Podcasts about aws iot

In this podcast episode, Amit welcomes Harshit Shah, CTO at Kyruus Health, to delve into the concept of high-performing cultures within engineering teams. They explore the core tenets of such cultures in the rapidly-evolving tech landscape, focusing on identifying and nurturing key attributes. The discussion covers empowerment, geo-strategy shifts post-pandemic, and the scalable principles of high performance. Harsha shares insights into Kairos Health's mission of facilitating cost-effective healthcare access through data-driven provider matching and how the company integrates technology into care experiences. Additionally, the episode touches on how collaboration, a growth mindset, and the emergence of Gen AI tools are shaping the future of engineering productivity and culture. Highlights 03:13 Defining High-Performance Engineering Cultures 06:54 Attributes of High-Performing Teams 08:17 Balancing Skills and Team Needs 12:47 Remote Work and Hybrid Teams 22:54 Impact of Generative AI on Engineering Guest: Harshit Shah is the Chief Technology Officer at Kyruus Health, leading technology initiatives and shaping the roadmap. His oversight spans engineering, including software development, infrastructure, security, and data management. He collaborates with the product team to optimize technology for improved delivery and operational efficiency. With over 24 years of experience, his career trajectory includes roles at startups, Amazon, and Microsoft. Previously, as CTO at Spring Health, Harshit fueled exponential growth, achieving milestones in customers, revenue, and team expansion. His expertise extends to managing large-scale projects, leading global teams, and contributing notably to AWS IoT services and Microsoft's Bing Search. As an advisor and coach, he supports initiatives like WEST (Women Entering and Staying in Tech), Interview Kickstart, Asha for Education, and startup guilds. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshah/ ---- Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek. We would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player. Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests? Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)

En este episodio, conversamos con Sergio Méndez, embajador CNCF, quien nos sumerge en el mundo del Food Tech. Nos cuenta cómo utilizar sensores IoT y cámaras térmicas para optimizar la elaboración de salsa picante, integrando tecnologías y servicios de AWS IoT. Descubre cómo la innovación está mejorando los procesos de producción alimentaria.Este es el episodio 13 de la temporada 5 del Podcast de Charlas Técnicas de AWS.Tabla de Contenidos:00:52 Conociendo a Sergio Méndez, embajador CNCF05:57 La vida como profesor en la universidad08:47 Proyectos de IoT11:11 Limpieza de los Océanos14:18 Detección Terremotos16:21 Deforestación en el Amazonas17:25 AWS Snowball y Outpost17:58 Food Tech, Salsa Picante20:40 Proceso de elaboración22:19 Sensores y dispositivos IoT para el proceso28:57 Procesos de Agricultura30:20 Volviendo a nuestra solución de salsa picante, cámaras Termales y etiquetado con IA33:00 Servicios AWS IoT Core, Greengrass, TimeSeries, Twinmaker,33:47 Arquitecturas Graviton y Spot35:52 Protocolos de Comunicaciones, MQTT, COAP, AMQP,37:10 Ejemplo domotizando Centro de Excelencia38:22 Sonar eliminador de Mosquitos42:15 Recomendaciones finalesRedes Sociales del Invitado:LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergioarmgpl/X: @sergioarmgplPágina Web: sergiops.xyz Links mencionados en este episodio:Distribuciones Kubernetes:K3s, https://k3s.io/K3os, https://k3os.io/K3sup, https://github.com/alexellis/k3supOtros temas:Libro Edge Computing Systems with Kubernetes, Sergio Méndez.RaspberryShake, https://stationview.raspberryshake.org/Cesar Jung-Harada, https://www.linkedin.com/in/cesarharadaImpresoras 3D e IA Generativa:✉️ Si quieren escribirnos pueden hacerlo a este correo: podcast-aws-espanol@amazon.comPodes encontrar el podcast en este link: https://aws-espanol.buzzsprout.com/O en tu plataforma de podcast favoritaMás información y tutoriales en el canal de youtube de Charlas Técnicas☆☆ NUESTRAS REDES SOCIALES ☆☆

In season 4 episode 8, we are joined by the incredible Yasser Alsaied – Vice President of Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT to explore the IoT journey of AWS, how AWS is making IoT easier for partners and end-users, the impacts of emerging technology including AI & ML, exciting Alexa innovations and what he sees as the three critical industries of advancement! Yasser has over 30 year's experience in executive management and technical experience in the semiconductors, cloud, and wireless industries with strong knowledge in technology management and IoT reference platforms. From his time as Qualcomm's VP of IoT to his current position as VP AWS IoT, Yasser has been at the forefront of many technological innovations and advancements. In this episode, Yasser will discuss what he's observed while working in the IoT space over the years and the emerging technologies that are set to make the biggest strides. Sit back, relax, tune in and discover… (01:17) About Yasser (03:30) Technology has evolved so quickly (07:50) Qualcomm days (09:55 ) There's nothing new about IoT (12:00) Why is IoT essential? (14:53) What has changed in IoT from the beginning? (17:00) There is real value (18:20) The are 200 AWS services available for IoT (22:37) Making IoT easy (24:24) What are three areas of advancement in IoT? (27:40) Why do technologies disappear? (30:00) The consumer will pick the technology easiest for them (32:56) The role of AI (37:29) Helping customers imagine the value for them (44:58) Advice for those getting into IoT (52:00) Question from the audience And much more! Thank you to today's episode sponsors... IoT Tech Expo Europe 2023 – get your free ticket for their upcoming conference in Amsterdam or virtual (26-27th September) We can't wait to see you there! ⏩ https://www.iottechexpo.com/europe/ticket-registration-2023/ And 5V Tech! Discover how 5V Tech can help you unlock your scaling potential in cutting-edge tech and IoT, here: https://www.weare5vtech.com/ ABOUT THE GUEST Yasser Alsaied is the Vice president of AWS IoT. He is a seasoned executive with over 30 years of experience in semiconductors, cloud, and wireless industries. He excels in technology management for mobile and IoT reference platforms, and he's known for his global operational expertise and strong communication skills. Yasser has contributed significantly to industry standards committees, particularly in mobile technology and digital home SIGs. He's a results-driven leader with a talent for both strategic thinking and tactical problem-solving. With a background in IT and electronic warfare, he has a deep understanding of emerging technologies. Yasser is recognized for his integrity, leadership, and ability to deliver value in challenging environments. Connect with Yasser: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasseralsaied/ ABOUT AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a prominent global cloud computing platform launched in 2006. It offers a broad spectrum of cloud-based services, including computing, storage, databases, AI, and IoT solutions. AWS's scalable, secure, and cost-effective services have made it a preferred choice for businesses and organizations worldwide. It continually innovates and maintains a vast network of data centers, enabling customers to access flexible and reliable cloud infrastructure. AWS has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the way computing resources are accessed and utilized, becoming a cornerstone of the digital era. Find out more about AWS: https://aws.amazon.com Follow AWS on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazon-web-services/ and X (previously Twitter): https://twitter.com/awscloud SUBSCRIBE TO THE IOT PODCAST ON YOUR FAVOURITE LISTENING PLATFORM: https://linktr.ee/theiotpodcast Sign Up for exclusive email updates: https://theiotpodcast.com/ Contact us to become a guest/partner: https://theiotpodcast.com/contact/ Connect with host Tom White: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom5values/

Greg Thompson s the Global Technology Business Leader for Amazon Web Services with a focus on the sports business space. In that leadership role with AWS Greg has strategically develop new business with, and solutions for, customers in the sports industries utilizing the AWS cloud. He leads business strategy and performance to quickly innovate at scale. Prior to his current role Greg was the AWS IoT Worldwide Business Development leader for the Power & Utilities industry vertical. In that role he was responsible for developing the global AWS IoT strategy for the Power & Utilities industry segment and executing on the vision with global sales teams and partners. Greg has over 20 years of experience developing and leading SaaS, IoT, and enterprise solutions for utilities, datacenters, smart buildings, automotive, and now the sports industry.

Jon Turow is a partner at Madrona, a VC firm that has invested in amazing companies like OctoML, HighSpot, Fixie, Clari, Runway, UiPath, and many more. He holds 26 patents! Most recently, he led the product teams for AWS Computer Vision AI services, including Amazon Textract and Amazon Rekognition. He wrote the original product and business plans for AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass, which extend AWS services to run locally on edge devices. Prior to Amazon, he co-founded a cloud telephony startup. He holds a bachelor's from Wharton and an MBA from Kellogg. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - The Generative AI stack- Application frameworks for developers- Using a combination of multiple foundation models- Data tooling for AI applications- Making LLMs faster/better/cheaper- The Android moment of AI- Open source AI opportunities- AI copilots for software development- What use cases within AI infrastructure are exciting to youJon's favorite book: Night Flight (Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)--------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

「Matterport、AWS IoT TwinMakerと連携。設備監視をリアルタイムに情報更新する没入型デジタルツインで改変」　Matterportは、「AWS IoT TwinMaker」との新たな統合ツールの一般提供を発表した。これにより、法人のユーザーはIoT データを正確な寸法で視覚化されたMatterportの没入型デジタルツインにシームレスに接続できるようになるという。

Auto enthusiasts and gearheads, this episode is for you. This week, Hawn is joined by Anis Moussa (Embedded Software Engineer), to discuss how AWS IoT FleetWise helps automotive companies collect data more efficiently across a diverse fleet of vehicles. Listen to learn about AWS' first purpose-built service for the automotive industry and how with AWS IoT FleetWise, you can easily collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud, in near real time. Once the data is in the cloud, you can use it for tasks like training AI/ML models, monitoring EV battery health, or building predictive maintenance schedules. Read the blog - https://go.aws/3fya43R Watch the video - https://bit.ly/3SscQ9n Learn more - https://go.aws/3UULSJd Submit audio feedback - https://bit.ly/3y5bnxC

Laura joins Adam to discuss her many IoT projects, her role at AWS as a Global Solutions Architect for Resilience Hub, how she's continued to find her passion in tech, and some facts about Oxford University. Spoiler: it's really old.

Have you heard about digital twins and wanted to know how to build and use them? Tune in to listen to Simon chat with Andra Christie (Senior Domain Solutions Architect at AWS), to learn more about a new service called AWS IoT TwinMaker. AWS IoT TwinMaker makes it faster and easier for customers to create and use digital twins to optimize industrial operations, increase production output, and improve equipment performance. Listen to the episode to learn more about the service, why we built it, and how you can get started creating your own digital twins. Get started with AWS IoT TwinMaker - https://aws.amazon.com/iot-twinmaker/ Read the blog -https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-twinmaker-is-now-generally-available/ What's New post - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-iot-twinmaker-now-generally-available/ Learn more - https://aws.amazon.com/iot-twinmaker/resources/

Alle Infos unter: www.iotusecase.comIn Folge 62 des IoT Use Case Podcast geht es um ein IIoT-Projekt aus der rauen Branche der „Heavy Machinery“ – vorgestellt von Roundsolutions und ihrem Partner Amazon Web Services (AWS). L&H Industrial hilft Kunden in der Entwicklung, Bau, Bereitstellung und dem Betrieb der Großmaschinen. Mit ihrem weltweiten 24/7-Außendienst und über 50 Jahren Erfahrung in der Praxis setzen sie nun mithilfe der IoT-Technologie neue Maßstäbe im Service. Ihr Ziel: Ihre Kunden stetig bei Fehlersuchen, Reparaturen, Umbauten, Installationen und der Verlagerung der schweren Maschinen unterstützen. Auf Basis wertvoller Daten können Ingenieure und Techniker mit den Erkenntnissen Kosten für Kunden im Betrieb einsparen. Mithilfe von Sensor- und Kameradaten werden Verschleißerscheinungen und mögliche Downtimes frühzeitig erkannt und verhindert. – der führende Anbieter von LTE, NB1, CatM1, 5G, NB-IoT, GSM/GPRS, UMTS/HSPA(+), GNSS und BLE/WiFi-Modulen in Europa. Sie bringen die notwendige „Plug and Play“-Hardware mit robustem Gehäuse mit, welche den Sicherheitsstandard IP67 erfüllt. Für die Cloud- und Software-Lompetenz wählte Roundsolutions ihren Partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) als weltweit umfassendste Cloud-Plattform, mit mehr als 200 voll funktionsfähigen Diensten auf der ganzen Welt aus. In dieser Folge werden die Top 3 Use Cases besprochen:L&H Industrial: Die größten Maschinen der Welt mit 5G-Monitoring verbessertVolkswagen-Konzern: Effizienz und Verfügbarkeit der Anlage steigern, um die Produktionsflexibilität zu verbessern und die Fahrzeugqualität mit AWS-IoT zu erhöhenAmazon Versandhandel: Monitorisierung für erneuerbarer EnergienDie Interviewgäste der 62. Folge sind: Ben Hoelke (Founder & CEO, RoundSolutions) und Juan Carlos Martinez (Business Development Manager IoT & Robotics, Amazon Web Services (AWS)).

Rob is a cowboy through and through. He grew up on a ranch and maintains a cattle ranch to this day in Central Oregon. Rob also has had an interesting career outside the cowboy world. Rob has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years, from building a top 10 e-commerce site in a time when e-commerce was still in its infancy to establishing what is now known as Amazon's AWS IoT. On this episode we talk about Rob's tech career, beef alternatives, automation and the philosophy behind becoming wealthy. Enjoy! Topics: (3:51) - Rob's background and family in ranching (7:19) - Do you think growing up in that environment has played well in your business career? (12:44) - Rob's father & leaving ranching to go into tech (14:52) - What is a CTO? (16:45) - What's something that people think is a fad right now but will be around long term? (22:39) - What is IoT? (Internet of Things) (26:21) - As we take humans out of processes where do we go? (31:13) - Thoughts on beef alternatives, vegetarians and conservationists (38:24) - Rob's Barley Beef (43:05) - Thoughts on becoming wealthy (47:15) - Wrap Up The Cowboy Perspective is produced by Johnny Podcasts & Root and Roam.

