Thursday, June 7, 2018

The Cloudcast #350 - Accenture Cloud Platform

Aaron and Brian talk with Michael Liebow (@mliebow, Global Managing Director, @AccentureCloud) about evolving the Accenture culture to deliver on-demand cloud services, working across multiple cloud platforms, managing complex cloud billing models, and leveraging serverless technology to improve operations.

Show Links:

Show Notes
  • Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve done some fairly significant things (Gov’t, VC/Board, CEO, International Business, Startups, etc.) prior to joining Accenture. Tell us about your background and some of your focus areas at Accenture.
  • Topic 1a - Let’s start by talking about the Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP) and how it has adapted to the Accenture culture (consulting). How do you bridge a culture of broad projects to a cloud offering with defined services?
  • Topic 1b - What do Accenture clients expect from the Accenture Cloud Platform both in terms of technology as well as culture/organizational shifts (e.g. DevOps, Digital Transformation, move into new markets, etc.)?
  • Topic 2 - In large corporations, what are realistic timelines before technology changes or cultural changes start to make a material impact on the business?
  • Topic 3 - Recently the ACP team was recognized for some new innovation around “tagging” cloud assets in multiple environments. How important is it to be able to bring basic concepts like tagging to corporations for consistency (terminology, asset management, compliance, billing, etc.)?
  • Topic 4 - We’ve heard that there is some pretty unique technology behind the scenes of the ACP - e.g. the entire platform runs as a set of serverless functions. Is this true, or what other tidbits can you share with us about building a global, multi-tenant cloud platform?
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    Thursday, May 31, 2018

    The Cloudcast #349 - VMware Cloud Networking

    Aaron and Brian talk with Peder Ulander (@ulander, VP Marketing, Networking and Security @VMware) about still being interesting, the evolution of software-defined networking, how to interconnect cloud networks, and which roles and skills are needed to manage today's cloud networks.

    Show Links:

    Show Notes
    • Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. You were once the Most Interesting Man in the Cloud, so what are you doing now?
    • Topic 2- VMware pioneered virtual networking back when VM Admins and Network Admins had to figure out how to network virtual machines, but the world has moved well beyond on-prem VMs. Where is VMware bringing software-defined networking now? Follow Up: As someone who pioneered the concept of cloud (and owned cloud.com), where do you see the future of networking? Is it all software? Do you own www.cloudnetworking.com?
    • Topic 3- Walk us through the basics and differences between NSX-V and NSX-T?
    • Topic 3 - Public clouds have their own internal networks, so help us understand what role VMware plays in networking once a company gets outside the 4 walls of the data center?
    • Topic 4 - Is this where VMware Virtual Cloud Network comes into play? Help listeners out that aren’t familiar with the product?
    • Topic 5 - Who is a Virtual Cloud Network Admin? Is that a VM-admin or Container-admin or SRE or DevOps team or something else?
    • Topic 6 - Have you ever seen Dom Delfino and the singer Pitbull in the same room together?
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      Thursday, May 24, 2018

      The Cloudcast #348 - Bringing Serverless to Rock 'n Roll

      Aaron and Brian talk with Michael Garski (Director of Software Engineering @FenderDigital) about building serverless applications for their Fender Play digital learning platform. He explains how the Lambdas are built, version controlled and tested, as well as provides into the broader architecture and how their Dev and Ops teams are integrated.

      Show Links:

      Show Notes
      • Topic 1 - We appreciate you reaching out to tell us about your experience. So let’s talk about your background prior to Fender and some of the things you focus on at Fender.
      • Topic 1a - Are you a guitar player? Do you have a favorite guitar riff?
      • Topic 2 - We’re going to talk about how you use serverless (AWS Lambda) for Fender Play, but before we do that, I want you to walk us through that the guitar player experiences in the Play framework.
      • Topic 3 - Let’s talk about the challenges in delivering this framework that lead you to consider using Lambda (and other AWS services).
      • Topic 4 - Let’s dive into the architecture that you’ve built. What have been easier to evolve and what challenges have you run into?
      • Topic 5 - Fender Play starts with a free trial and then can evolve to a paid service. How much did your engineering team connect those subscription requirements with your choice of using serverless technologies?
      • Topic 6 - What are some lessons or best-practices that you’d recommend to someone new to serverless (either in development or ops).
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        Thursday, May 17, 2018

        The Cloudcast #347 - The Critical Skills for AI and ML

        Aaron and Brian talk with Chao Han, (VP & Head of R&D at @Lucidworks) about critical Data Science skills for AI and ML, how Data Scientists engage with Business Leaders, the Lucidworks AI platform, and emerging research in the AI/ML space.

