The Cloudcast

Ken Meyer (EVP & CIO Consumer Technology at Truist Bank) talks about the 2yr transformation of Truist Bank (SunTrust and BB&T), managing multiple tech stacks, enabling a multi-cloud strategy, and internal communications and learnings. SHOW: 561CLOUD 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 experience with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.SHOW NOTES:BB&T to buy Suntrust in $66B “merger of equals”A glimpse inside Truist and its bank tech strategyBanks can be “fast followers” in AI: Truist CIOTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start by talking about your background, and the scope of the transformation you’ve been driving at Truist Bank. Topic 2 - Beyond the merger of two large banks, how did you think about the business challenges that you were trying to solve? Topic 3 - Walk us through how you tried to rationalize two technology stacks, and how you’ve been planning for a more cloud-centric future? Topic 4 - Every transformation has to balance existing (“old”) and new. How did you work through priorities, leveraging new technologies, maintaining existing systems, learning curves, etc? Topic 5 - Have you been able to create any unique ways to manage through the transition of so many technology stacks?Topic 6 - How are you measuring progress, success, alignment to business goals, etc? Topic 7 - How are you communicating the evolution to the teams, as well as management and stakeholders? Any lessons learned?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Many tech workers are struggling with the repetitive effects of the COVID pandemic (work from home, constant video calls, longer hours, etc.). But there’s never been a better time to explore new ways to be a “maker”. SHOW: 560CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account phoenixNAP websitephoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud PlatformSHOW NOTES:Apple launches the M1 Pro laptopThis is an acknowledgement of the growth of the creator economy (via @RFFlores)Tech workers are leaving their jobs at higher rates. What to do in 2022? (via @cra) CREATIVITY GETS THE BRAIN ENGAGEDWe (The Cloudcast)  frequently discuss the need to have a “learning mindset” in the IT industry, since the only constant is changing technologies. But learning requires a specific time commitment and a specific type of mind engagement. It’s important, but at times can feel very mentally draining. Finding a way to be creative, to be a “maker”, can be a good balance to learning. MAKERS FIND, ENGAGE and EXPAND via COMMUNITIESOne of the reasons we keep doing The Cloudcast is that it gives us a creative outlet to directly make something. Making something gives you a chance to get feedback. It gives you a chance to succeed or fail. Makers tend to seek out other makes, to share experiences, to bond, to create new ideas. These communities tend to be more positive than online forums (e.g. Reddit, HN, etc.) which tend to trend towards negativity and complaints. The tools to be a digital creator are more available and more powerful than ever. Our friend Rodrigo Flores had a good Twitter thread this week about the new Apple Mac M1 Pro and how it’s tailored for the (digital) creator economy. I’ve been reading a book, The Making of Bandon Dunes, about the history behind the creation of that resort in Oregon. Part of that reading is history, part of it is learning, and part of it is seeing how other creators think about their dreams, their opportunities and their ambitions. And how they overcame challenges.   FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Kevin Hoffman (@KevinHoffman, CTO at @Cosmonic_com, wasmCloud creator) talks about WebAssembly and wasmCloud, and how this new development paradigm can simplify application development.SHOW: 559CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Datadog Security Solution: Modern Monitoring and SecurityStart investigating security threats before it affects your customers with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsSHOW NOTES:Cosmonic (homepage)Webassembly (homepage)wasmCloud (homepage)Getting started with wasmCloudThe Webassembly stack (vs. containers, VMs)Building a Containerless Future with WebAssemblyFrom Napkin to the Cloud - A Webassembly JourneyProgramming Webassembly with Rust (Kevin Hoffman, new book)Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start by talking a little bit about your background, and what led you to create wasmCloud. Topic 2 - Let’s begin by talking about Webassembly. What is it (a language, a framework??), and what problems does it solve for developers?Topic 3 - Let’s talk about wasmCloud. Once you’ve built something leveraging Webassembly, how does it interact with wasmCloud?Topic 4 - Everything in application development tends to be a progression from something prior. How did Webassembly evolve? Docker’s Solomon Hykes said that if wasm+wasi existed 7yrs ago, he never would have created Docker. Topic 5 - Yesterday was WASM Day at Cloud Native Con. What were some of the highlights and focus areas?Topic 6 - What are some of the early uses and usage patterns of Webassembly?Topic 7 - What are some of the ways to get started with Webassembly and wasmCloud?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

