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?

The Cloudcast #183 - Container-Centric Application Deployments

Brian talks to Alexis Richardson (Founder @WeaveWorks) and Khash Sajadi (CEO @Cloud66) about their global DevOps as a Service platform and how they have interconnected it across 76 Data Centers. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (nin.com)

Topic 1 - It’s unusual for us to have guests from different companies, but your stories have commonality. But let’s talk about both of your backgrounds (and company backgrounds) first.

Topic 2 - When I was watching this video of Khash (Cloud 66) at this Hacker News meetup in London, it looked to me like a concept I call “unstructured PaaS”, which is sort of a DIY PaaS, with the best-of technologies.

Topic 3 - We’re curious to learn more about ContainerNet, that is the backbone for the container networking of Cloud66 (using Weave technology) and how it really works.

Topic 4 - Both of you are at the forefront of this transition of container-centric application deployments. Where do you see the maturity in the market and what are the next big opportunities?

Topic 5 - You both seem to believe in the model of modularity for these new architectures. Beyond “giving customers choice”, what are the big focus areas in building elements of these modular architectures?

Topic 6 - What are some of the tangible business advantages that you’ve heard from customers when it comes to choice and modularity in this container-centric application model?

The Cloudcast #182 - Moving DevOps Forward with CI/CD

Brian talks to TJ Randall (@TJRandall; VP System Engineering @XebiaLabs) about how customers work through changes to people/skills, process, financial modeling, internal communications and tools, as they migrate to more agile application development and utilize CI/CD methodology. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (nin.com)

The Cloudcast #181 - Investigating the ELK Stack

Aaron and Brian talk to Robyn Bergeron (@robynbergeron; Ops Advocate @Elasticsearch) about the various usage models of the ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana), as well as the ElasticSearch developer community + Elastic{ON} event. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

The Cloudcast #180 - Understanding CoreOS Distributed Architecture

Aaron and Brian talk to Alex Polvi (@polvi; CEO of @CoreOSLinux) about the system architecture around CoreOS - containers, appc, etcd, quay.io, flannel, etc. They also talk about the challenges of distributed system applications and how CoreOS architecture aligns to solve those challenges in simple ways. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

New ByteSized DevOps Podcasts - Logging, Monitoring and Application State

A few weeks ago we introduced the ByteSized DevOps Podcast series. Initial feedback from the community was very strong, so we've decided to do some more. We plan to release a few every week or two. Let us know what topics you'd like to see covered.

Monitoring and Logging

Brian and Jonas Rosland (@virtualswede) discuss Logging and Monitoring systems and how they have evolved with open source projects and SaaS services. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

Stateful vs. Stateless Apps

Brian and Jonas Rosland (@virtualswede) talk about the key architectural and deployment differences between Stateful and Stateless Applications. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

The Cloudcast #179 - Managing Containers w/o a Tupperware Party

Aaron and Brian talk with Nick Weaver (@lynxbat; Director of Software Defined Infrastructure @ Intel) about competing container formats and runtimes, managing containers at scale, PaaS + containers, and how applications are adapting to live in a container-centric world. We also dive into the deep dark secrets of being on the Cloud Foundry Foundation board of directors. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)