AWS re:Invent is Amazon Web Services annual conference and it took place recently. Celebrating AWS's 15th anniversary and the 10th year of re:Invent, there was keynotes and sessions from some of the most prominent leaders across industries and AWS. One of the keynotes was delivered by Michael MacKenzie, General Manager, AWS IoT. Ronan talks to Michael MacKenzie. Michael talks about what his role in AWS entails, what AwS IoT does, the increase of IoT usage, auto manufacturer usage, machine learning and AI, the issues the pandemic caused, and how security is handled. More about Michael Mackenzie's AWS re:Invent session: By unlocking data and control surfaces through connected devices, organisations are taking the first steps to reinvent their businesses with data. By using IoT technology as a gateway to big data analytics, image analytics, application modernisation, and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, companies are powering innovations to improve their customer experiences, optimise industry operations, increase vehicle safety, and protect their supply chains. In this session, which can be viewed here, learn how AWS is helping its customers send data to the cloud and send actionable insights back to the device to effectively close the loop and deliver business value.

In this week's show, Phil talks to Rob Rastovich, the Chief Technical Officer at ThingLogix, a provider of Internet of Things solutions, solution components and advisory services. He has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years including what is now known as Amazon's AWS IoT. As CTO of ThingLogix he is the chief architect behind the company's ground-breaking IoT platform that eliminates the need for code. Rob talks about the importance of continual learning and how it can advance our IT career paths. He also discusses why we must never feel boxed in by the career we choose, and why it's okay to follow our passions into other fields.   KEY TAKEAWAYS:   TOP CAREER TIP We must always be learning. The IT industry is never static, and so we must endeavour to keep abreast of what's new, and master the skills and tools that push us forward.   WORST CAREER MOMENT While working on a job, Rob accidentally deleted some invaluable information on a server. It taught him to always make sure that he is aware of the consequences of every command entered.   CAREER HIGHLIGHT The Amazon acquisition was a particular highlight. The early development of these systems were a period of experimentation and discovery, and provided much insight and motivation.   THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T The disappearing of laptops, computers and browsers, and the advancements that will replace them. The internet will become less of a service that we plug into, and something that becomes more ubiquitous – more device agnostic.   THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? – After his first successful attempts at coding, Rob was hooked. What's the best career advice you received? – To go all in on ideas, and never live with any regrets. What's the worst career advice you received? – That Rob would be paid when the company went IPO. What would you do if you started your career now? –To have focused more time looking at the possibilities of cloud computing. What are your current career objectives? – Rob is focusing on stepping back from the cutting edge of innovation, and spending more time in guiding the next generation of thinkers and dreamers. What's your number one non-technical skill? – Ranching has taught Rob the value of balance. How do you keep your own career energized? – Rob is always researching and looking for the next big thing. What do you do away from technology? – Rob spends his time on his ranch, and enjoys outdoor pursuits.   FINAL CAREER TIP Rid yourself of the idea that your career path is permanent. Remain fluid, and if you find diversions that thrill you more than the path you're already on, follow your heart and diversify.   BEST MOMENTS  (6:37) – Rob - “The ability to discern and learn and absorb quickly has been the cornerstone for me” (6:50) – Rob - “That's a skill that you learn – how to learn” (15:09) – Rob – “Being on the cutting edge is fun and exciting, but it's not as profitable as being right behind that” (18:55) – Rob – “Shoot for the stars, and if you miss you'll end up on the moon”   ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS  Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organizations to design, develop, and implement software solutions.  Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers.  And in 2017 Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey.   CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://twitter.com/_PhilBurgess LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Instagram: https://instagram.com/_philburgess Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.com and via the podcast's website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer   ABOUT THE GUEST – ROB RASTOVICH Rob Rastovich is the Chief Technical Officer at ThingLogix, a provider of Internet of Things solutions, solution components and advisory services. He has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years including what is now known as Amazon's AWS IoT. As CTO of ThingLogix he is the chief architect behind the company's ground-breaking IoT platform that eliminates the need for code.   CONTACT THE GUEST – ROB RASTOVICH Rob Rastovich can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://twitter.com/thinglogix LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-rastovich-1560532/ Website: https://www.thinglogix.com/

On this episode of the Jason Cavness Experience I talk to Rob Rastovich – CTO at ThingLogix, Inc We talk about the following What is ranch live like Bend, Oregon Being a CTO His company ThingLogix Rob's Bio Rob Rastovich has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years, from building a top 10 e-commerce site in a time when e-commerce was still in its infancy to establishing what is now known as Amazon's AWS IoT. He is the CTO ThingLogix which provides a low-code platform built on AWS, Google, and Azure to accelerate innovation and system development by a factor of 50 or more, reduce cost and risk, and deliver future-proof applications. With Rob as CTO, ThingLogix was awarded the 2018 IoT Platforms Leadership Award and has become an advanced tier technology partner for Amazon Web Services. When he's not at the forefront of IoT, Rob is maintaining his cattle ranch in Central Oregon. Rob's Social Media Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-rastovich-1560532/ Rob's Email: Rob@Thinglogic.com SMS: 805-207-7027 Rob's Gift I would be happy to have a free consultation. I'll give an hour with anybody to go over about your IoT solution. We've just recently announced, the open sourcing of our platform. We can give you some free training around that. Probably the biggest one right now, is our SMS management and SMS communications. I would be happy to get that installed and show you the advantages. If you are interested in seeing how SMS can change how you manage your customers and your customer relationship. I am happy to get you installed with that and get you started on that for free for a few days as well. Rob's Advice I'm not one to, wax poetically. But I would say probably the most important thing that that I do every day is just be grateful and be thankful for what we've got. I would say start each day like that. You'll see great changes in your life, whether it's technology or farming.

近年全世界的物聯網裝置成長非常快，包含市場上流行的商品，從手錶、手機、家電產品、到電動車…等硬體，皆以物聯網應用對其做加值服務。而 AWS 在近幾年的 IoT 領域相關服務中也不斷的更新，甚至在 2019 年宣布大中華區首座 AWS IoT Lab 物聯網實驗室將在台北開幕，希望能幫助客戶設計和部署物聯網應用。 IoT 的重要性在未來也會逐漸增加，那我們可以如何快速且有效的學習 AWS IoT 呢？對於物聯網應用有興趣的朋友，絕不能錯過今天的主題唷！一起來聽聽 En 講師談談學習 AWS IoT 最棒的方式吧！ 延伸閱讀：學習 AWS IoT 最棒的方式 – AWS Edukit 我有話要說：想聽什麼或建議，都可以偷偷跟我們說喔 Facebook｜Instagram｜Spotify｜Apple Podcast ｜Google Podcast ｜KKBOX Podcast

In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, ThingLogix CTO Rob Rastovich joins us to talk no- and low-code IoT and how they will affect the IoT landscape as a whole. Rob shares some of the use cases that benefit most from these kinds of solutions and how we're likely to see them affect the IoT business models of the future.Rob Rastovich has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years, from building a top 10 e-commerce site in a time when e-commerce was still in its infancy to establishing what is now known as Amazon's AWS IoT. As CTO of ThingLogix, Rob is the chief architect behind the company's groundbreaking IoT platform that eliminates the need for code. Rob is probably the only CTO that also runs a working cattle ranch in central Oregon, but he is equally comfortable developing cloud applications as he is feeding cattle.Interested in connecting with Rob? Reach out to him on Linkedin!About ThingLogix: Founded in 2014, ThingLogix focuses on helping companies adopt emerging technologies to change their businesses, their customers' lives and the world. ThingLogix provides a low-code/no-code AI and IoT platform to accelerate software development by a factor of 50 or more, reduces cost, risk and delivers future-proof applications.This episode of the IoT For All Podcast is brought to you by Soracom.Check them out at soracom.ioKey Questions and Topics from this Episode:(00:54) Intro to Rob Rastovich(04:59) Intro to ThingLogix(07:49) How will low-code/no-code solutions affect IoT as a whole?(10:56) What use cases can you share?(16:02) What does the future of AIoT look like?(19:11) How are business models changing in IoT?(25:29) How should companies approach the technology side of IoT as they begin to plan their solutions?(30:39) News from ThingLogix

In this week's Software Process and Measurement Cast, I speak with Rob Rastovich, CTO of ThingLogix. We talked about meeting customer needs through developing solutions using the AIoT (not a typo).  This is a seachange for both businesses and developers who will need to reskill and rethink what is possible.  Rob has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years, from building a top 10 e-commerce site in a time when e-commerce was still in its infancy to establishing what is now known as Amazon's AWS IoT.  As CTO of ThingLogix, Rob is the chief architect behind the company's groundbreaking IoT platform that eliminates the need for code. ThingLogix uses AI to power digital transformation across industry, commerce, and government globally.  Web: https://www.thinglogix.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rob-rastovich-1560532  Upcoming Events Using the TMMi accelerates the value of DevOps Fri, August 6, 2021 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT This is a free TMMi America Webinar featuring Rex Black  (SPaMCAST is a proud media sponsor of the TMMi America ) Register at https://bit.ly/3AOlvdC About this event In this webinar, we will address how DevOps testing benefits through TMMi How TMMi's higher Process Areas drive defect prevention, Shift Left, and CI/CD build and test pipelines Address the benefits of how DevOps Organization benefits from using the TMMi. Leveraging TMMi to focus DevOps test process improvements Re-Read Saturday News  This week we focus on Chapter 3 of  Monotasking by Staffan Nöteberg.  The chapter this week is titled, Focus on One Task Now.  An update on the continued experiment using Monotasking. In Chapter 2, Staffan describes how to create a short list of five items and then to push everything else to the “grass catcher” list. I have been working on using this approach this week with a special focus on capturing the date an item was added to the list and the stakeholder for the item. In the past, I trimmed my list on a quarterly basis. I use the dramatic approach of starting a new list saving only those items on my short list. This week I tried Staffan's weekly approach, trimming off a few older items on a weekly basis. The date added is useful but what I found more useful was asking myself the question, “am I really going to do this or is this an aspirational item?” Cue the chainsaw; even though I started a new list on July 1st I was able to remove several items from my new grass catcher list. This Week Week 5 - Focus on One Task - https://bit.ly/3hK2XDU    Previous Monotasking by Staffan Nöteberg Entries Week 1 - Logistics, Game Plan, and Preface - https://bit.ly/3x1oVap  Week 2 - Introduction - https://bit.ly/2TXVfwt  Week 3 - Monotasking In A Nutshell - https://bit.ly/3gGMb72  Week 4 - Cut Down on Things to Do - https://bit.ly/3wt1ENL  Next SPaMCAST Over the past few months, I have been in traffic jams on the highway several times when traveling to our weekly hike.  In more than one instance someone has decided to pull over and drive on the berm.  In more than a few cases the outcome of this technique for getting things done ends poorly. Despite the unpredictable outcome, jumping the queue is practiced by many in traffic and even more when funneling work to teams. The consequences when working on information technology products are far more predictable than driving, and they are ALWAYS bad. We will also have a visit from Susan Parente, who brings her I Am Not A Scrumdamentalist column to the cast.  We discuss risk management when using hybrid agile approaches.

In this episode, I sit down with Rob Rastovich, CTO of ThingLogix to talk about the Internet of Things. We discuss the problem of privacy in an age where all of our things talk to one another--and where tech companies are listening in to our conversations with our devices. Rob addresses some of the ethical critiques that have emerged about IoT, and I ask him about how he understands the relationship between his work as a technologist, anchored in the digital world of tech, and his work as a rancher, anchored in the very physical world of non-human animals, plants, and land. Rob Rastovich is the Chief Technology Officer of ThingLogix, and an expert on the Internet of Things, or IoT. He has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years, from building a top 10 e-commerce site in a time when e-commerce was still in its infancy to establishing Amazon’s AWS IoT. ThingLogix was awarded the 2018 IoT Platforms Leadership Award, and has become an advanced tier technology partner for Amazon Web Services. When he’s not at the forefront of IoT, Rob can be found maintaining his cattle ranch in Central Oregon. Episode produced by Ana Marsh and Matt Perry. Artwork by Desi Aleman.

Este es el primer episodio de la serie sobre IoT y computo en el edge, se enfoca en cómo comenzar en el mundo de AWS IoT. Alessandro Morales - fundador de la comunidad de IoT en Peru, Jorge Alfaro y Raúl Hugo cuentan sus experiencias acerca de que conocimientos necesita un profesional en los tres pilares de AWS IoT: Dispositivos, Connectividad y Analítica. Material Adicional: https://aws.amazon.com/iot-core/lorawan/

Richard Barry joins David to talk about the role of the RTOS in IoT, the increasing complexities that need to be considered when connecting devices to the internet and how security must be a mindset from the beginning of product development. The discussion also covers the coordination of device-side and cloud-side security to look at patterns from a fleet of devices and prevent scalable attacks. Minutes: Introducing Richard Barry and the FreeRTOS project [00:57] Breaking down what an RTOS is [2:04] Real-time use cases – the variety of real-time requirements [4:10] The increase in remote accessibility and the security challenges it brings [5:40] RTOS as the undifferentiating factor in devices [6:48] Internet connectivity and the increasing security complexities it brings [8:10] The role of Amazon in FreeRTOS - making development as quick and secure as possible [9:18] Knowledge gaps in a multi-disciplinary IoT [10:50] The relationship between the RTOS and Root of Trust [13:22] Reference integrations and standardized interfaces to ease the porting to hardware security [14:28] Developer security expertise – the challenge of new concepts, terminology and requirements [15:55] Practical challenges that come with scale [17:35] Developer considerations for lifecycle security [18:40] The importance of demonstrating and educating best practice [19:26] Awareness of the consequences of getting it wrong, the increased legislation and, inevitably, the increased use of the Root of Trust [21:36] The importance of security being the mindset from the beginning [22:37] Evolution of Open Source projects – being driven by market requirements, enabling scalability [23:30] Building confidence in FreeRTOS, with backing and credibility from Amazon [24:30] Simplifying the FreeRTOS software – making it smaller and decoupled to suit the diversified use cases [25:11] Futureproofed strategy for developers – reuse undifferentiating factors [26:42] Coordinating cloud and device security to prevent scalable attacks [27:33] Learn more about PSA Certified www.psacertified.org

ST is launching its Alexa Voice Service for AWS IoT refrence design. It's also the first single-chip design of its kind for greater efficiency and accessibility. This is the audio version of a blog post. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/stmicroelectronics-blog/message

