Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Low Code meets Professional Developers

Sanjiva Weerawarana (@sanjiva, CEO of @wso2) talks about the intersection of low-code and business applications, the Ballerina language, and the WSO2 iPaaS platform Choreo. 

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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background as an inventor, prior to founding WSO2.

Topic 2 - We are at a stage where every business opportunity requires new applications, and every application requires integration with multiple systems. Let’s begin by talking about your philosophy behind the Choreo iPaaS platform. 

Topic 3 - How do you view the intersection between low-code visual coding and the needs to get under the hood of the code for professional developers? 

Topic 4 - What are some of the common application-types or usage-patterns you’re seeing with early users of Choreo? What are some of the patterns that have surprised you? 

Topic 5 - Organizationally, do you see the iPaaS platform as being operated by an integrated team, or did you design it to be flexible about which teams/groups are engaged with or around the platform?

Topic 6 - There is quite a bit of intelligence and self-service built into the platform. Where do AI-driven guidance and self-service marketplaces fit into the way developers do their day-to-day jobs? 

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Sunday, June 27, 2021

Listener Mailbag Questions

We get a lot of questions from our audience each week, so we thought that it would be useful to answer some listener questions that aren’t easily answered during one of the podcasts. 

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CLOUDCAST LISTENER QUESTIONS

Thank you for all the questions. Send them to show@thecloudcast.net


CLOUD GROWTH, PEOPLE MOVEMENT, OPEN SOURCE TRENDS

Question 1 - Do you expect to see any significant changes to the top public clouds over the next few years?  - Sam A.

  • New AWS leadership; AWS profit center needed to keep driving the stock price
  • Microsoft capturing more of developers “native tools”; more willing to acquire
  • GCP coming up on the 2023 “1st or 2nd place” goal
  • “Edge” computing is just starting to take shape.
  • Will be interesting to watch how aggressive they get with acquisitions given the antitrust concerns from the US Congress

Question 2 - How is the open source world keeping up with the public cloud? - Melissa L.

  • Cloudera was recently acquired by private equity
  • IBM acquired Red Hat, and IBM is doubling down on Red Hat technologies
  • MongoDB continues to grow their Atlas business
  • Confluent is scheduled to IPO soon
  • Snowflake is trying to focus more on open APIs and ecosystems
  • Several companies (Solo, Hashicorp, Buoyant) recently launched cloud versions of their software
  • The public cloud providers continue to ride both sides of the fence regarding open source

Question 3 - Any opinions on the better way to reduce technical debt - lift and shift apps to the cloud, or modernize existing apps? - Sanjay R.

Question 4 - Is the recent consolidation in the IT training market a good thing or a bad thing? - Thomas A.

Question 5 - Are you seeing any post-COVID trends accelerating or gaining more traction?  - Michelle T.

Question 6 - Does it seem like less people are making big money after working for a tech startup than in the past? - Nadir M.


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Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Mid-Year Cloud Hot Takes

Brandon Whichard (@@bwhichard) joins us to talk about the @awscloud leadership transition, the future of @VMware, developer preferences, the return of live events, and OSS licensing strategies.

SHOW: 525

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. How are things going over at Software Defined Talk? 

Topic 2 - Following a legendary leader has historically been very difficult. Do you foresee any issues with the transition from Besos to Jassy, and Jassy to Selipsky at Amazon/AWS? 

Topic 3 - Has any tech company been more influential, and yet not completely controlled their own destiny than VMware?  

Topic 3a - How do we bring gambling to the tech industry? The stock market moves too slow and too many interesting companies are private. For example, can we bet on the next ransomware target, or the next acquisition, or the next company to claim to be Observability?

Topic 4 - Is there a market segment more fragmented than “tools for developers”? There’s the “everyone is recreating Heroku” crowd; the “Serverless or die!” crowd, the “VSCode + GitHub” crowd, the Jamstack crowd, the iOS vs. Android crowd, Data Scientists crowd, etc...

Topic 5 - Between Clubhouse collapsing and all virtual events being snoozefests, has the last year essentially killed our desire in tech to get together in anything resembling “in person”? 

Topic 5a - What are the lasting and fading changes from the pandemic?

Topic 6 - Does it make complete tech-karma sense that the only two uses of Blockchain have turned out to be cryptocurrencies and NFTs? 

Topic 7 - We’ve seen a number of “OSS companies” try and change their licensing model to deal with competitive challenges from the public cloud. What do you predict will be their next move? Did that previous move do anything? 

Topic 8 - How disappointed are you that (seemingly) no big tech company took advantage of their growing stock price to take over their market via acquisitions?

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Sunday, June 20, 2021

Improving the Adoption Rate of New Tech

A common question we often hear is, “How to improve our adoption rate of new technology?” 

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WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THESE IN-THE-MIDDLE JOBS?

DevRel, Advocates, Evangelists, Strategists. We’ve all heard about these job titles, but what do people in those roles actually do? And are they necessary?  

WHAT DO DEVREL, ADVOCATES, EVANGELISTS, TECHNICAL MARKETERS, STRATEGISTS DO, AND DO WE ACTUALLY NEED THEM?

  1. Every project, every market, every new technology has both short-term and long-term goals. Companies need to find a way to balance both goals.
  2. Successful teams, in every industry, have excellent in-between people. 
  3. In-between roles are a great way to learn the business, and build varied career paths. They usually aren’t career paths on their own. Many people don’t understand this. 
  4. DevRel / Advocate / Evangelist
  5. Technical Marketing
  6. Strategy

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Automated Data Labeling for AI Apps

Alex Ratner (@ajratner, Co-Founder/CEO @SnorkelAI) talks about Snorkel’s evolution from Stanford AI Labs, the challenges of labeling data for AI modeling, and simplifying how AI applications can be built. 

