The Cloudcast

Aaron and Brian talk with Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) about emerging technology trends, how Enterprises around the world differ from the Bay Area, the organizational challenges of containers, and his CIO/CTO advice for large companies. Show Links: This show sponsored by Intel Cloud For All Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount on all books Keith's Podcast - The CTO Advisor Podcast Keith's Blog - The CTO Advisor Topic 1 - Let's talk about your background, community involvement, and in particular your recent move from Consultant to IT practitioner. Topic 2 - You stay up to date on most of the modern technologies, but also work in large Enterprise in the Midwest. How different is the Bay Area echo chamber from your view of the world? Topic 3 - Let's talk about containers and DevOps. How do you see that fitting into today's IT organizations? What has to change? What won't change? Topic 4 - We're seeing more "overlay" technologies in the market, from containers or SDN or aspects of security (we talked to Illumio on Eps.239). How do you see those working in silo'd IT environments? Who pays for them? Topic 5 - If you were a CIO, in an industry that's getting more competitive with a digital competitor, how would you start thinking about allocating resources, uplifting (or rehiring) skills, organizational culture, etc.?

Aaron and Brian talk with Ryan Kroonenburg (@acloudguru and @KroonenburgRyan, AWS Cloud Architect) and Anthony Stanley (@IamStan, AWS Cloud Architect) from A Cloud Guru about their passion for teaching, how they created A Cloud Guru, the framework for achieving AWS certifications and some examples of learners that got a big bump in pay after completing the courses. This show is sponsored by Intel Cloud for All - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/cloud-for-all/cloud-for-all.html A Cloud Guru Homepage - https://acloud.guru/
 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - #1 Paying Certification - http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/generic.asp?pageid=3855
 Some insight into how A Cloud Guru is using AWS Lambda to build their architecture to scale and reduce costs: https://read.acloud.guru/why-serverless-with-aws-is-a-game-changer-3cb37e25f638#.hfb74n8ig
 https://read.acloud.guru/serverless-the-future-of-software-architecture-d4473ffed864#.gmgtxc920
 https://read.acloud.guru/serverless-user-interfaces-stealing-the-best-of-mobile-for-the-web-802e1e8a30cb#.jcxc8bxal Topic 1 - Before we get into what A Cloud Guru does, let’s talk about your backgrounds. Where have you been and what made you want to start this business? Topic 2 - Let’s talk about A Cloud Guru. What does the site offer and what can “learners” expect from the training courses? Topic 3 - Ryan mentioned in the introduction video that he trained 30,000 people on AWS last year (or the last couple years) and you expect to reach 100,000 this year. That obviously means a lot of people using this platform to guide them. Tell us about the early feedback and things people want you to add? Topic 3a - Every new business has a plan or a set of expectations. What has been the unexpected that you’ve seen and heard from the market? Topic 4 - There was a recent survey from Global Knowledge that AWS Certified Solutions Architect is now the #1 Paying Certification. You mentioned that only 2000 people have that certification today, which feels a lot like the Cisco CCIE in 1997. Any ideas how much demand there is for that level of AWS certification? Topic 5 - Obviously you’ll see a number of individuals taking the courses, but are you starting to see corporate update as well? Can companies buy bulk licenses from A Cloud Guru?

Aaron and Brian talk with Alan Cohen (@ascohen, Chief Commercial Officer @illumio) about disrupting long-held technology architectures, the challenge of deploying and operating new technologies, and how Illumio security is designed to work around multiple cloud environments. This show sponsored by Intel Cloud For All The Cloudcast is an O'Reilly Media Partner, Request a free eBook or use code PCBW for a discount on all books Show Links: The Tailgating Security Podcast Illumio Adaptive Security Platform Adaptive User Security Topic 1 - Give us the 101 on Illumio - Who is the team, What do you build, What's the problem space. Let's talk about your background - Airespace, Nicira, some Advisory companies - you're sort of a "Serial Disrupter". Topic 2 - The last few weeks we've been talking about the operation challenges of all these cool new technologies (cloud, cloud-native, . Deployment problems, networking problems. Security is right up there at the top of the list of problems. Let's talk about how Illumio Adaptive Security Platform works. Topic 3 - Security is a little bit like a magician's conference. Lots of cool tricks, and then competitors start trying to disprove it. As a company that's only a couple years old, what's been your biggest surprise that customers have tried to de-mystify and just haven't been able to do? Topic 4 - This week Illumio made an announcement that seems to take this security model from the application-level to the user-level. What does this mean in the bigger picture of corporate security? Topic 5 - RSA is coming up in about a week, which is sort of the Super Bowl of Security. Besides the FBI/iPhone privacy stuff, what are the big issues that people should be paying attention to, especially if they are focused on the evolving parts of their business?

