Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Many Paths of an Engineering Journey

SHOW: 400

DESCRIPTION: Aaron and Brian continue the "Four for Four Hundred" shows, with a focus on engineering career opportunities. Then Brian talks with Nick Weaver (@lynxbat, Engineering Leader) about transitioning from customer to vendor, from junior to senior engineers, and the realities of Digital Transformation. 

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show, it’s been way too long. What are you up to these days?

Topic 2 - We wanted to bring you back on because you’ve gone through quite a few transitions as an engineer, from infrastructure to cloud to vendor-side to customer-side. Can you share some of the ways that you were able to make transitions, and how you overcame concerns about some of the big leaps?

Topic 3 - Some projects are a success (EMCworld Labs), often wildly successful. How did you deal with success, and then how did you deal with the ongoing maintenance once the shininess wore off? 

Topic 4 - Some projects are less successful (vCloudAir). How did you personally handle some of the problems, and how did you grow from it?

Topic 5 - You’re in an engineering leadership role now (and have been for the last few years). How has that changed your perspective, and what are some of the lessons you’ve learned?

Topic 6 - Can you quickly tell the stories of all the Nick Weavers? 

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Wednesday, May 22, 2019

How Big is your Public Cloud bill?

SHOW: 399

DESCRIPTION: Aaron and Brian continue the "Four for Four Hundred" shows, with a focus on following the money in cloud computing. Then Brian talks with Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig, Cloud Economist @ Duckbill Group) about the economic realities of being all-in on the public cloud.

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Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. You’ve become a multi-media star since your last appeared (newsletter, podcasting, stand-up comedy, co-hosting theCUBE, live blogger, etc.). 

Topic 2 - In case you haven’t noticed, revenues in the public cloud have grown quite a bit in the last few years. And not a day goes by without some web company announcing their monthly AWS spend. Walk us through the world of an organization that is a reasonably heavy spender in the public cloud. Are there steak dinners and rounds of golf still involved? 

Topic 3 - We hear about long-term contracts being negotiated with public cloud providers. How do these negotiations go, and where are customer’s leverage points?

Topic 4 - What are the typical stages of Cloud Adoption and Cloud Grief? 

  • Excitement - bypass IT, everything seems cheap
  • Curiosity - so many new services to explore and use
  • Confusion - so many services, they don’t all fit on the dashboard, where are the neglected services running?
  • Fear - the bills come in and they are more than we expected

Topic 5 - Do you find that legacy IT is actually brought along on the journey to large-scale public cloud usage? If so, what is the transition process for people/groups used to CAPEX and Hardware and ELAs and Data Centers? 

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Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Focusing Apps only on Business Value

SHOW: 398

DESCRIPTION: Aaron and Brian kick off "Four for Four Hundred" by discussing the massive evolutions of the industry over the last 8 years. Then Brian talks with Joe Emison (@JoeEmison, Co-Founder/CTO at Branch Insurance) about the next generation of serverless technologies to help develop applications, focusing only on creating business value, communicating this new approach to engineers, and leveraging technology to take on big markets. 

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. It’s been way too long. Tell us about your new company and some of the things you’ve been working on.

Topic 2 - The last time you were on it was the earlier days of serverless. Since then, you’d stayed active around serverless, but have been vocal about how the space has evolved. Where has your experience taken you over the past couple of years? 

Topic 3 - You talk (and write) a lot about only focusing on building business value. That’s a hard concept for some technologists to grasp, as they always believe there is some amount of technical debt to own. How do you communicate your perspective on this to people? 

Topic 4 - The last time you were on, we talked about thick clients and Netlify and some things that were new to us. What are some of the tools/services you really like these days? 

Topic 5 - You’re trying to re-establish the home and auto insurance bundling business. There are big names in this space. How does your technology philosophy allow a small startup to compete against very well established (and funded companies)?

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Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Simplifying Application Development and Integration

SHOW: 397

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Matthew Creager (@matt_creager, Co-Founder & VP Developer Relations @manifoldco) about the challenges of cloud silos, connecting apps to multiple cloud services, the importance of collaboration beyond just coding, and how Manifold makes it simpler to integrate apps to align to business needs. 

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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background prior to Manifold, and what motivated you to focus on this new model of application development and integration.  

Topic 2 - I know one truth about developers, that they prefer things to be simple or taken care of for them. Beyond that, I’m not sure of any absolute truths. It seems like Manifold is somewhere near the intersection of Low-Code and PaaS and Integration Services (API Gateways or Middleware) and CI/CD. Beyond simplicity, how do you describe what Manifold does? 

Topic 2a - What is the interaction between the Manifold services and Prefab.cloud services? 

Topic 3 - I really like the idea of shared projects and shared billing. How much do you find that overlapping or re-inventing slows down developers? 

Topic 4 - Can you help us understand the business model or community model? 

Topic 5 - Can you share any examples of how Manifold has helped companies and teams accelerate their application development models?

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Advancements in Webscale Logging

SHOW: 396

DESCRIPTION: Aaron and Brian talk with Renaud Boutet (@boutetren, VP Product Management @datadoghq) about logging, monitoring, observability, and the challenges of balancing the collection of the right data with the costs of all the data.

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CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about some of your background prior to joining Datadog, and about your focus areas today. 

Topic 2 - Let’s start with some conceptual buckets - how do you sort out the differences when people say “monitoring” vs. “logging” vs. “observability”? 

Topic 3 - Logging has the inherent tradeoff between the desire to “log everything” and the limitation of costs to log (and retain everything). What are some of the trends to potentially make this tradeoff more manageable?

Topic 4 - At some point, the tradeoff between sending logs, filtering logs, storing logs all boils down to a financial trade-off of immediate costs vs potential costs associated with failure. How do you see those conversations playing out in real life? Any suggestions on a framework for doing those types of analysis? 

Topic 5 - What role do you see AI playing in the future of Logging/Observability? It seems like that needs to become the next big step if the industry solves the challenges of logging/storage more and more. 

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