While many computing systems mirror systems in nature, one aspect that doesn’t is technical debt. The majority of spending is maintaining the existing systems, and yet very little attention is paid to how to reduce the on-going costs. SHOW: 558CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:phoenixNAP websitephoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud PlatformCBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account SHOW NOTES:Fall Colors in NC MountainsSuccession Session 3 (HBO)GitLab goes IPO  IN NATURE, THE FALL BEGINS THE PROCESS OF RESETTINGIn many parts of the world, Fall (or Autumn) gives us a last glimpse of the beauty of nature, but then it resets for another cycle of recuperation and regeneration. This is one of the aspects of nature that the tech industry doesn’t seem to emulate in their systems. WE ACCEPT RESETS AND CHANGES ALL AROUND US, EXCEPT IN ITWhy don’t we create “life cycles” on commonly deployed systems? Why don’t we prepare people for resets and “leap forwards” better?Why isn’t there a part of our industry that attempts to innovate in this space, rather than just shift it to another party as “someone else’s problem”?Why do we assume the same needs (support, uptime, etc.) of the technical debt as we do the new things we build to replace it?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Jonathan Seelig (@j_seelig, Co-Founder/CEO of Ridge) talks about building the distributed cloud, remotely managing cloud resources, and the evolution of the edge. SHOW: 557CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Datadog 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.CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsSHOW NOTES:Ridge - Distributed Cloud ComputingWhat is Cloud Gaming? The Future is NowTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start by talking a little bit about your background, and what led you to trying to create a new vision of “the cloud”. Topic 2 - What types of problems exist with the current (mostly centralized) cloud architectures today? Or where are there new opportunities to rethink and introduce a new architecture?Topic 3 - Let’s talk about the main concepts behind the Ridge architecture. How much does it borrow from your experience at Akamai, and how much of it is your team looking at the world differently?Topic 4 - What are the core primitives of Ridge? How do companies engage with it? Topic 5 - What are some of the near-term and long-term impacts that you expect companies would see in using the Ridge architecture vs. more centralized cloud architectures? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Part 2 (of 2) looking at a recent example of how The Innovator’s Dilemma is playing out between the biggest clouds and the challenging upstarts.  SHOW: 556CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account phoenixNAP websitephoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud PlatformSHOW NOTES:Innovator’s Dilemma - Part 1How IBM Lost the CloudMAKING A MAJOR CHANGE IS ALWAYS DIFFICULTUnderstanding the transition to cloud means understanding that almost everything about your technology stack and business stack will likely have to change, get re-invented, or built from scratch.A BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS OR FAILURE THROUGH THE TRANSITIONTo build or to buy? Do you understand the scope of the problem, the velocity of change this creates,and how well you can actually execute?  How do you acquire, and how do you manage internal conflict?What will the new technology stack look like? Are you using the same design principles? Are you using the same architects?  How does this impact your business? What backstops (“cash cows”) does your business have to prop up the new business? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Huxlee Barbee (@huxley_barbee, Head Security Prod Mktg @DataDogHQ) talks about the challenging odds of preventing security attacks, managing configuration mistakes, scaling security through monitoring, and security feedback loops in production.  SHOW: 555CLOUD 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.SHOW NOTES:Cloud misconfiguration, a major risk for cloud securityResilience, DevSecOps, and other key takeaways from RSAC 2021Secure your infrastructure in real time with Datadog Cloud Workload SecurityIntroducing Datadog Cloud Security Posture ManagementTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start by talking a little bit about your background, and where you focus your attention these days.Topic 2 -According to many reports, configuration mistakes tend to lead to the most security breaches. Who is typically making the mistakes? Topic 3 - Can you dig deeper on the dynamics between security on the one hand and developers and SRE engineers on the other hand?Topic 4 - So what are some of the strategies and tactics for achieving optimum balance between these opposing interests?Topic 5 - Should we think about platform (infra) security apart from workload (application) security?Topic 6 - Can you talk to us about the differences between applying security to things that happen pre-production (e.g. CI/CD, software-supply chains) and things that happen in production?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Part 1 (of 2) looking at a recent example of how The Innovator’s Dilemma is playing out between the biggest clouds and the challenging upstarts.  