Podcasts about CDN

Today I have Keri Glassman, MS, RD, CDN on the pod. While we can all agree that diet culture is ~traumatizing~, Keri believes the anti-diet space has gone too far — causing us to feel guilt and shame for choosing healthy options. This was slightly different than the content I usually share, and loved hearing a new perspective from Keri. Curious to hear your feedback — send me a DM!  If you found value from this episode, leave a review! We pick one review each week to win free Granola Butter. 

Joy Bauer, MS, RDN, CDN, is one of the nation's leading health authorities. She is the nutrition and healthy lifestyle expert for the TODAY show and the host of NBC's Health + Happiness. She recently launched her own Amazon Live weekly show, Health, Happiness, Joy, where she answers viewers' questions in real-time and cooks up mouthwatering recipes. Joy is a #1 New York Times bestselling author with 14 bestsellers to her credit. Her latest book, Joy Bauer's Superfood! 150 Recipes For Eternal Youth, features delicious dishes to enhance health, boost energy and increase longevity. In the earlier part of her career, Joy was the Director of Nutrition and Fitness for the Department of Pediatric Cardiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, as well as the clinical dietitian for their neurosurgical team. One of Joy's most rewarding experiences was creating and implementing “Heart Smart Kids,” a health program for underprivileged children living in Harlem. Audible: Go to www.audible.com or text INMYHEART to 500-500 Ana Luisa: Go to www.shop.analuisa.com for up to 40% off. Feals: Go to www.Feals.com/INMYHEART to get 50% off your first order with free shipping. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

