Documentary - Part 2Software Defined Talk - Eps.344 - Kubernetes Documentary HOW DID KUBERNETES WIN WHEN IT STARTED FROM BEHIND?Listening to this week's SDT show, and remembering listening to SDT years ago, @cote comments about why Kubernetes "won" were always interesting. In essence it was late to market, was lacking in features vs. competitors (Mesos, Swarm, CF), and had a terrible user-experience...so how did it "win"? It all seems ass-backwards. HOW HAS KUBERNETES CONTINUED TO WIN, WITHOUT A DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE?Mesos, CF and Swarm were all single-vendor dominated projects, and many companies had concerns about another generation of vendor lock-in. This point is reasonably valid, but the companies that were using Mesos, CF and Swarm did all seem to love that technology.Mesos was primarily focused on big data workloads. For each new application-type, you needed to write (or use) another application-specific framework. So it was good at its niche, but couldn't easily be used for other types of apps. [Kubernetes eventually copied this model with CRDs].Swarm was the easiest to use, but it wasn't very good technology and didn't scale. So it got pigeon-holed for smaller projects.CF focused on Java/SpringBoot, which is a big Enterprise opportunity. but CF was super complicated to set up. And CF never really embraced containers, so companies were weary of if they were missing this big trend (Docker).Kubernetes comes along and  becomes the good-enough platform. It's not dominated by a single vendor. It natively supports Docker, it has some built-in usage patterns so it's easier than Mesos to add apps, it scales better than Swarm, and it can support Java/Spring or even legacy Java (lift-and-shift). And as Joe Beda says, you could use it natively or you could build some PaaS-y like features on top of it.FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Kevin Hu (@kevinzenghu, Co-Founder | CEO at @Metaplane) talks about the concepts behind Data Observability and the unique challenges for Data Engineers.SHOW: 594CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:BMC Wants to Know if your business is on it's A-GameBMC Autonomous Digital EnterpriseUsage.ai (homepage)Start saving up to 57% of your AWS EC2 spend in under 5 minutes with Usage AI. No code change, no downtime, no engineering work required.New Relic (homepage)Services down? New Relic offers full stack visibility with 16 different monitoring products in a single platform.SHOW NOTES:Metaplane (homepage)Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s talk about your background and what led you to start Metaplane.Topic 2 - Let’s start by talking about the concept of what is a modern data engineer. What is this person doing, what are they responsible for, and who are their typical “customers” within a business. Topic 3 - Beyond just huge volumes of data and trying to make the data usable (formatting, ETL, storage access, etc.), what sort of problems do data engineers encounter? How much is typically “first-party data” and how much comes from external systems? Topic 4 - Let’s talk about Data Observability. First off, what is it?. And second, how is it different from the Observability that we’ve seen from Datadog or Honeycomb or Observe or many others? Topic 5 - What are the types of Data Observability problems that Metaplane is focused on solving for Data engineers? Are these usually done independently, or in collaboration with the application or business analyst teams?Topic 6 - What are some of the immediate results (improvements) that companies see when adding Data Observability to their environments?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

DevOps is defined as, “Everything you do to overcome the friction created by silos … All the rest is plain engineering” Why is it so difficult to implement, but so easy to make up so many job titles surrounding it?SHOW: 593CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsDatadog Monitoring: Modern Monitoring and AnalyticsStart monitoring your infrastructure, applications, logs and security in one place with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all your infrastructure Get started with Teleport SHOW NOTES:Shades of DevOps Roles (Patrick Dubois) IF EVERYTHING IS DEVOPS, THEN WHAT IS DEVOPS?Patrick Dubois, one of the original creators of the DevOps concept, recently published a framework to think about all the job titles that have emerged out of the original DevOps concept. Is this a good progression, or is it just hiding the cultural and organizational complexities that DevOps is trying to address?THE CHALLENGES OF TRYING TO ELIMINATE SILOED TECHNOLOGY FUNCTIONSIt seems like it all began when AWS’ CTO Werner Vogels said, “You build it, you run it.” That was such a foreign concept in the IT world, and ever since, we’ve been trying to invent ways to apply existing organization paradigms to the byproduct of that concept. Previous applications were rarely changed. Now applications (microservices, etc.) are designed from Day 1 to frequently change. Once again, the existing organization paradigms have to change. And the public cloud introduces a level of financial transparency and complexity (e.g. here’s a bill every month) that is creating new roles (or newer concepts) that are trying to optimize that information. Lots of companies say that they can’t support multiple operational models (hence why they try to retrofit old models into new names), but the reality is that they are always supporting multiple process or platform models. Resume-driven-development has become a real thing, so it’s not unusual to see title-washing happen at various companies. It can also be valuable for recruiting as well, at least in the short-term. I wish there was some better measurement model for progress along these DevOps paths, instead of just the tiering of the State of DevOps report. It’s too easy to get frustrated, when many companies are just striving to get to a mid-level of DevOps efficiency. FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Erik Peterson (@silvexis, Founder/CTO/CISO @CloudZeroInc) talks about