David is a Webby Award winning cloud development consultant that focuses on cloud native custom development strategy. For over fifteen years as a consultant David has led custom software development on emerging platforms for companies such as FedEx, AT&T, Sony Music, Intel, Comcast, Herman Miller, Principal Financial, and Adobe (as well as many others). David regularly writes and speaks on the digital landscape with published works for Pluralsight, O’Reilly, and Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning). He has written for Mashable, Smashing Magazine, and VentureBeat, and he has spoken at events like AdTech, Interop, and Adobe Max.Show resources:David's blog Follow David on Twitter Pluralsight AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner PathFull transcript:Barry Luijbregts  0:20  Welcome to another episode of developer weekly. This week, I'm talking with David Ducker about getting started with Amazon Web Services or AWS. David is a cloud development consultant and author at Pluralsight, O'Reilly LinkedIn learning and much more. Thanks for being on the show. David's. How are you doing? David TuckerI'm doing excellent. Thank you for having me on. Barry Luijbregts  0:46  Yeah, I know. It's a very interesting topic. I usually get into as your topics as I I love as you and I have been playing with it since its conception. So I don't know much about AWS and I would love to Learn from you, because AWS is actually a lot older than Azure, right? David Tucker  1:05  Yeah, that's correct. And so AWS really began began this entire space. And one of the interesting things is, you know, when we look at it, they have kind of evolved the entire concept of what it means to even be a cloud provider. And so AWS, in a lot of ways has led the way in this area. But obviously, we've seen providers like Azure, come up and provide very similar services in a lot of areas. But yet, it's still confusing when you're dealing with any platform that has so many different options and services included in it. Barry Luijbregts  1:36  Yeah, absolutely. That's also what I usually try to do in Azure as in tell people which services they can use for which scenarios because that is very confusing. There are hundreds of services. For your scenario, which one do you pick, and there's lots of overlap as well. So how did you even get into the topic of AWS? David Tucker  1:56  Well, I could I could go back to almost the beginning of my career. I'll Just give a super, super quick highlight. I remember when I was working at a university here in the States, and I was helping to consult on research projects with the university. And I remember the first time I could actually fire up virtual servers, like multiple virtual servers on my own machine. And I just remember the excitement of being like I can make anything I want to make with this. And so when the cloud came out, I started to understand more about the public cloud, it really was helping with a lot of the challenges that I was seeing with my development projects, just figuring out how to handle storage, for example, and how to spin up web servers because I really my initial development was in just being a web developer. I wanted to figure out how I could go beyond what I could do just with a co located server, which was how I was doing a lot of my work. And so with that the cloud became a really a big interest for me because it enabled me to do so much more than I could do with what I had. Barry Luijbregts  2:55  Right? Yeah, the cloud is, is an amazing place. So let's just let's just start right there, as in cloud in general, why is that even interesting over, let's say, a server that's under your desk? David Tucker  3:09  Yeah, I think for I think, especially when we think about today's climate in terms of development and technology in general, the exciting thing here is, we've made it accessible to pretty much everyone. I remember when I first started as a developer, you had to have so much money to be able to set up something that could scale to even meet thousands of users. And the exciting thing here is now if you're a developer, and you have an idea, you can bring it to millions of people, and really only pay for what you're actually using. Back. When we think about traditional data centers with the ability to scale you had to predict the amount of loads we're going to have, you had to get more servers than what you needed. You had to have access to a data center. And it's just we've almost democratized getting technology in the hands of people and that to me, is what's most exciting about it? Barry Luijbregts  4:02  Yeah, that is very exciting to me as well. Because, you know, basically now if you have an idea, you can just bring it to market. It doesn't really matter if you have no budget or anything, you can just put it all in the cloud on serverless services. And it just works. It's amazing. Absolutely. Yeah, it still excites me to this day as well, because cloud services evolve quickly, as well, as in back in the day, I used to work with web applications a lot. And they also needed to be scalable, even if they would run on virtual machines on premises or wherever. So then we would build web farms, and those web farms within their be connected to each other and scale, which was a very, very difficult thing to do with sharing session state and things like that. And nowadays, it's just a slider. You just slide to scale up and down and it's just crazy how much time I have invested into learning that and actually getting things to run on that. And now it's just a slider. It kind of makes me sad, but also very excited. David Tucker  5:08  I totally agree. And I think only people like us who have lived in both of these worlds really understand the brilliance of what we have currently. And one of the interesting things is, is that it means that in some ways, we're doing less. And I think for some people, that reaction is almost, it's a little, it's almost a little troubling for them because they feel like, Well, I know how to do all this complex things. Like for example, like you're talking about setting up some type of store for doing session state and keeping that across an entire cluster of servers. But what we've learned is we get to now focus in not on all of these things required to do something but we can really focus in on the application we're building and not any of these other things. Barry Luijbregts  5:50  Exactly. The cloud takes care of the plumbing for us and we just focus on creating value for the customers.So AWS What can you do for us? Let's say I'm a dotnet developer, which I am and I create, let's say, an ASP. NET Core web application, which is just a web application that can run anywhere. Really? Where would I run that in AWS? How would that work? David Tucker  6:14  Well, that's a great question. And one of the things that I've seen because several of my clients are primarily dotnet shops as well. However, for some of them, whether it's for financial reasons, or existing relationships, they have, they've chosen to go the AWS route. And again, for most developers, that decision is going to be made, you know, by their company yet at a high level. So you could be a dotnet developer, and maybe again, you really love Azure, you use it for all of your side projects, but all of a sudden, you find yourself trying to figure out how do I work in this AWS space. And when we look at the problem, like you mentioned, trying to figure out where to run something like this A dotnet core application, that's a web application. One of the great things is just like on Azure, you have a lot of different choices depending on what you needed to do. So when we started off with eight have us, you know, there really was a couple of ways to do this. But we've seen new services expand. And so, you know, if you're looking for the serverless type approach, where you're really trying to minimize the amount of maintenance, you're going to have to have looking at a service like AWS lambda, which really, when lambda launched, it really kicked off this serverless concept across most all of the cloud platforms. And they now have some equivalent, it gives you the ability to do something closer to what we would call Functions as a Service f as within the cloud, but you still have the ability if you need to, to either spin up a container with the container service, it's available on AWS, which we call ECS. Or just spin up your virtual servers, if that's what you're more comfortable with using EC two, which is a service that's been around really since about the beginning of AWS. Barry Luijbregts  7:45  Right. So you could use lambda, which is the serverless service to run an complete website in it. David Tucker  7:54  Yeah, that's correct. And in most cases, we'll see this actually paired if you're doing a serverless approach. So if you're Looking to do, let's say maybe a single page application type approach. And so you're going to build and react or Angular or view. And you're going to host that in s3, which is the object storage service that we have within AWS. And then you're going to do all of your API calls through lambda. So if you're looking to do more of that type of web application, then you'll just see all of that logic handled within lambda, but the hosting in s3. But if you're doing more of a traditional web application, then you can look at using ECS, it's still possible to do it in lambda, but it's a little bit more complicated in that approach. So that's when you generally see people moving over to more of a containerized approach. Barry Luijbregts  8:38  And why would you use containers, really, in this case? Sure.  David Tucker  8:43  So in this case, when we're thinking about, you know, building out a traditional application where, you know, you're not adopting a front end, you know, web framework that's going to handle all the rendering for you and you're doing more page based, when you're looking at running something that's going to run over an extended period of time. One of the limitations that you have in working with a solution like lambda is it even though you get the benefits of it being more of a serverless type approach, you you have specific limits for how it can run and for how much memory it can have. And so in some cases, you could build an entire an entire traditional web application to run within those constructs. However, it probably would end up feeling a little bit limiting when you, when you're running something on a container, you obviously you lose those limits, you have the ability to give it as much time as it needs to run and because it's always going to be up and running. Or you could even set it to just run based on traffic. But you also lose that memory limit as well. You have the ability to configure it to have as much memory as you needed to have. So again, it would depend on what your limits are. But you gain the ability and using a specific service within ECS called fargate. You lose the the kind of the burden of having to manage your underlying cluster that your containers are running on. So you can do it in a much more efficient way than what we use To have to do when we were managing those clusters ourselves. Barry Luijbregts  10:02  And that is fargate. Is that then a container orchestrator? David Tucker  10:07  Yes. So it pairs with the AWS service called ECS. So there's really two different approaches, you can take on AWS, if you're interested in running a container. So you have ECS, which is Amazon's native service for running containers in the cloud. They also have Eks, for people that are interested in doing the full Kubernetes workflow. But with ECS, you have the option to use this sub service called fargate. And it totally manages the underlying layer for you. And this was one of the challenges that those of us that that when we were starting off, and we were trying to use ECS over Kubernetes. The challenge was the effective way to manage that underlying layer, because initially Kubernetes just did that better. But with fargate AWS has totally built up a native service for this and managing that underlying layer. So you don't even have to think about it. As a developer, you can simply say, I want to have this container running. I want to have this menu. instance is up and running. And I want it to be able to, you know, meet this demand and the rest of it will be handled for it. Right. So if you would compare fargate to Kubernetes service, then fargate is even more platform as a service as in you don't have to do as much then Kubernetes. Absolutely. And and so you, you gain, you have a little bit less control, but you haven't been fully managed, as opposed to, you know, with Kubernetes, as you mentioned, you'd have, you'd have a lot more things you'd have to control and a lot more things that could go wrong. In some situations, that's exactly what you need. But for most cases, especially with the clients that I work with, that they actually need less control, because the platform is going to manage it efficiently for them. Barry Luijbregts  11:39  Yeah. Okay. Oh, that's a great option, actually. Because I like containers. And I like the concept of containers, and that you can just take it and run it locally. And it's the exact same thing that you run into Cloud, but I always, I'm not sure you know, because it's so Infrastructure as a Service, especially when you use Kubernetes. Because then stuff You have to manage that whole infrastructure. And that's just not what I want to do. I want to just focus on creating stuff David Tucker  12:06  Exactly. And this brings up what I think is the number one mistake that new developers make when moving into the cloud. And that's because especially if they're more senior developers, they immediately shift to the more complex option, instead of what's the option that's going to allow me to maximize the time I spend maintaining whatever I build. And I think you see that with even organizations, they'll, they'll say, Well, of course, we need Kubernetes. We need all of those controls. And yet they don't ever factor in the maintenance time to the solutions that they build. I've worked with clients that really do need those controls. But again, I would say a vast majority of them, do not. And so with the cloud, one of the things I encourage new developers with is is choose the minimum approach that will allow you to get the objectives that you need. You can always add new things in later you can always adjust your approach. But in the beginning build something for The minimum amount of maintenance that you need long term that still meets the needs of the users that are going to be using it. Barry Luijbregts  13:05  Right. Because Is it easy to migrate from service to service? David Tucker  13:09  Yeah, one of the great things about a lot of the services is you do have that ability to migrate aspects of it. So if you're using a container, so especially if let's take a look at the container services, ECS, fargate, and Eks. Within that approach, you're still using a Docker container no matter which direction you choose. So if you wanted to start off by using fargate, and then you know what we really need the controls that Kubernetes provides for us, absolutely, you can make that switch, there will be some work in switching. But it's not going to be it's a little easier to to go from a simpler solution to a more complex one than it is to work backwards and go from the more complex one to the simple one. Barry Luijbregts  13:47  All right. So that's great. That's a couple of options. And those are actually a lot less options to run your application and then as your has, which is a great thing, I think because there's so much overlap always and it's difficult to choose things from. So what about storing data? What would you use for that? David Tucker  14:04  Yeah, and this this, there are a couple of options here with this as well. And I think this is one of the things that's important to remember to those of us that have been in the cloud for a while is that chances are when we started in the cloud, there were a lot less options. And now that there's so many options, it's a little bit more overwhelming for new developers that are getting into the platform. But for most things, in terms of storage on AWS, you're going to be looking at s3, which is just one of the most important services on the entire platform. Now, if you're talking about things like where you're actually attaching volumes to virtual servers, there's there's other services that you're going to be leveraging. But when you're simply talking about storage, whether that's storing things like user generated content, from your web application or your mobile application, or whether you're talking about storing a log data or whether you're talking about you know, really storing any type of just general data In those cases, s3 is going to be the solution for you. And one of the things that I think developers can sometimes be fooled by is it's very simple to get into s3 and to go in and upload files into s3. And you might think well, that's that's all this is, right? This just stores files. But you can begin to know some of the capabilities that are provided with s3 that really do differentiate it being you know, one is there's lifecycle configuration. So you've got the ability to move your data between, you know, warm storage to cold storage to a true complete cold, cold archive storage, you've got the ability to use it for a data lake. So you've got the ability to even go in and run queries against unstructured data that's stored within your s3 buckets. There's, I mean, really, there's so much that s3 does, and it all ties in very nicely with AWS is authorization tool, which is I am so you can control who has access to it and even set up some very specific policies for things like controlling who can access it from, from a user perspective, from an IP perspective, there's there's a lot of different options. So s3 is really the powerhouse storage service that we have on AWS. And then you use that to store unstructured data. Barry Luijbregts  16:09  So normal relational data, right?  