About PetePete does many startup things at Allma. Links: Last Tweet in AWS: https://lasttweetinaws.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/petecheslock LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecheslock/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined—as is tradition, for a post re:Invent wrap up, a month or so later, once everything is time to settle—by my friend and yours, Pete Cheslock. Pete, how are you?Pete: Hi, I'm doing fantastic. New year; new me. That's what I'm going with.Corey: That's the problem. I keep hoping for that, but every time I turn around, it's still me. And you know, honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone.Pete: Exactly. [laugh]. I wouldn't wish you on me either. But somehow I keep coming back for this.Corey: So, in two-thousand twenty—or twenty-twenty, as the children say—re:Invent was fully virtual. And that felt weird. Then re:Invent 2021 was a hybrid event which, let's be serious here, is not really those things. They had a crappy online thing and then a differently crappy thing in person. But it didn't feel real to me because you weren't there.That is part of the re:Invent tradition. There's a midnight madness thing, there's a keynote where they announce a bunch of nonsense, and then Pete and I go and have brunch on the last day of re:Invent and decompress, and more or less talk smack about everything that crosses our minds. And you weren't there this year. I had to backfill you with Tim Banks. You know, the person that I backfield you with here at The Duckbill Group as a principal cloud economist.Pete: You know, you got a great upgrade in hot takes, I feel like, with Tim.Corey: And other ways, too, but it's rude of me to say that to you directly. So yeah, his hot takes are spectacular. He was going to be doing this with me, except you cannot mess with tradition. You really can't.Pete: Yeah. I'm trying to think how many—is this third year? It's at least three.Corey: Third or fourth.Pete: Yeah, it's at least three. Yeah, it was, I don't want to say I was sad to not be there because, with everything going on, it's still weird out there. But I am always—I'm just that weird person who actually likes re:Invent, but not for I feel like the reasons people think. Again, I'm such an extroverted-type person, that it's so great to have this, like, serendipity to re:Invent. The people that you run into and the conversations that you have, and prior—like in 2019, I think was a great example because that was the last one I had gone to—you know, having so many conversations so quickly because everyone is there, right? It's like this magnet that attracts technologists, and venture capital, and product builders, and all this other stuff. And it's all compressed into, like, you know, that five-day span, I think is the biggest part that makes so great.Corey: The fear in people's eyes when they see me. And it was fun; I had a pair of masks with me. One of them was a standard mask, and no one recognizes anyone because, masks, and the other was a printout of my ridiculous face, which was horrifyingly uncanny, but also made it very easy for people to identify me. And depending upon how social I was feeling, I would wear one or the other, and it worked flawlessly. That was worth doing. They really managed to thread the needle, as well, before Omicron hit, but after the horrors of last year. So, [unintelligible 00:03:00]—Pete: It really—Corey: —if it were going on right now, it would not be going on right now.Pete: Yeah. I talk about really—yeah—really just hitting it timing-wise. Like, not that they could have planned for any of this, but like, as things were kind of not too crazy and before they got all crazy again, it feels like wow, like, you know, they really couldn't have done the event at any other time. And it's like, purely due to luck. I mean, absolute one hundred percent.Corey: That's the amazing power of frugality. Because the reason is then is it's the week after Thanksgiving every year when everything is dirt cheap. And, you know, if there's one thing that I one-point-seve—sorry, their stock's in the toilet—a $1.6 trillion company is very concerned about, it is saving money at every opportunity.Pete: Well, the one thing that was most curious about—so I was at the first re:Invent in-what—2012 I think it was, and there was—it was quaint, right?—there was 4000 people there, I want to say. It was in the thousands of people. Now granted, still a big conference, but it was in the Sands Convention Center. It was in that giant room, the same number of people, were you know, people's booths were like tables, like, eight-by-ten tables, right? [laugh].It had almost a DevOpsDays feel to it. And I was kind of curious if this one had any of those feelings. Like, did it evoke it being more quaint and personable, or was it just as soulless as it probably has been in recent years?Corey: This was fairly soulless because they reduced the footprint of the event. They dropped from two expo halls down to one, they cut the number of venues, but they still had what felt like 20,000 people or something there. It was still crowded, it was still packed. And I've done some diligent follow-ups afterwards, and there have been very few cases of Covid that came out of it. I quarantined for a week in a hotel, so I don't come back and kill my young kids for the wrong reasons.And that went—that was sort of like the worst part of it on some level, where it's like great. Now I could sit alone at a hotel and do some catch-up and all the rest, but all right I'd kind of like to go home. I'm not used to being on the road that much.Pete: Yeah, I think we're all a little bit out of practice. You know, I haven't been on a plane in years. I mean, the travel I've done more recently has been in my car from point A to point B. Like, direct, you know, thing. Actually, a good friend of mine who's not in technology at all had to travel for business, and, you know, he also has young kids who are under five, so he when he got back, he actually hid in a room in their house and quarantine himself in the room. But they—I thought, this is kind of funny—they never told the kids he was home. Because they knew that like—Corey: So, they just thought the house was haunted?Pete: [laugh].Corey: Like, “Don't go in the west wing,” sort of level of nonsense. That is kind of amazing.Pete: Honestly, like, we were hanging out with the family because they're our neighbors. And it was like, “Oh, yeah, like, he's in the guest room right now.” Kids have no idea. [laugh]. I'm like, “Oh, my God.” I'm like, I can't even imagine. Yeah.Corey: So, let's talk a little bit about the releases of re:Invent. And I'm going to lead up with something that may seem uncharitable, but I don't think it necessarily is. There weren't the usual torrent of new releases for ridiculous nonsense in the same way that there have been previously. There was no, this service talks to satellites in space. I mean, sure, there was some IoT stuff to manage fleets of cars, and giant piles of robots, and cool, I don't have those particular problems; I'm trying to run a website over here.So okay, great. There were enhancements to a number of different services that were in many cases appreciated, in other cases, irrelevant. Werner said in his keynote, that it was about focusing on primitives this year. And, “Why do we have so many services? It's because you asked for it… as customers.”Pete: [laugh]. Yeah, you asked for it.Corey: What have you been asking for, Pete? Because I know what I've been asking for and it wasn't that. [laugh].Pete: It's amazing to see a company continually say yes to everything, and somehow, despite their best efforts, be successful at doing it. No other company could do that. Imagine any other software technology business out there that just builds everything the customers ask for. Like from a product management business standpoint, that is, like, rule 101 is, “Listen to your customers, but don't say yes to everything.” Like, you can't do everything.Corey: Most companies can't navigate the transition between offering the same software in the Cloud and on a customer facility. So, it's like, “Ooh, an on-prem version, I don't know, that almost broke the company the last time we tried it.” Whereas you have Amazon whose product strategy is, “Yes,” being able to put together a whole bunch of things. I also will challenge the assertion that it's the primitives that customers want. They don't want to build a data center out of popsicle sticks themselves. They want to get something that solves a problem.And this has been a long-term realization for me. I used to work at Media Temple as a senior systems engineer running WordPress at extremely large scale. My websites now run on WordPress, and I have the good sense to pay WP Engine to handle it for me, instead of doing it myself because it's not the most productive use of my time. I want things higher up the stack. I assure you I pay more to WP Engine than it would cost me to run these things myself from an infrastructure point of view, but not in terms of my time.What I see sometimes as the worst of all worlds is that AWS is trying to charge for that value-added pricing without adding the value that goes along with it because you still got to build a lot of this stuff yourself. It's still a very janky experience, you're reduced to googling random blog posts to figure out how this thing is supposed to work, and the best documentation comes from externally. Whereas with a company that's built around offering solutions like this, great. In the fullness of time, I really suspect that if this doesn't change, their customers are going to just be those people who build solutions out of these things. And let those companies capture the up-the-stack margin. Which I have no problem with. But they do because Amazon is a company that lies awake at night actively worrying that someone, somewhere, who isn't them might possibly be making money somehow.Pete: I think MongoDB is a perfect example of—like, look at their stock price over the last whatever, years. Like, they, I feel like everyone called for the death of MongoDB every time Amazon came out with their new things, yet, they're still a multi-billion dollar company because I can just—give me an API endpoint and you scale the database. There's is—Corey: Look at all the high-profile hires that Mongo was making out of AWS, and I can't shake the feeling they're sitting there going, “Yeah, who's losing important things out of production now?” It's, everyone is exodus-ing there. I did one of those ridiculous graphics of the naming all the people that went over there, and in—with the hurricane evacuation traffic picture, and there's one car going the other way that I just labeled with, “Re:Invent sponsorship check,” because yeah, they have a top tier sponsorship and it was great. I've got to say I've been pretty down on MongoDB for a while, for a variety of excellent reasons based upon, more or less, how they treated customers who were in pain. And I'd mostly written it off.I don't do that anymore. Not because I inherently believe the technology has changed, though I'm told it has, but by the number of people who I deeply respect who are going over there and telling me, no, no, this is good. Congratulations. I have often said you cannot buy authenticity, and I don't think that they are, but the people who are working there, I do not believe that these people are, “Yeah, well, you bought my opinion. You can buy their attention, not their opinion.” If someone changes their opinion, based upon where they work, I kind of question everything they're telling me is, like, “Oh, you're just here to sell something you don't believe in? Welcome aboard.”Pete: Right. Yeah, there's an interview question I like to ask, which is, “What's something that you used to believe in very strongly that you've more recently changed your mind on?” And out of politeness because usually throws people back a little bit, and they're like, “Oh, wow. Like, let me think about that.” And I'm like, “Okay, while you think about that I want to give you mine.”Which is in the past, my strongly held belief was we had to run everything ourselves. “You own your availability,” was the line. “No, I'm not buying Datadog. I can build my own metric stack just fine, thank you very much.” Like, “No, I'm not going to use these outsourced load balancers or databases because I need to own my availability.”And what I realized is that all of those decisions lead to actually delivering and focusing on things that were not the core product. And so now, like, I've really flipped 180, that, if any—anything that you're building that does not directly relate to the core product, i.e. How your business makes money, should one hundred percent be outsourced to an expert that is better than you. Mongo knows how to run Mongo better than you.Corey: “What does your company do?” “Oh, we handle expense reports.” “Oh, what are you working on this month?” “I'm building a load balancer.” It's like that doesn't add the value. Don't do that.Pete: Right. Exactly. And so it's so interesting, I think, to hear Werner say that, you know, we're just building primitives, and you asked for this. And I think that concept maybe would work years ago, when you had a lot of builders who needed tools, but I don't think we have any, like, we don't have as many builders as before. Like, I think we have people who need more complete solutions. And that's probably why all these businesses are being super successful against Amazon.Corey: I'm wondering if it comes down to a cloud economic story, specifically that my cloud bill is always going to be variable and it's difficult to predict, whereas if I just use EC2 instances, and I build load balancers or whatnot, myself, well, yeah, it's a lot more work, but I can predict accurately what my staff compensation costs are more effectively, that I can predict what a CapEx charge would be or what the AWS bill is going to be. I'm wondering if that might in some way shape it?Pete: Well, I feel like the how people get better in managing their costs, right, you'll eventually move to a world where, like, “Yep, okay, first, we turned off waste,” right? Like, step one is waste. Step two is, like, understanding your spend better to optimize but, like, step three, like, the galaxy brain meme of Amazon cost stuff is all, like, unit economics stuff, where trying to better understand the actual cost deliver an actual feature. And yeah, I think that actually gets really hard when you give—kind of spread your product across, like, a slew of services that have varying levels of costs, varying levels of tagging, so you can attribute it. Like, it's really hard. Honestly, it's pretty easy if I have 1000 EC2 servers with very specific tags, I can very easily figure out what it costs to deliver product. But if I have—Corey: Yeah, if I have Corey build it, I know what Corey is going to cost, and I know how many servers he's going to use. Great, if I have Pete it, Pete's good at things, it'll cut that server bill in half because he actually knows how to wind up being efficient with things. Okay, great. You can start calculating things out that way. I don't think that's an intentional choice that companies are making, but I feel like that might be a natural outgrowth of it.Pete: Yeah. And there's still I think a lot of the, like, old school mentality of, like, the, “Not invented here,” the, “We have to own our availability.” You can still own your availability by using these other vendors. And honestly, it's really heartening to see so many companies realize that and realize that I don't need to get everything from Amazon. And honestly, like, in some things, like I look at a cloud Amazon bill, and I think to myself, it would be easier if you just did everything from Amazon versus having these ten other vendors, but those ten other vendors are going to be a lot better at running the product that they build, right, that as a service, then you probably will be running it yourself. Or even Amazon's, like, you know, interpretation of that product.Corey: A few other things that came out that I thought were interesting, at least the direction they're going in. The changes to S3 intelligent tiering are great, with instant retrieval on Glacier. I feel like that honestly was—they talk a good story, but I feel like that was competitive response to Google offering the same thing. That smacks of a large company with its use case saying, “You got two choices here.” And they're like, “Well, okay. Crap. We're going to build it then.”Or alternately, they're looking at the changes that they're making to intelligent tiering, they're now shifting that to being the default that as far as recommendations go. There are a couple of drawbacks to it, but not many, and it's getting easier now to not have the mental overhead of trying to figure out exactly what your lifecycle policies are. Yeah, there are some corner cases where, okay, if I adjust this just so, then I could save 10% on that monitoring fee or whatnot. Yeah, but look how much work that's going to take you to curate and make sure that you're not doing something silly. That feels like it is such an in the margins issue. It's like, “How much data you're storing?” “Four exabytes.” Okay, yeah. You probably want some people doing exactly that, but that's not most of us.Pete: Right. Well, there's absolutely savings to be had. Like, if I had an exabyte of data on S3—which there are a lot of people who have that level of data—then it would make sense for me to have an engineering team whose sole purpose is purely an optimizing our data lifecycle for that data. Until a point, right? Until you've optimized the 80%, basically. You optimize the first 80, that's probably, air-quote, “Easy.” The last 20 is going to be incredibly hard, maybe you never even do that.But at lower levels of scale, I don't think the economics actually work out to have a team managing your data lifecycle of S3. But the fact that now AWS can largely do it for you in the background—now, there's so many things you have to think about and, like, you know, understand even what your data is there because, like, not all data is the same. And since S3 is basically like a big giant database you can query, you got to really think about some of that stuff. But honestly, what I—I don't know if—I have no idea if this is even be worked on, but what I would love to see—you know, hashtag #AWSwishlist—is, now we have countless tiers of EBS volumes, EBS volumes that can be dynamically modified without touching, you know, the physical host. Meaning with an API call, you can change from the gp2 to gp3, or io whatever, right?Corey: Or back again if it doesn't pan out.Pete: Or back again, right? And so for companies with large amounts of spend, you know, economics makes sense that you should have a team that is analyzing your volumes usage and modifying that daily, right? Like, you could modify that daily, and I don't know if there's anyone out there that's actually doing it at that level. And they probably should. Like, if you got millions of dollars in EBS, like, there's legit savings that you're probably leaving on the table without doing that. But that's what I'm waiting for Amazon to do for me, right? I want intelligent tiering for EBS because if you're telling me I can API call and you'll move my data and make that better, make that [crosstalk 00:17:46] better [crosstalk 00:17:47]—Corey: Yeah it could be like their auto-scaling for DynamoDB, for example. Gives you the capacity you need 20 minutes after you needed it. But fine, whatever because if I can schedule stuff like that, great, I know what time of day, the runs are going to kick off that beat up the disks. I know when end-of-month reporting fires off. I know what my usage pattern is going to be, by and large.Yeah, part of the problem too, is that I look at this stuff, and I get excited about it with the intelligent tiering… at The Duckbill Group we've got a few hundred S3 buckets lurking around. I'm thinking, “All right, I've got to go through and do some changes on this and implement all of that.” Our S3 bill's something like 50 bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. It's a no, that really isn't a thing. Like, I have a screenshot bucket that I have an app installed—I think called Dropshare—that hooks up to anytime I drag—I hit a shortcut, I drag with the mouse to select whatever I want and boom, it's up there and the URL is not copied to my clipboard, I can paste that wherever I want.And I'm thinking like, yeah, there's no cleanup on that. There's no lifecycle policy that's turning into anything. I should really go back and age some of it out and do the rest and start doing some lifecycle management. It—I've been using this thing for years and I think it's now a whopping, what, 20 cents a month for that bucket. It's—I just don't—Pete: [laugh].Corey: —I just don't care, other than voice in the back of my mind, “That's an unbounded growth problem.” Cool. When it hits 20 bucks a month, then I'll consider it. But until then I just don't. It does not matter.Pete: Yeah, I think yeah, scale changes everything. Start adding some zeros and percentages turned into meaningful numbers. And honestly, back on the EBS thing, the one thing that really changed my perspective of EBS, in general, is—especially coming from the early days, right? One terabyte volume, it was a hard drive in a thing. It was a virtual LUN on a SAN somewhere, probably.Nowadays, and even, like, many years after those original EBS volumes, like all the limits you get in EBS, those are actually artificial limits, right? If you're like, “My EBS volume is too slow,” it's not because, like, the hard drive it's on is too slow. That's an artificial limit that is likely put in place due to your volume choice. And so, like, once you realize that in your head, then your concept of how you store data on EBS should change dramatically.Corey: Oh, AWS had a blog post recently talking about, like, with io2 and the limits and everything, and there was architecture thinking, okay. “So, let's say this is insufficient and the quarter-million IOPS a second that you're able to get is not there.” And I'm sitting there thinking, “That is just ludicrous data volume and data interactivity model.” And it's one of those, like, I'm sitting here trying to think about, like, I haven't had to deal with a problem like that decade, just because it's, “Huh. Turns out getting these one thing that's super fast is kind of expensive.” If you paralyze it out, that's usually the right answer, and that's how the internet is mostly evolved. But there are use cases for which that doesn't work, and I'm excited to see it. I don't want to pay for it in my view, but it's nice to see it.Pete: Yeah, it's kind of fun to go into the Amazon calculator and price out one of the, like, io2 volumes and, like, maxed out. It's like, I don't know, like $50,000 a month or a hun—like, it's some just absolutely absurd number. But the beauty of it is that if you needed that value for an hour to run some intensive data processing task, you can have it for an hour and then just kill it when you're done, right? Like, that is what is most impressive.Corey: I copied 130 gigs of data to an EFS volume, which was—[unintelligible 00:21:05] EFS has gone from “This is a piece of junk,” to one of my favorite services. It really is, just because of its utility and different ways of doing things. I didn't have the foresight, just use a second EFS volume for this. So, I was unzipping a whole bunch of small files onto it. Great.It took a long time for me to go through it. All right, now that I'm done with that I want to clean all this up. My answer was to ultimately spin up a compute node and wind up running a whole bunch of—like, 400, simultaneous rm-rf on that long thing. And it was just, like, this feels foolish and dumb, but here we are. And I'm looking at the stats on it because the instance was—all right, at that point, the load average [on the instance 00:21:41] was like 200, or something like that, and the EFS volume was like, “Ohh, wow, you're really churning on this. I'm now at, like, 5% of the limit.” Like, okay, great. It turns out I'm really bad at computers.Pete: Yeah, well, that's really the trick is, like, yeah, sure, you can have a quarter-million IOPS per second, but, like, what's going to break before you even hit that limit? Probably many other things.Corey: Oh, yeah. Like, feels like on some level if something gets to that point, it a misconfiguration somewhere. But honestly, that's the thing I find weirdest about the world in which we live is that at a small-scale—if I have a bill in my $5 a month shitposting account, great. If I screw something up and cost myself a couple hundred bucks in misconfiguration it's going to stand out. At large scale, it doesn't matter if—you're spending $50 million a year or $500 million a year on AWS and someone leaks your creds, and someone spins up a whole bunch of Bitcoin miners somewhere else, you're going to see that on your bill until they're mining basically all the Bitcoin. It just gets lost in the background.Pete: I'm waiting for those—I'm actually waiting for the next level of them to get smarter because maybe you have, like, an aggressive tagging system and you're monitoring for untagged instances, but the move here would be, first get the creds and query for, like, the most used tags and start applying those tags to your Bitcoin mining instances. My God, it'll take—Corey: Just clone a bunch of tags. Congratulations, you now have a second BI Elasticsearch cluster that you're running yourself. Good work.Pete: Yeah. Yeah, that people won't find that until someone comes along after the fact that. Like, “Why do we have two have these things?” And you're like—[laugh].Corey: “Must be a DR thing.”Pete: It's maxed-out CPU. Yeah, exactly.Corey: [laugh].Pete: Oh, the terrible ideas—please, please, hackers don't take are terrible ideas.Corey: I had a, kind of, whole thing I did on Twitter years ago, talking about how I would wind up using the AWS Marketplace for an embezzlement scheme. Namely, I would just wind up spinning up something that had, like, a five-cent an hour charge or whatnot on just, like, basically rebadge the CentOS Community AMI or whatnot. Great. And then write a blog post, not attached to me, that explains how to do a thing that I'm going to be doing in production in a week or two anyway. Like, “How to build an auto-scaling group,” and reference that AMI.Then if it ever comes out, like, “Wow, why are we having all these marketplace charges on this?” “I just followed the blog post like it said here.” And it's like, “Oh, okay. You're a dumbass. The end.”That's the way to do it. A month goes by and suddenly it came out that someone had done something similarly. They wound up rebadging these community things on the marketplace and charging big money for it, and I'm sitting there going like that was a joke. It wasn't a how-to. But yeah, every time I make these jokes, I worry someone's going to do it.Pete: “Welcome to large-scale fraud with Corey Quinn.”Corey: Oh, yeah, it's fraud at scale is really the important thing here.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I still remember a year ago now at re:Invent 2021 was it, or was it 2020? Whatever they came out with, I want to say it wasn't gp3, or maybe it was, regardless, there was a new EBS volume type that came out that you were playing with to see how it worked and you experimented with it—Pete: Oh, yes.Corey: —and the next morning, you looked at the—I checked Slack and you're like well, my experiments yesterday cost us $5,000. And at first, like, the—my response is instructive on this because, first, it was, “Oh, my God. What's going to happen now?” And it's like, first, hang on a second.First off, that seems suspect but assume it's real. I assumed it was real at the outset. It's “Oh, right. This is not my personal $5-a-month toybox account. We are a company; we can absolutely pay that.” Because it's like, I could absolutely reach out, call it a favor. “I made a mistake, and I need a favor on the bill, please,” to AWS.And I would never live it down, let's be clear. For a $7,000 mistake, I would almost certainly eat it. As opposed to having to prostrate myself like that in front of Amazon. I'm like, no, no, no. I want one of those like—if it's like, “Okay, you're going to, like, set back the company roadmap by six months if you have to pay this. Do you want to do it?” Like, [groans] “Fine, I'll eat some crow.”But okay. And then followed immediately by, wow, if Pete of all people can mess this up, customers are going to be doomed here. We should figure out what happened. And I'm doing the math. Like, Pete, “What did you actually do?” And you're sitting there and you're saying, “Well, I had like a 20 gig volume that I did this.” And I'm doing the numbers, and it's like—Pete: Something's wrong.Corey: “How sure are you when you say ‘gigabyte,' that you were—that actually means what you think it did? Like, were you off by a lot? Like, did you mean exabytes?” Like, what's the deal here?Pete: Like, multiple factors.Corey: Yeah. How much—“How many IOPS did you give that thing, buddy?” And it turned out what happened was that when they launched this, they had mispriced it in the system by a factor of a million. So, it was fun. I think by the end of it, all of your experimentation was somewhere between five to seven cents. Which—Pete: Yeah. It was a—Corey: Which is why you don't work here anymore because no one cost me seven cents of money to give to Amazon—Pete: How dare you?Corey: —on my watch. Get out.Pete: How dare you, sir?Corey: Exactly.Pete: Yeah, that [laugh] was amazing to see, as someone who has done—definitely maid screw-ups that have cost real money—you know, S3 list requests are always a fun one at scale—but that one was supremely fun to see the—Corey: That was a scary one because another one they'd done previously was they had messed up Lightsail pricing, where people would log in, and, like, “Okay, so what is my Lightsail instance going to cost?” And I swear to you, this is true, it was saying—this was back in 2017 or so—the answer was, like, “$4.3 billion.” Because when you see that you just start laughing because you know it's a mistake. You know, that they're not going to actually demand that you spend $4.3 billion for a single instance—unless it's running SAP—and great.It's just, it's a laugh. It's clearly a mispriced, and it's clearly a bug that's going to get—it's going to get fixed. I just spun up this new EBS volume that no one fully understands yet and it cost me thousands of dollars. That's the sort of thing that no, no, I could actually see that happening. There are instances now that cost something like 100 bucks an hour or whatnot to run. I can see spinning up the wrong thing by mistake and getting bitten by it. There's a bunch of fun configuration mistakes you can make that will, “Hee, hee, hee. Why can I see that bill spike from orbit?” And that's the scary thing.Pete: Well, it's the original CI and CD problem of the per-hour billing, right? That was super common of, like, yeah, like, an i3, you know, 16XL server is pretty cheap per hour, but if you're charged per hour and you spin up a bunch for five minutes. Like, it—you will be shocked [laugh] by what you see there. So—Corey: Yeah. Mistakes will show. And I get it. It's also people as individuals are very different psychologically than companies are. With companies it's one of those, “Great we're optimizing to bring in more revenue and we don't really care about saving money at all costs.”Whereas people generally have something that looks a lot like a fixed income in the form of a salary or whatnot, so it's it is easier for us to cut spend than it is for us to go out and make more money. Like, I don't want to get a second job, or pitch my boss on stuff, and yeah. So, all and all, routing out the rest of what happened at re:Invent, they—this is the problem is that they have a bunch of minor things like SageMaker Inference Recommender. Yeah, I don't care. Anything—Pete: [laugh].Corey: —[crosstalk 00:28:47] SageMaker I mostly tend to ignore, for safety. I did like the way they described Amplify Studio because they made it sound like a WYSIWYG drag and drop, build a React app. It's not it. It basically—you can do that in Figma and then it can hook it up to some things in some cases. It's not what I want it to be, which is Honeycode, except good. But we'll get there some year. Maybe.Pete: There's a lot of stuff that was—you know, it's the classic, like, preview, which sure, like, from a product standpoint, it's great. You know, they have a level of scale where they can say, “Here's this thing we're building,” which could be just a twinkle in a product managers, call it preview, and get thousands of people who would be happy to test it out and give you feedback, and it's a, it's great that you have that capability. But I often look at so much stuff and, like, that's really cool, but, like, can I, can I have it now? Right? Like—or you can't even get into the preview plan, even though, like, you have that specific problem. And it's largely just because either, like, your scale isn't big enough, or you don't have a good enough relationship with your account manager, or I don't know, countless other reasons.Corey: The thing that really throws me, too, is the pre-announcements that come a year or so in advance, like, the Outpost smaller ones are finally available, but it feels like when they do too many pre-announcements or no big marquee service announcements, as much as they talk about, “We're getting back to fundamentals,” no, you have a bunch of teams that blew the deadline. That's really what it is; let's not call it anything else. Another one that I think is causing trouble for folks—I'm fortunate in that I don't do much work with Oracle databases, or Microsoft SQL databases—but they extended RDS Custom to Microsoft SQL at the [unintelligible 00:30:27] SQL server at re:Invent this year, which means this comes down to things I actually use, we're going to have a problem because historically, the lesson has always been if I want to run my own databases and tweak everything, I do it on top of an EC2 instance. If I want to managed database, relational database service, great, I use RDS. RDS Custom basically gives you root into the RDS instance. Which means among other things, yes, you can now use RDS to run containers.But it lets you do a lot of things that are right in between. So, how do you position this? When should I use RDS Custom? Can you give me an easy answer to that question? And they used a lot of words to say, no, they cannot. It's basically completely blowing apart the messaging and positioning of both of those services in some unfortunate ways. We'll learn as we go.Pete: Yeah. Honestly, it's like why, like, why would I use this? Or how would I use this? And this is I think, fundamentally, what's hard when you just say yes to everything. It's like, they in many cases, I don't think, like, I don't want to say they don't understand why they're doing this, but if it's not like there's a visionary who's like, this fits into this multi-year roadmap.That roadmap is largely—if that roadmap is largely generated by the customers asking for it, then it's not like, oh, we're building towards this Northstar of RDS being whatever. You might say that, but your roadmap's probably getting moved all over the place because, you know, this company that pays you a billion dollars a year is saying, “I would give you $2 billion a year for all of my Oracle databases, but I need this specific thing.” I can't imagine a scenario that they would say, “Oh, well, we're building towards this Northstar, and that's not on the way there.” Right? They'd be like, “New Northstar. Another billion dollars, please.”Corey: Yep. Probably the worst release of re:Invent, from my perspective, is RUM, Real User Monitoring, for CloudWatch. And I, to be clear, I wrote a shitposting Twitter threading client called Last Tweet in AWS. Go to lasttweetinaws.com. You can all use it. It's free; I just built this for my own purposes. And I've instrumented it with RUM. Now, Real User Monitoring is something that a lot of monitoring vendors use, and also CloudWatch now. And what that is, is it embeds a listener into the JavaScript that runs on client load, and it winds up looking at what's going on loading times, et cetera, so you can see when users are unhappy. I have no problem with this. Other than that, you know, liking users? What's up with that?Pete: Crazy.Corey: But then, okay, now, what this does is unlike every other RUM tool out there, which charges per session, meaning I am going to be… doing a web page load, it charges per data item, which includes HTTP errors, or JavaScript errors, et cetera. Which means that if you have a high transaction volume site and suddenly your CDN takes a nap like Fastly did for an hour last year, suddenly your bill is stratospheric for this because errors abound and cascade, and you can have thousands of errors on a single page load for these things, and it is going to be visible from orbit, at least with a per session basis thing, when you start to go viral, you understand that, “Okay, this is probably going to cost me some more on these things, and oops, I guess I should write less compelling content.” Fine. This is one of those one misconfiguration away and you are wailing and gnashing teeth. Now, this is a new service. I believe that they will waive these surprise bills in the event that things like that happen. But it's going to take a while and you're going to be worrying the whole time if you've rolled this out naively. So it's—Pete: Well and—Corey: —I just don't like the pricing.Pete: —how many people will actively avoid that service, right? And honestly, choose a competitor because the competitor could be—the competitor could be five times more expensive, right, on face value, but it's the certainty of it. It's the uncertainty of what Amazon will charge you. Like, no one wants a surprise bill. “Well, a vendor is saying that they'll give us this contract for $10,000. I'm going to pay $10,000, even though RUM might be a fraction of that price.”It's honestly, a lot of these, like, product analytics tools and monitoring tools, you'll often see they price be a, like, you know, MAU, Monthly Active User, you know, or some sort of user-based pricing, like, the number of people coming to your site. You know, and I feel like at least then, if you are trying to optimize for lots of users on your site, and more users means more revenue, then you know, if your spend is going up, but your revenue is also going up, that's a win-win. But if it's like someone—you know, your third-party vendor dies and you're spewing out errors, or someone, you know, upgraded something and it spews out errors. That no one would normally see; that's the thing. Like, unless you're popping open that JavaScript console, you're not seeing any of those errors, yet somehow it's like directly impacting your bottom line? Like that doesn't feel [crosstalk 00:35:06].Corey: Well, there is something vaguely Machiavellian about that. Like, “How do I get my developers to care about errors on consoles?” Like, how about we make it extortionately expensive for them not to. It's, “Oh, all right, then. Here we go.”Pete: And then talk about now you're in a scenario where you're working on things that don't directly impact the product. You're basically just sweeping up the floor and then trying to remove errors that maybe don't actually affect it and they're not actually an error.Corey: Yeah. I really do wonder what the right answer is going to be. We'll find out. Again, we live, we learn. But it's also, how long does it take a service that has bad pricing at launch, or an unfortunate story around it to outrun that reputation?People are still scared of Glacier because of its original restore pricing, which was non-deterministic for any sensible human being, and in some cases lead to I'm used to spending 20 to 30 bucks a month on this. Why was I just charged two grand?Pete: Right.Corey: Scare people like that, they don't come back.Pete: I'm trying to actually remember which service it is that basically gave you an estimate, right? Like, turn it on for a month, and it would give you an estimate of how much this was going to cost you when billing started.Corey: It was either Detective or GuardDuty.Pete: Yeah, it was—yeah, that's exactly right. It was one of those two. And honestly, that was unbelievably refreshing to see. You know, like, listen, you have the data, Amazon. You know what this is going to cost me, so when I, like, don't make me spend all this time to go and figure out the cost. If you have all this data already, just tell me, right?And if I look at it and go, “Yeah, wow. Like, turning this on in my environment is going to cost me X dollars. Like, yeah, that's a trade-off I want to make, I'll spend that.” But you know, with some of the—and that—a little bit of a worry on some of the intelligent tiering on S3 is that the recommendation is likely going to be everything goes to intelligent tiering first, right? It's the gp3 story. Put everything on gp3, then move it to the proper volume, move it to an sc or an st or an io. Like, gp3 is where you start. And I wonder if that's going to be [crosstalk 00:37:08].Corey: Except I went through a wizard yesterday to launch an EC2 instance and its default on the free tier gp2.Pete: Yeah. Interesting.Corey: Which does not thrill me. I also still don't understand for the life of me why in some regions, the free tier is a t2 instance, when t3 is available.Pete: They're uh… my guess is that they've got some free t—they got a bunch of t2s lying around. [laugh].Corey: Well, one of the most notable announcements at re:Invent that most people didn't pay attention to is their ability now to run legacy instance types on top of Nitro, which really speaks to what's going on behind the scenes of we can get rid of all that old hardware and emulate the old m1 on modern equipment. So, because—you can still have that legacy, ancient instance, but now you're going—now we're able to wind up greening our data centers, which is part of their big sustainability push, with their ‘Sustainability Pillar' for the well-architected framework. They're talking more about what the green choices in cloud are. Which is super handy, not just because of the economic impact because we could use this pretty directly to reverse engineer their various margins on a per-service or per-offering basis. Which I'm not sure they're aware of yet, but oh, they're going to be.And that really winds up being a win for the planet, obviously, but also something that is—that I guess puts a little bit of choice on customers. The challenge I've got is, with my serverless stuff that I build out, if I spend—the Google search I make to figure out what the most economic, most sustainable way to do that is, is going to have a bigger carbon impact on the app itself. That seems to be something that is important at scale, but if you're not at scale, it's one of those, don't worry about it. Because let's face it, the cloud providers—all of them—are going to have a better sustainability story than you are running this in your own data centers, or on a Raspberry Pi that's always plugged into the wall.Pete: Yeah, I mean, you got to remember, Amazon builds their own power plants to power their data centers. Like, that's the level they play, right? There, their economies of scale are so entirely—they're so entirely different than anything that you could possibly even imagine. So, it's something that, like, I'm sure people will want to choose for. But, you know, if I would honestly say, like, if we really cared about our computing costs and the carbon footprint of it, I would love to actually know the carbon footprint of all of the JavaScript trackers that when I go to various news sites, and it loads, you know, the whatever thousands of trackers and tracking the all over, like, what is the carbon impact of some of those choices that I actually could control, like, as a either a consumer or business person?Corey: I really hope that it turns into something that makes a meaningful difference, and it's not just greenwashing. But we'll see. In the fullness of time, we're going to figure that out. Oh, they're also launching some mainframe stuff. They—like that's great.Pete: Yeah, those are still a thing.Corey: I don't deal with a lot of customers that are doing things with that in any meaningful sense. There is no AWS/400, so all right.Pete: [laugh]. Yeah, I think honestly, like, I did talk to a friend of mine who's in a big old enterprise and has a mainframe, and they're actually replacing their mainframe with Lambda. Like they're peeling off—which is, like, a great move—taking the monolith, right, and peeling off the individual components of what it can do into these discrete Lambda functions. Which I thought was really fascinating. Again, it's a five-year-long journey to do something like that. And not everyone wants to wait five years, especially if their support's about to run out for that giant box in the, you know, giant warehouse.Corey: The thing that I also noticed—and this is probably the—I guess, one of the—talk about swing and a miss on pricing—they have a—what is it?—there's a VPC IP Address Manager, which tracks the the IP addresses assigned to your VPCs that are allocated versus not, and it's 20 cents a month per IP address. It's like, “Okay. So, you're competing against a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet”—which is what people are using for these things now—“Only you're making it extortionately expensive?”Pete: What kind of value does that provide for 20—I mean, like, again—Corey: I think Infoblox or someone like that offers it where they become more cost-effective as soon as you hit 500 IP addresses. And it's just—like, this is what I'm talking about. I know it does not cost AWS that kind of money to store an IP address. You can store that in a Route 53 TXT record for less money, for God's sake. And that's one of those, like, “Ah, we could extract some value pricing here.”Like, I don't know if it's a good product or not. Given its pricing, I don't give a shit because it's going to be too expensive for anything beyond trivial usage. So, it's a swing and a miss from that perspective. It's just, looking at that, I laugh, and I don't look at it again.Pete: See I feel—Corey: I'm not usually price sensitive. I want to be clear on that. It's just, that is just Looney Tunes, clown shoes pricing.Pete: Yeah. It's honestly, like, in many cases, I think the thing that I have seen, you know, in the past few years is, in many cases, it can honestly feel like Amazon is nickel-and-diming their customers in so many ways. You know, the explosion of making it easy to create multiple Amazon accounts has a direct impact to waste in the cloud because there's a lot of stuff you have to have her account. And the more accounts you have, those costs grow exponentially as you have these different places. Like, you kind of lose out on the economies of scale when you have a smaller number of accounts.And yeah, it's hard to optimize for that. Like, if you're trying to reduce your spend, it's challenging to say, “Well, by making a change here, we'll save, you know, $10,000 in this account.” “That doesn't seem like a lot when we're spending millions.” “Well, hold on a second. You'll save $10,000 per account, and you have 500 accounts,” or, “You have 1000 accounts,” or something like that.Or almost cost avoidance of this cost is growing unbounded in all of your accounts. It's tiny right now. So, like, now would be the time you want to do something with it. But like, again, for a lot of companies that have adopted the practice of endless Amazon accounts, they've almost gone, like, it's the classic, like, you know, I've got 8000 GitHub repositories for my source code. Like, that feels just as bad as having one GitHub repository for your repo. I don't know what the balance is there, but anytime these different types of services come out, it feels like, “Oh, wow. Like, I'm going to get nickeled and dimed for it.”Corey: This ties into the re:Post launch, which is a rebranding of their forums, where, okay, great, it was a little crufty and it need modernize, but it still ties your identity to an IAM account, or the root email address for an Amazon account, which is great. This is completely worthless because as soon as I change jobs, I lose my identity, my history, the rest, on this forum. I'm not using it. It shows that there's a lack of awareness that everyone is going to have multiple accounts with which they interact, and that people are going to deal with the platform longer than any individual account will. It's just a continual swing and a miss on things like that.And it gets back to the billing question of, “Okay. When I spin up an account, do I want them to just continue billing me—because don't turn this off; this is important—or do I want there to be a hard boundary where if you're about to charge me, turn it off. Turn off the thing that's about to cost me money.” And people hem and haw like this is an insurmountable problem, but I think the way to solve it is, let me specify that intent when I provision the account. Where it's, “This is a production account for a bank. I really don't want you turning it off.” Versus, “I'm a student learner who thinks that a Managed NAT Gateway might be a good thing. Yeah, I want you to turn off my demo Hello World app that will teach me what's going on, rather than surprising me with a five-figure bill at the end of the month.”Pete: Yeah. It shouldn't be that hard. I mean, but again, I guess everything's hard at scale.Corey: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.Pete: But still, I feel like every time I log into Cost Explorer and I look at—and this is years it's still not fixed. Not that it's even possible to fix—but on the first day of the month, you look at Cost Explorer, and look at what Amazon is estimating your monthly bill is going to be. It's like because of your, you know—Corey: Your support fees, and your RI purchases, and savings plans purchases.Pete: [laugh]. All those things happened, right? First of the month, and it's like, yeah, “Your bill's going to be $800,000 this year.” And it's like, “Shouldn't be, like, $1,000?” Like, you know, it's the little things like that, that always—Corey: The one-off charges, like, “Oh, your Route 53 zone,” and all the stuff that gets charged on a monthly cadence, which fine, whatever. I mean, I'm okay with it, but it's also the, like, be careful when that happen—I feel like there's a way to make that user experience less jarring.Pete: Yeah because that problem—I mean, in my scenario, companies that I've worked at, there's been multiple times that a non-technical person will look at that data and go into immediate freakout mode, right? And that's never something that you want to have happen because now that's just adding a lot of stress and anxiety into a company that is—with inaccurate data. Like, the data—like, the answer you're giving someone is just wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't even give it to them if it's that wrong. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens this coming year. We're already seeing promising stuff. They—give people a timeline on how long in advance these things record—late last night, AWS released a new console experience. When you log into the AWS console now, there's a new beta thing. And I gave it some grief on Twitter because I'm still me, but like the direction it's going. It lets you customize your view with widgets and whatnot.And until they start selling widgets on marketplace or having sponsored widgets, you can't remove I like it, which is no guarantee at some point. But it shows things like, I can move the cost stuff, I can move the outage stuff up around, I can have the things that are going on in my account—but who I am means I can shift this around. If I'm a finance manager, cool. I can remove all the stuff that's like, “Hey, you want to get started spinning up an EC2 instance?” “Absolutely not. Do I want to get told, like, how to get certified? Probably not. Do I want to know what the current bill is and whether—and my list of favorites that I've pinned, whatever services there? Yeah, absolutely do.” This is starting to get there.Pete: Yeah, I wonder if it really is a way to start almost hedging on organizations having a wider group of people accessing AWS. I mean, in previous companies, I absolutely gave access to the console for tools like QuickSight, for tools like Athena, for the DataBrew stuff, the Glue DataBrew. Giving, you know, non-technical people access to be able to do these, like, you know, UI ETL tasks, you know, a wider group of a company is getting access into Amazon. So, I think anything that Amazon does to improve that experience for, you know, the non-SREs, like the people who would traditionally log in, like, that is an investment definitely worth making.Corey: “Well, what could non-engineering types possibly be doing in the AWS console?” “I don't know, jackhole, maybe paying the bill? Just a thought here.” It's the, there are people who look at these things from a variety of different places, and you have such sprawl in the AWS world that there are different personas by a landslide. If I'm building Twitter for Pets, you probably don't want to be pitching your mainframe migration services to me the same way that you would if I were a 200-year-old insurance company.Pete: Yeah, exactly. And the number of those products are going to grow, the number of personas are going to grow, and, yeah, they'll have to do something that they want to actually, you know, maintain that experience so that every person can have, kind of, the experience that they want, and not be distracted, you know? “Oh, what's this? Let me go test this out.” And it's like, you know, one-time charge for $10,000 because, like, that's how it's charged. You know, that's not an experience that people like.Corey: No. They really don't. Pete, I want to thank you for spending the time to chat with me again, as is our tradition. I'm hoping we can do it in person this year, when we go at the end of 2022, to re:Invent again. Or that no one goes in person. But this hybrid nonsense is for the birds.Pete: Yeah. I very much would love to get back to another one, and yeah, like, I think there could be an interesting kind of merging here of our annual re:Invent recap slash live brunch, you know, stream you know, hot takes after a long week. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. The real way that you know that it's a good joke is when one of us says something, the other one sprays scrambled eggs out of their nose. Yeah, that's the way to do it.Pete: Exactly. Exactly.Corey: Pete, thank you so much. If people want to learn more about what you're up to—hopefully, you know, come back. We miss you, but you're unaffiliated, you're a startup advisor. Where can people find you to learn more, if they for some unforgivable reason don't know who or what a Pete Cheslock is?Pete: Yeah. I think the easiest place to find me is always on Twitter. I'm just at @petecheslock. My DMs are always open and I'm always down to expand my network and chat with folks.And yeah, right, now, I'm just, as I jokingly say, professionally unaffiliated. I do some startup advisory work and have been largely just kind of—honestly checking out the state of the economy. Like, there's a lot of really interesting companies out there, and some interesting problems to solve. And, you know, trying to spend some of my time learning more about what companies are up to nowadays. So yeah, if you got some interesting problems, you know, you can follow my Twitter or go to LinkedIn if you want some great, you know, business hot takes about, you know, shitposting basically.Corey: Same thing. Pete, thanks so much for joining me, I appreciate it.Pete: Thanks for having me.Corey: Pete Cheslock, startup advisor, professionally unaffiliated, and recurring re:Invent analyst pal of mine. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment calling me a jackass because do I know how long it took you personally to price CloudWatch RUM?Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Muji stops by The Business Brew to discuss modern internet infrastructure.  Muji has extensive technical knowledge about internet infrastructure, network security, and high growth companies such as Snowflake.  He shares his knowledge via a paid newsletter, found at hhhypergrowth.com, which Bill subscribes to and enjoys very much.  Our discussion mostly focuses on how information travels over the internet to end up being consumed by everyone.  This is a very interesting discussion and we hope you enjoy. Detailed show notes below the Stream by Mosiac sponsor copy and thank yous. Please leave us a rating in your favorite podcast player! This episode is brought to you by Stream by Mosaic, a product that is integral to any fundamental research process.  Stream has developed an extensive library of expert interviews that cover a variety of industries.  StreamRG.com features over 300 expert interviews.  70% of Stream's experts are found exclusively on StreamRG.com.  Visit StreamRG.com and use promo code BREW for a 14 day trial. Album art photo taken by Mike Ando.  Please see https://www.mikeando.com/ Thank you to @mathewpassy (on Twitter) for the show production. Detailed Show Notes 4:30 – What is an edge network and a CDN   9:45 – How Fastly and Cloudflare attacked Akami   15:40 – Cloud Infrastructure vs. CDNs   18:50 – Fastly strategy   21:30 – The rise of software defined networking   23:15 – Fully programmable app stacks vs. monolithic app stacks   27:50 – Why Muji was hesitant to invest in software and what changed   30:30 – Why some applications are potentially more sticky than they used to be   36:30 – How Muji finds hhhypergrowth companies to invest in   41:00 – When Muji sells   44:50 – Muji's process and what he looks for   50:50 – What is zero trust and why is it important?   57:20 – Back to CDNs and their roles in app reliability and performance   1:02:00 – CDNs are now “mesh” and what that means   1:06:20 -  What is the role of centralized data going forward?   1:12:54 – The Internet of Things and how 5G fits in   1:18:00 – How does Muji think about valuation? 1:22:00 – How Muji thinks about company culture and the risks of growth