Brian talks with Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle, Founder/CEO of RackN) about the evolution of OpenStack, Containers, his company RackN and Digital Rebar, and how Microservices and DevOps go hand-in-hand. Show Links: This show sponsored by Intel Cloud For All The Cloudcast is an O'Reilly Media Partner, Request a free eBook or use code PCBW for a discount on all books RackN Homepage Digital Rebar Homepage (GitHub) Rob’s Blog How We Changed Digital Rebar’s Architecture, But Not Its Code, in Six Easy Steps Topic 1 - It’s been a long time since you were last on the show (Eps.16), back when you were at Dell in 2011. A lot has changed since then. What have you been up to? Topic 2 - You been heavily involved in OpenStack since the earliest days, serving in board roles, contributing role, working on architectures. You’ve also been critical of several areas around operations. What’s the state of OpenStack from your perspective? Topic 3 - Let’s talk about Digital Rebar and the challenges involved in using resources in different environments - bare metal, containers, VMs, various clouds. Topic 4 - You recently wrote a great article in The New Stack about how you migrated Digital Rebar to a microservices architecture. Give us the lessons learned in that migration process. Topic 5 - Given all the tools and frameworks and platforms available to developers and operations today, why is it so important to align application architectures (microservices) with modularity of the tools and frameworks? Can monoliths and microservices exist across DevOps

Brian talks with Chris Marino (@chris_marino, Founder/CEO of Pani Networks) about the his new startup, the evolution of networking for Cloud Native applications, and the opportunities to change networking as application models radically change. Show Notes: Krispy Kreme Challenge Donations - https://www.crowdrise.com/thecloudcastkrispykr/fundraiser/briangracely
 Pani Networks Homepage - http://www.paninetworks.com/ Romana Networking (Overview) - http://romana.io/
 Romana Slack Channel - romana.slack.com Topic 1 - We’ve known each other for a while, but give our audience some details about your background and what you’re building with Pani. Topic 2 - You highlight that there are 4 types (use-cases) of SDN in the market today: Enterprise, Carrier (NFV), SD-WAN and now Cloud Native. Let’s talk briefly about each one. Topic 3 - Let’s talk about the basics of how the Romana Project works - addressing, tenants, IPAM, service discovery Topic 4 - There’s an interesting trend happening where more intelligence and awareness is getting pushed up into higher-level systems like OpenStack, Kubernetes, etc. - how does this align to an application team vs. an operations team? Topic 5 - How can people learn more about Pani and Romana, and start to play with the technology?

Brian talks with James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart, Senior Vice President of Performance Analytics @SOASTA) about the evolution of the digital economy, performance testing applications, understanding business impact of performance, and how companies are evolving in this new economy. Show Notes: Krispy Kreme Challenge Donations - https://www.crowdrise.com/thecloudcastkrispykr/fundraiser/briangracely
 SOASTA Homepage - http://www.soasta.com/ Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show, it’s been a little while. Tell us what you’re doing these days. Topic 2 - We now live in a (mostly) digital world, where applications are the face or experience of many businesses. Where does SOASTA fit into this new world? Topic 3 - Last summer, I was at VelocityConf and saw this massive display (for SOASTA) and it looked like the control center in movies for a Space Shuttle launch. Turns out it was the launch of the mPulse platform. It was very business centric, which was unique and unusual for a highly technical conference. Topic 4 - Lots of talk about microservices and distributed applications. Also, lots of talk about how this becomes orders of magnitude more complex. How are application teams explaining this to their businesses, and how does SOASTA help them manage this? Topic 5 - Mobile devices are everything these days, and they have very different usage/access patterns. From a Performance/Analysis perspective, what are some of the most important things companies need to think about? Topic 6 - We’re starting to see more and more traditionally “non-technical” companies that will have massive application challenges in the future (e.g. connected vehicles). What’s your advice to them beyond just “be sure you’re testing early and often”?

Brian talks with Alex Polvi (@polvi, Founder/CEO of @CoreOSLinux) about how startups measure innovation, the evolution of both Tectonic solution and CoreOS projects, the evolution of Kubernetes and how many companies are building digital presences (web/mobile). This show sponsored by Intel Cloud For All Show Links: Krispy Kreme Challenge Donations Topic 1 - Let's start with product updates. It's been about six months since we talked with Redbeard (Brian Harrington) about CoreOS and security at OSCON. What's new with CoreOS (Tectonic, Kubernetes 1.0, Clair, etc.) Topic 2 - Kubernetes get most of the attention, but let's talk about "Clair" since it aligns to CoreOS's goal of securing the Internet. What is it and how does it work? Topic 3 - Tectonic was announced as GA in December. How has the shift from project/product based offerings to more solution-centric offerings changed your interaction with the market? Topic 4 - As best I can tell, your customers seem to be digital-centric companies (Samsung, Jive Software, etc.) with customer-facing applications. Is that the ideal customer profile for where CoreOS is today? Topic 5 - The other day you sent a tweet that mentioned how many releases that CoreOS had done in 2015. And I've seen about 6-10 more companies send a similar tweet. First time I've seen the release metric be the end-of-year measurement at a company level. Why is that happening now? Topic 6 - What's the sentiment in Silicon Valley these days about startups? Interest rates moved up a little bit, many unicorns ($1B valuations) were created in 2014-2015. Are the investors saying anything to startups in early 2016 that's different than 2014 or 2015?  

Aaron and Brian do their annual 2015 WrapUp show. They look at the most interesting shows, trends and topics from 2015, as well as making predictions for 2016. Show Notes: Krispy Kreme Challenge Donations Topic 1 - Is Public Cloud making any money? Topic 2 - Is Open Source Software making any money Topic 3 - Everything is becoming an integrated solution. Topic 4 - Bi-Modal vs. Tri-Modal IT Topic 5 - The continued rise of SaaS applications (and who manages them) Topic 6 - The continued rise of non-vendor companies recruiting developers Show Stats and Interesting Facts  60 Shows
  Official Podcast at Cloud Foundry Summit, MesosCon, LinuxCon, DockerCon, VelocityConf, OSCON
  Went over $5B in VC + M&A Funding for Guests
  Most Popular Show(s) of 2015: Eps.200 (Future of Connected Cloud; Christian Reilly) 
  Eps.199 (Docker Security; Diogo & Nathan)  Eps.208 (DevOps; Nathan Harvey)
  Aaron’s 2015 Predictions - From 2014 show  Container ecosystem is beginning to mature
  Docker needs to go through Trough of Disillusionment
  Skill Sets Changing - Blogging will become a lost art
  GitHub or “GetOut” - people need to learn GitHub - see 30 Days of Commitmas (GitHub learning)
  Existence of Bi-Modal IT - There is no migration path between the two.
  “Infrastructure as a Code” replaces “Software-Defined” terminology
 Infrastructure jobs will become the operations portion of DevOps (automate everything)
  Brian’s 2015 Predictions - From 2014 show Containers, Containers, Containers - competition for Docker in containers (VMware, CoreOS, etc.)? Moved from Containers to Systems.
 Containers/Docker were mentioned everywhere (AWS, Tutum, Microsoft, DigitalOcean)
  VMware pushes that “containers need VMs”
  AWS is finally starting to understand the Enterprise; bundling/integrating services
  Nobody values Cloud Management software
  How do the VCs justify all this investment in companies that drive open-source projects?
  What happens to all the SaaS tools platforms on AWS, can they survive economically?
  Our Grades on Various Topics/Companies/Themes OpenStack
  AWS
  Azure
  Google
  Cisco
  Other Public Clouds
  Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud
  VMware
  Docker
  Cloud Foundry
  Open Source centric companies (CoreOS, Hashicorp, Mesosphere)
   Cluster-Management and Schedulers (Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm)
  SaaS Applications
  Brian’s 2016 Prediction Notes: We’ll continue to see big bets (legacy vendors) and big failures  Very curious to watch the open-source VMware-replacements (Hashicorp, CoreOS, Docker, etc.) monetize their business
  We’ll begin to hear about some IoT success stories
  Aaron’s 2016 Prediction Notes:  Industry Predictions:
 Docker Trough of Disillusionment will happen (push from last year) in favor of Open Standards
  We will consolidate down to a handful of large hardware and software vendors in one (Oracle, Cisco, Dell) and pr

Aaron and Brian talk with Larry McQueary - (@McQueary; Product Manager at Apcera for NATS.io Cloud Native Infrastructure) about messaging platforms for microservices and distributed applications, how they differ from Enterprise Service Bus and how IoT applications have new requirements on the backend systems. Show Notes:  - How NATS, a REST Alternative, Provides Messaging for Distributed Systems http://thenewstack.io/nats-rest-alternative-provides-messaging-distributed-systems/ Topic 1 - People know Apcera from previous shows and discussions about Platforms. NATS is part of Apcera's platform, but it's also an independent project. Help us understand how the two are connected and separate? Topic 2 - Let's talk about the basics of NATS? What's the difference between a message-bus and an enterprise-service-bus (or caching layers)? Topic 3 - What types of applications use NATS and what are some of the characteristics (or architecture) of NATS that make it so fast and scalable? Topic 4- Everybody is talking about mobile and IoT these days. We know about phones and sensors, but what do the back-end systems look like and how does this interact with NATS? Topic 5 - How would someone deploy NATS? It is something that is best in a private cloud environment because of the performance requirements, or could it also run in multi-tenant, shared public cloud environments?

Aaron talks to Cloudcast alum Diogo Monica and Nathan McCauley (@diogomonica and @nathanmccauley; Security Leads @Docker) about the focus on security at DeckerConEU, hardware signing of containers, the evolution and updates to Docker Notary and Trusted Registry, Project Nautilus and the security scanning of containers, and secret data in Docker Control Plane Show Links: Thank you to Docker for having us as a media sponsor at Dockercon EU This show sponsored by Intel Cloud For All Docker Blog The Cloudcast #199 - Docker Security