David Tucker  16:10  Correct. So we can see, I know a lot of organizations that will dump For example, let's say large amounts of log data into s3 directly. And as mentioned, you can use a service called Athena to go in and actually run queries against that data. Again, you can also use it just as easily to store you know, photos that people upload as a part of your web application. And again, use that to potentially use the lifecycle rules to move that back and forth between warm storage and cold storage, for example. And one of the great things about s3 as well is built into that by default, depending on how you configure it, but you have the ability to also have URLs to every object that you store within s3. So if you want to use it as storage for your web assets, you have the ability to do that if you want to be able to just make something available to the public and throw it out there so you can have a download link. You can Do that. And then you also compare this in with another service, which is called Amazon CloudFront, which is Amazon's global content delivery network. So you can utilize pair s3 with CloudFront. And now you've distributed your content out to all of their edge locations. And you see a lot of people using this with their web applications for storing their static assets. And doing it this way, you're really optimizing the download speed. For anyone that's using your web application, we can see great increases over just using s3 by pairing it with CloudFront. Barry Luijbregts  17:30  Right. So just for the listeners, if you didn't catch that, then CloudFront is a content delivery network, which makes sure that stuff that you put in there, like static files, like JavaScript files, or images, get to be populated to edges that are very close to the user's little data centers that are always close to the user so that the data is always close to you. And therefore you have less latency and things are more performance. David Tucker  17:57  Absolutely. And so that's cool in AWS has many, many edge locations. I forget the exact number now, but I'm pretty sure we're north of 200 edge locations around the world. So you can really see your content spread out. And this is another one of the things that just gets me excited when we think about kind of how things used to be versus how they are now, the fact that virtually anyone can take and distribute their content and send it out to servers, you know, from, from Europe, to Asia, to North America, South America, you can just send it out through just really with one click of the mouse, within five to 10 minutes, you're gonna have that content all around the world. That's something that's still really excites me. Barry Luijbregts  18:32  Yeah. It's it's just a massive scale, isn't it? It's the extreme, massive scale that is so easy to use with the cloud. It's just still amazing to me. Absolutely. So what about relational data, like a SQL database? For instance, can I put that somewhere in AWS? David Tucker  18:48   Absolutely. And so there's several different approaches that you can take, but the core service for relational databases on AWS is called RDS or relational database service. And the great thing here is we're not just talking about, you know, using an AWS specific database, you have access here to SQL Server, you have access to MySQL, you have, you know, access to Postgres and Maria dB, there's several choices. But in addition to that, you also do have access to something that's AWS specific. And that's called Aurora. And that's a database engine that really was built for the cloud. So they built that themselves, but they really targeted it at being both MySQL and Postgres compatible. So you actually can pick when you create an overall database, hey, do I want it to be MySQL compatible, or Postgres compatible, and you can use all of the same libraries. So one of the great benefits is, if you're used to using either of those databases, then you simply can create a database in RDS that's Aurora, and you don't have to change any of your code to get it to work with Aurora. It just works out of the box. And one of the really exciting things that they also have developed with this is there's a concept called Aurora serverless. So if you have a database, maybe you have a side project and You're just you want to have access to a database, but you don't want to pay for one to be up all the time with serverless, you gain the ability to basically have this database spin up and spin down as needed, and even scale as needed without you having to worry about managing those underlying database instances. So we're certainly seeing a lot more in this area, there's still a few negative aspects of using the serverless approach. They're still kind of maturing that product over time. But it's really exciting to see those kind of concepts factor in now two databases as well as you know, compute resources that we have with lambda. Barry Luijbregts  20:29  Yeah, that's very exciting. What a cool name. By the way, I'll roll rock. There are cool names in AWS. David Tucker  20:36  I will give you one comment on the names. One thing you do have to be careful with when you're learning about AWS as a developer is a lot of the services have similar names. And so one of the things that I always hear back from learners when they're getting ready for certification tests is there's so many services to memorize. And we have things like cloud search versus cloud formation versus, you know, cloud trail all of these sounded the same, how do I you know, so so that's just where Other things to let developers know if you're struggling with that you're not the only one. There's, you know, 212 services right now on AWS. And sometimes it can be hard to remember all of the different names and what they mean. Barry Luijbregts  21:10  Yeah, absolutely. And they might change as well, like Microsoft Azure, they sometimes change because the marketing team just decides that another name just sounds better, or is better for the markets. Yes, definitely. So what about big data and data analytics, because you talked about that a little bit already, that you can use, it was s3, I think, also to run to store your big, non relational data and then do a bit of data analytics over that other services as well. David Tucker  21:39  Yeah, there are and there's there's actually a growing number of services in this area. This is an area that I think AWS has really placed a lot of emphasis on in the last few years. We've even seen them develop what we call specialty certifications for both big data which is now called analytics and also within machine learning. And these areas really do intersect. So if you're looking for more of a traditional data warehousing approach, this is where we have a service called redshift. And so this is what's going to give you, you know, again, column based storage for structured data, where you can store it at a petabyte scale. So large, large amounts of data. So that's where we see a lot of organizations shift. They're looking for more of that data warehouse approach. Now, if you're looking for more of that data lake approach, this is where we see organizations looking to use s3 for that type of data storage. And AWS has even tried to make this easier with a service called Lake formation, which any of their services that that end in formation are really there to help you build out an initial capability in this area to launch infrastructure. So Lake formation tries to go in and set up data lake constructs go in and actually set up some aspects of governance and they even have services you can integrate with it that will help to go through and identify using Machine Learning identify sensitive data and make sure that that's being handled properly as well. So this is an exciting area, there's so many services. You know, if you're an organization that's used to using traditional if you're if you're used to using Apache Spark, for example, you know, we have the service EMR, which is elastic MapReduce, which will allow you to have access to all of those same tools within AWS, but in a way where they're managing that for you, it's really more of a platform as a service approach when you're doing that, but there also are, you know, cloud native tools that you can interact with as well. And then we have the entire suite, with Sage maker, for example, that will enable us to go in and take all the data that we have stored in and begin to create machine learning solutions on top of what's there. Ah, very cool. Barry Luijbregts  23:43  And what about visualizing that data? David Tucker  23:47  So we have some different tools. And here's, here's where I'm going to be really honest with you, because I know that you know, some people that work in a platform like AWS, just always believe AWS is the best solution. But here you know if we have people that are used to working within power Bi and Tableau, for example. You know, AWS has a service called Quick side. And it's a really good service, it doesn't have the capabilities that you would see in a Power BI or a tableau solution. But for some organizations, the solutions there are adequate for what they need. I've moved several of my clients on to quick site, because they have some very, pretty basic needs in terms of data visualization. And with quick site, you can go in just as you can with those other services and create customized dashboards that are tied into your data. And you can do that, you know, you can marry together your structured and unstructured data into a single into a single view. And, you know, for a lot of organizations, that type of data insight is just something that you know, something that they use on a daily basis. But I will say again, if you're looking for some really advanced visualization use cases, solutions, like Power BI and Tableau are they're going to be a little bit a step ahead of what we have within quick sight. Barry Luijbregts  24:50  Okay, well, you should choose a tool that's best for you and appreciate a tool that's in your preferred platform. Barry Luijbregts  24:58  All right. So we're building quite intricate Already, we can run our websites, we can store our data, we can use containers, if we want to, we can do data analytics, if we want to. What about if I want to do something with IoT? David Tucker  25:11  Like I have a little device or I have many devices? And that sends many, many millions of messages to the cloud? Is there something for that? Absolutely. And what we see here within a service called AWS IoT is that one of the great benefits of it is that it does integrate seamlessly into a lot of the other services that we've already mentioned. And This to me is while I totally agree with what you mentioned previously, we need to use the service that's best for whatever solution we need. One of the things I will say too, is when we do pick services that are in the platform that we're in, we do usually get some advantages with that. And I think here One of the advantages in using AWS IoT is we can see this integrated in a great way with services like lambda, for example and with with some of the messaging services that We have within AWS. So it becomes very easy for us to go in and configure even if we have millions of messages coming in from our IoT devices, we can see them, you know, come in, we can analyze them, we can get analytics on them using some tools with what we call Amazon kinesis, which is the stream processing solution we have on AWS, we can then based on certain conditions, fire off a compute instance with lambda to actually perform some action on the data that's coming in. And we can store that data, even if it's unstructured in s3 and get that data lake capability that we talked about previously. So I really think the IoT example is really a strong use case for pairing some of these services together, because of all the tight integration that can happen when you're working within a platform like AWS. Barry Luijbregts  26:44  Yeah. And then from there, you have lots of data that you can then do machine learning on and use artificial intelligence to discover what's in the data or to use it for different purposes. I'll bet you guys probably have a lot of Artificial intelligence services as well like as your cognitive services that is artificial intelligence as a service, which is really a software as a service offering. What is what is there in AWS for that? David Tucker  27:11  Absolutely. So the equivalent services to the cognitive services in Azure is that on AWS, we have what they call their AI services. And they're very similar in nature. And this is one of the things I love really about both Azure and AWS, you know, for some organizations, especially if we look, you know, three, four years in the past, it was really difficult for them to get up to speed with using any aspect of machine learning or AI because it required them to have a very specific skill set, they had to have people that were really at the time kind of on the cutting edge, they had to have a lot of expensive hardware to do some GPU based processing. And and what we see here is we've really lowered the barrier for what it takes for organizations to get in and use these kind of services. So on AWS, we have a whole suite of them and it can be you know, ones like for example, AWS recognition. This is the Computer Vision service. And so with this, you can go in and get keywords back from an image. For example, if we want to just understand what is detected within that image, we can get those back. We also can go in and store faces within recognition and then detect those faces in other images, we can even go through and try to determine the emotion of someone within a particular image. And that's just that's just really the tip of the iceberg of what's possible. We also have the ability to go in and get take text and convert audio of text into into actual text that we can work with. We can take text that we submit and have it be converted into a voice actually speaking that so we have so many different things that cover you know, visual use cases from computer vision to natural language processing. To regression, we have a service called AWS forecasts that is able to actually just based on the data that you input, create a regression model and be able to predict future values. So we really see a wide range of services. that people can simply use, you know, in a SaaS based approach to fully take advantage of machine learning, but without having to build their own models and go through all the complexities that come with that. Barry Luijbregts  29:09  Yeah, I think that's a very good approach to get people into AI as well, because it's very complex to to show. And when you use these, you can just get started. And if you want to customize, you can always do that later. Barry Luijbregts  29:23  So I would like to use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code to create my applications. Are there any extensions for AWS in Visual Studio Visual Studio code so that I can easily deploy stuff or maybe talk to API's within AWS? David Tucker  29:42  Sure, that's, that's a great question. And in first, let me just, I'll throw out the irony here that, you know, for a long time, I was a developer, not in the Microsoft world. And I you know, I was on a Mac and I was, you know, I was doing iOS development for a long period of time. And it's funny if you would have ever told me that so much of what I'm doing would would shift over to the Microsoft stack, I probably wouldn't have believed you. But even me on a daily basis, I'm using Visual Studio code as my primary editor in working with AWS and in working with Azure with some of my clients. And so one of the great things we have here is there are multiple extensions that are available for AWS in terms of working with within Visual Studio code. This actually is the primary editor I see them creating extensions for so you have depending on what you're doing within within AWS, there's going to be several different extensions that you can take advantage of including just, you know, some basic extensions that that cover, you know, wide use cases and then some very specific extensions for working with specific things like for example, the the cDk, which is AWS, one of AWS tools for doing infrastructures code. So there are there are several different options that are available to you. And if you're using Visual Studio code, especially, I think you'll you'll probably feel right at home working within AWS. Barry Luijbregts  30:54  I expected as much. There probably are lots of extensions just like they offer as your Course. Yes. As in Visual Studio code in Visual Studio as well. So So Amazon just tell it's it seems like a very complete platform, of course, because it's very mature. And it has all these offerings for basically everything that you can think of. How do you best get started with it? As in? Are there guides or websites that you can go to? What's the best way to get started? David Tucker  31:25  Yeah, absolutely. I think for for most developers, there are some great resources that AWS does provide to kind of help you take those first steps. One of the things that I probably would selfishly say this is I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about how to get developers started on AWS. And a lot of this went into a path that I have on Pluralsight. And I worked very closely with Pluralsight. we'd spent about a month kind of rethinking, you know, how do we put out a path that really helps people get started in this area, and what we ended up with is a path that covers something called the cloud practitioner certification. So AWS has this an entry level certification. And this is pretty unique here. This is designed not just for developers, but really anybody who's going to be working in or around the cloud. And this is the initial certification that just shows that somebody has a good understanding of the platform, and of the different capabilities. It doesn't cover everything. It's it's a very wide, but kind of very shallow certification. It's designed to help just demonstrate that you have this wide knowledge. And one of the things I've seen is, you know, we've seen so many people take this on, especially in this current time when people aren't sure about their job status, they're trying to get new skills. They're trying to make themselves marketable within, you know, within this pandemic, to potentially new opportunities. And this certification has proved to be a great way for new developers to get into AWS. So that would be one of the things I would reference there. There's three different courses, there's even a project where you can begin to put some of those concepts in place, and while AWS has some free resources that also are very, very good. I think this would really help you get from, you know, kind of your starting point of not knowing much about the platform at all, to truly understanding the benefits of the cloud, what AWS provides. And also one of the great things about it is if you go down this path and you stick with it, you actually will end up with a certification that you can actually go out and have that on your resume be something that helps open up doors for you within your career. All right, well, that is absolutely great. Barry Luijbregts  33:25  I will put a link to this Pluralsight path in the show notes, and also to other links of yours, including https://www.davidtucker.net/. Well, thank you very much for being on the show. And we will see you next week. Thank you for listening to another episode of developer weekly. Please help me to spread the word by reviewing the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player. Also visit https://developerweeklypodcast.com/ for shownotes and the full transcript. And if you'd like to support me in making the show, please visit my Pluralsight courses to learn something new.  

Virginia Purnell:Welcome to EntrepreneurConundrum with Virginia Purnell, where growing entrepreneurs share how they get visible online.Hi Everyone. Today I'm talking with James Hurst about how he incorporates marketing automation in his business. James is a veteran online marketer starting on eBay in late 2000. He is the creator of multiple softwares including ClickFunnels Follow Up Pro, which is a ClickFunnels Affiliate software as well as a creator of Email Slurper 3000, he has created five online courses including make Power Wheels Faster and Build an AWS IOT button slack bot step by step. He is a ClickFunnels dream car winner and a respected affiliate for multiple other softwares. He and his wife Amanda, reside with their four boys in Springfield, Utah.Welcome James.James Hurst:Hey, thank you so much for having me.Virginia Purnell:Thanks for being here today. So tell us a little bit about yourself.James Hurst:Okay, so yeah, like the intro kind of said, I've been doing this for quite a while ever since. I've been selling things since on eBay. And then I got into, I've worked for an agency doing pay-per-click, been doing SEO, I had a local business, so I kind of always had some business going on in some computer aspect of it. You know, website, lead gen and since you can tell even already, I'm like a little bit all over the place. I've kind of settled in a little bit as an affiliate marketer, which is good because that means I can, you know, if I think something's really cool and interesting, I can go check it out, review it, you know, make a blog or make a video post about it and then I can go to the next thing and, and review that.And so I'm kind of realizing that yeah, I don't just have one, one particular niche, but I kind of just, I kind of enjoy, enjoy soaking, soaking up a little bit of everything, if that makes sense.Virginia Purnell:So, whatever catches your fancy the moment, right?James Hurst:Yeah.Virginia Purnell:What inspired you to become an affiliate marketer?James Hurst:Affiliate marketer? Well, one of the big, one of the bigger products that I promote is ClickFunnels. And just this idea of making a sale once and then getting paid for it multiple times on the backend. So a big shift you'll see in the industry is everyone wants to sell a subscription. Seems like whether it's Netflix or ClickFunnels or Active Campaign, most or even Adobe, the Adobe softwares, they're wanting to sell a subscription so they can have a recurring residual income model so they can probably forecast better and everything.And so I figured, Hey, if I'm going to, if I'm going to sell something, why not sell something that people will use, you know, month in and month out. And then if I truly put in enough work and build up a big enough base, then it really is something that I could, I could take, you know, two weeks a month off from work, quote unquote work and, and still have that revenue coming in. That seemed like a very, that's seemed like a very powerful model. Something worth investing. Your limited amount of time into it is doing the work once and getting paid for it over and over again. I think whether that principle, I find itself, you know, in software, if I'm, if I'm creating a software, I work hard once, make a software, sell it over and over again. If I make a YouTube video that's really valuable, it sits there on YouTube and unlike Facebook where you know, the video's gone a couple of days. No, it's down in your feed on YouTube. It will grow, you know, in three years. It's just growing in, in, in views and it's essentially working for you. So this idea of doing work once, getting paid for it for the rest of your life, or at least for a good two, two to five years is something that I've always, always kind of have front and center when I'm working.Virginia Purnell:Well, what's nice about what you're doing, like with affiliate offers versus trying to sell someone a subscription is you did all the work at the front where now it's up to that company to keep those clients there. So you don't have to try to keep them there all the time.James Hurst:Exactly. And there's pros and cons to that too, which means that, you know, some of that's out of my hands. Like if that company doesn't support people very well, you know, or it's too complicated or the support, the support process is too, you know, then it's out of your hands. Whereas you know, if it is my own product and I've actually, one of the things you introduced was Email Sluper 3000 I'm just in the process of changing that from a one time fee to a small monthly fee. So I'm actually getting my feet wet myself as a product owner for Email Slurper 3000 of what's that like to have my own subscription, my own subscription based product. And it's exciting to think about, you know, and this one's only $7 a month. And so I just kind of dream about, you know, even just a thousand people.Like what if I had a thousand people paying $7 a month, then I could count on that. I could basically count on $7,000 a month, you know? And I would probably have some, you know, I would probably know about how much I'm growing at the time. And that's really, it's a really powerful model to be able to predict your, your monthly revenues, right? To have some sort of consistency there, whether it's on an affiliate residual model or whether it's software as a subscription for yourself. And I'm just doing that with ClickFunnels and Stripe. So I just set up, set up a recurring product in Stripe and I tie that back to ClickFunnels. And that's how I'm, that's how I'm doing that.Virginia Purnell:Utilize the platform that's paying you.James Hurst:No, and that's, yeah, typically, typically I don't....it's not a hard and fast rule that I have to be using the product, but it's typically a natural, a natural thing to promote the things that I recommend, you know, as a, as someone that puts my own name on the line for what the things that I recommend I, I'd have a hard time, you know, pushing things that I don't really believe in,Virginia Purnell:Which says a lot too. Because then if other people know that you recommend a product, then they're more likely to trust you too, right?James Hurst:Yep. Yep. And now the tricky thing, like, I don't know if you've heard of Kajabi or not. I have, yes. Yeah. So I have Kajabi as an end user. I've purchased many courses that have, so I know what Kajabi is like as an end user. Unfortunately, to promote it as an affiliate, you actually have to purchase, you have to, you have to be a paying member of Kajabi. And so that, that is it. That is an obstacle is that there's some programs that you have to be a paying member, and have to be able to promote them. And that's actually, in a way, it's a good, it's a good thing and a bad thing because it means that it means that the, the, the amount of competition that you're competing with, with other affiliates is going to be much less because you have to be a paying member to do it.So the trick is if I wanted to be, you know, if I'm paying for ClickFunnels, which does membership sites, and then why would I want to go and pay extra just to be using Kajabi so I can promote Kajabi or do or do a compare and contrast. So at a minimum I would not be afraid to start up a free trial of these softwares. You can, I mean within 14 days or a month you can do a good comparison review, that kind of thing. And actually have a, make an, an opinion about, you know, about the two different softwares. But if you wanted to go all in, it's tempting because I think Kajabi is great too. It's tempting to want to just say, well, I've got to figure out how a way to be, you know, to break even on my Kajabi subscription.Maybe throw, maybe throw a course up in there. And so that's, that's tough. There's another program too that I'm like that it's like, I don't use it, but I want to know about it and promote it. So I bought like sheep, like a lifetime version of it. So I could have access, make tutorials, do you know, do comparisons, and be knowledgeable about the subject. But yeah, it's a lot. It's, it's a lot. Definitely pros and cons to whether you have to pay or not to be able to promote, to be a paying member, not to promote something.Virginia Purnell:Yes. And like you said, like it, put something on Kajabi and then hope to get your investment back out of it. Right?James Hurst:Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause I'm pretty well ingrained. I have, I've got quite a bit of stuff in ClickFunnels so it would be, it would be a ton of work to get everything of mine out of there and I'm okay. You know, I'm kind of, my role out there is kind of to be the guy that does know, Hey, what's better, good job, your ClickFunnels for this purpose, what, you know, go high level versus ClickFunnels. And so as an affiliate, you know, I don't have, I mean I, I've done well as a ClickFunnels affiliate, but to try to, even though there's, we have bias for the things that we promote, I think the best way is to be an affiliate for both products. Do a review and, and be an affiliate for both. Let's say this is my honest opinion of this one. For these people. Here's my honest opinion of this. These ones for those people, I don't care which one you think is better for you. This is, here's my thing and here's, and either one or they're both my affiliate link. You know what I mean? Yeah.Virginia Purnell:So what do you look for when you go to promote an affiliate as an affiliate for a company?James Hurst:So I look for, I look for some excitement around something, right? I, you know, if I hear one person talking about it, that's one thing. If I hear it again and again and again, right? I see, I look, I'm joining the Facebook group. I can see kind of the trajectory of how it's growing and I kind of listen to it on the Facebook group. Are people complaining? Are people asking questions? What's, you know, people are there to support kind of. You just kind of get a vibe for the product and then like Kajabi, like for example, what's my experience like as an end user and just seeing, just basically keeping an ear to the wall on products that people seem to love. Right. And, and it seemed to be growing. I mean if it's not, it's nothing. There's no, I don't know, other than just intuition of, of just keeping your eye, keeping my ear to the wall on and what people are talking about, yeah. For what else I'd like to promote.Virginia Purnell:How do you stand out from all the other competition on the products that have a lot of affiliates promoting them?James Hurst:No, it is kind of crowded at the same time. A lot of people fizzle out too. Man. I, it has been a grind. Like, luckily I love, luckily I enjoy the grind. Otherwise I wouldn't like it, I'm just like, ah, this is not where the thing you do want to throw in the towel sometimes. But yeah, like I've been trying to grow like my YouTube channel and it's just like, it's literally, it's like one subscriber and then two days go by and then another subscriber and it's just, it's like pushing, like pushing the, you know, a rock up a Hill, but in the hopes that someday that thing will start rolling back down and, and gain that momentum. But how do you stand out? So yeah, even just showing up consistently, right. Will will separate you. Like that was really going to be consistent at first.And I had a thing that said, okay, you've got to publish at least one thing a week. Right. Whether it's a YouTube video, a blog or something. I tend to like video. Personally. I'm doing a lot of teaching, I'm opening up softwares, looking at, I'm teaching, that kind of thing. But yeah, I kind of had to commit to myself to show up at least once a week. And if you're really, you know, if you're really going to go all in, you've got to show up. You got to show up daily, right? If you're at the forefront of what you're doing, you should be having cool stuff that you're doing or thinking about or coming up with and sharing that with your audience. And there's also this idea of like when you're first getting started, like you may not be, you may not feel like you're the expert, but like pick that thing you want to be the expert in and start going deep on something.Like I just picked up a tool, I kind of literally picked up a product like a week or like a week and a half ago and I dove in, figured things out and then I made a, I made a tutorial on it. And I'm like on the first page of YouTube for this thing, I even feel like it's some of the best training out there. Like, it doesn't take that much. There's always going to be people that are like behind where you are and ahead of you. And so just don't worry about that, but just help anyone. Just whatever's on, I don't know, whatever's on your mind, you'd be surprised how quickly you can become like, you know, this little mini expert on a certain, on a certain topic.Virginia Purnell:I like how you said not to worry about the people in front of you because there's going to be people behind you that are just where you were not long ago. Right,James Hurst:Exactly. And in this case, like this specific case, like I'm on, I'm like a week, I'm like a week ahead of these people. Like I just, you know, but the fact that I took the time and that's actually a really cool place. It's easy to, Oh my goodness. Someone was just doing a tutorial on the most simple thing and people were raving about, you know, like, Oh my gosh, this is, you know, I was just like, you kidding me? Like I can't, like I almost would've never bothered. Like it seems so simple that why would I bother to make a, you know what I mean? But people need to just completely like step-by-step to talk to me like I'm a third grader or a fifth grader type thing and it's so it's, it's good to kind of make that. So I debated sometimes whether to make tutorials like as I'm learning it because then it's like, so let's say like an unboxing, like let's say I'm going to unbox this thing and figure it out right here, live in front of you so you can like kind of seen any like how hard is this thing to figure out?But instead, instead I think it's better to unbox the thing, get it all set up or take it for a drive and then like not too far out, but like just like a week or two out, then go back and make that video of the review about it. Because once you get a year or two out from the product, you forget what it's like to not know what, you know what I mean? You're, you're, you have a bias, you kind of forget what it's like to not know how to use something. So try to try to make that tutorial, you know, when it's still fresh on your mind when you are confused, you know, much better be able to relate to people when they're just getting started with something. So, yeah.Virginia Purnell:A little bit ago you had mentioned that one of your goals is to grow your YouTube channel. Do you have any other goals or how that you're hoping to achieve in the next year or two?James Hurst:Yeah, so I actually, I have a day job. I'm a computer programmer by day in AWS and it's good, it's a good, safe, secure, you know, job. I've been there five years, great people have been happy there, generous, you know, health benefits and generous paid vacation. Right. And so the, you know, the, a big dream would be to be able to have that stability in, in online marketing space to be able to, you know, typically make that big leap. Right. And I always debate whether I could or should. And then something like, you know, the Coronavirus happens and be like, Oh my gosh, I'm grateful to have so stability. You know, when things are crazy and you know, and, and so in the meantime, you know, I'm paying off, you know, paying off my car that paying off some debt, you know, trying to strengthen my position, my cash position, like with, with cash reserves and savings.And so, yeah, so the you know, a big goal would be to, you know, to go a hundred percent online, but at the same time like I don't want to, I dunno, there's, it's, I kind of in the mix of aye, I don't want to just just work from home and like have a bunch of like clients necessarily and like have 10 bosses instead of one and S but you know, I've been spoiled a little bit in having passive and cause I know what, I know what it's like to have passive income coming in and so in, in some ways the constraint to say, no, James, you have to figure this out with your little, with your, you can't, you can't have having extra time be a crutch, right? You need to think about these things in a way. Like you can, like, yeah, you know, you can't rely on making 40 hours of YouTube content a week to feel, I don't know.I'm trying to find that balance if I don't want to trade my time for money, right. I don't want to trade my time for money. But at a certain, there's a certain amount of that that you have to do to convert it into, you know, an asset. But I, I'm very, yeah, very cautious on, on how I, on how I think about things. So like I can make 40 different YouTube videos or I could make one awesome YouTube ad, right? That hopefully is for converting people for selling and then pushing that out to, you know, on a, as a YouTube ad. And so I'm very, I'm very cognizant of that. So I'm, I think I'm trying in a way that's like, I'm trying to figure out how to do scale things with having some of that security of the job. You know, cause I, there's, as an entrepreneur, you're, you're spending money on things and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. It's, it can be kind of brutal.Yeah, exactly. And advertising has been, I know the average advertising, like figuring out either a Google ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, like you know, I, I, I've had some success I've had success and failure with, with ads and so I know that, you know, you gotta get eyes, you gotta get eyeballs on your, on your offers and different things, whether it's affiliate offer or your own offers. But this space, there's a, there's a, it's an extremely long learning curve, which I enjoy. I just recently, like I don't like, I haven't done well with Facebook ads, but I was just like, at the minimum, if someone comes to my site, let's say I have like five or 10 people coming today for whatever reason, visiting my Facebook profile or YouTube, let's say just have five or 10 people a day, no big deal. I at least like James to retarget those people.Those should be like, that should be cheap. That should be cheap ads. And so, and also even before you run normal traffic to your offers, you would want to have the retargeting piece set up anyways. So I'm having like this breakthrough of like at least setting up your pixel and setting up a retargeting ad. And then when that's there, then you can go to the next step, which is try to maybe send some cold traffic or any of your warm traffic that does come. At least you're going to be able to stay in front of them. I don't, I kind of have this other idea, which is I don't have the budget to be in front of everybody all the time, but I should try to be in front of, I should try to be in front of a few people wherever they go. Once they've come into my world, I should hold on to them. And you know, with Instagram and Facebook and Facebook marketplace and how people are interconnected, if they, you know, with the retargeting, they could come in from Google and I could retarget them on Facebook. Right? Yeah. So I think that's a powerful principle, which is at least retarget your traffic,Virginia Purnell:Which is good to think about too, because a lot of people say it's between like 7 - 12 times of them seeing you before they'll actually buy something from you.James Hurst:Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, like I said, you know, I don't have thousands of people coming to my stuff, but for the five or 10 people that are, I should, I should feel like I'm everywhere now. And with today's modern, you know, advertising platforms, that's, that's very possible. There's still, but yeah, I mean there's still lots to learn. I was just happy because the other day I saw an advertisement of myself, you know, I saw on my own feed my own ad. I was like, yes, I retargeted myself. Virginia Purnell:You're doing a good job. Right?James Hurst:So, but yeah, there's so much, there's so much, there's so much overwhelm. There's so many shiny objects. And I actually, I know everyone says avoid them. I kinda like them. And yeah, from Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and making video tutorials and podcasts and blogs and YouTube channels and Facebook groups. And this cool tool in that cold tool. I mean they're, they're all great, but golly, use up a lot of time if you don't, aren't strategic with it all. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You like to share that we haven't talked about yet today? Well, you know, I would love to just, I'd love to just make people aware of a few of the things that you know, I have made. So you talked about CF Follow Up Pro. Basically if you're a ClickFunnels affiliate you get a, you get a commission's report and in the commissions report there's the name, the email, the product that they purchased and it looks like an Excel spreadsheet and it pretty much is a spreadsheet.Right? Well, the stuff that I came up with was I took, if you're familiar with Zapier, I took those, the spreadsheet and I put it into, into Google sheets and from Google sheets I put that into a Zapier, which puts it into Active Campaign, which is my email tool. And those are, this is what it does. Let's say you sign up through my link for ClickFunnels for a free trial that would end up in the report, your email, your name, the fact that you're trialing, and today's date. I take all that information, I put it into Active Campaign, and 30 minutes later I've got an email out to you saying, Hey, welcome to click. Congratulations on your free trial, right? And then I drip out. Then two days later I say, Hey, it's been a couple of days. Just want to check in with you.Have you, have you made your first funnel yet? Are you stuck on anything? How can I help? Right? And then four or five days later, Hey, here's a free training. A couple of days later, this is in 14 days, Hey, show me your funnel that you've made. Here's a free training. Here's a share funnel. Just a few little things, keeping in touch. And what's really cool is I built up these automations that one of the, one of them, what it does on day 15 the email, the email automation, it asks the question, it says, Hey, does this person, does it still say that they're trialing or have they converted over to a paid subscription? Okay. Because if they pay, then there'll be another row in the spreadsheet that says your name and it says, you're on the startup plan and you paid, and I made $38 and 80 cents.Okay. So the automation, it looks at that and it says, Oh no, I don't see another record in here for her. That came through a, it's the last thing I saw was that there was a, that it was trialing, so that flips a switch that branches and it says, Oh, Hey, it looks like you didn't continue your trial with ClickFunnels or whatever with ClickFunnels. Hey, you know what? Something wrong? You need to make your trial longer. Do you need, you know, what did you get stuck on something? It's that. It's that feedback. And some people will, some people will never hear back from right. Other people will reply and say, Oh gosh, I was so busy. You know, they got sick, whatever. I'd love to. If I get this extended or you know, I couldn't get my domain set up. It was just a pain, you know?And so you get that feedback of why are people falling through the cracks? Same thing for a refund. If my little automations, they listen, quote unquote listening for a refund, boom, that kicks off an automation emails. Hey, it looks like you refunded. Let's like he refunded your last month. Did you know you can downgrade, you don't have to cancel. You can, you can downgrade to the smaller plan. You know, maybe they don't know. You're just trying. And so to have those emails going out perfectly that right time, like it's very, very powerful. And that's a, that's a tool I built. The other one, which is really, really cool too. There's a few competitors out there, but the other one's called Email Slurper for 3000. And do you have a, you have a Facebook group yourself? Virginia Purnell:Not quite yet. James Hurst:Not quite yet. So Facebook groups are really powerful. It's a great way to kind of congregate, you know, your audience, right? Whether it's your podcast listeners or people that are buying your tools or that want to get your trainings, things like that. And so a lot of people have Facebook groups and you get three questions as an admin to kind of filter out the spam of the internet. And you could say like, why do you want to join? How did you hear about us? Do you, you know, do you agree to follow the group rules of no spamming, no, no, this or that. What we did was marketers, we took those three admin questions and we said, well, we're going to use one of them to say, Hey do you would like this free training, a lead magnets, enter your email address, okay, enter your email address. And then another question could be, imagine this.Imagine, imagine the question is, do you have ClickFunnels? And they put yes or no as the answer. So now you're getting some market research about you, about your audience. And then you have another third question you could say, you know, what's your biggest, what's your biggest concern when it comes to getting visibility right out on the internet? What's, what's your biggest question about YouTube? So now you're getting ideas about content you can create. Well, where are people getting stuck? They're coming to you as the expert. Where are people getting stuck? What kind of content could you make? Let's say 50 people come in and they all have these top five questions. You can directly speak to them. Okay, so what my tool Email Slurper 3000 does is it takes, most importantly, it takes that email address, it puts it into a Google sheet, which it gets picked up by Zapier.I put that into my Active Campaign. And then I email people, Hey, welcome to this group that you just joined. Okay? And so I have a group that people are literally finding it every single day without me doing anything like just the way it's named, the amount of buzz around it. And people come and join every single day. He emails her, they put their email in email, super picks them up, and I started and I started dripping them 10 emails. This one I'm doing, it just has a little Amazon affiliate link that says a related thing, right? So you're just, you email out related products and services and so I just say, Oh, this is cool. You're welcome. This group, here's a link for this thing the next day. Oh, you should know about this. Oh and here's the link if you want to get it.I just every single day for like seven days anyways, so Email Slurper it. If you hit, if you didn't have Email Sluper, you'd have to copy that email address out of there. You have to copy it out of there manually. If you hit, approve, if you, if you hit approve its just gone. Facebook does not save the answers to those questions anywhere. That's a, that's a big painful moment when someone learns that for the first time that you, you know, if, if you didn't copy those emails, they're gone. So Email Slurper grabs them out of there and puts them into your tool. Here's a really cool thing to do, which I came up with is remember how I asked like you have ClickFunnels, yes or no? Yes I can take, I can take the answer to that question and map that to a custom field in my auto responder and then I can have an automation. What I'm, when I'm dripping them out, I can have an automation say, how did they answer that question if they, if they said no to the ClickFunnels, do they have ClickFunnels? Yes or no? Then I can send them other emails say, Hey, let me tell you about ClickFunnels and here's my, here's my link, right, to get them on a free trial of ClickFunnels.Does that make sense? It does and it makes me really excited. Well good. It's actually, I mean it's actually really cool cause I mean I just love, I love automation. Like you know, just little things like, and it's so simple. Do you have ClickFunnels, yes or no, and then the auto responder says, what do they say to the answer to that question? They say, yes. Okay, well don't bother telling them more about ClickFunnels. Did they say no? Then tell them this, you know, and then your third question, you could also branch them another, you know another way. The key with that question is it has to be something you can't say, what's your favorite color? Red, right. It can't be a free response. It has to be something that I can like, you know, get ahold of and and ask does it stay yes or no, like past to be something specificVirginia Purnell:And then information that you can utilize down the road. Right?James Hurst:Yeah, exactly. And I mean it's great. It's great. Let's, let's say this, they say no to ClickFunnels. I may be, I may be happy to, I may be happy to just do it with email automations. Like, okay, here's a trial ClickFunnels. You should try this, try that. Or if it's important enough or high value enough, you could then say, you could even send yourself an email and said someone just joined your group and they said they're very interested in your nine 97 plan. Then you notify them to get on the phone with this or get over on the Facebook messenger. So depending on the value of that thing, you know you might want to escalate your personal involvement. So those are good tips too.Virginia Purnell:I'm glad we talked today, so it was awesome. How can people find out more about you or find you online?James Hurst:So I'm pretty active on Facebook. Facebook.com/OJHurst, I think is my profile. I have a website, JamesHurst.com and find me there. So either of those two places. I have a Facebook group kind of geared around affiliate marketing and ClickFunnels, that kind of thing. I also have one on live streaming, the live streaming practice with James Hurst. There's just a few of us in there and we just practice that up and try to get better at the live stream, which I think is something everyone should, you know, should get better at and take advantage of. I think live, I think live video is a huge kind of untapped opportunity.Virginia Purnell:I really appreciate you being on here, James.James Hurst:Well, thanks so much. Nice visiting.Virginia Purnell:Have a great day.James Hurst:See ya.Virginia Purnell:Thank you so much for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe and leave some love through a review and I'll catch you on the next episode. Links of Interest:DistinctDigitalMarketing.comhttps://www.facebook.com/ojhurstJamesHurst.com

A common manufacturing challenge is getting the right materials to the right location at the right time. In this episode, Subrata Roy, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and AWS IoT leader, shares how cloud-based IoT solutions like Smart Factory Fabric are helping businesses better track assets, monitor machines, and gain insights from all the data being collected. Just as important as the technology is an emphasis on user-centered design and change management to facilitate adoption.

With the massive growth of connected devices across many verticals, including connected home and manufacturing, multi-tenant services are often used that cater to the needs of use cases such as asset tracking, predictive maintenance, and fleet management. As companies grow, they often find that they spend a disproportionate amount of time managing the increasing volume of device connections and message traffic rather than improving products. In this session, we discuss new capabilities of AWS IoT Core that allow you to easily offload the challenges of scaling connectivity and messaging infrastructure to AWS IoT Core without making substantial changes to your application architecture and with minimal impact to your customers' devices.

AWS IoT device software enables you to connect your IoT devices and operate them at the edge. In this session, you'll learn what's new with AWS IoT device software including Amazon FreeRTOS, AWS IoT Greengrass, and AWS IoT Device Tester. You will leave this session ready to connect, manage, and update your IoT devices with AWS IoT.

In this demo, you learn how Amazon fulfillment centers reduced station downtime by deploying a scalable Andon system to help optimize their processes, support the transition to predictive maintenance, and prevent issues by monitoring manufacturing workstations and industrial equipment. Learn how we built two AWS Solutions-vetted reference implementation from AWS-that use the Machine to Cloud Connectivity (M2C2) framework to monitor sensors connected to a raspberry PI. See how they push that data to the AWS Cloud using AWS IoT and Amazon Virtual Andon to monitor the status of the manufacturing workstations and sensors and notify engineers when an event occurs.

In this session, we introduce Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Integration, a new Amazon-managed service that enables device makers to quickly and easily create products with Alexa Built-in (devices that customers can talk to) using low-cost microcontroller chipsets by leveraging AWS IoT.

This presentation was recorded prior to re:Invent. In this session, learn how AWS teams used AWS IoT Core to provide more advantage to their architectures. These teams got operational by connecting multiple devices, managing their device fleet, learning lessons along the way, and deploying their workloads to production. Gain insights from tried and tested architectures that you can use to supplement your own workloads. We also discuss other AWS IoT offerings, such as AWS IoT Greengrass and Amazon FreeRTOS.

AWS IoT is deployed at scale across industries around the globe-but what's the business outcome behind the buzz? In this session, we dive deep into how some customers are monetizing their IoT solutions built on AWS. We also explore examples of bottom-line impact resulting from digital transformation of manufacturing across a variety of use cases, including: predictive maintenance, asset performance management, self-optimizing product, and automated inventory management.

AWS IoT analytics services help you get extra value from your IoT data. In this session, find out what's new across the analytics services, including AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT Events,  AWS IoT SiteWise, and AWS IoT Things Graph. You leave the session ready to tackle your latest analytics challenges from the factory floor, run sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of IoT data to visualize on operational dashboards, and detect and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications.

A connected home unites devices and services for an integrated, autonomous experience that improves a consumer's life. In this session, discover how everyday devices in your home can be transformed into intelligent things. Embedded with digital smarts and connected to the internet, these devices can create real-time, contextual, and smart experiences. Learn how these devices can be remotely monitored, controlled, and secured at scale using the rich set of AWS IoT services. We also describe how to use AWS IoT to analyze the data unlocked from these smart devices to make good business decisions, build better products, and enhance the consumer experience.

Your IoT application is live! Now, the real power of IoT is integrating your devices; reasoning atop collected data; and acting-at scale-to realize operational efficiencies, improve customer experiences, and drive better business outcomes. In this session, discover how to manage and iterate upon your IoT deployment while moving from a single device to large-scale deployment, using a range of AWS IoT services from the edge to the cloud. Learn how to manage critical product components like over-the-air updates (OTAs); activate internal management and analytics dashboards; and establish a data-centric, outcomes-focused mindset for smarter architecture decisions as your dataset and fleet grow.

In this session, learn how to use AWS IoT, AI/ML, and data analytics services to build a connected, intelligent biopharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain environment. Hear from Moderna Therapeutics, a "born in the cloud" pharma company that constructed a 200,000-square-foot Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)-compliant manufacturing facility utilizing SAP S/4HANA and AWS services to facilitate a "batch of one"; it recently won the ISPE Facility of the Future Award. Learn how to incorporate AWS IoT and AWS AI/ML while maintaining the automated guardrails necessary for the creation and maintenance of regulated workloads following GMP and other industry standards and ISOs.

AWS IoT connectivity & control services allow you to securely connect, control, and manage your devices from the cloud. In this session, you'll learn what's new across AWS IoT connectivity & control services including AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Management, and AWS IoT Device Defender. You'll walk away understanding how you can use AWS IoT services to securely connect, control, and manage your devices at scale.

The AWS IoT and APN Partner community provides deep IoT expertise to accelerate your IoT adoption journey. In this session, we cover how APN Partners spanning silicon and connectivity and including OEMs, ISVs, and systems integrators can help you get started with IoT projects quicker while benefiting from AWS IoT software and services from the edge to the cloud. You also learn how this community is addressing use cases across connected home, industrial, and commercial applications.

The best IoT solutions start with a desired outcome-like a customizable consumer experience in a home-and work backward. In this session, discover how to build an outcomes-focused, end-to-end IoT solution. Learn what to consider and how to use the broad, deep AWS IoT services to design and launch your solution, including connecting devices; collecting, storing, and analyzing device data; enabling data-driven decisions and actions; monitoring; and beyond. We address security considerations, integration with AI and ML for continuous improvement, and more. Gain a holistic understanding of connecting customer needs with the right steps to build a smart, outcome-achieving IoT solution.

This presentation was recorded prior to re:Invent. Amazon ships millions of packages every day from fulfilment centers worldwide. As part of that process, it's imperative to print labels, packing slips, and other documents in a scalable and quick manner. Enter the Amazon Fulfillment Technology team, who pioneered an AWS IoT Greengrass-based solution to ensure consistent and stable network connections in addition to smooth printing of artifacts. Join us to learn about their journey and about how they used AWS IoT to modernize fulfilment centers, warehouses, and beyond.

IoT accelerates digital transformation and is the springboard for smarter homes, workplaces, and industrial processes. It is a critical enabler for emerging technologies like AI/ML, robotics, and video analytics, as access to device data is crucial to training machine learning models, delivering intelligence, and driving business efficiency. With AWS IoT, organizations can securely connect, manage, and analyze device data with unmatched scalability, end-to-end security, and tight integration with other AWS services. In this session, the VP of AWS IoT shares what's new from AWS IoT and how our customers are unlocking today's insights to transform tomorrow's industries.

Connected devices constantly communicate with each other and the cloud using wireless communication protocols. This communication can expose security vulnerabilities and channels for malicious actors or data leaks. To protect users, devices, and companies, IoT devices must be secured and protected. In this session, we cover the technology and security best practices to continually evaluate your attack surface, analyze threat impact, and act on potential threats to your IoT devices, connections, and the data they generate. Learn how to use AWS IoT to keep data secure, restrict access to devices and cloud resources, securely connect to the cloud, and audit device usage.

Companies create IoT proof of concepts (PoCs) or small tests to fine-tune IoT designs before deploying new technology across a plant or plants. Large-scale deployments present challenges that might not be uncovered during the PoC stage. In this session, we cover the most common challenges companies fall victim to when they move from testing to deployment and how AWS IoT services give customers flexible and scalable solutions that help them scale to meet their IoT needs regardless of the number of devices connected.

Predictive maintenance captures the state of your devices to identify potential breakdowns before they impact operations, often resulting in an increase in equipment life span. In this session, learn how to progress your IoT journey and move from reactive to proactive with AWS IoT services and AWS machine-learning services. We also teach you how you can train ML models in the cloud and infer at the edge to predict problems faster.

Amazon handles millions of products, and delivering those products at lightning speed is how we earn and maintain customer trust. Fulfilling our delivery promise requires a lot of coordination between systems involving software, machines, and people. In this session, we describe how Amazon deploys AWS IoT with innovative robotics integration to enable faster development at greater scale and delight customers with speedy delivery.

IoT is transforming and modernizing the industrial sector to improve performance, productivity, and efficiency. The digital production platform (DPP) is a cloud platform built using AWS IoT's broad and deep catalog of services, including machine learning, analytics, and compute services. In this session, discover how Volkswagen and AWS use the DPP to accelerate connectivity and optimize production plants by providing a common set of shared services, including plant/device connectivity, data management and governance, and integration with existing industrial and enterprise systems. You also learn how this can be achieved through a comprehensive platform spanning public cloud and on-premises AWS IoT deployments.

Internet of Things get smarter with smaller Alexa. Decreased size from offloading work from devices to the cloud in fast, real-time operating systems and constant connectivity for ambient computing. From Amazon: " Today, smart home IoT devices are Built with low cost microcontrollers (MCU) with limited memory to run real time operating systems. Until now, AVS solutions for Alexa Built-in products required expensive application processor-based devices with >50MB memory running on Linux or Android. These expensive hardware requirements made it cost prohibitive to integrate Alexa Voice on resource constrained IoT devices. AVS for AWS IoT enables Alexa Built-in functionality on MCUs like ARM Cortex ‘M’ class with

Satyen Yadav serves as the Chief Technology Officer and head of software development for Boeing Digital Solutions & Analytics. He manages a global organization responsible for all external‐facing software development in support of digital aviation business. He is responsible for creating the vision and direction for digital product architecture, agile development methodologies, cloud service architecture, and security practices. Satyen is also responsible for providing industry technology leadership for airlines, MROs, and other commercial aviation and regulatory agencies. Before joining Boeing, Satyen was General Manager at Amazon Web Services and led the global product, software engineering, and P&L portfolio for the Internet of Things (IoT) cloud‐to‐edge, Machine Learning at the edge, and edge computing services. His team developed and launched many innovative service offerings including one of the world's most innovative edge computing platforms called AWS Greengrass, Amazon FreeRTOS – an open source IoT OS for building intelligent embedded systems, AWS IoT 1‐Click ‐ a turnkey service for customers wanting fast IoT results with ready‐to‐deploy devices and pre‐built cloud services, and machine learning at the edge service. These services are available globally and have thousands of active developers and customers from many industries. Before joining Amazon, he was General Manager of IoT and Wearable Solutions at Intel Corporation and led a global organization to deliver hardware and software solutions for IoT and wearable devices. Before this, he held global leadership positions in engineering and business functions at Intel and helped establish new businesses in wireless networking and cybersecurity areas. Satyen holds an MBA degree from Northwestern University (Kellogg) and a master’s degree in Computer Science from Iowa State University. Satyen was named one of The World's Top 50 Cloud and Edge Computing Influencers (AMERICAS50 and EDGE50), by Data Economy in 2018. He holds over 20 patents in distributed & cloud computing, networking, and Internet security innovations.  

In this messaging themed episode of AWS TechChat, Pete is back, and more so in person. They started the show reminiscing about messaging history, going back, looking at where we came from and how we arrived at the position we are today. More importantly, why do we use messaging and the benefits you can derive in decoupling your architecture. They then pivot to event streams, which cover both Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, (Amazon MSK). They are both designed to process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. Next, they moved to a more traditional message bus - Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon MQ (Managed message broker service for ActiveMQ), both a durable pull-based messaging platform. Amazon SQS being lightweight and tightly integrated to the AWS Cloud platform and Amazon MQ supporting a variety of protocols making it a great choice for existing applications that use industry-standard protocols. Finally, they talked about push-based messaging with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and the Message Broker for AWS IoT. Both publish/subscribe (pub/sub) platform that enables you to build fan out architectures with hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers. You now have more than a hammer to build your applications, Maslow would be proud. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS Resources: Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Shenzhen, China https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-cloudfront-shenzhen-launch/ What is Pub/Sub Messaging? https://aws.amazon.com/pub-sub-messaging/ Amazon Kinesis Data Streams https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-streams/ Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) https://aws.amazon.com/msk/ Apache ZooKeeper https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ReleaseGuide/emr-zookeeper.html Amazon Simple Queue Service https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/ Amazon Simple Queue Service Released https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_simple_q/ Amazon MQ https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-mq/ Amazon Simple Notification Service https://aws.amazon.com/sns/ MQTT - AWS IoT https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/mqtt.html Message Broker for AWS IoT https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/iot-message-broker.html AWS Events: AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/ AWSome Day Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/ AWS Modern Application Development Online Event https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/ AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

In this episode, we chat with Michael Neil a DevOps Automation Engineer here at Mphasis Stelligent about the  AWS IoT platform. AWS IoT consists of many products and services: Greengrass, IoT Core, Amazon FreeRTOS, and Device Defender.  It can be difficult to know where to start when piecing together each of the offerings to create an IoT solution. Paul Duvall and Michael Neil will give you an overview of the AWS IoT platform, guide you in how to get started with AWS IoT, teach you how to automate it, and walk through a use case using AWS IoT. To learn more about Stelligent, visit www.stelligent.com.

One of the latest advances is the Internet of Things.  As one would think, this focus on small and connected devices has not been lost on Amazon.  They may be one of the most visible adopters of this wave of technology.  Thus, it should not be surprising that they have a large number of services to assist you in your IoT strategy. AWS IoT Core The core helps you connect devices to the cloud.  This is a quick way to connect your applications to the cloud and exchange data through it.  However, it is more than an API and provides a means to message and exchange data much more like a queue system. Amazon FreeRTOS This is an IoT Operating System for Microcontrollers.  It is not a service, but instead is an operating system that makes it easy to craft an IoT device and includes integrations to some AWS services. AWS Greengrass A challenge with mobile devices is that they are not always connected.  This fact can make it difficult to take advantage of cloud services and computing like lambda functions.  However, the Greengrass service addresses this challenge.  It provides a way to extend those cloud services to the device in a manner that makes them available even when it is not connected to the Internet or network. AWS IoT 1-Click The 1-click offering is as much a product as it is a service.  This is how you configure those Amazon order buttons you have likely seen advertised.  Of course, there is more that can be done with these outside of ordering a product.  They are preconfigured to connect to a lambda function and thus can do whatever a lambda function can. AWS IoT Analytics It is hard to make this simpler to understand.  This service provides analytics for IoT devices.  It is fully managed and allows you to dive right into analyzing the petabytes of data that IoT devices can generate. AWS IoT Button This is a 1-Click button for the related service.  There are a few different such hardware devices available.  Nevertheless, the button is an excellent entry point for learning about these. AWS IoT Device Defender One of the concerns about IoT devices is the massive effort required to secure them.  Device defender works like the web version of the service and provides assessments as well as monitoring to determine whether your network of devices is safe and secure. AWS IoT Device Management The number of IoT devices makes managing them a substantial effort.  This service makes it easy to onboard your devices, monitor them and send out updates.  Thus, you will find this an excellent service to learn early on in your Internet of Things build out. AWS IoT Events IoT devices are well suited to gather and share a lot of discrete data.  Thus, they are perfect for doing things like monitoring automated systems and detecting errors.  However, the work required to handle and analyze that data can be costly.  This service gives you a framework to track your devices for events such as these.  There are use cases for this from self-healing systems to early alert solutions across a broad number of industries. AWS IoT SiteWise We keep looking at the sheer size of data that we can get from the Internet of Things devices.  The SiteWise service provides a way to gather and report on all of that in a way that can help.  It even has some dashboard functionality to help you track what is working and where. AWS IoT Things Graph All of these devices and services can cause your head to explode when thinking about the network.  The graph service provides a tool to easily connect services and devices without a complicated bunch of coding. AWS Partner Device Catalog It is hard to argue a catalog as an actual service.  However, this may be precisely what you need if you are trying to build out an IoT solution or presence.  This gives you a curated list of options so you can trust they are real and not just some smoke-and-mirrors device someone is using to test the waters.

