The Cloudcast #215 - Open Source in Europe

Brian talks with Rachel Roumeliotis (@rroumeliotis, Co-Chair of OSCON EU) about open-source in Europe, regional diversity, the evolution of open-source for application development and how to select speakers and topics for large events.

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Show Links:
OSCON Europe

Topic 1 - We’re a month away from OSCON EU, October 26-28 in Amsterdam. Give us the highlights. What’s new and cool?

Topic 2 - We’ve attended OSCON in Portland several times. It’s going through changes as interests change. What about OSCON in Europe. What is the overall vibe in Europe about Open Source? Does it vary widely by region?

Topic 3 - While you’re the event chair, your expertise is around Software Architecture. That track has a ton of really interesting topics - Distributed Patterns (Chaos), Microservices, Containers, etc.

Topic 4 - Lots of talk about software-eating-the-world. How much do you see open-source re-shaping infrastructure vs. re-shaping application development. Any favorite examples you’d like to share?

Topic 5 - Diversity at events is always a topic. Sometimes it’s gender, sometimes it’s culture. Europe is already fairly diverse, but as an OSCON leader, how are you able to influence this and find the right balance between technical insight and speaker/topic variety?

The Cloudcast #214 - Packaging DevOps Big and Small

Aaron and Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) talk to Jeff Dickey(@jeffdickey; Chief Innovation Officer @Redapt) about building Clouds and DevOps environments for both small and large customers and the real world challenges they face. Thank you to the Linux Foundation for hosting us as a media sponsor!

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• Topic 1 - This will be a quick follow up from our podcast at DockerCon, this has to be the fastest follow up ever on the show. We wanted to thank Rich for his great feedback and questions.
• Topic 2 - Let’s start at the start. What does a company like Redapt see when it has a customer engagement. What is a typical customer? What market? What application needs? How often do they deploy? What's the developer's environment?
• Topic 3 - When Redapt is proposing a solution, what is the "usual" target environment that Redapt tries to influence. Where have you seen success? Where have you “learned some lessons”?
• Topic 4 - What are the typical barriers to adoption and success/failure? How do customers handle cultural shifts? Can it be done?
• Topic 5 - If you had to label an industry or customer type that is the “poster child” for success, what would they look like? How long does it take most customers to get there?

The Cloudcast #213 - What is Immutable Infrastructure?

Brian talks with Subbu Allamaraju (@sallamar, Chief Engineer, Cloud & Platforms @ebay) about Cloud Computing in Seattle, immutable infrastructure, the P-D-M-R cycle, and understanding Durable and Declarative environments.

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Show Links:

• Lessons From Cloud Bunker
• Subbu Allamaraju - OpenStack Seattle 2015

Topic 1 - Let’s talk about your background. You’ve been part of some very well-known companies and large environments over the past decade

Topic 2 - Virtualization and cloud have introduced these terms that really we’re around previously - “ephemeral”, “immutable”. Let’s set a baseline for what those terms means.

Topic 3 - In your blog, you talk about this concept of a closed-loop “P-D-M-R cycle”.  Provision - Deploy - Monitor - Remediate. Then you talk about how this is a broken model; let’s explore that.

Topic 4 - Let’s talk about these concepts - “durable” and “declarative”. What does that mean and how is the technology around us starting to deliver that?

Topic 5 - You mention that IaaS isn’t dead, even though it’s currently made up of ephemeral elements (e.g. VMs, etc.). Do you see a distinction between the Durable/Declarative “layer” and the IaaS “layer” - who manages those resources?

The Cloudcast #212 - Big Data and Mesos

Description: Aaron and Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) talk with Derrick Harris (@derrickharris, Senior Research Analyst @mesosphere) about the latest in both the big data and cloud native apps using Mesos.

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Show Links:
The Data Center Show Podcast
SCALE Blog

Topic 1 - Many of us know you for the excellent work you did at GigaOm. How did you end up at Mesosphere and what are you working on these days?

Topic 2 - You write an excellent publication called “SCALE”, which is focused on large scale data centers and data analytics. What trends or new ideas are really interesting to you these days?

Topic 3 - Big Data is an area that you’ve covered for a while. The data science skills are really difficult to find. Are you seeing anything that’s making it easier for companies to engage big data technologies?

Topic 4 - Let’s get back to Mesosphere and Mesos. Is this a technology that we’ll see lots of customers using (large # of customers), or is it a smaller # of customers but with really large usage models?

