Podcasts about amazonians

Join the YouTube Baal Busters Channel While it Lasts!https://www.youtube.com/@baalbustersPATREON Community to ChatGET AD-FREE podcasts and Exclusive Content: Become a $5-10 Patron.https://Patreon.com/c/DisguisetheLimits4.11.2025L.A. Waddell Told us the real story of our past. We continue Makers of Civilization and the British Edda.I encourage all to become familiar with the British Edda. L.A. Waddell studied history in a time before the control mechanism on information locked into place. Prior to the end of WWII the world still had the "fixers" in to shout down any Truth unfavorable to the descendants of the Ancient Cult, but the wholesale ban on the past was yet to be fully instituted.Call: 619-431-0334Join Dr. Glidden's Membership site:https://leavebigpharmabehind.com/?via=pgndhealthCode: baalbusters for 50% OffMy Book: https://www.semperfryllc.com/store/p93/Priestcraft%3A_Beyond_Babylon_%28Signed_Copy%29.htmlWhile you're there get the Best Condiments this side of Valhalla.https://x.com/DisguiseLimitsPATREON Community to ChatGET AD-FREE and Exclusive Content: Become a Patron.https://Patreon.com/DisguisetheLimitsBEST HOT SAUCE of the Realm:https://SemperFryLLC.com to get Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon and AWESOME Hot Sauce 1STOPSHOP for 10% OFFI was deleted from Spotify! If you absolutely must listen to podcasts instead of just listening to videos like I do, go here and FOLLOW:https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ba-al-busters-broadcast--5100262STRIPE: https://buy.stripe.com/cN28wSelp30wgaA288GiveSendGo: https://GiveSendGo.com/BaalBustersBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ba-al-busters-broadcast--5100262/support.

In this episode, I sit down with Jason Bronstad, CEO of Malk Organics, and talk about the journey of not just leading a clean-label brand but rebuilding it from the inside out.   Jason shares how a deeply personal career pivot led him to a mission-driven company that's transforming the plant-based milk category, one clean ingredient at a time. We get into the weeds from SKU rationalization and shelf life extension to the emotional lessons of transparent leadership and brand stewardship. What happens when your consumers call you out on social media? You listen, and you learn, and Jason shares exactly how his team responded and evolved.

In this episode, I sit down with Dan Abel, Co-founder and CEO of Pilot Project Brewing, a first-of-its-kind beverage incubator helping brands navigate one of the most competitive and complex CPG categories: beverages.   From launching home-brew experiments in his garage to opening multi-location tasting rooms and scaling more than 20 innovative brands, Dan shares the real story behind building an incubator that acts more like a record label than a traditional brewery. We discuss how Pilot Project removes barriers for founders, democratizes access to manufacturing and distribution, and gathers real-time consumer data to help determine which brands will succeed. Dan also shares lessons on entrepreneurship, brand validation, and why beverage founders shouldn't go it alone. Key Moments in This Episode: * How Pilot Project Brewing was inspired by the music industry's support system for creatives * Why real product validation means gathering comparative data, not just compliments * What founders need to know about packaging, shelf presence, and customer experience * The trends Dan sees emerging from over 1,200 brand applications (including what's next) * How this incubator helped a non-alcoholic brand scale and get acquired in under two years Join me, Ramon Vela, in listening to this episode for a deep look into how smart support systems and shared resources are reshaping the beverage world. Whether you're a founder or a fan of what's next, this one's for you. For more on Pilot Project Brewing, visit:  https://www.pilotprojectbrewing.com/ If you enjoyed this episode, please leave The Story of a Brand a rating and review.  Plus, don't forget to follow us on Apple and Spotify.  Your support helps us bring you more content like this! * Today's Sponsors: Compass Rose Ventures - Advisor for CPG Brands: https://compassroseventures.com/contact/ Compass Rose Ventures can help your CPG brand increase customer lifetime value, expand into the US market, create an omnipresent omnichannel footprint, optimize customer journeys, build brand communities, and more. Visit the link above to learn more.    Color More Lines: https://www.colormorelines.com/get-started Color More Lines is a team of ex-Amazonians and e-commerce operators who help brands grow faster on Amazon and Walmart. With a performance-based pricing model and flexible contracts, they've generated triple-digit year-over-year growth for established sellers doing over $5 million per year. Use code "STORY OF A BRAND” and receive a complimentary market opportunity assessment of your e-commerce brand and marketplace positioning. 

This Week on Earth Station DCU! Drew Leiter and Cletus Jacobs put on their power rings as we catch up on Green Lantern and other titles. Batgirl Casandra Cain goes undercover by herself to help find some missing Amazonians in Birds of Prey #14, 15, 16. Green Arrow investigates a series of murders linked to Horton Chemical, a company that Oliver Queen briefly owned in Green Lantern #18. The Renegade Green Lanterns confront Lord Premier Thaaros revealing his corruption in Green Lantern Civil Corps Special #1. Red Lantern Mogo destroys Thanagar, but is saved by Red Lantern Sinestro who helps save Oa in Green Lantern #16, 17, 18. A new terrorist group calling themselves The Green Knight begins blowing up building in Gotham and claiming that Poison Ivy is their leader in Poison Ivy #26, 27, and 28. Nightwing puts a stop to Heartless in Nightwing #118 and then deals with a gang war in Nightwing #119 & 120. All this plus, DC News, Shout Outs, and much, much more! ------------------------ Table of Contents 0:00:00 Show Open 0:01:02 DC News 0:07:48 Birds of Prey #14, 15, 16 0:10:58 Green Arrow #18 0:12:36 Green Lantern Civil Corps Special #1 0:19:35 Green Lantern #16, 17, 18 0:30:22 Poison Ivy #26, 27, 28 0:35:55 Nightwing #118 0:39:34 Nightwing #119 & 120 0:44:20 Show Close   Links Birds of Prey #14 Birds of Prey #15 Birds of Prey #16 Green Arrow #18 Green Lantern Civil Corps Special #1 Green Lantern #16 Green Lantern #17 Green Lantern #18 Poison Ivy #26 Poison Ivy #27 Poison Ivy #28 Nightwing #118 Nightwing #119 Nightwing #120 Green Lantern the Sinestro Corps War #1 (Cletus's Read More Comics Pick) Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying (Drew's Read More Comics Pick) Earth Station DCU Website The ESO Network If you would like to leave feedback, comment on the show, or would like us to give you a shout out, please call the ESDCU feedback line at (317) 455-8411 or feel free to email us @ earthstationdcu@gmail.com

This Week on Earth Station DCU! Drew Leiter and Cletus Jacobs put on their power rings as we catch up on Green Lantern and other titles. Batgirl Casandra Cain goes undercover by herself to help find some missing Amazonians in Birds of Prey #14, 15, 16. Green Arrow investigates a series of murders linked to […] The post The Earth Station DCU Episode 406 – Green Lantern and Others Catchup appeared first on The ESO Network.

Hello Justice Leaguers!  Wonder Woman has been away from home for 8 months. At Superman's urging, she decides to go home and face the consequences of her actions. She was expecting an icy homecoming, but was faced with a stone cold one.  Themyscira is in ruins and all of the Amazonians have been turned to stone. Felix Faust, disgraced archeologist and power-hungry magician, has taken the island on behalf of his master, Hades. Faust makes a deal with Diana, gather the pieces of the Key to Tartarus and he will free the Amazonians. The League agrees to help her while Batman does research on Faust. Diana brings the league to Themyscira to fight Faust and Hades.  But Faust is able to open the gates to Tartarus and free Hades.  Hades raises an army of the dead. The League fight them while Diana and her mother fight Hades.  He is returned to Tartarus, his army and Faust is killed. The League is thanked. However, Diana is exiled from bringing men to the island.   Contact Information: If you want to join in the discussion, you can submit feedback via email to TomorrowsLegendsPodcast@gmail.com or at at https://www.speakpipe.com/TomorrowsLegends . Please submit all feedback by 7:00 pm eastern on Friday. You can also join the Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/tomorrowslegends. Answer all the questions and agree to the group rules to be accepted. You can follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @tomorowslegends, on Instagram  and Threads @TomorrowsLegendsPodcast. We are also on Blue Sky at @TomorrowsLegends .  You can support the show on our Patreon page! https://www.patreon.com/TomorrowsLegends You will get access to bonus content like advanced releases, extra questions answered, hang-out sessions, bonus episodes, and merchandise of course!

Jorge Pando spent eight years at Amazon, holding key leadership roles across retail and advertising, most recently as Head of Product for Amazon Advertising. In addition to his corporate responsibilities, Jorge developed and scaled the "Effective at Amazon" program, which grew from a side project to an initiative impacting over 70,000 Amazonians across 60 countries. Now, Jorge provides courses and coaching to help business leaders improve their effectiveness in work and life.In this episode, Jorge shares his unique career journey, insights into Amazon's leadership principles, and lessons learned from scaling impactful programs. You'll hear Jorge discuss:How Learn and Be Curious fueled his transitions between diverse roles at Amazon, from general management to advertising innovation.The process of developing and growing the "Effective at Amazon" program—and how it shaped his personal and professional growth.The importance of balancing curiosity and execution to deliver results while driving personal development.Why side projects can build your brand, expand your network, and open unexpected doors in your career.Practical advice for integrating continuous learning into your life and workplace.Whether you're interested in Amazon's mechanisms, leadership development, or strategies for pursuing passion alongside a corporate career, you're sure to glean valuable insights from this conversation with Jorge.Mentioned in the Episode:Jorge's Website: https://theeffective.co/Jorge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgelpando/Follow us on LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-like-amazon-podcast/

5PM: New WA state laws in 2025 // Amazon’s new in-office rule arrives Thursday. Amazonians are nervous // For German 'sick leave detective', business is booming // Remembering John’s Cabin and the loss of Dori Monson // Letters

Our long time guest Renny is back for this week as we dive into Season 7 Episode 13, through the theme of Duty! Join us as we question why this episode is all about these powerful Amazonian women and yet it still doesn't pass the Bechtel test?? And how are they only finding out about these Amazonians now if they have been around for centuries? How many of them are there? Why haven't the police investigated them in the past? We have a lot of questions. Listen in to see if we have the answers! ;) Find us at queeringthingspodcast.com!

What’s Trending: It happened again, another attempt was made on Donald Trump’s life yesterday at his golf course in Florida. The media is doing their best to victim blame Donald Trump. // Amazon’s CEO told employees that they will soon have to return to work in-person 5 days a week. // Kamala Harris did her first solo sit-down interview with a local news outlet in Philadelphia and it was a total disaster.  

Homer and Thelustra share their contributions with their people. The Amazonians and Spartans United through Jesus, listened closely.

​​​​​​​​​Level Up Newsletter & Community paid members and the Scarlet Ink Newsletter paid members were invited to join this live event with Ethan Evans (retired Amazon VP) and David Anderson (former Amazon GM) dissecting Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) followed by a live audience Q&A. ​David came to work for Ethan in his final role at Amazon (in Amazon Games) kicking off a friendship that has continued to flourish as they both enjoy teaching and writing on career advice in their post-Amazon lives. --- Show Notes: 00:00 Introduction 00:58 David's Career Journey 04:40 The Power of Amazon Leadership Principles 07:44 Evolution and Application of Leadership Principles 18:52 Ownership and Personal Reflections 22:18 Challenges and Controversies in Leadership 40:36 Identifying the Weakest Link 41:50 Hiring for Leadership Principles 44:01 Teaching Leadership Principles 47:49 Addressing the Empathy Gap 51:51 Amazon's Cultural Challenges 56:23 Handling Leadership Conflicts 59:32 The Importance of Company Culture 01:11:11 Final Thoughts and Personal Insights --- About Ethan Evans ​​​​​​​​​​​​​Ethan retired from Amazon as a Vice President after 15 years where he led global teams of 800+ and invented businesses such as Prime Video, Amazon Video, Amazon Appstore, Merch by Amazon, Prime Gaming (formerly Twitch Prime), and Twitch Commerce. ​​​​​​​​70+ patents. ​​​​​​​​Reviewed 10,000+ resumes, conducted 2,500+ interviews, and 1,000+ hires. ​​​​​​​​Was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators. ​​​​​​​​Helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) “Ownership” — the words, “They never say ‘that's not my job.'” are Ethan's (read the story). ​Ethan retired from Amazon as a Vice President in September 2020. ​Join Ethan's Level Up Newsletter & Community to get ongoing career advice and leadership networking access. --- About David Anderson ​David is the author of Scarlet Ink, a popular technology leadership newsletter. ​He spent more than 12 years at Amazon, moving from the lowest level development manager, to a Technology Director and GM. During the majority of those years, David was also a bar raiser and member of the bar raiser core leadership group (helping direct how the bar raiser program operates). ​At the beginning of the pandemic, David was asked to help Bezos Academy get started as their CTO. He spent a year at Bezos Academy building the Technology foundation for the school system, and hiring an excellent IT leadership team. ​David left the corporate world to pursue his passion for writing, and raising chickens.

Originally recorded during the 7/14/24 Episode of How Did We Miss That?, found here: ⭐ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ardzDXmwI ⭐ Rokfin: https://rokfin.com/stream/50513 ⭐ Rumble: https://rumble.com/v56vzx1-20-trillion-stolen-will-gaza-end-like-russiagate-began-ny-amazonians-organi.html ⭐ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2066358343761903 Tonight's Topics: ⭐ Gaza Updates: Russiagate, Ethnic Cleansing, New Publication, Microsoft Canceling Palestinian Accounts Abroad “Russiagate” was Israelgate: Sam Husseini https://husseini.substack.com/p/russiagate-was-israelgate Trump and the Plan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza: Will the Gaza Genocide End the Way "Russiagate" Began?: Sam Husseini https://husseini.substack.com/p/trump-and-the-plan-for-the-ethnic Introducing West Bank Alerts https://winterwheat.substack.com/p/introducing-west-bank-alerts Jewish Woman GOES OFF https://x.com/HumaZhr/status/1811270649291190554 Microsoft Canceling Diaspora Palestinian accounts? https://x.com/MintPressNews/status/1811466849051377803 ⭐ New York Amazon Workers Organizing, Making Demands New York Amazon Workers Demand Paid Juneteenth Holiday: Kenneth Guy and Dylan Maraj, Labor Notes https://labornotes.org/2024/07/new-york-amazon-workers-demand-paid-juneteenth-holiday ⭐ Censorship Industrial Complex Update: FOIA Files, Stanford Shutters Internet Observatory The Stanford Internet Observatory is brought to heel: Andrew Lowenthal, Network Affects https://networkaffects.substack.com/p/the-stanford-internet-observatory FOIA Files: Clemson University: James Rushmore, Racket News https://www.racket.news/p/foia-files-clemson-university All episode links found at our Substack: https://www.indiemediatoday.com/p/how-did-we-miss-that-ep-120 How Did We Miss That? features articles written by independent journalists who routinely challenge corporate-friendly “mainstream” narratives & counter the talking points pushed out by corporate-controlled media. Watch new episodes LIVE Sunday nights at 10pm ET / 7pm PT on YouTube, Rumble, Rokfin, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter & Telegram. Find the podcast on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Amazon + most other major platforms. co-Host Indie is: ⭐ an INN co-founder ⭐ Co-host of American Tradition with Jesse Jett on INN ⭐ Founder & Editor of Indie Media Today Substack @IndieMediaToday ⭐ Executive Producer, The Politics of Survival with Tara Reade on INN ⭐ Creator of the Indie Media Awards @IndieMediaAward co-host Reef Breland is: ⭐ an INN co-founder ⭐ INN's Technical Director ⭐ Creator, co-Executive Producer, engineer & co-host of INN News ⭐ Producer, The Politics of Survival w/ Tara Reade on INN #SupportIndependentMedia #news #analysis #GeneralStrike #mutualaid #FreeJonathanWall #FreeLeonardPeltier #JournalismIsNotACrime #FreeMumiaAbuJamal #FreedJulianAssange Credits: ⭐ Co-Host, Producer, Stream & Podcast Engineer, Clip Editor: Indie Left ⭐ Co-Host, Producer & Technical Director: Reef Breland ⭐ Thumbnails & Outro: Bigmadcrab & Indie Left ⭐ Intro: Joe @STFUshitlib3 & Indie Left ⭐ Outro Music: Redpilled by Jesse Jett & The Awakening by Patrick Patrikios Wherever you are, Indie is! ⭐ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/indleft ⭐ Newsletter: https://www.indiemediatoday.com ⭐ How Did We Miss That?: https://rumble.com/c/HowDidWeMissThat ⭐ How Did We Miss That Twitter: https://twitter.com/HowDidWeMissTha ⭐ How Did We Miss That? Podcast: https://anchor.fm/independentleftnews/ ⭐ How Did We Miss That? Clips & Livestreams: https://www.indiemediatoday.com/p/how-did-we-miss-that-clips-livestreams ⭐ Indie Media Awards: https://linktr.ee/indiemediaawards Reef's Links: ⭐ LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/reefbreland ⭐ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReefBreland INN Links: ⭐ Network Channels LinkTree: http://indienews.network ⭐ Network Members LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/innmembers ⭐ Newsletter: https://indienewsnetwork.substack.com

Este episodio consiste en el impacto de mentoría para brillar en carreras de tecnología, específicamente en AWS y hablar específicamente de un programa que ofrece AWS para atraer mujeres en tech a lo largo de 12 semanas de mentoría con Amazonians llamado AWS She Builds

Clancy Overall, Errol Parker and Wendall Hussey wrap up all the biggest stories from the week - live from the Desert Rock FM studio in downtown Betoota. Subscribe to the Betoota Newsletter HERE Betoota on Instagram Betoota on TikTok Produced by DM PodcastsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kristi Coulter is the author of the acclaimed memoirs Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career and Nothing Good Can Come From This, and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine/The Cut, Elle, Glamour, DAME, Big Technology, and elsewhere. She has been a guest and commentator for media outlets ranging from Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway's Pivot podcast to the Evercore Investor Forum to NPR's Live Wire Radio. Coulter has taught creative writing at the University of Washington, University of Michigan, and Hugo House. She lives in Seattle and Los Angeles. EXIT INTERVIEW tells the story of Kristi's twelve-year career at Amazon, where she held numerous leadership roles in an obsessively driven, punishing work culture that was particularly unfriendly to women (though not exactly great for men, either!). Her experience included thrills and exhilarating achievements along with alcohol abuse, burnout, and disillusionment. Ultimately, Kristi recognized that for her ambition to live and thrive, she would need to leave the alpha-male rigidity of Big Tech. Her story is incredible. I could not put this book down!   Listen in to hear Kristi share: Her deeply thoughtful and personal story of professional endurance within the “alpha-male rigidity of Big Tech” The significance of unconscious sexism in the workplace and the impact on men and women Her nerves around the publication of the book and what her co-workers and fellow Amazonians might think How her ambition didn't die when she left Amazon, but it outgrew Amazon and corporate spaces The messaging she received around success as a Gen Xer and how she sees this shifting for younger generations How she had to overcome people pleasing to write honestly and ethically about other people who may feel called out when reading book What burnout looked like and how easy it was to not see it or acknowledge it How her gray area drinking impacted her career at Amazon Links mentioned: Connect with Kristi: www.kristicoulter.com Book: Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career Book: Nothing Good Can Come From This Kristi on IG Kristi on LinkedIn We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: https://shamelessmom.com/sponsor Interested in becoming a sponsor of the Shameless Mom Academy? Email our sales team at sales@adalystmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to this week's episode! Get ready to unlock the secrets of Amazon sales profitability with Todd VanderStelt, a former Amazonian and the Founder of MixShift. With his extensive experience at Amazon from 2010 to 2015 and subsequent ventures in the Amazon agency world, Todd brings a wealth of knowledge on leveraging metrics to grow your sales profitably. Discover how MixShift's innovative SAAS platform simplifies reporting, analytics, and Amazon data analysis, including the groundbreaking Share Center. From optimizing PPC campaigns to understanding what drives your brand's performance on Amazon, Todd shares valuable insights that can revolutionize your approach to e-commerce success. Whether you're an established Amazon seller or an aspiring entrepreneur looking to break into the market, this episode is a must-watch! Tune in to this insightful discussion and take your Amazon sales to new heights! Takeaways :Customer Order Labeling: Every customer order is labeled based on whether it's their first purchase or if they are a repeat customer. This allows for tracking customer acquisition and retention metrics effectively.  Event Analysis: Events like Prime Day with deep discounts can lead to spikes in new customer acquisitions. However, it's crucial to analyze data over time to determine which events successfully convert new customers into repeat customers.  Repeat Customer Measurement: By tracking repeat customers over time, sellers can measure the effectiveness of different events or strategies in converting new customers into loyal, repeat buyers.  Data Segmentation and Insights: Analyzing data in cohorts and segments provides valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, helping sellers make informed decisions. Evolution of Amazon Ecosystem: The Amazon marketplace has evolved significantly over the years, presenting sellers with new challenges and opportunities for growth.  Quote of the Show: One of the metrics that I would like to see is Customer Lifetime Value. By dissecting CLV over time, separating new versus repeat customer revenue, we gain insights into which products are driving long-term success. Links :MixShift email: hello@mixshift.io  Todd VanderStelt LI Page:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-vanderstelt-284956/  MixShift LI Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mixshift  MixShift Website Landing Page: https://mixshift.io/out-of-the-box-amazon-reporting/  Special Offer: MixShift offers a 30-day free trial of the software with no long-term commitments for all users.  For Amazon Legends listeners, reach out to hello@mixshift.io noting #AmazonLegends for a free account audit. And for Agencies & Brands, MixShift offers flexible, in-depth training programs on all things Amazon and Amazon Advertising.Want To Level Up Your Business? Register With Our SponsorsAmazon often loses inventory or overcharges fees. With Arthy, you can recover up to 30% of your lost revenue. At a monthly flat rate of only $99 with no commission fees for unlimited reimbursements, you can increase your bottom line. Their automated, Amazon-compliant process ensures hassle-free refunds.Visit https://www.getarthy.com/feature-lp/reimbursements and sign up today to get one month free and discover your recovery potential!

Evelyn Osman, Principal Platform Engineer at AutoScout24, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the dire need for developers to agree on a standardized tool set in order to scale their projects and innovate quickly. Corey and Evelyn pick apart the new products being launched in cloud computing and discover a large disconnect between what the industry needs and what is actually being created. Evelyn shares her thoughts on why viewing platforms as products themselves forces developers to get into the minds of their users and produces a better end result.About EvelynEvelyn is a recovering improviser currently role playing as a Lead Platform Engineer at Autoscout24 in Munich, Germany. While she says she specializes in AWS architecture and integration after spending 11 years with it, in truth she spends her days convincing engineers that a product mindset will make them hate their product managers less.Links Referenced:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyn-osman/TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is Evelyn Osman, engineering manager at AutoScout24. Evelyn, thank you for joining me.Evelyn: Thank you very much, Corey. It's actually really fun to be on here.Corey: I have to say one of the big reasons that I was enthused to talk to you is that you have been using AWS—to be direct—longer than I have, and that puts you in a somewhat rarefied position where AWS's customer base has absolutely exploded over the past 15 years that it's been around, but at the beginning, it was a very different type of thing. Nowadays, it seems like we've lost some of that magic from the beginning. Where do you land on that whole topic?Evelyn: That's actually a really good point because I always like to say, you know, when I come into a room, you know, I really started doing introductions like, “Oh, you know, hey,” I'm like, you know, “I'm this director, I've done this XYZ,” and I always say, like, “I'm Evelyn, engineering manager, or architect, or however,” and then I say, you know, “I've been working with AWS, you know, 11, 12 years,” or now I can't quite remember.Corey: Time becomes a flat circle. The pandemic didn't help.Evelyn: [laugh] Yeah, I just, like, a look at that the year, and I'm like, “Jesus. It's been that long.” Yeah. And usually, like you know, you get some odd looks like, “Oh, my God, you must be a sage.” And for me, I'm… you see how different services kind of, like, have just been reinventions of another one, or they just take a managed service and make another managed service around it. So, I feel that there's a lot of where it's just, you know, wrapping up a pretty bow, and calling it something different, it feels like.Corey: That's what I've been low-key asking people for a while now over the past year, namely, “What is the most foundational, interesting thing that AWS has done lately, that winds up solving for this problem of whatever it is you do as a company? What is it that has foundationally made things better that AWS has put out in the last service? What was it?” And the answers I get are all depressingly far in the past, I have to say. What's yours?Evelyn: Honestly, I think the biggest game-changer I remember experiencing was at an analyst summit in Stockholm when they announced Lambda.Corey: That was announced before I even got into this space, as an example of how far back things were. And you're right. That was transformative. That was awesome.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. Because before, you know, we were always, like, trying to figure, okay, how do we, like, launch an instance, run some short code, and then clean it up. AWS is going to charge for an hour, so we need to figure out, you know, how to pack everything into one instance, run for one hour. And then they announced Lambda, and suddenly, like, holy shit, this is actually a game changer. We can actually write small functions that do specific things.And, you know, you go from, like, microservices, like, to like, tiny, serverless functions. So, that was huge. And then DynamoDB along with that, really kind of like, transformed the entire space for us in many ways. So, back when I was at TIBCO, there was a few innovations around that, even, like, one startup inside TIBCO that quite literally, their entire product was just Lambda functions. And one of their problems was, they wanted to sell in the Marketplace, and they couldn't figure out how to sell Lambda on the marketplace.Corey: It's kind of wild when we see just how far it's come, but also how much they've announced that doesn't change that much, to be direct. For me, one of the big changes that I remember that really made things better for customers—thought it took a couple of years—was EFS. And even that's a little bit embarrassing because all that is, “All right, we finally found a way to stuff a NetApp into us-east-1,” so now NFS, just like you used to use it in the 90s and the naughts, can be done responsibly in the cloud. And that, on some level, wasn't a feature launch so much as it was a concession to the ways that companies had built things and weren't likely to change.Evelyn: Honestly, I found the EFS launch to be a bit embarrassing because, like, you know, when you look closer at it, you realize, like, the performance isn't actually that great.Corey: Oh, it was horrible when it launched. It would just slam to a halt because you got the IOPS scaled with how much data you stored on it. The documentation explicitly said to use dd to start loading a bunch of data onto it to increase the performance. It's like, “Look, just sandbag the thing so it does what you'd want.” And all that stuff got fixed, but at the time it looked like it was clown shoes.Evelyn: Yeah, and that reminds me of, like, EBS's, like, gp2 when we're, like you know, we're talking, like, okay, provision IOPS with gp2. We just kept saying, like, just give yourself really big volume for performance. And it feel like they just kind of kept that with EFS. And it took years for them to really iterate off of that. Yeah, so, like, EFS was a huge thing, and I see us, we're still using it now today, and like, we're trying to integrate, especially for, like, data center migrations, but yeah, you always see that a lot of these were first more for, like, you know, data centers to the cloud, you know. So, first I had, like, EC2 classic. That's where I started. And I always like to tell a story that in my team, we're talking about using AWS, I was the only person fiercely against it because we did basically large data processing—sorry, I forget the right words—data analytics. There we go [laugh].Corey: I remember that, too. When it first came out, it was, “This sounds dangerous and scary, and it's going to be a flash in the pan because who would ever trust their core compute infrastructure to some random third-party company, especially a bookstore?” And yeah, I think I got that one very wrong.Evelyn: Yeah, exactly. I was just like, no way. You know, I see all these articles talking about, like, terrible disk performance, and here I am, where it's like, it's my bread and butter. I'm specialized in it, you know? I write code in my sleep and such.[Yeah, the interesting thing is, I was like, first, it was like, I can 00:06:03] launch services, you know, to kind of replicate when you get in a data center to make it feature comparable, and then it was taking all this complex services and wrapping it up in a pretty bow for—as a managed service. Like, EKS, I think, was the biggest one, if we're looking at managed services. Technically Elasticsearch, but I feel like that was the redheaded stepchild for quite some time.Corey: Yeah, there was—Elasticsearch was a weird one, and still is. It's not a pleasant service to run in any meaningful sense. Like, what people actually want as the next enhancement that would excite everyone is, I want a serverless version of this thing where I can just point it at a bunch of data, I hit an API that I don't have to manage, and get Elasticsearch results back from. They finally launched a serverless offering that's anything but. You have to still provision compute units for it, so apparently, the word serverless just means managed service over at AWS-land now. And it just, it ties into the increasing sense of disappointment I've had with almost all of their recent launches versus what I felt they could have been.Evelyn: Yeah, the interesting thing about Elasticsearch is, a couple of years ago, they came out with OpenSearch, a competing Elasticsearch after [unintelligible 00:07:08] kind of gave us the finger and change the licensing. I mean, OpenSearch actually become a really great offering if you run it yourself, but if you use their managed service, it can kind—you lose all the benefits, in a way.Corey: I'm curious, as well, to get your take on what I've been seeing that I think could only be described as an internal shift, where it's almost as if there's been a decree passed down that every service has to run its own P&L or whatnot, and as a result, everything that gets put out seems to be monetized in weird ways, even when I'd argue it shouldn't be. The classic example I like to use for this is AWS Config, where it charges you per evaluation, and that happens whenever a cloud resource changes. What that means is that by using the cloud dynamically—the way that they supposedly want us to do—we wind up paying a fee for that as a result. And it's not like anyone is using that service in isolation; it is definitionally being used as people are using other cloud resources, so why does it cost money? And the answer is because literally everything they put out costs money.Evelyn: Yep, pretty simple. Oftentimes, there's, like, R&D that goes into it, but the charges seem a bit… odd. Like from an S3 lens, was, I mean, that's, like, you know, if you're talking about services, that was actually a really nice one, very nice holistic overview, you know, like, I could drill into a data lake and, like, look into things. But if you actually want to get anything useful, you have to pay for it.Corey: Yeah. Everything seems to, for one reason or another, be stuck in this place where, “Well, if you want to use it, it's going to cost.” And what that means is that it gets harder and harder to do anything that even remotely resembles being able to wind up figuring out where's the spend going, or what's it going to cost me as time goes on? Because it's not just what are the resources I'm spinning up going to cost, what are the second, third, and fourth-order effects of that? And the honest answer is, well, nobody knows. You're going to have to basically run an experiment and find out.Evelyn: Yeah. No, true. So, what I… at AutoScout, we actually ended up doing is—because we're trying to figure out how to tackle these costs—is they—we built an in-house cost allocation solution so we could track all of that. Now, AWS has actually improved Cost Explorer quite a bit, and even, I think, Billing Conductor was one that came out [unintelligible 00:09:21], kind of like, do a custom tiered and account pricing model where you can kind of do the same thing. But even that also, there is a cost with it.I think that was trying to compete with other, you know, vendors doing similar solutions. But it still isn't something where we see that either there's, like, arbitrarily low pricing there, or the costs itself doesn't really quite make sense. Like, AWS [unintelligible 00:09:45], as you mentioned, it's a terrific service. You know, we try to use it for compliance enforcement and other things, catching bad behavior, but then as soon as people see the price tag, we just run away from it. So, a lot of the security services themselves, actually, the costs, kind of like, goes—skyrockets tremendously when you start trying to use it across a large organization. And oftentimes, the organization isn't actually that large.Corey: Yeah, it gets to this point where, especially in small environments, you have to spend more energy and money chasing down what the cost is than you're actually spending on the thing. There were blog posts early on that, “Oh, here's how you analyze your bill with Redshift,” and that was a minimum 750 bucks a month. It's, well, I'm guessing that that's not really for my $50 a month account.Evelyn: Yeah. No, precisely. I remember seeing that, like, entire ETL process is just, you know, analyze your invoice. Cost [unintelligible 00:10:33], you know, is fantastic, but at the end of the day, like, what you're actually looking at [laugh], is infinitesimally small compared to all the data in that report. Like, I think oftentimes, it's simply, you know, like, I just want to look at my resources and allocate them in a multidimensional way. Which actually isn't really that multidimensional, when you think about it [laugh].Corey: Increasingly, Cost Explorer has gotten better. It's not a new service, but every iteration seems to improve it to a point now where I'm talking to folks, and they're having a hard time justifying most of the tools in the cost optimization space, just because, okay, they want a percentage of my spend on AWS to basically be a slightly better version of a thing that's already improving and works for free. That doesn't necessarily make sense. And I feel like that's what you get trapped into when you start going down the VC path in the cost optimization space. You've got to wind up having a revenue model and an offering that scales through software… and I thought, originally, I was going to be doing something like that. At this point, I'm unconvinced that anything like that is really tenable.Evelyn: Yeah. When you're a small organization you're trying to optimize, you might not have the expertise and the knowledge to do so, so when one of these small consultancies comes along, saying, “Hey, we're going to charge you a really small percentage of your invoice,” like, okay, great. That's, like, you know, like, a few $100 a month to make sure I'm fully optimized, and I'm saving, you know, far more than that. But as soon as your invoice turns into, you know, it's like $100,000, or $300,000 or more, that percentage becomes rather significant. And I've had vendors come to me and, like, talk to me and is like, “Hey, we can, you know, for a small percentage, you know, we're going to do this machine learning, you know, AI optimization for you. You know, you don't have to do anything. We guaranteed buybacks your RIs.” And as soon as you look at the price tag with it, we just have to walk away. Or oftentimes we look at it, and there are truly very simple ways to do it on your own, if you just kind of put some thought into it.Corey: While we want to talking a bit before this show, you taught me something new about GameLift, which I think is a different problem that AWS has been dealing with lately. I've never paid much attention to it because it is the—as I assume from what it says on the tin, oh, it's a service for just running a whole bunch of games at scale, and I'm not generally doing that. My favorite computer game remains to be Twitter at this point, but that's okay. What is GameLift, though, because you want to shining a different light on it, which makes me annoyed that Amazon Marketing has not pointed this out.Evelyn: Yeah, so I'll preface this by saying, like, I'm not an expert on GameLift. I haven't even spun it up myself because there's quite a bit of price. I learned this fall while chatting with an SA who works in the gaming space, and it kind of like, I went, like, “Back up a second.” If you think about, like, I'm, you know, like, World of Warcraft, all you have are thousands of game clients all over the world, playing the same game, you know, on the same server, in the same instance, and you need to make sure, you know, that when I'm running, and you're running, that we know that we're going to reach the same point the same time, or if there's one object in that room, that only one of us can get it. So, all these servers are doing is tracking state across thousands of clients.And GameLift, when you think about your dedicated game service, it really is just multi-region distributed state management. Like, at the basic, that's really what it is. Now, there's, you know, quite a bit more happening within GameLift, but that's what I was going to explain is, like, it's just state management. And there are far more use cases for it than just for video games.Corey: That's maddening to me because having a global session state store, for lack of a better term, is something that so many customers have built themselves repeatedly. They can build it on top of primitives like DynamoDB global tables, or alternately, you have a dedicated region where that thing has to live and everything far away takes forever to round-trip. If they've solved some of those things, why on earth would they bury it under a gaming-branded service? Like, offer that primitive to the rest of us because that's useful.Evelyn: No, absolutely. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if you peeled back the curtain with GameLift, you'll find a lot of—like, several other you know, AWS services that it's just built on top of. I kind of mentioned earlier is, like, what I see now with innovation, it's like we just see other services packaged together and releases a new product.Corey: Yeah, IoT had the same problem going on for years where there was a lot of really good stuff buried in there, like IOT events. People were talking about using that for things like browser extensions and whatnot, but you need to be explicitly told that that's a thing that exists and is handy, but otherwise you'd never know it was there because, “Well, I'm not building anything that's IoT-related. Why would I bother?” It feels like that was one direction that they tended to go in.And now they take existing services that are, mmm, kind of milquetoast, if I'm being honest, and then saying, “Oh, like, we have Comprehend that does, effectively detection of themes, keywords, and whatnot, from text. We're going to wind up re-releasing that as Comprehend Medical.” Same type of thing, but now focused on a particular vertical. Seems to me that instead of being a specific service for that vertical, just improve the baseline the service and offer HIPAA compliance if it didn't exist already, and you're mostly there. But what do I know? I'm not a product manager trying to get promoted.Evelyn: Yeah, that's true. Well, I was going to mention that maybe it's the HIPAA compliance, but actually, a lot of their services already have HIPAA compliance. And I've stared far too long at that compliance section on AWS's site to know this, but you know, a lot of them actually are HIPAA-compliant, they're PCI-compliant, and ISO-compliant, and you know, and everything. So, I'm actually pretty intrigued to know why they [wouldn't 00:16:04] take that advantage.Corey: I just checked. Amazon Comprehend is itself HIPAA-compliant and is qualified and certified to hold Personal Health Information—PHI—Private Health Information, whatever the acronym stands for. Now, what's the difference, then, between that and Medical? In fact, the HIPAA section says for Comprehend Medical, “For guidance, see the previous section on Amazon Comprehend.” So, there's no difference from a regulatory point of view.Evelyn: That's fascinating. I am intrigued because I do know that, like, within AWS, you know, they have different segments, you know? There's, like, Digital Native Business, there's Enterprise, there's Startup. So, I am curious how things look over the engineering side. I'm going to talk to somebody about this now [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's the—like, I almost wonder, on some level, it feels like, “Well, we wound to building this thing in the hopes that someone would use it for something. And well, if we just use different words, it checks a box in some analyst's chart somewhere.” I don't know. I mean, I hate to sound that negative about it, but it's… increasingly when I talk to customers who are active in these spaces around the industry vertical targeted stuff aimed at their industry, they're like, “Yeah, we took a look at it. It was adorable, but we're not using it that way. We're going to use either the baseline version or we're going to work with someone who actively gets our industry.” And I've heard that repeated about three or four different releases that they've put out across the board of what they've been doing. It feels like it is a misunderstanding between what the world needs and what they're able to or willing to build for us.Evelyn: Not sure. I wouldn't be surprised, if we go far enough, it could probably be that it's just a product manager saying, like, “We have to advertise directly to the industry.” And if you look at it, you know, in the backend, you know, it's an engineer, you know, kicking off a build and just changing the name from Comprehend to Comprehend Medical.Corey: And, on some level, too, they're moving a lot more slowly than they used to. There was a time where they were, in many cases, if not the first mover, the first one to do it well. Take Code Whisperer, their AI powered coding assistant. That would have been a transformative thing if GitHub Copilot hadn't beaten them every punch, come out with new features, and frankly, in head-to-head experiments that I've run, came out way better as a product than what Code Whisperer is. And while I'd like to say that this is great, but it's too little too late. And when I talk to engineers, they're very excited about what Copilot can do, and the only people I see who are even talking about Code Whisperer work at AWS.Evelyn: No, that's true. And so, I think what's happening—and this is my opinion—is that first you had AWS, like, launching a really innovative new services, you know, that kind of like, it's like, “Ah, it's a whole new way of running your workloads in the cloud.” Instead of you know, basically, hiring a whole team, I just click a button, you have your instance, you use it, sell software, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they went towards serverless, and then IoT, and then it started targeting large data lakes, and then eventually that kind of run backwards towards security, after the umpteenth S3 data leak.Corey: Oh, yeah. And especially now, like, so they had a hit in some corners with SageMaker, so now there are 40 services all starting with the word SageMaker. That's always pleasant.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. And what I kind of notice is… now they're actually having to run it even further back because they caught all the corporations that could pivot to the cloud, they caught all the startups who started in the cloud, and now they're going for the larger behemoths who have massive data centers, and they don't want to innovate. They just want to reduce this massive sysadmin team. And I always like to use the example of a Bare Metal. When that came out in 2019, everybody—we've all kind of scratched your head. I'm like, really [laugh]?Corey: Yeah, I could see where it makes some sense just for very specific workloads that involve things like specific capabilities of processors that don't work under emulation in some weird way, but it's also such a weird niche that I'm sure it's there for someone. My default assumption, just given the breadth of AWS's customer base, is that whenever I see something that they just announced, well, okay, it's clearly not for me; that doesn't mean it's not meeting the needs of someone who looks nothing like me. But increasingly as I start exploring the industry in these services have time to percolate in the popular imagination and I still don't see anything interesting coming out with it, it really makes you start to wonder.Evelyn: Yeah. But then, like, I think, like, roughly a year or something, right after Bare Metal came out, they announced Outposts. So, then it was like, another way to just stay within your data center and be in the cloud.Corey: Yeah. There's a bunch of different ways they have that, okay, here's ways you can run AWS services on-prem, but still pay us by the hour for the privilege of running things that you have living in your facility. And that doesn't seem like it's quite fair.Evelyn: That's exactly it. So, I feel like now it's sort of in diminishing returns and sort of doing more cloud-native work compared to, you know, these huge opportunities, which is everybody who still has a data center for various reasons, or they're cloud-native, and they grow so big, that they actually start running their own data centers.Corey: I want to call out as well before we wind up being accused of being oblivious, that we're recording this before re:Invent. So, it's entirely possible—I hope this happens—that they announce something or several some things that make this look ridiculous, and we're embarrassed to have had this conversation. And yeah, they're totally getting it now, and they have completely surprised us with stuff that's going to be transformative for almost every customer. I've been expecting and hoping for that for the last three or four re:Invents now, and I haven't gotten it.Evelyn: Yeah, that's right. And I think there's even a new service launches that actually are missing fairly obvious things in a way. Like, mine is the Managed Workflow for Amazon—it's Managed Airflow, sorry. So, we were using Data Pipeline for, you know, big ETL processing, so it was an in-house tool we kind of built at Autoscout, we do platform engineering.And it was deprecated, so we looked at a new—what to replace it with. And so, we looked at Airflow, and we decided this is the way to go, we want to use managed because we don't want to maintain our own infrastructure. And the problem we ran into is that it doesn't have support for shared VPCs. And we actually talked to our account team, and they were confused. Because they said, like, “Well, every new service should support it natively.” But it just didn't have it. And that's, kind of, what, I kind of found is, like, there's—it feels—sometimes it's—there's a—it's getting rushed out the door, and it'll actually have a new managed service or new service launched out, but they're also sort of cutting some corners just to actually make sure it's packaged up and ready to go.Corey: When I'm looking at this, and seeing how this stuff gets packaged, and how it's built out, I start to understand a pattern that I've been relatively down on across the board. I'm curious to get your take because you work at a fairly sizable company as an engineering manager, running teams of people who do this sort of thing. Where do you land on the idea of companies building internal platforms to wrap around the offerings that the cloud service providers that they use make available to them?Evelyn: So, my opinion is that you need to build out some form of standardized tool set in order to actually be able to innovate quickly. Now, this sounds counterintuitive because everyone is like, “Oh, you know, if I want to innovate, I should be able to do this experiment, and try out everything, and use what works, and just release it.” And that greatness [unintelligible 00:23:14] mentality, you know, it's like five talented engineers working to build something. But when you have, instead of five engineers, you have five teams of five engineers each, and every single team does something totally different. You know, one uses Scala, and other on TypeScript, another one, you know .NET, and then there could have been a [last 00:23:30] one, you know, comes in, you know, saying they're still using Ruby.And then next thing you know, you know, you have, like, incredibly diverse platforms for services. And if you want to do any sort of like hiring or cross-training, it becomes incredibly difficult. And actually, as the organization grows, you want to hire talent, and so you're going to have to hire, you know, a developer for this team, you going to have to hire, you know, Ruby developer for this one, a Scala guy here, a Node.js guy over there.And so, this is where we say, “Okay, let's agree. We're going to be a Scala shop. Great. All right, are we running serverless? Are we running containerized?” And you agree on those things. So, that's already, like, the formation of it. And oftentimes, you start with DevOps. You'll say, like, “I'm a DevOps team,” you know, or doing a DevOps culture, if you do it properly, but you always hit this scaling issue where you start growing, and then how do you maintain that common tool set? And that's where we start looking at, you know, having a platform… approach, but I'm going to say it's Platform-as-a-Product. That's the key.Corey: Yeah, that's a good way of framing it because originally, the entire world needed that. That's what RightScale was when EC2 first came out. It was a reimagining of the EC2 console that was actually usable. And in time, AWS improved that to the point where RightScale didn't really have a place anymore in a way that it had previously, and that became a business challenge for them. But you have, what is it now, 2, 300 services that AWS has put out, and out, and okay, great. Most companies are really only actively working with a handful of those. How do you make those available in a reasonable way to your teams, in ways that aren't distracting, dangerous, et cetera? I don't know the answer on that one.Evelyn: Yeah. No, that's true. So, full disclosure. At AutoScout, we do platform engineering. So, I'm part of, like, the platform engineering group, and we built a platform for our product teams. It's kind of like, you need to decide to [follow 00:25:24] those answers, you know? Like, are we going to be fully containerized? Okay, then, great, we're going to use Fargate. All right, how do we do it so that developers don't actually—don't need to think that they're running Fargate workloads?And that's, like, you know, where it's really important to have those standardized abstractions that developers actually enjoy using. And I'd even say that, before you start saying, “Ah, we're going to do platform,” you say, “We should probably think about developer experience.” Because you can do a developer experience without a platform. You can do that, you know, in a DevOps approach, you know? It's basically build tools that makes it easy for developers to write code. That's the first step for anything. It's just, like, you have people writing the code; make sure that they can do the things easily, and then look at how to operate it.Corey: That sure would be nice. There's a lack of focus on usability, especially when it comes to a number of developer tools that we see out there in the wild, in that, they're clearly built by people who understand the problem space super well, but they're designing these things to be used by people who just want to make the website work. They don't have the insight, the knowledge, the approach, any of it, nor should they necessarily be expected to.Evelyn: No, that's true. And what I see is, a lot of the times, it's a couple really talented engineers who are just getting shit done, and they get shit done however they can. So, it's basically like, if they're just trying to run the website, they're just going to write the code to get things out there and call it a day. And then somebody else comes along, has a heart attack when see what's been done, and they're kind of stuck with it because there is no guardrails or paved path or however you want to call it.Corey: I really hope—truly—that this is going to be something that we look back and laugh when this episode airs, that, “Oh, yeah, we just got it so wrong. Look at all the amazing stuff that came out of re:Invent.” Are you going to be there this year?Evelyn: I am going to be there this year.Corey: My condolences. I keep hoping people get to escape.Evelyn: This is actually my first one in, I think, five years. So, I mean, the last time I was there was when everybody's going crazy over pins. And I still have a bag of them [laugh].Corey: Yeah, that did seem like a hot-second collectable moment, didn't it?Evelyn: Yeah. And then at the—I think, what, the very last day, as everybody's heading to re:Play, you could just go into the registration area, and they just had, like, bags of them lying around to take. So, all the competing, you know, to get the requirements for a pin was kind of moot [laugh].Corey: Don't you hate it at some point where it's like, you feel like I'm going to finally get this crowning achievement, it's like or just show up at the buffet at the end and grab one of everything, and wow, that would have saved me a lot of pain and trouble.Evelyn: Yeah.Corey: Ugh, scavenger hunts are hard, as I'm about to learn to my own detriment.Evelyn: Yeah. No, true. Yeah. But I am really hoping that re:Invent proves me wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, and then all my colleagues can proceed to mock me for this ridiculous podcast that I made with you. But I am a fierce skeptic. Optimistic nihilist, but still a nihilist, so we'll see how re:Invent turns out.Corey: So, I am curious, given your experience at more large companies than I tend to be embedded with for any period of time, how have you found that these large organizations tend to pick up new technologies? What does the adoption process look like? And honestly, if you feel like throwing some shade, how do they tend to get it wrong?Evelyn: In most cases, I've seen it go… terrible. Like, it just blows up in their face. And I say that is because a lot of the time, an organization will say, “Hey, we're going to adopt this new way of organizing teams or developing products,” and they look at all the practices. They say, “Okay, great. Product management is going to bring it in, they're going to structure things, how we do the planning, here's some great charts and diagrams,” but they don't really look at the culture aspect.And that's always where I've seen things fall apart. I've been in a room where, you know, our VP was really excited about team topologies and say, “Hey, we're going to adopt it.” And then an engineering manager proceeded to say, “Okay, you're responsible for this team, you're responsible for that team, you're responsible for this team talking to, like, a team of, like, five engineers,” which doesn't really work at all. Or, like, I think the best example is DevOps, you know, where you say, “Ah, we're going to adopt DevOps, we're going to have a DevOps team, or have a DevOps engineer.”Corey: Step one: we're going to rebadge everyone with existing job titles to have the new fancy job titles that reflect it. It turns out that's not necessarily sufficient in and of itself.Evelyn: Not really. The Spotify model. People say, like, “Oh, we're going to do the Spotify model. We're going to do skills, tribes, you know, and everything. It's going to be awesome, it's going to be great, you know, and nice, cross-functional.”The reason I say it bails on us every single time is because somebody wants to be in control of the process, and if the process is meant to encourage collaboration and innovation, that person actually becomes a chokehold for it. And it could be somebody that says, like, “Ah, I need to be involved in every single team, and listen to know what's happening, just so I'm aware of it.” What ends up happening is that everybody differs to them. So, there is no collaboration, there is no innovation. DevOps, you say, like, “Hey, we're going to have a team to do everything, so your developers don't need to worry about it.” What ends up happening is you're still an ops team, you still have your silos.And that's always a challenge is you actually have to say, “Okay, what are the cultural values around this process?” You know, what is SRE? What is DevOps, you know? Is it seen as processes, is it a series of principles, platform, maybe, you know? We have to say, like—that's why I say, Platform-as-a-Product because you need to have that product mindset, that culture of product thinking, to really build a platform that works because it's all about the user journey.It's not about building a common set of tools. It's the user journey of how a person interacts with their code to get it into a production environment. And so, you need to understand how that person sits down at their desk, starts the laptop up, logs in, opens the IDE, what they're actually trying to get done. And once you understand that, then you know your requirements, and you build something to fill those things so that they are happy to use it, as opposed to saying, “This is our platform, and you're going to use it.” And they're probably going to say, “No.” And the next thing, you know, they're just doing their own thing on the side.Corey: Yeah, the rise of Shadow IT has never gone away. It's just, on some level, it's the natural expression, I think it's an immune reaction that companies tend to have when process gets in the way. Great, we have an outcome that we need to drive towards; we don't have a choice. Cloud empowered a lot of that and also has given tools to help rein it in, and as with everything, the arms race continues.Evelyn: Yeah. And so, what I'm going to continue now, kind of like, toot the platform horn. So, Gregor Hohpe, he's a [solutions architect 00:31:56]—I always f- up his name. I'm so sorry, Gregor. He has a great book, and even a talk, called The Magic of Platforms, that if somebody is actually curious about understanding of why platforms are nice, they should really watch that talk.If you see him at re:Invent, or a summit or somewhere giving a talk, go listen to that, and just pick his brain. Because that's—for me, I really kind of strongly agree with his approach because that's really how, like, you know, as he says, like, boost innovation is, you know, where you're actually building a platform that really works.Corey: Yeah, it's a hard problem, but it's also one of those things where you're trying to focus on—at least ideally—an outcome or a better situation than you currently find yourselves in. It's hard to turn down things that might very well get you there sooner, faster, but it's like trying to effectively cargo-cult the leadership principles from your last employer into your new one. It just doesn't work. I mean, you see more startups from Amazonians who try that, and it just goes horribly because without the cultural understanding and the supporting structures, it doesn't work.Evelyn: Exactly. So, I've worked with, like, organizations, like, 4000-plus people, I've worked for, like, small startups, consulted, and this is why I say, almost every single transformation, it fails the first time because somebody needs to be in control and track things and basically be really, really certain that people are doing it right. And as soon as it blows up in their face, that's when they realize they should actually take a step back. And so, even for building out a platform, you know, doing Platform-as-a-Product, I always reiterate that you have to really be willing to just invest upfront, and not get very much back. Because you have to figure out the whole user journey, and what you're actually building, before you actually build it.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Evelyn: So, I used to be on Twitter, but I've actually got off there after it kind of turned a bit toxic and crazy.Corey: Feels like that was years ago, but that's beside the point.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. So, I would even just say because this feels like a corporate show, but find me on LinkedIn of all places because I will be sharing whatever I find on there, you know? So, just look me up on my name, Evelyn Osman, and give me a follow, and I'll probably be screaming into the cloud like you are.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Evelyn: Thank you, Corey.Corey: Evelyn Osman, engineering manager at AutoScout24. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, and I will read it once I finish building an internal platform to normalize all of those platforms together into one.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

