The Cloudcast

Aaron, Brian and Amy Lewis talk with Srinivas Krishnamurti (@skrishna09; Founder/CEO of Zugata) about the VMware Mafia, being an EIR, the Zugata vision to make work-life better for individuals, the psychology of improving teamwork and the differences between building commercial software and SaaS services. Show Notes Zugata Homepage - http://www.zugata.com/
 Srinivas’ Blog - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/re-imagining-performance-reviews-srinivas-krishnamurti
 Topic 1 - You’re an alumni of the infamous VMware Mafia. Tell us about your background and why you decided to start Zugata. Also, let’s talk a little about the service. Topic 2 - You obviously had a premise about how this might change the work environment, but what have you learned from early adopters of the service? Topic 3 - How do you overcome that many people’s initial reaction to a tool like this is “privacy!, social engineering!, big brother! bullying!” Topic 4 - Let’s talk about building a SaaS service and mobile experience. Your background is in package software. What are the biggest differences from a development perspective? Topic 5 - Help us understand the basics of SaaS economics? Lots of services start for free, then attempt to convert to a freemium or fully-paid model. What are the milestones for new SaaS companies to consider? Topic 6 - As a SaaS service, you not only need to think about customers, but also your underlying cloud platform. What’s the landscape from the cloud providers for SaaS companies (advantages, disadvantages, etc)?

Aaron and Brian talk with Jonathan Donaldson (@jdonalds; VP/GM, Software Defined Infrastructure at Intel) about old times, how quickly the Cloud Computing market is evolving, the breadth of projects that the Intel SDI groups engages with, how to growth the number of clouds, and how Intel is addressing the IoT market. Intel Cloud for All  Intel Software Defined Infrastructure Jonathan’s Blog Topic 1 - Aaron and I both have known you for many years, and worked with you in various other organizations, but give our listeners not only your background but the things you’re working on at Intel these days. Topic 2 - The market is going pretty crazy these days as it relates to cloud - Dell/EMC merger and subsequent Virtustream announcement; HP getting out of public cloud (again); AWS announcing huge growth and new services; Rackspace becoming a service company for other clouds. Intel has pretty unique perspective. Help us see through all this cloudiness. Topic 3 - A lot of us follow Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) and the stuff he’s interested in (container, scheduling frameworks, automation, etc.) and we see some of the investments that Intel makes (or maybe they are just partnerships). As a VP/GM, how do you think about strategy when so many dynamics (economics, technology) are changing so rapidly? Topic 4 - The Cloud for All program is talking about “1000s of Clouds”. What do you think are the biggest areas that need to improve for that to happen, and are there some core applications that might accelerate this? Topic 5 - We’re starting to see lots of companies announce IoT platforms (Salesforce, AWS, SAP, Dell, Cisco, etc.). IoT is a cloud play and a device play. Where does Intel and SDI see the state of IoT these days?

Brian talks with Sam Fell (@samueldfell; Director of Product Marketing @ElectricCloud) about the DevOps Enterprise Summit, how Enterprise customers are different that startups, understanding the people/process side of DevOps and how Electric Cloud is making it easier to help Enterprise companies become more agile in deploying software. Show Links: DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 DOES2015 Day 1 Recap DOES2015 Day 2 Recap Electric Cloud Homepage Electric Cloud ElectricFlow Topic 1 - Tell us about your background and a little bit about Electric Cloud. Topic 2 - We’re here at DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. It’s been a great week in terms of learning and real customer stories of transformation. What have been your biggest takeaways or insight from some of the talks? Topic 3 - I’ve been doing some side research on the people and process part of companies transformation to DevOps and building/using Cloud Native applications. Certain patterns are beginning to emerge for me, but I’m curious on what you see from your customers. Topic 4 - Electric Cloud announced ElectricFlow this week, a framework for automated deployments. Talk a little bit about the product and how it fits into the stories we heard about this week? Topic 5 - We heard all week that DevOps is not about technology, but rather it’s about people and culture. But we know that technology plays a role. Are there things within the Electric Cloud platform that helps with those people elements, essentially shortcuts that can help make the people pieces be more successful?

Brian talks with Dave Zwieback (@mindweather; Head of Engineering @NextBigSound) about his book “Beyond Blame”, the challenging cultures of web-scale and DevOps, understanding complex and chaotic systems and how to lead through problems. Check out O-Reilly's new initiative: Learning Paths. Show Links: "Beyond Blame" book Dave’s Blog - Simple Thoughts on Complex Systems Topic 1 - Tell us about your background and the things you’re doing at NextBigSound. Topic 2 - You’re at VelocityConf this week. What topics are you really interested in or focused on? Topic 3 - Let’s talk about your book “Beyond Blame”. What was the motivation to write it and why choose the storytelling model (similar to The Phoenix Project)? Topic 4 - Is there a “journey to better post-mortems”  or “learning review” model, or is this an all-or-nothing approach? Topic 5 - The book talks a lot about accountability, and there is an area where “accountability” is defined very differently than we tend to use it today (“blame”). It’s one thing to discuss empathy, because that’s not really taught in any formal courses or via team/group things (e.g. sports). How to you expand or redefine a well-understood concept?

Aaron and Brian talk with Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout, Principal Technologist @pivotal, Co-Host @arresteddevops, @devopsdays Organizer.) about DevOps in practice, running Docker in production, building (or not) your own platform, AWS tools and where Docker fits with Cloud Native applications. Check out O-Reilly's new initiative: Learning Paths. Show Links: Bridget's Blog DevOps Days Arrested DevOps Podcast Topic 1 - Let's talk about your background in Operations, DevOps and now at Pivotal. Topic 2 - How did you shift from working as a grumpy SysAdmin to developing DevOps skills? What types of things are you doing now in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry team? Topic 3 - At OSCON 2015 you spoke about running Docker in production, from your time at DramaFever. Tell us about some of the things you learned and might do differently now? Topic 4 - What advice do you have for people considering the build, buy, rent question for a next-gen application platform? Topic 5 - What areas have you been focused on with your Arrested DevOps podcast?

Brian talks with Mark Imbriaco (@markimbriaco; Co-founder & CEO at @OperableInc) about the state of Cloud operations, the changes to DevOps, the human challenges of web scale operations and opinionated PaaS platforms. Check out O-Reilly's new initiative: Learning Paths. Show Links: Operable Homepage Topic 1 - The last time we spoke, you were part of the operations team at GitHub. Some things have changed since then. What’s new in your world? Topic 2 - What are the biggest changes that you’ve seen over the last 18 months that impact operations? How has DevOps continued to evolve? Topic 3 - Topic 3 - How much have things changed that require operations to deal with things in real-time? How much gets automatically remediated? Topic 4 - Topic 4 - What is most important to operations teams today? Topic 5 - Topic 5 - Lots of new frameworks and new ways to build applications. Any guidance that you have from an operations perspective to development teams?

Brian talks with Rachel Roumeliotis (@rroumeliotis, Co-Chair of OSCON EU) about open-source in Europe, regional diversity, the evolution of open-source for application development and how to select speakers and topics for large events. Check out O'Reilly Media's new training initiative: Learning Paths. Show Links: OSCON Europe Topic 1 - We’re a month away from OSCON EU, October 26-28 in Amsterdam. Give us the highlights. What’s new and cool? Topic 2 - We’ve attended OSCON in Portland several times. It’s going through changes as interests change. What about OSCON in Europe. What is the overall vibe in Europe about Open Source? Does it vary widely by region? Topic 3 - While you’re the event chair, your expertise is around Software Architecture. That track has a ton of really interesting topics - Distributed Patterns (Chaos), Microservices, Containers, etc. Topic 4 - Lots of talk about software-eating-the-world. How much do you see open-source re-shaping infrastructure vs. re-shaping application development. Any favorite examples you’d like to share? Topic 5 - Diversity at events is always a topic. Sometimes it’s gender, sometimes it’s culture. Europe is already fairly diverse, but as an OSCON leader, how are you able to influence this and find the right balance between technical insight and speaker/topic variety?

Aaron and Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) talk to Jeff Dickey(@jeffdickey; Chief Innovation Officer @Redapt) about building Clouds and DevOps environments for both small and large customers and the real world challenges they face. Thank you to the Linux Foundation for hosting us as a media sponsor! Check out O-Reilly's new initiative: Learning Paths Topic 1 - This will be a quick follow up from our podcast at DockerCon, this has to be the fastest follow up ever on the show. We wanted to thank Rich for his great feedback and questions. Topic 2 - Let’s start at the start. What does a company like Redapt see when it has a customer engagement. What is a typical customer? What market? What application needs? How often do they deploy? What's the developer's environment? Topic 3 - When Redapt is proposing a solution, what is the "usual" target environment that Redapt tries to influence. Where have you seen success? Where have you “learned some lessons”? Topic 4 - What are the typical barriers to adoption and success/failure? How do customers handle cultural shifts? Can it be done? Topic 5 - If you had to label an industry or customer type that is the “poster child” for success, what would they look like? How long does it take most customers to get there?

Brian talks with Subbu Allamaraju (@sallamar, Chief Engineer, Cloud & Platforms @ebay) about Cloud Computing in Seattle, immutable infrastructure, the P-D-M-R cycle, and understanding Durable and Declarative environments. Check out O'Reilly's new education initiative - Learning Paths. Show Links: Lessons From Cloud Bunker Subbu Allamaraju - OpenStack Seattle 2015 Topic 1 - Let’s talk about your background. You’ve been part of some very well-known companies and large environments over the past decade Topic 2 - Virtualization and cloud have introduced these terms that really we’re around previously - “ephemeral”, “immutable”. Let’s set a baseline for what those terms means. Topic 3 - In your blog, you talk about this concept of a closed-loop “P-D-M-R cycle”.  Provision - Deploy - Monitor - Remediate. Then you talk about how this is a broken model; let’s explore that. Topic 4 - Let’s talk about these concepts - “durable” and “declarative”. What does that mean and how is the technology around us starting to deliver that? Topic 5 - You mention that IaaS isn’t dead, even though it’s currently made up of ephemeral elements (e.g. VMs, etc.). Do you see a distinction between the Durable/Declarative “layer” and the IaaS “layer” - who manages those resources?

Description: Aaron and Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) talk with Derrick Harris (@derrickharris, Senior Research Analyst @mesosphere) about the latest in both the big data and cloud native apps using Mesos. Check out O-Reilly's new initiative: Learning Paths. Show Links: The Data Center Show Podcast SCALE Blog Topic 1 - Many of us know you for the excellent work you did at GigaOm. How did you end up at Mesosphere and what are you working on these days? Topic 2 - You write an excellent publication called “SCALE”, which is focused on large scale data centers and data analytics. What trends or new ideas are really interesting to you these days? Topic 3 - Big Data is an area that you’ve covered for a while. The data science skills are really difficult to find. Are you seeing anything that’s making it easier for companies to engage big data technologies? Topic 4 - Let’s get back to Mesosphere and Mesos. Is this a technology that we’ll see lots of customers using (large # of customers), or is it a smaller # of customers but with really large usage models? Topic 5 - Sometimes we wonder about revenue models for companies that are based on open-source projects. Did you understand this when you were an independent analyst, and how do you view it differently now that you’re at a vendor?