Topic 5 - Sometimes we wonder about revenue models for companies that are based on open-source projects. Did you understand this when you were an independent analyst, and how do you view it differently now that you’re at a vendor?

The Cloudcast #211 - Mesosphere DCOS

Aaron talks with Ben Hindman (@benh; Co-creator of ApacheMesos, Founder of @mesosphere) about his time at Twitter, building Mesos, understanding problems at scale, how Mesos compares to Kubernetes, Mesosphere DCOS and the recent announcements with Microsoft.


Interested in growing your career and networking with professionals in the Data Center and Cloud industry? Attend John Troyer's The Reckoning event, in Half Moon Bay, CA on September 13-14. Cloudcast listeners can get $100 discount by entering promo-code: CLOUDCAST.

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Links from the show:

• Dave Lester from Twitter/ApacheMesos on #155
• Understanding Mesos
• Kenneth Hui’s Series on Apache Mesos
• Microsoft / MesoSphere Announcement
• Thanks for the MesosCon folks for having us! - MesosCon Homepage

Topic 1 -  Give us some of your background and how you went from working on Apache Mesos at Twitter to becoming involved with Mesosphere?

Topic 2 - It’s been about a year since we talked about Mesos on the show. We’ve talked about Kubernetes a few times. Can you give us the basics of each of those technologies because sometimes people confuse them or think they are interchangeable or overlapping.

Topic 3 -  Let’s talk about Mesosphere and DCOS (Data Center Operating System). People talk about “durable and declarative” infrastructure for applications. How does DCOS accomplish this?

Topic 4 - Mesosphere includes not only systems and schedulers for the underlying container infrastructure, but also application-level schedulers. What are the differences, and how does a development team vs. an ops team interact with Mesosphere?

Topic 5 - What types of applications are you seeing Mesosphere customers running in this new environment? One thing we heard at VelocityConf was that there is work within Apache Mesos to look at adding support for stateful applications or stateful data - what’s the status of that?

The Cloudcast #210 - Open Source Foundations with Jim Zemlin

Description: Aaron talks with Jim Zemlin (@jzemlin, Executive Director Linux Foundation) about the continued rise of Open Source in our daily lives and necessary role of open source foundations. We also find out he has a favorite project!

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Announcements from LinuxCon:

• IO Visor Project
• Kinetic Open Storage Project
• Open Mainframe Project
• Open Container Initiative

Topic 1 - First question we have to ask about is foundations. What is changing in the market or with communities that we’ve seen so many get created in the last 12-18 months?

Topic 2 - Some people have said that foundations are becoming the new standards committees, which had a reputation for slowing down innovation. Does technology move so fast these days that we need to introduce some “governors” to pace it a little better, or do you have a different opinion?

Topic 3 -  We’re seeing more “traditional” companies get engaged with open source software, typically via the foundations. What guidance do you give their leadership, especially if open source isn't part of their core business model today?

Topic 4 -  The Linux Foundation is involved in so many interesting technologies. Without picking a favorite child, what areas or trends are really grabbing your attention these days?

The Cloudcast #209 - The Evolution of Private Cloud as a Service

Brian talks with Madhura Maskasky (@madhuramaskasky, Co-Founder/ VP Product @Platform9) about the evolution of Platform9, offloading the Private Cloud learning curve, SaaS management, and the intersection of VMware and OpenStack for customers.

Links from the show:

• Platform9 Website
• Madhura’s Bio
• Kenneth Hui's Platform9 Blog

Topic 1 - We had your Co-Founder, Sirish Raghuram, on the show back in August 2014 when you were just going out of stealth. Tell us about your background and some of the lessons the team learned in getting from Beta to GA and early customers.

Topic 2 - It’s nice to see the Cloud-Management-as-a-Service trend gain traction. How challenging has it been to get customers to understand the concept of on-premises hardware, but SaaS-based management?

Topic 3 - We often talk about companies like Uber or AirBnB, that have taken the concept of “asset-less” and make it very disruptive and successful in their specific industries. Platform9 has a similar concept, in that the customer still owns the equipment. How much economic flexibility do that give you as a company?  

Topic 4 - One of the things you’re announcing this week, as well as a new round of funding, is interoperability with VMware. As you talk to customers, what problems are they trying to solve by co-existing VMware and OpenStack? And what does “interoperability” mean?

Topic 5 - OpenStack is starting to explore how container technology might fit into that architecture. You’ve written about container standards before, having been through the OVF “standard” at VMware. Should customers care about container standards at this point, or is this mostly a vendor/community issue?