People are at the core of organizations, and we need to treat them like the valued stakeholders they are to help retain and recruit them in today's competitive job market. Upskilling and expanding benefits and strategic hiring for specialized skills will go a long way toward fostering the right culture for growth on your teams and in your business.In this episode, PwC US Chief People Officer Yolanda Seals-Coffield is joined by J. Ofori Agboka, Amazon Vice-President of People Experience and Technology, for a discussion on how companies are tailoring benefits and development programs for different types of workers, and technology's role in that process. We'll also explore ways to personalize the career journey, including PwC's own My+ people strategy. For more information on this episode's speakers, and to view the full transcript, please visit pwc.com.About the podcast participantsYolanda Seals-Coffield, Chief People Officer, PwC US As US Chief People Officer, Yolanda Seals-Coffield drives PwC's people solutions and function, promoting and supporting our firm's growth strategy to serve our clients and help our people thrive in and outside of work. As former Chief Employment Counsel, Yolanda worked with teams across every aspect of the employee life cycle — from hiring to performance, diversity and inclusion and alumni. This gives her unique insights into opportunities to help PwC employees learn, develop and grow. J Ofori Agboka, Vice President People Experience and Technology (PXT) - Global Operations at AmazonJ Ofori Agboka is responsible for the worldwide Human Resource (HR) practices for Fulfillment, Transportation, Delivery, Customer Service, Employee Relations (ER), and Workplace Health & Safety. He leads teams that support the employment life cycle of Amazonians globally.His background covers diverse aspects of Human Resources in global and domestic markets spanning automotive and industrial environments. He works hard to utilize his extensive knowledge and expertise and his passion for putting people first, to the fullest potential. He has expertise in strategic human capital planning, employee relations, employment law, employee engagement, performance management, retention and recruiting. His operational background includes in dynamic environments requiring focused decision-making, understanding of how to optimize business processes, developing cost management systems, and enhancing operational efficiency and excellence. His language capabilities include moderate Spanish, and social Mandarin.  

#029 - In this special episode of Better Advertising with Better AMS things are about to get really exciting! Your hosts, Destaney Wishon and Justin Nuckols, will be chatting with the awesome Amazonians who brought us the latest cool tools from Amazon's 2023 unBoxed keynotes. We've got Teresa, Ruslana, Kelly, and Jeff here to spill the beans and give us the inside scoop. We're going to dive deep, ask the burning questions, and get to know all the amazing stuff these experts have been working on. So grab a seat, tune in, and get ready for a fun, friendly conversation filled with fresh insights and fascinating stories from the heart of Amazon's advertising innovations! Key Takeaways: Sponsored TV: Amazon's new offering aims to democratize TV buying and make it accessible to brands of all sizes. Leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): Brands can use AMC to gain insights and measure the success of their advertising campaigns. Customization and Measurement: Brands should use the right mix of advertising tools and strategies to reach their target audience and achieve their business goals. Follow Justin on LinkedIn Follow Destaney on LinkedIn Follow Teresa on LinkedIn Follow Ruslana on LinkedIn Follow Kelly on LinkedIn Follow Jeff on LinkedIn Learn More About BetterAMS

In this special live-recorded episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey interviews himself— well, kind of. Corey hosts an AMA session, answering both live and previously submitted questions from his listeners. Throughout this episode, Corey discusses misconceptions about his public persona, the nature of consulting on AWS bills, why he focuses so heavily on AWS offerings, his favorite breakfast foods, and much, much more. Corey shares insights into how he monetizes his public persona without selling out his genuine opinions on the products he advertises, his favorite and least favorite AWS services, and some tips and tricks to get the most out of re:Invent.About CoreyCorey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group. Corey's unique brand of snark combines with a deep understanding of AWS's offerings, unlocking a level of insight that's both penetrating and hilarious. He lives in San Francisco with his spouse and daughters.Links Referenced: lastweekinaws.com/disclosures: https://lastweekinaws.com/disclosures duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: As businesses consider automation to help build and manage their hybrid cloud infrastructures, deployment speed is important, but so is cost. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is available in the AWS Marketplace to help you meet your cloud spend commitments while delivering best-of-both-worlds support.Corey: Well, all right. Thank you all for coming. Let's begin and see how this whole thing shakes out, which is fun and exciting, and for some godforsaken reason the lights like to turn off, so we're going to see if that continues. I've been doing Screaming in the Cloud for about, give or take, 500 episodes now, which is more than a little bit ridiculous. And I figured it would be a nice change of pace if I could, instead of reaching out and talking to folks who are innovative leaders in the space and whatnot, if I could instead interview my own favorite guest: myself.Because the entire point is, I'm usually the one sitting here asking questions, so I'm instead going to now gather questions from you folks—and feel free to drop some of them into the comments—but I've solicited a bunch of them, I'm going to work through them and see what you folks want to know about me. I generally try to be fairly transparent, but let's have fun with it. To be clear, if this is your first exposure to my Screaming in the Cloud podcast show, it's generally an interview show talking with people involved with the business of cloud. It's not intended to be snarky because not everyone enjoys thinking on their feet quite like that, but rather a conversation of people about what they're passionate about. I'm passionate about the sound of my own voice. That's the theme of this entire episode.So, there are a few that have come through that are in no particular order. I'm going to wind up powering through them, and again, throw some into the comments if you want to have other ones added. If you're listening to this in the usual Screaming in the Cloud place, well, send me questions and I am thrilled to wind up passing out more of them. The first one—a great one to start—comes with someone asked me a question about the video feed. “What's with the Minecraft pickaxe on the wall?” It's made out of foam.One of my favorite stories, and despite having a bunch of stuff on my wall that is interesting and is stuff that I've created, years ago, I wrote a blog post talking about how machine learning is effectively selling digital pickaxes into a gold rush. Because the cloud companies pushing it are all selling things such as, you know, they're taking expensive compute, large amounts of storage, and charging by the hour for it. And in response, Amanda, who runs machine learning analyst relations at AWS, sent me that by way of retaliation. And it remains one of my absolute favorite gifts. It's, where's all this creativity in the machine-learning marketing? No, instead it's, “We built a robot that can think. But what are we going to do with it now? Microsoft Excel.” Come up with some of that creativity, that energy, and put it into the marketing side of the world.Okay, someone else asks—Brooke asks, “What do I think is people's biggest misconception about me?” That's a good one. I think part of it has been my misconception for a long time about what the audience is. When I started doing this, the only people who ever wound up asking me anything or talking to me about anything on social media already knew who I was, so I didn't feel the need to explain who I am and what I do. So, people sometimes only see the witty banter on Twitter and whatnot and think that I'm just here to make fun of things.They don't notice, for example, that my jokes are never calling out individual people, unless they're basically a US senator, and they're not there to make individual humans feel bad about collectively poor corporate decision-making. I would say across the board, people think that I'm trying to be meaner than I am. I'm going to be honest and say it's a little bit insulting, just from the perspective of, if I really had an axe to grind against people who work at Amazon, for example, is this the best I'd be able to do? I'd like to think that I could at least smack a little bit harder. Speaking of, we do have a question that people sent in in advance.“When was the last time that Mike Julian gave me that look?” Easy. It would have been two days ago because we were both in the same room up in Seattle. I made a ridiculous pun, and he just stared at me. I don't remember what the pun is, but I am an incorrigible punster and as a result, Mike has learned that whatever he does when I make a pun, he cannot incorrige me. Buh-dum-tss. That's right. They're no longer puns, they're dad jokes. A pun becomes a dad joke once the punch line becomes a parent. Yes.Okay, the next one is what is my favorite AWS joke? The easy answer is something cynical and ridiculous, but that's just punching down at various service teams; it's not my goal. My personal favorite is the genie joke where a guy rubs a lamp, Genie comes out and says, “You can have a billion dollars if you can spend $100 million in a month, and you're not allowed to waste it or give it away.” And the person says, “Okay”—like, “Those are the rules.” Like, “Okay. Can I use AWS?” And the genie says, “Well, okay, there's one more rule.” I think that's kind of fun.Let's see, another one. A hardball question: given the emphasis on right-sizing for meager cost savings and the amount of engineering work required to make real architectural changes to get costs down, how do you approach cost controls in companies largely running other people's software? There are not as many companies as you might think where dialing in the specifics of a given application across the board is going to result in meaningful savings. Yes, yes, you're running something in hyperscale, it makes an awful lot of sense, but most workloads don't do that. The mistakes you most often see are misconfigurations for not knowing this arcane bit of AWS trivia, as a good example. There are often things you can do with relatively small amounts of effort. Beyond a certain point, things are going to cost what they're going to cost without a massive rearchitecture and I don't advise people do that because no one is going to be happy rearchitecting just for cost reasons. Doesn't go well.Someone asks, “I'm quite critical of AWS, which does build trust with the audience. Has AWS tried to get you to market some of their services, and would I be open to do that?” That's a great question. Yes, sometimes they do. You can tell this because they wind up buying ads in the newsletter or the podcast and they're all disclaimed as a sponsored piece of content.I do have an analyst arrangement with a couple of different cloud companies, as mentioned lastweekinaws.com/disclosures, and the reason behind that is because you can buy my attention to look at your product and talk to you in-depth about it, but you cannot buy my opinion on it. And those engagements are always tied to, let's talk about what the public is seeing about this. Now, sometimes I write about the things that I'm talking about because that's where my mind goes, but it's not about okay, now go and talk about this because we're paying you to, and don't disclose that you have a financial relationship.No, that is called fraud. I figure I can sell you as an audience out exactly once, so I better be able to charge enough money to never have to work again. Like, when you see me suddenly talk about multi-cloud being great and I became a VP at IBM, about three to six months after that, no one will ever hear from me again because I love nesting doll yacht money. It'll be great.Let's see. The next one I have on my prepared list here is, “Tell me about a time I got AWS to create a pie chart.” I wish I'd see less of it. Every once in a while I'll talk to a team and they're like, “Well, we've prepared a PowerPoint deck to show you what we're talking about.” No, Amazon is famously not a PowerPoint company and I don't know why people feel the need to repeatedly prove that point to me because slides are not always the best way to convey complex information.I prefer to read documents and then have a conversation about them as Amazon tends to do. The visual approach and the bullet lists and all the rest are just frustrating. If I'm going to do a pie chart, it's going to be in service of a joke. It's not going to be anything that is the best way to convey information in almost any sense.“How many internal documents do I think reference me by name at AWS,” is another one. And I don't know the answer to documents, but someone sent me a screenshot once of searching for my name in their Slack internal nonsense thing, and it was about 10,000 messages referenced me that it found. I don't know what they were saying. I have to assume, on some level, just something that does a belt feed from my Twitter account where it lists my name or something. But I choose to believe that no, they actually are talking about me to that level of… of extreme.Let's see, let's turn back to the chat for a sec because otherwise it just sounds like I'm doing all prepared stuff. And I'm thrilled to do that, but I'm also thrilled to wind up fielding questions from folks who are playing along on these things. “I love your talk, ‘Heresy in the Church of Docker.' Do I have any more speaking gigs planned?” Well, today's Wednesday, and this Friday, I have a talk that's going out at the CDK Community Day.I also have a couple of things coming up that are internal corporate presentations at various places. But at the moment, no. I suspect I'll be giving a talk if they accept it at SCALE in Pasadena in March of next year, but at the moment, I'm mostly focused on re:Invent, just because that is eight short weeks away and I more or less destroy the second half of my year because… well, holidays are for other people. We're going to talk about clouds, as Amazon and the rest of us dance to the tune that they play.“Look in my crystal ball; what will the industry look like in 5, 10, or 20 years?” Which is a fun one. You shouldn't listen to me on this. At all. I was the person telling you that virtualization was a flash in the pan, that cloud was never going to catch on, that Kubernetes and containers had a bunch of problems that were unlikely to be solved, and I'm actually kind of enthused about serverless which probably means it's going to flop.I am bad at predicting overall trends, but I have no problem admitting that wow, I was completely wrong on that point, which apparently is a rarer skill than it should be. I don't know what the future the industry holds. I know that we're seeing some AI value shaping up. I think that there's going to be a bit of a downturn in that sector once people realize that just calling something AI doesn't mean you make wild VC piles of money anymore. But there will be use cases that filter out of it. I don't know what they're going to look like yet, but I'm excited to see it.Okay, “Have any of the AWS services increased costs in the last year? I was having a hard time finding historical pricing charts for services.” There have been repricing stories. There have been SMS charges in India that have—and pinpointed a few other things—that wound up increasing because of a government tariff on them and that cost was passed on. Next February, they're going to be charging for public IPV4 addresses.But those tend to be the exceptions. The way that most costs tend increase have been either, it becomes far cheaper for AWS to provide a service and they don't cut the cost—data transfer being a good example—they'll also often have stories in that they're going to start launching a bunch of new things, and you'll notice that AWS bills tend to grow in time. Part of that growth, part of that is just cruft because people don't go back and clean things up. But by and large, I have not seen, “This thing that used to cost you $1 is now going to cost you $2.” That's not how AWS does pricing. Thankfully. Everyone's always been scared of something like that happening. I think that when we start seeing actual increases like that, that's when it's time to start taking a long, hard look at the way that the industry is shaping up. I don't think we're there yet.Okay. “Any plans for a Last Week in Azure or a Last Week in GCP?” Good question. If so, I won't be the person writing it. I don't think that it's reasonable to expect someone to keep up with multiple large companies and their releases. I'd also say that Azure and GCP don't release updates to services with the relentless cadence that AWS does.The reason I built the thing to start with is simply because it was difficult to gather all the information in one place, at least the stuff that I cared about with an economic impact, and by the time I'd done that, it was, well, this is 80% of the way toward republishing it for other people. I expected someone was going to point me at a thing so I didn't have to do it, and instead, everyone signed up. I don't see the need for it. I hope that in those spaces, they're better at telling their own story to the point where the only reason someone would care about a newsletter would be just my sarcasm tied into whatever was released. But that's not something that I'm paying as much attention to, just because my customers are on AWS, my stuff is largely built on AWS, it's what I have to care about.Let's see here. “What do I look forward to at re:Invent?” Not being at re:Invent anymore. I'm there for eight nights a year. That is shitty cloud Chanukah come to life for me. I'm there to set things up in advance, I'm there to tear things down at the end, and I'm trying to have way too many meetings in the middle of all of that. I am useless for the rest of the year after re:Invent, so I just basically go home and breathe into a bag forever.I had a revelation last year about re:Play, which is that I don't have to go to it if I don't want to go. And I don't like the cold, the repetitive music, the giant crowds. I want to go read a book in a bathtub and call it a night, and that's what I hope to do. In practice, I'll probably go grab dinner with other people who feel the same way. I also love the Drink Up I do there every year over at Atomic Liquors. I believe this year, we're partnering with the folks over at RedMonk because a lot of the people we want to talk to are in the same groups.It's just a fun event: show up, let us buy you drinks. There's no badge scan or any nonsense like that. We just want to talk to people who care to come out and visit. I love doing that. It's probably my favorite part of re:Invent other than not being at re:Invent. It's going to be on November 29th this year. If you're listening to this, please come on by if you're unfortunate enough to be in Las Vegas.Someone else had a good question I want to talk about here. “I'm a TAM for AWS. Cost optimization is one of our functions. What do you wish we would do better after all the easy button things such as picking the right instance and family, savings plans RIs, turning off or delete orphan resources, watching out for inefficient data transfer patterns, et cetera?” I'm going to back up and say that you're begging the question here, in that you aren't doing the easy things, at least not at scale, not globally.I used to think that all of my customer engagements would be, okay after the easy stuff, what's next? I love those projects, but in so many cases, I show up and those easy things have not been done. “Well, that just means that your customers haven't been asking their TAM.” Every customer I've had has asked their TAM first. “Should we ask the free expert or the one that charges us a large but reasonable fixed fee? Let's try the free thing first.”The quality of that advice is uneven. I wish that there were at least a solid baseline. I would love to get to a point where I can assume that I can go ahead and be able to just say, “Okay, you've clearly got your RI stuff, you're right-sizing, you're deleting stuff you're not using, taken care of. Now, let's look at the serious architecture stuff.” It's just rare that I get to see it.“What tool, feature, or widget do I wish AWS would build into the budget console?” I want to be able to set a dollar figure, maybe it's zero, maybe it's $20, maybe it is irrelevant, but above whatever I set, the account will not charge me above that figure, period. If that means they have to turn things off if that means they had to delete portions of data, great. But I want that assurance because even now when I kick the tires in a new service, I get worried that I'm going to wind up with a surprise bill because I didn't understand some very subtle interplay of the dynamics. And if I'm worried about that, everyone else is going to wind up getting caught by that stuff, too.I want the freedom to experiment and if it smacks into a wall, okay, cool. That's $20. That was worth learning that. Whatever. I want the ability to not be charged unreasonable overages. And I'm not worried about it turning from 20 into 40. I'm worried about it turning from 20 into 300,000. Like, there's the, “Oh, that's going to have a dent on the quarterlies,” style of [numb 00:16:01]—All right. Someone also asked, “What is the one thing that AWS could do that I believe would reduce costs for both AWS and their customers. And no, canceling re:Invent doesn't count.” I don't think about it in that way because believe it or not, most of my customers don't come to me asking to reduce their bill. They think they do at the start, but what they're trying to do is understand it. They're trying to predict it.Yes, they want to turn off the waste in the rest, but by and large, there are very few AWS offerings that you take a look at and realize what you're getting for it and say, “Nah, that's too expensive.” It can be expensive for certain use cases, but the dangerous part is when the costs are unpredictable. Like, “What's it going to cost me to run this big application in my data center?” The answer is usually, “Well, run it for a month, and then we'll know.” But that's an expensive and dangerous way to go about finding things out.I think that customers don't care about reducing costs as much as they think; they care about controlling them, predicting them, and understanding them. So, how would they make things less expensive? I don't know. I suspect that data transfer if they were to reduce that at least cross-AZ or eliminate it ideally, you'd start seeing a lot more compute usage in multiple AZs. I've had multiple clients who are not spinning things up in multi-AZ, specifically because they'll take the reliability trade-off over the extreme cost of all the replication flowing back and forth. Aside from that, they mostly get a lot of the value right in how they price things, which I don't think people have heard me say before, but it is true.Someone asked a question here of, “Any major trends that I'm seeing in EDP/PPA negotiations?” Yeah, lately, in particular. Used to be that you would have a Marketplace as the fallback, where it used to be that 50 cents of every dollar you spent on Marketplace would count. Now, it's a hundred percent up to a quarter of your commit. Great.But when you have a long-term commitment deal with Amazon, now they're starting to push for all—put all your other vendors onto the AWS Marketplace so you can have a bigger commit and thus a bigger discount, which incidentally, the discount does not apply to Marketplace spend. A lot of folks are uncomfortable with having Amazon as the middleman between all of their vendor relationships. And a lot of the vendors aren't super thrilled with having to pay percentages of existing customer relationships to Amazon for what they perceive to be remarkably little value. That's the current one.I'm not seeing generative AI play a significant stake in this yet. People are still experimenting with it. I'm not seeing, “Well, we're spending $100 million a year, but make that 150 because of generative AI.” It's expensive to play with gen-AI stuff, but it's not driving the business spend yet. But that's the big trend that I'm seeing over the past, eh, I would say, few months.“Do I use AWS for personal projects?” The first problem there is, well, what's a personal project versus a work thing? My life is starting to flow in a bunch of weird different ways. The answer is yes. Most of the stuff that I build for funsies is on top of AWS, though there are exceptions. “Should I?” Is the follow-up question and the answer to that is, “It depends.”The person is worrying about cost overruns. So, am I. I tend to not be a big fan of uncontrolled downside risk when something winds up getting exposed. I think that there are going to be a lot of caveats there. I know what I'm doing and I also have the backstop, in my case, of, I figure I can have a big billing screw-up or I have to bend the knee and apologize and beg for a concession from AWS, once.It'll probably be on a billboard or something one of these days. Lord knows I have it coming to me. That's something I can use as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Most people can't make that guarantee, and so I would take—if—depending on the environment that you know and what you want to build, there are a lot of other options: buying a fixed-fee VPS somewhere if that's how you tend to think about things might very well be a cost-effective for you, depending on what you're building. There's no straight answer to this.“Do I think Azure will lose any market share with recent cybersecurity kerfuffles specific to Office 365 and nation-state actors?” No, I don't. And the reason behind that is that a lot of Azure spend is not necessarily Azure usage; it's being rolled into enterprise agreements customers negotiate as part of their on-premises stuff, their operating system licenses, their Office licensing, and the rest. The business world is not going to stop using Excel and Word and PowerPoint and Outlook. They're not going to stop putting Windows on desktop stuff. And largely, customers don't care about security.They say they do, they often believe that they do, but I see where the bills are. I see what people spend on feature development, I see what they spend on core infrastructure, and I see what they spend on security services. And I have conversations about budgeting with what are you doing with a lot of these things? The companies generally don't care about this until right after they really should have cared. And maybe that's a rational effect.I mean, take a look at most breaches. And a year later, their stock price is larger than it was when they dispose the breach. Sure, maybe they're burning through their ablated CISO, but the business itself tends to succeed. I wish that there were bigger consequences for this. I have talked to folks who will not put specific workloads on Azure as a result of this. “Will you talk about that publicly?” “No, because who can afford to upset Microsoft?”I used to have guests from Microsoft on my show regularly. They don't talk to me and haven't for a couple of years. Scott Guthrie, the head of Azure, has been on this show. The problem I have is that once you start criticizing their security posture, they go quiet. They clearly don't like me.But their options are basically to either ice me out or play around with my seven seats for Office licensing, which, okay, whatever. They don't have a stick to hit me with, in the way that they do most companies. And whether that's true or not that they're going to lash out like that, companies don't want to take the risk of calling Microsoft out in public. Too big to be criticized as sort of how that works.Let's see, someone else asks, “How can a startup get the most out of its startup status with AWS?” You're not going to get what you think you want from AWS in this context. “Oh, we're going to be a featured partner so they market us.” I've yet to hear a story about how being featured by AWS for something has dramatically changed the fortunes of a startup. Usually, they'll do that when there's either a big social mission and you never hear about the company again, or they're a darling of the industry that's taking the world by fire and they're already [at 00:22:24] upward swing and AWS wants to hang out with those successful people in public and be seen to do so.The actual way that startup stuff is going to manifest itself well for you from AWS is largely in the form of credits as you go through Activate or one of their other programs. But be careful. Treat them like actual money, not this free thing you don't have to worry about. One day they expire or run out and suddenly you're going from having no dollars going to AWS to ten grand a month and people aren't prepared for that. It's, “Wait. So you mean this costs money? Oh, my God.”You have to approach it with a sense of discipline. But yeah, once you—if you can do that, yeah, free money and a free cloud bill for a few years? That's not nothing. I also would question the idea of being able to ask a giant company that's worth a trillion-and-a-half dollars and advice for how to be a startup. I find that one's always a little on the humorous side myself.“What do I think is the most underrated service or feature release from 2023? Full disclosures, this means I'll make some content about it,” says Brooke over at AWS. Oh, that's a good question. I'm trying to remember when various things have come out and it all tends to run together. I think that people are criticizing AWS for charging for IPV4 an awful lot, and I think that that is a terrific change, just because I've seen how wasteful companies are with public IP addresses, which are basically an exhausted or rapidly exhausting resource.And they just—you spend tens or hundreds of thousands of these things and don't use reason to think about that. It'll be one of the best things that we've seen for IPV6 adoption once AWS figures out how to make that work. And I would say that there's a lot to be said for since, you know, IPV4 is exhausted already, now we're talking about can we get them on the secondary markets, you need a reasonable IP plan to get some of those. And… “Well, we just give them the customers and they throw them away.” I want AWS to continue to be able to get those for the stuff that the rest of us are working on, not because one big company uses a million of them, just because, “Oh, what do you mean private IP addresses? What might those be?” That's part of it.I would say that there's also been… thinking back on this, it's unsung, the compute optimizer is doing a lot better at recommending things than it used to be. It was originally just giving crap advice, and over time, it started giving advice that's actually solid and backs up what I've seen. It's not perfect, and I keep forgetting it's there because, for some godforsaken reason, it's its own standalone service, rather than living in the billing console where it belongs. But no one's excited about a service like that to the point where they talk about or create content about it, but it's good, and it's getting better all the time. That's probably a good one. They recently announced the ability for it to do GPU instances which, okay great, for people who care about that, awesome, but it's not exciting. Even I don't think I paid much attention to it in the newsletter.Okay, “Does it make economic sense to bring your own IP addresses to AWS instead of paying their fees?” Bring your own IP, if you bring your own allocation to AWS, costs you nothing in terms of AWS costs. You take a look at the market rate per IP address versus what AWS costs, you'll hit break even within your first year if you do it. So yeah, it makes perfect economic sense to do it if you have the allocation and if you have the resourcing, as well as the ability to throw people at the problem to do the migration. It can be a little hairy if you're not careful. But the economics, the benefit is clear on that once you account for those variables.Let's see here. We've also got tagging. “Everyone nods their heads that they know it's the key to controlling things, but how effective are people at actually tagging, especially when new to cloud?” They're terrible at it. They're never going to tag things appropriately. Automation is the way to do it because otherwise, you're going to spend the rest of your life chasing developers and asking them to tag things appropriately, and then they won't, and then they'll feel bad about it. No one enjoys that conversation.So, having derived tags and the rest, or failing that, having some deployment gate as early in the process as possible of, “Oh, what's the tag for this?” Is the only way you're going to start to see coverage on this. And ideally, someday you'll go back and tag a bunch of pre-existing stuff. But it's honestly the thing that everyone hates the most on this. I have never seen a company that says, “We are thrilled with our with our tag coverage. We're nailing it.” The only time you see that is pure greenfield, everything done without ClickOps, and those environments are vanishingly rare.“Outside a telecom are customers using local zones more, or at all?” Very, very limited as far as what their usage looks like on that. Because that's… it doesn't buy you as much as you'd think for most workloads. The real benefit is a little more expensive, but it's also in specific cities where there are not AWS regions, and at least in the United States where the majority of my clients are, there is not meaningful latency differences, for example, from in Los Angeles versus up to Oregon, since no one should be using the Northern California region because it's really expensive. It's a 20-millisecond round trip, which in most cases, for most workloads, is fine.Gaming companies are big exception to this. Getting anything they can as close to the customer as possible is their entire goal, which very often means they don't even go with some of the cloud providers in some places. That's one of those actual multi-cloud workloads that you want to be able to run anywhere that you can get a baseline computer up to run a container or a golden image or something. That is the usual case. The rest are, for local zones, is largely going to be driven by specific one-off weird things. Good question.Let's see, “Is S3 intelligent tiering good enough or is it worth trying to do it yourself?” Your default choice for almost everything should be intelligent tiering in 2023. It winds up costing you more only in very specific circumstances that are unlikely to be anything other than a corner case for what you're doing. And the exceptions to this are, large workloads that are running a lot of S3 stuff where the lifecycle is very well understood, environments where you're not going to be storing your data for more than 30 days in any case and you can do a lifecycle policy around it. Other than those use cases, yeah, the monitoring fee is not significant in any environment I've ever seen.And people view—touch their data a lot less than they believe. So okay, there's a monitoring fee for object, yes, but it also cuts your raw storage cost in half for things that aren't frequently touched. So, you know, think about it. Run your own numbers and also be aware that first month as it transitions in, you're going to see massive transition charges per object, but wants it's an intelligent tiering, there's no further transition charges, which is nice.Let's see here. “We're all-in on serverless”—oh good, someone drank the Kool-Aid, too—“And for our use cases, it works great. Do I find other customers moving to it and succeeding?” Yeah, I do when they're moving to it because for certain workloads, it makes an awful lot of sense. For others, it requires a complete reimagining of whatever it is that you're doing.The early successes were just doing these periodic jobs. Now, we're seeing full applications built on top of event-driven architectures, which is really neat to see. But trying to retrofit something that was never built with that in mind can be more trouble than it's worth. And there are corner cases where building something on serverless would cost significantly more than building it in a server-ful way. But its time has come for an awful lot of stuff. Now, what I don't subscribe to is this belief that oh, if you're not building something serverless you're doing it totally wrong. No, that is not true. That has never been true.Let's see what else have we got here? Oh, “Following up on local zones, how about Outposts? Do I see much adoption? What's the primary use case or cases?” My customers inherently are coming to me because of a large AWS bill. If they're running Outposts, it is extremely unlikely that they are putting significant portions of their spend through the Outpost. It tends to be something of a rounding error, which means I don't spend a lot of time focusing on it.They obviously have some existing data center workloads and data center facilities where they're going to take an AWS-provided rack and slap it in there, but it's not going to be in the top 10 or even top 20 list of service spend in almost every case as a result, so it doesn't come up. One of the big secrets of how we approach things is we start with a big number first and then work our way down instead of going alphabetically. So yes, I've seen customers using them and the customers I've talked to at re:Invent who are using them are very happy with them for the use cases, but it's not a common approach. I'm not a huge fan of the rest.“Someone said the Basecamp saved a million-and-a-half a year by leaving AWS. I know you say repatriation isn't a thing people are doing, but has my view changed at all since you've published that blog post?” No, because everyone's asking me about Basecamp and it's repatriation, and that's the only use case that they've got for this. Let's further point out that a million-and-a-half a year is not as many engineers as you might think it is when you wind up tying that all together. And now those engineers are spending time running that environment.Does it make sense for them? Probably. I don't know their specific context. I know that a million-and-a-half dollars a year to—even if they had to spend that for the marketing coverage that they're getting as a result of this, makes perfect sense. But cloud has never been about raw cost savings. It's about feature velocity.If you have a data center and you move it to the cloud, you're not going to recoup that investment for at least five years. Migrations are inherently expensive. It does not create the benefits that people often believe that they do. That becomes a painful problem for folks. I would say that there's a lot more noise than there are real-world stories [hanging 00:31:57] out about these things.Now, I do occasionally see a specific workload that is moved back to a data center for a variety of reasons—occasionally cost but not always—and I see proof-of-concept projects that they don't pursue and then turn off. Some people like to call that a repatriation. No, I call it as, “We tried and it didn't do what we wanted it to do so we didn't proceed.” Like, if you try that with any other project, no one says, “Oh, you're migrating off of it.” No, you're not. You tested it, it didn't do what it needed to do. I do see net-new workloads going into data centers, but that's not the same thing.Let's see. “Are the talks at re:Invent worth it anymore? I went to a lot of the early re:Invents and haven't and about five years. I found back then that even the level 400 talks left a lot to be desired.” Okay. I'm not a fan of attending conference talks most of the time, just because there's so many things I need to do at all of these events that I would rather spend the time building relationships and having conversations.The talks are going to be on YouTube a week later, so I would rather get to know the people building the service so I can ask them how to inappropriately use it as a database six months later than asking questions about the talk. Conference-ware is often the thing. Re:Invent always tends to have an AWS employee on stage as well. And I'm not saying that makes these talks less authentic, but they're also not going to get through slide review of, “Well, we tried to build this onto this AWS service and it was a terrible experience. Let's tell you about that as a war story.” Yeah, they're going to shoot that down instantly even though failure stories are so compelling, about here's what didn't work for us and how we got there. It's the lessons learned type of thing.Whenever you have as much control as re:Invent exhibits over its speakers, you know that a lot of those anecdotes are going to be significantly watered down. This is not to impugn any of the speakers themselves; this is the corporate mind continuing to grow to a point where risk mitigation and downside protection becomes the primary driving goal.Let's pull up another one from the prepared list here. “My most annoying, overpriced, or unnecessary charge service in AWS.” AWS Config. It's a tax on using the cloud as the cloud. When you have a high config bill, it's because it charges you every time you change the configuration of something you have out there. It means you're spinning up and spinning down EC2 instances, whereas you're going to have a super low config bill if you, you know, treat it like a big dumb data center.It's a tax on accepting the promises under which cloud has been sold. And it's necessary for a number of other things like Security Hub. Control Towers magic-deploys it everywhere and makes it annoying to turn off. And I think that that is a pure rent-seeking charge because people aren't incurring config charges if they're not already using a lot of AWS things. Not every service needs to make money in a vacuum. It's, “Well, we don't charge anything for this because our users are going to spend an awful lot of money on storing things in S3 to use our service.” Great. That's a good thing. You don't have to pile charge upon charge upon charge upon charge. It drives me a little bit nuts.Let's see what else we have here as far as questions go. “Which AWS service delights me the most?” Eesh, depends on the week. S3 has always been a great service just because it winds up turning big storage that usually—used to require a lot of maintenance and care into something I don't think about very much. It's getting smarter and smarter all the time. The biggest lie is the ‘Simple' in its name: ‘Simple Storage Service.' At this point, if that's simple, I really don't want to know what you think complex would look like.“By following me on Twitter, someone gets a lot of value from things I mention offhandedly as things everybody just knows. For example, which services are quasi-deprecated or outdated, or what common practices are anti-patterns? Is there a way to learn this kind of thing all in one go, as in a website or a book that reduces AWS to these are the handful of services everybody actually uses, and these are the most commonly sensible ways to do it?” I wish. The problem is that a lot of the stuff that everyone knows, no, it's stuff that at most, maybe half of the people who are engaging with it knew.They find out by hearing from other people the way that you do or by trying something and failing and realizing, ohh, this doesn't work the way that I want it to. It's one of the more insidious forms of cloud lock-in. You know how a service works, how a service breaks, what the constraints are around when it starts and it stops. And that becomes something that's a hell of a lot scarier when you have to realize, I'm going to pick a new provider instead and relearn all of those things. The reason I build things on AWS these days is honestly because I know the ways it sucks. I know the painful sharp edges. I don't have to guess where they might be hiding. I'm not saying that these sharp edges aren't painful, but when you know they're there in advance, you can do an awful lot to guard against that.“Do I believe the big two—AWS and Azure—cloud providers have agreed between themselves not to launch any price wars as they already have an effective monopoly between them and [no one 00:36:46] win in a price war?” I don't know if there's ever necessarily an explicit agreement on that, but business people aren't foolish. Okay, if we're going to cut our cost of service, instantly, to undercut a competitor, every serious competitor is going to do the same thing. The only reason to do that is if you believe your margins are so wildly superior to your competitors that you can drive them under by doing that or if you have the ability to subsidize your losses longer than they can remain a going concern. Microsoft and Amazon are—and Google—are not in a position where, all right, we're going to drive them under.They can both subsidize losses basically forever on a lot of these things and they realize it's a game you don't win in, I suspect. The real pricing pressure on that stuff seems to come from customers, when all right, I know it's big and expensive upfront to buy a SAN, but when that starts costing me less than S3 on a per-petabyte basis, that's when you start to see a lot of pricing changing in the market. The one thing I haven't seen that take effect on is data transfer. You could be forgiven for believing that data transfer still cost as much as it did in the 1990s. It does not.“Is AWS as far behind in AI as they appear?” I think a lot of folks are in the big company space. And they're all stammering going, “We've been doing this for 20 years.” Great, then why are all of your generative AI services, A, bad? B, why is Alexa so terrible? C, why is it so clear that everything you have pre-announced and not brought to market was very clearly not envisioned as a product to be going to market this year until 300 days ago, when Chat-Gippity burst onto the scene and OpenAI [stole a march 00:38:25] on everyone?Companies are sprinting to position themselves as leaders in the AI space, despite the fact that they've gotten lapped by basically a small startup that's seven years old. Everyone is trying to work the word AI into things, but it always feels contrived to me. Frankly, it tells me that I need to just start tuning the space out for a year until things settle down and people stop describing metric math or anomaly detection is AI. Stop it. So yeah, I'd say if anything, they're worse than they appear as far as from behind goes.“I mostly focus on AWS. Will I ever cover Azure?” There are certain things that would cause me to do that, but that's because I don't want to be the last Perl consultancy is the entire world has moved off to Python. And effectively, my focus on AWS is because that's where the painful problems I know how to fix live. But that's not a suicide pact. I'm not going to ride that down in flames.But I can retool for a different cloud provider—if that's what the industry starts doing—far faster than AWS can go from its current market-leading status to irrelevance. There are certain triggers that would cause me to do that, but at the time, I don't see them in the near term and I don't have any plans to begin covering other things. As mentioned, people want me to talk about the things I'm good at not the thing that makes me completely nonsensical.“Which AWS services look like a good idea, but pricing-wise, they're going to kill you once you have any scale, especially the ones that look okay pricing-wise but aren't really and it's hard to know going in?” CloudTrail data events, S3 Bucket Access logging any of the logging services really, Managed NAT Gateways in a bunch of cases. There's a lot that starts to get really expensive once you hit certain points of scale with a corollary that everyone thinks that everything they're building is going to scale globally and that's not true. I don't build things as a general rule with the idea that I'm going to get ten million users on it tomorrow because by the time I get from nothing to substantial workloads, I'm going to have multiple refactors of what I've done. I want to get things out the door as fast as possible and if that means that later in time, oh, I accidentally built Pinterest. What am I going to do? Well, okay, yeah, I'm going to need to rebuild a whole bunch of stuff, but I'll have the user traffic and mindshare and market share to finance that growth.Early optimization on stuff like this causes a lot more problems than it solves. “Best practices and anti-patterns in managing AWS costs. For context, you once told me about a role that I had taken that you'd seen lots of companies tried to create that role and then said that the person rarely lasts more than a few months because it just isn't effective. You were right, by the way.” Imagine that I sometimes know what I'm talking about.When it comes to managing costs, understand what your goal is here, what you're actually trying to achieve. Understand it's going to be a cross-functional work between people in finance and people that engineering. It is first and foremost, an engineering problem—you learn that at your peril—and making someone be the human gateway to spin things up means that they're going to quit, basically, instantly. Stop trying to shame different teams without understanding their constraints.Savings Plans are a great example. They apply biggest discount first, which is what you want. Less money going out the door to Amazon, but that makes it look like anything with a low discount percentage, like any workload running on top of Microsoft Windows, is not being responsible because they're always on demand. And you're inappropriately shaming a team for something completely out of their control. There's a point where optimization no longer makes sense. Don't apply it to greenfield projects or skunkworks. Things you want to see if the thing is going to work first. You can optimize it later. Starting out with a, ‘step one: spend as little as possible' is generally not a recipe for success.What else have we got here? I've seen some things fly by in the chat that are probably worth mentioning here. Some of it is just random nonsense, but other things are, I'm sure, tied to various questions here. “With geopolitics shaping up to govern tech data differently in each country, does it make sense to even build a globally distributed B2B SaaS?” Okay, I'm going to tackle this one in a way that people will probably view as a bit of an attack, but it's something I see asked a lot by folks trying to come up with business ideas.At the outset, I'm a big believer in, if you're building something, solve it for a problem and a use case that you intrinsically understand. That is going to mean the customers with whom you speak. Very often, the way business is done in different countries and different cultures means that in some cases, this thing that's a terrific idea in one country is not going to see market adoption somewhere else. There's a better approach to build for the market you have and the one you're addressing rather than aspirational builds. I would also say that it potentially makes sense if there are certain things you know are going to happen, like okay, we validated our marketing and yeah, it turns out that we're building an image resizing site. Great. People in Germany and in the US all both need to resize images.But you know, going in that there's going to be a data residency requirement, so architecting, from day one with an idea that you can have a partition that winds up storing its data separately is always going to be to your benefit. I find aligning whatever you're building with the idea of not being creepy is often a great plan. And there's always the bring your own storage approach to, great, as a customer, you can decide where your data gets stored in your account—charge more for that, sure—but then that na—it becomes their problem. Anything that gets you out of the regulatory critical path is usually a good idea. But with all the problems I would have building a business, that is so far down the list for almost any use case I could ever see pursuing that it's just one of those, you have a half-hour conversation with someone who's been down the path before if you think it might apply to what you're doing, but then get back to the hard stuff. Like, worry on the first two or three steps rather than step 90 just because you'll get there eventually. You don't want to make your future life harder, but you also don't want to spend all your time optimizing early, before you've validated you're actually building something useful.“What unique feature of AWS do I most want to see on other cloud providers and vice versa?” The vice versa is easy. I love that Google Cloud by default has the everything in this project—which is their account equivalent—can talk to everything else, which means that humans aren't just allowing permissions to the universe because it's hard. And I also like that billing is tied to an individual project. ‘Terminate all billable resources in this project' is a button-click away and that's great.Now, what do I wish other cloud providers would take from AWS? Quite honestly, the customer obsession. It's still real. I know it sounds like it's a funny talking point or the people who talk about this the most under the cultists, but they care about customer problems. Back when no one had ever heard of me before and my AWS Bill was seven bucks, whenever I had a problem with a service and I talked about this in passing to folks, Amazonians showed up out of nowhere to help make sure that my problem got answered, that I was taken care of, that I understood what I was misunderstanding, or in some cases, the feedback went to the product team.I see too many companies across the board convinced that they themselves know best about what customers need. That occasionally can be true, but not consistently. When customers are screaming for something, give them what they need, or frankly, get out of the way so someone else can. I mean, I know someone's expecting me to name a service or something, but we've gotten past the point, to my mind, of trying to do an apples-to-oranges comparison in terms of different service offerings. If you want to build a website using any reasonable technology, there's a whole bunch of companies now that have the entire stack for you. Pick one. Have fun.We've got time for a few more here. Also, feel free to drop more questions in. I'm thrilled to wind up answering any of these things. Have I seen any—here's one that about Babelfish, for example, from Justin [Broadly 00:46:07]. “Have I seen anyone using Babelfish in the wild? It seems like it was a great idea that didn't really work or had major trade-offs.”It's a free open-source project that translates from one kind of database SQL to a different kind of database SQL. There have been a whole bunch of attempts at this over the years, and in practice, none of them have really panned out. I have seen no indications that Babelfish is different. If someone at AWS works on this or is a customer using Babelfish and say, “Wait, that's not true,” please tell me because all I'm saying is I have not seen it and I don't expect that I will. But I'm always willing to be wrong. Please, if I say something at some point that someone disagrees with, please reach out to me. I don't intend to perpetuate misinformation.“Purely hypothetically”—yeah, it's always great to ask things hypothetically—“In the companies I work with, which group typically manages purchasing savings plans, the ops team, finance, some mix of both?” It depends. The sad answer is, “What's a savings plan,” asks the company, and then we have an educational path to go down. Often it is individual teams buying them ad hoc, which can work, cannot as long as everyone's on the same page. Central planning, in a bunch of—a company that's past a certain point in sophistication is where everything winds up leading to.And that is usually going to be a series of discussions, ideally run by that group in a cross-functional way. They can be cost engineering, they can be optimization engineering, I've heard it described in a bunch of different ways. But that is—increasingly as the sophistication of your business and the magnitude of your spend increases, the sophistication of how you approach this should change as well. Early on, it's the offense of some VP of engineering at a startup. Like, “Oh, that's a lot of money,” running the analyzer and clicking the button to buy what it says. That's not a bad first-pass attempt. And then I think getting smaller and smaller buys as you continue to proceed means you can start to—it no longer becomes the big giant annual decision and instead becomes part of a frequently used process. That works pretty well, too.Is there anything else that I want to make sure I get to before we wind up running this down? To the folks in the comments, this is your last chance to throw random, awkward questions my way. I'm thrilled to wind up taking any slings, arrows, et cetera, that you care to throw my way a going once, going twice style. Okay, “What is the most esoteric or shocking item on the AWS bill that you ever found with one of your customers?” All right, it's been long enough, and I can say it without naming the customer, so that'll be fun.My personal favorite was a high five-figure bill for Route 53. I joke about using Route 53 as a database. It can be, but there are better options. I would say that there are a whole bunch of use cases for Route 53 and it's a great service, but when it's that much money, it occasions comment. It turned out that—we discovered, in fact, a data exfiltration in progress which made it now a rather clever security incident.And, “This call will now be ending for the day and we're going to go fix that. Thanks.” It's like I want a customer testimonial on that one, but for obvious reasons, we didn't get one. But that was probably the most shocking thing. The depressing thing that I see the most—and this is the core of the cost problem—is not when the numbers are high. It's when I ask about a line item that drives significant spend, and the customer is surprised.I don't like it when customers don't know what they're spending money on. If your service surprises customers when they realize what it costs, you have failed. Because a lot of things are expensive and customers know that and they're willing to take the value in return for the cost. That's fine. But tricking customers does not serve anyone well, even your own long-term interests. I promise.“Have I ever had to reject a potential client because they had a tangled mess that was impossible to tackle, or is there always a way?” It's never the technology that will cause us not to pursue working with a given company. What will is, like, if you go to our website at duckbillgroup.com, you're not going to see a ‘Buy Here' button where you ‘add one consulting, please' to your shopping cart and call it a day.It's a series of conversations. And what we will try to make sure is, what is your goal? Who's aligned with it? What are the problems you're having in getting there? And what does success look like? Who else is involved in this? And it often becomes clear that people don't like the current situation, but there's no outcome with which they would be satisfied.Or they want something that we do not do. For example, “We want you to come in and implement all of your findings.” We are advisory. We do not know the specifics of your environment and—or your deployment processes or the rest. We're not an engineering shop. We charge a fixed fee and part of the way we can do that is by controlling the scope of what we do. “Well, you know, we have some AWS bills, but we really want to—we really care about is our GCP bill or our Datadog bill.” Great. We don't focus on either of those things. I mean, I can just come in and sound competent, but that's not what adding value as a consultant is about. It's about being authoritatively correct. Great question, though.“How often do I receive GovCloud cost optimization requests? Does the compliance and regulation that these customers typically have keep them from making the needed changes?” It doesn't happen often and part of the big reason behind that is that when we're—and if you're in GovCloud, it's probably because you are a significant governmental entity. There's not a lot of private sector in GovCloud for almost every workload there. Yes, there are exceptions; we don't tend to do a whole lot with them.And the government procurement process is a beast. We can sell and service three to five commercial engagements in the time it takes to negotiate a single GovCloud agreement with a customer, so it just isn't something that we focused. We don't have the scale to wind up tackling that down. Let's also be clear that, in many cases, governments don't view money the same way as enterprise, which in part is a good thing, but it also means that, “This cloud thing is too expensive,” is never the stated problem. Good question.“Waffles or pancakes?” Is another one. I… tend to go with eggs, personally. It just feels like empty filler in the morning. I mean, you could put syrup on anything if you're bold enough, so if it's just a syrup delivery vehicle, there are other paths to go.And I believe we might have exhausted the question pool. So, I want to thank you all for taking the time to talk with me. Once again, I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. And this is a very special live episode of Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review wherever you can—or a thumbs up, or whatever it is, like and subscribe obviously—whereas if you've hated this podcast, same thing: five-star review, but also go ahead and leave an insulting comment, usually around something I've said about a service that you deeply care about because it's tied to your paycheck.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