        Show Links:

        Show Notes
        • Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s talk about your background, as it’s very rich both in the breadth of technology as well as the industries where you’ve applied your skills.
        • Topic 2 - Let’s start with the basics of what companies do when they hire or engage data scientists. At what point do they typically shift their thinking (or problem solving) from needing Statistical Analysis to understanding when and where AI or ML are a better fit?
        • Topic 3 - Lucidworks specializes in Enterprise Search, and is one of the primary sponsors of both Apache Lucene and Solr. How do those technologies fit into the Enterprise today, and who are newer AI/ML frameworks being built in conjunction with them?
        • Topic 4 - As you’re working with Data Scientists, where do you see their interests evolving, or what types of problems interest them today? How do you connect and communicate this to business challenges and business leaders?
        • Topic 5 - Can you share some of the research that you’ve been recently focused on that begin to start making it easier for non Data Scientists to start answering questions in a faster or easier manner?
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          Wednesday, May 9, 2018

          The Cloudcast #346 - What is Observability?

          Brian talks with Christine Yen (@cyen, Co-Founder at @honeycombio) about the concept of Observability, why it's needed with new application and failure patterns, how to think about testing in production, and how to manage the collection of Observability data.

          Show Links:

          Show Notes
          • Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we get into the topic of Observability, tell us about your background and how you ultimately came to founding Honeycomb?
          • Topic 2 - Let’s start with the basics - what is “Observability” and is this new or different from the thing we’ve called “Monitoring” for a long time? What’s changing that is driving the need for Observability?
          • Topic 3 - Digging into Observability, there seems to be this question of “how do we know if something is up?”. That seems both simple and complex (in context). Let’s talk about what that means in a distributed system.
          • Topic 4 - So Honeycomb collects data about applications in a bunch of different ways - logs, agents, monitoring APIs, etc. - What does Honeycomb do to all that information to start making it useful?
          • Topic 5 - I’ve heard your co-founder Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) talk about this idea that Honeycomb allows people ask questions of the data. What does this mean?
          • Topic 6 - I was reading your blog about Fender Guitars using Honeycomb for their applications. Fender isn’t a Silicon Valley company. How are non-Valley companies beginning to use these Observability models?
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            Wednesday, May 2, 2018

            The Cloudcast #345 - Understanding Google Cloud Databases

            Brian talks with Dominic Preuss (@deesix, Director Product Management @GoogleCloud) about the breadth of GCP's database portfolio, the adoption of GCP within the Enterprise, Big Data usage, and how the concept of "serverless" applies to database infrastructure.

            Show Links:

            Show Notes
            • Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. Tell us about your background, as well as your area of focus at Google, because you’ve done some pretty interesting things in a bunch of different disciplines.
            • Topic 1a - What’s the general mood at Google Cloud Platform these days, and what’s some of the sentiment that you hear from customers?
            • Topic 1b - For anyone that hasn’t dug into GCP, give us an overview of the various types of database services that GCP offers today.
            • Topic 2 - Does GCP see more demand for DB-migrations or new DBs in the cloud? What are the top couple of usage models?
            • Topic 3 - How are you finding that DBAs adapt to working on DBs in the cloud, or are the consumers of the services now application developers because the DBs are managed?
            • Topic 4 - It seems like we hear more about “big data” use-cases with GCP than traditional SQL DB usage. What are some of the things that attract companies to GCP for NoSQL, Analytics, or global-scale DBs?
            • Topic 5 - We’re starting the hear the concept of “serverless” being used in the context of operations of the underlying infrastructure - different from a function for an application. Can you give us a sense of how you see this trend in the context of databases?
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              Wednesday, April 25, 2018

              The Cloudcast #344 - Bringing AI to Edge Computing

              Aaron and Brian talk with Simon Crosby (@simoncrosby, CTO) and Simon Aspinall (@saspinall, CMO) at new AI startup SWIM.AI about the changing landscape of the cloud and edge, the vertical industry opportunities with edge computing, how AI is being applied to real-time events, and how SWIM is enabling new thinking for those use-cases.

              Show Links:

              Show Notes
              • Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. Let’s put some voices with names, since we have two Simons today.
              • Topic 1a - You’re both coming off of successful companies that you built or grew (Simon Crosby - Bromium, Zen Source), (Simon Aspinall, Virtustream). What motivated you to get involved in both the AI and Edge Computing space?
              • Topic 2 - Let’s start with the basics. There’s lots of data happening at the edge. This means there is lots of potential value at the edge. But the computing and network at the edge is different than the centralized cloud. Walk us through how to extract that potential value?
              • Topic 3 - SWIM’s technology is called EDX. How does EDX get deployed, and what needs to live around it to make it valuable to companies. Are there edge and cloud components?
              • Topic 4 - We were learning about EDX and came across the concept called “digital twins”. What does this mean and what does it do?
              • Topic 5 - What are some of the initial use-cases that you’re finding interesting in EDX?
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