SHOW: 523

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, the origins of the company, and a little bit about the founding team. 

Topic 2 - Let’s start by framing the day in the life of a data scientist. There’s raw data, there’s a data sorting/organizing process, there’s model building, there’s results and analysis, and the cycle continues, etc. What parts are solved problems, what parts are commoditized, and where is there still room for improvement?

Topic 3 - Now that we understand today’s AI/ML/DataScience landscape, let’s talk about how Snorkel Flow and automated data labeling is able to evolve those environments

Topic 4 - Application Studio seems like the intersection of Low-Code and Industry-specific templates and the Python toolkit that data scientists understand. Walk us through the mindset of today’s data scientists in how they think about the “developer” part of their jobs.

Topic 5 - What are some of the frequent use-cases or business problem areas that you’ve seen drive early adoption of the Snorkel platform? 

Topic 6 - Where do you see Snorkel fitting into the broader ecosystem of AI capabilities that companies may already have in place? 

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Sunday, June 13, 2021

Tips for Identifying Tech Trends

For more than 10 years we’re interviewed the people that changed the tech world. What are some tips and tricks to identify which trends emerge, survive and fail? 

SHOW: 522

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SHOW NOTES:

IDENTIFYING TRENDS TO HIGHLIGHT ON THE PODCAST

  1. 522 shows, 57 companies acquired, $4.9B in VC funding, $58B in Acquisitions/IPOs
  2. Track Record of Founding Team, Macro Trends, Societal Trends

VC TRENDS vs. TECHNOLOGY TRENDS vs. CUSTOMER BUYING TRENDS

  1. There is a very long lifecycle between university research vs. early VC investments vs. early technology trends vs. customer buying trends. Often 10-20 years.
  2. Gracely’s Theorem: “There are very few truly new ideas, rather there are mostly advancements because of improved CPUs and Networking speeds.”
  3. The Platform vs. Feature test: A baseline platform or higher-level platform? 
  4. The Bed, Bath & Beyond test: Is it more than 50% cheaper than previous generations?
  5. The Friction test: Does it remove significant barriers to previous generations?
  6. The Don’t Fight a Land War in Asia test: Is it trying to be too many things to too many people?
  7. The Follow-the-Money test: How do companies around this technology make money? Does the ecosystem make money? Are there adjacent paths to monetization?
  8. The Culture Change test: People don’t like change, especially for change’s sake. Changing culture is one of the hardest things to do at most companies. 
  9. The Re-Education test: How much of a learning curve is required to make this technology successful? 

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Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Building Private 5G Networks

Rob Parsons (Practice Director, Network and Integrated Security, Insight Enterprises) talks about advances in edge computing, connections to edge using 5G, and CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) as an emerging use case.

SHOW: 521

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into today’s focus, tell us about your background and how you’ve come to focus on CBRS. 

Topic 2 - Let’s talk about the basics of CBRS. What are the underlying technologies, how does it work? 

Topic 3 - What are some of the most common use-cases for CBRS technologies? What are some of the problems it solves that can’t be solved with 5G/LTE or WiFi? 

Topic 4 - What are some of the design considerations that companies need to make in deploying and maintaining CBRS systems? 

Topic 5 - Is there an ecosystem of applications that are specifically built to run on CBRS systems, or are they more specific to the use-case (e.g. municipalities, manufacturing, etc.)?

Topic 6 - How much of a learning curve does CBRS present to teams that have networking and security background? 

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Sunday, June 6, 2021

Repatriation and Cloud Cost Management

While there are scenarios where public cloud is much less expensive than data centers, there are times when it’s much more expensive. Is repatriation a viable way to manage cloud costs? 

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ARTICLE QUOTES: 

Repatriation results in one-third to one-half the cost of running equivalent workloads in the cloud

You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it.

infrastructure spend should be a first-class metric

THE CASE FOR REPATRIATION

  1. Cloud costs are a large % of Cost of Sales (often times 50-80%)
  2. Cloud providers operate on large margins (e.g. AWS at 30%)
  3. Repatriation could reduce costs 30-50% of existing cloud spend

THE REALITIES OF REPATRIATION

  1. The case in the article is primarily based on 25-40x valuation multiples for software companies. While every companies believes they are a software company today, not every company is getting 25-40x revenue multiple from the market.  
  2. All repatriation calculations begin with, “if you run a highly efficient data center”
  3. All repatriation calculations next involve, “assuming you have the talent to run a cloud”
  4. Repatriation is technical debt. How does your company typically handle that?
  5. Less than 100% repatriation creates multiple operational models (ops, billing, security, etc.)
  6. Most companies use a subset of the features in any given cloud.
  7. Can you create a financial situation in your data center that’s similar to the cloud?

 

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Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Low Code vs. No Code

Gary Hoberman (@GaryHoberman, Founder / CEO of @Unqork) talks about No Code vs. Low Code, Bringing No Code into the Enterprise, and evolving industry experience. 

SHOW: 519

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into today’s topic, let’s talk about your background and what motivated you to found Unqork. 

Topic 2 - There are a ton of ways that some technologies get positioned as silver bullets or catch-all. First of all, how do you think about this space from the perspective of a business user? 

Topic 3 - Let’s talk about the distinction between “low-code” and “no-code” and how the tradeoffs or differences actually impact users of the system.

Topic 4 - With systems like these, there is an expectation that the system has quite a bit of knowledge, which creates these “highly opinionated” workflows. You’ve worked at large companies, which also have opinions based on existing culture or experience. How do you work groups through adopting these newer concepts?

Topic 5 - This segment of the market is extremely “hyped” at this stage, with lots of companies. Help us understand how to put a frame around understanding the various options that are available in the market. 

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