A book on utopias and gender roles, India looks to beat climate-induced heat in cities, and how ancient Amazonians improved the soil First up on this week's show: the latest in our series of books on sex, gender, and science. Books host Angela Saini discusses Everyday Utopia: In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home with ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee, professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. See this year's whole series here.   Also this week, as part of a special issue on climate change and health, host Sarah Crespi speaks with Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, a freelance journalist based in Mumbai, India. They talk about how India is looking to avoid overheating cities in the coming decades, as climate change and urbanization collide.   Finally, we hear about how ancient Amazonians created fertile “dark earth” on purpose. Sarah is joined by Morgan Schmidt, an archaeologist and geographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. They discuss recent research published in Science Advances on the mysterious rich soil that coincides with ancient ruins, which may still be produced by modern Indigenous people in Brazil.   This week's episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi, Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Angela Saini    Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0606See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A book on utopias and gender roles, India looks to beat climate-induced heat in cities, and how ancient Amazonians improved the soil First up on this week's show: the latest in our series of books on sex, gender, and science. Books host Angela Saini discusses Everyday Utopia: In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home with ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee, professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. See this year's whole series here.   Also this week, as part of a special issue on climate change and health, host Sarah Crespi speaks with Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, a freelance journalist based in Mumbai, India. They talk about how India is looking to avoid overheating cities in the coming decades, as climate change and urbanization collide.   Finally, we hear about how ancient Amazonians created fertile “dark earth” on purpose. Sarah is joined by Morgan Schmidt, an archaeologist and geographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. They discuss recent research published in Science Advances on the mysterious rich soil that coincides with ancient ruins, which may still be produced by modern Indigenous people in Brazil.   This week's episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi, Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Angela Saini    Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0606

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Bana Kawar from AWS join us. Bana, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Bana Kawar: Thank you very much, Shawnna. Hello, everyone who’s listening to this podcast, and a shout out to all enablement professionals all over the world. My name is Bana, and oftentimes people think of a banana without an A to remember my name here in the UK. I look after the UK public sector enablement here at Amazon Web Services. I have been with the company for seven and a half years now in different functions and different countries. I currently spearhead the enablement function here in the public sector and help the organization grow to what it is today and reach our organizational outcomes. Apart from work, I have a huge passion for ID&E. I try to call it IDEA where possible, where A stands for action. It’s inclusion, diversity, equity, and action. I’ve co-founded the EMEA chapter, along with two other Amazonians to reach where we are today. I love to mentor and empower different leaders on different topics. I’m a career coach as well. That’s a bit about me, Shawnna. I look forward to our discussion today. SS: Absolutely. Likewise. I look forward to digging into that with you as well. Now to get started, for our audience and sales enablement, which I’m sure they can all relate to, you are extremely passionate about driving excellence in sales performance. I’d love to start there. From your perspective, how does enablement strategically influence sales performance? BK: A lot of organizations, including ours, are focused on growth. I truly believe as an enablement function, we have key responsibility, and also a pleasure to be part of that journey as well. If I look at my current role for the UK, we’re trying to hit 1 billion business this year, and enablement is helping to drive insights that would help sellers in different orgs and different roles from ISRs, account managers, business developers, partner teams, etc, to drive those valuable conversations with their customers and help them on their key missions. I really think when enablement is aligned to the business and also aligned to revenue ops or business ops, depending on how organizations define it, you can influence strategically as well. The last piece that comes to mind is how enablement can play a role in reducing time to market. When you’re enabling teams to be more adaptive versus reactive, you are already helping in reducing that time to launch and ramp up faster. Finally, the downstream impact of this is having more time and more focused resources to drive high-velocity decisions and build better products from there. In a nutshell, that’s three different ways, how I see enablement playing a role in the business strategy. SS: I couldn’t agree more. One of your areas of expertise is really around building everboarding programs that continue to align with those organizational goals. I’d love to hear more about your everboarding programs. What are some of your best practices for building everboarding programs that drive sales performance? In other words, what does good everboarding look like? BK: I really believe in the power of everboarding because it also shows that you’re a learn it all organization versus a know it all organization. I truly believe in any function, learning does not stop when you hit that 90-day mark that oftentimes is the industry standard for onboarding. That continuous learning journey is ongoing in so many different ways and functions. To build a good everboarding program I think you could look at it and dissect it into different ways. The first one is the discovery piece. Truly understanding what are some of the problem statements that you’re solving for. In today’s world, we have a tsunami of information, and people are overwhelmed with how much they should get up to speed on. An everboarding program should sometimes also be a refresher. We have recharge programs here and I really think some of those key skills that a lot of people learn in their early selling journey are needed very much in everboarding programs. Examples that come to mind include prospecting, objection handling, mission understanding, and negotiation skills. Those are key to any seller in any role, and sometimes those refreshers can be absolutely valuable to drive those customer conversations and reduce time to ramp. The second piece that comes to mind is making sure you’re always up to date with what’s happening in the market. That brings me to the second point product knowledge and market understanding. A lot of SaaS companies have so many solutions and products that they’re trying to bring to market and one way to really do that is certifying reps and making sure that they’re actually going through the knowledge check and getting certified on a specific use case. I’m a firm believer in having certifications on any new product releases and also on new market trend understanding because that also shows your customer that you are meeting them where they need you to be as well. Last but not least, an everboarding program, or as a matter of fact, any enablement program, should align with business objectives. That includes successful OKRs to measure their success and iterate from there. If I zoom out, those are the three key things I would look at from an everboarding perspective and build from there. SS: Yeah, absolutely. Bana, what would you say the importance is of having everboarding programs rather than just onboarding programs? BK: One of the things that are important in any organization is staying agile and moving to a learning journey continuously. As I mentioned before, the learn it versus know it all, because of the pace and the agility that the market is moving towards. I think having everboarding programs is not nice to have, it is an absolute must-have, in my humble opinion, to be successful and have your position in the market lead and truly help to solve one customer problem at a time. A beautiful way to do that is to help grow the business and grow your own knowledge as well, whether you’re a seller, a partner, or even someone in enablement because I believe that you should enable the enablement org as well. You do that through creating everboarding programs to maintain that high performance, and retention, and also hit your OKRs at the end of the day. SS: Absolutely. Everboarding is increasingly important, especially as you try to make sure that you’re maximizing the productivity of your in-sync sales team. Now your everboarding programs have reached upwards of 400 employees globally. What tips do you have maybe for our audience who are also trying to create enablement programs on a global scale? BK: I really believe that scale happens a bit easier than what we expect when we’re solving the right problem. What I’ve noticed at Amazon, as an example, is that the problem statement is often shared across different functions and across different geographies versus only the actual customers that you’re looking after. That brings me to the first part of problem-solving, which is ensuring that the discovery phase is done really well. What I mean by that is what problem to solve first, and from there, you move into the solution. Enablement could and should, in my opinion, spend a bit of time on the discovery phase understanding first, is that problem statement shared across? Is that a global or regional problem only? You do that by asking the same set of questions as an example across the board to understand who’s the customer at this point. What are some of the key missions that they’re solving for? Who are the customer profiles that they look at at the moment? What is their impact on the industry? What vertical do they sit in? What are some of the KPIs that they’re assessed against? More often than not, sellers have similar metrics, but different numbers that they need to hit. That’s one way how to approach it when you’re trying to scale as well before you move into build mode. The second part that brings me to the ID&E is any perspective because I’m a huge believer in getting different perspectives and getting content reviews and content even being created by different people across the company and having that cross-functional and cross-pollination happening to build the best products you have so they get that impact that they need. The third piece, if I’m thinking of the power of scaling, is what happens afterward. How do you make sure that you tie in your input with your output through what we call a mechanism? That’s when you build through iterations and have a phased approach and a very clear feedback process built in and weaved done and you hold yourself and your stakeholders accountable to make sure that whatever you’re building is insisting on the highest standards and also really impacting the end customer and helping them move faster towards their mission. If you put those 3 things together, that’s when a beautiful Venn diagram is shaped and you see the impact of what we think of as the power of scaling. SS: I think that is amazing. You have done a phenomenal job building these programs at scale. Now, as you mentioned in your introduction, you are also a co-founder of the EMEA inclusion, diversity, and equity chapter. I think you also had action at the end of that at AWS. How do you incorporate ID&E best practices into your enablement programs, and what would you say is the impact of doing so? BK: I love that question, Shawnna. Thank you for addressing it, especially in today’s world where ID&E is really helping a lot of customers understand what is important and how to create that diverse product line, and best programs, and build better. To achieve this, in my opinion, the first thing you could also look at is how you could address some of the biases we all have. Everyone has biases, including myself, and those are just the mental shortcuts you have in your programs and the content you produce. The first thing that I try to address when I have a new program is to build an advisory board and have different people with different experiences and backgrounds to help build this up. You can cover it from different angles. If we focus on and double click on the enablement programs, you could also have people from different functions that you look after, like sales ops or biz ops, who should be part of that. The other pieces, having different and equal representation from your customers, for example, different geographies that you cover, different countries, different verticals, different personas, et cetera, bring that experience that you actually need to build that best product. If anyone wants a practitioner tip, one of the things that really helped me uncover some of those biases and understand them better is the Harvard Project Implicit Test to uncover some of those biases and address them. The second piece you could do is also have diverse speakers when you build those programs. Building the content and having the content reviews and the advisory board is one thing and then you move into the build phase. That’s where diverse speakers can help refine their program, and bring that message to different folks. That can already embed representation within having different levels of seniority and creating opportunities for underrepresented groups throughout the process versus just calling it global and having speakers from one country, as an example. The last topic, which is a dear topic to my heart and something that I’m trying now to learn more about is neurodivergence. A lot of products that we create sometimes have technical jargon and not the simplest visual aids that people should understand. We can take a step back and think from different perspectives and throughout that advisory board that you build, you can understand the different needs. For example, how do you build for people with visual impairment? How do you build for people with dyslexia? Understanding your neurodivergent customers in different sectors can be overwhelming at the beginning, but it is an absolute must to have that inclusive and best product. Those are the three key ingredients that come into play for enablement. The key ingredient from all of that is woven in through communication. When you have communication flowing, bottom-up, top-down, and sideways, you make sure that you’re also using that inclusive language and embodying inclusion throughout to make adjustments where you need and stay humble. As I mentioned at the beginning, the A part comes into play. It’s not enough to say we care about ID&E, but not embed ID&E throughout the content and the programs that we build. Every seller deserves an equal chance to have the best impact they could have on their customer, and it starts with the enablement team to do that. That’s my two cents on ID&E and enablement, Shawnna. SS: I love that. The last question for you, recently I saw a post from you on LinkedIn about how generative AI is really transforming businesses, including some of the ways that it influences the ID&E space. How do you think I will influence how you create and deliver enablement programs in the next year and maybe even beyond? BK: I really believe that in today’s world, we have far more accessibility on the topic of AI than ever before, thanks to generative AI. AI has been around for a while now, and whether we thought about it or not, it has shaped how we learn in different ways. Whether we think of it in person-wise self-learning and customized versions of learning, into chatbots, which is quite prominent in today’s world, having virtual assistance, simulated learning has been around for quite some time in today’s world. What I believe is important is how we’re using it and the ethical framework around it because it’s here to stay. I really think those tools can help us if used right, and if it’s a stress test and the accuracy is measured that it can help us be more productive. It also can help us reduce our time to impact our time to market. When we have that embedded in our processes, for example in our text summarizing that we could leverage, for example, generative AI for it can already have an impact on our sellers, and that will have the dominant effect on the end customer that we are already helping them on their mission. I do believe that AI and generative AI can absolutely personalize learning experiences and provide real-time performance insights, let alone automate content delivery. I really think it’s important to develop those mechanisms and I would also stress the ethical framework around it to build for impact and build for performance. I’d like to tie that with what I mentioned in one of my answers earlier today about having a more agile and adaptive selling team. You do that when you use the resources that are available to you to help your learners grow in their own journey and remain obsessed with the right technology at the right time and the right way. SS: I think that is phenomenal. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insight. BK: Thank you for having me, really enjoyed listening and having that discussion with you, Shawnna. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

