The Cloudcast

Aaron and Brian talk with Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen, @SpeakingInTech podcast) and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor, CTOAdvisor podcast) about today’s announcement of VMware vCloud on AWS. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos VMware Cloud on AWS Show Notes: Topic 1 - What happened today? What are the basics that we know about this announcement? Topic 1a - Why didn’t this happen 2, 3 or 4 years ago? Topic 2 - Why do you think each of these companies agreed to this deal/arrangement? Topic 3 - What does this say about VMware? About the Dell/EMC relationship with VMware? About the vCloud Network of SPs? About Dell and Azure? Topic 4 - What does this say about AWS? Topic 5 - Who are the potential winners and potential losers, and where do the ripples in the industry go from here (or do they)? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks about why there are rumors and discussions in the industry about “forking” docker and other potentially emerging container standards. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos CoreOS creates “Rocket” (rkt) Tracking Container Standards Carrying Patches vs. Forking Projects Kelsey Hightower on The Cloudcast (Eps.261 - Container Formats)
 Introducing OCID Understanding OCID, or CRI-O Are vendors planning to fork Docker? Show Notes: [NOTE: Towards the end of the show, I got one element incorrect. I mixed-up the OCI and CNCF. OCI is focused on container standards, and Kubernetes and Prometheus are governed under CNCF. The mistake does not materially impact the area of discussion around Topic 4a. Apologies for the mistake.] Topic 1 - Are there standards for containers today? Topic 2 - What is a “fork”, and why would there be talk of a fork for docker containers? What does it mean to “carry patches”? Topic 3 - Why are all of these discussions happening now? What has changed in the container ecosystem? Topic 3a - Where do the container orchestrators (Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm, Nomad, etc.) fit into all these discussions? Topic 3b - Should customers/companies care about all this standards-body or vendor hand-waving? Topic 4 - What’s the difference between OCI (Open Container Initiative) and Docker? Topic 4a - What are OCID and CRI-O? Topic 5 - What does all of this mean going forward? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks with Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton, International Man of Tech Knowledge) about the evolution from VMware to Docker communities, teaching ops/sysadmins about Docker, how to keep up with the faster pace of change and where he sees the Docker/docker ecosystem evolving. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos Nigel’s Blog Docker for SysAdmins [book] Docker Training [via PluralSight] In Tech We Trust [podcast] Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us who this guy is that keeps popping up in various Docker-related sources of information. Topic 2 - How does a Storage and Virtualization guy get into Docker and containers? We thought Docker was for developers. Topic 3 - Between the book and the training videos, what has been the feedback from people, especially VMware admins (or any I/O Admins) about how they are learning Docker? Topic 3a - How are Ops Admins able to keep up with the pace of change with Docker, especially since they are used to 1yr+ update cycles from VMware, etc.? Topic 4 - Let’s talk about the Docker portfolio and the docker ecosystem. How do you see those two things evolving? Topic 5 - Are you hearing much about Windows and containers? Topic 6 - How do you see the next couple years of this ecosystem, as well as the virtualization ecosystems playing out? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Aaron and Brian talk with Chad Arimura (@chadarimura, Founder/CEO of Iron.io) about the history of Serverless/Event-Driven/FaaS/Jeff computing, the differences in frameworks in the market, common customer use-cases and the need for multi-cloud platforms. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos Iron.io Homepage Iron.io on GitHub Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give us some of the background on Iron.io and how we’ve gotten from the start to where this serverless movement is going these days. Topic 2 - As the serverless movement has started to gain momentum, we’ve been seeing Iron.io mentioned in more and more partnership announcements with platform companies (Docker, Red Hat OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, etc.). Gives us the basics of the Iron.io technologies - How does it augment these platforms? Topic 3 - There seem to be lots of events-driven platforms / frameworks emerging. What are the core elements that developers and operators should be considering? Topic 4 - Iron.io has been doing this for quite a while. What are some of the application and design patterns that customers use the Iron.io platform to accomplish? Topic 5 - What are some of the business challenges that are solved with these events-driven architectures? How do you have a business-level conversation around “serverless”? Topic 6 - Where are the open source elements of Iron.io and which parts are commercial? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks with Lachlan Evenson (@LachlanEvenson, Sr. Solutions Architect @Deis) about their journey from a v1 to v2 hybrid cloud, how they created internal “ambassadors” for the cloud, how they better understood developer needs and started the adoption of containers, and how they thought about monoliths, microservices and the use of Kubernetes in their new v2 platform. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos Microservices Memoirs (video / presentation) Kubernetes and OpenStack Communities Deploying OpenStack services on Kubernetes Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give us some of your background in building cloud environments. Topic 2 - Prior to this microservices journey, you had already gone through building a v1 cloud, that was very IaaS focused. Talk about the goals of that cloud, as well as the feedback you got from the “customers”, which were internal developers. Topic 3 - Eventually you built a v2 cloud. What was the focus of that effort? Topic 4 - [Culture] “Don’t break up the monoliths”. “Have ambassadors”. “Stay in the success zone”. Topic 5 - [Containers] Talk about how you got developers to embrace containers. Topic 5a - [Opinionated Platform] Many people talk about having an opinionated platform, but they focus on the side that runs the applications (e.g. container orchestration). You focused on being opinionated on the developer pipeline. Tell us why that was so important. Topic 6 - [Consistency of Applications] What are some of the basic things you had to think about with microservices as you had to deal with things like network latency, tracing/logging, etc.? Topic 7 - [Kubernetes] You've been involve in the Kubernetes community since the v1 announcement. Where do you see the community today? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks with Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) about the announcements from VMworld 2016 as well their strategy, customer and technologist feedback, and where this large community is moving forward. They also look at some of the changes and challenges facing legacy vendors vs. cloud vendors. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos TheCUBE at VMworld CTO Advisor (blog | podcast) VMworld 2016 Sessions (recordings) Tech Field Day at VMworld 2016 Show Notes: Topic 1 - Let’s talk about the overall vibe at VMworld 2016. Technologists viewpoint, customers viewpoints, etc. Topic 2 - Were you surprised at how much VMware acknowledged the large public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, IBM) after downplaying them or FUD’ing them for so many years? Topic 3 - Regardless of the re-naming (Cloud Foundation, Cross-Cloud), VMware is still pushing the SDDC. Lots of vendors now have a complete stack story (Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, etc.). Do you see the complete story resonating, or is it still pieces and parts depending on buying areas (Apps vs. Infrastructure)? Topic 4 - What is your take on their “Cloud Native” story, between VMware Integrated Containers and Photon Platform? Topic 5 - Michael Dell said that the Dell strategy (going forward) is very focused on Private Cloud, and also included VMware’s revenues streams / cash flows as part of the math to make that huge merger work. So is that VMware’s future - primarily a company selling into private data centers? Topic 6 - The NSX / Cross-Cloud SaaS-delivered services seem to be one of the core innovation areas. Walk me through your thoughts on that, especially the delivery model. Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks with Jeremy Eder (@jeremyeder; Performance Engineering at @RedHatNews) about the CNCF’s 1000 node cluster, designing large scale cloud-native environments, how testing has evolved with containers and sharable lessons from this build-out. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos CNCF announces free access to 1000 node cluster Deploying 1000 nodes of OpenShift on CNCF Cluster OpenShift Homepage - @openshift OpenShift, Kubernetes, Docker - Performance, Scalability, Testing [Github] Jeremy Eder's Blog Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give us a little bit of your background, and some background on how you got involved with the CNCF Cluster testing. Topic 2 - There are tons of details about your project in the blog post (see show notes), but let’s talk about some of the core things you were able to demonstrate with this testing (OpenStack, OpenShift, OOB Management, Application Deployments, etc.) Topic 3 - Creating a POC and architecting a large-scale environment are very different tasks. Let’s discuss some of the major design considerations you needed to work out. Topic 4 - During the build, where were the major time savers or areas where automation was the only way to accomplish your goals? Topic 5 - Tell us about the applications that were running on the cluster? How did you decide what to test? How do you monitor the environment once it was up and running? Topic 5 - What lessons can you pass along to anyone looking to architect or test a larger-scale environment? Any scars and scabs that people can avoid? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks with Mitch Wainer (@mitchwainer; Co-Founder of DigitalOcean) and Nick Van Wiggeren (@NickVanWig; Storage Engineering Manager at DigitalOcean) about the overall cloud market, being focused on developers, how to think about geographic coverage and how many features that customers actually ask for. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos DigitalOcean Homepage DigitalOcean - 2nd Largest Hosting Company in the World (NetCraft) Block Storage at DigitalOcean Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give us a little bit of your background, and give us a little bit of the story of DigitalOcean - it’s this success story that not that many people know about. Topic 2 - “the cloud” is a funny thing in that it can be focus on IT replacement, shadow IT, developers, platforms, etc. - but DigitalOcean has always been focused on developers. What does that really mean? Topic 3 - A lot of cloud providers are chasing really long lists of “features” or “services”, but the DigitalOcean list is much shorter. Does that tell us more about developers preferring simplicity over features, or does it give us a sense of how ready developers are to use embedded services vs. the DIY mentality? Topic 4 - Recently you announced a block storage offering. Give us some insight into the service/technology, and background on why it’s being announced now - it would seem like compute + storage was needed on Day 1. Topic 5 - The Big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google) tend to get the bulk of the media headlines for cloud. Tell us something about your customer base that would surprise us about how developers use DigitalOcean instead of those bigger offerings Topic 5 - DigitalOcean is a Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) backed company. I know that a number of our listeners read their blogs and listen to their podcasts. What do they bring to DigitalOcean as a VC? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Brian talks with Julius Volz (@juliusvolz; Co-Creator of Prometheus) about Project Prometheus, the challenges of monitoring containers, working within the CNCF and where the project will expand. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos Prometheus Homepage (project) Getting Started with Prometheus One year of Prometheus development Prometheus Conference (PromCon) Julius’s Homepage Julius’s GitHub Page Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Our first guest from Germany. Give us a little bit of your background and how you got involved in creating Prometheus. Topic 2 - Let’s talk about the basics of Prometheus. What are the core elements and what problems did you intend for it to solve? [From Prometheus homepage: “Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud.”] Topic 3 - Prometheus is part of the CNCF, which is also where Kubernetes resides, but it can work with lots of different frameworks. Is there a size of deployment where you’ve found that Prometheus starts to make sense? Topic 4 - Adrian Cockcroft has talked a number of times about the challenges of monitoring these fast moving, fast changing systems. What are the biggest challenges of these types of systems that Prometheus is about to solve today? Topic 5 - We’ve traditionally seen (larger) projects come out of a vendor (e.g. Google), into an open source community. Prometheus came out of SoundCloud, which is more of an end-user. How are the projects different in terms of getting community involvement and adoption? Topic 6 - It’s still early in the project’s life, but have you heard of any Cloud projects that want to offer Prometheus-as-a-Service? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Aaron and Brian talk with James Cowling (@jamesacowling; Storage Team Lead @Dropbox) about the Dropbox migration from AWS, project “Magic Pocket”, building distributed systems, lessons learned and how much better something must be before making a massive change. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos Dropbox Homepage Dropbox Tech Blog Dropbox’s Exodus from AWS (Wired Magazine) James’ Homepage Show Notes: Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’re a little bit Internet-famous due to the Wired Magazine article this year, but give us your background and how you got involved with Dropbox. Topic 2 - There were obviously business reasons why Dropbox did this, but walk us through your thinking about the challenges of designing “Magic Pocket” (codename of the project). Topic 3 - What does the application and operations team of a large distributed application (or platform) look like? What are the roles? What are the primary concerns and focus areas? Topic 4 - What did you get right on Magic Pocket and what surprised you as it went into production? What lessons could other people learn from your experience? Topic 5 - Are you able to share any “today” measurements about where Dropbox is today vs. 2012? People are obviously interested in big migrations and if it was worth all the time/cost/effort. Topic 6 - What lessons could people learn from this huge migration effort? What was the thought process between business decisions and technical decisions….and how did the process work over the timeframe? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel