Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Network Reliability Engineering (NRE / NRE Labs)

SHOW: 393

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Matt Oswalt (@mierdin, NRE @JuniperNetworks) and Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad, Product Marketing Manager @JuniperNetworks) about how networking has adapted to DevOps and SRE, internally marketing the evolution to teams, and how NRE Labs are helping network engineers get up to speed. 

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show Derick and welcome back Matt. Tell us about your background and some of the things you’re working on now at Juniper.

Topic 2 -  We talked a couple weeks ago with Gustavo Franco from Google about SRE, you guys have been working on something you’re calling “NRE”. Tell us about the NRE concept and how this fits into the world of Networking and DevOps.

Topic 3 - Networking hasn’t been a very static thing in a long time (DHCP, WiFi access, VPNs), but now we also have applications joining and changing on a regular basis (CI/CD pipelines, containers, etc.). So how is that world changing the demands on “DevNetOps”? 

Topic 4 - What are you guys working on to tangibly move people forward in this space? Are there any resources or projects they should be aware of?

Topic 5 - When you’re a foundational technology, such as networking or storage, it can be tough to adapt rapid DevOps type activities or culture. How much of NRE or DevNetOps is tooling (automation, controllers) and how much is culture changes? 

Topic 6 - Change is always a journey. What are some of the steps that you’re seeing people take towards NRE or DevNetOps, and maybe what are some of the common early mistakes they make?


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Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Navigating the Engineering Career Paths

SHOW: 392

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Uma Chingunde (@the_umac, Engineering Manager at @Stripe) about engineering career paths as an IC or Manager, how managers can be effective mentors, job rotations, and how diversity is an opportunity for every team. 

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Uma Chingunde’s Background: https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity/vl-ca/public/schedule/speaker/336620

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, as well as some of the things you’re working on these days at Stripe. 

Topic 2 -  We’ve discussed the career mindset of people more on the sales/marketing side of companies, but you’re beginning to look at this within engineering teams. Let’s start with the framework of how you think about that for yourself and then for people within your team. 

Topic 3 - What are traditional vs non traditional IC and manager paths you can explore?

Topic 4 - How do you think about the engineer vs manager track? Does it always have to be these two options, or are you seeing other paths, maybe more senior options as an IC?

Topic 5 - What are some variations on the above for underrepresented groups?


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Thursday, March 28, 2019

Real-World SRE Perspectives

SHOW: 391

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Gustavo Franco (@stratus, Customer Reliability Engineer at Google) about real-world experience as SRE/SRE Manager and CRE Manager, a discussion about how to measure SRE success, as well as how to onboard the SRE/CRE concepts and processes to new teams. 

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Gustavo's Background: https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity/vl-ca/public/schedule/speaker/150125

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, and some of the things you work on today as it relates to SRE and CRE teams. 

Topic 2 - Let's talk about what SRE is intended to do, and maybe how it differs (or is the same) from existing teams that might be labeled "Ops" or "DevOps". Maybe we can also talk about some of the types of skills that highlight what SRE does.

Topic 3 - What are some of the ways to avoid an SRE (or CRE) team just becoming the band-aid team to fix all the things that developers don't want to put into code because they are under deadlines (security, bug fixed, scalability, etc.)?

Topic 4 - We're hearing more about these terms "AIOps" and "ChaosEngineering". How much can SRE/CRE teams augment applications through tools that either bring deeper insight (e.g. AIOps) or create scenarios that developers can't emulate (e.g. Chaos)?

Topic 5 - You've been around SRE/CRE for a while now. What are some of the positive and negative lessons you've learned and could share with the audience?

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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Exploring the SaaS Business Model

SHOW: 390

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Aneel Lakhani (@aneel, Go To Market Consultant and Advisor) about the difference between traditional Enterprise software and B2B SaaS offerings, how the sales and marketing models work, and how development and operations is significantly changed with SaaS.

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Aneel’s Background: From engineering and product roles at IBM to marketing and go to market roles at Cisco and a number of SaaS startups, with a brief stint as a Research Director at Gartner. Has been a frequent speaker at events like Velocity and been on many podcasts, including this one, Andreessen Horowitz’s, and Microsoft’s Open Source Show.

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. We’ve known each other for quite a while, but tell our audience about your last 10 years in gaining a ton of experience around startups and SaaS-based businesses.  

Topic 2 - A few weeks ago, in the middle of a Twitter conversation, you said “SaaS changes everything”. Let’s start with the most basic things. How is a SaaS-delivered business different than a traditional software business? (development, go-to-market, marketing, profitability (or loss) models)

Topic 3 - Digging into the sales and marketing funnel, walk us through what typically happens from awareness to sign-up to early/free trial to actual customer engagement, and how a SaaS company is measuring along the way.

Topic 4 - Help us understand the economics of product development in a SaaS business. Not only do you have the normal costs/challenges of building the software, but you have the ongoing costs of running the SaaS operations. 

Topic 5 - What are some of the critical metrics and measurements that the SaaS company and their VCs are typically looking at? 

Topic 6 - What is the thought process of SaaS companies about their service eventually becoming an AWS service at the next re:Invent?  


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Friday, March 15, 2019

AIOps for Security and Breach Protection

SHOW: 389

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Adam Hunt (CTO and Chief Data Scientist at @RiskIQ) about the breadth of security breaches, how AI/ML can play a role if used properly, and immediate steps to improve protection for breaches.

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CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK

AWS Announced Open Distro for ElasticSearch
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/

Rebuttals or Commentary on Open Distro for ElasticSearch  

Continuous Delivery Foundation launched by Linux Foundation
https://devops.com/the-linux-foundation-launches-continuous-delivery-foundation/

VC Investment in the Service Mesh space
Bouyant ($10M)
Tetrate ($12.5M) 

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You have quite an interesting and impressive background. Can you talk a little bit about your work in academia prior to RiskIQ, and then what drew you to this space?

Topic 2 - RiskIQ focuses on helping companies mitigate massive security attacks. For people that don’t live in the security domain, can you give us a sense of what one of these attacks and breaches look like? 

Topic 3 - Can you give us a sense of how many of these massive attacks are utilizing new techniques, or is it variants of existing techniques, or just old techniques looking for new (vulnerable) targets? And are there tools to help companies understand how to prioritize against these?  

Topic 4 - Where are we in the industry in terms of the intersection of security best practices that IT teams can control, and when ML-driven capabilities can augment for more proactive security? 

Topic 5 - What are some of the things that you’re recommending to companies that are helping to make immediate impacts to them preventing or reducing massive breaches?

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Wednesday, March 6, 2019

New Tools for Cloud Native Developers

Show: 388

Description: Brian talks with Eric Rudder (@ericrudder; Co-Founder and Executive Chairman @PulumiCorp) about the evolving tools and supply-chain for both developers and operations in a cloud-native world. 

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Show Notes:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background prior to Pulumi, and your motivation for creating Pulumi. 

Topic 2 - Pulumi’s stated goal is “Create, deploy, and manage modern cloud apps and infrastructure”. Break that down for us, as it cuts across a lot of different job functions and (currently) different tooling being used today. 

Topic 3 -  Between serverless and containers, it’s been pretty well acknowledged that the developer experience has a long way to go. Lots of burden put on the developer to understand the underlying systems. How does Pulumi attempt to simply or standardize around this challenge? 

Topic 4 - You obviously have a bunch of experience with developer communities from your days at Microsoft. Getting developers to standardize on things in mass is not a simple task. What are some of the ways to create movement to newer tools or technologies? 

Topic 5 - What are some of your expectations about how much of the software supply-chain, from writing code to testing/securing code to deploying will have to get disrupted with new cloud-native applications (containers, serverless, etc.) and how much do you feel like is solved enough to leave in place? 

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Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Discussing Service Mesh Architectures

Show: 387

Description: Aaron and Brian talk with Armon Dadgar (@armon, Founder/CTO @HashiCorp) about the problems service mesh can solve, the underlying technologies, control plane vs. data plane considerations, and who is making decisions about service meshes within an IT organization.

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Show Notes:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. It’s been a couple years since HashiCorp has been on the show, so give us an update on the company - big round of funding ($100M) in November.

Topic 2 - A couple months ago we saw you in a video called “What is a Service Mesh?”. It was intended to be a “let’s make this simple” and you realize that a Service Mesh could be a lot of things - L4-L7 routing, Proxy, Encryption, Authentication, Application patterns. Is a Service Mesh solving a new problem, or is it pulling together lots of things that have existed at L4-L7 and application stacks in the past? 

Topic 3 - “Service Mesh” has become a pretty crowded and fragmented market over the last couple years. HashiCorp Consul has been around since 2014 (was originally “Service Discovery”) and now there’s Linkerd, Istio, Envoy and a bunch of variations. As you talk to people in the market, how are they evaluating the options out there?  

Topic 4 - Consul has evolved from Service Discovery to Service Mesh, and seems to have come from more of an authentication and security perspective (some others tends to be more routing-centric). Are there use-cases when one Service Mesh is a better fit than others, or should we expect that all/most of them will more or less converged on features over the next 12-24 months? 

Topic 5 - Can you give us some examples of how companies are using Service Meshes today (parts or all of the capabilities) and what teams are usually driving the adoption (infra/ops, security, app-dev, etc.)?

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