ABOUT THE EPISODEComic Watch Content Manager Chad Burdette joins Sean to review the 5-issue series Flashpoint by DC Comics. It was released in 2011 and was written by Geoff Johns, penciled by Andy Kubert, inked by Sandra Hope, colored by Alex Sinclair, and lettered by Nick J. Napolitano.Flashpoint tells the story of Barry Allen, The Flash, finding himself in a new universe where his mom is still alive, he is no longer married to Iris West, the superheroes are all different, and the world is about the end thanks to a war between the Amazonians and the Atlanteans. ABOUT THE GUESTChad Burdette is a lifelong comic book fan and reader having been introduced at a young age via the Superfriends comics and other DC comics under the Whitman banner. In 2008 Chad began writing for the Albany NY Times Union contributing and overseeing the Comic Book Community blog hosted by the newspaper which lasted until 2021. In 2019 Chad came on as a news contributor for Comic Watch. During this time he also freelanced for ScreenRant and CBR writing lists. In 2021 Chad was promoted to editor for Comic Watch and later to Content Manager in 2022ish. In 2020 Chad started to focus on his YouTube Channel, The Comic Multiverse, which is an interview format where he talks to creators doing anything from Kickstarters to mainstream creators he has met on the convention scene. He also somehow weaseled his way into the cohost chair of The Comic Watchers and does the weekly Krowdfunder Korner along with editing, news, and the occasional review for the site. Find Chad online here:YouTube channel, “The Comics Multiverse”Twitter, @TUComicsBlogChad's work for Comic WatchEPISODE SPOTLIGHTNone Of My Friends Like Comics Podcast is a podcast for comic book fans new and old alike! Long-time comic book enthusiast, Nick, talks with a first-time reader about a comic book. Will the newcomers pull it or drop it??Find out every other Thursday!RESOURCES & LINKSEpisode Page - “#106 ‘Flashpoint' With Chad Burdette”“Flashpoint” Series InfoOur Blog of Comics, Movies, & Series Reviews, Top 5 Lists, and AnnouncementsComic WatchApply To Be A Reviewer For Comic WatchJoin The Illuminicasters' DiscordThe Captioned Life Show website Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Farris, Cloud Security Nerd at PrimeHarbor Technologies, LLC, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his new project, breaches.cloud, and why he feels having a centralized location for cloud security breach information is so important. Corey and Chris also discuss what it means to dive into entrepreneurship, including both the benefits of not having to work within a corporate structure and the challenges that come with running your own business. Chris also reveals what led him to start breaches.cloud, and what he's learned about some of the biggest cloud security breaches so far. About ChrisChris Farris is a highly experienced IT professional with a career spanning over 25 years. During this time, he has focused on various areas, including Linux, networking, and security. For the past eight years, he has been deeply involved in public-cloud and public-cloud security in media and entertainment, leveraging his expertise to build and evolve multiple cloud security programs.Chris is passionate about enabling the broader security team's objectives of secure design, incident response, and vulnerability management. He has developed cloud security standards and baselines to provide risk-based guidance to development and operations teams. As a practitioner, he has architected and implemented numerous serverless and traditional cloud applications, focusing on deployment, security, operations, and financial modeling.He is one of the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference and presented at various AWS conferences and BSides events. Chris shares his insights on security and technology on social media platforms like Twitter, Mastodon and his website https://www.chrisfarris.com.Links Referenced: fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/ breaches.cloud: https://breaches.cloud Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcfarris Company Site: https://www.primeharbor.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. My returning guest today is Chris Farris, now at PrimeHarbor, which is his own consultancy. Chris, welcome back. Last time we spoke, you were a Turbot, and now you've decided to go independent because you don't like sleep anymore.Chris: Yeah, I don't like sleep.Corey: [laugh]. It's one of those things where when I went independent, at least in my case, everyone thought that it was, oh, I have this grand vision of what the world could be and how I could look at these things, and that's going to just be great and awesome and everyone's going to just be a better world for it. In my case, it was, no, just there was quite literally nothing else for me to do that didn't feel like an exact reframing of what I'd already been doing for years. I'm a terrible employee and setting out on my own was important. It was the only way I found that I could wind up getting to a place of not worrying about getting fired all the time because that was my particular skill set. And I look back at it now, almost seven years in, and it's one of those things where if I had known then what I know now, I never would have started.Chris: Well, that was encouraging. Thank you [laugh].Corey: Oh, of course. And in sincerity, it's not one of those things where there's any one thing that stops you, but it's the, a lot of people get into the independent consulting dance because they want to do a thing and they're very good at that thing and they love that thing. The problem is, when you're independent, and at least starting out, I was spending over 70% of my time on things that were not billable, which included things like go and find new clients, go and talk to existing clients, the freaking accounting. One of the first hires I made was a fractional CFO, which changed my life. Up until that, my business partner and I were more or less dead reckoning of looking at the bank account and how much money is in there to determine if we could afford things. That's a very unsophisticated way of navigating. It's like driving by braille.Chris: Yeah, I think I went into it mostly as a way to define my professional identity outside of my W-2 employer. I had built cloud security programs for two major media companies and felt like that was my identity: I was the cloud security person for these companies. And so, I was like, ehh, why don't I just define myself as myself, rather than define myself as being part of a company that, in the media space, they are getting overwhelmed by change, and job security, job satisfaction, wasn't really something that I could count on.Corey: One of the weird things that I found—it's counterintuitive—is that when you're independent, you have gotten to a point where you have hit a point of sustainability, where you're not doing the oh, I'm just going to go work for 40 billable hours a week for a client. It's just like being an employee without a bunch of protections and extra steps. That doesn't work super well. But now, at the point where I'm at where the largest client we have is a single-digit percentage of revenue, I can't get fired anymore, without having a whole bunch of people suddenly turn on me because I've done something monstrous, in which case, I probably deserve not to have business anymore, or there's something systemic in the macro environment, which given that I do the media side and I do the cost-cutting side, I work on the way up, I work on the way down, I'm questioning what that looks like in a scenario that doesn't involve me hunting for food. But it's counterintuitive to people who have been employees their whole life, like I was, where, oh, it's risky and dangerous to go out on your own.Chris: It's risky and dangerous to be, you know, tied to a single, yeah, W-2 paycheck. So.Corey: Yeah. The question I'd like to ask is, how many people need to be really pissed off before you have one of those conversations with HR that doesn't involve giving you a cup of coffee? That's the tell: when you don't get coffee, it's a bad conversation.Chris: Actually, that you haven't seen [unintelligible 00:04:25] coffee these days. You don't want the cup of coffee, you know. That's—Corey: Even when they don't give you the crappy percolator navy coffee, like, midnight hobo diner style, it's still going to be a bad meeting because [unintelligible 00:04:37] pretend the coffee's palatable.Chris: Perhaps, yes. I like not having to deal with my own HR department. And I do agree that yeah, getting out of the W-2 space allows me to work on side projects that interests me or, you know, volunteer to do things like continuing the fwd:cloudsec, developing breaches.cloud, et cetera.Corey: I'll never forget, one of my last jobs I had a boss who walked past and saw me looking at Reddit and asked me if that was really the best use of my time. At first—it was in, I think, the sysadmin forum at the time, so yes, it was very much the best use of my time for the problem I was focusing on, but also, even if it wasn't, I spent an inordinate amount of time on social media, just telling stories and building audiences, on some level. That's the weird thing is that what counts as work versus what doesn't count as work gets very squishy when you're doing your own marketing.Chris: True. And even when I was a W-2 employee, I spent a lot of time on Twitter because Twitter was an intel source for us. It was like, “Hey, who's talking about the latest cloud security misconfigurations? Who's talking about the latest data breach? What is Mandiant tweeting about?” It was, you know—I consider it part of my job to be on Twitter and watching things.Corey: Oh, people ask me that. “So, you're on Twitter an awful lot. Don't you have a newsletter to write?” Like, yeah, where do you think that content comes from, buddy?Chris: Exactly. Twitter and Mastodon. And Reddit now.Corey: There's a whole argument to be had about where to find various things. For me at least, because I'm only security adjacent, I was always trying to report the news that other people had, not make the news myself.Chris: You don't want to be the one making the news in security.Corey: Speaking of, I'd like to talk a bit about what you just alluded to breaches.cloud. I don't think I've seen that come across my desk yet, which tells me that it has not been making a big splash just yet.Chris: I haven't been really announcing it; it got published the other night and so basically, yeah, is this is sort of a inaugural marketing push for breaches.cloud. So, what we're looking to do is document all the public cloud security breaches, what happened, why, and more importantly, what the companies did or didn't do that led to the security incident or the security breach.Corey: How are you slicing the difference between broad versus deep? And what I mean by that is, there are some companies where there are indictments and massive deep dives into everything that happens with timelines and blows-by-blows, and other times you wind up with the email that shows up one day of, “Security is very important to us. Now, listen to how we completely dropped the ball on it.” And it just makes the biggest description that they can get away with of what happened. Occasionally, you find out oh, it was an open S3 buckets, or they'll allude to something that sounds like it. Does that count for inclusion? Does it not? How do you make those editorial decisions?Chris: So, we haven't yet built a page around just all of the recipients of the Bucket Negligence Award. We're looking at the specific ones where there's been something that's happened that's usually involving IAM credentials—oftentimes involving IAM credentials found in GitHub—and what led to that. So, in a lot of cases, if there's a detailed company postmortem that they send their customers that said, “Hey, we goofed up, but complete transparency—” and then they hit all the bullet points of how they goofed up. Or in the case of certain others, like Uber, “Hey, we have court transcripts that we can go to,” or, “We have federal indictments,” or, “We have court transcripts, and federal indictments and FTC civil actions.” And so, we go through those trying to suss out what the company did or did not do that led to the breach. And really, the goal here is to be able to articulate as security practitioners, hey, don't attach S3 full access to this role on EC2. That's what got Capital One in trouble.Corey: I have a lot of sympathy for the Capital One breach and I wish they would talk about it more than they do, for obvious reasons, just because it was not, someone showed up and made a very obvious dumb decision, like, “Oh, that was what that giant red screaming thing in the S3 console means.” It was a series of small misconfigurations that led to another one, to another one, to another one, and eventually gets to a point where a sophisticated attacker was able to chain them all together. And yes, it's bad, yes, they're a bank and the rest, but I look at that and it's—that's the sort of exploit that you look at and it's okay, I see it. I absolutely see it. Someone was very clever, and a bunch of small things that didn't rise to the obvious. But they got dragged and castigated as if they basically had a four-character password that they'd left on the back of the laptop on a Post-It note in an airport lounge when their CEO was traveling. Which is not the case.Chris: Or all of the highlighting the fact that Paige Thompson was a former Amazon employee, making it seem like it was her insider abilities that lead to the incident, rather than she just knew that, hey, there's a metadata service and it gives me creds if I ask it.Corey: Right. That drove me nuts. There was no maleficence as an employee. And to be very direct, from what I understand of internal AWS controls, had there been, it would have been audited, flagged, caught, interdicted. I have talked to enough Amazonians that either a lot of them are lying to me very consistently despite not knowing each other, or they're being honest when they say that you can't get access to customer data using secret inside hacks.Chris: Yeah. I have reasonably good faith in AWS and their ability to not touch customer data in most scenarios. And I've had cases that I'm not allowed to talk about where Amazon has gone and accessed customer data, and the amount of rigmarole and questions and drilling that I got as a customer to have them do that was pretty intense and somewhat, actually, annoying.Corey: Oh, absolutely. And, on some level, it gets frustrating when it's a, look, this is a test account. I have nothing of sensitive value in here. I want the thing that isn't working to start working. Can I just give you a whole, like, admin-powered user account and we can move on past all of this? And their answer is always absolutely not.Chris: Yes. Or, “Hey, can you put this in our bucket?” “No, we can't even write to a public bucket or a bucket that, you know, they can share too.” So.Corey: An Amazonian had to mail me a hard drive because they could not send anything out of S3 to me.Chris: There you go.Corey: So, then I wound up uploading it back to S3 with, you know, a Snowball Edge because there's no overkill like massive overkill.Chris: No, the [snowmobile 00:11:29] would have been the massive overkill. But depending on where you live, you know, you might not have been able to get a permit to park the snowmobile there.Corey: They apparently require a loading dock. Same as with the outposts. I can't fake having one of those on my front porch yet.Chris: Ah. Well, there you go. I mean, you know it's the right height though, and you don't mind them ruining your lawn.Corey: So, help me understand. It makes sense to me at least, on some level, why having a central repository of all the various cloud security breaches in one place that's easy to reference is valuable. But what caused you to decide, you know, rather than saying it'd be nice to have, I'm going to go build that thing?Chris: Yeah, so it was actually right before the last time we spoke, Nicholas Sharp was indicted. And there was like, hey, this person was indicted for, you know, this cloud security case. And I'm like, that name rings a bell, but I don't remember who this person was. And so, I kind of realized that there's so many of these things happening now that I forget who is who. And so, when a new piece of news comes along, I'm like, where did this come from and how does this fit into what my knowledge of cloud security is and cloud security cases?So, I kind of realized that these are all running together in my mind. The Department of Justice only referenced ‘Company One,' so it wasn't clear to me if this even was a new cloud incident or one I already knew about. And so basically, I decided, okay, let's build this. Breaches.cloud was available; I think I kind of got the idea from hackingthe.cloud.And I had been working with some college students through the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, and I was like, “Hey, anybody want a spring research project that I will pay you for?” And so yeah, PrimeHarbor funded two college students to do quite a bit of the background research for me, I mentored them through, “Hey, so here's what this means,” and, “Hey, have we noticed that all of these seem to relate to credentials found in GitHub? You know, maybe there's a pattern here.” So, if you're not yet scanning for secrets in GitHub, I recommend you start scanning for secrets in your GitHub, private and public repos.Corey: Also, it makes sense to look at the history. Because, oh, I committed a secret. I'm going to go ahead and revert that commit and push that. That solves the problem, right?Chris: No, no, it doesn't. Yes, apparently, you can force push and delete an entire commit, but you really want to use a tool that's going to go back through the commit history and dig through it because as we saw in the Uber incident, when—the second Uber incident, the one that led to the CSOs conviction—yeah, the two attackers, [unintelligible 00:14:09] stuffed a Uber employee's personal GitHub account that they were also using for Uber work, and yeah, then they dug through all the source code and dug through the commit histories until they found a set of keys, and that's what they used for the second Uber breach.Corey: Awful when that hits. It's one of those things where it's just… [sigh], one thing leads to another leads to another. And on some level, I'm kind of amazed by the forensics that happen around all of these things. With the counterpoint, it is so… freakishly difficult, I think, for lack of a better term, just to be able to say what happened with any degree of certainty, so I can't help but wonder in those dark nights when the creeping dread starts sinking in, how many things like this happen that we just never hear about because they don't know?Chris: Because they don't turn on CloudTrail. Probably a number of them. Once the data gets out and shows up on the dark web, then people start knocking on doors. You know, Troy Hunt's got a large collection of data breach stuff, and you know, when there's a data breach, people will send him, “Hey, I found these passwords on the dark web,” and he loads them into Have I Been Pwned, and you know, [laugh] then the CSO finds out. So yeah, there's probably a lot of this that happens in the quiet of night, but once it hits the dark web, I think that data starts becoming available and the victimized company finds out.Corey: I am profoundly cynical, in case that was unclear. So, I'm wondering, on some level, what is the likelihood or commonality, I suppose, of people who are fundamentally just viewing security breach response from a perspective of step one, make sure my resume is always up to date. Because we talk about these business continuity plans and these DR approaches, but very often it feels like step one, secure your own mask before assisting others, as they always say on the flight. Where does personal preservation come in? And how does that compare with company preservation?Chris: I think down at the [IaC 00:16:17] level, I don't know of anybody who has not gotten a job because they had Equifax on their resume back in, what, 2017, 2018, right? Yes, the CSO, the CEO, the CIO probably all lost their jobs. And you know, now they're scraping by book deals and speaking engagements.Corey: And these things are always, to be clear, nuanced. It's rare that this is always one person's fault. If you're a one-person company, okay, yeah, it's kind of your fault, let's be clear here, but there are controls and cost controls and audit trails—presumably—for all of these things, so it feels like that's a relatively easy thing to talk around, that it was a process failure, not that one person sucked. “Well, didn't you design and implement the process?” “Yes. But it turned out there were some holes in it and my team reported that those weren't there and it turned out that they were and, well, live and learn.” It feels like that's something that could be talked around.Chris: It's an investment failure. And again, you know, if we go back to Harry Truman, “The buck stops here,” you know, it's the CEO who decides that, hey, we're going to buy a corporate jet rather than buy a [SIIM 00:17:22]. And those are the choices that happen at the top level that define, do you have a capable security team, and more importantly, do you have a capable security culture such that your security team isn't the only ones who are actually thinking about security?Corey: That's, I guess, a fair question. I saw a take on Twitter—which is always a weird thing—or maybe was Blue-ski or somewhere else recently, that if you don't have a C-level executive responsible for security with security in their title, your company does not take security seriously. And I can see that past a certain point of scale, but as a one-person company, do you have a designated CSO?Chris: As a one-person company and as a security company, I sort of do have a designated CSO. I also have, you know, the person who's like, oh, I'm going to not put MFA on the root of this one thing because, while it's an experiment and it's a sandbox and whatever else, but I also know that that's not where I'm going to be putting any customer data, so I can measure and evaluate the risk from both a security perspective and a business existential investment perspective. When you get to the larger the organization, the more detached the CEO gets from the risk and what the company is building and what the company is doing, is where you get into trouble. And lots of companies have C-level somebody who's responsible for security. It's called the CSO, but oftentimes, they report four levels down, or even more, from the chief executive who is actually the one making the investment decisions.Corey: On some level, the oh yeah, that's my responsibility, too, but it feels like it's a trap that falls into. Like, well, the CTO is responsible for security at a publicly traded company. Like, well… that tends to not work anymore, past certain points of scale. Like when I started out independently, yes, I was the CSO. I was also the accountant. I was also the head of marketing. I was also the janitor. There's a bunch of different roles; we all wear different hats at different times.I'm also not a big fan of shaming that oh, yeah. This is a universal truth that applies to every company in existence. That's also where I think Twitter started to go wrong where you would get called out whenever making an observation or witticism or whatnot because there was some vertex case to which it did not necessarily apply and then people would ‘well, actually,' you to death.Chris: Yeah. Well, and I think there's a lot of us in the security community who are in the security one-percenters. We're, “Hey, yes, I'm a cloud security person on a 15-person cloud security team, and here's this awesome thing we're doing.” And then you've got most of the other companies in this country that are probably below the security poverty line. They may or may not have a dedicated security person, they certainly don't have a SIIM, they certainly don't have anybody who's monitoring their endpoints for malware attacks or anything else, and those are the companies that are getting hit all the time with, you know, a lot of this ransomware stuff. Healthcare is particularly vulnerable to that.Corey: When you take a look across the industry, what is it that you're doing now at PrimeHarbor that you feel has been an unmet need in the space? And let me be clear, as of this recording earlier today, we signed a contract with you for a project. There's more to come on that in the future. So, this is me asking you to tell a story, not challenging, like, what do you actually do? This is not a refund request, let's be very clear here. But what's the unmet need that you saw?Chris: I think the unmet need that I see is we don't talk to our builder community. And when I say builder, I mean, developers, DevOps, sysadmins, whatever. AWS likes the term builder and I think it works. We don't talk to our builder community about risk in a way that makes sense to them. So, we can say, “Hey, well, you know, we have this security policy and section 24601 says that all data's classifications must be signed off by the data custodian,” and a developer is going to look at you with their head tilted, and be like, “Huh? What? I just need to get the sprint done.”Whereas if we can articulate the risk—and one of the reasons I wanted to do breaches.cloud was to have that corpus of articulated risk around specific things—I can articulate the risk and say, “Hey, look, you know how easy it is for somebody to go in and enumerate an S3 bucket? And then once they've enumerated and guessed that S3 bucket exists, they list it, and oh, hey, look, now that they've listed it, they know all of the objects and all of the juicy PII that you just made public.” If you demonstrate that to them, then they're going to be like, “Oh, I'm going to add the extra story point to this story to go figure out how to do CloudFront origin access identity.” And now you've solved, you know, one more security thing. And you've done in a way that not just giving a man a fish or closing the bucket for them, but now they know, hey, I should always use origin access identity. This is why I need to do this particular thing.Corey: One of the challenges that I've seen in a variety of different sites that have tried to start cataloging different breaches and other collections of things happening in public is the discoverability or the library management problem. The most obvious example of this is, of course, the AWS console itself, where when it paginates things like, oh, there are 3000 things here, ten at a time, through various pages for it. Like, the marketplace is just a joke of discoverability. How do you wind up separating the stuff that is interesting and notable, rather than, well, this has about three sentences to it because that's all the company would say?Chris: So, I think even the ones where there's three sentences, we may actually go ahead and add it to the repo, or we may just hold it as a draft, so that we know later on when, “Hey, look, here's a federal indictment for Company Three. Oh, hey, look. Company Three was actually this breach announcement that we heard about three months ago,” or even three years ago. So like, you know, Chegg is a great example of, you know, one of those where, hey, you know, there was an incident, and they disclosed something, and then, years later, FTC comes along and starts banging them over the head. And in the FTC documentation, or in the FTC civil complaint, we got all sorts of useful data.Like, not only were they using root API keys, every contractor and employee there was sharing the root API keys, so when they had a contractor who left, it was too hard to change the keys and share it with everybody, so they just didn't do that. The contractor still had the keys, and that was one of the findings from the FTC against Chegg. Similar to that, Cisco didn't turn off contractors' access, and I think—this is pure speculation—I think the poor contractor one day logged into his Google Cloud Shell, cd'ed into a Terraform directory, ran ‘terraform destroy', and rather than destroying what he thought he was destroying, it had the access keys back to Cisco WebEx and took down 400 EC2 instances that made up all of WebEx. These are the kinds of things that I think it's worth capturing because the stories are going to come out over time.Corey: What have you seen in your, I guess, so far, a limited history of curating this that—I guess, first what is it you've learned that you've started seeing as far as patterns go, as far as what warrants inclusion, what doesn't, and of course, once you started launching and going a bit more public with it, I'm curious to hear what the response from companies is going to be.Chris: So, I want to be very careful and clear that if I'm going to name somebody, that we're sourcing something from the criminal justice system, that we're not going to say, “Hey, everybody knows that it was Paige Thompson who was behind it.” No, no, here's the indictment that said it was Paige Thompson that was, you know, indicted for this Capital One sort of thing. All the data that I'm using, it all comes from public sources, it's all sited, so it's not like, hey, some insider said, “Hey, this is what actually happened.” You know? I very much learned from the Ubiquiti case that I don't want to be in the position of Brian Krebs, where it's the attacker themselves who's updating the site and telling us everything that went wrong, when in fact, it's not because they're in fact the perpetrator.Corey: Yeah, there's a lot of lessons to be learned. And fortunately, for what it's s—at least it seems… mostly, that we've moved past the battle days of security researchers getting sued on a whim from large companies for saying embarrassing things about them. Of course, watch me be tempting fate and by the time this publishes, I'll get sued by some company, probably Azure or whatnot, telling me that, “Okay, we've had enough of you saying bad things about our security.” It's like, well, cool, but I also read the complaint before you file because your security is bad. Buh-dum-tss. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Please don't sue me.Chris: So, you know, whether it's slander or libel, depending on whether you're reading this or hearing it, you know, truth is an actual defense, so I think Microsoft doesn't have a case against you. I think for what we're doing in breaches, you know—and one of the reasons that I'm going to be very clear on anybody who contributes—and just for the record, anybody is welcome to contribute. The GitHub repo that runs breaches.cloud is public and anybody can submit me a pull request and I will take their write-ups of incidents. But whatever it is, it has to be sourced.One of the things that I'm looking to do shortly, is start soliciting sponsorships for breaches so that we can afford to go pull down the PACER documents. Because apparently in this country, while we have a right to a speedy trial, we don't have a right to actually get the court transcripts for less than ten cents a page. And so, part of what we need to do next is download those—and once we've purchased them, we can make them public—download those, make them public, and let everybody see exactly what the transcript was from the Capital One incident, or the Joey Sullivan trial.Corey: You're absolutely right. It drives me nuts that I have to wind up budgeting money for PACER to pull up court records. And at ten cents a page, it hasn't changed in decades, where it's oh, this is the cost of providing that data. It's, I'm not asking someone to walk to the back room and fax it to me. I want to be very clear here. It just feels like it's one of those areas where the technology and government is not caught up and it's—part of the problem is, of course, having no competition.Chris: There is that. And I think I read somewhere that the ent—if you wanted to download the entire PACER, it would be, like, $100 million. Not that you would do that, but you know, it is the moneymaker for the judicial system, and you know, they do need to keep the lights on. Although I guess that's what my taxes are for. But again, yes, they're a monopoly; they can do that.Corey: Wildly frustrating, isn't it?Chris: Yeah [sigh]… yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there's a lot of value in the court transcripts. I've held off on publishing the Capital One case because one, well, already there's been a lot of ink spilled on it, and two, I think all the good detail is going to be in the trial transcripts from Paige Thompson's trial.Corey: So, I am curious what your take is on… well, let's called the ‘FTX thing.' I don't even know how to describe it at this point. Is it a breach? Is it just maleficence? Is it 15,000 other things? But I noticed that it's something that breaches.cloud does talk about a bit.Chris: Yeah. So, that one was a fascinating one that came out because as I was starting this project, I heard you know, somebody who was tweeting was like, “Hey, they were storing all of the crypto private keys in AWS Secrets Manager.” And I was like, “Errr?” And so, I went back and I read John J. Ray III's interim report to the creditors.Now, John Ray is the man who was behind the cleaning up of Enron, and his comment was “FTX is the”—“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy information as occurred here.” And as part of his general, broad write-up, they went into, in-depth, a lot of the FTX AWS practices. Like, we talk about, hey, you know, your company should be multi-account. FTX was worse. They had three or four different companies all operating in the same AWS account.They had their main company, FTX US, Alameda, all of them had crypto keys in Secrets Manager and there was no access control between any of those. And what ended up happening on the day that SBF left and Ray came in as CEO, the $400 million worth of crypto somehow disappeared out of FTX's wallets.Corey: I want to call this out because otherwise, I will get letters from the AWS PR spin doctors. Because on the surface of it, I don't know that there's necessarily a lot wrong with using Secrets Manager as the backing store for private keys. I do that with other things myself. The question is, what other controls are there? You can't just slap it into Secrets Manager and, “Well, my job is done. Let's go to lunch early today.”There are challenges [laugh] around the access levels, there are—around who has access, who can audit these things, and what happens. Because most of the secrets I have in Secrets Manager are not the sort of thing that is, it is now a viable strategy to take that thing and abscond to a country with a non-extradition treaty for the rest of my life, but with private keys and crypto, there kind of is.Chris: That's it. It's like, you know, hey, okay, the RDS database password is one thing, but $400 million in crypto is potentially another thing. Putting it in and Secrets Manager might have been the right answer, too. You get KMS customer-managed keys, you get full auditability with CloudTrail, everything else, but we didn't hear any of that coming out of Ray's report to the creditors. So again, the question is, did they even have CloudTrail turned on? He did explicitly say that FTX had not enabled GuardDuty.Corey: On some level, even if GuardDuty doesn't do anything for you, which in my case, it doesn't, but I want to be clear, you should still enable it anyway because you're going to get dragged when there's inevitable breach because there's always a breach somewhere, and then you get yelled at for not having turned on something that was called GuardDuty. You already sound negligent, just with that sentence alone. Same with Security Hub. Good name on AWS's part if you're trying to drive service adoption. Just by calling it the thing that responsible people would use, you will see adoption, even if people never configure or understand it.Chris: Yeah, and then of course, hey, you had Security Hub turned on, but you ignore the 80,000 findings in it. Why did you ignore those 80,000 findings? I find Security Hub to probably be a little bit too much noise. And it's not Security Hub, it's ‘Compliance Hub.' Everything—and I'm going to have a blog post coming out shortly—on this, everything that Security Hub looks at, it looks at it from a compliance perspective.If you look at all of its scoring, it's not how many things are wrong; it's how many rules you are a hundred percent compliant to. It is not useful for anybody below that AWS security poverty line to really master or to really operationalize.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to catch up with me once again. Although now that I'm the client, I expect I can do this on demand, which is just going to be delightful. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Chris: So, they can find breaches.cloud at, well https://breaches.cloud. If you're looking for me, I am either on Twitter, still, at @jcfarris, or you can find me and my consulting company, which is www.primeharbor.com.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:33:57]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. As always, I appreciate it.Chris: Oh, thank you for having me again.Corey: Chris Farris, cloud security nerd at PrimeHarbor. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that you're also going to use as the storage back-end for your private keys.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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Diya Wynn, Senior Practice Manager in Responsible AI for AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her team's efforts to study and implement responsible practices when developing AI technology. Corey and Diya explore the ethical challenges of AI, and why it's so important to be looking ahead for potential issues before they arise. Diya explains why socially responsible AI is still a journey, and describes how her and her team at AWS are seeking to forge that path to help their customers implement the technology in a safe and ethical way. Diya also describes her approach to reducing human-caused bias in AI models. About DiyaDiya Wynn is the Senior Practice Manager in Responsible AI for AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab. She leads the team that engages with customers globally to go from theory to practice - operationalizing standards for responsible Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and data. Diya leads discussions on taking intentional action to uncover potential unintended impacts, and mitigate risks related to the development, deployment and use of AI/ML systems. She leverages her more than 25 years of experience as a technologist scaling products for acquisition; driving inclusion, diversity & equity initiatives; leading operational transformation across industries and understanding of historical and systemic contexts to guide customers in establishing an AI/ML operating model that enables inclusive and responsible products. Additionally, she serves on non-profit boards including the AWS Health Equity Initiative Review Committee; mentors at Tulane University, Spelman College and GMI; was a mayoral appointee in Environment Affairs for 6 consecutive years and guest lectures regularly on responsible and inclusive technology. Diya studied Computer Science at Spelman College, the Management of Technology at New York University, and AI & Ethics at Harvard University Professional School and MIT Sloan School of Management.Links Referenced:Machine Learning is a Marvelously Executed Scam: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/machine-learning-is-a-marvelously-executed-scam/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Tailscale SSH is a new, and arguably better way to SSH. Once you've enabled Tailscale SSH on your server and user devices, Tailscale takes care of the rest. So you don't need to manage, rotate, or distribute new SSH keys every time someone on your team leaves. Pretty cool, right? Tailscale gives each device in your network a node key to connect to your VPN, and uses that same key for SSH authorization and encryption. So basically you're SSHing the same way that you're already managing your network.So what's the benefit? Well, built-in key rotation, the ability to manage permissions as code, connectivity between any two devices, and reduced latency. You can even ask users to re-authenticate SSH connections for that extra bit of security to keep the compliance folks happy. Try Tailscale now - it's free forever for personal use.Corey: Kentik provides Cloud and NetOps teams with complete visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Ensure an amazing customer experience, reduce cloud and network costs, and optimize performance at scale — from internet to data center to container to cloud. Learn how you can get control of complex cloud networks at www.kentik.com, and see why companies like Zoom, Twitch, New Relic, Box, Ebay, Viasat, GoDaddy, booking.com, and many, many more choose Kentik as their network observability platform. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. In a refreshing change of pace, I have decided to emerge from my home office cave studio thing and go to re:Invent and interview people in person. This is something of a challenge for me because it is way easier in person to punch me in the face, so we'll see how it winds up playing out. My guest today is Diya Wynn, Senior Practice Manager at AWS. Diya, what is a practice manager at AWS? What do you do?Diya: So, a practice manager, I guess you can think of it just like a manager of a team. I have a practice that's specifically focused on Responsible AI. And I mean, practices are just like you could have won in financial services or anything. It's a department, essentially. But more important than the practice in the title is actually what I get a chance to do, and that's working with our customers directly that are using and leveraging our AI/ML services to build products.And we have an opportunity to help them think about how are they using that technology in ways to have improvements or benefit individuals in society, but minimize the risk and the unintended impact or harm. And that's something that we get to do with customers over any industry as well as globally. And my team and I have been enjoying the opportunity to be able to help them along their Responsible AI journey.Corey: So, the idea of Responsible AI is… I'm going to sound old and date myself when I say this, but it feels like it's such a strange concept for me, someone who came up doing systems administration work in physical data centers. The responsible use of a server back when I was hands-on hardware was, “Well, you don't want to hit your coworker with a server no matter how obnoxious they are.” And it was fairly straightforward. It was clear: yes or no. And now it seems that whenever we talk about AI in society, in popular culture, from a technologist's point of view, the answer is always a deeply nuanced shade of gray. Help.Diya: Nuanced shade of gray. That's interesting. It is a little bit more challenging. I think that it is, you know, in one sense because of the notion of all of the data that we get to leverage, and our machine-learning models are reliant on data that has variations coming from, you know, historical sort of elements, things that are here baked with bias, all of that has to be considered. And I think when we think about some of the challenges and even the ways in which AI is being used, it means that we have to be much more mindful of its context, right?And these systems are being used in ways that we probably didn't think about servers being used in the past, but also are in the midst of some high-stakes decisions, right? Whether or not I might be identified or misidentified and inappropriately arrested or if I get the appropriate service that I was thinking about or whether or not there are associations related to my gender or my sexual preference. All of that matters, and so it does become much more of a nuanced conversation. Also because depending on the jurisdiction you're in, the region, what makes sense and what matters might differ slightly. So, it's a multidisciplinary problem or challenge that we need to think about what is the legality of this?And we have to think about social science sometimes and there's an element of ethics. And all of that plays into what becomes responsible, what is the right way in which we use the technology, what are the implications of technology? And so yes, it is a little bit more gray, but there are things that I think we have at our disposal to help us be able to respond to and put in place so that we really are doing the right things with technology.Corey: I've known Amazon across the board to be customer-obsessed, and they tell us that constantly—and I do believe it; I talk to an awful lot of Amazonians—and so much of what the company does comes directly from customer requests. I have to ask, what were customers asking that led to the creation of your group? Because it seems odd to me that you would have someone coming to you and saying, “Well, we built a ‘Hot Dog/Not A Hot Dog' image recognition app,” and, “Oopsie. It turns out our app is incredibly biased against Canadians. How do we fix this?” Like, that does not seem like a realistic conversation. What were the customer concerns? How are they articulated?Diya: No, that's really good. And you're right. They weren't asking the question in that way, but over the last five years or so, I would say, there has been an increase in interest and as well as concern about how AI is being used and the potential risks or the areas of unintended impact. And with this sort of heightened sensitivity or concern, both with our executives as well as members of common society, right—they're starting to talk about that more—they started to ask questions. They're using surfaces we want to be responsible in building.Now, some customers were saying that. And so, they would ask, “What are other customers doing? What should we be aware of? How do we or are there tools that we can use to make sure that we're minimizing bias in our systems? Are there things that we can think about in the way of privacy?”And oftentimes privacy and security are one of those areas that might come up first. And those were the kinds of questions. We actually did a survey asking a number of our customer-facing resources to find out what were customers asking so that we could begin to respond with a product or service that would actually meet that need. And I think we've done a great job in being able to respond to that in providing them assistance. And I think the other thing that we paid attention to was not just the customer requests but also what we're seeing in the marketplace. Part of our job is not only to respond to the customer need but also sometimes to see the need that they're going to have ahead of them because of the way in which the industry is moving. And I think we did a pretty good job of being able to see that and then start to provide service and respond to assist them.Corey: Yeah, it's almost like a rule that I believe it was Scott Hanselman that I stole it from where the third time that you're asked the same question, write a blog post, then that way you can do a full deep—Diya: Did he really say write a post? [laugh].Corey: Treatment of it. Yes, he did. And the idea is, write a blog post—because his blog is phenomenal—and that way, you have a really in-depth authoritative answer to that question and you don't have to ad-lib it off the cuff every time someone asks you in the future. And it feels like that's sort of an expression of what you did. You started off as a customer-facing team where they were asking you the same questions again and again and at some point it's, okay, we can either spend the rest of our lives scaling this team ad infinitum and winding up just answering the phone all day, or we can build a service that directly addresses and answers the question.Diya: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that's the way in which we scale, right, and then we have some consistency and structure in order to be able to respond and meet a need. What we were able to do was—and I think this is sort of the beauty of being at AWS and Amazon; we have this opportunity to create narratives and to see a need, and be able to identify and respond to that. And that's something that everybody can do, not just resigned to a VP or someone that's an executive, we all can do that. And that was an opportunity that I had: seeing the need, getting information and data, and being able to respond and say, “We need to come up with something.”And so, one of our first pieces of work was to actually define a framework. How would we engage? What would be that repeatable process or structure for us, framework that we can leverage with our customers every time to help them think through, look around corners, understand where there's risk, be better informed, and make better-informed decisions about how they were using the technology or what ways they could minimize bias? And so, that framework for us was important. And then we have now tools and services as well that were underway, you know, on our product side, if you will, that are complementing—or that, you know, complement the work.So, not only here's a process, here's a framework and structure, but also here are tools that in technology you can bring to bear to help you automate, to help you understand performance, or even you know, help you minimize the bias and risk.Corey: What's interesting to me, in a very different part of the world than AI, I live in AWS costing because I decided, I don't know, I should just go and try and be miserable for the rest of my life and look at bills all day. But whenever I talk to clients, they asked the same question: what are other customers doing, as you alluded to a few minutes ago? And that feels like it's a universal question. I feel like every customer, no matter in what discipline or what area they're in, is firmly convinced that somewhere out there is this utopian, platonic ideal of the perfect company that has figured all of this stuff out and we're all constantly searching for them. Like, there's got to be someone who has solved this problem the right way.And in several cases, I've had to tell clients that you are actually one of the best in the world and furthest advanced at this particular thing. That customer, the closest we've got to them is you, so we should be asking you these questions. And for whatever it's worth, no one ever likes hearing that because, “Like, oh, we're doing something wild.” It's like—Diya: [crosstalk 00:10:15] pioneers.Corey: —“Well, we got to solve this ourselves? That's terrible.”Diya: Well, it's interesting you say that because it is a common question. I think customers have an expectation that because we are AWS, we've seen a lot. And I think that's true. There are tens of thousands of customers that are using our services, we have conversations with companies all across the world, so we do have some perspective of what other customers are doing and that's certainly something that we can bring to the table. But the other part of this is that this is really a new area. This is a sort of new space, that we're focused on trustworthy and Responsible AI, and there aren't a ton of customers that are doing this—or companies at all—that have it entirely answered, that have—you know, we're all on a journey.So, these are, I would say, early stages. And we do have the benefit of being large, having a lot of customers, having some experience in building services as well as helping our customers build products, having a team that's focused on looking at standards and working with standards bodies globally, having teams that are working on our understanding what we're doing in regulation and public policy. And so, all of that we bring to bear when we start talking about, you know, this with our customers. But we don't have all the answers; we're on a journey like them. And I think that's something that we have to be comfortable with, to some degree, that this is an evolving area and we're learning. And we're investing even in research to help us continue to move forward. But there's a lot that we know, that there's a lot that we can bring to the table, and we can help our customers in that regard.Corey: Now, this might very well be old news and well understood and my understanding is laughably naive when this gets released, but as of this recording, a few hours beforehand, you released something called Service Cards. And I have to say, my initial glance at this was honestly one of disappointment when I saw what it was because what I was hoping for, with—when you ever see ‘service' and ‘cards' together, is these are going to be printable cardboard, little cards that I can slip into the Monopoly board game I have at home and game night at home is going to be so traumatic for my kids afterwards. Like, “What's a Fargate?” Says the five-year-old, and there we go. “It means that daddy is not going to passing go, going directly to jail with you. Have fun,” it's great. But I don't think that's what it is.Diya: No, not at all. Not at all. So, it is very similar to the context that people might be familiar with around model cards, being able to give definition and understanding of a model that's being used. For us, we sort of took that concept at one step beyond that in that, you know, just providing a model card isn't sufficient necessarily, especially when there are multiple services or multiple models being used for any one of our services. But what our Service Cards allow us to do is to provide a better understanding of the intended use of the service, you know, and the model that's underpinning that, give context for the performance of that service, give guidelines for our customers to be able to understand how was it best used and how does it best perform.And that's a degree of transparency that we're providing under the hood, for our customers to really help them as well be much more responsible and how they're building on top of those. And it gives them clarity because there is a growing interest in the marketplace for our customers to hold their vendors—or companies to hold their vendors responsible, right, making sure that they're doing the right things and covering off, are we building well? Do we have, like, the customer or enough of demographic covered? What the performance looks like. And this is a really big opportunity for us to be transparent with our customers about how our services are being built and give them a little bit more of that guardrail that we were talking about—guidelines—how to best use it as they look to build upon those.Corey: Not in any way, shape, or form to besmirch the importance of a lot of the areas that you're covering on this, but on some level, I'm just envious in that it would be so nice to have that for every AWS service, of this is how it is—Diya: Uh-oh [laugh].Corey: —actually intended to be used. Because to me, I look at it and all I see is database, database, really expensive database, probably a database, and, like, none of those are designed to be databases. Like, “You lack imagination,” is my approach. And no, it just turns out I'm terrible at computers, but I'm also enthusiastic and those are terrible combinations. But I would love to see breakdowns around things like that as far as intended use, potential pitfalls, and increasingly as we start seeing more and more services get machine learning mixed in, for lack of a better term, increasingly we're going to start to see areas where the ethical implications absolutely are going to be creeping in. Which is a wild thing to say about, I don't know, a service that recommends how to right-size instances having ethical concerns. But it's not that unreasonable.Diya: Well, I can't make any promises about us having those kinds of instructions or guidelines for some of our other services, but we are certainly committed to being able to provide this transparency across our AI/ML services. And again, that's something I will say that's a journey. We've released a few today; there are others that are going to come. We're going to continue to iterate and evolve so that we can get through our services. And there's a lot of work behind that, right?It's not just that we wrote up this document, but it is providing transparency. But it also means that our teams are doing a great bit in terms of the diligence to be able to provide that feedback, to be able to test their models, understand their datasets, you know, provide information about the datasets in public—you know, for the public datasets that are being tested against, and also have the structure for them to train their models appropriately. So, there's a lot going into the development of those that may not be immediately transparent, but really is core to our commitment to how we're building our services now.Corey: It's a new area in many respects because, like, to be very direct. If I wind up misusing or being surprised by a bad implementation of something in most cases in AWS context, the disaster area looks a lot closer to I get a big bill. Which—and this [unintelligible 00:16:35] is going to sound bizarre, but here we are, it's only money. Money can be fixed. I can cry and sob to support and get that fixed.With things like machine learning and AI, the stakes are significantly higher because given some of the use cases and given some of the rapid emerging technology areas in which these things are being tested and deployed, it hurts people if it gets wrong. And an AWS bill is painful, but not in a damaging to populations level. Yet. I'm sure at some point, it becomes so large it becomes its own micro-economy, I guess the way those credits are now, but it's a very different way.Diya: Right. Absolutely. So, I think that's why our work from a responsibility perspective is important. But I think it's also valuable for customers to understand, we're taking a step forward and being able to help them. Very much like what we do with well-architected, right? We have a framework, we have best practices and guidance that is being provided so that our customers who are using our cloud services really know what's the best.This is very much like those Service Cards, right? Here's the best conditions in order to be able to use and get the greatest value out of your cloud investment. The same thing is what we're doing with this approach in helping our customers in the Responsible AI way. Here's the best, sort of, best practices, guidance, guardrails, tools that are going to help you make the most out of your investment in AI and minimize where there's this unintended or potential areas of potential harm that you were describing. And you're right, there are high stakes use cases, right, that we want to make sure or want to be able to help and equip our customers to think more about intentionally and be prepared to be able to hopefully have a governance structure, people aligned, processes, technology to really be able to minimize that, right? We want to reduce the blast radius.[midroll 00:18:37]Corey: One thing I want to call out as well is that as much as we love in tech to pretend that we have invented all of these things ourselves—like, we see it all the time; like, “No one really knows how to hire, there's no real scientific study on this.” “Yes, there are. There are multi-decade longitudinal studies at places like GM and whatnot.” And, “No, no, no tech is different. There's no way to know this. La la la.”And that's great. We have to invent these things ourselves. But bias has been a thing in business decisions, even ones that are not directly caused by humans, for a long time. An easy example is in many cases, credit ratings and decisions whether to grant credit or not. Like, they were not using machine learning in the 90s to do this, but strangely, depending upon a wide variety of factors that are not actually things that are under your control as a person, you are deemed to be a good credit risk versus a bad credit risk.And as a result, I think one of the best terms I heard in the early days when machine learning started getting big, was just referring to it as bias laundering. Well, we've had versions of that for a long time. Now, at least it seems like this shines a light on it if nothing else, and gives us an opportunity to address it.Diya: Absolutely. Oh, I'd love that, right? The opportunity to address it. So, one of the things that I often share with folks is we all have bias, right? And so, like you said we've had bias in a number of cases. Now, you know, in some cases, bias is understandable. We all have it. It is the thing that often—we talk about the sort of like mental shortcuts, things that we do that help us to respond rapidly in the world in the vast array of information that we're taking in all the time. So—Corey: You're an Amazonian. You yourself bias for action.Diya: Exactly. Right? So, we have bias. Now, the intent is that we want to be able to disrupt that so that we don't make decisions, oftentimes, that could be harmful, right? So, we have proclivities, desires, interest, right, that kind of folds into our bias, but there are other things, our background, where we went to school, you know, experiences that we had, information that we've been taking that also helped to drive towards some of those biases.So, that's one element, right, understanding that. A human bias gets infiltrated into our systems. And there was a study in AI now—I think it was 2019—that talked about that, right, that our systems are often biased by—or the bias is introduced, you know, sometimes by individuals. And part of the necessity for us to be able to eliminate that is understanding that we have bias, do things to interrupt it, and then also bringing in diversity, right? Because some of our biases are just that we don't have enough of the right perspectives in the room; we don't have enough of the right people involved, right?And so, being able to sort of widen the net, making sure that we're involving the outliers, I think are important to us being able to eliminate bias as well. And then there are tools that we can use. But then you also bring up something interesting here in terms of the data, right? And there's a part that education plays a good role in helping us understand the things like what you described our institutional biases baked into our data that also can come out in decisions that are now being made. And the more that we use AI in these ways, the more there is risk for that, right?So, that's why this effort in Responsible AI, understanding how we mitigate bias, understanding how we invite the right people in, the inclusion of the right perspectives, thinking about the outliers, thinking about whether or not this is the right problem for us to solve with AI is important, right, so that we can minimize those areas where bias is just another thing that we continue to propagate.Corey: So, a year or two ago, I wrote a blog post titled Machine Learning is a Marvelously Executed Scam. And it was talking about selling digital pickaxes into a data gold rush.Diya: I [crosstalk 00:22:30] remember this one [laugh].Corey: And it was a lot of fun. In fact, the Head of Analyst Relations at AWS for Machine Learning responded by sending me a Minecraft pickaxe made out of foam, which is now in my home office hung behind my office and I get a comment at least three times a week on that. It was absolutely genius as far as rebuttal go. And I've got to find some way to wind up responding to her in kind one of these days.But it felt like it was a solution in search of a problem. And I no longer hold so closely to that particular opinion, in no small part due to the fact that, as you're discussing, this area is fraught, it's under an awful lot of scrutiny, large companies who use these things and then those tools get it wrong are going to basically wind up being castigated for it. And yet, they are clearly realizing enough value from machine learning that it is worth the risk. And these are companies whose entire business, start to finish, is managing and mitigating risk. There is something there or suddenly everyone has taken leave of their senses. I don't quite buy that second option, so I'm guessing it's the first.Diya: So, the question is, is it worth the risk? And I would say, I think some people might or some companies might have started to step into that area thinking that it is, but it's not. And that's what we're saying and that's what we're hearing in the industry [unintelligible 00:23:51], that it's not worth the risk. And you're hearing from customers, outcries from others, government officials, right, all of them are saying, like, “It's not worth the risk and we have to pay attention to that.”But I think that there's certainly value and we're seeing that, right? We're solving previously unattainable problems with AI. We want to be able to continue to do that, but give people the means to be able to sort of minimize where there is risk and recognize that this is not a risk that's worth us taking. So, the potential for reputational harm and the damage that will do is real, right? When a company is called out for the fact that they've discriminated and they're unfairly evaluating homes, for instance, for people of color in certain communities, right, that's not something that's going to be tolerated or accepted.And so, you have people really calling those things out so that we start to—organizations do the right things and not think that risk is worth the [unintelligible 00:24:52]. It is very well worth the risk to use AI, but we've got to do it responsibly. There's so much value in what we are able to accomplish. So, we're seeing, you know, even with Covid, being able to advance, like, the technology around vaccinations and how that was done and accelerated with machine learning, or being able to respond to some of the needs that small businesses and others had, you know, during Covid, being able to continuate their service because we didn't have people in businesses or in offices, a lot of that was advanced during that time as a result of AI. We want to be able to see advances like that and companies be able to continue to innovate, and so we want to be able to do that without the risk, without the sort of impact that we're talking about, the negative impact. And I think that's why the work is so important.Corey: Do you believe that societally we're closer to striking the right balance?Diya: We're on our way. I think this is certainly a journey. There is a lot of attention on this in the right ways. And my hope—and certainly, that's why I'm in a role like this—that we can actually invite the right voices into the room. One of the things—and one of my colleagues said this earlier today, and I think it was a really, really great point, right—as we are seeing—first of all, we never thought that we would have, like, ethicists roles and sort of Responsible AI folks, and chief ethics officers. That was not something that existed in the context of, sort of, machine learning, and that's something that it's evolved in the last, you know, few years.But the other thing that we're seeing is that the folks that are sitting in those roles are increasingly diverse and are helping to drive the focus on the inclusion that we need and the value of making sure that those voices are there so that we can build in inclusive and responsible ways. And that's one of the things that I think is helping us get there, right? We're not entirely there, but I think that we're on a path. And the more that we can have conversations like this, the more that companies are starting to pay attention and take intentional action, right, to build ethically and to have the trust in the technology and the products that they build, and to do that in responsible ways, we'll get there.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking so much time to talk through what you're up to with me.Diya: I am super excited and glad that you were able to have me on. I love talking about this, so it's great. And I think it's one of the ways that we get more people aware, and hopefully, it sparks the interest in companies to take their own Responsible AI journey.Corey: Thank you so much for your time.Diya: Thanks for having me.Corey: I appreciate it. Diya Wynn, Senior Practice Manager at AWS. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry insulting comment, presumably because you're Canadian.Diya: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Next up for Stupid Sequel Smarch, the boys celebrate International Women's Day! Join them as they take a trip back to a simpler time. When men were infected by the ghosts of the dead, and women were apex predators. Yeah, we're confused too.

What do you do when you're an innovator that has reached its prime and is no longer disrupting the marketplace?  If you're Andrew Jassy, you redefine your company from the inside out. Amazonians are in for a rocky ride recasting their company, forced to come back to the office, and challenged to meet their boss's mandate to succeed (at all costs) going forward. Join Robin Lewis and Shelley E. Kohan, TRR's chief strategist, as they take a deep dive in the current state of Amazon and deconstruct why it's not business as usual in Seattle.For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other industry experts.Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest from Robin Lewis and The Robin Report.

Penis problems, Put a RING on it, Faux-cuterie, Mean Green texting Machine, Palm reading Amazonians, CEO - Crying Executive OfficerHosts:Matt Fischer @flooredmattJustin MacDonald @justintyme44Fact-Checker:Jesse James @thee_jessejamesExecutive Producer:Dave Miller @dmiller1023This episodes official "Person on the Couch":

chris@ecommercechris.comChris McCabe founder of ecommerceChris worked for several years on Amazon's performance and policy enforcement teams and in recent times, helped compose appeals in the reinstatement of hundreds of sellers. Their expertise as ex-Amazonians positions them to complete successful reinstatement early and often, given their nearly two decades of combined experience. Their intimate knowledge of internal teams is unsurpassed by any other seller consulting service.  

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You're looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-community-isnt-for-amazoniansNever miss an episode Join the Last Week in AWS newsletter Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Help the show Leave a review Share your feedback Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Buy our merch https://store.lastweekinaws.comWhat's Corey up to? Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig) See our recent work at the Duckbill Group Apply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

John Ghiorso is the Senior Vice President of eCommerce at Media.Monks, a global marketing services company. He is also the CEO and Founder of Orca Pacific, a full-service Amazon and eCommerce agency that brings cutting-edge strategies and managed services to over 100 industry-leading brands, including Reebok, Godiva, Levi, and Mars. The company completed a merger with Media.Monks in 2020.  In his role, John leads Media.Monk's performance and enterprise teams which are composed of former Amazonians and top industry experts. With a decade of Amazon expertise, he has built a reputation for approximating industry reactions and forecasting shifts within Amazon's marketplace. John's insights have been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Vox, and Modern Retail. In this episode… Amazon pioneered eCommerce and retail media, leading other retailers to follow suit. Yet, these platforms are becoming commoditized and competitive, so brands need to develop sound strategies to remain relevant. How can you optimize eCommerce and retail media to maximize profitability? John Ghiorso warns against over-advertising on your website because it can diminish the customer experience by reducing site performance. Instead, he recommends establishing a unified retail media strategy that encompasses multiple channels. This entails collaborating with cross-functional teams and analyzing key KPIs to diversify your retail media budget, thereby increasing cumulative ROI.  Join Aaron Conant on today's episode of The Digital Deep Dive as he welcomes John Ghiorso, Senior Vice President of eCommerce at Media.Monks, to address retail media trends and projections for 2023. John explains Amazon's role in retail media and eCommerce, how to optimize ads on your eCommerce site, and the importance of developing a unified retail media strategy.

Tonight, we'll read the opening chapters of “New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future”, written by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett under the pen name “Mrs. James Corbett” and first published in 1889.  Categorized as “feminist utopian”, it was one element in the wave of utopian and dystopian literature that marked the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her novel, Corbett envisions a successful suffragette movement eventually giving rise to a breed of highly evolved "Amazonians" who turn Ireland into a utopian society.  — read by V — Support us: Listen ad-free on Patreon Get Snoozecast merch like cozy sweatshirts and accessories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rond de kerstperiode is het drukker dan ooit in het Nederlandse sorteercentrum van Amazon. Ruim honderd zogenoemde ‘Amazonians' zorgen ervoor dat jouw kerstcadeautje op tijd bij je bezorgd wordt. Stijn Bronzwaer mocht een dag meelopen bij het sorteercentrum in Rozenburg en zag hoe de medewerkers als menselijke robots aan de lopende band staan.Gast: Stijn BronzwaerPresentatie: Gabriella AdèrRedactie: Esmee Dirks en Anna KorterinkMontage: Bas van WinCoördinatie: Henk Ruigrok van der WervenFoto: Merlin DalemanLees hier de reportage die Stijn Bronzwaer maakte vanuit het sorteercentrum. Heeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze ombudsman via ombudsman@nrc.nlZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What is your brand's catalyzing statement? A catalyzing statement is a quick liner that explains the company's and its brand's values and what it does for the community in a few words. On this episode, Jake and Gino explain how they formed their brand's catalyzing statement as they are with Carmine Gallo. Carmine is a popular keynote speaker, Harvard instructor, and communication coach for the world's most admired brands. Carmine speaks about his book ‘The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets that Power Amazon's Success' and shares the stories behind the success of Amazonians. He reveals the communication strategies that Jeff Bezos pioneered to fuel Amazon's astonishing growth. As one of the most innovative and visionary entrepreneurs of our time, Bezos reimagined the way leaders write, speak and motivate teams and customers. He shares with us the communication tools Bezos created that are so effective that former Amazonians who worked directly with Bezos adopted them as blueprints to start their own companies. Gallo is the author of 9 books including international bestsellers: Talk Like TED, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, The Apple Experience, and The Storyteller's Secret. Key Insights: 00:35 Introduction 04:00 How Carmine started his career? 08:20 Becoming interesting and engaging communicator 10:00 Communicators are made, not born 14:00 Using metaphors to be effective communicator 19:28 Constant learning and humility are the ways towards growth mindset 25:55 Amazon's promising mission 27:59 Framework for effective story-telling 35:01 Simple is the new super power 41:07 Simplifying complex information 45:20 Carmine's favourite story-teller of all the time 48:25 Wrap-up Check out more about Carmine's initiatives on his website: https://www.carminegallo.com/ Check out the author's books on Amazon: https://amz.run/6Ckj Want To Get Into Multifamily Real Estate Or Scale Your Current Portfolio Faster❓ Apply to join our PREMIER MULTIFAMILY INVESTING COMMUNITY & MENTORSHIP PROGRAM. (*Note: Our community is not for beginners)

The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World's Greatest Salesman by Carmine Gallo About the Book: The communication and leadership secrets of Jeff Bezos and how to master them, from the bestselling author of Talk Like Ted. Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world's most influential company, a brand that likely touches your life every day. As a student of leadership and communication, he learned to elevate the way Amazonians write, collaborate, innovate, pitch, and present. He created a scalable model that grew from a small team in a Seattle garage to one of the world's largest employers. The Bezos Blueprint by Carmine Gallo reveals the communication strategies that Jeff Bezos pioneered to fuel Amazon's astonishing growth. As one of the most innovative and visionary entrepreneurs of our time, Bezos reimagined the way leaders write, speak, and motivate teams and customers. The communication tools Bezos created are so effective that former Amazonians who worked directly with Bezos adopted them as blueprints to start their own companies. Now, these tools are available to you. About the Author: Carmine Gallo is a Harvard instructor, bestselling author, and international keynote speaker. A “communications guru,” according to Publishers Weekly, Carmine coaches CEOs and leaders for the world's most admired brands. Carmine's bestselling books, including Talk Like TED and The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, have been translated into more than 40 languages. His expertise in business and leadership has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Success Magazine and on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and ABC's 20/20. And, interesting fact – he also spent 15 years as a television news anchor! Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/bezos-blueprint-carmine-gallo

About AnaïsAnaïs is a Developer Advocate at Aqua Security, where she contributes to Aqua's cloud native open source projects. When she is not advocating DevOps best practices, she runs her own YouTube Channel centered around cloud native technologies. Before joining Aqua, Anais worked as SRE at Civo, a cloud native service provider, where she helped enhance the infrastructure for hundreds of tenant clusters. As CNCF ambassador of the year 2021, her passion lies in making tools and platforms more accessible to developers and community members.Links Referenced: Aqua Security: https://www.aquasec.com/ Aqua Open Source YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/AquaSecurityOpenSource Personal blog: https://anaisurl.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, when I start trying to find guests to chat with me and basically suffer my various slings and arrows on this show, I encounter something that I've never really had the opportunity to explore further. And today's guest leads me in just such a direction. Anaïs is an open-source developer advocate at Aqua Security, and when I was asking her whether or not she wanted to talk about various topics, one of the first thing she said was, “Don't ask me much about AWS because I've never used it,” which, oh my God. Anaïs, thank you for joining me. You must be so very happy never to have dealt with the morass of AWS.Anaïs: [laugh]. Yes, I'm trying my best to stay away from it. [laugh].Corey: Back when I got into the cloud space, for lack of a better term, AWS was sort of really the only game in town unless you wanted to start really squinting hard at what you define cloud as. I mean yes, I could have gone into Salesforce or something, but I was already sad and angry all the time. These days, you can very much go all in-on cloud. In fact, you were a CNCF ambassador, if I'm not mistaken. So, you absolutely are in the infrastructure cloud space, but you haven't dealt with AWS. That is just an interesting path. Have you found others who have gone down that same road, or are you sort of the first of a new breed?Anaïs: I think to find others who are in a similar position or have a similar experience, as you do, you first have to talk about your experience, and this is the first time, or maybe the second, that I'm openly [laugh] saying it on something that will be posted live, like, to the internet. Before I, like, I tried to stay away from mentioning it at all, do the best that I can because I'm at this point where I'm so far into my cloud-native Kubernetes journey that I feel like I should have had to deal with AWS by now, and I just didn't. And I'm doing my best and I'm very successful in avoiding it. [laugh]. So, that's where I am. Yeah.Corey: We're sort of on opposite sides of a particular fence because I spend entirely too much time being angry at AWS, but I've never really touched Kubernetes and anger. I mean, I see it in a lot of my customer accounts and I get annoyed at its data transfer bills and other things that it causes in an economic sense, but as far as the care and feeding of a production cluster, back in my SRE days, I had very old-school architectures. It's, “Oh, this is an ancient system, just like grandma used to make,” where we had the entire web tier, then a job applic—or application server tier, and then a database at the end, and everyone knew where everything was. And then containers came out of nowhere, and it seemed like okay, this solves a bunch of problems and introduces a whole bunch more. How do I orchestrate them? How do I ensure that they're healthy?And then ah, Kubernetes was the answer. And for a while, it seemed like no matter what the problem was, Kubernetes was going to be the answer because people were evangelizing it pretty hard. And now I see it almost everywhere that I turn. What's your journey been like? How did you get into the weeds of, “You know what I want to do when I grow up? That's right. I want to work on container orchestration systems.” I have a five-year-old. She has never once said that because I don't abuse my children by making them learn how clouds work. How did you wind up doing what you do?Anaïs: It's funny that you mention that. So, I'm actually of the generation of engineers who doesn't know anything else but Kubernetes. So, when you mentioned that you used to use something before, I don't really know what that looks like. I know that you can still deploy systems without Kubernetes, but I have no idea how. My journey into the cloud-native space started out of frustration from the previous industry that I was working at.So, I was working for several years as developer advocate in the open-source blockchain cryptocurrency space and it's highly similar to all of the cliches that you hear online and across the news. And out of this frustration, [laugh] I was looking at alternatives. One of them was either going into game development, into the gaming industry, or the cloud-native space and infrastructure development and deployment. And yeah, that's where I ended up. So, at the end of 2020, I joined a startup in the cloud-native space and started my social media journey.Corey: One of the things that I found that Kubernetes solved for—and to be clear, Kubernetes really came into its own after I was doing a lot more advisory work and a lot more consulting style activity rather than running my own environments, but there's an entire universe of problems that the modern day engineer never has to think about due to, partially cloud and also Kubernetes as well, which is the idea of hardware or node failure. I've had middle of the night driving across Los Angeles in a panic getting to the data center because the disk array on the primary database had degraded because the drive failed. That doesn't happen anymore. And clouds have mostly solved that. It's okay, drives fail, but yeah, that's the problem for some people who live in Virginia or Oregon. I don't have to think about it myself.But you do have to worry about instances failing; what if the primary database instance dies? Well, when everything lives in a container then that container gets moved around in the stateless way between things, well great, you really only have to care instead about okay, what if all of my instances die? Or, what if my code is really crappy? To which my question is generally, what do you mean, ‘if?' All of us write crappy code.That's the nature of the universe. We open-source only the small subset that we are not actively humiliated by, which is, in a lot of ways, what you're focusing on now, over at Aqua Sec, you are an advocate for open-source. One of the most notable projects that come out of that is Trivy, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.Anaïs: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So, Trivy is our main open-source project. It's an all-in-one cloud-native security scanner. And it's actually—it's focused on misconfiguration issues, so it can help you to build more robust infrastructure definitions and configurations.So ideally, a lot of the things that you just mentioned won't happen, but it obviously, highly depends on so many different factors in the cloud-native space. But definitely misconfigurations of one of those areas that can easily go wrong. And also, not just that you have data might cease to exist, but the worst thing or, like, as bad might be that it's completely exposed online. And they are databases of different exposures where you can see all the kinds of data of information from just health data to dating apps, just being online available because the IP address is not protected, right? Things like that. [laugh].Corey: We all get those emails that start with, “Your security is very important to us,” and I know just based on that opening to an email, that the rest of that email is going to explain how security was not very important to you folks. And it's the apology, “Oops, we have messed up,” email. Now, the whole world of automated security scanners is… well, it's crowded. There are a number of different services out there that the cloud providers themselves offer a bunch of these, a whole bunch of scareware vendors at the security conferences do as well. Taking a quick glance at Trivy, one of the problems I see with it, from a cloud provider perspective, is that I see nothing that it does that winds up costing extra money on your cloud bill that you then have to pay to the cloud provider, so maybe they'll put a pull request in for that one of these days. But my sarcasm aside, what is it that differentiates Trivy from a bunch of other offerings in various spaces?Anaïs: So, there are multiple factors. If we're looking from an enterprise perspective, you could be using one of the in-house scanners from any of the cloud providers available, depending which you're using. The thing is, they are not generally going to be the ones who have a dedicated research team that provides the updates based on the vulnerabilities they find across the space. So, with an open-source security scanner or from a dedicated company, you will likely have more up-to-date information in your scans. Also, lots of different companies, they're using Trivy under the hood ultimately, or for their own scans.I can link a few where you can also find them in a Trivy repository. But ultimately, a lot of companies rely on Trivy and other open-source security scanners under the hood because they are from dedicated companies. Now, the other part to Trivy and why you might want to consider using Trivy is that in larger teams, you will have different people dealing with different components of your infrastructure, of your deployments, and you could end up having to use multiple different security scanners for all your different components from your container images that you're using, whether or not they are secure, whether or not they're following best practices that you defined to your infrastructure-as-code configurations, to you're running deployments inside of your cluster, for instance. So, each of those different stages across your lifecycle, from development to runtime, will maybe either need different security scanners, or you could use one security scanner that does it all. So, you could have in a team more knowledge sharing, you could have dedicated people who know how to use the tool and who can help out across a team across the lifecycle, and similar. So, that's one of the components that you might want to consider.Another thing is how mature is a tool, right? A lot of cloud providers, what they end up doing is they provide you with a solution, but it's nice to decoupled from anything else that you're using. And especially in the cloud-native space, you're heavily reliant on open-source tools, such as for your observability stack, right? Coming from Site Reliability Engineering also myself, I love using metrics and Grafana. And for me, if anything open-source from Loki to accessing my logs, to Grafana to dashboards, and all their integrations.I love that and I want to use the same tools that I'm using for everything else, also for my security tools. I don't want to have the metrics for my security tools visualized in a different solution to my reliability metrics for my application, right? Because that ultimately makes it more difficult to correlate metrics. So, those are, like, some of the factors that you might want to consider when you're choosing a security scanner.Corey: When you talk about thinking about this, from the perspective of an SRE is—I mean, this is definitely an artifact of where you come from and how you approach this space. Because in my world, when you have ten web servers, five application servers, and two database servers and you wind up with a problem in production, how do you fix this? Oh, it's easy. You log into one of those nodes and poke around and start doing diagnostics in production. In a containerized world, you generally can't do that, or there's a problem on a container, and by the time you're aware of that, that container hasn't existed for 20 minutes.So, how do you wind up figuring out what happens? And instrumenting for telemetry and metrics and observability, particularly at scale becomes way more important than it ever was, for me. I mean, my version of monitoring was always Nagios, which was the original Call of Duty that wakes you up at two in the morning when the hard drive fails. The world has thankfully moved beyond that and a bunch of ways. But it's not first nature for me. It's always, “Oh, yeah, that's right. We have a whole telemetry solution where I can go digging into.” My first attempt is always, oh, how do I get into this thing and poke it with a stick? Sometimes that's helpful, but for modern applications, it really feels like it's not.Anaïs: Totally. When we're moving to an infrastructure to an environment where we can deploy multiple times a day, right, and update our application multiple times a day, multiple times a day, we can introduce new security issues or other things can go wrong, right? So, I want to see—as much as I want to see all of the other failures, I want to see any security-related issues that might be deployed alongside those updates at the same frequency, right?Corey: The problem that I see across all this stuff, though, is there are a bunch of tools out there that people install, but then don't configure because, “Oh, well, I bought the tool. The end.” I mean, I think it was reported almost ten years ago or so on the big Target breach that they wound up installing some tool—I want to say FireEye, but please don't quote me on that—and it wound up firing off a whole bunch of alerts, and they figured was just noise, so they turned it all off. And it turned out no, no, this was an actual breach in progress. But people are so used to all the alarms screaming at them, that they don't dig into this.I mean, one of the original security scanners was Nessus. And I seen a lot of Nessus reports because for a long time, what a lot of crappy consultancies would do is they would white-label the output of whatever it was that Nessus said and deliver that in as the report. So, you'd wind up with 700 pages of quote-unquote, “Security issues.” And you'd have to flip through to figure out that, ah, this supports a somewhat old SSL negotiation protocol, and you're focusing on that instead of the oh, and by the way, the primary database doesn't have a password set. Like, it winds up just obscuring it because there is so much. How does Trivy approach avoiding the information overload problem?Anaïs: That's a great question because everybody's complaining about vulnerability fatigue, of them, for the first time, scanning their container images and workloads and seeing maybe even hundreds of vulnerabilities. And one of the things that can be done to counteract that right from the beginning is investing your time into looking at the different flags and configurations that you can do before actually deploying Trivy to, for example, your cluster. That's one part of it. The other part is I mentioned earlier, you would use a security scan at different parts of your deployment. So, it's really about integrating scanning not just once you—like, in your production environment, once you've deployed everything, but using it already before and empowering engineers to actually use it on their machines.Now, they can either decide to do it or not; it's not part of most people's job to do security scanning, but as you move along, the more you do, the more you can reduce the noise and then ultimately, when you deploy Trivy, for example, inside of your cluster, you can do a lot of configuration such as scanning just for critical vulnerabilities, only scanning for vulnerabilities that already have a fix available, and everything else should be ignored. Those are all factors and flags that you can place into Trivy, for instance, and make it easier. Now, with Trivy, you won't have automated PRs and everything out of the box; you would have to set up the actions or, like, the ways to mitigate those vulnerabilities manually by yourself with tools, as well as integrating Trivy with your existing stack, and similar. But then obviously, if you want to have something more automated, if you want to have something that does more for you in the background, that's when you want to use to an enterprise solution and shift to something like Aqua Security Enterprise Platform that actually provides you with the automated way of mitigating vulnerabilities where you don't have to know much about it and it just gives you the solution and provides you with a PR with the updates that you need in your infrastructure-as-code configurations to mitigate the vulnerability [unintelligible 00:15:52]?Corey: I think that's probably a very fair answer because let's be serious when you're running a bank or someone for whom security matters—and yes, yes, I know, security should matter for everyone, but let's be serious, I care a little bit less about the security impact of, for example, I don't know, my Twitter for Pets nonsense, than I do a dating site where people are not out about their orientation or whatnot. Like, there is a world of difference between the security concerns there. “Oh, no, you might be able to shitpost as me if you compromise my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter client that I put out there for folks to use.” Okay, great. That is not the end of the world compared to other stuff.By the time you're talking about things that are critically important, yeah, you want to spend money on this, and you want to have an actual full-on security team. But open-source tools like this are terrific for folks who are just getting started or they're building something for fun themselves and as it turns out, don't have a full security budget for their weird late-night project. I think that there's a beautiful, I guess, spectrum, as far as what level of investment you can make into security. And it's nice to see the innovation continued happening in the space.Anaïs: And you just mentioned that dedicated security companies, they likely have a research team that's deploying honeypots and seeing what happens to them, right? Like, how are attackers using different vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and what can be done to mitigate them. And that ultimately translates into the configurations of the open-source tool as well. So, if you're using, for instance, a security scanner that doesn't have an enterprise company with a research team behind it, then you might have different input into the data of that security scanner than if you do, right? So, these are, like, additional considerations that you might want to take when choosing a scanner. And also that obviously depends on what scanning you want to do, on the size of your company, and similar, right?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: Something that I do find fairly interesting is that you started off, as you say, doing DevRel in the open-source blockchain world, then you went to work as an SRE, and then went back to doing DevRel-style work. What got you into SRE and what got you out of SRE, other than the obvious having worked in SRE myself and being unhappy all the time? I kid, but what was it that got you into that space and then out of it?Anaïs: Yeah. Yeah, but no, it's a great question. And it's, I guess, also was shaped my perspective on different tools and, like, the user experience of different tools. But ultimately, I first worked in the cloud-native space for an enterprise tool as developer advocate. And I did not like the experience of working for a paid solution. Doing developer advocacy for it, it felt wrong in a lot of ways. A lot of times you were required to do marketing work in those situations.And that kind of got me out of developer advocacy into SRE work. And now I was working partially or mainly as SRE, and then on the side, I was doing some presentations in developer advocacy. However, that split didn't quite work, either. And I realized that the value that I add to a project is really the way I convey information, which I can't do if I'm busy fixing the infrastructure, right? I can't convey the information of as much of how the infrastructure has been fixed as I can if I'm working with an engineering team and then doing developer advocacy, solely developer advocacy within the engineering team.So, how I ultimately got back into developer advocacy was just simply by being reached out to by my manager at Aqua Security, and Itay telling me, him telling me that he has a role available and if I want to join his team. And it was open-source-focused. Given that I started my career for several years working in the open-source space and working with engineers, contributing to open-source tools, it was kind of what I wanted to go back to, what I really enjoy doing. And yeah, that's how that came about [laugh].Corey: For me, I found that I enjoy aspects of the technology part, but I find I enjoy talking to people way more. And for me, the gratifying moment that keeps me going, believe it or not, is not necessarily helping giant companies spend slightly less money on another giant company. It's watching people suddenly understand something they didn't before, it's watching the light go on in their eyes. And that's been addictive to me for a long time. I've also found that the best way for me to learn something is to teach someone else.I mean, the way I learned Git was that I foolishly wound up proposing a talk, “Terrible Ideas in Git”—we'll teach it by counterexample—four months before the talk. And they accepted it, and crap, I'd better learn enough get to give this talk effectively. I don't recommend this because if you miss the deadline, I checked, they will not move the conference for you. But there really is something to be said for watching someone learn something by way of teaching it to them.Anaïs: It's actually a common strategy for a lot of developer advocates of making up a talk and then waiting whether or not it will get accepted. [laugh] and once it gets accepted, that's when you start learning the tool and trying to figure it out. Now, it's not a good strategy, obviously, to do that because people can easily tell that you just did that for a conference. And—Corey: Sounds to me, like, you need to get better at bluffing. I kid.Anaïs: [laugh].Corey: I kid. Don't bluff your way through conference talks as a general rule. It tends not to go well. [laugh].Anaïs: No. It's a bad idea. It's a really bad idea. And so, I ultimately started learning the technologies or, like, the different tools and projects in the cloud-native space. And there are lots, if you look at the CNCF landscape, right? But just trying to talk myself through them on my YouTube channel. So, my early videos on my channel, it's just very much on the go of me looking for the first time at somebody's documentation and not making any sense out of them.Corey: It's surprising to me how far that gets you. I mean, I guess I'm always reminded of that Tom Hanks movie from my childhood Big where he wakes up—the kid wakes up as an adult one day, goes to work, and bluffs his way into working at a toy company. He's in a management meeting and just they're showing their new toy they're going to put out there and he's, “I don't get it.” Everyone looks at him like how dare you say it? And, “I don't get it. What's fun about this?” Because he's a kid.And he wants to getting promoted to vice president because wow, someone pointed out the obvious thing. And so often, it feels like using a tool or a product, be it open-source or enterprise, it is clearly something different in my experience of it when I try to use this thing than the person who developed it. And very often it's that I don't see the same things or think of the problem space the same way that the developers did, but also very often—and I don't mean to call anyone in particular out here—it's a symptom of a terrible user interface or user experience.Anaïs: What you've just said, a lot of times, it's just about saying the thing that nobody that dares to say or nobody has thought of before, and that gets you obviously, easier, further [laugh] then repeating what other people have already mentioned, right? And a lot of what you see a lot of times in these—also an open-source projects, but I think more even in closed-source enterprise organizations is that people just repeat whatever everybody else is saying in the room, right? You don't have that as much in the open-source world because you have more input or easier input in public than you do otherwise, but it still happens that I mean, people are highly similar to each other. If you're contributing to the same project, you probably have a similar background, similar expertise, similar interests, and that will get you to think in a similar way. So, if there's somebody like, like a high school student maybe, somebody just graduated, somebody from a completely different industry who's looking at those tools for the first time, it's like, “Okay, I know what I'm supposed to do, but I don't understand why I should use this tool for that.” And just pointing that out, gets you a response, most of the time. [laugh].Corey: I use Twitter and use YouTube. And obviously, I bias more for short, pithy comments that are dripping in sarcasm, whereas in a long-form video, you can talk a lot more about what you're seeing. But the problem I have with bad user experience, particularly bad developer experience, is that when it happens to me—and I know at a baseline level, that I am reasonably competent in technical spaces, but when I encounter a bad interface, my immediate instinctive reaction is, “Oh, I'm dumb. And this thing is for smart people.” And that is never, ever true, except maybe with quantum computing. Great, awesome. The Hello World tutorial for that stuff is a PhD from Berkeley. Good luck if you can get into that. But here in the real world where the rest of us play, it's just a bad developer experience, but my instinctive reaction is that there's stuff I don't know, and I'm not good enough to use this thing. And I get very upset about that.Anaïs: That's one of the things that you want to do with any technical documentation is that the first experience that anybody has, no matter the background, with your tool should be a success experience, right? Like people should look at it, use maybe one command, do one thing, one simple thing, and be like, “Yeah, this makes sense,” or, like, this was fun to do, right? Like, this first positive interaction. And it doesn't have to be complex. And that's what many people I think get wrong, that they try to show off how powerful a tool is, of like, oh, “My God, you can do all those things. It's so exciting, right?” But [laugh] ultimately, if nobody can use it or if most of the people, 99% of the people who try it for the first time have a bad experience, it makes them feel uncomfortable or any negative emotion, then it's really you're approaching it from the wrong perspective, right?Corey: That's very apt. I think it's so much of whether people stick with something long enough to learn it and find the sharp edges has to do with what their experience looks like. I mean, back when I was more or less useless when it comes to anything that looked like programming—because I was a sysadmin type—I started contributing to SaltStack. And what was amazing about that was Tom Hatch, the creator of the project had this pattern that he kept up for way too long, where whenever anyone submitted an issue, he said, “Great, well, how about you fix it?” And because we had a patch, like, “Well, I'm not good at programming.” He's like, “That's okay. No one is. Try it and we'll see.”And he accepted every patch and then immediately, you'd see another patch come in ten minutes later that fixed the problems in your patch. But it was the most welcoming and encouraging experience, and I'm not saying that's a good workflow for an open-source maintainer, but he still remains one of the best humans I know, just from that perspective alone.Anaïs: That's amazing. I think it's really about pointing out that there are different ways of doing open-source [laugh] and there is no one way to go about it. So, it's really about—I mean, it's about the community, ultimately. That's what it boils down to, of you are dependent, as an open-source project, on the community, so what is the best experience that you can give them? If that's something that you want to and can invest in, then yeah [laugh] that's probably the best outcome for everybody.Corey: I do have one more question, specifically around things that are more timely. Now, taking a quick look at Trivy and recent features, it seems like you've just now—now-ish—started supporting cloud scanning as well. Previously, it was effectively, “Oh, this scans configuration and containers. Okay, great.” Now, you're targeting actually scanning cloud providers themselves. What does this change and what brought you to this place, as someone who very happily does not deal with AWS?Anaïs: Yeah, totally. So, I just started using AWS, specifically to showcase this feature. So, if you look at the Aqua Open Source YouTube channel, you will find several tutorials that show you how to use that feature, among others.Now, what I mentioned earlier in the podcast already is that Trivy is really versatile, it allows you to scan different aspects of your stack at different stages of your development lifecycle. And that's made possible because Trivy is ultimately using different open-source projects under the hood. For example, if you want to scan your infrastructure-as-code misconfigurations, it's using a tool called tfsec, specifically for Terraform. And then other tools for other scanning, for other security scanning. Now, we have—or had; it's going to be probably deprecated—a tool called CloudSploit in the Aqua open-source project suite.Now, that's going to, kind of like, the functionality that CloudSploit was providing is going to get converted to become part of Trivy, so everything scanning-related is going to become part of Trivy that really, like, once you understand how Trivy works and all of the CLI commands in Trivy have exactly the same structure, it's really easy to scan from container images to infrastructure-as-code, to generating s-bombs to scanning also now, your cloud infrastructure and Trivy can scan any of your AWS services for misconfigurations, and it's using basically the AWS client under the hood to connect with the services of everything you have set up there, and then give you the list of misconfigurations. And once it has done the scan, you can then drill down further into the different aspects of your misconfigurations without performing the entire scan again, since you likely have lots and lots of resources, so you wouldn't want to scan them every time again, right, when you perform the scan. So, once something has been scanned, Trivy will know whether the resource changed or not, it won't scan it again. That's the same way that in-classes scanning works right now. Once a container image has been scanned for vulnerabilities, it won't scan the same container image again because that would just waste time. [laugh]. So yeah, do check it out. It's our most recent feature, and it's going to come out also to the other cloud providers out there. But we're starting with AWS and this kind of forced me to finally [laugh] look at it for the sake of it. But I'm not going to be happy. [laugh].Corey: No, I don't think anyone is. It's every time I see on a resume that someone says, “Oh, I'm an expert in AWS,” it's, “No you're not.” They have 400-some-odd services now. We have crossed the point long ago, where I can very convincingly talk about AWS services that do not exist to Amazonians and not get called out for it because who in the world knows what they run? And half of their services sound like something I made up to be funny, but they're very real. It's wild to me that it is a sprawling as it is and apparently continues to work as a viable business.But no one knows all of it and everyone feels confused, lost, and overwhelmed every time they look at the AWS console. This has been my entire career in life for the last six years, and I still feel that way. So, I'm sure everyone else does, too.Anaïs: And this is how misconfigurations happen, right? You're confused about what you're actually supposed to do and how you're supposed to do it. And that's, for example, with all the access rights in Google Cloud, something that I'm very familiar with, that completely overwhelms you and you get super frustrated by, and you don't even know what you give access to. It's like, if you've ever had to configure Discord user roles, it's a similar disaster. You will not know which user has access to which. They kind of changed it and try to improve it over the past year, but it's a similar issue that you face in cloud providers, just on a much larger-scale, not just on one chat channel. [laugh]. So.Corey: I think that is probably a fair place to leave it. I really want to thank you for spending as much time with me as you have talking about the trials and travails of, well, this industry, for lack of a better term. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Anaïs: So, I have a weekly DevOps newsletter on my blog, which is anaisurl—like, how you spell U-R-L—and then dot com. anaisurl.com. That's where I have all the links to my different channels, to all of the resources that are published where you can find out more as well. So, that's probably the best place. Yeah.Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to that in the show notes. I really want to thank you for being as generous with your time as you have been. Thank you.Anaïs: Thank you for having me. It was great.Corey: Anaïs, open-source developer advocate at Aqua Security. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that I will never see because it's buried under a whole bunch of minor or false-positive vulnerability reports.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About AdamAdam is an independent cloud consultant that helps startups build products on AWS. He's also the host of AWS FM, a podcast with guests from around the AWS community, and an AWS DevTools Hero.Adam is passionate about open source and has made a handful of contributions to the AWS CDK over the years. In 2020 he created Ness, an open source CLI tool for deploying web sites and apps to AWS.Previously, Adam co-founded StatMuse—a Disney backed startup building technology that answers sports questions—and served as CTO for five years. He lives in Nixa, Missouri, with his wife and two children.Links Referenced: 17 Ways to Run Containers On AWS: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-17-ways-to-run-containers-on-aws/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aeduhm Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/adamelmore TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I encounter someone in the wild that… well, I'll just be direct, makes me feel a little bit uneasy, almost like someone's walking over my grave. And I think I've finally figured out elements of what that is. It feels sometimes like I run into people—ideally not while driving—who are trying to occupy sort of the same space in the universe, and I never quite know how to react to that.Today's guest is just one such person. Adam Elmore is an independent AWS consultant, has been all over the Twitters for a while, recently started live streaming basically his every waking moment because he is just that interesting. Adam, thank you for suffering my slings and arrows—Adam: [laugh].Corey: —and agreeing to chat with me today.Adam: I would say first of all, you don't need to be worried about anyone walking over your grave. [laugh]. That was very flattering.Corey: No, honestly, I have big enterprise companies looking to put me in my grave, but that's a separate threat model. We're good on that, for now.Adam: [laugh]. I got to set myself up here to—I'm just going to laugh a lot, and your editor or somebody's going to have to deal with that. And maybe the audience will see—[laugh].Corey: Hey, I prefer that as opposed to talking to people who have absolutely no sense of humor of which they are aware. Awesome, I have a list of companies that they should apply for immediately. So, when I say that we're trying to occupy elements of the same space in the universe, let me talk a little bit about what I mean by that. You are independent as a consultant, which is how I started this whole nonsense, and then I started gathering a company around me almost accidentally. You are an AWS Dev Tools Hero, whereas I am an AWS community villain, which is kind of a polar opposite slash anti-hero approach, and it's self-granted in my case. How did you stumble into the universe of AWS? You just realized one day you were too happy and what can you do to make yourself miserable, and this was the answer, or what?Adam: Yeah, I guess. So. I mean, I've been a software developer for 15 years, like, my whole career, that's kind of what I've done. And at some point, I started a startup called StatMuse. And I was able, as sort of a co-founder there, with venture backing, like, I was able to just kind of play with the cloud.And we deployed everything on AWS, so that was—like, I was there five years; it was sort of five years of running this, I would call it like a Digital Media Studio. Like, we built technology, but we did lots of experiments, so it felt like playing on AWS. Because we built kind of weird one-offs, these digital experiences for various organizations. The Hall of Fame was one of them. We did, like, a, like, a 3-D Talking bust of John Madden, so it was like all kinds of weird technology involved.But that was sort of five years of, I guess, spending venture money [laugh] to play on AWS. And some of that was Google money; I guess I never thought about that, but Google was an investor in StatMuse. [laugh]. Yeah, so we sort of like—I ran that for five years and was able to learn just a lot of AWS stuff that really excited me. I guess, coming from normal web development stuff, it was exciting just how much leverage you have with AWS, so I sort of dove in pretty hard. And then yeah, when I left StatMuse in 2019 I've just been, I guess, going even harder into that direction. I just really enjoy it.Corey: My first real exposure to AWS was at a company where the CTO was a, I guess we'll call him an extraordinarily early cloud evangelist. I was there as a contractor, and he was super excited and would tweet nonsensical things like, “I'm never going to rack a server ever again.” And I was a grumpy sysadmin type; I came from the ops world where anything that is new shouldn't be treated with disdain and suspicion because once you've been a sysadmin for 20 minutes, you've been there long enough to see today's shiny new shit become tomorrow's legacy garbage that you're stuck supporting. So, “Oh, great. What now?”I was very down on Cloud in those days and I encountered it with increasing frequency as I stumbled my way through my career. And at the end of 2016, I wound up deciding to go out independent and fix… well, what problems am I good at fixing that I can articulate in a sentence, and well, I'd gotten surprised by AWS bills from time to time—fortunately with someone else's money; the best kind of mistake to make—and well I know a few things. Let's get really into it. In time, I came to learn that cost and architecture the same thing in cloud, and now I don't know how the hell to describe myself. Other people love to describe me, usually with varying forms of profanity, but here we are. It really turns into the idea of forging something of your own path. And you've absolutely been doing that for at least the last three years as you become someone who's increasingly well known and simultaneously harder to describe.Adam: Yeah, I would say if you figure it out, if you know how to describe me, I would love to know because just coming up with the title—for this episode you needed, like, my title, I don't know what my title is. I'm also—like, we talked about independent, so nobody sort of gives me a title. I would love to just receive one if you think of one, [laugh] if anyone listening thinks of one… it's increasingly hard to, sort of like, even decide what I care most about. I know I need to, like, probably niche down, I feel like you've kind of niched into the billing stuff. I can't just be like, “I'm an AWS guy,” because AWS is so big. But yeah, I have no idea.Corey: Anyone who claims, “Oh, I'm an expert in AWS,” is lying or trying to sell something.Adam: [laugh]. Exactly.Corey: I love that. It's, “Really? I have some questions to establish that for you.” As far as naming what it is, you do, first piece of advice, never ever, ever, ever listen to someone who works at AWS; those people are awful at naming things, as evidenced by basically every service they've ever launched. But you are actually fairly close to being an AWS expert. You did a six-week speed-run through every certification that they offer and that is nothing short of astonishing. How'd it come about?Adam: It's a unique intersection of skills that I think I have. And I'm not very self-aware, I don't know all my strengths and weaknesses and I struggle to sort of nail those down, but I think one of my strengths is just ability to, like, consume information, I guess at a high volume. So, I'm like an auditory learner; I can listen to content really fast and sort of retain enough. And then I think the other skill I have is just I'm good at tests. I've always said that, like, going back to school, like, high school, I always felt like I was really good at multiple-choice tests. I don't know if that's a skill or some kind of innate talent.But I think those two things combined, and then, like, eight years of building on AWS, and that sort of frames how I was able to take all that on. And I don't know that I really set out thinking I will do it in six weeks. I took the first few and then did them pretty fast and thought, “I wonder how quickly I could do all of them.” And I just kind of at that point, it became this sort of goal. I have to take on certain challenges occasionally that just sound fun for no reason other than they sound fun and that was kind of the thing for those six weeks. [laugh].Corey: I have two certifications: Cloud Practitioner and the SysOps Administrator Associate. Those were interesting.Adam: You took the new one, right? The new SysOps with the labs and stuff I'd love to hear about that.Corey: I did, back when it was in beta. That was a really interesting experience and I'll definitely get to that, but I wound up, for example, getting a question wrong in the Cloud Practitioner exam four years ago or so, when it was, “How long does it take to restore an RDS instance from backup?” And I gave the honest answer instead of the by-the-book, correct answer. That's part of the problem is that I've been doing this stuff too long and I know how these things break and what the real world looks like. Certifications are also very much a snapshot at a point in time.Because I write the Last Week in AWS newsletter, I'm generally up-to-the-minute on what has changed, and things that were not possible yesterday, suddenly are possible today, so I need to know when was this certification launched. Oh, it was in early 2021. Yeah, I needed to be a lot more specific; which week? And then people look at me very strangely and here we are.The Systems Administrator Certification was interesting because this is the first one, to my knowledge, where they started doing a live lab as a—Adam: Yeah.Corey: Component of this. And I don't think it's a breach of the NDA to point out that one of the exams was, “Great. Configure CloudWatch out of the box to do this thing that it's supposed to do out of the box.” And I've got to say that making the service do what it's supposed to do with no caveats is probably the sickest shade I've ever seen anyone throw at AWS, like, configuring the service is so bad that it is going to be our test to prove you know what you're doing. That is amazing.Adam: [laugh]. Yeah, I don't have any shade through I'm not as good with the, like, ability to come off, like, witty and kind while still criticizing things. So, I generally just try not to because I'm bad at it. [laugh].Corey: It's why I generally advise people don't try, in seriousness. It's not that people can't be clever; it's that the failure mode of clever is ‘asshole' and I'm not a big fan of making people feel worse based upon the things that I say and do. It's occasionally I wind up getting yelled at by Amazonians saying that the people who built a service didn't feel great about something I said, and my instinctive immediate reaction is, “Oh, shit, that wasn't my intention. How did I screw this up?” Given a bit of time, I realized that well hang on a minute because I'm not—they're not my target audience. I'm trying to explain this to other customers.And, on some level, if you're going to charge tens of millions of dollars a month for a service or more, maybe make a better one, not for nothing. So, I see both sides of it. I'm not intentionally trying to cause pain, but I'm also not out here insulting people individually. Like, sometimes people make bad decisions, sometimes individually, sometimes in a group. And then we have a service name we have to live with, and all right, I guess I'm going to make fun of that forever. It's fun that keeps it engaging for me because otherwise, it's boring.Adam: No, I hear you. No, and somebody's got to do it. I'm glad you do it and do it so well because, I mean, you got to keep them honest. Like, that's the thing. Keep AWS in check.Corey: Something that I went through somewhat recently was a bit of an awakening. I have no problem revisiting old opinions and discovering that huh, I no longer agree with it; it's time to evolve that opinion. The CDK specifically was one of those where I looked at it and thought this thing looks a little hokey. So, I started using it in Python and sure enough, the experience was garbage. So cool, the CDK is a piece of crap. There we go. My job is easy.I was convinced to take a second look at it via TypeScript, a language I do not know and did not have any previous real experience with. So, I spent a few days just powering through it, and now I'm a convert. I think it's amazing. It is my default go-to for building AWS infrastructure. And all it took was a little bit of poking and prodding to get me to change my mind on that. You've taken it to another level and you started actively contributing to the AWS CDK. What was your journey with that, honestly, remarkable piece of software?Adam: Yeah, so I started contributing to CDK when I was actually doing a lot of Python development. So, I worked with a company that was doing—there was a Python shop. So actually, the first thing I contributed was a Python function construct, which is sort of the equivalent of the Node.js function construct, which like, you can just basically point at a TypeScript file and it transpiles it, bundles it, and does all that, right? So, it makes it easy to deploy TypeScript as a Lambda function.Well, I mean, it ends up being a JavaScript Lambda function, but anyway, that was the Python function construct. And then I sort of got really into it. So, I got pretty hooked on using the CDK in every place that I could. I'm a huge fan, and I do primarily write in TypeScript these days. I love being able to write TypeScript front-end and back, so built a lot of, like, Next.JS front-ends, and then I'm building back-ends with CDK TypeScript.Yeah, I've had, like, a lot of conversations about CDK. I think there's definitely a group that's sort of, against the CDK, if you're thinking in terms of, like, beginners. And I do see where, for people who aren't as familiar with AWS, or maybe this is their entry point into cloud development, it does a lot of things that maybe you're not aware of that, you know, you're now kind of responsible for. So, it's deploying—like, it makes it really easy to write, like, three lines of TypeScript that stand up an entire VPC with all this configuration and Managed NAT Gateways and [laugh] everything else. And you may not be aware of all the things you just stood up.So, CloudFormation maybe is a little more—sort of gives you that better visibility into what you're creating. So, I've definitely seen that pushback. But I think for people who really, like, have built a lot of applications on AWS, I think the CDK is just such a time-saver. I mean, I spend so much less time building the same things in the CDK versus CloudFormation. I'm a big fan.Corey: For me, I've learned enough about JavaScript to be dangerous and it seems like TypeScript is more or less trying to automate a bunch of people's jobs away, which is basically, from I can tell, their job is to go on the internet and complain about someone's JavaScript. So great, that that's really all it does is it complains, “Oh, this ambiguous. You should be more specific about it.” And great. Awesome. I still haven't gotten into scenarios where I've been caught out by typing issues, and very often I find that it just feels like sheer bloodymindedness, but I smile, nod, bend the knee and life goes on.Adam: [laugh]. When you've got a project that's, like, I don't know, a few months old—or better, a few years old—and you need to do, like, major refactoring, that's when TypeScript really saves you just a ton of time. Like, when you can make a change in a type or in actual implementation stuff and then see the ripple effects and then sort of go around the codebase and fix those things, it's just a lot easier than doing it in JavaScript and discovering stuff at runtime. So, I'm a big TypeScript fan. I don't know where it's all headed. I know there's people that are not fans of, like, transpiling your Lambda functions, for instance. Like, why not just ship good JavaScript? And I get that case, too. Yeah, but I've definitely—I felt the productivity boost, I guess—if that's the thing—from TypeScript.Corey: For me, I'm still at a point where I'm learning the edges of where things start and where they stop. But one of the big changes I made was that I finally, after 15 years, gave up my beloved Vim as my editor for this and started using VS Code. Because the reasons that I originally went with Vi were understandable when you realize what I was. I'm always going to be remoting into network gear or random—on maintained Unix boxes. Vi is going to be everywhere on everything and that's fine.Yeah, I don't do that anymore, and increasingly, I find that everything I'm writing is local. It is not something that is tied to a remote thing that I need to login and edit by hand. At that point, we are in disaster area. And suddenly it's nice. I mean things like tab completion, where it just winds up completing the rest of the variable name or, once you enable Copilot and absolutely not CodeWhisperer yet, it winds up you tab complete your entire application. Why not? It's just outsourcing it to Stack Overflow without that pesky copy and paste step.Adam: Yeah, I don't know how in the weeds you want to get on your p—I don't know, in terms of technical stuff, but Copilot both blows me away—there are days where it autocompletes something that I just, I can't fathom how—it pulled in not just, like, the patterns that it found, obviously, in training, but, like, the context in the file I'm working and sort of figured out what I was trying to do. Sometimes it blows me away. A lot of times, though, it frustrates me because of TypeScript. Like, I'm used to Typescript and types saving me from typing a lot. Like, I can tab-complete stuff because I have good types defined, right, or it's just inferred from the libraries I'm using.It's tough though when GitHub is fighting with TypeScript and VS Code. But it's funny that you came from Vim and you now live in VS Code. I really am trying to move from VS Code to, like, the Vim world, mostly because of Twitch streamers that blow my mind with what they can do in Vim [laugh] and how fast they can move. I do—every time I move my hand, like, over to the arrow keys, I feel a little sad and I wish I just did Vim.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lambda Cloud. They offer GPU instances with pricing that's not only scads better than other cloud providers, but is also accessible and transparent. Also, check this out, they get a lot more granular in terms of what's available. AWS offers NVIDIA A100 GPUs on instances that only come in one size and cost $32/hour. Lambda offers instances that offer those GPUs as single card instances for $1.10/hour. That's 73% less per GPU. That doesn't require any long term commitments or predicting what your usage is gonna look like years down the road. So if you need GPUs, check out Lambda. In beta, they're offering 10TB of free storage and, this is key, data ingress and egress are both free. Check them out at lambdalabs.com/cloud. That's l-a-m-b-d-a-l-a-b-s.com/cloud.Corey: There are people who have just made it into an entire lifestyle, on some level. And I'm fair to middling; I've known people who are dark wizards at it. In practice, I found that my productivity was never constrained by how quickly I can type. It's one of those things where it's, I actually want to stop and have my brain catch up sometimes, believe it or not, for those who follow me on Twitter. It's the idea of wanting to make sure that I am able to intelligently and rationally wrap my head around what it is I'm doing.And okay, just type out a whole bunch of boilerplate is, like, the least valuable use of anything and that is where I find things like Copilot working super well, where I, if I'm doing CloudFormation, for example, the fact that it tab-completes all the necessary attributes and can go back and change them or whatnot, that's an enormous time saver. Same story with the CDK, although with some constructs, it doesn't quite understand which ones get certain values to it. And I really liked the idea behind it. I think this is in some ways, the future of IDEs, to a point.Adam: Oh, for sure. I think, like, the case, you call that with CloudFormation, you don't have really typeahead in VS Code, at least I'm not using anything. Maybe there are extensions that give you that in VS Code. But to have Copilot fill in required prompts on a CloudFormation template, that's a lifesaver. Because I just, every time I write CloudFormation, I've just got the docs up and I'm copying stuff I've done before or whatever; like, to save that time it's huge. But CodeWhisperer, not so much? Is it not, I guess, up to snuff? I haven't seen it or played with it at all.Corey: It's still very early days and it hasn't had exposure outside of Amazonian codebases to my understanding, so it's, like, “Learn to code like an Amazonian.” And you can fill in your own joke here on that one. I imagine it's like—isn't that—aren't they primarily a Java shop, for one? And all right. It turns out most of my code doesn't need to operate the way that there's does.Adam: I didn't know that they were training it just internally. Like, I'm assuming Copilot is trained on, like, Stack Overflow or something, right? Or just all of GitHub, I guess.Corey: And GitHub and a bunch of other things, and people are yelling at them for it, and I haven't been tracking that. But honestly, the CodeWhisperer announcement taught me things about Copilot, which is weird, which tells me that none of these companies are great at explaining this. Like I can just write a comment in this of, “Add an S3 bucket,” and then Copilot will tab-complete the entirety of adding an S3 bucket, usually even secure, which is awesome. They also fix the early Copilot teething problems of tab-completing people's AWS API credentials. You know, the—yeah, they've fixed a lot of that, thankfully.Adam: Yeah.Corey: But it's still one of those neat things that you can just basically start—it gets a little bit closer to describe what you want the application to do and then it'll automatically write it for you on the back-end. Sure, sometimes it makes naive decisions that do not bear out, but again, it's still early days. I'm optimistic.Adam: Yeah, that reminds me of, like, the, I mean, the serverless cloud, so serverless framework folks, like, what they're doing where they're sort of inferring your infrastructure based on you just write an app and it sort of creates the infrastructure as code for you, or just sort of infers it all from your code. So, if you start using a bucket, it'll create a bucket for that. That definitely seems to be a movement as well, where just do less as a developer [laugh] seems to be the theme.Corey: Yeah, just move up the stack. We see this time and time again. I mean, look at the—I use this analogy from time to time from the sysadmin world, but in the late-90s, if you wanted to build a web server, you needed a spare week and an intimate knowledge of GCC compiler flags. In time, it became oh, great, now it's rpm install, then yum install, then ensure present with something like Puppet, and then Docker has it, and now it's just a checkbox on the S3 page, and you're running a static site. Things don't get harder with time, and I don't think that as a developer, your time is best spent writing by hand the proper syntax for a for loop or whatnot.It's not the differentiated value. Talk to me instead about what you want that thing to do. That was my big problem with Lambda when it first came out and I spent two weeks writing my first Lambda function—because I'm bad at programming—where I had to learn the exact format of expected for input and output, and now any Lambda function I write takes me a couple of minutes to write because I'm also bad at programming and don't know what tests are.Adam: [laugh]. Tests are overrated, I don't spend a lot of time writing t—I mean, I do a lot of stuff alone and I do a lot of stuff for myself, so in those contexts, I'm not writing tests if I'm being honest. I stream now and everyone on the stream is constantly asking, “Where are the tests?” Like, there are no tests. I'm sorry. [laugh]. Was someone else's stream.Corey: Oh yeah, it used to be though, that you had to be a little sneakier to have other people do work for you. Copilot makes it easier and presumably CodeWhisperer will, too. Used to be that if AWS launched new service and I didn't know how to configure it, all I would do is restrict a role down to only being able to work with that service, attach that to a user and then just drop the credentials on Twitter or GitHub. And I waited 20 minutes and I came back and sure enough, someone configured it and was already up and mining Bitcoin. So, turn that off, take what they built, and off the production with it. Problem solved. Oh, and rotate those credentials, unless you enjoy pain. Problem solved. The end. And I don't know if it's a best practice, but it sure was effective.Adam: Yeah, that would do it. Well, they're just like scanners now, right, like they're just scanning GitHub public repos for any credentials that are leaked like that, and they're available within seconds. You can literally, like, push a public repo with credentials and it is being [laugh] used within minutes. It's nuts.Corey: GitHub has some automatic back channel thing—I believe; I haven't done an experiment lately, but I believe that AWS will intentionally shoot down the credential as soon as it gets reported, which is kind of amazing. I really should do some more experiments with it just to see how disastrous this can get.Adam: Yeah. No, I'd be curious. Please let me know. I guess you'll tweet about it so I'll see it.Corey: Can I borrow your account for a few minutes?Adam: Yeah. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's fun. Now, the secret to my 17 Ways to Run Containers On AWS is in almost every case, those containers can be crypto miners, so it's not just about having too many services do the same thing; it's the attack surface continues to grow and expand in the fullness of time. I'm not saying this is right or wrong; it is what it is, but it's also something that I think people have an understated appreciation for.Let's change topic a little bit. Something you've been doing lately and talking about is the idea of building a course on AWS. You're clearly capable of doing the engineering work. That's not in question. You've been a successful consultant for years, which tells me you also know how to deliver software that meets customer requirements, as opposed to, “Well, the spec was shitty, but I wrote it anyway,” because you don't last long as a consultant if you enjoy being able to afford to eat if that's the direction you go in. Now, you're drifting toward becoming a teacher. Tell me about that. First, what makes you think that's something you're good at?Adam: So, I don't know. I don't know that I'm good at it and I guess I'll find out. I've been streaming, like, on Twitch just my work days, and that's been early signs that I think I'm okay at it, at least. I think it's very different, obviously, like, a self-paced course are going to be very different from streaming for hours, so there's a lot more editing and thoughtfulness involved, but I do think, like, I've always wanted to teach. So, even before I got into technology—I was pretty late into technology; it was after high school. Like back in high school, I always thought I wanted to be a professor.I just enjoyed, I guess the idea of presenting ideas in ways that people understood. And I live in an area—so I live in the Ozarks, it's not a very tech literate area. It became, like, this thing where I felt like I could really explain technology to people who are non-technical. And that's not necessarily what my course—what I'm aiming to do. I'm trying to teach web developers how to leverage AWS, and then sort of get out of the maybe front-end only or maybe traditional web frameworks—like, they've only worked with stuff that they deploy to Heroku or whatever—trying to teach that crowd, how to leverage AWS and all these wonderful primitives that we have.So, that's not exactly the same thing, but that's sort of like, I feel like I do have the ability to translate technology to non-technical folks. And then I guess, like, for me, at this stage of my career, you know, I've done a lot of work for a company, for startups, for individual clients, and it feels very, like—I just always feel like I'm going in a hole. Like, I feel like, I'm doing this little thing and I'm serving this one customer, but the idea of being able to, I guess, serve more people and sort of spread my reach, the idea of creating something that I can share with a lot of developers who would maybe benefit from it, it just feels better, I guess. [laugh]. I don't know exactly all the reasons why that feels better, but like, at the end of the day, my consulting kind of feels like this thing I do because I just need money.And now that I need money less and less, I just feel like I'd rather do stuff that I actually am excited about. I'm actually really excited about the outcomes for creating a course where, you know, I think I can maybe—my style of teaching or something could resonate with some group of people. Yeah, so that's it. It's AWS for web devs. The thought is that I'm going to create courses after this. Like, I hope to move into more education, less consulting. That's where I'm at.Corey: I would say you're probably selling yourself fairly short. I've seen a lot of the content you've put out over the years and I learned a lot from it every time. I think that there are some folks who put courses out where, one, they don't have the baseline knowledge around what it is that they're teaching, it just feels like a grift, and another failure mode is that people know how to do the thing, but they have no idea how to teach it to someone who isn't them. And there's nothing inherently wrong with not knowing how to teach; it is its own distinct skill. The problem is when you don't recognize that about yourself and in turn, wind up having some somewhat significant challenges.Adam: Yeah. No, I know that one of the struggles is, I work with pretty obscure technologies on AWS. Not obscure, but like, I have a very specific way I build APIs on AWS and I don't know that's generally, if you're taking a bunch of web developers and trying to move them into AWS is probably not the stack that I use. So, that is part of it, but that's also kind of to my benefit, I guess. It works for me a little bit in that I'm less familiar with maybe the more beginner-friendly way to enter into AWS.It's been years, so I think I can kind of come at it a little fresh and that'll help me produce a course that maybe meets them where they're at better. Yeah, the grifting thing, I'm definitely sensitive to just this idea of putting out a course. It was hard for me to really go out there and say I was making a course, even on Twitter, because I just feel like there's, like, some stereotype—I don't know, there's an association with that, for me at least, for my perception of course creation. But I know that there are people who've done it right and do it for the right reasons. And I think to the extent that I could hit that, you know, both those things, do it right and do it for the right reasons, then it's exciting to me. And if I can't, and it turned out not good at teaching, then I'll move on and do more consulting, I guess, [laugh] or streaming on Twitch.Corey: You are very clearly self-aware enough that if you put something out and it isn't effective, I have zero doubt that you won't just stop selling it, you'll take it down and reach out to people. Because you, more so than most, seem very cognizant of the fact that a poor experience learning something does not in most people's cases, translate to, “Oh, my teacher is shitty.” Instead, it's, “Oh, I'm bad at this and I'm not smart enough to figure it out.” That's still the problem I run into with bad developer experience on a bunch of things that get launched. If I have a bad time, I assume it's, “Oh, I'm stupid. I wish someone had told me.”And first, they did, secondly, it's the sense that no, it's just not being very clearly explained and the folks who wrote the documentation or talking about it are too close to what they've built to understand what it's like to look at this thing from fresh eyes. They're doing a poor job of setting the stage to explain the value it brings and in what scenario, you should be using this.Adam: It's a long process. I want to launch the course in the fall, but in the process of building out the course, I'm really going to be doing workshops and individual—like, I just have a lot of friends that are web developers and I'm going to be kind of getting on with them and teaching them this material and just trying to see what resonates. I'm going to a lot of trouble, I guess, to make sure I'm not just putting out a thing just to say I made a course. Like, I don't actually want to say I made a course, so if I'm going to do it, it's like most things I do I really kind of throw myself into. And I know if I spend enough energy and effort, I think I can make something that at least helps some people. I guess we'll see.Corey: I look forward to it. Any idea as far as rough timeline goes?Adam: Yeah, I hope to launch in the fall. But if it takes longer, I don't know. I've heard people say, to do a course right, you should spend a year on it. And maybe that's what I do.Corey: No, I love that answer. It's great. You're just saying I want to launch in the fall, which is sufficiently vague, and if that winds up not being vague enough, you could always qualify with, “Well, I didn't say what year.”Adam: [laugh].Corey: So, great you know, it's always going to be the fall somewhere.Adam: [laugh]. I just know, like, when someone says you should spend a year I just do things very hard. Like I really, like, throw a lot of time and obsess, like, I'm very obsessive. And when I do something, it's hard for me imagine doing any one thing for a year because I burn myself out. Like, I obsess very hard for usually, like, three months, it's usually, like, a quarter, and then I fall off the face of the earth for three months and I basically mope around the house and I'm just too tired to do anything else. So, I think right now I'm streaming and that's kind of been my obsession. I'm three weeks in so we got a few more months and then we'll see, [laugh] we'll see how I maintain it.Corey: Well, I look forward to seeing how it comes out. You'll have to come back and let us know when it's ready for launch.Adam: Yeah, that sounds great.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time and taking me through what you're up to. If people want to learn more, what's the best place for them to find you?Adam: Yeah, I think Twitter. I mean, I mostly hang out on Twitter, and these days Twitch. So, Twitter my handle—I guess you'll put it, like, in the thing description or something. It's like the phonetic—Corey: Oh, we will absolutely toss it into the show notes, where useful content goes to linger.Adam: [laugh]. It's like A-E-D-U-H-M. It's like a—it's the phonetic way of saying Adam, I guess. And then on Twitch, I'm adamelmore. So, those are the two places I spend most my time.Corey: And off to the show notes it goes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it, Adam.Adam: Thank you so much for having me, Corey. I really appreciate it.Corey: Adam Elmore, independent AWS consultant. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment that attempts to teach us exactly what we got wrong, but fails utterly because you're terrible at teaching things.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You're looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why_amazon_cant_end_the_release_tidal_wave/Want to watch the full dramatic reenactment of this podcast? Watch the YouTube Video here: https://youtu.be/eKMxBNF5N-kNever miss an episode Join the Last Week in AWS newsletter Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Help the show Leave a review Share your feedback Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts What's Corey up to? Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig) See our recent work at the Duckbill Group Apply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

About JonA husband, father of 3 wonderful kids who turned Podcaster during the pandemic. If you told me in early 2020 I would be making content or doing a podcast, I probably would have said "Nah, I couldn't see myself making YouTube videos". In fact, I told my kids, no way am I going to make videos for YouTube. Well, a year later I'm over 100 uploads and my subscriber count is growing.Links Referenced: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-myer/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/_JonMyer jonmyer.com: https://jonmyer.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I get to talk to a guest who has the same problem that I do. Now, not that they're a loud, obnoxious jerk, but rather that describing what they do succinctly is something of a challenge. It's not really an elevator pitch anymore if you have to sabotage the elevator before you start giving it. I'm joined by Jon Myer. Jon, thank you for joining me. What the hell do you do?Jon: Corey, thanks for that awesome introduction. What do I do? I get to talk into a microphone. And sometimes I get to stare at myself on camera, whether it makes a recording or not. And either I talk to myself or I talk to awesome people like you. And I get to interview and tell other people's stories on my show; I pull out the interesting parts and we have a lot of freaking fun doing it.Corey: I suddenly feel like I've tumbled down the rabbit hole and I'm in the wrong side of the conversation. Are we both trying to stand in the same part of the universe? My goodness.Jon: Is this your podcast or mine? Maybe I should do an introduction right now to introduce you onto it and we'll see how this works.Corey: The dueling podcast banjo. I liked the approach quite a bit. So, you have done a lot of very interesting things. For example, once upon a time, you worked at AWS. But you have to go digging to figure that out because everything I'm seeing about you in your professional bio and the rest is forward-looking, as opposed to Former Company A, Former Company B, and this one time I was an early investor in Company C, which means, that's right, one of the most interesting things about me is that I wrote a check once upon a time, which is never something I ever want to say about myself, ever. You're very forward-looking, and I strive to do the same. How do you wind up coming at it from that position?Jon: When I first left AWS—it's been a year ago, so I served my time—and I actually used to have ex-Amazonian on it and listed on it. But as I continuously look at it, I used to have a podcast called The AWS Blogger. And it was all about AWS and everything, and there's nothing wrong with them. And what I would hear—Corey: Oh, there's plenty wrong with them, but please continue.Jon: [laugh]. We won't go there. But anyway, you know, kind of talking about it and thinking about it ex-Amazonian, yeah, that's great, you put it on your resume, put it on your stuff, and it, you know, allows you that foot in the door. But I want to look at and separate myself from AWS, in that I am my own independent voice. Yes, I worked for them; great company, I've learned so much from them, worked with some awesome people there, but my voice in the community has become very engaging and trustworthy. I don't want to say I'm no longer an Amazonian; I still have some of the guidelines, some of the stuff that's instilled in me, but I'm independent. And I want that to speak for itself when I come into a room.Corey: It's easy as hell, by the way, for me to sit here and cast stones at folks who, “Oh, you're going to talk about this big company you worked for, even though you don't work there anymore.” Yeah, I really haven't worked anywhere that most people would recognize unless they're, you know, professionally sad all the time. So, I don't have that luxury; I had to wind up telling a story that was forward-looking just because I didn't really have much of a better option. You have that option and decided to go in a direction where it presents, honestly as your viewpoint is that your best days are yet to come. And I want to be clear that for folks who are constantly challenged in our space to justify their existence there, usually because they don't look like our wildly over-represented selves, Jon, they need that credibility.And when they say that it's necessary for them, I am not besmirching that. I'm speaking from my own incredibly privileged position that you share. That is where I'm coming from on this, so I don't want people to hear this as shaming folks who are not themselves wildly over-represented. I'm not talking about you fine folks, I assure you.Jon: You can have ex-Amazonian on your resume and be very proud of it. You can remove it and still be very proud of the company. There's nothing wrong with either approach. There are some conversations that I'll be in, and I'll be on with AWS folks and I'll say, “I completely understand where you're coming from. I'm an ex-Amazonian.” And they're like, “Oh, you get us. You get the process. You get the everything.”I just want to look forward that I will be that voice in the community and that I have an understanding of what AWS is and will continuously be. And I have so much that I'm working towards that I'm very proud of where I've come from, but I do want to look forward.Corey: One of these days, I really feel like I should hang out with some Amazonians or ex-Amazonians who don't know who I am—which is easier to find than you think—and pretend that I used to work there and wonder how long I can keep the ruse going. Just because I've been told a few times that I am suspiciously Amazonian for someone who's never worked there.Jon: You have a lot of insights on the AWS processes and understanding. I think you could probably keep it going for quite a while. You will have to get that orange lanyard though, when you go to, like—Corey: I got one once when I was at a New York Summit a couple years ago. My affiliation then, before I started The Duckbill Group, was Last Week in AWS, and apparently, someone saw that and thought that I was the director of Take-this-Job-and-Shove-it, but I'll serve out my notice until Friday. So, cool; employee lanyard, it was. And I thought this is going to be awesome because I'll be able to walk around and I'll get the inside track if people think I work there. And they treated me like crap until I put the customer lanyard back on. It's, “Oh, it's better to be a customer at an AWS event than it is to be an employee.” I learned that when the fun way.Jon: There is one day that I hope to get the press or analyst lanyard. I think it would be an accomplishment for me. But you get to experience that firsthand, and I hate to switch the tables because I know it's your podcast recording, not mine, but—Corey: Having the press analyst lanyard is interesting because a lot of people are not allowed to speak to you unless they've gone through training. Which, okay, great. I will say that it is a lot nicer walking the expo floor because most of the people working the booths know that means that person is press, generally—they're not quite as familiar with analysts—but they know that regardless that they're not going to sell you a damn thing, so they basically give you a little bit of breathing room, which is awesome, especially in these pandemic times. But the challenge I have with it is that very often I want to talk to folks who are AWS employees who may not have gone through press training. And I've never gotten anyone in trouble or taken advantage of things that I hear in those conversations and write about them.Everything I write about is what I've experienced in public or as a customer, not based upon privileged inside information. I have so many NDAs at this point, I can't keep track, so I just make sure everything I talked about publicly cited I have that already.Jon: Corey, I got to flip the script real quick. I got to give you a shout-out because everybody sees you on Twitter and sees, like, “Oh, my God, he's saying this negative, that negative towards AWS.” You and I had, I don't know, it was a 30, 45 minute at the San Francisco Summit, and I think every Summit, we try to connect for a little bit. But that was really the premise I kicked off a lot of our conversations when you joined my podcast. No, this is not my podcast, this is Corey's, but anyway—Corey: And just you remember that. Please continue.Jon: [laugh]. But you know, kind of going off it you have so much insight, so much value, and you kind of really understand the entire processes and all the behind the scenes and everything that's going on that I was like, “Corey, I got to get your voice out there and show the other side of you, that you're not there trying to get people in trouble, you never poke fun of an AWS employee. I heard there was some guy named Larry that you do, but we won't jump into that.”Corey: One of the things that I think happened is, first and foremost, there is an algorithmic bias towards outrage. When I say nice things about AWS or other providers, which I do periodically, they get basically no engagement. When I say something ridiculous, inflammatory, and insulting about a company, oh, goes around the internet three times. One of the things that I'm slowly waking up to is that when I went into my Covid hibernation, my audience was a quarter of the size it is now. People don't have the context of knowing what I've been up to for the last five or six years. All they see is a handful of tweets.And yeah, of course, you wind up taking some of my more aggravated moment tweets and put a few of those on a board, and yeah, I start to look a fair bit like a jerk if you're not aware of what's going on inside-track-wise. That's not anyone else's fault, except my own, and I guess understanding and managing that perception does become something of a challenge. I mean, it's weird; Amazon is a company that famously prides itself on being misunderstood for long periods of time. I guess I never thought that would apply to me.Jon: Well, it does. Maybe that's why most people think you're an Amazonian.Corey: You know, honestly, I've got to say, there are a lot of worse things people can and do call me. Amazon has a lot to recommend it in different ways. What I find interesting now is that you've gone from large companies to sort of large companies. You were at Spot for a hot minute, then you were doing the nOps thing. But one thing that you've been focusing on a fair bit has been getting your own voice and brand out there—and we talked about this a bit at the Summit when we encountered each other which is part of what sparked this conversation—you're approaching what you're doing next in a way that I don't ever do myself. I will not do it justice, but what are you working on?Jon: All right. So Corey, when we talked at the New York Summit, things are actually moving pretty good. And some of the things that I am doing, and I've actually had a couple of really nice engagements kind of kick off is, that I'm creating highly engageable, trustworthy content for the community. Now, folks, you're asking, like, what is that? What is that really about? You do podcasts?Well, just think about some of the videos that you're seeing on customer sites right now. How are they doing? How's the views? How's the engagement? Can you actually track those back to, like, even a sales engagement in utilizing those videos?Well, as Jon Myer—and yes, this is highly scalable because guess what I am in talks with other folks to join the crew and to create these from a brand awareness portion, right? So, think about it. You have customers that you want to get engaged with: you have products, you have demos, you have reviews that you want to do, but you can't get them turned around in a quick amount of time. We take the time to actually dive into your product and pull out the value prop of the exact product, a demo, maybe a review, all right? We do sponsors as well; I have a number of them that I can talk about, so Veeam on AWS, Diabolical Coffee, there's a couple of other I cannot release just yet, but don't worry, they will be hitting out there on social pretty soon.But we take that and we make it an engaging kind of two to three-minute videos. And we say, “Listen, here's the value of it. We're going to turn this around, we're going to make this pop.” And putting this stuff, right, so we'll take the podcast and I'll put it on to my YouTube channel, you will get all my syndication, you'll get all my viewers, you'll get all my views, you'll get my outreach. Now, the kicker with that is I don't just pick any brand; I pick a trusted brand to work with because obviously, I don't want to tarnish mine or your brand. And we create these podcasts and we create these videos and we turn them around in days, not weeks, not months. And we focus on those who really need to actually present the value of their product in the environment.Corey: It sounds like you're sort of the complement to the way that I tend to approach these things. I'll periodically do analyst engagements where I'll kick the tires on a product in the space—that's usually tied to a sponsorship scenario, but not always—where, “Oh, great. You want me to explain your product to people. Great, could I actually kick the tires on it so I understand at first? Otherwise, I'm just parroting what may as well be nonsense. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not.”Very often small companies, especially early stage, do a relatively poor job of explaining the value of their product because everyone who works there knows the product intimately and they're too close to the problem. If you're going to explain what this does in a context where you have to work there and with that level of intensity on the problem space, you're really only pitching to the already converted as opposed to folks who have the expensive problem that gets in the way of them doing their actual job. And having those endless style engagements is great; they periodically then ask me, “Hey, do you want to build a bunch of custom content for us?” And the answer is, “No, because I'm bad at deadlines in that context.”And finding intelligent and fun and creative ways to tell stories takes up a tremendous amount of time and is something that I find just gets repetitive in a bunch of ways. So, I like doing the typical sponsorships that most people who listen to this are used to: “This episode is sponsored by our friends at Chex Mix.” And that's fine because I know how to handle that and I have that down to a set of study workflows. Every time I've done custom content, I find it's way more work than I anticipated, and honestly, I get myself in trouble with it.Jon: Well, when you come across it, you send them our way because guess what, we are actually taking those and we're diving deep with them. And yes, I used an Amazon term. But if you take their product—yeah [laugh]. I love the reaction I got from you. But we dive into the product. And you said it exactly: those people who are there at the facility, they understand it, they can say, “Yeah, it does this.”Well, that's not going to have somebody engaged. That's not going to get somebody excited. Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I had a call with an awesome company that I want to use their product. And I was like, “Listen, I want to know about your product a little bit more.”We demoed it for my current company, and I was like, “But how do you work for people like me: podcasters who do a lot of the work themselves? Or a social media expert?” You know, how do I get my content out there? How does that work? What's your pricing?And they're, like, “You know, we thought about getting it and see if there was a need in that space, and you're validating that there's a need.” I actually turned it around and I pitched them. I was like, “Listen, I'd love for you guys to be a sponsor on my show. I'd love for you to—let me do this. Let me do some demos. Let's get together.”And I pitched them this idea that I can be a spokesperson for their product because I actually believed in it that much just from two calls, 30 minutes. And I said, “This is going to be great for people like me out there and getting the voice, getting the volume out there, how to use it.” I said, “I can show some quick integration setups. You don't have to have the full-blown product that you sell out the businesses, us as individuals or small groupings, we're only going to use certain features because, one, is going to be overwhelming, and two, it's going to be costly. So, give us these features in a nice package and let's do this.” And they're like, “Let's set something up. I think we got to do this.”Corey: How do you avoid the problem where if you do a few pieces of content around a particular brand, you start to become indelibly linked to that brand? And I found that in my early days when I was doing a lot of advisory work and almost DevRel-for-hire as part of the sponsorship story thing that I was doing, and I found that that did not really benefit the larger thing I was trying to build, which is part of the reason that I got out of it. Because it makes sense for the first one; yeah, it's a slam dunk. And the second one, sure, but sooner or later, it feels like wow, I have five different sponsors in various ways that want me to be building stories and talking about their stuff as I travel the world. And now I feel like I'm not able to do any of them a decent service, while also confusing the living hell out of the audience of, “Who is it you work for again anyway?” It was the brand confusion, for lack of a better term.Jon: Okay, so you have two questions there. One of them is, how do you do this without being associated with the brand? I don't actually see a problem with that. Think of a race car; NASCAR drivers are walking around with all their stuff on their jackets, you know, sponsored by this person, this group, that group. Yeah, it's kind of overwhelming at times, but what's wrong with being tied to a couple of brands as long as the brands are trustworthy, like yourself? Or you believing those, right? So, there's nothing wrong with that.Second is the scalability that you're talking about where you're traveling all over the world and doing this and that. And that's where I'm looking for other leaders and trustworthy community members that are doing this type of thing to join a highly visible team, right? So, now you have a multitude and a diverse group of individuals who can get the same message out that's ultimately tied to—and I'm actually going to call it out here, I have it already as Myer Media, right? So, it's going to be under the Jon Myer Podcast; everything's going to be grouped in together under Myer Media, and then we're going to have a group of highly engaging individuals that enjoy doing this for a living, but also trust what they're talking about.Corey: If you can find a realistic way to scale that, that sounds like it's going to have some potential significant downstream consequences just as far as building almost a, I guess, a DevRel workshop, for lack of a better term. And I mean, that in the sense of an Andy Warhol workshop style approach, not just a training course. But you wind up with people in your orbit who become associated, affiliated with a variety of different brands. I mean, last time I did the numbers, I had something like 110 sponsors over the last five years. If I become deeply linked to those brands, no one knows what the hell I do because every company in the space, more or less, has at some level done a sponsorship with me at some point.Jon: I guess I'll cross that when it happens, or keep that in the top-of-mind as it moves forward. I mean, it's a good point of view, but I think if we keep our individualism, that's what's going to separate us as associated. So, think of advertising, you have a, you know, actor, actress that actually gets on there, and they're associated with a certain brand. Did they do it forever? I am looking at long-term relationships because that will help me understand the product in-depth and I'll be able to jump in there and provide them value in a expedited version.So, think about it. Like, they are launching a new version of their product or they're talking about something different. And they're, like, “Jon, we need to get this out ASAP.” I've had this long-term relationship with them that I'm able to actually turn it around rather quickly, but create highly engaging out of it. I guess, to really kind of signify that the question that you're asking is, I'm not worried about it yet.Corey: What stage or scale of company do you find is, I guess, the sweet spot for what you're trying to build out?Jon: I like the small to medium. And looking at it, the small to medium—Corey: Define your terms because to my mind, I'm still stuck in this ancient paradigm that I was in as an employee, where a big company is anything that has more than 200 people, which is basically everyone these days.Jon: So, think about startups. Startups, they are usually relatively 100 or less; medium, 200 or less. The reason I like that type of—is because we're able to move fast. As you get bigger, you're stuck in processes and you have to go through so many steps. If you want speed and you want scalability, you got to pay attention to some of the stuff that you're doing and the processes that are slowing it down.Granted, I will evaluate, you know, the enterprise companies, but the individuals who know the value of doing this will ultimately seek me and say, “Hey, listen, we need this because we're just kicking this off and we need highly visible content, and we want to engage with our current community, and we don't know how.”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: I think that there's a fair bit of challenge somewhere in there. I'm not quite sure how to find it, that you're going to, I think, find folks that are both too small and too big, that are going to think that they're ready for this. I feel like this doesn't, for example, have a whole lot of value until a company has found product-market fit unless what you're proposing to do helps get them to that point. Conversely, at some point, you have some of the behemoth companies out there, it's, “Yeah, we can't hire DevRel people fast enough. We've hired 500 of them. Cool, can you come do some independent work for us?” At which point, it's… great, good luck standing out from the crowd in any meaningful way at that point.Jon: Well, even a high enterprise as hired X number of DevRels, the way you stand out is your personality and everything that you built behind your personal brand, and your value brand, and what you're trying to do, and the voice that you're trying to achieve out there. So, think about it—and this is very difficult for me to, kind of, boost and say, “Hey, listen, if I were to go to a DevRel of, like, say, 50 people, I will stand out. I might be one of the top five, or I might be two at the top five.” It doesn't matter. But for me why and what I do, the value that I am actually driving across is what will stand out, the engaging conversations.Every interview, every podcast that I do, at the end, everybody's like, “Oh, my God, you're, like, really good at it; you kind of keep us engaging, you know when to ask a question; you jump in there and you dive even deeper.” I literally have five bullet points on any conversation, and these are just, like, two or three sentences, maybe. And they're not exact questions. They're just topics that we need to talk about, just like we did going into this conversation. There is nothing that scripted. Everything that's coming across the questions that you're pulling out from me giving an answer to one of your questions and then you're diving deep on it.Corey: I think that that's probably a fair approach. And it's certainly going to lead to a better narrative than the organic storytelling that tends to arise internally. I mean, there's no better view to see a lot of these things than working on bills. One of my favorite aspects of what I do is I get to see the lies that clients tell to themselves, where it's—like, they believe these things, but it no longer matches the reality. Like developer environments being far too expensive as a proportion of the rest of their environment. It's miniscule just because production has scaled since you last really thought about it.Or the idea that a certain service is incredibly expensive. Well, sure. The way that it was originally configured and priced, it was and that has changed. Once people learn something, they tend to stop keeping current on that thing because now they know it. And that's a bit of a tricky thing.Jon: That's why we keep doing podcasts, you keep doing interviews, you keep talking with folks is because if you look at when you and I actually started doing these podcasts—and aka, like, webinars, and I hate to say webinars because it's always negative and—you know because they're not as highly engaging, but taking that story and that narrative and creating a conversation out of it and clicking record. There are so many times that when I go to a summit or an event, I will tell people, they're like, “So, what am I supposed to do for your podcast?” And we were talking for, like, ten minutes, I said, “You know, I would have clicked record and we would have ten minutes of conversation.” And they're like, “What?” I was like, “That's exactly what it is.”My podcast is all about the person that I'm interviewing, what they're doing, what they're trying to achieve, what's their message that they're trying to get across? Same thing, Corey. When you kick this off, you asked me a bunch of questions and then that's why we took it. And that's where this conversation went because it's—I mean, yeah, I'm spinning it around and making it about you, sometimes because obviously, it's fun to do that, and that's normally—I'm on the other side.Corey: No, it's always fun to wind up talking to people who have their own shows just because it's fun watching the narrative flow back and forth. It's kind of a blast.Jon: It's almost like commentators, though. You think about it at a sporting event. There's two in the booth.Corey: Do a team-up at some point, yeah.Jon: Yeah.Corey: In fact, doing the—what is it like the two old gentlemen in the Sesame Street box up in the corner? I forget their names… someone's going to yell at me for that one. But yeah, the idea of basically kibitzing back and forth. I feel like at some level, we should do a team up and start doing a play-by-play of the re:Invent keynotes.Jon: Oh… you know what, Corey, maybe we should talk about this offline. Having a huge event there, VIP receptions, a podcasting booth is set up at a villa that we have ready to go. We're going to be hosting social media influencers, live-tweeting happening for keynotes. Now, you don't have to go to the keynotes personally. You can come to this room, you can click record, we'll record a live session right there, totally unscripted, like everything else we do, right? We'll have a VIP reception, come in chat, do introductions. So, Corey, love to have you come into that and we can do a live one right there.Corey: Unfortunately, I'm going to be spending most of re:Invent this year dressed in my platypus costume, but you know how it works.Jon: [laugh]. Oh man, you definitely got to go for that because oh, I have a love to put that on the show. I'm actually doing something not similar, but in true style that I've been going to the last couple of re:Invents I will be doing something unique and standing out.Corey: I'm looking forward to it. It's always fun seeing how people continue to successfully exceed what they were able to do previously. That's the best part, on some level, is just watching it continually iterate until you're at a point where it just becomes, well frankly, either ridiculous or you flame out or it hits critical mass and suddenly you launch an entire TV network or something.Jon: Stay tuned. Maybe I will.Corey: You know, it's always interesting to see how that entire thing plays out. Last question before we call it a show. Talk to me about your process for building content, if you don't mind. What is your process when you sit down and stare at—at least from my perspective—that most accursed of all enemies, a blank screen? “All right time to create some content, Jackwagon, better be funny. And by the way, you're on a deadline.” That is the worst part of my job.Jon: All right, so the worst part of your job is the best part of my job. I have to tell you, I actually don't—and I'm going to have to knock on wood because I don't get content block. I don't sit at a screen when I'm doing it. I actually will go for a walk or, you know, I'll have my weirdest ideas at the weirdest time, like at the gym, I might have a quick idea of something like that and I'll have a backlog of these ideas that I write down. The thing that I do is I come down, I open up a document and I'll just drop this idea.And I'll write it out as almost as it seems like a script. And I'll never read it verbatim because I look at it and be like, “I know what I'm going to say right now.” An example, if you take a look at my intros that I do for my podcast, they are done after the recording because I recap what we do on a recording.So, let's take this back. Corey will talk about the one you and I just did. And you and I we hopped on, we did a recording. Afterwards, I put together the intro. And what I'm going to say the intro, I have no freaking clue until I actually get to it, and then all of a sudden, I think of something—not at my desk, but away from my desk—what I'm going to say about you or the guest.An example, there was a gentleman I did his name's called Mat Batterbee, and he's from the UK. And he's a Social Media Finalist. And he has this beard and he always wears, like, this hat or something. And I saw somebody on Twitter make a comment about, you know, following in his footsteps or looking like him. So, they spoofed him with a hat and everything—glasses.I actually bought a beard off of Amazon, put it on, glasses, hat, and I spoofed him for the intro. I had this idea, like, the day before. So, thank goodness for Prime delivery, that I was able to get this beard ASAP, put it on. One take; I only tried to do one take. I don't think I've ever recorded any more.Corey: I have a couple of times sometimes because the audio didn't capture—Jon: Yeah.Corey: —but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, I agree with you, I find that the back-and-forth with someone else is way easier from a content perspective for me. Because when you and I started talking, on this episode, for example, I had, like, three or four bullet points I wanted to cover and that's about it. The rest of it becomes this organic freewheeling conversation and that just tends to work when it's just me free-associating in front of the camera, it doesn't work super well. I need something that's a bit more structured in that sense. So apparently, my answer is just never be alone, ever.Jon: [laugh]. The content that I create, like how-to tutorials, demos, reviews, I'll take a lot more time on them and I'll put them together in the flow. And I record those in certain sections. I'll actually record the demo of walking through and clicking on everything and going through the process, and then I will actually put that in my recording software, and then I will record against it like a voiceover.But I don't record a script. I actually follow the flow that I did and in order to do that, I understand the product, so I'll dive deep on it, I'll figure out some of the things using keywords along the way to highlight the value of utilizing it. And I like to create these in, like, two to three minutes. So, my entire process of creating content—podcast—you know what we hop on, I give everybody the spiel, I click record and I say, “Welcome.” And I do the introduction. I cut that out later. We talk. I'll tell you what, I never edited anything throughout the entire length of it because whatever happens happens in his natural and comes across.And then I slap on an ending. And I try to make it as quick and as efficiently as possible because if I start doing cuts, people are going to be, like, “Oh, there's a cut there. What did he cut out?” Oh, there's this. It's a full-on free flow. And so, if I mess up and flub or whatever it is, I poke fun of myself and we move on.Corey: Oh, I have my own favorite punching bag. And I honestly think about that for a second. If I didn't mock myself the way that I do, I would be insufferable. The entire idea of being that kind of a blowhard just doesn't work. From my perspective, I am always willing to ask the quote-unquote dumb question.It just happens to turn out but I'm never the only person wondering about that thing and by asking it out loud, suddenly I'm giving a whole bunch of other folks air cover to say, “Yeah, I don't know the answer to that either.” I have no problem whatsoever doing that. I don't have any technical credibility to worry about burning.Jon: When you start off asking and say, “Hey, dumb question or dumb question,” you start being unsure of yourself. Start off and just ask the question. Never say it's a dumb question because I'll tell you what, like you said, there's probably 20 other people in that room that have the same question and they're afraid to ask it. You can be the one that just jumps up there and says it and then you're well-respected for it. I have no problem asking questions.Corey: Honestly, the problem I've got is I wish people would ask more questions. I think that it leads to such a better outcome. But people are always afraid to either admit ignorance. Or worse, when they do ask questions just for the joy they get from hearing themselves talk. We've all been conference talks where you there's someone who's just asking the question because they love the sound of their own voice. I say, they, but let's be serious; it's always a dude.Jon: That is very true.Corey: So, if people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to go?Jon: All right, so the best place to go is to follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my primary one, right? Jon Myer; can't miss me. At all. Twitter, I am active on Twitter. Not as well as Corey; I would love to get there one day, but my audience right now is LinkedIn.Else you can go to jonmyer.com. Yes, that's right, jonmyer.com. Because why not? I found I have to talk about this just a little bit. And the reason that I changed it—I actually do own the domain awsblogger, by the way and I still have it—is that when I was awsblogger, I had to chan—I didn't have to change anything' nobody required me to, but I changed it to, like, thedailytechshow. And that was pretty cool but then I just wanted to associated with me, and I felt that going with jonmyer, it allowed me not having to change the name ever again because, let's face it, I'm not changing my name. And I want to stick with it so I don't have to do a whole transition and when this thing takes off really huge, like it is doing right now, I don't have to change the name.Corey: Yeah. I would have named it slightly differently had I known was coming. But again, this far in—400 some-odd episodes in last I checked recorded—though I don't know what episode this will be when it airs—I really get the distinct impression that I am going to learn as I go and, you know, you can't change that this far in anymore.Jon: I am actually rounding so I'm not as far as you are with the episodes, but I'm happy to say that I did cross number 76—actually 77; I recorded yesterday, so it's pretty good. And 78 tomorrow, so I am very busy with all the episodes and I love it. I love everybody reaching out and enjoying the conversations that I have. And just the naturalness and the organicness of the podcast. It really puts people at ease and comfortable to start sharing more and more of their stories and what they want to talk about.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time and speak with me today. Thanks. It's always a pleasure to talk with you and I look forward to seeing what you wind up building next.Jon: Thanks, Corey. I really appreciate you having me on. This is very entertaining, informative. I had a lot of fun just having a conversation with you. Thanks for having me on, man.Corey: Always a pleasure. Jon Myer, podcaster extraordinaire and content producer slash creator. The best folks really have no idea what to refer to themselves and I am no exception, so I made up my own job title. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment telling me that I'm completely wrong and that you are a very interesting person. And then tell me what company you wrote a check to once upon a time.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About JeffJeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 20 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Director of Production Operations for Basis Technologies (formerly Centro), an advertising software company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Before that he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub.Jeff is passionate about DevOps transformations in organizations large and small, with a particular interest in the psychological aspects of problems in companies. He lives in Chicago with his wife Stephanie and their two kids Ella and Xander.Jeff is also the author of Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions with Manning publishing. (https://www.manning.com/books/operations-anti-patterns-devops-solutions) Links Referenced: Basis Technologies: https://basis.net/ Operations Anti-Patterns: https://attainabledevops.com/book Personal Site: https://attainabledevops.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffery-smith-devops/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DarkAndNerdy Medium: https://medium.com/@jefferysmith duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the fun things about doing this show for long enough is that you eventually get to catch up with people and follow up on previous conversations that you've had. Many years ago—which sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but is increasingly actually true—Jeff Smith was on the show talking about a book that was about to release. Well, time has passed and things have changed. And Jeff Smith is back once again. He's the Director of Product Operations at Basis Technologies, and the author of DevOps Anti-Patterns? Or what was the actual title of the book it was—Jeff: Operations Anti-Patterns.Corey: I got hung up in the anti-patterns part because it's amazing. I love the title.Jeff: Yeah, Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions.Corey: Got you. Usually in my experience, alway been operations anti-patterns, and here I am to make them worse, probably by doing something like using DNS as a database or some godforsaken thing. But you were talking about the book aspirationally a few years ago, and now it's published and it has been sent out to the world. And it went well enough that they translated it to Japanese, I believe, and it has seen significant uptick. What was your experience of it? How did it go?Jeff: You know, it was a great experience. This is definitely the first book that I've written. And the Manning process was extremely smooth. You know, they sort of hold your hand through the entire process. But even after launch, just getting feedback from readers and hearing how it resonated with folks was extremely powerful.I was surprised to find out that they turned it into an audiobook as well. So, everyone reaches out and says, “Did you read the audiobook? I was going to buy it, but I wasn't sure.” I was like, “No, unfortunately, I don't read it.” But you know, still cool to have it out there.Corey: My theory has been for a while now that no one wants to actually write a book; they want to have written a book. Now that you're on the other side, how accurate is that? Are you in a position of, “Wow, sure glad that's done?” Or are you, “That was fun. Let's do it again because I like being sad all the time.” I mean, you do work Kubernetes for God's sake. I mean, there's a bit of masochism inherent to all of us in this space.Jeff: Yeah. Kubernetes makes me cry a little bit more than the writing process. But it's one of the things when you look back on it, you're like, “Wow, that was fun,” but not in the heat of the moment, right? So, I totally agree with the sentiment that people want to have written a book but not actually gone through the process. And that's evident by the fact that how many people try to start a book on their own without a publisher behind them, and they end up writing it for 15 years. The process is pretty grueling. The feedback is intense at first, but you start to get into a groove and you—I could see, you know, in a little while wanting to write another book. So, I can see the appeal.Corey: And the last time you were on the show, I didn't really bother to go in a particular topical direction because, what's the point? It didn't really seem like it was a top-of-mind issue to really bring up because what's it matter; it's a small percentage of the workforce. Now I feel like talking about remote work is suddenly taking on a bit of a different sheen than it was before the dark times arrived. Where do you land on the broad spectrum of opinions around the idea of remote work, given that you have specialized in anti-patterns, and well, as sarcastic as I am, I tend to look at almost every place I've ever worked is expressing different anti-patterns from time to time. So, where do you land on the topic?Jeff: So, it's funny, I started as a staunch office supporter, right? I like being in the office. I like collaborating in person; I thought we were way more productive. Since the pandemic, all of us are forced into remote work, I've hired almost half of my team now as remote. And I am somewhat of a convert, but I'm not on the bandwagon of remote work is just as good or is better as in person work.I've firmly landed in the camp of remote work is good. It's got its shortcomings, but it's worth the trade off. And I think acknowledging what those trade-offs are important to keeping the team afloat. We just recently had a conversation with the team where we were discussing, like, you know, there's definitely been a drop in productivity over the past six months to a year. And in that conversation, a lot of the things that came up were things that are different remote that were better in person, right, Slack etiquette—which is something, you know, I could talk a little bit about as well—but, you know, Slack etiquette in terms of getting feedback quickly, just the sort of camaraderie and the lack of building that camaraderie with new team members as they come on board and not having those rituals to replace the in-person rituals. But through all that, oddly enough, no one suggested going back into the office. [laugh].Corey: For some strange reason, yeah. I need to be careful what I say here, I want to disclaim the position that I'm in. There is a power imbalance and nothing I say is going to be able to necessarily address that because I own the company and if my team members are listening to this, they're going to read a lot into what I say that I might not necessarily intend. But The Duckbill Group, since its founding, has been a fully distributed company. My business partner lives in a different state than I do so there's never been the crappy version of remote, which is, well, we're all going to be in the same city, except for Theodore. Theodore is going to be timezones away and then wonder why he doesn't get to participate in some of the conversations where the real decisions get made.Like that's crappy. I don't like that striated approach to things. We don't have many people who are co-located in any real sense, nor have we for the majority of the company's life. But there are times when I am able to work on a project in a room with one of my colleagues, and things go a lot more smoothly. As much as we want to pretend that video is the same, it quite simply isn't.It is a somewhat poor substitute for the very high bandwidth of a face-to-face interaction. And yes, I understand this is also a somewhat neurotypical perspective, let's be clear with that as well, and it's not for everyone. But I think that for the base case, a lot of the remote work advocates are not being fully, I guess, honest with themselves about some of the shortcomings remote has. That is where I've mostly landed on this. Does that generally land with where you are?Jeff: Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at. I completely agree. And when we take work out of the equation, I think the shortcomings lay themselves bare, right? Like I was having a conversation with a friend and we were like, well, if you had a major breakup, right, I would never be like, “Oh, man. Grab a beer and hop on Zoom,” right? [laugh]. “Let's talk it out.”No, you're like, hey, let's get in person and let's talk, right? We can do all of that conversation over Zoom, but the magic of being in person and having that personal connection, you know, can't be replaced. So, you know, if it's not going to work, commiserating over beers, right? I can't imagine it's going to work, diagramming some complex workflows and trying to come to an answer or a solution on that. So again, not to say that, you know, remote work is not valuable, it's just different.And I think organizations are really going to have to figure out, like, okay, if I want to entice people back into the office, what are the things that I need to do to make this realistic? We've opened the floodgates on remote hiring, right, so now it's like, okay, everyone's janky office setup needs to get fixed, right? So, I can't have a scenario where it's like, “Oh, just point your laptop at the whiteboard, right?” [laugh]. Like that can't exist, we have to have office spaces that are first-class citizens for our remote counterparts as well.Corey: Right because otherwise, the alternative is, “Great, I expect you to take the home that you pay for and turn it into an area fit for office use. Of course, we're not going to compensate you for that, despite the fact that, let's be realistic, rent is often larger than the AWS bill.” Which I know, gasp, I'm as shocked as anyone affected by that, but it's true. “But oh, you want to work from home? Great. That just means you can work more hours.”I am not of the school of thought where I consider time in the office to be an indicator of anything meaningful. I care if the work gets done and at small-scale, this works. Let me also be clear, we're an 11-person company. A lot of what I'm talking about simply will not scale to companies that are orders of magnitude larger than this. And from where I sit, that's okay. It doesn't need to.Jeff: Right. And I think a lot of the things that you talk about will scale, right? Because in most scenarios, you're not scaling it organizationally so much as you are with a handful of teams, right? Because when I think about all the different teams I interact with, I never really interact with the organization as a whole, I interact with my little neighborhood in the organization. So, it is definitely something that scales.But again, when it comes to companies, like, enticing people back into the office, now that I'm talking about working from home five days a week, I've invested in my home setup. I've got the monitor I want, I've got the chair that I want, I've got the mouse and keyboard that I want. So, you're going to bring me back to the office so I can have some standard Dell keyboard and mouse with some janky, you know—maybe—21-inch monitor or something like that, right? Like, you really have to decide, like, okay, we're going to make the office a destination, we're going to make it where people want to go there where it's not just even about the collaboration aspect, but people can still work and be effective.And on top of that, I think how we look at what the office delivers is going to change, right? Because now when I go to the office now, I do very little work. It's connections, right? It's like, you know, “Oh, I haven't seen you in forever. Let's catch up.” And a lot of that stuff is valuable. You know, there's these hallway conversations that exist that just weren't happening previously because how do I accidentally bump into you on Slack? [laugh]. Right, it has to be much more it of a—Corey: Right. It takes some contrivance to wind up making that happen. I remember back in the days of working in offices, I remember here in San Francisco where we had unlimited sick time and unlimited PTO, I would often fake a sick day, but just stay home and get work done. Because I knew if I was in the office, I'd be constantly subjected to drive-bys the entire time of just drive-by requests, people stopping by to ask, “Oh, can you just help me with this one thing,” that completely derails my train of thought. Then at the end of the day, they'd tell me, “You seem distractible and you didn't get a lot of work done.”It's, “Well, no kidding. Of course not. Are you surprised?” And one of the nice things about starting your own company—because there are a lot of downsides, let me be very clear—one of the nice things is you get to decide how you want to work. And that was a study in, first, amazement, and then frustration.It was, “All right, I just landed a big customer. I'm off to the races and going to take this seriously for a good six to twelve months. Great sky's the limit, I'm going to do up my home office.” And then you see how little money it takes to have a nice chair, a good standing desk, a monitor that makes sense and you remember fighting tooth-and-nail for nothing that even approached this quality at companies and they acted like it was going to cost them 20-grand. And here, it's two grand at most, when I decorated this place the first time.And it was… “What the hell?” Like, it feels like the scales fall away from your eyes, and you start seeing things that you didn't realize were a thing. Now I worry that five years in, there's no way in the world I'm ever fit to be an employee again, so this is probably the last job I'll ever have. Just because I've basically made myself completely unemployable across six different axes.Jeff: [laugh]. And I think one of the things when it comes to, like, furniture, keyboard, stuff like that, I feel like part of it was just, like, this sort of enforced conformity, right, that the office provided us the ability to do. We can make sure everyone's got the same monitor, the same keyboard that way, when it breaks, we can replace it easily. In a lot of organizations that I've been in, you know, that sort of like, you know, even if it was the same amount or ordering a custom keyboard was a big exception process, right? Like, “Oh, we've got to do a whole thing.” And it's just like, “Well, it doesn't have to be that complicated.”And like you said, it doesn't cost much to allow someone to get the tools that they want and prefer and they're going to be more productive with. But to your point really quickly about work in the office, until the pandemic, I personally didn't recognize how difficult it actually was to get work done in the office. I don't think I appreciated it. And now that I'm remote, I'm like, wow, it is so much easier for me to close this door, put my headphones on, mute Slack and go heads down. You know, the only drive-by I've got is my wife wondering if I want to go for a walk, and that's usually a text message that I can ignore and come back to later.Corey: The thing that just continues to be strange for me and breaks in some of the weirdest ways has just been the growing awareness of how much of office life is unnecessary and ridiculous. When you're in the office every day, you have to find a way to make it work and be productive and you have this passive-aggressive story of this open office, it's for collaboration purposes. Yeah, I can definitively say that is not true. I had a boss who once told me that there was such benefits to working in an open plan office that if magically it were less expensive to give people individual offices, he would spare the extra expense for open plan. That was the day I learned he would lie to me while looking me in the eye. Because of course you wouldn't.And it's for collaboration. Yeah, it means two loud people—often me—are collaborating and everyone else wears noise-canceling headphones trying desperately to get work done, coming in early, hours before everyone else to get things done before people show up and distracted me. What the hell kind of day-to-day work environment is that?Jeff: What's interesting about that, though, is those same distractions are the things that get cited as being missed from the perspective of the person doing the distracting. So, everyone universally hates that sort of drive-by distractions, but everyone sort of universally misses the ability to say like, “Hey, can I just pull on your ear for a second and get your feedback on this?” Or, “Can we just walk through this really quickly?” That's the thing that people miss, and I don't think that they ever connect it to the idea that if you're not the interruptee, you're the interruptor, [laugh] and what that might do to someone else's productivity. So, you would think something like Slack would help with that, but in reality, what ends up happening is if you don't have proper Slack etiquette, there's a lot of signals that go out that get misconstrued, misinterpreted, internalized, and then it ends up impacting morale.Corey: And that's the most painful part of a lot of that too. Is that yeah, I want to go ahead and spend some time doing some nonsense—as one does; imagine that—and I know that if I'm going to go into an office or meet up with my colleagues, okay, that afternoon or that day, yeah, I'm planning that I'm probably not going to get a whole lot of deep coding done. Okay, great. But when that becomes 40 hours a week, well, that's a challenge. I feel like being full remote doesn't work out, but also being in the office 40 hours a week also feels a little sadistic, more than almost anything else.I don't know what the future looks like and I am privileged enough that I don't have to because we have been full remote the entire time. But what we don't spend on office space we spend on plane tickets back and forth so people can have meetings. In the before times, we were very good about that. Now it's, we're hesitant to do it just because it's we don't want people traveling before the feel that it's safe to do so. We've also learned, for example, when dealing with our clients, that we can get an awful lot done without being on site with them and be extraordinarily effective.It was always weird have traveled to some faraway city to meet with the client, and then you're on a Zoom call from their office with the rest of the team. It's… I could have done this from my living room.Jeff: Yeah. I find those sorts of hybrid meetings are often worse than if we were all just remote, right? It's just so much easier because now it's like, all right, three of us are going to crowd around one person's laptop, and then all of the things that we want to do to take advantage of being in person are excluding the people that are remote, so you got to do this careful dance. The way we've been sort of tackling it so far—and we're still experimenting—is we're not requiring anyone to come back into the office, but some people find it useful to go to the office as a change of scenery, to sort of, like break things up from their typical routine, and they like the break and the change. But it's something that they do sort of ad hoc.So, we've got a small group that meets, like, every Thursday, just as a day to sort of go into the office and switch things up. I think the idea of saying everyone has to come into the office two or three days a week is probably broken when there's no purpose behind it. So, my wife technically should go into the office twice a week, but her entire team is in Europe. [laugh]. So, what point does that make other than I am a body in a chair? So, I think companies are going to have to get flexible with this sort of hybrid environment.But then it makes you wonder, like, is it worth the office space and how many people are actually taking advantage of it when it's not mandated? We find that our office time centers around some event, right? And that event might be someone in town that's typically remote. That might be a particular project that we're working on where we want to get ideas and collaborate and have a workshop. But the idea of just, like, you know, we're going to systematically require people to be in the office x many days, I don't see that in our future.Corey: No, and I hope you're right. But it also feels like a lot of folks are also doing some weird things around the idea of remote such as, “Oh, we're full remote but we're going to pay you based upon where you happen to be sitting geographically.” And we find that the way that we've done this—and again, I'm not saying there's a right answer for everyone—but we wind up paying what the value of the work is for us. In many cases, that means that we would be hard-pressed to hire someone in the Bay Area, for example. On the other hand, it means that when we hire people who are in places with relatively low cost of living, they feel like they've just hit the lottery, on some level.And yeah, some of them, I guess it does sort of cause a weird imbalance if you're a large Amazon-scale company where you want to start not disrupting local economies. We're not hiring that many people, I promise. So, there's this idea of figuring out how that works out. And then where does the headquarters live? And well, what state laws do we wind up following on what we're doing? Just seems odd.Jeff: Yeah. So, you know, one thing I wanted to comment on that you'd mentioned earlier, too, was the weird things that people are doing, and organizations are doing with this, sort of, remote work thing, especially the geographic base pay. And you know, a lot of it is, how can we manipulate the situation to better us in a way that sounds good on paper, right? So, it sounds perfectly reasonable. Like, oh, you live in New York, I'm going to pay you in New York rates, right?But, like, you live in Des Moines, so I'm going to pay you Des Moines rates. And on the surface, when you just go you're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense, but then you think about it, you're like, “Wait, why does that matter?” Right? And then, like, how do I, as a manager, you know, level that across my employees, right? It's like, “Oh, so and so is getting paid 30 grand less. Oh, but they live in a cheaper area, right?” I don't know what your personal situation is, and how much that actually resonates or matters.Corey: Does the value that they provide to your company materially change based upon where they happen to be sitting that week?Jeff: Right, exactly. But it's a good story that you can tell, it sounds fair at first examination. But then when you start to scratch the surface, you're like, “Wait a second, this is BS.” So, that's one thing.Corey: It's like tipping on some level. If you can't afford the tip, you can't afford to eat out. Same story here. If you can't afford to compensate people the value that they're worth, you can't afford to employ people. And figure that out before you wind up disappointing people and possibly becoming today's Twitter main character.Jeff: Right. And then the state law thing is interesting. You know, when you see states like California adopting laws similar to, like, GDPR. And it's like, do you have to start planning for the most stringent possibility across every hire just to be safe and to avoid having to have this sort of patchwork of rules and policies based on where someone lives? You might say like, “Okay, Delaware has the most stringent employer law, so we're going to apply Delaware's laws across the board.” So, it'll be interesting to see how that sort of plays out in the long run. Luckily, that's not a problem I have to solve, but it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.Corey: It is something we had to solve. We have an HR consultancy that helps out with a lot of these things, but the short answer is that we make sure that we obey with local laws, but the way that we operate is as if everyone were a San Francisco employee because that is—so far—the locale that, one, I live here, but also of every jurisdiction we've looked at in the United States, it tends to have the most advantageous to the employee restrictions and requirements. Like one thing we do is kind of ridiculous—and we have to do for me and one other person, but almost no one else, but we do it for everyone—is we have to provide stipends every month for electricity, for cellphone usage, for internet. They have to be broken out for each one of those categories, so we do 20 bucks a month for each of those. It adds up to 100 bucks, as I recall, and we call it good. And employees say, “Okay. Do we just send you receipts? Please don't.”I don't want to look at your cell phone bill. It's not my business. I don't want to know. We're doing this to comply with the law. I mean, if it were up to me, it would be this is ridiculous. Can we just give everyone $100 a month raise and call it good? Nope. The forms must be obeyed. So, all right.We do the same thing with PTO accrual. If you've acquired time off and you leave the company, we pay it out. Not every state requires that. But paying for cell phone access and internet access as well, is something Amazon is currently facing a class action about because they didn't do that for a number of their California employees. And even talking to Amazonians, like, “Well, they did, but you had to jump through a bunch of hoops.”We have the apparatus administratively to handle that in a way that employees don't. Why on earth would we make them do it unless we didn't want to pay them? Oh, I think I figured out this sneaky, sneaky plan. I'm not here to build a business by exploiting people. If that's the only way to succeed, and the business doesn't deserve to exist. That's my hot take of the day on that topic.Jeff: No, I totally agree. And what's interesting is these insidious costs that sneak up that employees tend to discount, like, one thing I always talk about with my team is all that time you're thinking about a problem at work, right, like when you're in the shower, when you're at dinner, when you're talking it over with your spouse, right? That's work. That's work. And it's work that you're doing on your time.But we don't account for it that way because we're not typing; we're not writing code. But, like, think about how much more effective as people, as employees, we would be if we had time dedicated to just sit and think, right? If I could just sit and think about a problem without needing to type but just critically think about it. But then it's like, well, what does that look like in the office, right? If I'm just sitting there in my chair like this, it doesn't look like I'm doing anything.But that's so important to be able to, like, break down and digest some of the complex problems that we're dealing with. And we just sort of write it off, right? So, I'm like, you know, you got to think about how that bleeds into your personal time and take that into account. So yeah, maybe you leave three hours early today, but I guarantee you, you're going to spend three hours throughout the week thinking about work. It's the same thing with these cellphone costs that you're talking about, right? “Oh, I've got a cell phone anyways; I've got internet anyways.” But still, that's something that you're contributing to the business that they're not on the hook for, so it seems fair that you get compensated for that.Corey: I just think about that stuff all the time from that perspective, and now that I you know, own the place, it's one of those which pocket of mine does it come out of? But I hold myself to a far higher standard about that stuff than I do the staff, where it's, for example, I could theoretically justify paying my internet bill here because we have business-class internet and an insane WiFi system because of all of the ridiculous video production I do. Now. It's like, like, if anyone else on the team was doing this, yes, I will insist we pay it, but for me, it just it feels a little close to the edge. So, it's one of those areas where I'm very conservative around things like that.The thing that also continues to just vex me, on some level, is this idea that time in a seat is somehow considered work. I'll never forget one of the last jobs I had before I started this place. My boss walked past me and saw that I was on Reddit. And, “Is that really the best use of your time right now?” May I use the bathroom when I'm done with this, sir?Yeah, of course it is. It sounds ridiculous, but one of the most valuable things I can do for The Duckbill Group now is go on the internet and start shit posting on Twitter, which sounds ridiculous, but it's also true. There's a brand awareness story there, on some level. And that's just wild to me. It's weird, we start treating people like adults, they start behaving that way. And if you start micromanaging them, they live up or down to the expectations you tend to hold. I'm a big believer in if I have to micromanage someone, I should just do the job myself.Jeff: Yeah. The Reddit story makes me think of, like, how few organizations have systematic ways of getting vital information. So, the first thing I think about is, like, security and security vulnerabilities, right? So, how does Basis Technologies, as an organization, know about these things? Right now, it's like, well, my team knows because we're plugged into Reddit and Twitter, right, but if we were gone Basis, right, may not necessarily get that information.So, that's something we're trying to correct, but it just sort of highlights the importance of freedom for these employees, right? Because yeah, I'm on Reddit, but I'm on /r/sysadmin. I'm on /r/AWS, right, I'm on /r/Atlassian. Now I'm finding out about this zero-day vulnerability and it's like, “Oh, guys, we got to act. I just heard about this thing.” And people are like, “Oh, where did this come from?” And it's like it came from my network, right? And my network—Corey: Mm-hm.Jeff: Is on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit. So, the idea that someone browsing the internet on any site, really, is somehow not a productive use of their time, you better be ready to itemize exactly what that means and what that looks like. “Oh, you can do this on Reddit but you can't do that on Reddit.”Corey: I have no boss now, I have no oversight, but somehow I still show up with a work ethic and get things done.Jeff: Right. [laugh].Corey: Wow, I guess I didn't need someone over my shoulder the whole time. Who knew?Jeff: Right. That's all that matters, right? And if you do it in 30 hours or 40 hours, that doesn't really matter to me, you know? You want to do it at night because you're more productive there, right, like, let's figure out a way to make that happen. And remote work is actually empowering us ways to really retain people that wasn't possible before I had an employee that was like, you know, I really want to travel. I'm like, “Dude, go to Europe. Work from Europe. Just do it. Work from Europe,” right? We've got senior leaders on the C-suite that are doing it. One of the chief—Corey: I'm told they have the internet, even there. Imagine that?Jeff: Yeah. [laugh]. So, our chief program officer, she was in Greece for four weeks. And it worked. It worked great. They had a process. You know, she would spent one week on and then one week off on vacation. But you know, she was able to have this incredible, long experience, and still deliver. And it's like, you know, we can use that as a model to say, like—Corey: And somehow the work got done. Wow, she must be amazing. No, that's the baseline expectation that people can be self-managing in that respect.Jeff: Right.Corey: They aren't toddlers.Jeff: So, if she can do that, I'm sure you can figure out how to code in China or wherever you want to visit. So, it's a great way to stay ahead of some of these companies that have a bit more lethargic policies around that stuff, where it's like, you know, all right, I'm not getting that insane salary, but guess what, I'm going to spend three weeks in New Zealand hanging out and not using any time off or anything like that, and you know, being able to enjoy life. I wish this pandemic had happened pre-kids because—Corey: Yeah. [laugh].Jeff: —you know, we would really take advantage of this.Corey: You and me both. It would have very different experience.Jeff: Yeah. [laugh]. Absolutely, right? But with kids in school, and all that stuff, we've been tethered down. But man, I you know, I want to encourage the young people or the single people on my team to just, like, hey, really, really embrace this time and take advantage of it.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: One last topic I want to get into before we call it an episode is, I admit, I read an awful lot of books, it's a guilty pleasure. And it's easy to fall into the trap, especially when you know the author, of assuming that snapshot of their state of mind at a very fixed point in time is somehow who they are, like a fly frozen in amber, and it's never true. So, my question for you is, quite simply, what have you learned since your book came out?Jeff: Oh, man, great question. So, when I was writing the book, I was really nervous about if my audience was as big as I thought it was, the people that I was targeting with the book.Corey: Okay, that keeps me up at night, too. I have no argument there.Jeff: Yeah. You know what I mean?Corey: Please, continue.Jeff: I'm surrounded, you know, by—Corey: Is anyone actually listening to this? Yeah.Jeff: Right. [laugh]. So, after the book got finished and it got published, I would get tons of feedback from people that so thoroughly enjoyed the book, they would say things like, you know, “It feels like you were in our office like a fly on the wall.” And that was exciting, one, because I felt like these were experiences that sort of resonated, but, two, it sort of proved this thesis that sometimes you don't have to do something revolutionary to be a positive contribution to other people, right? So, like, when I lay out the tips and things that I do in the book, it's nothing earth-shattering that I expect Google to adopt. Like, oh, my God, this is the most unique view ever.But being able to talk to an audience in a way that resonates with them, that connects with them, that shows that I understand their problem and have been there, it was really humbling and enlightening to just see that there are people out there that they're not on the bleeding edge, but they just need someone to talk to them in a language that they understand and resonate with. So, I think the biggest thing that I learned was this idea that your voice is important, your voice matters, and how you tell your story may be the difference between someone understanding a concept and someone not understanding a concept. So, there's always an audience for you out there as you're writing, whether it be your blog post, the videos that you produce, the podcasts that you make, somewhere there's someone that needs to hear what you have to say, and the unique way that you can say it. So, that was extremely powerful.Corey: Part of the challenge that I found is when I start talking to other people, back in the before times, trying to push them into conference talks and these days, write blog posts, the biggest objection I get sometimes is, “Well, I don't have anything worth saying.” That is provably not true. One of my favorite parts about writing Last Week in AWS is as I troll the internet looking for topics about AWS that I find interesting, I keep coming across people who are very involved in one area or another of this ecosystem and have stories they want to tell. And I love, “Hey, would you like to write a guest post for Last Week in AWS?” It's always invite only and every single one of them has been paid because people die of exposure and I'm not about that exploitation lifestyle.A couple have said, “Oh, I can't accept payment for a variety of reasons.” Great. Pick a charity that you would like it to go to instead because we do not accept volunteer work, we are a for-profit entity. That is the way it works here. And that has been just one of the absolute favorite parts about what I do just because you get to sort of discover new voices.And what I find really neat is that for a lot of these folks, this is their start to writing and telling the story, but they don't stop there, they start telling their story in other areas, too. It leads to interesting career opportunities for them, it leads to interesting exposure that they wouldn't have necessarily had—again, not that they're getting paid in exposure, but the fact that they are able to be exposed to different methodologies, different ways of thinking—I love that. It's one of my favorite parts about doing what I do. And it seems to scale a hell of a lot better than me sitting down with someone for two hours to help them build a CFP that they wind up not getting accepted or whatnot.Jeff: Right. It's a great opportunity that you provide folks, too, because of, like, an instant audience, I think that's one of the things that has made Medium so successful as, like, a blogging platform is, you know, everyone wants to go out and build their own WordPress site and launch it, but then it like, you write your blog post and it's crickets. So, the ability for you to, you know, use your platform to also expose those voices is great and extremely powerful. But you're right, once they do it, it lights a fire in a way that is admirable to watch. I have a person that I'm mentoring and that was my biggest piece of advice I can give. It was like, you know, write. Just write.It's the one thing that you can do without anyone else. And you can reinforce your own knowledge of a thing. If you just say, you know, I'm going to teach this thing that I just learned, just the writing process helps you solidify, like, okay, I know this stuff. I'm demonstrating that I know it and then four years from now, when you're applying for a job, someone's like, “Oh, I found your blog post and I see that you actually do know how to set up a Kubernetes cluster,” or whatever. It's just extremely great and it—Corey: It's always fun. You're googling for how to do something and you find something you wrote five years ago.Jeff: Right, yeah. [laugh]. And it's like code where you're like, “Oh, man, I would do that so much differently now.”Corey: Since we last spoke, one of the things I've been doing is I have been on the hook to write between a one to two-thousand-word blog post every week, and I've done that like clockwork, for about a year-and-a-half now. And I was no slouch at storytelling before I started doing that. I've given a few hundred conference talks in the before times. And I do obviously long Twitter threads in the past and I write reports a lot. But forcing me to go through that process every week and then sit with an editor and go ahead and get it improved, has made me a far better writer, it's made me a better storyteller, I am far better at articulating my point of view.It is absolutely just unlocking a host of benefits that I would have thought I was, oh, I passed all this. I'm already good at these things. And I was, but I'm better now. I think that writing is one of those things that people need to do a lot more of.Jeff: Absolutely. And it's funny that you mentioned that because I just recently, back in April, started to do the same thing I said, I'm going to write a blog post every week, right? I'm going to get three or four in the can, so that if life comes up and I miss a beat, right, I'm not actually missing the production schedule, so I have a steady—and you're right. Even after writing a book, I'm still learning stuff through the writing process, articulating my point of view.It's just something that carries over, and it carries over into the workforce, too. Like, if you've ever read a bad piece of documentation, right, that comes from—Corey: No.Jeff: Right? [laugh]. That comes from an inability to write. Like, you know, you end up asking these questions like who's the audience for this? What is ‘it' in this sentence? [laugh].Corey: Part of it too, is that people writing these things are so close to the problem themselves that the fact that, “Well, I'm not an expert in this.” That's why you should write about it. Talk about your experience. You're afraid everyone's going to say, “Oh, you're a fool. You didn't understand how this works.”Yeah, my lived experiences instead—and admittedly, I have the winds of privilege of my back on this—but it's also yeah, I didn't understand that either. It turns out that you're never the only person who has trouble with a concept. And by calling it out, you're normalizing it and doing a tremendous service for others in your shoes.Jeff: Especially when you're not an expert because I wrote some documentation about the SSL process and it didn't occur to me that these people don't use the AWS command line, right? Like, you know, in our organization, we sort of mask that from them through a bunch of in-house automation. Now we're starting to expose it to them and simple things like oh, you need to preface the AWS command with a profile name. So, then when we're going through the setup, we're like, “Oh. What if they already have an existing profile, right?” Like, we don't want to clobber that.SSo, it just changed the way you write the documentation. But like, that's not something that initially came to mind for me. It wasn't until someone went through the docs, and they're like, “Uh, this is blowing up in a weird way.” And I was like, “Oh, right. You know, like, I need to also teach you about profile management.”Corey: Also, everyone has a slightly different workflow for the way they interact with AWS accounts, and their shell prompts, and the way they set up local dev environments.Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So, not being an expert on a thing is key because you're coming to it with virgin eyes, right, and you're able to look at it from a fresh perspective.Corey: So, much documentation out there is always coming from the perspective of someone who is intimately familiar with the problem space. Some of the more interesting episodes that I have, from a challenge perspective, are people who are deep technologists in a particular area and they love they fallen in love with the thing that they are building. Great. Can you explain it to the rest of us mere mortals so that we can actually we can share your excitement on this? And it's very hard to get them to come down to a level where it's coherent to folks who haven't spent years thinking deeply about that particular problem space.Jeff: Man, the number one culprit for that is, like, the AWS blogs where they have, like, a how-to article. You follow that thing and you're like, “None of this is working.” [laugh]. Right? And then you realize, oh, they made an assumption that I knew this, but I didn't right?So, it's like, you know, I didn't realize this was supposed to be, like, a handwritten JSON document just jammed into the value field. Because I didn't know that, I'm not pulling those values out as JSON. I'm expecting that just to be, like, a straight string value. And that has happened more and more times on the AWS blog than I can count. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah, very often. And then there's other problems, too. “Oh, yeah. Set up your IAM permissions properly.” That's left as an exercise for the reader. And then you wonder why everything's full of stars. Okay.Jeff: Right. Yep, exactly, exactly.Corey: Ugh. It's so great to catch up with you and see what you've been working on. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Jeff: So, the best place is probably my website, attainabledevops.com. That's a place where you can find me on all the other places. I don't really update that site much, but you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, from that jumping off point, links to the book are there if anyone's interested in that. Perfect stocking stuffers. Mom would love it, grandma would love it, so definitely, definitely buy multiple copies of that.Corey: Yeah, it's going to be one of my two-year-old's learning to read books, it'd be great.Jeff: Yeah, it's perfect. You know, you just throw it in the crib and walk away, right? They're asleep at no time. Like I said, I've also been taking to, you know, blogging on Medium, so you can catch me there, the links will be there on Attainable DevOps as well.Corey: Excellent. And that link will of course, be in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really do appreciate it. And it's great to talk to you again.Jeff: It was great to catch up.Corey: Really was. Jeff Smith, Director of Product Operations at Basis Technologies. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice or smash the like and subscribe buttons on the YouTubes, whereas if you've hated this podcast, do the exact same thing—five-star review, smash the buttons—but also leave an angry, incoherent comment that you're then going to have edited and every week you're going to come back and write another incoherent comment that you get edited. And in the fullness of time, you'll get much better at writing angry, incoherent comments.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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We are so used to being suppressed by society that we often don't see ourselves for the amazing Wonder Women we truly are. This week, episode 69 of The Jen Marples Show Meet in Malibu series is about finding your inner Wonder Woman! Gwendolyn Osborne is an actor, singer, speaker, entrepreneur, and CEO. Gwendolyn worked at CBS as a TV personality on The Price is Right for 12 years, gaining her the accolade as the ‘longest-running woman of color on a daytime game show.' With grace and courage, she was also the first talent to share two pregnancies on the show and continue working, paving the way for other female talents to do the same. Joining the cast of the motion picture blockbuster movie Wonder Woman 1984 as one of the elite athlete Amazonians was where she captured her true inner power and strength. While still acting in powerful roles, Gwendolyn now shares her message through her speaking and impactful meditation sessions. In this episode of The Jen Marples Show, my guest Gwendolyn Osborne shares her journey from becoming a mother earlier than she expected to playing an elite Amazonian woman warrior in the movie Wonder Woman 1984, running a beauty company, coaching women, and producing her podcast.She also shares:How to connect to your genuine, authentic self, The importance of creating connections with other women.How to achieve your dreams by taking up space. Women are multi-passionate, multi-dimensional, and they are all Wonder Women! Make sure to listen to the entire episode to receive inspiration, tips, and advice that will help you change your life and improve your business.Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me on Instagram @jenmarples!  And don't forget to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!Unedited AI Transcript HereCONNECT WITH GWENDOLYN OSBORNE:WebsiteInstagramLomolique PodcastCONNECT WITH JEN MARPLES:Subscribe to my NewsletterJoin Jen's Private, Free Facebook GroupInstagramLinkedInTikTok Work with Jen! Website

Hi everyone! Doone here - your host and hype girl. Thank you for tuning in to my solo episode this week. Today, I'm bringing you another workshop inspired special, brought to you through the Hype Club coffee chats. If you listen regularly you've heard me chatting about our Wednesday virtual coffee chats in Hype Club before and this is such a great hour of the week. It's a chance for all the founders to catch up with each other up on their busy weeks, and an intimate place to hype and support one another. We have such an awesome group of like-minded founders early on in their journey right now, and these Wednesdays have really become a highlight of my week. This is even more so the case when we have a special guest popping in to teach us a workshop in their area of expertise.  With a couple of the founders in our group looking to launch into Amazon in the near future, we invited Carina McLeod to come and teach us the initial steps to getting the hang of this tricky channel. Carina is a real expert in the space, with 20 years retail and 18 years of Amazon experience behind her. She now runs an Amazon focused agency called Ecommerce Nurse ran by a team of ex Amazonians, helping sellers and vendors grow and reach their potential on Amazon in North America and Europe. In other words, the perfect woman for the job. During our session, she broke down the seven key steps you absolutely must take into consideration if you're to succeed on Amazon. And because I know how useful that was to all of the women in the club, I'm excited to share the general roadmap with you here today.  You'll have to tune into the episode to catch all the good bits here, but let me give you a little speakpeak into the last step you've got to keep in check for Amazon success. It's to realise your listing isn't something that you just set up and leave to fend for itself. A set-up and leave it strategy just doesn't work on this platform. You need to nurture it on the daily.  It's all about momentum and relevance with Amazon. What was a strategy yesterday might not be a strategy today, and you should be consistently working to optimise your listing and AB test your strategies. So, get yourself nice and familiar with the platform, because you're in this for the long-run. Ok that's all for today! Thank you so much for listening in. Success for Amazon is absolutely possible for everyone, and I hope this episode allows you to focus your attention on all the right areas for that initial launch. If you want to get the extended version of what I'm talking about, you can sign up to Hype Club and watch the replays of all our past workshops, including this one with Carina from Ecommerce Nurse.  So let's get into it, here are seven key steps to success on Amazon.  LINKS WE MENTION: eCommerce Nurse Website eCommerce Nurse Instagram Carina McLeod LinkedIn Female Startup Club's Instagram Doone's Instagram Doone's TikTok Learn more about Dymo at Dymo.com Learn more about Athletic Greens at Athleticgreens.com Try Zapier for free today at zapier.com/STARTUP In partnership with Klaviyo, the best email marketing tool for ecommerce businesses. Female Startup Club's YouTubeFemale Startup Club's Private Facebook Group Say hello to Doone: hello@femalestartupclub.com Female Startup Club + Clearco: Clear.co/partner/female-star