This episode has nothing to do with restriction (except that we talk about how it can be majorly detrimental). I call in Lisa Moskovitz, RD, CDN, author of The Core 3 Healthy Eating Plan and the CEO of NY Nutrition Group, to talk about the types of resolutions and goals we should be making in 2022 when it comes to nourishing our bodies. Think things you should be adding in instead of getting rid of, nourishment beyond just good (content, energy), thinking about the "three B's", and choosing alcohol wisely (including my big $ idea). SOCIAL @lisamnutrition @emilyabbate @hurdlepodcast JOIN: THE *Secret* FACEBOOK GROUP SIGN UP: Weekly Hurdle Newsletter ASK ME A QUESTION: Leave me a voice message, ask me a question, and it could be featured in an upcoming episode! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/hurdle/message

Kendra Tolbert MS, RDN, CDN, LD, RYT, Cert AT is a registered dietitian nutritionist, registered yoga teacher, and certified aromatherapist specializing in PCOS, fertility, and PMS. She received her Bachelor of Science in Nutritional Sciences from Howard University and her Master of Science in Nutrition and Public Health from Teachers College, Columbia University. In 2017, She was awarded the Emerging Professional Award from the Women's Health Dietetic Practice Group.   Kendra has experience helping individuals, families, and communities make improvements to their wellbeing and quality of life by adopting healthier habits. Her areas of expertise include women's health, PCOS, fertility, mind-body practices, and community nutrition.    Kendra is passionate about helping women live fertile. To LIVE FERTILE is to live the most joyful, productive, and fruitful life you can by caring for your body, mind, and soul. Whether your goal is to have more energy, make peace with your body, or get pregnant, living F.E.R.T.I.L.E. can help you get there.     Enhancing your fertility isn't something you do through force or trying to wrestle your body into submission. It's something you set the stage for by supporting yourself with life-giving habits. Our bodies and fertility are beautifully complex, but supporting and enhancing our wellbeing and fertility is simple.   In this episode we discuss: Kendra's journey to becoming a registered dietitian, yoga teacher, aromatherapist andspecializing in PCOS and fertility, and starting Live Fertile. Kendra's passion for helping women who want to conceive (someday or today) preserve and optimize their fertility all without restrictive diets, exhausting exercise, and extreme measures. Why extreme measures aren't necessary for fertility, and may even inhibit it. Why with PCOS, Kendra doesn't counsel most women to diet or exercise excessively, and instead encourages gentle nutrition practices like using the plate method. Types of behaviors that lead to long term health, happiness and happy hormones, including how yoga benefits your fertility and hormone balance. Strategies to include in your life to either protect their fertility or conceive soon. How Kendra practices wellness without obsession.   Learn more about Kendra at: livefertile.com youtube.com/livefertile instagram.com/live.fertile   This episode is brought to you by Food & Body Peace Playbook, which is officially open for enrollment for our January program. If you ready to say YES to intuitive eating and treating your body well in 2022 join now to grab one of the limited spots inside the program.   Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here.  Join our FREE support group for like-minded women, the Nourishing Women Community for more community & support. Take a look at our online shop, the Wellness Without Obsession Shop.   Let's hang out! Connect with Victoria and the staff at NMN: Victoria's Instagram Victoria's Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram Nourishing Minds Nutrition website   For every guest that comes on the show, we donate money to Loveland Foundation. The Loveland Foundation, is a foundation that provides therapy and  healing to Black women and girls. We are honored to donate monthly to the Loveland Foundation, and you can learn more and donate yourself here.

Many people don't think about food racism, but the diet world can be a big contributor to making what we buy and how we eat a classist issue. As we scour the online world for recipes under whatever diet we follow, it's easy to assume that everyone has access to the ingredients so often found. But what happens to people that struggle to obtain those foods? Maya Feller, MS, RD, CDN of Brooklyn-based Maya Feller Nutrition is a registered dietitian nutritionist, nationally recognized nutrition expert and adjunct professor at New York University. In her practice, she provides medical nutrition therapy for the management of and risk reduction of non-communicable diseases. Maya received her Masters of Science in clinical nutrition at New York University, where she is adjunct faculty. Whether addressing the nation or working one on one and with groups, Maya believes in providing nutrition education from an antibias patient-centered, culturally sensitive approach. Maya is dedicated to promoting nutrition education that helps the public to make informed food choices that support health and longevity. Maya shares her approachable, real food-based solutions to millions of people through regular speaking engagements, writing in local and national publications, via her social media account on Instagram, @mayafellerRD, and as a national nutrition expert on Good Morning America, GMA3: What You Need to Know and more. She is the author of The Southern Comfort Food Diabetes Cookbook: Over 100 Recipes for a Healthy Life. Inequality in The Wellness Space As a whole, the wellness space struggles when it comes to being a welcome and accessible space to all people. Because of the "look" portrayed, many don't feel represented and therefore they don't believe it is a space they belong in. But we need to radicalize this space so that it feels more inclusive. This isn't easy as the issues run deep. A few things we can do to help make change are: Share others in the wellness space that come from all cultures.Share accounts with people who range in size, ability and ethnicity.Recognize your implicit bias and when working with clients don't make assumptions about their diet based on their culture or size. Allow clients to be a part of the process from the beginning.Recognize that foods aren't bad and good, and all foods can have a place in someones diet if planned correctly.Open space to talk about things that may make you uncomfortable. This issue is seen across diets, whether it's veganism or medical centered diet's like the Mediterranean and DASH diet. The research shows great gains when following these diets so at the core they are great, however they don't translate to race and ethnicity for people that don't eat in those ways. The bottom line is that there is not just one path to health. There are many ways to reach health goals that can honor the person as a whole. It is possible to support a diagnosed condition with a diet that includes cultural foods. Food Accessibility When it comes to wellness, there is an underlying assumption that it needs to be expensive and fit a certain theme. But not only is this not true, it also doesn't recognize that not everyone has access to the same foods. Depending on where someone lives, whether they have a car, what hours they work and many more other factors, being able to shop for, afford and even find things like fresh produce, specialty ingredients, grains, etc may not happen. But there are ways to help clients and readers with food accessibility and make wellness more accessible: Help share ways to look at food costs and determine where people can get the best deals.Encourage eating a combination of fresh foods and prepared foods, including those that are pre cut, canned or frozen to balance time and cost.Help make diet plans that will be sustainable long term. Keeping social determinants of health in mind when sharing wellness ideas and pract...

Just because something is in the cloud, doesn't always mean that it is safe and secure and that you don't play a role in keeping it that way. Those who move into the cloud need to understand cloud security best practices and how to implement them.  Today's guest is Dr. Randall Magiera. Dr. Magiera is a cybersecurity professional with over 15 years of experience in security management, change management, risk analysis, intrusion prevention and detection systems, and vulnerability assessments. He has a doctorate of science in cybersecurity, multiple advanced degrees in cybersecurity and technology, and certifications too numerous to list. Show Notes: [1:00] - Randall introduces himself and his background in the field. [3:05] - Things regarding cloud technology have advanced greatly in the last 15 years. [4:09] - These cloud companies do go to great lengths to keep things as secure as possible. [5:16] - The shared responsibility model is important to understand. [6:44] - Large cloud providers do offer some education on best practices to users. [8:01] - Breaches are causing the public to place blame on large companies like Amazon and Google, but it is more related to users not being familiar with how to use the product. [10:47] - A lot of the time, the goal is speed in developing a program, app, or product and security sometimes gets pushed aside. [12:33] - Chris shares a funny story about crypto-mining. [14:48] - Randall explains a recent crypto-mining code placed in a javascript library. [17:50] - Chris and Randall discuss the Colonial Pipeline Attack. [20:00] - A CDN is great for organizations with employees all over the world working in the same program. [23:31] - Ideally, the goal is to have everything stored in the cloud rather than on devices. [25:00] - Malicious actors are motivated by money and they will use the cloud in creative ways as a means to an end. [26:53] - Randall believes that we will be seeing the use of deep fakes more often in coming years. [28:50] - Cloud computing gives users virtually endless capabilities which means that people who are malicious can use them for advanced attacks as well. [31:51] - Per terms and conditions, if you delete data, it is on you. [34:04] - Once something is deleted from the cloud, it is gone forever. [36:21] - Randall describes how AWS works regarding backups. [38:18] - When it comes to disaster recovery, especially for businesses, there is an option for data backup that will create a quick turn around if something happens. [41:51] - Always test your backups and DR. Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.  Links and Resources: Podcast Web Page Facebook Page whatismyipaddress.com Easy Prey on Instagram Easy Prey on Twitter Easy Prey on LinkedIn Easy Prey on YouTube Easy Prey on Pinterest Dr. Randall Magiera on LinkedIn Tulane University - Randy Magiera

Our Guest: Salma Alam-Naylor What she'd like for you to see: Unbreak.tech Her JAMstack Jams: All the amazing rendering options! Her musical Jam: Move On by Emily Vaughn Grant (pay special attention at 1:47 in the track for the double tracked bass!) Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello Hello everyone. Welcome to another JAM PACKED Jamstack episode. This is That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the best question since sliced bread. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host Brian Robinson and this week, we have a very special guest. I'm pleased to introduce the winner of the Jamstack community creator award from Jamstack Conf 2021 Salma Alam-Naylor. Salma helps developers build stuff, learn things and love what they do. She does that via her Twitch streams, YouTube channel and blog. One quick update for the episode, we recorded this prior to Salma joining the Netlify team. So while we mentioned Contentful, in various parts of the episode, Sam is now on the DX team at Netlify. Bryan Robinson 1:04 Alright, Salma, well, thanks for joining us on the show today. Salma Alam-Naylor 1:06 Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Bryan Robinson 1:08 Awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, Salma Alam-Naylor 1:13 I am currently a developer advocate for Contentful. I've also got like kind of other stuff that you do. So you might know me on the internet as white Panther. And I help developers build stuff, learn things and love what they do. I write educational blog posts about web development. I do a lot of live streaming on Twitch, I make YouTube content. And I'm an all round Jamstack enthusiast To be honest, for fun, I mean, I kind of do that for fun as well. But if you want to know about non web dev stuff, I actually love interior design. And I'm moving in the next like two months. So hopefully, when people hear this, they would have actually finally moved house. So I can't wait to get my hand stuck in to that little project. I also like to play cerebral puzzle games with my husband on on a computer, most recently, a game called Super liminal, which is all about like perspective and maths and stuff. It's very good. Bryan Robinson 2:19 I'm gonna jump in real fast. I have a six year old and we were playing super limited together. Nothing about it. I was like, this is super fun. And like we were having good time. He that was really cool. And then it gets creepy. I didn't expect they get super creepy. And he's like, I don't want to play this game anymore. Daddy. We never have to play it again. You're fine. Salma Alam-Naylor 2:38 Yeah, it was a good game. It's a good game. I remember this one bit that when you get on like a roof, and there's the moon. And we were like on the roof thinking this you have to we have to get above the roof because of the weird glitch thing when you turn the light on and off. But it wasn't it was an Easter egg. It wasn't a thing. It was fun. And I'm also, you know, my background is in music. I did a music degree. I was a music teacher. I was a musician. So I still try to play music for fun with my family. And I do want to get back into making music. Actually, I missed that a lot. But so when I move into my new house, I'll have a proper studio purposely for the music. So I think I'm looking forward to that a lot. Bryan Robinson 3:21 That's amazing. So what's your instrument of choice or musical talent of choice, I suppose. Salma Alam-Naylor 3:27 So when I was growing up, and when I was a teacher, my main instruments were piano and flute, but and singing, but I also taught kids how to play in rock bands for a few years. So I was a bass player. I don't really do much bass now. And I did some guitar and played some drums and stuff. But making music now I really like making electronic music mainly. I was also a musical comedian for a few years. Interesting. touring the UK, singing weirdly satirical British political songs. We'd get cancelled now so you can't hear any of it. Bryan Robinson 4:14 Out of curiosity. Is there any comedy in Britain? That's not satirical political comedy? I feel like everything kind of falls into it. Salma Alam-Naylor 4:23 Yeah, it's pretty much there's a lot to satirize in the British political system. But I guess that's for another podcast. Bryan Robinson 4:31 Yeah, sure. Awesome. Yeah. Let's let's maybe not talk about about the Jamstack. He's, he said that you're a Jamstack enthusiast. So what was your entry point into this ecosystem philosophy, what have Salma Alam-Naylor 4:45 you it was actually with Jekyll, the first static site generator many, many years ago, and that was the only one that existed you know, like around 2015 2016 and I had no idea what it was doing. But I was experimenting, I had really no idea that it was part of the Jamstack. At the time, I was just building a website, I had no idea that it was a static website, and really what that meant, but I was building something with liquid templates that compiled into a website. And I was hosting it on GitLab Pages at the time, not GitHub Pages. I was because I used to get lab for work. And so I kind of naturally gravitated towards GitLab at that time. But I guess the ecosystem sucked me in. I really don't know how I went from building my first Jekyll site to where I am now. I have no idea how, how this has happened, or what made it happen. But clearly, the Jamstack has, has a good thing going right. Like, it's fantastic. Bryan Robinson 5:51 So what are you doing right before you started playing with Jekyll, you were at some sort of company doing tech stuff he's mentioned you are you are using GitLab. So what was that like? Salma Alam-Naylor 5:59 So I did a variety of different things. Before I ended up here. I was working for some startups, I was working for a global e commerce company that was using like Java, whether bespoke kind of E commerce system with JSP front ends. I was also before that I was building a new e commerce platform in a startup that was JavaScript based what we're even using PHP, we're using PHP with JavaScript front end. But it was a it was a plain JavaScript front end, it wasn't statically generated, it wasn't using a framework or anything like that. After the global e commerce company, I was actually working for another startup building a React Native app. So like my career actually had nothing to do with the Jamstack. It was all my side projects. Until my last job, I was working at an agency, product agency. And we built quite a lot of things in the team. And actually we started gravitating towards next J S for these quick. They were initially proofs of concept, because next JS was pretty young at the time. But it ended up that next JS was a really scalable front end with a lot of capabilities. So we normally have like a dotnet back end and an extra as front end kind of thing with the API layer in the middle. And that was really my intro into the enterprise levels, scalable, robust, we can build whatever we want with the Jamstack kind of thing. Bryan Robinson 7:38 Alright, so let's fast forward a little bit. That was your last thing, right? How today, are you using the Jamstack philosophies professionally, I mean, obviously, Contentful is pretty, pretty big in that world. But also personally with both your educational stuff and anything else you're doing on the side. Salma Alam-Naylor 7:52 So one of the biggest philosophies that I like to promote the Jamstack is that just do it, just build something and get it live, just build it learn some stuff while you do it, and have a good time. Like, I can try things out without having to over commit to anything on the Jamstack I if I've got an idea for a website, a lot of the time I will get the idea or buy the domain, I will go on my Twitch stream for three hours. And I will build it and release it in that three hours. And that is the joy of the Jamstack. Salma Alam-Naylor 8:05 And what I love about that as well as it's so accessible to developers, because you don't have to over commit or pay for anything at that stage of IDEA inception. And so it's so accessible, and it's so in reach for so many people, for example, dot take dotnet I don't want to like hate on dotnet. It's great. It's a fantastic enterprise solution for enterprise products. But as a developer, as a front end developer, even though the dotnet comes with front end or back end stuff, what do I do when I've built an app? Like how do I put it online? So like I can just hook up a Jamstack hosting platform to my GIT repository, do a git push and great, there it is. It's online on a on a URL, I don't have to buy a domain even it's just there. And it's it's just so beautiful. And it's it really embodies the actual kind of agile kind of continuous delivery methodology as well. Salma Alam-Naylor 9:26 Every commit is a release, every commit is an immutable release. So you can roll back, you can have a look at the history you can you have, you can just click in a UI in like Vercel or Netlify or GitLab. Just click Oh, look at that. That's what I mean and week ago, I can compare that with what I've got now. And, and it scales. You don't even have to worry about scaling. If you get like a big hit on your proof of concept or whatever. And you know, it just enables developers to move fast to try things out to experiment and test Have fun without all the nonsense that developers have to deal with, day in, day out. And it's just a joy. Salma Alam-Naylor 10:09 And I've learned so much like, I never would have thought like, when I was building my like first websites maybe 10 10-12 years ago, my first proper websites, I never would have thought that I would be utilizing a CDN at the edge. And all of these different rendering methods, depending on the data that I needed to serve, auto scaling, immutable deploys, Git integration, infrastructure, serverless functions, you know, it's like a whole ecosystem that lets you try stuff, to see if it's gonna work. And if it does work, you can go further and make it robust. Like one of one of my biggest slogans is also build first engineer later. And that I think, is a really like, core part of the Jamstack. Just get it live and see what happens. Bryan Robinson 11:00 And you can get it live in any number of ways too, right? You can if you're making a content driven thing to begin with, you don't need a CMS. But yes, it takes like a few lines of code tweaked. And your next js, your 11ty, your whatever static site generator, right, like just ingest from somewhere else. And it's good to go? Unknown Speaker 11:19 Yes. It's very exciting. It's very exciting. Like imagine. So this has happened in the all in the last like six years since like, 2015, when the Jamstack kind of first came about, like what's going to happen in the next six years, and the next six years, and the next six years, I actually did. At the Contentful, fast forward conference at the beginning of November, I actually did the keynote with Stephan Judas, about the last 10 years of web development and how Jamstack came about to solve the problems of old school monolith solutions where back end and front end were divided, where everyone was reinventing the wheel the whole time. And the Jamstack has really come to like, solve these problems, where as a front end developer, you don't need all this back end nonsense anymore. You're and and because of that, it's like enabled developers, it's increased their skills is giving them the power is empowering developers to to build stuff that they couldn't have even dreamed of before. And I think that's really, really, like wonderful for the future. Salma Alam-Naylor 12:24 Like I have a four year old. And I can't wait to show him the stuff like he could put a website live. That's just an HTML page and JavaScript file, potentially, you know, on the Jamstack, when he's like, eight years old, you know. And imagine us being able to do that when we were eight. Bryan Robinson 12:46 At like 14, I think I had my first website. And it was like Microsoft front page built like graphical UI, it was, it was quite choice. Yeah, my six year old, I built him a website in a day, he happened to have a piece of art that he brought home from school, that instead of writing his name on it, he had to write his his first first name, and last initial, because that was yet another, another kid in his class with that name. And then he wrote.com At the end, and I said, I bet that domain is open. And it was and like, I threw it together, uploaded the artwork. And then he told me, he's like, I want to like button. And I was like, I bet I could do that. But you have to do three pieces of art every week to to make it so that I'll build that for you. And then like, I was able to walk him through what I done. And he had no real understanding. But it was like, okay, I can. This is simple enough, I can show you and it's Yeah, super low bar. Salma Alam-Naylor 13:43 Yeah, I can't wait. I can't wait for that. It's so empowering. And it's so exciting to see what our children could make one day with, how it's being innovated, and the improvements and the things that are being done on the Jamstack. And Bryan Robinson 13:57 how it kind of opens up into like the the kind of natural open web platform. Yeah, walled garden is not something that you have to buy into. And it allowed, like, I used to teach a journalism class on HTML and CSS. And I was like, look, you'll you can you can do this. And if you do this, you don't have to depend on these other platforms anymore. And like, I would talk about the history of the web and how in the 90s, it was a creator focus space. And in the current state, in fact, like anything from like, 2010 on, it's very consumer based. And so it's like, there's this dichotomy of the web, and the more people that can be creators, the better. Yes, yeah. So we've talked about next JS some, obviously, you work at Contentful. We talked about the olden days of Jekyll and all that good stuff. What would you say is your current jam in the Jamstack? What's your favorite product? Or maybe it's a philosophy or framework. What makes you love the Jamstack? Salma Alam-Naylor 14:53 It's sounds really nerdy. But what I like about the Jamstack is the different types. Types of rendering that are available. This is like, this is so ridiculous, but it's like. So obviously, I work for Contentful. Right, and I'm dealing with data like data comes from a CMS. But data is not all created equal. And so there are four types of rendering depending on the data your data needs, like, it's not just about like pages and posts and stuff, like there are some bits of data that are very granular, they might need to be more up to date than the others, because obviously, mainly Jamstack is static first, right? And so but not everything can be static. But not everything needs to be client side. And so that what the Jamstack has now is like these four types of rendering. So back in the old, old web days, everything was server side rendered, right, you you your web request, hit a server that went to the backend that generated from all the logic a, an HTML document and gave it back to the client, right. So we still got server side rendering on the Jamstack, which I think right now is really great for personalization for things like E commerce, and other things. Because I especially talk a lot about using query params with get server side props with NextJs. JS, for those kind of personalized experiences, rather than just serving everything statically to the same as same to everyone. But then we've got the static, so there's, the second one is static generation. So you've got a plain site content site, nothing changes, nothing needs to update it, just serve it as quickly as you can statically do your visitors great. But now we've got some fancy stuff, there's incremental static regeneration, which is based on a cache validation strategy called stale while revalidate. And what this does, especially inside next js is you choose when the server re validates your data. And at certain intervals, and if it is out of date, it will rebuild in the background via serverless functions. And then for the next visitor, it will show it up to date. So that's like good for kind of data that it's great if it's up to date doesn't matter if some people see it if it's out of date. And then you've got distributed persistent rendering, which so if you want the Jamstack to scale, you, you might have 1000s, and 1000s, and 1000s of pages, right from your CMS, your E commerce site or wherever. Now we know that with the Jamstack, a site to go live and be deployed, it needs to be pre built and pre rendered, right, but 1000s and 1000s of pages could take hours to build. And if you want to continuously deploy and be agile and move fast and break stuff, you can't have every single bill taking hours and hours and hours. So distributed percentage rendering, what it does, it lets you choose what pages are pre rendered, and then doesn't pre render the other ones, you could pre render like your top 20 pages or wherever at build time. But then when someone goes to visit a page that hasn't been pre rendered, it gets pre rendered at request time, and then cached at the edge for future requests. So we've moved away from like building static pages and static data on the Jamstack blanket to a flexible model where you can choose when your pages rendered, depending on the type of data that you're serving your visitors and how up to date it needs to be. It sounds really weird, but this is my favorite part of the Jamstack. Bryan Robinson 18:19 So it obviously, right? Because like that's a lot. And like when you when you actually said like my favorite parts, the rendering modes like okay, all right, but no, totally. And like, here's my absolute favorite bit of that entire of that entire conversation, right? You don't have to understand any of what Salma just said, if you're listening, right? Because you can start and you can, like we talked about, like the accessibility of the Jamstack earlier, you can start and you can just upload an HTML file and you're Jamstack. But then you can bring on something like a nextjs or an 11ty or a Gatsby or what have you. And then you're doing a different kind of Jamstack. And then you can bring in, like you said, the incremental static regeneration ISR. We love acronyms. And that uses SWR another accurate acronym, and then you've got DPR. But you can learn those things slowly as you go. And like you said before it, you can build stuff and put it live and have no understanding of any of that and then come back and get a little bit of performance boost or a little bit of build boost or these little things. And you can go Salma Alam-Naylor 19:24 When you need it. You know when it's appropriate when your site needs to scale when you've now got a CMS when you've got different types of data when you convert to use this database or something like that. And it's so flexible. It's not just static sites. It's it's a whole ecosystem that is so far removed from the monolithic way. We used to do things with just everything, everything from the server at request time done, or you know, everything from the CDN or request time static done. It's like there's these combinations Have those but then some more clever stuff that makes your workflow more efficient. That means that you don't need to worry about these things. And it's just like whoever thought of these things. I wish I had thought of those things. Oh, yeah. I'd feel pretty accomplished. Bryan Robinson 20:20 Oh, yeah. And I mean, we'd be having a completely different conversation if either of us were there. But But, but in all seriousness, right, like, the fact that I built my son's website, and it has a like button, I have no clue. Like, I've been doing this a long time, I have no clue how 10 years ago, I would have done that, because I would have had to stand up a server, I would have had to learn PHP or Python, or a server side scripting language, I would have had to do all these things, I would have had to do the JavaScript on the fly on the front end, I wouldn't have done it just pure and simple, I would not have done it. And literally, it was two hours of work 2 serverless functions and low clients are JavaScript and I was done. Salma Alam-Naylor 20:56 Do you remember back in the day when front end development involved, like httpd conf files and things like that, and I had no idea what that meant server configuration, get out of my life, I just want to build some front end with JavaScript, I don't care about that stuff is in my way. And the amount of I used to work on the LAMP stack when I was first starting because I was doing PHP at work. And so like to set up a whole PHP server on your on your local machine with PHP, MyAdmin, and blah, blah, blah, like, I'm not hating on PHP is great. But as a front end developer, you don't want to deal with that. Because that's not what you are an expert in, that's not what you want to do. That's not what makes you happy. It's, you know, it doesn't make me happy, like the four different types of rendering on the Jamstack makes me happy. Bryan Robinson 21:51 Well, and I mean, you get further into that. And you have to think about the DevOps. And like I, I pride myself on being able to find all the edge cases and break everyone's DevOps, that's something that I'm incredibly good at. And it comes from, like, I learned about Vagrant, and, you know, virtual machines on my laptop. And I, I haven't installed a vagrant or virtual machine on my laptop in six years now. And it is so refreshing. Salma Alam-Naylor 22:18 Yes, I remember that used to do that was all I did at work on these big monolith systems and deploy systems. I wonder how far those systems are away from that now. But I wonder if that's still the same, but it's just, there's always, there's big pain points between Windows and Mac, as well. And the Jamstack doesn't really have that, because you're just running some Node in a terminal right to develop locally. And then you're just sending it to the CDN. It's just Bryan Robinson 22:46 that like, like between Linux that you might have your server and Mac the Mac flavor versions, then then you got like title case sensitivity. Like no, no, don't make me think about that. Please. Bryan Robinson 22:59 Let's pivot a little bit. You have a music history. And so I'm very excited now that I've learned that for the next question, which is what is your actual musical jam right now? What's your favorite musician or album or what's playing on a day to day basis for you? Salma Alam-Naylor 23:14 So I think whenever you ask a musician this question, they will always say, the classic developer line it depends. Always It depends. I have I like such a varied bag of music because I used to listen to such a varied bag of music when I was learning music and writing music. I like music from progressive metal to EDM to jazz to folk to weird sounds. A solid favorite band that I will always reach for is Architectes, which is a British metal core band. And me and my husband. I actually met my husband when I joined his band. So we've got like a lot of music in common. It was a progressive metal band long story a long time ago. But the song I have on repeat right now is more on the EDM side. It's called probably no one's ever heard of this. It's called move on by Grant and I love it right? Because another weird nerdy thing. This is a music nerdy thing now. You know how often in pop songs your head double tracked guitars like panned left and right. This song for the first time in my life, I have heard double tracked bass guitars, and they're playing slightly different things. One minute 47 into the song is a feast for your ears. It's amazing to listen to, and I can't stop listening to it because of this double bass track thing. Move on by Grant if you want to hear some nerdy stuff, musically. Bryan Robinson 24:42 Now for that you probably need stereo headphones, right? Yeah, exactly. Get the benefit of that. Yes. Wow. Okay, that's I am not disappointed by the answer in any way shape or form. I learned a lot I didn't even know that was the thing double tracked anything so excellent nerding on that Salma Alam-Naylor 25:01 Yeah, great nerding love it. Bryan Robinson 25:04 Alright, so before we go, is there anything that you would like to promote out into the Jamstack ecosystem, anything, you're doing Contentful anything. Salma Alam-Naylor 25:11 So on my Twitch streams, I stream twice a week. Currently, I always build on the Jamstack. And one of the most challenging projects I'm building is something called Unbreak dot tech, where, and sometimes it's weird to bring these stuff. These sometimes it's weird to bring these things up in these kinds of podcasts. But as a woman in tech on the internet, it's very difficult, full stop, to realize. And sometimes it generally falls on the women and the marginalized people to talk about the issues that we face. However, unbraked dot Tech offers a platform for men to talk to other men, about being a better person and treating women and marginalized people better. So I've been working on that on my stream, I am welcoming contributions from men who want to talk on the matter. And we'll see how it goes. It's a complete experiment. I have no idea. You know, again, I'm using the Jamstack to experiment and see how it goes. So it's all good. It's hosted on Netlify using like Netlify forms, it's built with NextJs. JS. And I work on that every now and then and see where it goes, you can now submit videos as well as articles to the site, and they have captioned I've got captions and all sorts of accessibility stuff going on. So that's the thing. Catch me on twitch twitch.tv/white p four, and three are the Bryan Robinson 26:45 one of the hardest screen names in the business. Salma Alam-Naylor 26:48 Yeah, I regret it holy. Bryan Robinson 26:50 Anyway, definitely check out on what was it Unbreak tech it on Unbreak dot tech unbrick break dye Tech because I have heard way too many stories, and everyone should know the stories and again, the women and the marginalized people have had to tell them enough. So men, let's step up and do a little bit more around that. Salma Alam-Naylor 27:09 I appreciate that. Bryan Robinson 27:10 Salma, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. And I hope you keep doing amazing things, especially with Unbreak dot tech, and Contentful and everything in the Jamstack. And we hope to see some really cool stuff in the future. Salma Alam-Naylor 27:21 Thank you, Bryan. Thanks for having me. Bryan Robinson 27:24 Thanks again to our guest, and thanks to everyone out there listening to each new episode. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to leave a review, rating, Star heart favorite, whatever it is, and your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web. And remember, keep things jammy Intro/outtro music by bensound.com Support That's my JAMstack by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

#422: On today's episode we are joined by Lisa Moskovitz, RD, CDN to discuss intuitive eating and decipher different kinds of diets. We also discuss why most diets fail people and what we can do to shift our mindset around diets. We also dive into how we can develop healthier relationships with food. To connect with Lisa Moskovitz click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by Sakara This year, turn your resolutions into reality. Whether you're looking to try plant-based eating, build an empowered body, boost skin's glow, or simply feel your very best, Sakara makes it easy to create rituals that last. Sakara is a wellness company rooted in the transformative power of plant-based food. Their menu of creative, chef-crafted breakfasts, lunches, and dinners changes weekly, so you'll never get bored. And it's delivered fresh, anywhere in the U.S. And right now, Sakara is offering our listeners 20% off their first order when they go to www.sakara.com/skinny and enter code SKINNY at checkout. Produced by Dear Media 

Media network is a new protocol that bypasses traditional content delivery network (CDN) providers' centralized approach for a self-governed and open source solution where everyone can participate. A distributed economy that enables anyone with spare bandwidth resources to monetize them, earning MEDIA Network Tokens in exchange for their contributions to the network.Any existing infrastructure can now be scaled by hiring bandwidth-on-demand without constraining long-term business commitments or compromising privacy. No accounts, KYC, or personal information is required at any point for any of the participants of the Network. Media Network creates a distributed bandwidth market that enables service providers such as media platforms to hire resources from the network and dynamically come and go as the demand for last-mile data delivery shifts.The New to Crypto Podcast is designed to guide you through the crypto landscape with pinpoint accuracy. New episodes are added daily. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to all of the episodes to help you in your cryptocurrency journey.I'd love to hear from you! Email me at show@newtocrypto.io and let's chat.LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to explode their business growth by sharing this episode or click here to listen to our previous episodes.Disclaimer: New To Crypto is a podcast for entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by the hosts and guests should not be considered as financial advice. Views expressed by guests and the host do not reflect the views of the show. Listeners should perform their own research. Sponsorships, which are clearly disclosed, are informational in nature and do not constitute a call to action to purchase cryptocurrency. This channel does not offer the purchase or sale of securities. New to Crypto Podcast is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused by, alleged to be caused by, or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this published media.

Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, and welcome back to season three of That's My Jamstack. It's amazing that we've been going this long. I know it's been quite a bit since our last episode, but to jog your memories, That's My Jamstack is the podcast asks that time honored and tested question. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and we've got a lot of great guests lined up for this season. So without further ado, let's dive in. On today's episode, we talk with Sean C. Davis. Sean is a passionate tinkerer and teacher. He's currently working as a developer experience engineer at stack bit. Bryan Robinson 1:04 All right, Shawn. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking with us today. Sean C. Davis 1:07 Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be here. Bryan Robinson 1:09 Awesome. So first and foremost, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? And what do you do for fun outside of work Sean C. Davis 1:15 For for work, I am currently the developer experience engineer for stack bit. I've been in the web development space for about a decade or so the first nine years, were all in agency space building agency freelancing, building websites for folks. And just this last year, took a shift into the product space and spending some time with stack bid. And that's that's been so that's super exciting. That's what I've been doing every day. And I'm sure we'll we'll dig into that a bit. For fun on the side. Well, I feel like I'm the I'm the classic developer in the sense that there's always some, there's always some technical thing that's happening on the side. Right now that thing is, it's it's my personal site I've had, I've had a couple of different blogs that I've maintained over the years. And within the last two years or so I've been trying to focus that content, bringing it all into my personal site. But right now, it's still kind of just like a, it's just a, it's a blog, most of most folks who come there, Googled some problem, they get the solution, and it serves those folks really well. But I'm in this transition of trying to make it more of a learning hub. So that's, it's kind of a side project now. But that's but it's still like it's fun, but it's still I don't know, it's where it could still be in a developer. I'm so like, the the other part of me, I've got two little kids at home and like a lot of folks when the pandemic hits kind of focused a lot of energy and attention into the home. So it's various projects around the house or like like many people I am part of the reason you couldn't find flour at the grocery store because I got really into baking for a while and still doing that a little bit to some like some gardening kind of just fun fun stuff around the house. Bryan Robinson 3:06 In your in your baking exploits. Are we talking like bread, baking, pastry baking, but what kind of baking Sean C. Davis 3:13 where I spend most of my time and still doing a little bit today is the classic sourdough loaf. So mostly bread, mostly bread, at least I'm better at the bread. I've done a bit of the Sweet Treats and trying to learn a little bit about the decorating but it's just the presentation isn't my strong suit. So the flavor might be there. I've got a ways to go in the inner desert department. Bryan Robinson 3:37 Yeah, I've got I've got my own sourdough starter and all that. So I definitely feel I actually, I like a time I can be a hipster about something. And so when my son was born, actually so that was six years ago now. So pre pandemic, my wife my birthday that year, two months after he was born he got me a sourdough starter from King Arthur baking and amazing. I lapsed right because obviously like infant and all that and I baked for a little bit but yeah, then started back up during the pandemic as well. Because who, who doesn't want to do that? We're gonna do Yeah, exactly. You got something to focus on. Anyway, I actually love your site. I'm sure that when we do shout outs at the end, we'll talk about that Sean C. Davis calm but one things that came up on the little repeating thing on your homepage is you're afraid of bears and Bs. Is that Is that a thing? Or is that just a funny thing? Sean C. Davis 4:21 Oh, yeah, it's a it's a funny thing. I mean, I I I love both of them, but also am terrified of both that I do. I do. I guess I didn't mention this in the fun thing. I really enjoy hiking and camping. haven't done much camping since having little kids. We're gonna eventually get them out there. But we do a fair amount of hiking. And so yeah, I've had a number of run ins with both bears and bees. And it's terrifying every time but I also very much appreciate and respect them for what they do for us. Yes. Bryan Robinson 4:54 All right. So let's talk a little bit about the Jamstack. So what was your entry point into this space? It seems this idea of Jamstack or static sites or whatever it was at the time. Sean C. Davis 5:03 It that's an interesting question. Because Okay, so if you say, Yeah, entry point into Jamstack, or static sites, if you broke that apart and said, What's your entry point into Jamstack? And what's your entry point into static sites? I have two different answers. So I'll tell you a little bit about the the journey from one to the other. It's, I find it kind of interesting. So it static sites were was the first thing before I knew anything about Jamstack. In fact, before Jamstack was coined, because the gens Jamstack term comes from I think, later in 2015, I believe. So the first agency job, I had built a few sites with middleman, they were originally a PHP shop, and about the time I joined, were transitioning into becoming a Rails shop. And so Ruby was the bread and butter programming language. And there were a few clients that would come on, who didn't want to pay for a CMS or just like they needed something real quick, and it could be static and totally fine. And so we, we were building middleman sites, but deploying, deploying them to like a digital ocean or equivalent, it's still running on a web server still serving up these pages in real time, even though they're just HTML files city like kind of silly, but But there weren't great solid patterns at that time. And about that time, 2013 or so is also when I started building custom content management systems. I built it, I evolved, and I iterated on it. And I think I was looking at this recently, I believe there were four major, different versions that I built over the series, or course of about three or four years in there. And so I'll come back to that. But as I was, so set, this first agency working on middleman, I built a few middleman sites is when I switched to freelancing. And then at this at the last Agency, also, a few middleman sites like middleman kept kept popping up when I was when I was freelancing there. Actually, that's when I built the fourth and final version of that CMS. And at that time, this is probably I think we're talking about 2016, maybe 20. Yeah, I think that seems right 2016. And so the Jamstack term exists, the term headless CMS exists, but I had no idea that these things were things that people were doing. But I had this need, where I had a client who wanted a mobile native application, and a, also a website. And it seemed like a lot of the content was going to overlap. And I was like, Well, I'm building this next version of a CMS, what should it look like? Maybe it should be able to serve both of these. And so I was like, Oh, brilliant, decoupled architecture like this is this is gonna be great. And so that that last CMS I built was API driven. And, and I believe, I believe the website was a middleman site, it, it may have been some other framework, but it was like this Jamstack pattern, but again, still deployed, still using a web server to serve every request. So like missing that, that final piece that that Netlify gives us in the CDN in that instant cache invalidation. So fast forward to this last agency, and we're also a rail shop Sean C. Davis 8:40 and built a few middleman sites. But what happened was, why I think that the 2017, I believe, the the CTO, late 2017, early 2018, our CTO gets wind of the Jamstack. And so this is pre Jamstack. Conference, still really small kind of tight knit community. And we're like, and everything just kind of aligned because we won this work. For a company where it was going to be building them a new marketing website, it was gonna be a fairly big site. But this company also had a product and an internal product team. And that team had already switched to building that product with React. And so and we had heard a little bit about Jamstack. We heard about Gatsby and we're like, Oh, perfect, perfect time. Gatsby is the cool kid in town. Like we can jump all in on the Jamstack we think we can reduce development costs over time. You know, all the all the classic Jamstack benefits like we can get those and so we took a leap. We jumped all in and so that was like that was the real introduction to Jamstack and I find it I find it kind of funny looking back on it now because I spent all those years with Jamstack like patterns and using tool and middleman was part of all of those and then we're like, oh Jamstack, but also switched to JavaScript based frameworks at the same time, which I think a lot of folks went through that pattern. But I don't know if funny to reflect on. Bryan Robinson 10:11 Yeah, definitely. And like that that kind of journey is really interesting. Like in that agency world, the fact that, like you were having defined these patterns on your own, and then this community kind of sprang up next to what you were doing, and then look like we can do those things, maybe even slightly better than than kind of where we are now that we see kind of this broader scope, and there are products out there. That's really, really interesting. And it kind of mirrors on my own journey. I was at an agency when I discovered all this as well and never really implemented at the agency that we had a customer we had a full fledge, like custom content management system that like the agency had built, so never got a big we Sean C. Davis 10:49 did we did too, I don't it was like it was a compelling enough idea to our CTO, that he's like, we're throat, like we're throwing it all out where we're, I, we had a lot of, I mean, you know, there's issues with you, you have to maintain your own software. And it's it's another piece of the stack. And he's like that we were just getting bogged down with this site went down. And there's a bug in this CMS. And I think the crux was, there was one site where we didn't protect the slash admin route, like, should have done that. And we're like, Okay, well, let's, this is a way to never make that mistake. Again. I'm not Bryan Robinson 11:27 gonna speak for you on this. But my advice to anyone listening out there is if you think you should build a content management system, don't just don't do it. Sean C. Davis 11:38 Yes, yes. I don't know if I may have written a post about this at one point, or maybe it was just an idea in my head, but it was gonna be ashes, I should see if I can find it. The idea was, here's how you can build a content management system and my journey and exactly why you shouldn't do it. Like it's, it's, I think the the lesson I have baked in there is, it can be a really powerful experience for learning about content schemas and know how to organize pages and components and like structured data. But it's also just not a good idea to do it. Because there's there are how many dozens or hundreds of companies that are focusing on that problem every single day. Bryan Robinson 12:20 And let's be fair to our past selves, right, like in 2012 2013 weren't as many companies do, and they weren't as fully featured as they are today. I think it's kind of the same thing. A lot of people have probably created their own, like, custom static site generator in the past, like, Oh, I just made a couple include stuff like that. Let's just, oh, but we have them now. From from the middleman and Jekyll times all the way through to all the fancy ones today. Let's fast forward to now. How are you using Jamstack philosophies professionally? And personally? And obviously, you're at stack bet. So probably quite a bit professionally nowadays. Sean C. Davis 12:54 Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So Stackbit is, I mean, if the Netlify is the Jamstack tool, but also when you think stack bit like stack bit is, exists, because the Jamstack exists. And it's, I know, the, the Jamstack pattern was really powerful and felt like a great entry point for newer developers. But it, it turned out that it was it was kind of difficult, because it's like you could get started really, really kind of simple to get started. Really difficult to go to the next level, which requires stitching together all of these decoupled services. And so stack bit pops up originally three years ago, as a solution to basically say, well, your start, here's the starting point. And it's Netlify and Jekyll and some markdown files or you know, in some styles, something like that, and it has evolved and now as a full fledge visual editor, what's, what's interesting is, we're in a transition where we're just about to release a new version, or the beta version of a new version. And it's still largely following that pattern. It's a really powerful visual editing experience. But the the Jamstack I feel like Jamstack is kind of in this identity crisis sort of mode or, or maybe not like figuring out where they where they fit. You know, what Jamstack actually means and knowing that the web is going to continue to evolve. And so if you, depending when, when this episode gets released, it's like what we, if we look before this release, and what happens after it right now you go to the website, so pre pre release, and like Jamstack is plastered all over it real big, top of the homepage. And I I'm seeing that this, this language is going to shift a little bit and so we're still very much Jamstack tool. Websites are going to get deployed. They're going to be built with next they're going to be static by default. They're going to be deployed To Netlify using Marco. So it's like still, it's still very much Jamstack pattern. But I think how we, how we talk about that might change a little bit. That's, that's professionally and personally, I mentioned, the, the project I'm spending most of time on now is my personal site, that site is built with eleventy. and deploy to Netlify. And using Mark, just local markdown for content. I, I've been thinking a lot about like, well, what's the future of this? For me, if I really want to make this a hub, and I want to make it a content engine? And I'm thinking well, okay, well, eventually, I'm going to have to go to like a next or something like that. But honestly, I every change that I make, I say, Well, okay, well, can I get this done with eleventy? And I consistently finding that the answer is yes, like it has, there's probably a limit to this some point in my future. But right now, I'm in love with, but eleventy is giving me and so I've kind of have this classic Jamstack pattern happening on the side and loving that Bryan Robinson 16:08 perfectly. And then I mean, I can go on and on about love. And it is it is kind of where I'm at in the last of two and Zach Leatherman, the creator of 11. D, recently just even showed like gated content with 11, D serverless. And so like the, the line is blurring about what 11 D can and can't do, it used to be pretty solid, like there was a pretty solid point where like 11 D didn't serve you anymore. Little little iffy. Now, Sean C. Davis 16:30 I think that the big question for me was, oh, there were two. So one is that I'm I built my own kind of component system using nunchucks shortcodes in and so like, you have this smart transformers that make it nice and easy to work with. But it's I mean, it's still a little clunky, I would love to be able to use something like reactors felt and then hydrate them on the fly as needed. And fortunately, we have been homes and slinky, working on that exact problem. So that's really exciting to follow that. And then the second question I had, and second hurdle I thought I was going to run into was authentication, I don't need it now. But my plan is to start to build out some courses, and some of them will be free, and you don't have to track them. And other ones, you know, I feel like well down the road, I'm going to want people to people are gonna want to sign in, they're gonna want to track their progress, maybe some of them are paid. And just this last week, a video came out where Zach was going through the process of showing authentication with 11. D. And now I'm like I, I mean, I feel like the wall I'm going to hit now has less to do with features, and is probably going to have more to do with how many files can we read from the file system? And but I also think that it's getting smarter in terms of incremental builds. And so maybe I don't hit that. Well, I don't know. I'm gonna keep pushing it. We'll see what happens. Bryan Robinson 17:58 Yeah, that wall becomes smaller and further and smaller and further. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right. So we've talked about a few technologies. We've talked about a few methodologies. But what would you say currently? Is your jam in the Jamstack? What's your favorite service? Maybe its stack, but are your favorite framework or philosophy? What what makes you love working in the Jamstack? Sean C. Davis 18:19 Yeah, talk philosophically for a minute, I suppose. Yeah. So what I really loved about the Jamstack, especially in the early days of me discovering it, I'm thinking pre NextJs. JS blowing up. So like 2019. And before? Is that it? To me, it was it's, well, it's still very much this way like you. It's a methodology. It's not a prescription say this all the time. And there's something really powerful in that in that if here's a pattern that we think is a really strong way to build websites that it's it improves the developer experience, and delivers great experience for end users. But you can use whatever tool you think is best for your particular project. And I what I've realized is as the web continues to evolve, is that the there were more kind of guardrails on what Jamstack is than I originally thought, like there, there are more opinions baked in than I originally was, was seeing. However, it's still within within those guardrails and within that pattern, very open and, and not not prescriptive in terms of tooling. And I think what that has led to that even though the community is led by a product in in Netlify, that it's very open in talking about what tools you can use in the space. It's really everyone's really respectful in that space and empowering and so just like the My Favorite I'd love to philosophy itself, the community that came out of that philosophy. It's is like a really, really great thing to be involved in. But I think in terms of tooling, yeah, I can't. I mean, I love stack. But that's why it's why I'm at stack, but I think it's a, it's a great, I do think it's a great entry point into the Jamstack. space. And it it's, it's a such a unique tool that it can serve. The personal blogger, especially someone who isn't super technically savvy, wants to learn a little development. But it can also serve a serve enterprises that have hundreds 1000s of pages, but are storing those in Contentful, or Sanity, some other headless CMS. But really, I keep coming back to eleventy. Especially, there was some news in the last couple of weeks where Rich Harris, the creator of spelt joined, we joined Vercel. Right, so so it's he gets to work on it full time. It's still community driven, but it still also kind of feels a little bit like funding from Vercel. And with that, I, I don't Okay, I don't know if this is entirely accurate. But it's, I think of the group of static site generators or front end frameworks, popular front end frameworks today. The vast majority of them are funded by or have some ulterior motive for where they're there. The people are working for some particular company. And so even though they're open source, they're, I mean, I don't I'm not saying that they've done their communities to services in any way. But eleventy what I love about eleventy is that it is it for now. I mean, today, it's all about the community it is it is very much driven by the community. And it is. And I just I love the way that Zach leads that project. It's, it's really exciting. And similar to what I said about a stack bit and what we just mentioned about eleventy, it's, it's great, because you can get started and know if you know HTML, like you can, you're good, you can build a website, and you can just you can fly. And then you can you can piece together things a little bit at a time, like learn a little bit of nunchucks. Or eventually if we have if when slinky gets to version one, and maybe it's like maybe you just dip your toes into React and, and, but that it also seems like it's going to it's scaling well for a handful of folks. And so it's not like you learn it as an entry level tool. I think that's that's where it was for a while, like a great entry level tool. And then our I don't want to build a serious site. So I'm going to go get a serious framework. It's starting to become a serious framework, and, but without necessarily raising the barrier to entry. And I think that's, that's really cool. So that's, yeah, I just, I feel like I'm just gonna keep talking about stack bid and 11. D all day. Bryan Robinson 23:07 Yeah, no, that doesn't that that's a great combo. Anyway. Um, I also think it's entering you said, like, you know, rich, rich chains go into Vercel. And, I mean, Zack Letterman's at Netlify. But he's building sites for Netlify. And so I think the interesting thing that's happened there is that he's learned what a company the size of Netlify needs out of some of what it's doing. And that's what's been kind of powering is not that Netlify has been prescribing what he needs. But Zack as a developer using 11. D to build sites for an enterprise level company now knows more about what what 11 D needs for that area. I think that's an interesting bit of information that he's kind of feeding back into the the 11 D framework. That's Sean C. Davis 23:51 a great point. Absolutely. Bryan Robinson 23:53 All right, so let's shift gears a little bit. Let's go away from technology and let's let's find out what is your actual jam right now? What's your favorite song or musician? Or what are you listening to day in day out? Sean C. Davis 24:04 Alright, so I had I had to look this up because I'm I am all over the board in terms of music and I haven't hadn't been listening to as much recently as I have in the past it you know, excluding like, all the all the Disney soundtracks that are on all the time, kids. Okay, so just to tell you how weird my, my taste in music is. I was like, alright, well, what are what are a few of the what are a few of the albums that have been on in the last week or two? Okay, so I've had gone all the way back to the Beatles revolver. I love that one. Okay, then what I'm almost like chronologically What have I done? I put on I put on Jay Z's Black Album. I had. I forget what it's called is Sturgill. Simpson. He released a couple blue grass albums, I think I think they're called cutting grass. Maybe not. Do you know? I do not know. Okay. Blue Grass. And then what did I have? I've had the newer Lord and Taylor Swift albums on as well. So I'm like, all over all over the place all over the Bryan Robinson 25:18 place. Yeah. That's awesome. That's I mean, it's variety is the spice of life, right? Sure. Yes. Yes. I love that. Now, it's kind of open forum, right? Is there anything that you that you are doing right now you stack that whomever that you want to promote and get out into the Jamstack. Community. Sean C. Davis 25:34 I mentioned a little bit earlier, this this idea of the the Jamstack identity crisis. And I try to talk about this without sounding disparaging or critical, because I actually think it's a good thing. And I think there's a lot to come in come from being from the community being introspective and figuring out who we are. And so I had, I've had lots of conversations around this topic throughout the year. And in, in doing so what a few of us realized is that the, it? You know, I think we all kind of have a little bit of different opinion of like, well, where's the line? What exactly does Jamstack mean, but maybe it doesn't, maybe it doesn't totally matter. But it's still, like, like we talked about earlier, like, there's still a there's still that the the guardrail is in a sense, like, there, there is an established pattern, in a way to build websites, the web is going to continue to evolve, and it won't necessarily be the cool thing on the cool kid on the block forever. But that, that that community can still exist. So what what a few of us have done is we said, Okay, well, what if we step outside of that? And to say, What if we created a space where folks could talk about all sorts of different patterns and ways to build websites, and Jamstack and all of the tools and variations within within that community is part of that discussion, but it's not the only part of that discussion. So there's also folks who are building rail sites and are choosing rails for a good reason or choosing full stack WordPress for for a good reason. I'm sure there's a good reason in there somewhere. Maybe. And so it's it's goofy, and it's brand new, but it's called good websites club. And it's at you can visit the bare bones website. It's good websites dot club. And so we're there's, it's just a tiny discord community with a little bit of chatter now, but there are there are some grand visions for it. There's someone who's talking about conference and 20, to 23, maybe some, maybe some various meetups throughout there. Personally, I am starting a show that I'm calling the the good websites show, and I don't know exactly what it's gonna be, it's gonna, it'll evolve. But it's, it's gonna start as a live just like a live interview show. And in kind of, we'll talk about, yeah, grab various folks from around different communities and talk about problems they have solved on the web, all kind of in a way to help inform developers or even marketers, content editors just have different different patterns, different ideas that are out there, and kind of kind of help them hone in on what exactly they are. They're going after, and I think we'll see, my prediction is we're gonna see it largely be, there's, there's gonna be this huge fear to draw a Venn diagram, like a lot of overlap with Jamstack in the beginning, and maybe it evolves, I don't really know. But that's, I'm kind of excited to see where that goes, while also being really heavily invested in Jamstack. And seeing how that evolves, because this, this recent announcement of Netlify got got their next series of funding, and they're gonna pump $10 million investing in the Jamstack. And that is really exciting. I cannot wait to see what that means for the community. So that's, I'm working on Yeah, like, websites club, but but, but also really excited for the Jamstack at same time, Bryan Robinson 29:25 absolutely cool. I'm now a member of the discord as of two months ago. So I'm really excited to see that everyone else listening should go go sign up as well. And then keep an eye out for Shawn doing good websites show in the future as well. So Shawn, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. And we look forward to seeing more amazing stuff you in the future. Sean C. Davis 29:46 Alright, thanks for having me, Bryan. Bryan Robinson 29:48 Thanks again to our guest and thanks to everyone out there listening to each new episode. If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review rating star heart favorite whatever it is in your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web. And remember, keep things jammy Intro/outtro music by bensound.com Support That's my JAMstack by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

On this episode of the Alix Turoff Nutrition podcast, Alix sits down with Let's Be Bessties founders, Bess Orwasher Rostowsky and Jamie Goldstein. Bessties    Bess and Jamie met by chance at college orientation in 2008 when they were paired as random roommates. They quickly became BESSTIES and spent most of their time at The George Washington University together, both socially and academically.   As perpetual partners in crime in business classes and startup ideas, it was only natural for them to work together on Bessties. When Bess had the idea to start Bessties, she knew Jamie was the perfect partner to bring her vision to life and spread the Besst Cracker love. Their shared love of health and nutrition combined with their passion for entrepreneurship make them a perfect pair. Prior to starting Bessties, both Jamie and Bess worked for two successful startups for 7+ years - Jamie was at Warby Parker and Bess at Grubhub/Seamless.    The Besstie is a high fiber cracker that offers all the same benefits of other high fiber foods, just using the highest quality, certified organic ingredients (and they're tastier too)!   To learn more about Bessties, visit their website at www.letsbebessties.com or connect with them on instagram (@letsbebessties)   Download three free recipes developed by Alix Turoff MS, RD, CDN, CPT using Bessties' products!   Resources: Get the 5 week Flexible Nutrition Starter Kit Join Alix's 12 week small group coaching program Apply for Alix's 1:1 coaching program Follow Alix on Instagram  Join Alix's private Facebook group Download your FREE Happy Hour Survival Guide Buy Alix's book on Amazon Shop my favorite products on Amazon Contact Alix via email   Be sure you're subscribed to this podcast to automatically receive your episodes!!!    If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love it if you would take a minute to leave a rating and review! Subscribe to The Alix Turoff Nutrition Podcast   Discount Codes: Built Bar: Use the code ALIX for 10% off your order Legion Athletics: Use the code Alix for 20% off your order

Josh and Kurt start the show with the reading of a security themed Christmas poem. We then discuss some of the new happenings around Log4j. The basic theme is that even if we were over-investing in Log4j, it probably wouldn't have caught this. There are still a lot of things to unpack with this event, I'm sure we'll be talking about it well into the future. Log before Christmas poem 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the stack Not a scanner was scanning, not even a rack, The SBOMs were uploaded to the portal with care, In hopes that next year would be boring and bare The interns were nestled all snug at their beds; While visions of dashboards danced in their heads; The CISO in their 'kerchief, and I in my cap, Had just slept our laptops for a long winter's nap, When all of a sudden the pager went ack ack I sprang to my laptop with worries of attack Away to the browser I flew like a flash, Tore open the window and cleared out the cache The red of the dashboard the glow of the screen Gave a lustre of disaster my eyes rarely seen When what to my wondering eyes did we appear, But a new advisory and eight vulnerabilities to fear, Like a little old hacker all ready to play, I knew in a moment it must be Log4j More rapid than gigabit its coursers they came, And it whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: "Now, Log4Shell! now CVE! now ASF and NVD! On, CISA! on, LunaSec! on, GossiTheDog! To the top of the HackerNews! to the top of the wall! Now hack away! hack away! hack away all!" Like the bits that before the wild CDN fly by When they meet with a firewall, they mount to the sky; So up to the cloud like bastards they flew With tweets full of vulns, and Log4j too— And then, in a twinkling, I read in the slack The wailing and screaming of each analyst called back As I drew in my head, and was turning around, Down the network Log4j came with a bound. It was dressed in a hoodie, black and zipped tight, The clothes were all swag from a conference one night A bundle of vulns it had checked in its git And it looked like a pedler just being a twit The changelog—how it twinkled! its features, how merry! Its versions were like roses, its logo like a cherry! Its droll little mouth was drawn up like an at, And the beard on its chin made it look stupid and fat The stump of a diff it held tight in its teeth, And the bits, they encircled the repo like a wreath; It had a flashy readme an annoying little fad That shook when it downloaded, like a disk drive gone bad It was chubby and plump, an annoying old package, And I laughed when I saw it, in spite of the hackage A wink of its bits and a twist of its head Soon gave me to know I had everything to dread It spoke not a word, but went straight to its work, And pwnt all the servers; then turned with a jerk, And laying its patches aside of its nose, And giving a nod, up the network it rose; It sprang to its packet, to its team gave them more, And away they all fled leaving behind a back door But I heard it exclaim, ere it drove out of sight— “Merry Christmas you nerds, Log4j won tonight!”

So I've been playing with sql.jSHTtPvfs for a few months now. Basically, what this is is it's a sequel light worker compiled in web ASM and it runs against the remote database now the interesting that is the implements, implements a virtual file system and arrange requests. So say you have a gigabyte SQL database somewhere in the cloud. As long as you have a FASTSIGNS support range requests, then this is just grabbing data, one kilobyte at a time. Similarly, to how a sequel, I would read a local database from the file system if it was configured to page with file, reads of 1024 bias anyway, that's the interesting part. So what makes it interesting is, if you indexed an organize your data, in a way that a request would be fast from a local SQL database, then in theory, you could perform the same requests remotely from the browser to that SQL database on a CDN, but you're Back in the server would not be running a database senses and in theory, if you optimize those they would be, they have some overhead for every request. But in theory it's not horrible, but maybe your hundred millisecond request becomes her 900 and the second request, something like that. So I was thinking about it and in August I wrote a possible analytics clone in a couple weekends that used sequel to JSHTTPVFS end. It was interesting, but it was not interesting to me as I just very Leslie implemented it. It cleared a lot of data, it might as well just download the entire database because it didn't really taste the idea out too thoroughly, but give me a chance to play around with it. And it was a nice proof of concept fast forward to December, and I rewrote this at to start off with in injects walk parser, so that I will have a pretty large status at minded up with a 300 MB log file, which I parsed turns into a Roughly 300 MB equal a database, and that gave me a large enough database to play around with him. It was large enough that I had to optimize long, parsing and inserts so that it didn't take an incredibly long mountain time to parse over. I think 1.3 million rose. I got it down to about 57 seconds and then includes a bunch of like I Peed, a country, look at parsing, URLs person, user agents, things like that, nothing that requires a web request, just things that can be done locally and I know it's all stored in Sql light which brought me to actually querying the database running it locally or indexed that size Deezer about 13. Second, queries to just group by pathname to do like top 25 requested pages and then count of requests for that page, not ideal and for the server that I was looking at. I actually only loaded like eight hours of data, so it would be a much larger data set in production. So obviously that's not gon na work, even if it run locally. So I would never have a whole of adding a few indexes and immediately you know that clears up the problem that becomes like 100 and 300 millisecond. Where is than when you get to the end of all this and get it working, and you know I'm just about to implement the web assembly module and do it all remotely when it occurs to me, why why? What does it get you to get you like? A little bit of scaling, you know say that there's no overhead, it just means you can scale. The number of reads infinitely doesn't really make a lot of sense. It'S like now that I reduce this to like the eight or so columns that I want to index. I'Ve basically written out the only eight SQL queries in a run against this. I might as well pre-computer or from the sky surfer, because it's it's kind of pointless to do this over 80 TTPVFS unless you're talking about sticking it on a CDN and then, like millions of people, view those charts and you just can't be bothered to pre-compute the Data, this is like the most interesting little thing I've played around with in a while. I got to the end of it, and it's just like wait as fun as this is like. This is not a compelling use case for the virtual file system that works over HTTPit's like really interesting, and it blew my mind. I saw that technique for months back and I want to build something with it, but once I got to the end of this thread that I've been pulling on for the past few months, I just realize there's nothing there like. I can't understand, unless, like it was, you were building some kind of. I don't know something like mix or something like that where you couldn't pre-compute the data or it would be kind of ridiculous, the pre-computer data, maybe something like that, would be a very used case. I don't know, but with all – four adult shows: U how many people visited website type URLs they had and what countries R from what browsers R using like. I was really easy to build, but it's not a compelling enough used case and then post once you index. Everything C quite literally doubles in size anyway. Anyway, that's it.

VANESSA RISSETTO https://vrissettord.com/ Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Academy of Nutrition and DieteticsCertified Dietitian Nutritionist, New York State LicenseNew York University Master's Degree in MarketingCertificate of Training in Adult Weight Management (Levels I & II), Academy of... The post 106: Understanding Nutrition with VANESSA RISSETTO MS, RD, CDN appeared first on This is Joy & Claire.

*Trigger Warning - if you are actively struggling with an eating disorder, this may be something to discuss with your treatment team before listening to this episode. This episode is not to be used for diagnostic purposes or in place of any form of therapy. Hi Guys and thank you for tuning into another episode of Get IN-TU-IT with Gila. Today, I interview Batya. Batya decided to keep her last name anonymous. She generously shared her eating disorder journey with us to be a resource for anyone struggling. Eating disorders never exist in a vacuum. For most people, their are many other variables that contribute to an eating disorder and create "the perfect storm" for the eating disorder to ensue. Many comorbidity's exist with eating disorders such as a diagnoses of depression, anxiety, bipolar or OCD. And this is very important to know- for so many people - the precursor for their eating disorder was actually going on a diet! I know dieting is alluring and it seems harmless but I want you to know that information before you decide to embark on a diet. Batya created a peer support group to help others who are struggling with an active eating disorder as well as those in recovery from an eating disorder. She used her pain from struggling with an eating disorder to create a way to help others. Anyone interested in joining the support group can email kindredforum@gmail.com with the subject line "Join." I asked Batya to share some resources that helped her through her eating disorder. She mentioned the following: 1. Relief - https://www.reliefhelp.org/blog/the-road-to-recovery-relief-resources-on-eating-disorders/ 2. Chazkeinu - https://chazkeinu.org/ 3. Books The book Batya referenced is Decoding Anorexia by Carrie Arnold. https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Anorexia-Breakthroughs-Science-Disorders/dp/0415898676/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=Cj0KCQiAk4aOBhCTARIsAFWFP9Fj9evAsp8BBGyDBjeK7WQKFAr4G0M53n73qY-CTSxxmL8UsCJvWZEaAhiOEALw_wcB&hvadid=241610704058&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1022987&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=18184178650223117046&hvtargid=kwd-54799436010&hydadcr=15496_10339892&keywords=decoding+anorexia&qid=1640113116&sr=8-1 I love the book Sick Enough - https://www.amazon.com/Sick-Enough-Jennifer-L-Gaudiani/dp/0815382456/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1640113926&sr=8-1 Check out the website EDRDPRO -https://edrdpro.com/resources/ - Their are so many resource's on this website I highly recommend it for nutrition professionals as well as anyone who is looking for Eating Disorder information. If you have gained from this episode or any of my content, please leave a rating and review and share it with those who can benefit. This is how the podcast moves up on Apple Podcast and more people can hear this information. Feel free to reach out with comments, questions and any feedback at gilaglassberg18@gmail.com. Have a great day and thank you for being here! -Gila Glassberg, MS, RDN, CDN, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor If you are ready to make peace with food and never say diet again, check out my website www.gilaglassberg.com and apply for a free 20 minute clarity call. I look forward to hearing from you! https://gilaglassberg.com/scheduling/ If you'd like to learn more about what I do, follow me on Instagram @gila.glassberg.intuitiveRD. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Evelyn Tribole (co-author of Intuitive Eating) returns to celebrate the launch of Christy's first book, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating! Evelyn interviews Christy about the history of diet culture and The Wellness Diet, diet culture's role in healthcare and the so-called “obesity epidemic,” why food activism is not as progressive as it seems, intuitive eating as the anti-diet approach to eating, and so much more. (This episode originally aired on December 23, 2019.) Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD is an award-winning registered dietitian, specializing in eating disorders and Intuitive Eating, with a private practice in Newport Beach, California. She has written nine books, including the bestsellers Healthy Homestyle Cooking and Intuitive Eating (co-author). Evelyn was the nutrition expert for Good Morning America in 1994-'95, and was a national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association for 6 years. She was contributing editor for Shape magazine where her monthly column, Recipe Makeovers, appeared for 11 years. She is often sought by the media for her nutritional expertise and has appeared on hundreds of interviews, including: CNN, Today Show, MSNBC, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and People magazine. Find Evelyn online at EvelynTribole.com. Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN is an anti-diet registered dietitian nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and author of the new book Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating (Little, Brown Spark 2019). She offers online courses and private intuitive eating coaching to help people all over the world make peace with food and their bodies. Since 2013 Christy has hosted Food Psych, a weekly podcast exploring people's relationships with food and paths to body liberation. It is now one of Apple Podcasts' top 100 health podcasts, reaching tens of thousands of listeners worldwide each week. Christy began her career in 2003 as a journalist covering food, nutrition, and health, and she's written for major publications including The New York Times, SELF, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, Gourmet, Slate, The Food Network, and many more. Learn more about Christy and her work at ChristyHarrison.com. Subscribe to our newsletter, Food Psych Weekly, to keep getting new weekly Q&As and other new content while the podcast is on hiatus! If you're ready to break free from diet culture once and for all, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. You'll get all your questions answered in an exclusive monthly podcast, plus ongoing support in our private community forum and dozens of hours of other great content. Christy's first book, Anti-Diet, is available wherever you get your books. Order online at christyharrison.com/book, or at local bookstores across North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, for help getting started on the anti-diet path. For full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych. Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions.

Cross River Ventures is focused on the development of top tier exploration properties in the premier mining district of Red Lake Ontario exploring for gold, and for several good reasons. The Red Lake Mining jurisdiction hosts one of the largest mineral rich greenstone belt on the planet that has produced 200 million ounces of gold in over 100 years of mining. This includes a total gold endowment exceeding 300million ounces with over 124 mines and 21 plus deposits with more than 3 million ounces each. Cross River hosts 7 Projects (over 28,000-hectares) within the prolific greenstone belts of NW Ontario, Canada which host the most productive gold deposits in the world. This is where Cross River is targeting gold for discovery potential. Armed with a world class technical team led by Dr. Rob Carpenter, who was the CEO of Kaminak, ( acquired by Goldcorp for CDN $520 million), know how to plan and execute a exploration program designed specifically to make a discovery. Cross Rivers Flagship McVicar Property is just one of the properties they are targeting for discovery. Situated close to the 3.8m Oz Springpole deposit controlled by First Mining Gold Corp. ( FF.TO ) it hosts 2 mineralized trends that are parallel to one another and include new surface discoveries of gold, as well as previous sampling of high grade with numerous results greater than 500g/t gold. McVicar is ready to be fully explored and drill permits for the property have been issued for multiple target areas delineated via modern geophysics. The recent driver of attention to the Red Lake area is the takeover of Great Bear Resources by Kinross Gold Corp. under which Kinross has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of the Red Lake explorer for C$29.00 per share, approximately $1.8-billion and being done without a resource calculation. This is primarily due to the excellent nature of their drill results. The peer takeover speaks to the attractiveness of discovery potential and quality of the mining jurisdiction. Cross River is in the right neighborhood to make a discovery, at the right time in the market, and when attention in the area has never been greater. Sit back and enjoy this great interview with Cross River Venture CEO Alex Klenman as he walks us through their objective to make a discovery equal to their peers in the Red Lake Mining District.

Links: The internet is now on fire:https://www.engadget.com/log4shell-vulnerability-log4j-155543990.html Blog post:https://blog.cloudflare.com/exploitation-of-cve-2021-44228-before-public-disclosure-and-evolution-of-waf-evasion-patterns/ Expecting to be down for weeks:https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/kronos-suffers-ransomware-attack-expects-full-restoration-to-take-weeks- Update for the Apache Log4j2 Issue:https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2021-006/ Log4Shell Vulnerability Tester at log4shell.huntress.com:https://log4shell.huntress.com/ TranscriptCorey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it's nobody in particular's job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key or a shared admin account isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open-source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more, visit goteleport.com. And no, that's not me telling you to go away; it is, goteleport.com.Corey: I think I owe the entire internet a massive apology. See, last week I titled the episode, “A Somehow Quiet Security Week.” This is the equivalent of climbing to the top of a mountain peak during a violent thunderstorm, then waving around a long metal rod. While cursing God.So, long story short, the internet is now on fire due to a vulnerability in the log4j open-source logging library. Effectively, if you can get an arbitrary string into the logs of a system that uses a vulnerable version of the log4j library, it will make outbound network requests. It can potentially run arbitrary code.The impact is massive and this one's going to be with us for years. WAF is a partial solution, but the only real answer is to patch to an updated version, or change a bunch of config options, or disallow affected systems from making outbound connections. Further, due to how thoroughly embedded in basically everything it is—like S3; more on that in a bit—a whole raft of software you run may very well be using this without your knowledge. This is, to be clear, freaking wild. I am deeply sorry for taunting fate last week. The rest of this issue of course talks entirely about this one enormous concern.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at Cloud Academy. Something special for you folks: if you missed their offer on Black Friday or Cyber Monday or whatever day of the week doing sales it is, good news, they've opened up their Black Friday promotion for a very limited time. Same deal: $100 off a yearly plan, 249 bucks a year for the highest quality cloud and tech skills content. Nobody else is going to get this, and you have to act now because they have assured me this is not going to last for much longer. Go to cloudacademy.com, hit the ‘Start Free Trial' button on the homepage and use the promo code, ‘CLOUD' when checking out. That's C-L-O-U-D. Like loud—what I am—with a C in front of it. They've got a free trial, too, so you'll get seven days to try it out to make sure it really is a good fit. You've got nothing to lose except your ignorance about cloud. My thanks to Cloud Academy once again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Cloudflare has a blog post talking about the timeline of what they see as a global observer of exploitation attempts of this nonsense. They're automatically shooting it down for all of their customers and users—to be clear, if you're not paying for a service you are not its customer, you're a marketing expense—and they're doing this as part of the standard service they provide. Meanwhile AWS's WAF has added the ruleset to its AWSManagedRulesKnownBadInputsRuleSet—all one word—managed rules—wait a minute; they named it that? Oh, AWS. You sad, ridiculous service-naming cloud. But yeah, you have to enable AWS WAF, for which there is effectively no free tier, and configure this rule to get its protection, as I read AWS's original update. I'm sometimes asked why I use CloudFlare as my CDN instead of AWS's offerings. Well, now you know.Also, Kronos, an HR services firm, won the ransomware timing lottery. They're expecting to be down for weeks, but due to the log4shell—which is what they're calling this exploit: The log4shell problem—absolutely nobody is paying attention to companies that are having ransomware problems or data breaches. Good job, Kronos.Now, what did AWS have to say? Well, they have an ongoing “Update for the Apache Log4j2 Issue” and they've been updating it as they go. But at the time of this recording, AWS is a Java shop, to my understanding.That means that basically everything internet-facing at AWS—which is, you know, more or less everything they sell—has some risk exposure to this vulnerability. And AWS has moved with a speed that can only be described as astonishing, and mitigated this on their managed services in a timeline I wouldn't have previously believed possible given the scope and scale here. This is the best possible argument to make for using higher-level managed services instead of building your own things on top of EC2. I just hope they're classy enough not to use that as a marketing talking point.And for the tool of the week, the Log4Shell Vulnerability Tester at log4shell.huntress.com automatically generates a string and then lets you know when that is exploited by this vulnerability what systems are connecting to is. Don't misuse it obviously, but it's great for validating whether a certain code path in your environment is vulnerable. And that's what happened last week in AWS Security, and I just want to say again how deeply, deeply sorry I am for taunting fate and making everyone's year suck. I'll talk to you next week, if I live.Corey: Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition with the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—and be sure to sign up for the Last Week in AWS newsletter at lastweekinaws.com.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

You have come to a very special episode with Alyssa Goldwater! We covered so many things from so many different angles. Alyssa's story of becoming religious was fascinating to hear! On top of that, she used to work for NCSY and ended up becoming a lifestyle/real Mom influencer on social media. One of the things that has always stood out to me about Alyssa is her sense of confidence. She specifically promotes plus size modest fashion. As we discussed on the podcast, Alyssa wanted to feel better about herself so she started shopping for nice clothing that fit her body well and put on make up everyday. She speaks about "non-scale" victories. I loved how this was almost intuitive for her - you can work on feeling good about yourself without internalizing that something is wrong with YOU and YOUR body. Alyssa Goldwater is a CEO, wife, mom and the Digital Influencer behind the lifestyle brand, A Glass of Goldwater (@alyssagoldwater). Merging motherhood with humor, A Glass of Goldwater has become a community and support network of over 55,000 women across the world. By having hard conversations about difficult topics such as mental health, body confidence, and the unspoken struggles of motherhood, Alyssa not only keeps people laughing with her sarcastic take on life, but also helps women feel part of something bigger - that they aren't alone in this crazy world. If you have gained from this episode or any of my content, please leave a rating and review and share it with those who can benefit. This is how the podcast moves up on Apple Podcast and more people can hear this information. Feel free to reach out with comments, questions and any feedback at gilaglassberg18@gmail.com. Have a great day and thank you for being here! -Gila Glassberg, MS, RDN, CDN, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor If you are ready to make peace with food and never say diet again, check out my website www.gilaglassberg.com and apply for a free 20 minute clarity call. I look forward to hearing from you! https://gilaglassberg.com/scheduling/ If you'd like to learn more about what I do, follow me on Instagram @gila.glassberg.intuitiveRD. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction  00:04:30 - Early Dark Days in Chaos Engineering and Reliability 00:08:27 - Anecdotes from the “Long Dark Time” 00:16:00 - The Big Changes Over the Years 00:20:50 - Mandi's Work at PagerDuty 00:27:40 - Mandi's Tips for Better DevOps 00:34:15 - Outro Links:PagerDuty: https://www.pagerduty.com TranscriptJason: — hilarious or stupid?Mandi: [laugh]. I heard that; I listened to the J. Paul Reed episode and I was like, “Oh, there's, like, a little, like, cold intro.” And I'm like, “Oh, okay.”Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability and learning from failure. In this episode, we take a trip down memory lane with Mandi Walls to discuss how much technology, reliability practices, and chaos engineering has evolved over her extensive career in technology.Jason: Everybody, welcome to the show, Julie Gunderson, who recently joined Gremlin on the developer advocacy team. How's it going, Julie?Julie: Great, Jason. Really excited to be here.Jason: So, Mandi is actually a guest of yours. I mean, we both have been friends with Mandi for quite a while but you had the wonderful opportunity of working with Mandi.Julie: I did, and I was really excited to have her on our podcast now as we ran a podcast together at PagerDuty when we worked there. Mandi has such a wealth of knowledge that I thought we should have her share it with the world.Mandi: Oh, no. Okay.Julie: [laugh].Jason: “Oh, no?” Well, in that case, Mandi, why don't you—Mandi: [crosstalk 00:01:28]. I don't know.Jason: Well, in that case with that, “Oh no,” let's have Mandi introduce herself. [laugh].Mandi: Yeah hi. So, thanks for having me. I am Mandi Walls. I am currently a DevOps advocate at PagerDuty, Julie's last place of employment before she left us to join Jason at Gremlin.Julie: And Mandi, we worked on quite a few things over a PagerDuty. We actually worked on things together, joint projects between Gremlin, when it was just Jason and us where we would run joint workshops to talk about chaos engineering and actually how you can practice your incident response. And I'm sure we'll get to that a little bit later in the episode, but will you kick us off with your background so everybody knows why we're so excited to talk to you today?Mandi: Oh, goodness. Well, so I feel like I've been around forever. [laugh]. Prior to joining PagerDuty. I spent eight-and-a-half years at Chef Software, doing all kinds of things there, so if I ever trained you on Chef, I hope it was good.Prior to joining Chef, I was assistant administrator for AOL.com and a bunch of other platform and sites at AOL for a long time. So, things like Moviefone, and the AOL Sports Channel, and dotcom, and all kinds of things. Most of them ran on one big platform because the monolith was a thing. So yeah, my background is largely in operations, and just systems administration on that side.Jason: I'm laughing in the background because you mentioned Moviefone, and whenever I think of Moviefone, I think of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer decides to make a Moviefone competitor, and it's literally just his own phone number, and people call up and he pretends to be that, like, robotic voice and has people, like, hit numbers for which movie they want to see and hear the times that it's playing. Gives a new meaning to the term on-call.Mandi: Indeed. Yes, absolutely.Julie: And I'm laughing just because I recently watched Hackers and, you know, they needed that AOL.com disc.Mandi: That's one of my favorite movies. Like, it's so ridiculous, but also has so many gems of just complete nonsense in it. Absolutely love Hackers. “Hack the planet.”Julie: “Hack the planet.” So, with hacking the planet, Mandi, and your time working at AOL with the monolith, let's talk a little bit because you're in the incident business right now over at PagerDuty, but let's talk about the before times, the before we practiced Chaos Engineering and before we really started thinking about reliability. What was it like?Mandi: Yeah, so I'll call this the Dark Ages, right? So before the Enlightenment. And, like, for folks listening at home, [laugh] the timeline here is probably—so between two-thousand-and-fi—four, five, and 2011. So, right before the beginning of cloud, right before the beginning of, like, Infrastructure as Code, and DevOps and all those things that's kind of started at, like, the end of my tenure at AOL. So, before that, right—so in that time period, right, like, the web was, it wasn't like it was just getting started, but, like, the Web 2.0 moniker was just kind of getting a grip, where you were going from the sort of generic sites like Yahoo and Yellow Pages and those kinds of things and AOL.com, which was kind of a collection of different community bits and news and things like that, into more personalized experiences, right?So, we had a lot of hook up with the accounts on the AOL side, and you could personalize all of your stuff, and read your email and do all those things, but the sophistication of the systems that we were running was such that like, I mean, good luck, right? It was migration from commercial Unixes into Linux during that era, right? So, looking at when I first joined AOL, there were a bunch of Solaris boxes, and some SGIs, and some other weird stuff in the data center. You're like, good luck on all that. And we migrated most of those platforms onto Linux at that time; 64 bit. Hurray.At least I caught that. And there was an increase in the use of open-source software for big commercial ventures, right, and so less of a reliance on commercial software and caught solutions for things, although we did have some very interesting commercial web servers that—God help them, they were there, but were not a joy, exactly, to work on because the goals were different, right? That time period was a huge acceleration. It was like a Cambrian explosion of software pieces, and tools, and improvements, and metrics, and monitoring, and all that stuff, as well as improvements on the platform side. Because you're talking about that time period is also being the migration from bare metal and, like, ordering machines by the rack, which really only a handful of players need to do that now, and that was what everybody was doing then.And in through the earliest bits of virtualization and really thinking about only deploying the structures that you needed to meet the needs of your application, rather than saying, “Oh, well, I can only order gear, I can only do my capacity planning once a year when we do the budget, so like, I got to order as much as they'll let me order and then it's going to sit in the data center spinning until I need it because I have no ability to have any kind of elastic capacity.” So, it was a completely, [laugh] completely different paradigm from what things are now. We have so much more flexibility, and the ability to, you know, expand and contract when we need to, and to shape our infrastructures to meet the needs of the application in such a more sophisticated and almost graceful way that we really didn't have then. So, it was like, “Okay, so I'm running these big websites; I've got thousands of machines.” Like, not containers, not services.Like, there's tens of thousands of services, but there's a thousand machines in one location, and we've got other things spread out. There's like, six different pods of things in different places and all this other crazy business going on. At the same time, we were also running our own CDN, and like, I totally recommend you never, ever do that for any reason. Like, just—yeah. It was a whole experience and I still sometimes have, like, anxiety dreams about, like, the configuration for some of our software that we ran at that point. And all of that stuff is—it was a long… dark time.Julie: So, now speaking of anxiety dreams, during that long, dark time that you mentioned, there had to have been some major incidents, something that stands out that that you just never want to relive. And, Mandi, I would like to ask you to relive that for us today.Mandi: [laugh]. Okay, well, okay, so there's two that I always tell people about because they were so horrific in the moment, and they're still just, like, horrible to think about. But, like, the first one was Thanksgiving morning, sometime early in the morning, like, maybe 2 a.m. something like that, I was on call.I was at my mom's, so at the time, my mom had terrible internet access. And again, this time period don't have a lot of—there was no LTE or any kind of mobile data, right? So, I'm, like, on my mom's, like, terrible modem. And something happened to the database behind news.aol.com—which was kind of a big deal at the time—and unfortunately, we were in the process of, like, migrating off of one kind of database onto another kind of database.News was on the target side but, like, the actual platform that we were planning to move to for everything else, but the [laugh] database on-call, the poor guy was only trained up in the old platform, so he had no idea what was going on. And yeah, we were on that call—myself, my backup, the database guy, the NOC analyst, and a handful of other people that we could get hold of—because we could not get into touch with the team lead for the new database platform to actually fix things. And that was hours. Like, I missed Thanksgiving dinner. So, my family eats Thanksgiving at midday rather than in the evening. So, that was a good ten hour call. So, that was horrifying.The other one wasn't quite as bad as that, but like, the interesting thing about the platform we were running at the time was it was AOL server, don't even look it up. Like, it was just crazytown. And it was—some of the interesting things about it was you could actually get into the server platform and dig around in what the threads were doing. Each of the servers had, like, a control port on it and I could log into the control port and see what all the requests were doing on each thread that was live. And we had done a big push of a new release of dotcom onto that platform, and everything fell over.And of course, we've got, like, sites in half a dozen different places. We've got, you know, distributed DNS that's, like, trying to throw traffic between different locations as they fall over. So, I'm watching, like, all of these graphs oscillate as, like, traffic pours out of the [Secaucus 00:11:10] or whatever we were doing, and into Mountain View or something and, like, then all the machines in the Secaucus recover. So, then they start pinging and traffic goes back, and, like, they just fall over, over and over again. So, what happened there was we didn't have enough threads configured in the server for the new time duration for the requests, so we had to, like, just boosted up all of the threads we could handle and then restart all of the applications. But that meant pushing out new config to all the thousands of servers that were in the pool at the time and then restarting all of them. So, that was exciting. That was the outage that I learned that the CTO knew how to call my desk. So, highly don't recommend that. But yeah, it was an experience. So.Julie: So, that's really interesting because there's been so many investments now in reliability. And when we talk about the Before Times when we had to cap our text messages because they cost us ten cents a piece, or when we were using those AOL discs, the thought was there; we wanted to make that user experience better. And you brought up a couple of things, you know, you were moving to those more personalized experiences, you were migrating those platforms, and you actually talked about your metrics and monitoring. And I'd like to dig in a little on that and see, how did that help you during those incidents? And after those incidents, what did you do to ensure that these types of incidents didn't occur again in the future?Mandi: Yeah, so one of the interesting things about, you know, especially that time period was that the commercially available solutions, even some of the open-source solutions were pretty immature at that time. So, AOL had an internally built solution that was fascinating. And it's unfortunate that they were never able to open-source it because it would have been something interesting to sort of look at. Scale of it was just absolutely immense. But the things that we could look at the time to sort of give us, you know, an indication of something, like, an AOL.com, it's kind of a general purpose website; a lot of different people are going to go there for different reasons.It's the easiest place for them to find their email, it's the easiest place for them to go to the news, and they just kind of use it as their homepage, so as soon as traffic starts dropping off, you can start to see that, you know, maybe there's something going on and you can pull up sort of secondary indicators for things like CPU utilization, or memory exhaustion, or things like that. Some of the other interesting things that would come up there is, like, for folks who are sort of intimately tied to these platforms for long periods of time, to get to know them as, like, their own living environment, something like—so all of AOL's channels at the time were on a single platform.—like, hail to the monolith; they all live there—because it was all linked into one publishing site, so it made sense at the time, but like, oh, my goodness, like, scaling for the combination of entertainment plus news plus sports plus all the stuff that's there, there's 75 channels at one time, so, like, the scaling of that is… ridiculous.But you could get a view for, like, what people were actually doing, and other things that were going on in the world. So like, one summer, there were a bunch of floods in the Midwest and you could just see the traffic bottom out because, like, people couldn't get to the internet. So, like, looking at that region, there's, like, a 40% drop in the traffic or whatever for a few days as people were not able to be online. Things like big snowstorms where all the kids had to stay home and, like, you get a big jump in the traffic and you get to see all these things and, like, you get to get a feel for more of a holistic attachment or holistic relationship with a platform that you're running. It was like it—they are very much a living creature of their own sort of thing.Like, I always think of them as, like, a Kraken or whatever. Like, something that's a little bit menacing, you don't really think see all of it, and there's a lot of things going on in the background, but you can get a feel for the personality and the shape of the behaviors, and knowing that, okay, well, now we have a lot of really good metrics to say, “All right, that one 500 error, it's kind of sporadic, we know that it's there, it's not a huge deal.” Like, we did not have the sophistication of tooling to really be able to say that quantitatively, like, and actually know that but, like, you get a feel for it. It's kind of weird. Like, it's almost like you're just kind of plugged into it yourself.It's like the scene in The Matrix where the operator guy is like, “I don't even see the text anymore.” Right? Like, he's looking directly into the matrix. And you can, kind of like—you spend a lot of time with [laugh] those applications, you get to know how they operate, and what they feel like, and what they're doing. And I don't recommend it to anyone, but it was absolutely fascinating at the time.Julie: Well, it sounds like it. I mean, anytime you can relate anything to The Matrix, it is going to be quite an experience. With that said, though, and the fact that we don't operate in these monolithic environments anymore, how have you seen that change?Mandi: Oh, it's so much easier to deal with. Like I said, like, your monolithic application, especially if there are lots of different and diverse functionalities in it, like, it's impossible to deal with scaling them. And figuring out, like, okay, well, this part of the application is memory-bound, and here's how we have to scale for that; and this part of the application is CPU-bound; and this part of the application is I/O bound. And, like, peeling all of those pieces apart so that you can optimize for all of the things that the application is doing in different ways when you need to make everything so much smoother and so much more efficient, across, like, your entire ecosystem over time, right?Plus, looking at trying to navigate the—like an update, right? Like, oh, you want to do an update to your next version of your operating system on a monolith? Good luck. You want to update the next version of your runtime? Plug and pray, right? Like, you just got to hope that everybody is on board.So, once you start to deconstruct that monolith into pieces that you can manage independently, then you've got a lot more responsibility on the application teams, that they can see more directly what their impacts are, get a better handle on things like updates, and software components, and all the things that they need independent of every other component that might have lived with them in the monolith. Noisy neighbors, right? Like, if you have a noisy neighbor in your apartment building, it makes everybody miserable. Let's say if you have, like, one lagging team in your monolith, like, nobody gets the update until they get beaten into submission.Julie: That is something that you and I used to talk about a lot, too, and I'm sure that you still do—I know I do—was just the service ownership piece. Now, you know who owns this. Now, you know who's responsible for the reliability.Mandi: Absolutely.Julie: You know, I'm thinking back again to these before times, when you're talking about all of the bare metal. Back then, I'm sure you probably didn't pull a Jesse Robbins where you went in and just started unplugging cords to see what happened, but was there a way that AOL practiced Chaos Engineering with maybe not calling it that?Mandi: It's kind of interesting. Like, watching the evolution of Chaos Engineering from the early days when Netflix started talking about it and, like, the way that it has emerged as being a more deliberate practice, like, I cannot say that we ever did any of that. And some of the early internet culture, right, is really built off of telecom, right? It was modem-based; people dialed into your POP, and like, that was the reliability they were expecting was very similar to what they expect out of a telephone, right? Like, the reason we have, like, five nines as a thing is because you want to pick up dial tone, and—pick up your phone and get dial tone on your  line 99.999% of the time.Like, it has nothing to do with the internet. It's like 1970s circuits with networking. For part of that reason, like, a lot of the way things were built at that time—and I can't speak for Yahoo, although I suspect they had a very similar setup—that we had a huge integration environment. It's completely insane to think now that you would build an integration environment that was very similar in scope and scale to your production environment; simply does not happen. But for a lot of the services that we had at that time, we absolutely had an integration environment that was extraordinarily similar.You simply don't do that anymore. Like, it's just not part of—it's not cost effective. And it was only cost effective at that time because there wasn't anything else going on. Like, you had, like, the top ten sites on the internet, and AOL was, like, number three at the time. So like, that was just kind of the way things are done.So, that was kind of interesting and, like, figuring out that you needed to do some kind of proactive planning for what would happen just wasn't really part of the culture at the time. Like, we did have a NOC and we had some amazing engineers on the NOC that would help us out and do some of the things that we automate now: putting a call together, or when paging other folks into an incident, or helping us with that kind of response. I don't ever remember drilling on it, right, like we do. Like, practicing that, pulling a game day, having, like, an actual plan for your reliability along those lines.Julie: Well, and now I think that yeah, the different times are that the competitive landscape is real now—Mandi: Yeah, absolutely.Julie: And it was hard to switch from AOL to something else. It was hard to switch from Facebook to MySpace—or MySpace to Facebook, I should say.Mandi: Yeah.Julie: I know that really ages me quite a bit.Mandi: [laugh].Julie: But when we look at that and when we look at why reliability is so important now, I think it's because we've drilled it into our users; the users have this expectation and they aren't aware of what's happening on the back end. They just kn—Mandi: Have no idea. Yeah.Julie: —just know that they can't deposit money in their bank, for example, or play that title at Netflix. And you and I have talked about this when you're on Netflix, and you see that, “We can't play this title right now. Retry.” And you retry and it pops back up, we know what's going on in the background.Mandi: I always assume it's me, or, like, something on my internet because, like, Netflix, they [don't ever 00:21:48] go down. But, you know, yeah, sometimes it's [crosstalk 00:21:50]—Julie: I just always assume it's J. Paul doing some chaos engineering experiments over there. But let's flash forward a little bit. I know we could spend a lot of time talking about your time at Chef, however, you've been over at PagerDuty for a while now, and you are in the incident response game. You're in that lowering that Mean Time to Identification and Resolution. And that brings that reliability piece back together. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?Mandi: One of the things that is interesting to me is, like, watching some of these slower-moving industries as they start to really get on board with cloud, the stairstep of sophistication of the things that they can do in cloud that they didn't have the resources to do when they were using their on-premises data center. And from an operation standpoint, like, being able to say, “All right, well, I'm going from, you know, maybe not bare metal, but I've got, like, some kind of virtualization, maybe some kind of containerization, but like, I also own the spinning disks, or whatever is going on there—and the network and all those things—and I'm putting that into a much more flexible environment that has modern networking, and you know, all these other elastic capabilities, and my scaling and all these things are already built in and already there for me.” And your ability to then widen the scope of your reliability planning across, “Here's what my failure domains used to look like. Here's what I used to have to plan for with thinking about my switching networks, or my firewalls, or whatever else was going on and, like, moving that into the cloud and thinking about all right, well, here's now, this entire buffet of services that I have available that I can now think about when I'm architecting my applications for the cloud.” And that, just, expanded reliability available to you is, I think, absolutely amazing.Julie: A hundred percent. And then I think just being able to understand how to respond to incidents; making sure that your alerting is working, for example, that's something that we did in that joint workshop, right? We would teach people how to validate their alerting and monitoring, both with PagerDuty and Gremlin through the practice of incident response and of chaos engineering. And I know that one of the practices at PagerDuty is Failure Fridays, and having those regular game days that are scheduled are so important to ensuring the reliability of the product. I mean, PagerDuty has no maintenance windows, correct?Mandi: No that—I don't think so, right?Julie: Yeah. I don't think there's any planned maintenance windows, and how do we make sure for organizations that rely on PagerDuty—Mandi: Mm-hm.Julie: —that they are one hundred percent reliable?Mandi: Right. So, you know, we've got different kinds of backup plans and different kinds of rerouting for things when there's some hiccup in the platform. And for things like that, we have out of band communications with our teams and things like that. And planning for that, having that game day to just be able to say—well, it gives you context. Being able to say, “All right, well, here's this back-end that's kind of wobbly. Like, this is the thing we're going to target with our experiments today.”And maybe it's part of the account application, or maybe it's part of authorization, or whatever it is; the team that worked on that, you know, they have that sort of niche view, it's a little microcosm, here's a little thing that they've got and it's their little widget. And what that looks like then to the customer, and that viewpoint, it's going to come in from somewhere else. So, you're running a Failure Friday; you're running a game day, or whatever it is, but including your customer service folks, and your front-end engineers, and everyone else so that, you know, “Well, hey, you know, here's what this looks like; here's the customers' report for it.” And giving you that telemetry that is based on customer experience and your actual—what the business looks like when something goes wrong deep in the back end, right, those deep sea, like, angler fish in the back, and figuring out what all that looks like is an incredible opportunity. Like, just being able to know that what's going to happen there, what the interface is going to look like, what things don't load, when things take a long time, what your timeouts look like, did you really even think about that, but they're cascading because it's actually two layers back, or whatever you're working on, like that kind of insight, like, is so valuable for your application engineers as they're improving all the pieces of architecture, whether it's the most front-end user-facing things, or in the deep back-end that everybody relies on.Julie: Well, absolutely. And I love that idea of bringing in the different folks like the customer service teams, the product managers. I think that's important on a couple of levels because not only are you bringing them into this experience so they're understanding the organization and how folks operate as a whole, but you're building that culture, that failure is acceptable and that we learn from our failures and we make our systems more resilient, which is the entire goal.Mandi: The goal.Julie: And you're sharing the learning. When we operate in silos—which even now as much as we talk about how terrible it is to be in siloed teams and how we want to remove silos, it happens. Silos just happen. And when we can break down those barriers, any way that we can to bring the whole organization in, I think it just makes for a stronger organization, a stronger culture, and then ultimately a stronger product where our customers are living.Mandi: Yeah.Julie: Now, I really do want to ask you a couple of things for some fun here. But if you were to give one tip, what is your number one tip for better DevOps?Mandi: Your DevOps is always going to be—like, I'm totally on board with John Wallace's [CAMS 00:27:57] to, like, move to CALMS sort of model, right? So, you've got your culture, your automation, your learning, your metrics, and your sharing. For better DevOps, I think one of the things that's super important—and, you know, you and I have hashed this out in different things that we've done—we hear about it in other places, is definitely having empathy for the other folks in your organization, for the work that they're doing, and the time constraints that they're under, and the pressures that they're feeling. Part of that then sort of rolls back up to the S part of that particular model, the sharing. Like, knowing what's going on, not—when we first started out years ago doing sort of DevOps consulting through Chef, like, one of the things we would occasionally run into is, like, you'd ask people where their dashboards were, like, how are they finding out, you know, what's going on, and, like, the dashboards were all hidden and, like, nobody had access to them; they were password protected, or they were divided up by teams, like, all this bonkers nonsense.And I'm like, “You need to give everybody a full view, so that they've all got a 360 view when they're making decisions.” Like you mentioned your product managers as part of, like, being part of your practice; that's absolutely what you want. They have to see as much data as your applications engineers need to see. Having that level of sharing for the data, for the work processes, for the backlog, you know, the user inputs, what the support team is seeing, like, you're getting all of this input, all this information, from everywhere in your ecosystem and you cannot be selfish with it; you cannot hide it from other people.Maybe it doesn't look as nice as you want it to, maybe you're getting some negative feedback from your users, but pass that around, and you ask for advice; you ask for other inputs. How are we going to solve this problem? And not hide it and feel ashamed or embarrassed. We're learning. All this stuff is brand new, right?Like, yeah, I feel old talking about AOL stuff, but, like, at the same time, like, it wasn't that long ago, and we've learned an amazing amount of things in that time period, and just being able to share and have empathy for the folks on your team, and for your users, and the other folks in your ecosystem is super important.Julie: I agree with that. And I love that you hammer down on the empathy piece because again, when we're working in ones and zeros all day long, sometimes we forget about that. And you even mentioned at the beginning how at AOL, you had such intimate knowledge of these applications, they were so deep to you, sometimes with that I wonder if we forget a little bit about the customer experience because it's something that's so close to us; it's a feature maybe that we just believe in wholeheartedly, but then we don't see our customers using it, or the experience for them is a little bit rockier. And having empathy for what the customer may go through as well because sometimes we just like to think, “Well, we know how it works. You should be able to”—Mandi: Yes.Julie: Yes. And, “They're definitely not going to find very unique and interesting ways to break my thing.” [laugh].Mandi: [laugh]. No, never.Julie: Never.Mandi: Never.Julie: And then you touched on sharing and I think that's one thing we haven't touched on yet, but I do want to touch on a little bit. Because with incident—with incident response, with chaos engineering, with the learning and the sharing, you know, an important piece of that is the postmortem.Mandi: Absolutely.Julie: And do you want to talk a little bit about the PagerDuty view, your view on the postmortems?Mandi: As an application piece, like, as a feature, our postmortem stuff is under review. But as a practice, as a thing that you do, like, a postmortem is an—it should be an active word; like, it's a verb, right? You hol—and if you want to call it a post-incident review, or whatever, or post-incident retrospective, if you're more comfortable with those words, like that's great, and that's—as long as you don't put a hyphen in postmortem, I don't care. So, like—Julie: I agree with you. No hyphen—Mandi: [laugh].Julie: —please. [laugh].Mandi: Please, no hyphen. Whatever you want to call that, like, it's an active thing. And you and I have talked a number of times about blamelessness and, like, making sure that what you do with that opportunity, this is—it's a gift, it's a learning opportunity after something happened. And honestly, you probably need to be running them, good or bad, for large things, but if you have a failure that impacted your users and you have this opportunity to sit down and say, all right, here's where things didn't go as we wanted them to, here's what happened, here's where the weaknesses are in our socio-technical systems, whether it was a breakdown in communication, or breakdown in documentation, or, like, we we found a bug or, you know, [unintelligible 00:32:53] defect of some kind, like, whatever it is, taking that opportunity to get that view from as many people as possible is super important.And they're hard, right? And, like, we—John Allspaw, on our podcast, right, last year talked a bit about this. And, like, there's a tendency to sort of write the postmortem and put it on a shelf like it's, like, in a museum or whatever. They are hopefully, like, they're learning documents that are things that maybe you have your new engineers sort of review to say, “Here's a thing that happened to us. What do you think about this?” Like, maybe having, like, a postmortem book club or something internally so that the teams that weren't maybe directly involved have a chance to really think about what they can learn from another application's learning, right, what opportunities are there for whatever has transpired? So, one of the things that I will say about that is like they aren't meant to be write-only, right? [laugh]. They're—Julie: Yeah.Mandi: They're meant to be an actual living experience and a practice that you learn from.Julie: Absolutely. And then once you've implemented those fixes, if you've determined the ROI is great enough, validate it.Mandi: Yes.Julie: Validate and validate and validate. And folks, you heard it here first on Break Things on Purpose, but the postmortem book club by Mandi Walls.Mandi: Yes. I think we should totally do it.Julie: I think that's a great idea. Well, Mandi, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Real quick before we go, did you want to talk a little bit about PagerDuty and what they do?Mandi: Yes, so Page—everyone knows PagerDuty; you have seen PagerDuty. If you haven't seen PagerDuty recently, it's worth another look. It's not just paging anymore. And we're working on a lot of things to help people deal with unplanned work, sort of all the time, right, or thinking about automation. We have some new features that integrate more with our friends at Rundeck—PagerDuty acquired Rundeck last year—we're bringing out some new integrations there for Rundeck actions and some things that are going to be super interesting for people.I think by the time this comes out, they'll have been in the wild for a few weeks, so you can check those out. As well as, like, getting better insight into your production platforms, like, with a service graph and other insights there. So, if you haven't looked at PagerDuty in a while or you think about it as being just a place to be annoyed with alerts and pages, definitely worth revisiting to see if some of the other features are useful to you.Julie: Well, thank you. And thanks, Mandi, and looking forward to talking to you again in the future. And I hope you have a wonderful day.Mandi: Thank you, Julie. Thank you very much for having me.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

