Elastic for Search & Analytics

SHOW: 406

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Steve Kearns (@skearns64, VP Product Mgmt @Elastic) about how search is being used in many ways of our day-to-day life, how search has evolved to be a core element of Analytics platforms, and how Elastic search is evolving to help the next generation of developers in area like APM, Security, Metrics, etc. 

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

• Digital Ocean Homepage
• Get Started Now and Get a free $50 Credit on Digital Ocean
• Datadog Homepage - Modern Monitoring and Analytics
• Try Datadog yourself by starting a free, 14-day trial today. Listeners of this podcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt
• Get 20% off VelocityConf passes using discount code CLOUD

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:

• AT&T and IBM announce multi-year strategic alliance
• Venture Capital funding surges thanks to mega rounds
• John Deere Acquires golf Software, OnLink
• More bad multi-cloud terms ("Poly-nimbus")

SHOW INTERVIEW LINKS:

• Elastic Homepage - Open Source Search & Analytics
• Elastic-On-Tour

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we get into your work at Elastic, can you tell us a little bit about your background? 

Topic 2 - Let’s start with the basics of search. Everyone knows about how they use Google for their day-to-day activities, but what are some of the common uses of search in a business or IT context that people might not think about or know about?  

Topic 3 - Elastic is mentioned very frequently in the “search” discussion, but then it’s also included in a number of popular “stacks” (ELK stack, EFK stack, etc.). How does Elastic think about search being a core component of many other stacks (Metrics, APM, Security, etc.), some of which you may not have any immediate visibility to?

Topic 4 - What are some of the evolutions that are happening around search (or broader stacks) that are interesting to developers? 

Topic 5 - How does Elastic think about how or when customers (or developers) are consuming Elastic technologies, across OSS, commercial software and SaaS offerings? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at thecloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet and @ServerlessCast

The Cloudcast #184 - Streaming Analytics for Distributed Applications

Aaron talks to Karthik Rau (@krrau; Founder/CEO of @SignalFx) about the launch of their advanced monitoring platform, doing streaming analytics for distributed applications, the new role of developers and the mindset of technology-centric business groups. Links: - SignalFx Website - https://signalfx.com/ - SignalFx REST API - https://support.signalfx.com/hc/en-us/articles/201270489 - TheNewStack covers SignalFx launch - http://thenewstack.io/signalfx-a-saas-to-monitor-apps-at-any-scale/ - Ben’s Blog - http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_past_and_future_of_systems_management Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (nin.com)

Projects of the Week - None this week

• SignalFx Website - https://signalfx.com/
• SignalFx REST API - https://support.signalfx.com/hc/en-us/articles/201270489
• TheNewStack covers SignalFx launch - http://thenewstack.io/signalfx-a-saas-to-monitor-apps-at-any-scale/
• Ben’s Blog - http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_past_and_future_of_systems_management

Topic 1 - Came out of Stealth recently (3/12), Give a quick overview of the company and the problem you are trying to solve… Given what SignalFx offers, it’s important to understand the people behind it. Let’s start with the background of the team - lots of large, webscale, distributed system background. [how much is “productizing lessons learned”?; how much is “the will be different in 5yrs”?]

Topic 2 - What does streaming analytics mean? Why do companies care about getting analytics faster? Why build an analytics engine to solve a monitoring problem?

Topic 3 - You mention (intro video) that you’re a company that builds services for distributed systems, which are run by product teams, not IT. You were previously at VMware. Can you talk about the different mindset those product teams have vs. IT teams, especially how SignalFx takes their ideas and feedback?

Topic 4 - Walk us through how your customers interact with your service? Where do metrics come from (app, message queue, etc)? How do you secure that API interaction? How are metrics different from logs or events?

Topic 5 - In the same vein as the shift from IT to the Product Groups, your co-founder mentions that Developers are closer to production than ever. What does that mean to the evolution of tools and overall psyche of application developers?

Topic 6 - You mention that SignalFx “double purposes as a Application Intelligence solution”. We’ve been watching lots of interesting SaaS applications  emerge that tend to have a more singular purpose (Logging, PerfMon, AppIntelligence, etc.). Are you hearing from customers that some consolidation of functions is needed?