So…your leaders and colleagues could all improve their emotional intelligence, or EQ, to better collaborate - and you want to change your company culture for the better - but where the heck do you start? Today, I talk with Rich Hua, Global Head of EPIC Leadership at Amazon. Rich's personal journey from self-professed non-emotionally intelligent person to where he is today will inspire even those of you who falsely believe you'll never be good at this stuff! He shares how he intentionally built those muscles through self-reflection, coaching, and learning. We discuss the state of EQ and empathy in the corporate world and what talent is now demanding from leaders. He shares how we created his current role and started this movement at Amazon  - still a work in process but already having a profound impact -  and he will inspire you as he did me, with tips to do the same in your organization. Where is EQ headed in our workplace world? Let's find out! Key Takeaways:It takes work, self-reflection, and self-awareness to grow and hone your EQ. As humans we don't like to be uncomfortable, but it is in that discomfort that we grow. We all have a sphere of influence. It doesn't matter if it is our families, our neighbors, our church, or an audience of thousands. We can work on expanding our sphere as we embrace and teach empathy. Everyone is looking for hope and inspiration. That is human nature. Be the light in whatever sphere you are in.  "I think of it as inputs and outputs: Diversity, equity, or inclusive behavior are actually outputs. You don't necessarily teach people that. It's the result when you teach them empathy." —  Rich Hua About Rich Hua, Global Head of EPIC Leadership, Amazon:Rich Hua is a technology strategist and innovation evangelist, and he currently serves as the Global Head of EPIC Leadership at Amazon. His mission is to train Amazon's leaders in emotional intelligence and interpersonal dynamics, enabling  them to lead with greater Empathy, Purpose, Inspiration, and Connection (EPIC). Rich has spent decades training and mentoring people in leadership and interpersonal skills—from CEOs to aspiring managers to early career professionals. He launched the Emotional Intelligence and Success initiative at Amazon, and his team has trained over 150,000 Amazonians in emotional and social intelligence. His training is now an integral part of onboarding, sales, and leadership development programs across numerous parts of Amazon globally. Connect with Rich Hua:Website: www.richardhua.coTwitter: https://twitter.com/RichardTHuaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richhua  Don't forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy  Connect with Maria: Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.comLearn more about Maria's brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossTake my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with EmpathyLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaTwitter: @redsliceFacebook: Red Slice

So…your leaders and colleagues could all improve their emotional intelligence, or EQ, to better collaborate - and you want to change your company culture for the better - but where the heck do you start? Today, I talk with Rich Hua, Global Head of EPIC Leadership at Amazon. Rich's personal journey from self-professed non-emotionally intelligent person to where he is today will inspire even those of you who falsely believe you'll never be good at this stuff! He shares how he intentionally built those muscles through self-reflection, coaching, and learning. We discuss the state of EQ and empathy in the corporate world and what talent is now demanding from leaders. He shares how we created his current role and started this movement at Amazon  - still a work in process but already having a profound impact -  and he will inspire you as he did me, with tips to do the same in your organization. Where is EQ headed in our workplace world? Let's find out! Key Takeaways:It takes work, self-reflection, and self-awareness to grow and hone your EQ. As humans we don't like to be uncomfortable, but it is in that discomfort that we grow. We all have a sphere of influence. It doesn't matter if it is our families, our neighbors, our church, or an audience of thousands. We can work on expanding our sphere as we embrace and teach empathy. Everyone is looking for hope and inspiration. That is human nature. Be the light in whatever sphere you are in.  "I think of it as inputs and outputs: Diversity, equity, or inclusive behavior are actually outputs. You don't necessarily teach people that. It's the result when you teach them empathy." —  Rich Hua About Rich Hua, Global Head of EPIC Leadership, Amazon:Rich Hua is a technology strategist and innovation evangelist, and he currently serves as the Global Head of EPIC Leadership at Amazon. His mission is to train Amazon's leaders in emotional intelligence and interpersonal dynamics, enabling  them to lead with greater Empathy, Purpose, Inspiration, and Connection (EPIC). Rich has spent decades training and mentoring people in leadership and interpersonal skills—from CEOs to aspiring managers to early career professionals. He launched the Emotional Intelligence and Success initiative at Amazon, and his team has trained over 150,000 Amazonians in emotional and social intelligence. His training is now an integral part of onboarding, sales, and leadership development programs across numerous parts of Amazon globally. Connect with Rich Hua:Website: www.richardhua.coTwitter: https://twitter.com/RichardTHuaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richhua  Don't forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy  Connect with Maria: Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.comLearn more about Maria's brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossTake my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with EmpathyLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaTwitter: @redsliceFacebook: Red Slice

Chris talks with Ted, an organizer with Amazonians United about solidarity unionism, direct action in the workplace, and organizing outside the legal frameworks of conventional unionization. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

About AlexAlex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he's had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. Prior to joining the Duckbill Group, Alex spent a few years as a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras/ Personal page: https://alexras.info Old Consulting website with blog: https://bitsondisk.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: The company 0x4447 builds products to increase standardization and security in AWS organizations. They do this with automated pipelines that use well-structured projects to create secure, easy-to-maintain and fail-tolerant solutions, one of which is their VPN product built on top of the popular OpenVPN project which has no license restrictions; you are only limited by the network card in the instance. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/deployandgoCorey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm the chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, which people are generally aware of. Today, I'm joined by our most recent principal cloud economist, Alex Rasmussen. Alex, thank you for joining me today, it is a pleasure to talk to you, as if we aren't talking to each other constantly, now that you work here.Alex: Thanks, Corey. It's great being here.Corey: So, I followed a more, I'd say traditional path for a cloud economist, but given that I basically had to invent the job myself, the more common path because imagine that you start building a role from scratch and the people you wind up looking for initially look a lot like you. And that is grumpy sysadmin, historically, turned into something, kind of begrudgingly, that looks like an SRE, which I still maintain are the same thing, but it is imperative people not email me about that. Yes, I know, you work at Google. But instead, what I found during my tenure as a sysadmin, is that I was working with certain things an awful lot, like web servers, and other things almost never, like databases and data warehouses. Because if you screw up a web server, we all have a good laugh, the site's down for a couple of minutes, life goes on, you have a shame trophy on your desk if that's your corporate culture, things continue.Mess up the data severely enough, and you don't have a company anymore. So, I was always told to keep my aura away from the expensive spendy things that power a company. You are sort of the first of a cloud economist subtype that doesn't resemble that. Before you worked here, you were effectively an independent consultant working on data engineering. Before that, you had a couple of jobs, but you had gotten a PhD in computer science, which means, first, you are probably one of the people in this world most qualified to pass some crappy job interview of solving a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard, but how did you get here from where you were?Alex: Great question. So, I like to joke that I kind of went to school until somebody told me that I had to stop. And I took that and went and started—or didn't start, but I was an early engineer at a startup and then was an executive at another early-stage one, and did a little bit of everything. And went freelance, did that for a couple of years, and worked with all kinds of different companies—vast majority of those being startups—helping them with data infrastructure problems. I've done a little bit of everything throughout my career.I've been, you know, IC, manager, manager, manager, IT guy, everything in between. I think on the data side of things, it just sort of happened, to be honest with you, it kind of started with the stuff that I did for my dissertation and parlayed that into a job back when the big data wave was starting to kind of truly crest. And I've been working on data infrastructure, basically my entire career. So, it wasn't necessarily something that was intentional. I've just been kind of taking the opportunity that makes the most sense for me it kind of every juncture. And my career path has been a little bit strange, both by academic and industrial standards. But I like where I'm at and I gained something really valuable from each of those experiences. So.Corey: It's been an interesting area of I won't say weakness here, but it's definitely been a bit of a challenge when we look at an AWS environment and even talking about a typical AWS customer without thinking of any of them in particular, I can already tell you a few things are likely to be true. For example, the number one most expensive line item in their bill is going to be EC2, and compute is the thing that powers it. Now, maybe that is they're running a bunch of instances the old-fashioned way. Maybe they're running Kubernetes but that's how it shows up. There's a lot of things that could be, and we look at what rounds that out.Now, the next item down should almost certainly not be data transfer and if so we should have a conversation, but data in one form or another is very often going to be number two. And that can mean a bunch of different things, historically. It could mean, “Oh, you have a whole bunch of stuff in S3. Let's talk about access patterns. Let's talk about lifecycle policies. Let's talk about making sure the really important stuff is backed up somewhere. Maybe you want to spend more on that particular aspect of it.”If it's on EBS volumes, that's interesting and definitely worth looking into and trying to understand the context of what's going on. Periodically we'll see a whole bunch of additional charges that speak to some of that EC2 charge in the form of EMR, AWS's Elastic MapReduce, which charges a per-hour instance charge, but also charges you for the instances that are running under the hood and under the EC2 line item. So, there's a lot of data lifecycle stuff, there's a lot of data ecosystem stories, that historically we've consulted out with experts in that particular space. And that's great, but we were starting to have to drag those people in on more and more engagements as we saw them. And we realized that was really something we had to build out as a core competency for ourselves.And we started out not intending to hire for someone with that specialty, but the more we talked to you, the more it became clear that this was a very real and very growing need that we and our customers have. How closely it is what you're doing now as far as AWS bill analysis and data pattern deep-dive align with what you were doing as a freelance consultant in the space?Alex: A lot more than you might expect. You know, I think that increasingly, what you're seeing now is that a company's core differentiator is its data, right, how much of it they have, what they do with it. And so, you know, to your point, I think when you look at any company's cloud spend, it's going to be pretty heavy on the data side in terms of, like, where have you put it? What are you doing to process it? Where is it going once it's been processed? And then how is that—Corey: And data transfer is a very important first word in that two-word sequence.Alex: Oh, sure is. And so I think that, like, in a lot of ways, the way that a customer's cloud architecture looks and the way that their bill looks kind of as a consequence of that is kind of a reification in a way of the way that the data flows from one place to another and what's done with it at each step along the way. I think what complicates this is that companies that have been around for a little while have lived through this kind of very amorphous, kind of, polyglot way that we're approaching data. You know, back when I was first getting started in the big data days, it was MapReduce, MapReduce, MapReduce, right? And we quickly [crosstalk 00:07:29]—Corey: Oh, yes. The MapReduce white paper out of Google, a beautiful April Fool's Day prank that the folks at Yahoo fell for hook, line, and sinker. They wrote Hadoop, and now we're all stuck with that pattern. Great gag, they really should have clarified they were kidding. Here we are.Alex: Exactly. So—Corey: I mostly kid.Alex: No, for sure. But I think especially when it comes to data, we tend to over-index on what the large companies do and then quickly realize that we've made a mistake and correct backwards, right? So, there was this big push toward MapReduce for everything until people realize that it was just a pain in the neck to operate and to build. And so then we moved into Spark, so kind of up-leveled a little bit. And then there was this kind of explosion of NoSQL and NewSQL databases that hit the market.And MongoDB inexplicably won that war and now we're kind of in this world where everything is cloud data warehouse, right? And now we're trying to wrestle with, like, is it actually a good idea to put everything in one warehouse and have SQL be the lingua franca on top of it? But it's all changing so rapidly. And when you come into a customer that's been around for 10 or 15 years, and has, you know, been in the cloud for a substantial—Corey: Yeah, one of those ancient customers. That is—Alex: I know, right?Corey: —basically old enough to almost get a driver's license? Oh, yeah.Alex: Right. It's one of those things where it's like, “Ah, yes, in startup years, you're, like, a hundred years old,” right? But still, you know, I think you see this, kind of—I wouldn't call it a graveyard of failed experiments, right, but it's a collection of, like, “Well, we tried this, and it kind of worked and we're keeping it around because the cost of moving this stuff around—the kind of data gravity, so to speak—is high enough that we're not going to bother transitioning it over.” But then you get into this situation where you have to bend over backwards to integrate anything with anything else. And we're still kind of in the early days of fixing that.Corey: And the AWS bill pattern that we see all the time across the board of those experiments were not successful and do not need to exist, but there's no context into that. The person that set them up left five years ago, the jobs are still running on time. What's happening with them? Well, we could stop them and see who screams, but very often, that's not the right answer either.Alex: And I think there's also something to note there, too, which is like, getting rid of data is very scary, right? I mean, if you resize a Kubernetes cluster from 15 nodes to 10, nobody's going to look at you sideways. But if you go, “Hey, we're just going to drop these tables.” The immediate reaction that you get, particularly from your data science team more often than not is, “Oh, God, what if we need that?” And so the conversation never really happens, and that causes this kind of snowball of data debt that persists in some cases for many, many years.Corey: Yeah, in some cases, what I found has been successful on those big unknown questions is don't delete the data, but restrict access to it for a few weeks and see what happens. Look into it a bit and make sure that it's not like, “Oh, cool. We just did for a month, and now we don't need that data. Let's get rid of it.” And then another month goes by it's like, “So, time to report quarterly earnings. Where's the data?”Oh, dear, that's not going to go well, for anyone. And understanding what's happening, the idea of cloning a petabyte of data so you can run an experiment on it. And okay, turns out the experiment wasn't needed. Do we still need to keep all of that?Alex: Yeah.Corey: The underlying platform advancements have been helpful toward this as well, a petabyte of data now in Glacier Deep Archive cost the princely sum of a thousand bucks a month, which is pretty close to the idea of why would I ever delete data ever again? I can get it back within a day if I need it, so let's just put it there instead.Alex: Right. You know, funny story. When I was in graduate school, we were dealing with, you know, 100 terabyte datasets on the regular that we had to generate every time because we only had 200 terabytes of raw storage. [laugh]. And this was before cloud was yet mature enough that we could get the kind of performance numbers that we wanted off of it.And we would end up having to delete the input data to make room for the output data. [laugh]. And thankfully, we don't need to do that anymore. But there are a lot of, kind of, anti-patterns that arise from that too, right? If data is easy to keep around forever, it stays around forever.And if it's easy to, let's say, run a SQL command against your Snowflake instance that scans 20 terabytes of data, you're just going to do it, and the exposure of that to you is so minimal that you can end up causing a whole bunch of problems for yourself by the fact that you don't have to deal with stuff at that low-level of abstraction anymore.Corey: It's always fun watching how this stuff manifests—because I'm dipping a toe into it from time to time—the easy, naive answer that we could give every customer but we don't is, “Huh. So, you have a whole bunch of EMR stuff? Well, you know, if you migrate that into something else, you'll save a whole bunch of money on that.” With no regard for the 500 jobs that run against that EMR cluster on a consistent basis that form is a key part of business process. “Yeah, if you could just do the entire flow of how data is operated with throughout your entire business that would be swell because you can save tens of thousands of dollars a month on that.” Yeah, how about we don't suggest things that are just absolute buffoonery.Alex: Well, and it's like, you know, you hit on a good point. Like, one of my least favorite words in the English language is the word ‘just.' And you know, I spent a few years as a freelance data consultant, and you know, a lot of what I would hear sometimes from customers is, “Well, why don't we ‘just' deprecate X?”Corey: “Why don't we just—” “I'm going to stop you there because there is no ‘just.'”Alex: Exactly.Corey: There's always context that we cannot have as outsiders.Alex: Precisely. Precisely. And digging into that really is—it's the fun part of the job, but it's also the hard part of the job.Corey: Before we created The Duckbill Group, which was really when I took Mike Julian on as business partner and CEO and formed the entity, I had something in common with you; I was freelancing for a couple of years beforehand. Now, I know why I wound up deciding, all right, we're going to turn this into a company, but what was it that I guess made you decide to, you know, freelancing is all well and good, but it's time to get something that looks a lot more like a quote-unquote, “Traditional job.”Alex: So, I think, on one level, I went freelance because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do next. And I knew what I was good at. I knew what I had a lot of experience at, and I thought, “Well, I can just go out and kind of find a bunch of people that are willing to hire me to do what I'm good at doing, and then maybe eventually I'll find one of them that I like enough that I'll go and work for them. Or maybe I'll come up with some kind of a business model that I can repeat enough times that I don't have to worry that I wake up tomorrow and all of my clients are gone and then I have to go live in a van down by the river.”And I think when I heard about the opening at The Duckbill Group, I had been thinking for a little while about well, this has been going fine for a long time, but effectively what I've been doing is I've been you know, a staff-level data engineer for hire. And do I want to do something more than that, you know? Do I want to do something more comp—perhaps more sophisticated or more complex than that? And I rapidly came to the conclusion that in order to do that, I would have to have sales and marketing, and I would have to, you know, spend a lot of my time bringing in business. And that's just not something that I have really any experience in or I'm any good at.And, you know, I also recognize that, you know, I'm a relatively small fish in a relatively large pond, and if I wanted to get the kind of like, large scale people, the like the big, you know, Fortune 1000 company kind of customers, they may not pay attention to somebody like me. And so I think that ultimately, what I saw with The Duckbill Group was, number one, a group of people that were strongly aligned to the way that I wanted to keep doing this sort of work, right? Cultural alignment was really strong, good people, but also, you know, you folks have a thing that you figured out, and that puts you 10 to 15 steps ahead of where I was. And I was kind of staring down the barrel that, I'm like, am I going to have to take six months not doing client work so that I can figure out how to make this business sustain? And, you know, I think that ultimately, like, I just looked at it, and I said, this just makes sense to me, like, as a next step. And so here we all are.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: It's always fun seeing how people perceive what we've done from the outside. Like, “Oh, yeah, you just stumbled right onto the thing that works, and you've just been going, like, gangbusters ever since.” Then you come aboard, it's like, “Here, look at this pile of things that didn't pan out over here.” And it's, you get to see how the sausage is made in a way that we talk about from time to time externally, but surprisingly, most of our marketing efforts aren't really focused on, “And here's this other time we screwed up as well.” And we're honest about it, but it's not sort of the thing that we promote as the core message of what we do and who we are.A question I like to ask people during job interviews, and I definitely asked you this, and I'll ask you now, which is going to probably throw some folks for a loop because who talks to their current employees like this? But what's next for you? When it comes time for you to leave the Duckbill Group, what do you want to do after this job?Alex: That's a great question. So, I mean, as we've mentioned before, you know, my career trajectory has been very weird and circuitous. And, you know, I would be lying to you if I said that I had absolute certainty about what the rest of that looks like. I've learned a few things about myself in the course of my career, such as it is. In my kind of warm, gooey center, I build stuff. Like, that is what gives me joy, it is what makes me excited to wake up in the morning.I love looking at big, complicated things, breaking them down into pieces, and figuring out how to make the pieces work in a way that makes sense. And, you know, I've spent a long time in the data ecosystem. I don't know, necessarily, if that's something that I'm going to do forever. I'm not necessarily pigeonholing myself into that part of the space just yet, but as long as I get to kind of wake up in the morning, and say, “I'm going to go and build things and it's not going to actively make the world any worse,” I'm happy with that. And so that's really—you know, might go back to freelancing, might go and join another group, another company, big small, who knows. I'm kind of leaving that up to the winds of destiny, so to speak.Corey: One thing that I have found incredi—sorry. Let me just address that first. Like that—Alex: Sure.Corey: —is the right way to think about it. My belief has always been that you don't necessarily have, like, the ten-year plan, or the five-year plan or whatever it is because that's where you're going to go so much as it gives you direction and forces you to keep moving so you don't wind up sitting in the same place for five years with one year of experience repeated five times. It helps you remember the bigger picture. Because I've always despised this fiction that we see in job interviews where average tenure in our industry is 18 to 36 months, give or take, but somehow during the interviews, we all talk like this is now your forever job, and after 25 years, you'll retire. And yeah, let's be a little more realistic than that.My question is always what is next and how can we align in a way that helps you get to what's coming? That's the purpose behind the question, and that's—the only way to make that not just a drippingly insincere question is to mean it and to continue to focus on it from time to time of, great. What are you learning what's next? Now, at the time of this recording, you've been here, I believe three weeks if I'm not mistaken?Alex: I've—this is week two for me at time of recording.Corey: Excellent. Yes, my grasp of time is sort of hazy at the best of times. I have a—I do a lot of things.Alex: For sure.Corey: But yeah, it has been an eye-opening experience for me, not because, “Oh, wow, we have an employee.” Yeah, we've done that a few times before. But rather because of your background, you are asking different questions than we typically get during onboarding. I had a blog post go out recently—or will be by the time this airs—about a question that you asked about, “Wow, onboarding into our internal account structure for AWS is way more polished than I've ever seen it before. Is that something you built in-house? What is that?”And great. Oh, terrific, I'd forgotten that this is kind of a novel thing. No. What we're using is AWS's SSO offering, which is such a well-built, polished product that I can only assume that it's under NDA because Amazonians don't talk about it ever. But it's great.It has a couple of annoyances, but beyond that, it's something that I'm a big fan of, but I'd forgotten how transformative that is, compared to the usual approach of all right, here's your username, here's a password you're going to have to change, here are your IAM credentials to store on disk forever. It's the ability to look at what we're doing through the eyes of someone who is clearly deep into the technical weeds, but not as exposed to all of the minutiae of the 300-some-odd AWS services is really a refreshing thing for all of us, just because it helps us realize what it's like to see some of this stuff for the first time, as well as gives me content ideas because if it's new to you, I promise you are not the only person who's seeing it that way. And if you don't really understand something well enough to explain it, I would argue you don't really understand the thing, so it forces me to get more awareness around exactly how different facets work. It's been an absolutely fantastic experience so far, from my perspective.Alex: Thank you. Right back at you. I mean, spending so many years working with startups, my kind of level of expected sophistication is, “I'm going to write your password on the back of a napkin. I have fifteen other things to do. Go figure it out.” And so you know, it's always nice to see—particularly players like AWS that are such 800-pound gorillas—going in and trying to uplevel that experience in a way that feels like—because I mean, like, look, AWS could keep us with the, “Here's a CSV with your username and password. Good luck, have fun.” And you know, they would still make—Corey: And they're going to have to because so much automation is built around that—Alex: Oh yeah—Corey: In so many places.Alex: —so much.Corey: It's always net-additive, they never turn anything off, which is increasingly an operational burden.Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, it's nice to see them up-level this in a way that feels like they're paying attention to their customers' pain. And that's always nice to see.Corey: So, we met a few years ago—in the before times—at a mixer that we wound up throwing—slash meetup. It was in Southern California for some AWS event or another. You've been aware of who we are and what we do for a while now, so I'm very curious to know—and the joy of having these conversations is that I don't actually know what the answer is going to be, so this may never see the light of day if it goes to weird—Alex: [laugh].Corey: —in the wrong direction, but—no I'm kidding. What has been, I guess, the biggest points of dissonance or surprises based upon your perception of who we are and what we do externally, versus joining and seeing how the sausage is made?Alex: You know, I think the first thing is—um, well, how to put this. I think that a lot of what I was expecting, given how much work you all do and how big—well, ‘you all;' we do—and how big the list of clients is and how it gets bigger every day, I was expecting this to be, like, this very hyper put together, like, every little detail has been figured out kind of engagement where I would have to figure out how you all do this. And coming in and realizing that a lot of it is just having a lot of in-depth knowledge born from experience of a bunch of stuff inside of this ecosystem, and then the rest of it is kind of free jazz, is kind of encouraging. Because as someone that was you know, as a freelancer, right, who do you see, right? You see people who have big public presences or people who are giant firms, right?On the GCP side, SADA Systems is a great example. They're another local company for me here in Los Angeles, and—Corey: Oh, yes. [unintelligible 00:24:48] Miles has been a recurring guest on the show.Alex: Yeah. And he's great. And, like, they have this enormous company that's got, like, all these different specializations and they're basically kind of like the middleman for GCP on a lot of things. And, like, you see that, and then you kind of see the individual people that are like, “Yeah, you know, I'm not really going to tell you that I only have two clients and that if both of them go away, I'm screwed, but, like, I only have two clients, and if both of them go away, I'm screwed.” And so, you know, I think honestly seeing that, like, what you've built so far and what I hope to help you continue to build is, you know, you've got just enough structure around the thing so that it makes sense, and the rest of it, you're kind of admitting that no plan ever survives contact with the client, right, and that everybody's going to be different than that everybody's problems are going to be different.And that you can't just go in and say, “Here's a dashboard, here's a calculator, have fun, give me my money,” right? Because that feels like—in optimization spaces of any kind, be that cloud, or data or whatever, there's this, kind of, push toward, how do I automate myself out of a job, and the realization that you can't for something like this, and that ultimately, like, you're just going to have to go with what you know, is something that I kind of had a suspicion was the case, but this really made it clear to me that, like, oh, this is actually a reasonable way of going about this.Corey: We thought otherwise at one point. We thought that this was something could be easily addressed their software. We launched our DuckTools SaaS platform in beta and two months later, did the—our incredible journey has come to an end, and took it off of a public offering. Because it doesn't lend itself to solving these problems in software in any reasonable way. I am ever more convinced over time that the idea of being able to solve cloud cost optimization with software at VC-scale is a red herring.And yeah, it just isn't going to work because it's one size fits some. Our customers are, by definition, exceptional in many respects, and understanding the context behind why things are the way that they are mean that we can only go so far with process because then it becomes a let's have a conversation and let's be human. Otherwise, we try to overly codify the process, and congratulations, we just now look like really crappy software, but expensive because it's all people doing it. It doesn't work that way. We have tools internally that help smooth over a lot of those edges, but by and large, people who are capable of performing at especially at the principal level for a cloud economics role, inherently are going to find themselves stifled by too much process because they need to have the freedom to dig into the areas that are relevant to the customer.It's why we can't recraft all of our statements of work in ways that tend to shy away from explicitly defined deliverables. Because we deliver an outcome, but it's going to depend entirely, in most cases, up on what we discover along the way. Maybe a full-on report isn't the best way of presenting the data in the way that we see it. Maybe it's a small proof of concept script or something like that. Maybe it's, I don't know, an interpretive dance in front of the company's board.Alex: [laugh]. Right.Corey: I'm open to exploring opportunities. But it comes down to what is right for the customer. There's a reason we only ever charge a fixed fee for these things, and it's because at that point, great, we're giving you the advice that we'd implement ourselves. We have no partnerships with any vendor in the space just to avoid bias or the perception of same. It's important that we are the authoritative source around these things.Honestly, the thing that surprised me the most about all this is how true to that vision we've stayed as we've as we flushed out what works, what doesn't. And we can distantly fail to go out of business every month. I am ecstatic about that. I expected this to wind up cratering into a mountain four months after I went freelance. Not yet.Alex: Well, I mean, I think there's another aspect of this too, right? Because I've spent a lot of my career working inside of venture capital-backed companies. And there's a lot of positive things to be said about having ready access to that kind of cash, but it does something to your business the second you take it. And I've been in a couple of situations where, like, once you actually have that big bucket of money, the incentive is grow, right? Hire more people get more customers, go, go, go, go, go.And sometimes what you'll find is that you'll spend the time and the money on an initiative and it's clearly not working. And you just kind of have to keep doubling down because now you've got customers that are using this thing and now you have to maintain it, and before you know it, you've got this albatross hanging around your neck. And like one of the things that I really respect about the way that Duckbill Group is is handling this by not taking outside cash is, like, it frees you up to make these kinds of bets, and then two months later say, “Well, that didn't work,” and try something else. And you know, that's very difficult to do once you have to go and convince someone with, you know, money flowing out of their ears, that that's the right thing to do.Corey: We have to be intentional about what we're doing. One of the benefits of bringing you aboard is that one, it does improve our capacity for handling more engagements at the same time, but it also improves the quality of the engagements that we are delivering. Instead of basically doing a round-robin assignment policy we can—Alex: Right.Corey: —we consult with each other; we talk about specific areas in which we have specific expertise. You get dragged into a lot of data portions of existing engagements, and the rest of us get pulled into other areas in which you might not be as strong. For example, “What are all of these ridiculous services? I can't make heads or tails have the ridiculous naming side of it.” Surprise, that's not a you problem.It comes down to being able to work collaboratively and let each other shine in a way that doesn't mean we load people up with work. We're very strict about having a 40-hour or less work week, just because we're not rushing for an exit. We want to enjoy our time working, we want to enjoy what we're doing, and then we want to go home and don't think about work until it's time to come back and think about these things. Like, it's a lifestyle company, but that lifestyle doesn't need to be run, run, run, run, run all the time, and it doesn't need to be something that people barely tolerate.Alex: Yeah. And I think that, you know, especially coming from being an army of one in a lot of engagements, it is really refreshing to be able to—see because, you know, I'm fortunate enough, I have friends in the industry that I can go and say like, “I have no idea how to make heads or tails of X.” And you know, I can get help that way, but ultimately, like, the only other outlet that I have here is the customer and they're not bringing me in if they have those answers readily to hand. And so being able to bounce stuff off of other people inside of an organization like this has been really refreshing.Corey: One of the things I've appreciated about your tenure here so far is the questions that you ask are pitched at the perfect level, by which I mean, it is never something you could answer with a three-second visit to Google, but it's also not something that you've spent three days spinning your wheels on trying to understand. You do a bit of digging; it's a little unclear, especially since there are multiple paths to go down, and then you flag it for clarification. And there's really so much to be said for that. Really, when we're looking for markers of seniority in the interview process, it's admitting you don't know something, but then also talking about how you would go about getting the answer. And it's—because no one has all this stuff in their head. I spend a disturbing amount of time looking at search engines and trying to reformulate queries and to get answers that make sense.I don't have the entirety of AWS shoved into my head. Yet. I'm sure there's something at re:Invent that's going to be scary and horrifying that will claim to do it and basically have a poor user interface, but all right. When that comes, we'll reevaluate then because this industry is always changing.Alex: For sure. For sure. And I think it's, it's worth pointing out that, like, one of the things that having done this for a long time gives you is this kind of scaffolding in your head that you can hang things over. We're like, you don't need to have every single AWS service memorized, but if you've got that scaffold in your head going, “Oh, like, this thing sounds like it hangs over this part of the mental scaffold, and I've seen other things that do that, so I wonder if it does this and this and this,” right? And that's a lot of it, honestly.Because especially, like, when I was solely in the data space, there's a new data wareho—or a new, like, data catalog system coming out every other week. You know, there are a thousand different things that claim to do MLOps, right? And whenever, like, someone comes to me and says, “Do you have experience with such and such?” And the answer was usually, “Well if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.” And, you know, that tends to help a great deal.Corey: Yeah. “No, but I'll find out and get back to you,” the right answer. Making it up and being wrong is the best way to get rejected from an environment. That's not just consulting; that's employment, too. If 95% of the time, you give the right answer, but that one time and 20 you're going to just make it up, well, I have to validate the other 19 because I never know when someone's faking it or not. There's that level of earned trust that's important.Alex: Well, yeah. And you're being brought in to be the expert in the room. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are the all-seeing, all-knowing oracle of knowledge but, like, if you say a thing, people are just going to believe you. And so, you know, it's beholden on you—Corey: If not, we have a different problem.Alex: Well, yeah, exactly. Hopefully, right? But yeah, I mean, it's beholden on you to be honest with your customer at a certain point, I think.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to got with me about this. And I would love to have you back on in a couple of months once you're fully up to speed and spinning at the proper RPMs and see what's happened then. I—Alex: Thank you. I'd—Corey: —really appreciate—Alex: —love to.Corey: —your time where's the best place for people to learn more about you if they haven't heard your name before?Alex: Well, let's see. I am @alexras on Twitter, A-L-E-X-R-A-S. My personal website is alexras.info.I've done some writing on data stuff, including a pretty big collection of blog posts on the data side of the AWS ecosystem that are still on my consulting page, bitsondisk.com. Other than that—I mean, yeah, Twitter is probably the best place to find me, so if you want to talk more about any weird, nerd data stuff, then please feel free to reach out there.Corey: And links to that will, of course, be in the [show notes 00:35:57]. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Alex: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.Corey: Alex Rasmussen, principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Corey Quinn, cloud economist to the stars, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that you then submit to three other podcast platforms just to make sure you have a backup copy of that particular piece of data.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.