how Cloud Cost Mgmt has matured, the importance of business context for cloud costs, and best practices for managing SaaS costs. SHOW: 592CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Usage.ai (homepage)Start saving up to 57% of your AWS EC2 spend in under 5 minutes with Usage AI. No code change, no downtime, no engineering work required.New Relic (homepage)Services down? New Relic offers full stack visibility with 16 different monitoring products in a single platform.BMC Wants to Know if your business is on it's A-GameBMC Autonomous Digital EnterpriseSHOW NOTES:CloudZero (homepage) - Cloud Cost IntelligenceTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. You have a very interesting background. Tell us a little bit how you’ve gone from Nuclear watchdog to Banking to Product guy to Security guy and now focus on Cloud costs. Topic 2 - Let’s start by talking about maturity levels of companies using the cloud. Engineering teams are fairly mature, but how mature are product teams, finance teams, marketing teams, etc, especially when it comes to understanding cloud costs in their world?Topic 3 - Cloud Cost Mgmt used to be all about when to use on-demand vs. Reserved Instances. Have the systems evolved to be more contextual - (example) so marketing teams can run experiments and product teams can make smarter feature priority decisions? Topic 4 - We’re seeing a lot of companies moving from selling software to delivering their capabilities as a SaaS offering. This is a big change in the economics of that business. How can those types of teams think about cloud costs? Topic 5 - How much of Cost Mgmt is systems vs. people that understand the contexts of costs? What is your perspective on how much should be automated systems vs. human expertise to augment automated systems? Topic 6 - What are some of the most common mistakes you see companies make around Cost Mgmt, or some tips you give to immediately help companies better spend on CloudFEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Shadow IT and start-ups were the original users of public cloud, over a decade ago. But as public cloud has become a multi-billion dollar business, let’s explore how the role of Shadow IT has evolved. SHOW: 591CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Datadog Kubernetes Solution: Maximum Visibility into Container EnvironmentsStart monitoring the health and performance of your container environment with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all your infrastructure Get started with Teleport CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering Teams SHOW NOTES:Shadow ITWhy Software is Eating the World (WSJ, 2011)“Does IT Matter” (Nicholas Carr, 2014)Bi-Modal IT (Gartner, 2015) DOES SHADOW IT STILL EXIST IF PUBLIC CLOUD IS MAINSTREAM?Shadow IT began as a way to be more productive in the office (server under the desk, WiFi in a conference room, etc.) and then it went to the cloud (SaaS, the IaaS/PaaS). But how did it evolve and what situations has it created now? WHAT DOES THE NEW DISTRIBUTED IT LOOK LIKE NOW?Everybody has the ability to get access to (almost) any technology, via open-source or public cloud, or freemium services.Everybody has the ability to learn something new (YouTube, ACloudGuru, Developer Evangelists, etc.IT organizations have less influence over company-wide architectures and strategies.IT still is often tasked with maintaining applications/security/compliance, even after another group deployed it. IT leaders are asked to lead digital transformation projects, and typically aren’t staying in the same place for more than 2-3 years. How much of that time is spent coordinating, communicating, re-organizing around DevOps, DevSecOps, FinOps, AIOps, etc..There are hybrid applications, but they aren’t hybrid in the sense of consistently being deployed everywhere to manage vendor lock-in.There are many multi-cloud companies because IT no longer has a boundary. And the economics of cloud means that most applications won’t move once deployed (easier to turn off than to move).There are many, many pains-of-glass. FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Tim Banks (@elchefe, Principal Cloud Economist @duckbillgroup) talks about how public cloud providers are offering committed spend programs, and ways to best use their programs to manage cloud spending. SHOW: 590CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:New Relic (homepage)Services down? New Relic offers full stack visibility with 16 different monitoring products in a single platform.Usage.ai (homepage)Start saving up to 57% of your AWS EC2 spend in under 5 minutes with Usage AI. No code change, no downtime, no engineering work required.SHOW NOTES:Duckbill Group (homepage)Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve got a very interesting background of hands-on technical and being on the business side of things. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you focus on at Duckbill Group. Topic 2 - Let’s start by talking about this trend of long-term cloud contracts. Why are we seeing more and more announced, and who does it seem to benefit more (cloud provider or customer)?Topic 2a - How do companies typically size these deals? Is it some percentage of current spend forecasted forward, or some aspirational goal, or something else? Topic 3 - When a company signs up for one of these long-term committed spend contracts, what are the mechanics of the contract? Is it just “all-you-can-eat” technology, or do they tend to include additional capabilities/services, etc?Topic 4 - What have you found to be the behavior of companies that sign these contracts? Does it lead to more projects getting created, or more experimentation, or any other unintended consequences?Topic 5 - At what point do companies start re-evaluating the contracts? What happens if they find themselves way below expected spending expectations?  Topic 6 - Have you seen any new behaviors from the cloud providers once they sign a contract, whereas one group (or service) is pushing hard to capture a bigger portion of the contract? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet