Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The Cloudcast #280 - DevOps from the Enterprise

Brian talks with Josh Atwell (@Josh_Atwell, Cloudcast's Chief DevOps Correspondent) about the DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES16), DevOps success stories, how companies manage the evolution, common DevOps failures and any models that can be reused by other companies.

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Let’s talk about your experiences at DOES in UK vs. DOES in US.
  • Topic 2 - What stories of successful DevOps implementations did you hear about, and were there any commonalities in those stories?
  • Topic 3 - Are you seeing the successful companies focus more on people/process or cultural changes or automation/CI/CD or on application transformation as part of their DevOps journey?
  • Topic 4 - Have any models emerged that are showing companies how to move DevOps from greenfield environments or POCs or Centers of Excellence (COEs) to wider-scale adoption?
  • Topic 5 - How are people managing the distributed nature of “two pizza teams” and the overhead of keeping projects in sync?
  • Topic 6 - What are the common pitfalls or mistakes that companies need to avoid if they are moving down the path towards DevOps?
Feedback?

Friday, November 18, 2016

The Cloudcast #279 - Understanding Kubernetes Operators

Brian talks with Brandon Phillips (@brandonphilips, CTO at @CoreOS) about “Operators” and the evolving capabilities to help companies operate Kubernetes and manage the application around Kubernetes.

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Before we dig into some of the new stuff, I’d like to get your perspective on this past week at KubeCon and the state of the Kubernetes community as a whole.
  • Topic 2 - Let’s talk about this new concept you introduced, called “Operators”. What problem does it intend to solve and how can it help either Developers or Operations teams?
  • Topic 3 - Kubernetes has been adding these more sophisticated concepts that are more application-pattern aware (e.g. ReplicaSets, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, etc.). In reading through the FAQs on your website, it says that Operators can be complementary to things like StatefulSets. Can you give us the basics of what Operators does that the other capabilities don’t?
  • Topic 4 - Is there any reason Operators couldn’t also be used to manage the core Kubernetes elements (e.g. Controllers, etc.), similar to something like Cloud Foundry BOSH? Or is it mostly focused on application-level capabilities?
  • Topic 5 - One of the concerns I heard from several people at KubeCon was around things like backups - both for applications and the overall environment. Can Operators play a role here?
  • Topic 6 - Since each Operator is going to get built for a specific application, it seems like there is an opportunity for reuse by people in the community with similar applications. Does the CNCF (or CoreOS) plan to maintain a centralized repository of Operators, similar to what Chef/Puppet/Ansible have done in the past with their recipes, cookbooks, playbooks, etc?
Feedback?

The Cloudcast #278 - Automatic DevOps for the People

Brian talks with John Troyer (@jtroyer, CEO at @TechReckoning, a community for IT pros) about IT organizations are dealing with DevOps, the pace of change, open source software and communities

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Catch us up - what’s going on in the world of Tech Reckoning?
  • Topic 2 - You and I have been having this on-going conversations about DevOps and trying to figure out how it relates to your “former” community at VMware, and the broader world of IT. (e.g. - need for infrastructure and IT infra skills)
  • Topic 3 - Now a days you are more engaged around open source communities. What are you seeing in terms of users vs. vendors vs. customers vs. a general understanding of these dynamics by the overall marketplace?
  • Topic 4 - You and I were both at KubeCon last week. What were your thoughts on that “community” and the overall set of communities around containers?
  • Topic 5 - Communities have evolved somewhat since you were at VMware. Things like Slack, GitHub, StackOverflow, the rise of Meetups, etc. are very different. What do you see that’s valuable and where do you see issues and complexities?
Feedback?

Sunday, October 30, 2016

The Cloudcast #277 - DevOps Perspectives from the Front Lines

Brian and Josh Atwell (@Josh_Atwell) talk with Chris Short (@ChrisShort, DevOps @SolarWinds) about the day-to-day role of a DevOps Engineer, how he chooses his tools and communications models, what he learned from the military that’s applicable to DevOps and how he uses his development skills to augment operations.

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Tell us about yourself and give us some of your background.
  • Topic 2 - So you’re a day-to-day, do it for real DevOps engineer. What does that mean these days?
  • Topic 3 - You recently gave a talk at DevOps Days Detroit about “What the Military Taught Me About DevOps”. Tell us about your talk. What can we learn from the military vs. civilian companies (both good and bad)?
  • Topic 4 - What are you seeing as the differences between the DevOpsDays events and what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis?
  • Topic 5 - Does DevOps only work for companies that have cloud-native applications, or is it applicable to any applications or levels of technical debt?
Feedback?

The Cloudcast #276 - 3D Printing & Maker Movement

Brian and Josh Atwell (@josh_atwell) talk with Harris Kenny (@harriskenny, VP Marketing @ Aleph Objects) about Lulzbot, the state of 3D printing, market segments, experimentation, innovation, new materials usage and how the Maker-Movement is impacting various aspects of the economy.

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Background and what is Lulzbot?
  • Topic 2 - I understand open source software, but what is open source hardware?
  • Topic 3 - Help us understand the scale of 3D printing - when is it desktop vs. “industrial”, and what types of projects fit in either category?
  • Topic 4 - Help us understand the economics of 3D printing? What is it better than today and when does it become better than for other things in the future?
  • Topic 5 - There is this thing called “Maker Movement” and “Maker Faire”. What are these events and how does this align to open source communities?
  • Topic 6 - Big Question - We’re at the end of election season, which means people are talking about jobs. The US has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs over the last couple decades. Is 3D printing something that could help reverse this trend, since it involves more technology?
Feedback?

Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Cloudcast #275 - Microsoft, Millennials & Open Source

Brian talks with Heather Shapiro (@microheather, Technical Evangelist @Microsoft) about Microsoft's approach to Big Data, how visualization helps people grasp analytics concepts, helping students learn the basics of big data, and the millennial perspective on the tech industry today.

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background and your talk today.
  • Topic 2 - Microsoft big data was Excel and visualization was Powerpoint. So what are you focused on today and what interesting things are you seeing people work on?
  • Topic 3 - What is a “Microsoft Developer” these days? What languages and frameworks are they focused on, or what tools and platforms?
  • Topic 4 - You’re a fairly recent grad, or “millennial”. What’s your outlook on the tech industry these days, and what areas of focus are interesting to you and your friends?
  • Topic 5 - What are the things that surprise you the most (or are most disappointing) about how us old people act in technology?
Feedback?

Friday, October 28, 2016

The Cloudcast #274 - Stranger Things with Netflix Containers & OSS

Brian talks with Andrew Spyker (@aspyker, Manager, Netflix Container Cloud) about his work on Netflix OSS, the evolution of Netflix’s Container Cloud, the Netflix culture and what other companies might be able to learn from their experiences.

Show Links:
Show Notes:
  • Topic 1 - Great to finally have you on the show, we’ve been trying to get you on for several years. What are you working on these days?
  • Topic 2 - What is Netflix OSS these days? Is it a hiring movement, or a “maybe move off AWS movement”, or is it getting non-Netflix adoption?
  • Topic 3 - You used to work at IBM. What have you learned at Netflix (culture, process, etc.) that could be applied to non-Netflix companies?
  • Topic 4 - We’ve see some of the Netflix OSS tools getting embedded into the Container and PaaS platforms (e.g. circuit breaker, chaos monkey, etc.)
  • Topic 5 - You’re also working on containers platforms at Netflix. Containers are a big deal for many companies these days. What has Netflix learned that could be valuable to other companies?
Feedback?