Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

A large cloud provider has high volumes of network traffic moving through data centers throughout the world. These providers manage the infrastructure for thousands of companies, across racks and racks of multitenant servers, and cables that stretch underseas, connecting network packets with their destination. Google Cloud Platform has grown steadily into a wide range of products, including database services, machine learning, and containerization. Scaling a cloud provider requires both technical expertise and skillful management. Lakshmi Sharma is the director of product management for networking at Google Cloud Platform. She joins the show to discuss the engineering challenges of building a large scale cloud provider, including reliability, programmability, and how to direct a large hierarchical team. We’re looking for new show ideas, so if you have any interesting topics, please feel free to reach out via twitter or email us at  jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Google Cloud Networking with Lakshmi Sharma appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A cloud provider gives developers access to virtualized server infrastructure. When a developer rents this infrastructure via an API call, a virtual server is instantiated on physical machines. That virtual server needs to be made addressable through the allocation of an IP address to make it reachable from the open Internet. When the virtual server starts to receive too much traffic, that traffic needs to be load balanced with another virtual server. The backend networking code that runs a cloud provider needs to be fast, secure, and memory-efficient. Languages that fit that description include C++, Rust, and Go. Digital Ocean’s low-level networking code is mostly written in Go. Sneha Inguva is an engineer with Digital Ocean who has written and spoken about writing networking applications using Go. She joins the show to talk about her work at Digital Ocean, including the implementation of a DHCP server, a network server that assigns IP addresses and other parameters to devices that sit on that network. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Go Networking with Sneha Inguva appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Distributed systems are required to run most modern enterprise software. Application services need multiple instances for scalability and failover. Large databases are sharded onto multiple nodes. Logging services, streaming frameworks, and continuous integration tools all require the orchestration of more than one server. Deploying a distributed system has historically been difficult because the nodes of the system must be managed by the underlying infrastructure. If I have a distributed database that I want to deploy, the complexity of that deployment is going to be different depending on whether I am running on AWS, or VMware, or my own bare metal server infrastructure.  Heterogeneous server infrastructure makes it hard to sell distributed applications that get deployed to that infrastructure. A vendor that is selling a distributed database would need to figure out how to make their database work on the infrastructure of any given customer.  Kubernetes has simplified the process of deploying a distributed application. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that has steadily grown in popularity, to the point where the ecosystem is mature and the software is stable. Now that the software industry has a reliable, portable means of deploying a distributed application, the enterprise software market is becoming easier to enter for companies that sell a distributed application. Replicated is a company that builds products for software delivery. Replicated allows for the distribution and updating of applications that would have been hard to deploy in the past. Grant Miller and Marc Campbell are the CEO and CTO of Replicated, and they join the show to talk about the modern enterprise software market, and the process of delivering software to companies that might otherwise have trouble consuming it. Full disclosure: Replicated is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We have partnered with SafeGraph for the SafeGraph Data Hackathon Challenge. We are giving away $4000 in cash prizes, as well as SE Daily and SafeGraph swag. SafeGraph is a geospacial data company which curates a dataset of more than 6 million points of interest. SafeGraph provides a high volume of location data–and you build apps and data science projects with that data. If you have been looking for a creative opportunity to explore large data sets with the potential to win $4000 in cash prizes, this is a great opportunity. The hackathon is hosted on FindCollabs. To enter, go to FindCollabs.com and sign up. If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons. Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. You can create your own hackathon at FindCollabs.com. The post Replicated Software Delivery with Grant Miller and Marc Campbell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The ridesharing infrastructure of Lyft has a high volume of traffic that is mostly handled by servers on AWS. When Vicki Cheung joined Lyft in 2018, the company was managing containers with an internally built container scheduler. One of her primary goals at the company was to move Lyft to Kubernetes. In today’s episode, Vicki gives an overview of Lyft infrastructure and the core engineering problems within the company. One subject she touched on was the network communications between the user on a mobile phone and the cloud backend. This was a topic we explored in detail on a previous episode about Envoy Mobile with Matt Klein. Vicki also discussed the broader Kubernetes ecosystem, as well as her time at OpenAI, where she managed infrastructure deployments for scheduling large machine learning jobs. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons. Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. FindCollabs is a company I started to allow people to find collaborators for their software projects, and our new hackathon product allows you to organize your hackathon participants to make your hackathon as productive as possible. Check it out at FindCollabs.com. The post Lyft Kubernetes with Vicki Cheung appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cloud infrastructure is usually consumed in the form of virtual machines or containers. These VMs or containers are running on a physical host machine that is also running other VMs and containers. This is called multitenancy. Servers across cloud providers such as AWS have a high utilization because there are multiple virtual instances running on each physical server host. Cloud computing has led to a low cost of compute infrastructure. But in some cases, this low cost comes at the price of not being able to control the underlying hardware with as much precision as the user would want. Some users want specific types of hardware. Other users want to be using dedicated hardware that does not risk the “noisy neighbor” problem of sharing a physical server with some other application that is using most of the resources. Packet is a company that provides remote access to baremetal infrastructure. The user experience is similar to that of a cloud provider, but with more control over how a given physical host will be used. Zachary Smith is the CEO of Packet and Nathan Goulding is the chief architect. Zach and Nathan join the show to talk about the business and the engineering behind Packet, as well as the future goals for where they want to take the company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons. Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. FindCollabs is a company I started to allow people to find collaborators for their software projects, and our new hackathon product allows you to organize your hackathon participants to make your hackathon as productive as possible. Check it out at FindCollabs.com. The post Packet: Baremetal Infrastructure with Zachary Smith and Nathan Goulding appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Edge computing is the usage of servers that are geographically close to the client device. The first common use case for edge computing was CDNs: content-delivery networks. A content delivery network placed media files such as images and videos on multiple servers throughout the world. These are big files, and they take lots of bandwidth to transfer. By placing them at CDNs, the files would be closer to any user around the world. These early use cases for edge computing were purely about storing large files. But the vast majority of compute still took place at the central application servers. Over time, users have required faster and faster application experiences. Today, an increasing amount of compute has been moved to the edge, in addition to the existing storage applications. More user data is being cached at the edge to make for quicker transactional processing. Machine learning model training and hosting at the edge makes for a faster, more responsive machine learning feedback loop. Jaromir Coufal is an engineer with Red Hat. He joins the show to talk about modern applications of edge computing, and how the demand for edge computing is creating a market opportunity for companies that have lots of servers at the edge, such as telecoms. These telecoms can repurpose their widely distributed telecom infrastructure as edge servers that they can sell usage on. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons. Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. FindCollabs is a company I started to allow people to find collaborators for their software projects, and our new hackathon product allows you to organize your hackathon participants to make your hackathon as productive as possible. Check it out at FindCollabs.com. The post Edge Computing Platform with Jaromir Coufal appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a virtualized server product that provides the user with scalable compute infrastructure. EC2 was created in 2006 as one of the first three AWS services along with S3 and Simple Queueing Service. Since then, EC2 has provided the core server infrastructure for many of the companies that have been built in the cloud.  A large scale virtualization product requires its engineers to have a deep understanding of scheduling and multitenancy. In previous shows, we have touched on subjects such as hypervisors, the noisy neighbor problem, the cold start problem, and other aspects of multitenant infrastructure. To make EC2 successful, these issues must be continuously revisited and resolved at different areas of the stack. Dave Brown joined the EC2 team in 2007, and now leads the EC2 Compute, Networking, and Load Balancing teams as a Vice President. Dave joins the show to discuss the history of EC2 and the canonical problems of virtualized server infrastructure. Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. The post Amazon EC2 with Dave Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Amazon’s container offerings include ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), and Fargate. Through these different offerings, Amazon provides a variety of ways that a user can manage Kubernetes clusters and standalone container instances. The choice of which containerization system to choose depends on the needs of the user, and the tradeoffs they want to make on control and portability. Amazon’s container products have been designed in the context of a shifting competitive landscape. Kubernetes presents a potential long-term threat to Amazon’s status as the most popular cloud provider. Properly responding to this threat has required Amazon to extend itself into the world of open source, contributing to Kubernetes and having more conversations with customers who want their products to have the high quality user experience of AWS along with the open characteristics of Kubernetes. Abby Fuller is a principal technologist with Amazon who works on containers and Linux. Abby joins the show to describe Amazon’s perspective on containers and Kubernetes. Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. The post Amazon Kubernetes with Abby Fuller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When the Kubernetes project was started, Amazon Web Services was the dominant cloud provider. Most of the code that runs AWS is closed source, which prevents an open ecosystem from developing around AWS. Developers who deploy their application onto AWS are opting into a closed, controlled ecosystem, which has both costs and benefits. The software industry has a history of closed and open ecosystems existing at the same time. AWS represented a huge closed ecosystem. With the amount of money at stake in the cloud business, it was only a matter of time before a more open ecosystem emerged. Since the creation of Kubernetes, the world of cloud computing has evolved rapidly. Google and Microsoft have both invested heavily into Kubernetes, and Amazon itself has adapted to the newer competitive landscape with a Kubernetes offering of its own. Amazon has also made efforts to become more publicly involved in open source projects, including Kubernetes. Kelsey Hightower has been a part of the Kubernetes ecosystem since the project was started. He is one of the most recognizable faces in the world of Kubernetes, delivering keynotes, appearing on podcasts, and co-authoring the popular Kubernetes Up and Running. Kelsey joins the show to discuss the progress in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and the competitive dynamics between Kubernetes and AWS. Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. The post Kubernetes Progress with Kelsey Hightower appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cruise is a company that is building a fully automated self-driving car service. The infrastructure of a self-driving car platform presents a large number of new engineering problems. Self-driving cars collect vast quantities of data as they are driving around the city. This data needs to be transferred from the cars onto cloud servers. The data needs to be used for training machine learning models. These models must be tested in a simulated environment, which provides more data to be integrated back into the self-driving system that is deployed to the cars. As the cars drive around the city, they can communicate with custom cloud services to get information about traffic, navigation, and weather. Cloud services are also used for internal tooling that can help with automotive diagnostics, configuration changes, deployments, and security policy management. The software platform used to manage infrastructure at Cruise is a combination of cloud products, open source tools, and custom built infrastructure that is mostly deployed to Kubernetes. Karl Isenberg is an engineer at Cruise, and he joins the show to talk about the engineering requirements of building a self-driving car service, and Cruise’s approach to platform engineering. The post Kubernetes at Cruise with Karl Isenberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.