In this episode, we talk about IoT: what's coming, why we're intrigued, and how we've already started it incorporating it in our office. In the next episodes to come, we will be having guests on the show to take a deeper dive into this technology. If you have any suggestions or know people we should reach out to, please get in touch! Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #77. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. Today, I have with me two other developers here at The Frontside. This is going to be a Frontside-only podcast and we're going to be introducing a topic that hopefully we're going to be podcasting a lot about in the coming weeks and months just because it's something that's kind of grabbed the interest of the office and seems like it's something that needs to be talked about. Hello Joe and hello Elrick. JOE: Hello, Charles. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Everything, really. Today we're going to be talking about the Internet of Things and we'll be talking a little bit about how we came to be interested in this topic and why we think this topic is important. Let's talk about why this topic is important. I think that this is a very important topic because IoT is only becoming more and more prevalent. It's emerging from the status of being this niche or boutique or very esoteric technology that's only worked on by a very small group of people to becoming very, very open and available and accessible so that anybody can buy a Raspberry Pi or an ODROID or Arduino and slap some Linux on there and connect it over the internet to a bunch of different things and the space of creative possibilities is just exploding. For me, it's very similar to where we were in the early 80s. You know, I see these IoT devices as being the hobbyist's computers, the Z80, Apple IIe, the Commodore 64 and that the people who are hacking on those things 30 years ago are going to be the people who are now leading the tech space today. I think another big and relevant analogy is web technologies. There was this inflection point where web technologies became very open, accessible, available and the people who were in it ended up being able to ride that wave for 10 years to where we are now. In both of those examples, we had the hardware and the PC revolution where the computation was distributed across a bunch of these different devices. Then over that time, we saw a migration over to the cloud and these web technologies where everything was centralized. Now, I actually think that there's a pendulum swinging back where we're actually going to see more and more computation distributed amongst physical devices, except this time, it's not going to be manifest as a PC. It's going to be manifest as these networks of devices that are just all around us. I really do think that we are on one of those watershed moments where these distributed networks of tiny devices are going to be the big next platform that when you invest in it now, this is something that's going to yield dividends for the next 20 years. I think it's an important topic but I don't think we had a well-crafted thought about it but we just kind of stumbled into the space. I was thinking we could start a little bit by talking about how we got into this and how it captured our imagination. If you rewind the clock to the stone age of 2015, I think it was the end of 2015 and it was Christmas break, that's often a time when people go and they hack on individual projects and Brandon, his project that for whatever reason, he decided to take on was he was really into Hue Bulbs at the time. We had Hue Bulbs around the office and we wired up some demos to control them from a website. He decided he wanted to take those Hue Bulbs and make them so they were accessible from our Slack. He built a server in Elixir because he also wanted to learn Elixir because if you're having fun in hacking around, it might as well pick up as many new things as you can. He built an API in Elixir that talk directly to the Hue Bulbs and the Slack integration that talk to the Elixir API and we actually are able to control all of our lights purely from Slack. We could turn them all on, we could turn them all off. That was great but then as we began to use it, we were wishing that we had control over our lights from our phones. We wish we had control over them through the website. I think, Elrick, isn't that was your first contact with the Frontside, wasn't it? ELRICK: Yes. That was my first contact with the Frontside. I was working on the lights app. I initially started working on just the user interface and bringing some different animations and working on the actual experience and the user story on that side about controlling the lights and what particular things you needed to do in trying to craft a UI around that. That's what I initially started. CHARLES: That was really fun. ELRICK: Yeah, that was really fun. That just started progressing more and more. As you said as we started to think about how could we access these lights from different places, using different devices and then that's how we stumbled into the Internet of Things. CHARLES: And it turns out, there's actually a lot of tech in the form of platforms out there that have been developed to help with this, although I would say that the water are still pretty murky as to kind of the best set of patterns to follow. ELRICK: Yes. JOE: That's hard to find information, especially with regard to design patterns. Since we've been working on this light thing, there's been so many times I've Googled and looking for prior art and found none or next to none. It's very much the Wild West. ELRICK: Yeah, because it's like going from a point where you're controlling one piece of data per se, like you have one sensor that does one thing. Now, it's starting to grow until you can have one sensor that can do multiple things and send it across different types of data and then how do you structure that data, how you capture it, how do you hold that state somewhere and it's one to one source of truth. It's just going to be the Wild West of how do you manage this, how do you structure it. It is definitely growing and changing constantly. CHARLES: I think one thing that is difficult is it feels very much like they're aligned in terms of silos. For example, the Hue has the Hue Bridge, which is capable of talking to the light bulbs and then they also have an API which is under development by which you can connect publicly to servers hosted by Philips to talk to the hues inside your office but if you want to integrate your Hue API like we did with Slack or with your iPhone or maybe some other device that you're trying to control, it becomes a little bit more difficult. You have all these vendors like Nest, MyQ and there's a whole bunch of lines like doorbells and smart this and that and everything and they're very good at talking. They have an ecosystem, this large vertical ecosystem, assigned with each one but actually getting cross cutting communication is a problem that I think is something that we've had to deal with and it's very, very difficult where we want to start having these devices talking to each other. ELRICK: Yeah, that area right there is ripe for innovation. I don't know the names off the top of my head but I know that there are people trying to make a smart hub per se. You can think of it like Jarvis from Iron Man. You buy that thing, you put it down in your house, you tell it all the devices you have and that takes care of all the communication between everything. There's definitely an area there that someone can step in and say, "You know what? I figured it out and here's your Jarvis Box." JOE: We're starting to see stuff like that with Alexa and Google has something similar. That's a little scary to me. I think that the one thing that needs to be made clear is when you're talking about these silos, it's a very good point because we think they're decentralized. We think these things are decentralized but in a way, they're not yet. We don't have peer-to-peer communication necessarily like Hue. They're going to public API but you're going through their ecosystem. You're passing through their lens, so to speak. We think Slack has distributed teams but there's a centralized server where those messages passed through so how do we break from that into full decentralization? CHARLES: Right, I know that's – ELRICK: The Jarvis Box. You could probably have a server at your house that keeps all your data there and then it spits out what it needs to spit out to the IoT server somewhere if they're doing some collection. When you leave your house, to say, "I need that information to come back to my cell phone now." Maybe in the future, you'll be able to control that, either from your house or just send out the pieces of data that you need and the centralized stuff, you can just keep at your house. CHARLES: The whole question of ownership is one that I feel is something that we have not addressed head on. Everybody is just rushing forward with how do I implement this, how do I get it done and it definitely is worth taking a step back and understanding who owns the things that I'm working with and that I'm inviting into my home. I think that smartphones provide a great example of how it can work really well for the consumer. I think certainly, in their inception I think this is mostly true if you have an iPhone. Most Android devices, you actually own that piece of hardware and the things that you install on it are very much controlled by you. I think that Apple especially, gets a big shout out for making sure and putting in those safeguards so that anyone who's participating in the ecosystem has to first acknowledge that the data is going to be owned by the user. I think that's maybe a little bit less true than it was back in 2009 or whatever but I think that there's definitely a lot of thought that went into that upfront, that I worry isn't going into with Alexa. Is Amazon protecting? Is there an understanding that if you're participating in that ecosystem that ultimately, the thing is owned by me? I feel the same way about a lot of these AI and robots where it may participate in the conversation but who is it really serving? Is it serving you or is it a proxy to serve somebody else like a Google or an Apple or an Amazon? JOE: I may just be a pessimist but I think it's safe to say that it's almost always the latter when money is involve. ELRICK: They had some situations arise where the powers that maybe we're trying to get the actual recordings and different things as Alexa is always on. Let me turn mine off because she's going to say, "Oh, did you ask me for something?" I have one sitting right here in front of me. They have been in situations where people had said, "Because that's constantly recording and that recording is going somewhere," and then if situations have arisen, they said, "We want that recording," and then Amazon is like, "No. We're not going to give you that recording because that is private information." They're trying to find a way to get around that and what laws and things are going to come out of this area that we're in right now, it's still unforeseen. But I think that companies that are in this space, know that the future of their company rests on them protecting that data and user data because if you don't, then people will sidestep and go elsewhere. CHARLES: Right. In so far, they hold that as a value. In so far, people are conscious of those concerns. If that's something that people are willing to pay money for, then you've got a market driving force pushing you in that direction. But if people don't care, they don't think and they're just like, "Whatever. It's cool," that's not going to be something that a business is going to roll into their product because ultimately, if people care, then it'll affect their bottom line. If they don't but it won't and they're going to act in their own best interest. ELRICK: True. CHARLES: I do worry that there needs to be a social awareness of what kind of powers these devices actually will end up having over our lives and hopefully, those will guide it but you're absolutely right. ELRICK: True. I view all of this IoT stuff and data is not too far off of what people do on Instagram per se like you have your pictures, you can either post crazy pictures or you can post casual pictures. How you use the power that these IoT devices are giving you is essentially falls into your hands like what am I going to send across this thing. I think that hopefully, the power falls into the user's hands and they empower people with these devices and not make them feel like a prisoner in their own home or car because this IoT things are popping up in vehicles now. If you step into your car, you start talking and your car is listening. If they go from it like the same way we approach our applications and such and say, we're going to empower the user, I think if these IoT companies take that approach and learn from the mistakes that were made in software by not empowering users, then after a couple years they're like, "Oh, my goodness. We need to empower the user." When Steve Jobs was preaching about this in the 80s and everybody thought he was crazy. Don't fall into our mistakes. Empower the users and I think that this technology in this space would just keep flourishing if they do that. CHARLES: Absolutely but it is going to take a generation of engineers to make sure they're always pushing in that direction, a generation of users who don't just wait for companies to hand power to them but demand it. ELRICK: Demand it, yes. CHARLES: Yeah, demand it and a generation of business owners who are going to listen and think about the long game and realize that that's the path to long term health and viability. ELRICK: Yep, even outside of the whole privacy thing where it's like there's too much data being sent out. People are building just cool stuff with IoT that doesn't really send that much data outside of normally that we do. Even on our phone, people use GPS all the time and that is sending data about all your locations, where you are, what restaurant you're at, what bus stop you're at, what bus you're on, what plane you're on and people are building a lot of cool things, just even using that. I saw the other day that someone had a bicycle, it has GPS and lights and gyroscopes and all kinds of stuff in that bicycle. When you're riding, the lights will go off and say, "It's time for you to take a right." It will blink in a certain sequence or take a left. It register your speed and it all comes back to your phone so it's not too outside of the norm of what we do on a regular day. There's people building things just in that sweet spot per se with these IoT devices that are building some pretty cool stuff. JOE: It's a very good point because Slack doesn't have to be centralized. It can be peer-to-peer. Hue doesn't have to be centralized outside of having a bridge on your local network. We don't really need to be phoning home for all of this stuff and if we move towards like a true decentralization, we don't need trust at that point. A company has our best interests at heart if we think about it as your trust ideal to remove the need for involving third party in the first place. CHARLES: Yeah, so what would that look like? I'm going to fast forward a little bit because we were a little bit further along on our journey and we've been experimenting with Amazon IoT services and we've been maintaining our own APIs to control our Hues directly. While they're still going through the bridge, it's not incorporating any other ecosystem but we are still routing all of this stuff through this low level Amazon infrastructure. There's a class of problems that that solves which it does help to have those primitives to be able to access your IoT devices through a firewall, to have them and be able to, at least have a known way to update themselves and distribute software to them. There's these fundamental infrastructural problems but at the same time, Amazon doesn't have any access to that data that's moving through their land, so to speak. What they're essentially doing is leasing you a railroad but they don't have new visibility into what's contained inside the cars. JOE: Do you know that? CHARLES: I actually don't know that because of course, it's through the Terms of Service. ELRICK: Who reads EULAs? They're too long. JOE: I think it's more often than not, people are going to use convenience over privacy. CHARLES: That's true so it is in keeping with what I understand of other Amazon services, which do have those guarantees. I don't know in particular for the Amazon IoT. But let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about a little bit about our setup and why we went to using Amazon IoT services and what it provides for us. ELRICK: We decided to use the Amazon IoT platform as a means to allow us to one control the bulbs from anywhere, to get access to them and then also to be able to distribute that change to anything we want. Coming through IoT or coming through their platform, when a change happens, you don't necessarily just have to send it to our one set of bulbs. You can send it to anything you want. You can send it to a phone, to another application somewhere, to a database. It gives you the ability and the flexibility to distribute that change or that state change anywhere. CHARLES: Which is I guess getting at the heart of it is actually managing this distributed state beast of a problem and really, the AWS IoT just helps you get your foot in the door. There are still a lot of cans of worms that are involved once you get there but for the first point that you have said, I want to unpack that a little bit because it's a problem very familiar to us but might not be to the listeners, you've got the set of devices and they come up, they connect to your Wi-Fi and that's fantastic and they can talk to other things on your Wi-Fi, on your local network and can discover services there. But what if you want to control them from outside like I want to send a message from Slack and have it affect the lights in our office. You've got to move through some public cloud to do that because Slack servers are not on our local area network. What you can do then is have essentially one thing that the IoT services provides is your device comes online and it immediately calls home to a generic location and opens up, what is in practice a web socket. You can program in whatever language you want but that's probably the analogy that's most familiar to everyone. It basically connects a web socket that then you can send messages to it in real time so any time I want to connect to that, I can do it and I don't need Hue's API. I don't need Slack's API. I can just talk to one API which is the low level Amazon -- AWS IoT API -- and I can send real time messages to my devices. That's a huge problem solved right there. But it's hard to maintain that infrastructure yourself. We could write our own AWS IoT but then we'd probably host it on AWS anyway. JOE: The real world is not a JSON Blob. That becomes a problem. In college, I took a course where we programmed robots for the majority of it and what you quickly find out is that you can't count on revolutions of a wheel or what have you. The world is imperfect. Keeping a state is one thing but keeping state reflected back and keeping state up to date is where the challenge has been for us. CHARLES: That is right because you've got this highly distributed systems. That's kind of a second class of problems that it attempts to solve for you. You got these highly distributed set of devices but even if the connections are 99.9% reliable, sometimes they're highly latent. You can't control the latency on the connection and sometimes, it fails altogether, which can affect one, how do I even read state from these things. Is the button pressed? Is the button not pressed? Is the light on? Is it off? Is the wheel spinning like you said? Or is it off? These are things that you need to know and then you need to react to those changes like, "We're spinning at 90 RPM. I want to bump it up to 10. How do I get my system to converge on that desired state based on my current state?" It's hard because you don't know all of the demons of distributed state management are in full like they have ripped off their masks and they're roaming about. ELRICK: Yep. I saw them introduced something the other day but I haven't had time to dive too deep into it. It was something called Greengrass that it will continue to gather and allow you to utilize your devices locally and it will keep all that data and then it will do the diffing, let's say when you connect back online until what your old state was and what the new state is and then go about updating everything. JOE: That could be very useful. ELRICK: Yeah. It just got implemented probably three weeks ago or something like that. It's inside of the IoT platform. I just clicked in and they said, "We have a new feature now called Greengrass," but I haven't got time to dive too deep into it but like you were saying, state management is something that's extremely difficult, especially across a distributed systems. They know it's a problem and it seem to be addressing that problem and trying to make it simpler for people and give you these tools to say, "Here are some stuff that you can leverage," and a lot of that is great. CHARLES: I think that's an excellent point and I think that it's also worth mentioning too that there's two sets of state that you have to manage. There's the runtime state, which controls the flow of data as your system operates. Then there's the static state of just what is the code that's going to run on this device. Let's say, my robot or my button that's got V1 of the software, that all it does when I push it, it rings a bell. That's V1. I want to add this awesome feature to this button that when I push it, it rings a bell and it also pops open a Topo Chico from the refrigerator or something like that. The question is how do I get that software from my laptop with that Topo Chico enhancement all the way to my button, which is what essentially amounts to being across the internet inside this private network. In the current state or when you're first starting out hacking, let's say this is based on a Raspberry Pi, I just burn a new Raspberry Pi image with my new software with V2. I walked over and I stick it into the Raspberry Pi and that doesn't really cut it. That does a great job but now, I want to turn this into a business and I want to have 20,000 of these things installed or let's think big like every home in America gets one. Every home in the planet, I want two billion of these type of devices. What happens when I come out with V3? ELRICK: Then you can either go the route of hiring -- CHARLES: Hiring a favor. ELRICK: -- Technical folks to go out, to update all your Topo Chico poppers or have your users struggle to do it or what we did, implement Resin. Let Resin update your Topo Chico poppers around the world. CHARLES: Right. There are a lot of problems in terms of static state management, runtime state management, peer-to-peer communication and problems of resiliency and robustness. I'm hoping that we can discuss these over the coming weeks and months because each one is a topic in of itself. ELRICK: And offline management too. CHARLES: And offline management too, there you go. There's another one. There's a lot to explore, a lot that's unknown and there might be people who have answers to all of these and there might be papers on them but they're buried in weird corners of the internet. I'm hoping that we can fill the podcast with a couple of guests to come in and talk about these different things. ELRICK: Yeah, that would be fantastic. CHARLES: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. ELRICK: I started playing around with Watson IoT. It is an IoT service that allows you to leverage the natural language processing and computing from Watson. It's pretty awesome. CHARLES: Wow, that is really cool. ELRICK: That's another space of IoT that we can explore and hopefully, we can explore over the next few podcasts. CHARLES: Yeah, awesome you all. Well, I think that's about it for this episode. Thank you, Joe. JOE: Thank you, Charles. CHARLES: Thank you, Elrick. ELRICK: Thank you, Charles. It was fantastic. CHARLES: And I look forward to hacking on the lights with you guys. That is always one of my favorite things to hack on. I don't get to do it enough but I think we're going to try and have a big throw down on state management on Friday, right? ELRICK: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: It is going to be exciting. It's going to be super nerdy and we'll let you all know what the outcome of that is. See you all next week. As always, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. You can get us on Twitter at @Frontside or send an email to Contact@Frontside.io. We always love to hear from our listeners. Take care!