Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Natural Language Understanding with AI for IT Support

Vaibhav Nivargi (CTO & Founder @Moveworks) talks about Natural Language Understanding (NLU), interacting with users using chatbots, and augmenting customer service with AI. 

SHOW: 458

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:


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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Vaibhav, welcome to the show. Tell everyone a little about yourself and what got you started in the AI space?

Topic 2 - We’ve done a number of AI/ML shows over the years, but we haven’t talked much about Natural Language Understanding or NLU. Let’s start there, can you give everyone an introduction?

Topic 3 - Based on that, is the primary interaction with the end user through a chatbot or something similar? What are the primary use cases and tools you are seeing in the industry? Is this a Slack and/or Microsoft Teams integration? Unsolicited plug, I’m a customer in my day job… 

Topic 4 - We’ve been talking a lot on the show recently about the migration to SaaS based products. What is the model here? Is the AI central (cloud hosted) or private and in-house?  Do you have the concept of a template AI and then each customer AI is an instance or is this a central AI that is called? How does it get customized and updated over time? What training is typically required and is this training on-going?

Topic 5 - How do you prevent user frustration from “loops” or unanswered questions? I think of the voice automated telephone systems I’m not a fan of as an example. How would you handle language that isn’t built into the AI?

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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

2020 in Review - Midyear Edition

Aaron and Brian review the first half of 2020, which feels like it’s lasted 6 years. 

SHOW: 457

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Back on March 18th, Aaron and Ken Hui did a show about “Working from Home Tips and Tricks”. Can you even remember your mindset back in March?  

  • Zoom becomes a verb

Topic 1a - Is 2020 the Year of Virtual Desktops? Have you seen any last shifts happening about people being remote? [are companies going to allow people to work remote?]

Topic 2 - We’re starting to see the major clouds start to carve out some unique personalities:

  • AWS - Goes over $10B for the quarter, not a lot of big announcements
  • Azure - Lots of interesting growth around GitHub; pushing Teams hard with COVID; but had some scaling issues with COVID - also has made several acquisitions
  • Google - Getting very sales focused (CEO Kurian); pushing Anthos into other clouds (AWS now, Azure soon)
  • Oracle - Are they becoming the low-cost bandwidth cloud?

Topic 3 - Should anybody be running their own software anymore? 

  • MongoDB, Confluent, Datastax, Hashicorp, Red Hat, VMware (and many more) now have managed cloud-based versions of their core software.

Topic 4 - 2001 Internet Crash drove a ton of new innovation. 2008 Financial Crash led to the public cloud, but also lots of “cost savings” innovation. What does 2020 potentially bring? 

Topic 5 - We have to talk about conferences and tradeshows. Do they return in 2021? What have we learned from the virtual ones in 2020?

Topic 6 - Any insights / predictions about the rest of 2020? 


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Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Building a Next-Generation of Serverless

Tim Zonca (@timzonca, CEO at @stackeryio) talks about the next evolution of the serverless developer experience, the maturity of customer adoption, how much customer appreciate not having to manage infrastructure, and how to manage the journey to serverless.

SHOW: 456

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve had a pretty diverse career in terms of elements of making developers successful. Tell about your background and how you became CEO at Stackery almost a year ago.

Topic 2 - It’s hard to believe that AWS Lambda launched about 5.5 years ago. Obviously the serverless ecosystem has grown and expanded quite a bit since then. Where do you see serverless in terms of both maturity of the technologies, and maturity of customer adoption?

Topic 3 - Lets talk about what the Stackery platform brings to the serverless ecosystem. 

Topic 4 - As you talk to prospective customers, how much different is it to discuss not have to be burdened by underlying resources vs. previous conversations you’ve had about applications? How long does it usually take them to grasp the magnitude of the changes in development?

Topic 5 - How much of a “traditional” developer experience still exists with serverless (write code, write tests, pipelines, etc.) and what are some immediate things they will see that’s different?

Topic 6 - Having been at Puppet you obviously saw many DevOps transformations. What are some of the steps on a typical Serverless transformation for companies?


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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

MLOps, GPUs and AI Developers

Dillon Erb (@dlnrb, CEO @HelloPaperSpace) talks about what exactly is MLOps, Serverless AI platforms, and how developers can utilize GPUs for AI/ML.

SHOW: 455

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Dillon, welcome to the show, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in this space?

Topic 2 - I’ve had a running joke on the show that a market doesn’t exist until you attach Ops to it. Today we’ll talk about MLOps. Give everyone an introduction for those not familiar.

Topic 3 - What exactly is a Serverless AI Platform? How does this differ from traditional CI/CD platforms that our listeners would be used too? Is this abstracting away the infrastructure layer for MLOps teams?

Topic 3a - Switching gears from Ops to Developers, what do you mean when you say that you make it easy for developers to use GPUs? What do developers need to know about hardware-level stuff like GPUs that they didn’t need to know with CPUs?

Topic 4 - As with all things emerging tech, the use cases are constantly evolving. What are the early initial use cases that you are seeing? Are there unique things that emerge for gaming or media applications?

Topic 5 - How does access to data models fit into all of this?

Topic 6 - I noticed your company did some articles on Covid-19, can you explain what is going on there?

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Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Security Visibility from Observability Data

Marc Tremsal (@mtremsal, Director Product Management @datadoghq) talks about the intersection of observability and security, if SRE needs a DevSecOps transition, using security data for modeling, and tips to make immediate impacts on overall security.

SHOW: 454

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve played a role in helping to design systems that secure some of the most critical environments in the world. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Topic 2 - We’ve talked about monitoring, observability and in various ways “security”, but how do you see all those things beginning to come together more these days? 

Topic 3 - As we get into more distributed environments, especially for security (authentication, encryption, key-management, proxies, etc.), how should people think about a framework to have visibility and be able to take action across these distributed systems? 

Topic 4 - Is this visibility of security-related activities (or potentially security-associated) mostly useful for real-time security threats (e.g. “we’re being attacked”), or can it also be used for more long-term types of activities (planning, threat modeling, chaos engineering, etc.)?

Topic 5 - Can you share with us any customer-centric stories of how this is helping companies deliver better services, or more uptime for their services?

Topic 6 - What are some tips you can share with the audience today that would help them make immediate impacts to how them monitor for security? 

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Wednesday, June 3, 2020

AI for the Mainstream

Venkat Rangan (Co-Founder & CTO @ Clari) talks about AI and application into more mainstream areas and revenue generation.

SHOW: 453

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Venkat, you have a very interesting background as a technologist in our industry. Give everyone a brief introduction and if you don’t mind also tell everyone a bit about being a member of the Forbes Technology Council. I believe you are our first guest from there.

Topic 2 - Today we’re going to dig back into AI as a topic. Let’s start at the start. In your current role you have been involved in technology over the years and Clari has been around for awhile. What compelled you to focus on this space?

Topic 3 - AI has suffered from a perception issue. It often is seen as unapproachable with a pretty high barrier to entry. We’ve spoken to companies in the past about specific industry or vertical applications (manufacturing for instance). Many architects and our listeners are practitioners vs. data scientists. How do we solve this problem and “bring AI to mainstream”

Topic 4 - In order for that to happen, what does our industry need? Is it SaaS based, services from public clouds, etc?

Topic 5 - Having been in field sales for years, it’s always been somewhere between complete and utter guesswork all the way to precision, rocket science level analysis. - What are your thoughts here and how can AI improve this situation?

Topic 6 - What’s next for industry? What are the use cases both today and in the future?

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Continuous Reliability

Tal Weiss (@weisstal, Co-Founder/CTO of @OverOpsHQ) talks about the challenges of frequently deploying applications, understanding cloud-native patterns, and helping developers debug problems in production.

SHOW: 452

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

PodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.com

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve been a software developer, an entrepreneur and worked on some pretty challenging technical areas - tell us a little bit about your background. What motivated you to start OverOps?

Topic 2 - We are quickly moving to a world where software is no longer a “big bang” planning activity, but lots of continuous activities, loosely coordinated. What sort of challenges does that create for production applications? 

Topic 3 - OverOps talks about this concept of Continuous Reliability. What does this mean in a world where cloud-native patterns are teaching people that they should build systems that are designed around unreliable infrastructure?

Topic 4 - How does OverOps begin to make it easier for developers to debug production problems, especially when there are many tools collecting lots and other information about systems? 

Topic 5 - Where do you see the most progress for companies that have these highly variable, fast-moving application environments improving the most? Is it the evolution of SRE teams, or visibility tools, or something else?  

Topics 6 - Any tips you can pass along to our audience for reaching continuous reliability?

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