SHOW: 554CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:phoenixNAP websitephoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud PlatformCBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account SHOW NOTES:The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)AWS’s Egregious Egress (Cloudflare)Announcing Cloudflare R2 Object Storage (without Egress fees)Cloudflare’s Disruption (Stratechery)Bandwidth AllianceCloudflare is eating the Cloud from outside in (swyx @ dev.to)Overview of AWS Infinidash (Did The Cloudcast predict R2?)Understanding Data Transfer in AWS (Last Week in AWS) ONE COMPANY’S PROFIT IS ANOTHER COMPANY’S OPPORTUNITYAs AWS transitions from long-time leaders to a new leadership team, many industry upstarts are looking for ways to pick away at their most profitable (and customer-problematic) services, with new capabilities that may unlock completely new business models for companies.CHEAPER NETWORKING, AGILE COMPUTING, and NEW COMPANY MODELSDisruption rarely happens because of better technology, but more often because of changing economics. (Gracely’s Theorem) AWS has long had very expensive networking costs, but it’s an area that really hasn’t faced competition. AWS offered enough services that their customers made the choice to deal with the network costs vs. having to build things themselves.Being the “everything” thing in computing always has its pros and cons. Computing has historically (last 40yrs) been moving to more distributed, modular architectures.We’ve seen a number of companies begin to offer edge or serverless types of offerings (GitHub, Netlify, Google Run, various CDN offerings, New ideas always emerge from difficult times (e.g. COVID pandemic) that we didn’t expect.Will this create a new round of acquisitions? Will it trigger price wars? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Josh Stella (@joshstella, Founder/CEO of @FugueHQ) talks about the differences between cloud security and data center security, the value businesses place on security implementations, and enabling governance in the cloud.SHOW: 553CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering TeamsCBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account AWS Data Backup for Dummies (Veeam)Choose Your Own Cloud Adventure with Veeam and AWSSHOW NOTES:PagerDuty (homepage)State of Digital Operations report (PagerDuty)Fugue (homepage)Sonatype (homepage)State of Cloud Security 2021The Cloudcast Eps.333 - DevSecOps and Governance (with Josh Stella) The Cloudcast Eps.543 - What does Security even mean anymoreTopic 1 - Welcome back to the show. It’s been a complicated world for security the last 12-18 months. Tell us a little bit about your background and the State of Cloud Security 2021 report.Topic 2 - Between the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft database hack and daily breaches of 100M users, where are we with security these days? It seems as messy as ever, and yet it also seems like people aren’t that concerned anymore. Topic 3 - Misconfiguration still seems to be a major issue. Isn’t Automation and Infra-as-Code and GitOps catching on? Policy-as-Code.Topic 4 - We now have DevSecOps, which combines all these functions together. Who is ultimately responsible for Security?Topic 5 - When companies move to the public cloud, they still have regulatory requirements. The cloud providers have “certifications” (e.g. SOC 2, NIST 800-53, GDPR, and HIPAA, so are they responsible now?Topic 6 - How do we start matching the level of motivation the bad guys (hackers) have with the level of concern companies should have?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

COVID has changed the world over the past two years. But how many of the technology changes we’ve made will remain, and which ones may revert back to pre-COVID standards? SHOW: 552CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account Spot by NetAppMore Cloud, Less Cost (Spot by NetApp)Datadog Application Monitoring: Modern Application Performance MonitoringGet started monitoring service dependencies to eliminate latency and errors and enhance your users experience with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.SHOW NOTES:We’ve All Become The Cloudcast (Eps.545)Apple employees don’t want to return to the office CLOUD GROWTH THROUGH GLOBAL PANDEMICThis week I had a discussion about the amount of change that happened over the past 18-24 months and whether or not that's normal (across industries)?WHAT STAYS, WHAT CHANGES, and WHY?Not every company or industry reacted the same. Companies established new norms around remote work. This will impact future hiring.Companies adopted more remote-friendly technologies.Many customers began using more public cloud services (out of necessity) and it worked fine. They likely won’t abandon these technology choices.Companies are focused on how to adjust to these new normals, so they’ll prioritize things that work (in the short-term) Will this be a boom for people getting new cloud certifications?Will companies eventually do cost-cutting on cloud spending, since it was “just do it!” last year?Will this create the new “bi-modal” IT?  FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet