Wednesday, July 14, 2021

State of Containers in the Public Cloud

Michael Gerstenhaber (@mikezvi, Sr.Director Prod Mgmt @Datadog) talks about the public cloud container usage, the evolution of Kubernetes adoption, application usage patterns and what's next.

SHOW: 531

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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background and your transition from engineer to product manager.

Topic 2 - Let’s talk out container usage in the public cloud. Beyond the rapid pace of growth/usage, what trends are you following the most closely?

Topic 3 - What are some of the unique things that you have to do to monitor container usage, or provide unique data insights to containerized applications?

Topic 4 - We were surprised that only 50% of container usage is associated with Kubernetes. It’s been the de facto standard for the past several years. What else is orchestrating containers, or is it lots of one-off containers? 

Topic 5 - Large clusters are dominated by large nodes. That seems somewhat counter-intuitive. What do you think drives this pattern? 

Topic 6 - Lots of users are running older versions of Kubernetes. The CNCF has moved back to 3 releases a year. Do you expect that we’ll see longer life cycles supported in the future?

Topic 7 - Since the report was released, are you beginning to see any new trends that people should be keeping an eye on? 


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Sunday, July 11, 2021

The Transformation of Microsoft

Since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, the transformation of Microsoft has been incredible. Let’s explore how he evolved the company from many previously missed opportunities.  

SHOW: 530
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SHOW NOTES:

  1. Microsoft Acquisitions
  2. History of Microsoft Xbox
  3. History of Microsoft Azure
  4. 10 Charts that will change your perspective on Microsoft


AREAS OF STRUGGLE FOR MICROSOFT pre-2014

  • Social Networking
  • Search
  • Mobile
  • Streaming Video
  • Mac vs. Windows

AREAS OF TRANSFORMATION UNDER SATYA NADELLA (since 2014)

  • Windows to OS Agnostic
  • Software company to Cloud computing company
  • Embrace Open Source Software
  • Gaming
  • Refocus on modern developers (VSCode, GitHub, OSS, etc.)
  • Microsoft Xbox and Surface (hardware)
  • Cybersecurity for the Internet
  • Not competing with customers and ecosystem
  • Collaboration systems

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Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Teach the Geeks to Speak

Neil Thompson (@teachthegeek, Teach the Geek) talks about educating geeks and engineers in all fields of STEM about how to become a better communicator, storyteller and influencer.

SHOW: 529
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SHOW NOTES:


Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Today we’re going to teach our audience some valuable skills. Tell us a little bit about your background. 

Topic 2 - Let’s begin by talking about the intersection of geeks and how they communicate. In what ways do they feel comfortable communicating vs. uncomfortable communicating?

Topic 3 - We find that oftentimes geeks will focus more on their technical skills early in their career, and only later in their career do they recognize the importance of a broad set of communication skills. Do you find this to be a common pattern?

Topic 4 - What are some tips, tricks and ways to get better at communication? Which modes of communication (written, oral, story-telling, influence) are the most important?

Topic 5 - What are some ways that geeks can get the practice or experience needed to improve their communications? 


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Sunday, July 4, 2021

GitHub CoPilot, AWS Infinidash and the New Hotness

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Let’s explore if our audience can tell the difference. 

SHOW: 528

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SOMETIMES SOMETHING COMPLETELY NEW COMES ALONG...

It might be 5yrs, 10yrs or 100yrs, but eventually (sometimes) things change and they might be awesome! 

CAN WE EVER FIGURE OUT IF THE NEW STUFF IS REALLY NEW AND AWESOME?

GitHub CoPilot suggests lines of code or entire functions, within the context of your GitHub Codespace. It’s built on OpenAI Codex.

  • Real issues: Does it align licenses? Are the code suggestions secure? Do the suggestions write tests or docs? 
  • Maybe issues: Do we need good coders anymore? 
  • Maybe opportunities: Can you bootstrap an entire company on top of this? Enabling more people to code more easily is a good thing, right? 

AWS Infinidash is designed to address the one major issue that AWS hasn’t addressed yet - using their network is really expensive and it never gets cheaper. [NOTE: Pure Speculation, might not be 100% (or 1%) correct]

  •  Hybrid Cloud is a real thing, and IT networking is free, because you never see a bill for it.
  • AWS now loves Hybrid Cloud, and they also love the environment (it’s in the new Amazon Leadership Principles), so AWS Snowmobile isn’t a realistic options because it’s not 100% electric and self-driving, and because Amazon can now package your USB drives in the same packages they use with Amazon Prime, so they’ll be back daily to pick up data - Infinidash Prime.
  • Within AWS, all networking across AZs and Regions is now free, because people can’t follow the AWS best practices, and AWS doesn’t like people complaining when there is an outage that would be avoided by using Multi-AZ or Multi-Region. 
  • But how will AWS make money? Well, they invented Lambda with microsecond billing, so they really don’t even want you to use EC2 anymore. This has all been a long-game to get more people using Amazon Prime. 

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Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Low Code meets Professional Developers

Sanjiva Weerawarana (@sanjiva, CEO of @wso2) talks about the intersection of low-code and business applications, the Ballerina language, and the WSO2 iPaaS platform Choreo

SHOW: 527

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SHOW NOTES:


Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background as an inventor, prior to founding WSO2.

Topic 2 - We are at a stage where every business opportunity requires new applications, and every application requires integration with multiple systems. Let’s begin by talking about your philosophy behind the Choreo iPaaS platform. 

Topic 3 - How do you view the intersection between low-code visual coding and the needs to get under the hood of the code for professional developers? 

Topic 4 - What are some of the common application-types or usage-patterns you’re seeing with early users of Choreo? What are some of the patterns that have surprised you? 

Topic 5 - Organizationally, do you see the iPaaS platform as being operated by an integrated team, or did you design it to be flexible about which teams/groups are engaged with or around the platform?

Topic 6 - There is quite a bit of intelligence and self-service built into the platform. Where do AI-driven guidance and self-service marketplaces fit into the way developers do their day-to-day jobs? 

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Sunday, June 27, 2021

Listener Mailbag Questions

We get a lot of questions from our audience each week, so we thought that it would be useful to answer some listener questions that aren’t easily answered during one of the podcasts. 

SHOW: 526

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CLOUDCAST LISTENER QUESTIONS

Thank you for all the questions. Send them to show@thecloudcast.net


CLOUD GROWTH, PEOPLE MOVEMENT, OPEN SOURCE TRENDS

Question 1 - Do you expect to see any significant changes to the top public clouds over the next few years?  - Sam A.

  • New AWS leadership; AWS profit center needed to keep driving the stock price
  • Microsoft capturing more of developers “native tools”; more willing to acquire
  • GCP coming up on the 2023 “1st or 2nd place” goal
  • “Edge” computing is just starting to take shape.
  • Will be interesting to watch how aggressive they get with acquisitions given the antitrust concerns from the US Congress

Question 2 - How is the open source world keeping up with the public cloud? - Melissa L.

  • Cloudera was recently acquired by private equity
  • IBM acquired Red Hat, and IBM is doubling down on Red Hat technologies
  • MongoDB continues to grow their Atlas business
  • Confluent is scheduled to IPO soon
  • Snowflake is trying to focus more on open APIs and ecosystems
  • Several companies (Solo, Hashicorp, Buoyant) recently launched cloud versions of their software
  • The public cloud providers continue to ride both sides of the fence regarding open source

Question 3 - Any opinions on the better way to reduce technical debt - lift and shift apps to the cloud, or modernize existing apps? - Sanjay R.

Question 4 - Is the recent consolidation in the IT training market a good thing or a bad thing? - Thomas A.

Question 5 - Are you seeing any post-COVID trends accelerating or gaining more traction?  - Michelle T.

Question 6 - Does it seem like less people are making big money after working for a tech startup than in the past? - Nadir M.


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Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Mid-Year Cloud Hot Takes

Brandon Whichard (@@bwhichard) joins us to talk about the @awscloud leadership transition, the future of @VMware, developer preferences, the return of live events, and OSS licensing strategies.

SHOW: 525

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. How are things going over at Software Defined Talk? 

Topic 2 - Following a legendary leader has historically been very difficult. Do you foresee any issues with the transition from Besos to Jassy, and Jassy to Selipsky at Amazon/AWS? 

Topic 3 - Has any tech company been more influential, and yet not completely controlled their own destiny than VMware?  

Topic 3a - How do we bring gambling to the tech industry? The stock market moves too slow and too many interesting companies are private. For example, can we bet on the next ransomware target, or the next acquisition, or the next company to claim to be Observability?

Topic 4 - Is there a market segment more fragmented than “tools for developers”? There’s the “everyone is recreating Heroku” crowd; the “Serverless or die!” crowd, the “VSCode + GitHub” crowd, the Jamstack crowd, the iOS vs. Android crowd, Data Scientists crowd, etc...

Topic 5 - Between Clubhouse collapsing and all virtual events being snoozefests, has the last year essentially killed our desire in tech to get together in anything resembling “in person”? 

Topic 5a - What are the lasting and fading changes from the pandemic?

Topic 6 - Does it make complete tech-karma sense that the only two uses of Blockchain have turned out to be cryptocurrencies and NFTs? 

Topic 7 - We’ve seen a number of “OSS companies” try and change their licensing model to deal with competitive challenges from the public cloud. What do you predict will be their next move? Did that previous move do anything? 

Topic 8 - How disappointed are you that (seemingly) no big tech company took advantage of their growing stock price to take over their market via acquisitions?

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