Listen to the Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/467Essays: https://www.swyx.io/LIP https://www.swyx.io/api-economy https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go TranscriptJerod Santo: So swyx, we have been tracking your work for years; well, you've been Learning in Public for years, so I've been (I guess) watching you learn, but we've never had you on the show, so welcome to The Changelog.Shawn Wang: Thank you. Long-time listener, first-time guest, I guess... [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Happy to have you here.Adam Stacoviak: Very excited to have you here.Jerod Santo: So tell us a little bit of your story, because I think it informs the rest of our conversation. We're gonna go somewhat deep into some of your ideas, some of the dots you've been connecting as you participate and watch the tech industry... But I think for this conversation it's probably useful to get to know you, and how you got to be where you are. Not the long, detailed story, but maybe the elevator pitch of your recent history. Do you wanna hook us up?Shawn Wang: For sure. For those who want the long history, I did a 2,5-hour podcast with Quincy Larson from FreeCodeCamp, so you can go check that out if you want. The short version is I'm born and raised in Singapore, came to the States for college, and was totally focused on finance. I thought people who were in the finance industry rules the world, they were masters of the universe... And I graduated just in time for the financial crisis, so not a great place to be in. But I worked my way up and did about 6-7 years of investment banking and hedge funds, primarily trading derivatives and tech stocks. And the more I covered tech stocks, the more I realized "Oh, actually a) the technology is taking over the world, b) all the value is being created pre-IPO, so I was investing in public stocks, after they were basically done growing... And you're kind of just like picking over the public remains. That's not exactly true, but...Jerod Santo: Yeah, tell that to Shopify...Shawn Wang: I know, exactly, right?Adam Stacoviak: And GitLab.Shawn Wang: People do IPO and have significant growth after, but that's much more of a risk than at the early stage, where there's a playbook... And I realized that I'd much rather be value-creating than investing. So I changed careers at age 30, I did six months of FreeCodeCamp, and after six months of FreeCodeCamp - you know, I finished it, and that's record time for FreeCodeCamp... But I finished it and felt not ready, so I enrolled myself in a paid code camp, Full Stack Academy in New York, and came out of it working for Two Sigma as a frontend developer. I did that for a year, until Netlify came along and offered me a dev rel job. I took that, and that's kind of been my claim to fame; it's what most people know me for, which is essentially being a speaker and a writer from my Netlify days, from speaking about React quite a bit.[04:13] I joined AWS in early 2020, lasted a year... I actually was very keen on just learning the entire AWS ecosystem. You know, a frontend developer approaching AWS is a very intimidating task... But Temporal came along, and now I'm head of developer experience at Temporal.Adam Stacoviak: It's an interesting path. I love the -- we're obviously huge fans of FreeCodeCamp, and Quincy, and all the work he's done, and the rest of the team has done to make FreeCodeCamp literally free, globally... So I love to see -- it makes you super-happy inside just to know how that work impacts real people.Like, you see things happen out there, and you think "Oh, that's impacting", but then you really meet somebody, and 1) you said you're a long-time listener, and now you're on the show, so it just really -- like, having been in the trenches so long, and just see all this over-time pay off just makes me really believe in that whole "Slow and steady, keep showing up, do what needs done", and eventually things happen. I just love that.Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's an infinite game mentality to this. But I don't want to diminish the concept of free, so... It bothers me a little, because Quincy actually struggles a lot with the financial side of things. He supports millions of people on like a 300k budget. 300k. If every single one of us who graduated at FreeCodeCamp and went on to a successful tech career actually paid for our FreeCodeCamp education - which is what I did; we started the hashtag. It hasn't really taken off, but I started a hashtag called #payitbackwards. Like, just go back, once you're done -- once you can afford it, just go back and pay what you thought it was worth. For me, I've paid 20k, and I hope that everyone who graduates FreeCodeCamp does that, to keep it going.Adam Stacoviak: Well, I mean, why not...?Shawn Wang: I'd also say one thing... The important part of being free is that I can do it on nights and weekends and take my time to decide if I want to change careers. So it's not just a free replacement to bootcamps, it actually is an async, self-guided, dip-your-toe-in-the-water, try-before-you-buy type of thing for people who might potentially change their lives... And that's exactly what happened for me. I kept my day job until the point I was like "Okay, I like enough of this... I'm still not good, but I like enough of this that I think I could do this full-time."Adam Stacoviak: I like the #payitbackwards hashtag. I wish it had more steam, I suppose.Jerod Santo: We should throw some weight behind that, Adam, and see if we can...Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. Well, you know, you think about Lambda School, for example - and I don't wanna throw any shade by any means, because I think what Austin has done with Lambda... He's been on Founders Talk before, and we talked deeply about this idea of making a CS degree cost nothing, and there's been a lot of movement on that front there... But you essentially go through a TL;DR of Lambda as you go through it, and you pay it after you get a job if you hit certain criteria, and you pay it based upon your earnings. So why not, right? Why not have a program like that for FreeCodeCamp, now that you actually have to commit to it... But it's a way. I love that you paid that back and you made that an avenue, an idea of how you could pay back FreeCodeCamp, despite the commitment not being there.Jerod Santo: Right.Shawn Wang: Yeah. And Quincy is very dedicated to it being voluntary. He thinks that people have different financial situations. I don't have kids, so I can afford a bit more. People should have that sort of moral obligation rather than legal obligation.I should mention that Lambda School is currently being accused of some fairly substantial fraud against its students...Jerod Santo: Oh, really?Shawn Wang: Yeah, it actually just came out like two days ago.Adam Stacoviak: I saw that news too, on Monday.Shawn Wang: Yeah. It's not evidenced in the court of law, it's one guy digging up dirt; let's kind of put this in perspective. But still, it's very serious allegations, and it should be investigated. That said, the business of changing careers and the business of teaching people to code, and this innovation of Income Share Agreements (ISA), where it actually makes financial sense for people to grow bootcamps and fund bootcamps - this is something I strongly support... Whether or not it should be a venture-funded thing, where you try to go for 10x growth every year - probably not... [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Yeah...Jerod Santo: So after FreeCodeCamp you didn't feel quite ready, so you did do a bootcamp... Did you feel ready after that?Shawn Wang: [08:03] Yeah. [laughs] I did a reflection, by the way, of my first year of learning to code, so people can look it up... It's called "No zero days. My path to learning to code", and I think I posted it on Hacker News. And doing everything twice actually helped me a lot. Because before I came into my paid bootcamp, I had already spun up some React apps. I had already started to mess with WebPack, and I knew enough that I wasn't understanding it very much, I was just following the instructions. But the second time you do things, you have to space, to really try to experiment, to actually read the docs, which most people don't do, and actually try to understand what the hell it is you're doing. And I felt that I had an edge over the other people in my bootcamp because I did six months of FreeCodeCamp prior.Jerod Santo: So this other thing that you do, which not everybody does, is this Learning in Public idea... And you have this post, Learn in Public. You call it "The fastest way to learn", or the fastest way to build your expertise - networking, and second brain. I'm not sure what the second brain is, so help us out with that one... But also, why is learning in public faster than learning in private.Shawn Wang: Yeah. This is a reflection that came from me understanding the difference, qualitatively, between why I'm doing so well in my tech career versus my finance career. In finance, everything is private, meaning the investment memos that I wrote, the trade ideas that I had - they're just from a company; they're intellectual property of my company. In fact, I no longer own them. Some of my best work has been in that phase, and it's locked up in an email inbox somewhere, and I'll never see it again. And that's because tech is a fundamentally open and positive-sum industry, where if you share things, you don't lose anything; you actually gain from sharing things... Whereas in finance it's a zero-sum battle against who's got the secret first and who can act on it first.And I think when you're in tech, you should exploit that. I think that we have been trained our entire lives to be zero-sum, from just like the earliest days of our school, where we learn, we keep it to ourselves to try to pass the test, try to get the best scores, try to get the best jobs, the best colleges, and all that, because everything's positional. For you to win, others have to lose. But I don't see tech in that way, primarily because tech is still growing so fast. There's multiple ways for people to succeed, and that's just the fundamental baseline. You layer on top of that a bunch of other psychological phenomenon.I've been really fascinated by this, by what it is so effective. First of all, you have your skin in the game, meaning that a lot of times when your name is on the blog posts out there, or your name is on the talk that you gave, your face is there, and people can criticize you, you're just incentivized to learn better, instead of just "Oh, I'll read this and then I'll try to remember it." No, it doesn't really stick as much. So having skin in the game really helps.When you get something wrong in public, there are two effects that happen. First is people will climb over broken glass to correct you, because that's how the internet does. There's a famous XKCD comic where like "I can't go to bed yet." "Why?" "Someone's wrong on the internet. I have to correct them."Jerod Santo: Right.Shawn Wang: So people are incentivized to fix your flaws for you - and that's fantastic - if you have a small ego.Jerod Santo: I was gonna say, that requires thick skin.Shawn Wang: Yeah, exactly. So honestly -- and that's a barrier for a lot of people. They cannot get over this embarrassment. What I always say is you can learn so much on the internet, for the low, low price of your ego. If we can get over that, we can learn so much, just because you don't care. And the way to get over it is to just realize that the version that you put out today is the version you should be embarrassed about a year from now, because that shows that you've grown. So you divorce your identity from your work, and just let people criticize your work; it's fine, because it was done by you, before you knew what you know today. And that's totally fine.And then the second part, which is that once you've gotten something wrong in public, it's just so embarrassing that you just remember it in a much clearer fashion. [laughter] This built a feedback loop, because once you started doing this, and you show people that you respond to feedback, then it builds a feedback and an expectation that you'll do the next thing, and people respond to the next thing... It becomes a conversation, rather than a solitary endeavor of you just learning the source material.So I really like that viral feedback loop. It helps you grow your reputation... Because this is not just useful for people who are behind you; a lot of people, when they blog, when they write, when they speak, they're talking down. They're like "I have five years experience in this. Here's the intro to whatever. Here's the approach to beginners." They don't actually get much out of that.[12:17] That's really good, by the way, for beginners; that's really important, that experts in the field share their knowledge. They don't see this blogging or this speaking as a way to level up in terms of speaking to their experts in their fields. But I think it's actually very helpful. You can be helpful to people behind you, you can be helpful to people around you, but you can actually be helpful to people ahead of you, because you're helping to basically broadcast or personalize their message. They can check their messaging and see - if you're getting this wrong, then they're getting something wrong on their end, docs-wise, or messaging-wise. That becomes a really good conversation. I've interacted with mentors that way. That's much more how I prefer to interact with my mentors than DM-ing and saying "Hey, can you be my mentor?", which is an unspecified, unpaid, indefinitely long job, which nobody really enjoys. I like project-based mentorship, I like occasional mentorship... I really think that that develops when you learn in public.Adam Stacoviak: I've heard it say that "Today is the tomorrow you hope for."Shawn Wang: Wow.Adam Stacoviak: Because today is always tomorrow at some point, right? Like, today is the day, and today you were hoping for tomorrow to be better...Jerod Santo: I think by definition today is not tomorrow...Adam Stacoviak: No, today is the tomorrow that you hoped for... Meaning like "Seize your moment. It's here."Jerod Santo: Carpe diem. Gotcha.Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, kind of a thing like that.Shawn Wang: I feel a little shady -- obviously, I agree, but also, I feel a little shady whenever I venture into this territory, because then it becomes very motivational speaking-wise, and I'm not about that. [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Kind of... But I think you're in the right place; keep showing up where you need to be - that kind of thing. But I think your perspective though comes from the fact that you had this finance career, and a different perspective on the way work and the way a career progressed. And so you have a dichotomy essentially between two different worlds; one where it's private, and one where it's open. That to me is pretty interesting, how you were able to tie those two together and see things differently. Because I think too often sometimes in tech, especially staying around late at night, correcting someone on the internet, you're just so deeply in one industry, and you have almost a bubble around you. You have one lens for which you see the world. And you've been able to have multi-faceted perspectives of this world, as well as others, because of a more informed career path.Jerod Santo: Yeah. When you talk about finance as a zero-sum game, I feel like there's actually been moves now to actually open up about finance as well; I'm not sure if either of you have tracked the celebrity rise of Cathie Wood and Ark Invest, and a lot of the moves that she's doing in public. They're an investment fund, and they will actually publish their moves at the end of every day. Like, "We sold these stocks. We bought these stocks." And people laughed at that for a while, but because she's been successful with early on Bitcoin, early with Tesla, she's very much into growth stocks - because of that, people started to follow her very closely and just emulate. And when she makes moves now, it makes news on a lot of the C-SPANs and the... Is C-SPAN the Congress one? What's the one that's the finance one...?Shawn Wang: CNBC?Jerod Santo: CNBC, not C-SPAN. And so she's very much learning in public. She's making her moves public, she's learning as she goes, and to a certain degree it's paid off, it's paid dividends in her career. Now, I'm not sure if everyone's doing that... When you look at crypto investors, like - okay, pseudonymous, but a lot of that stuff, public ledgers. So there's moves that are being made in public there as well. So I wonder if eventually some of that mentality will change. What do you think about that?Shawn Wang: [15:45] It's definitely changed for -- there's always been celebrity investors, and people have been copying the Buffett portfolio for 30 years. So none of that is new. What is new is that Cathie Wood is running an ETF, and just by way of regulation and by way of innovation, she does have to report those changes. [laughs] So mutual funds, hedge fund holdings - these have all been public, and people do follow them. And you're always incentivized to talk your book after you've established your position in your book...Jerod Santo: Right, but you establish it first.Shawn Wang: ...so none of that has changed. But yeah, Cathie has been leading an open approach...Jerod Santo: Is it the rate of disclosure perhaps that's new? Because it seems like it's more real-time than it has historically...Shawn Wang: Yeah. I mean, she's running an ETF, which is new, actually... Because most people just run mutual funds or hedge funds, and those are much more private. The other two I'll probably shout out is Patrick O'Shaughnessy who's been running I guess a fund of funds, and he's been fairly open. He actually adopted the "learn in public" slogan in the finance field, independently of me. And then finally, the other one is probably Ted Seides, who is on the institutional investor side of things. So he invests for universities, and teachers pensions, and stuff like that. So all these people - yeah, they've been leading that... I'm not sure if it's spreading, or they've just been extraordinarily successful in celebrity because of it.Adam Stacoviak: This idea of "in public" is happening. You see people too, like -- CopyAI is building in public... This idea of learning in public, or building in public, or exiting in public... Whatever the public might be, it's happening more and more... And I think it's definitely similar to the way that open source moves around. It's open, so it's visible to everyone. There's no barrier to see what's happening, whether it's positive or negative, with whatever it is in public. They're leveraging this to their advantage, because it's basically free marketing. And that's how the world has evolved to use social media. Social media has inherently been public, because it's social...Jerod Santo: Sure.Adam Stacoviak: Aside from Facebook being gated, with friends and stuff like that... Twitter is probably the most primary example of that, maybe even TikTok, where if I'm a creator on TikTok, I almost can't control who sees my contact. I assume it's for the world, and theoretically, controlled by the algorithm... Because if I live in Europe, I may not see content in the U.S, and the algorithm says no, or whatever. But it's almost like everybody is just in public in those spaces, and they're leveraging it to their advantage... Which is an interesting place to be at in the world. There was never an opportunity before; you couldn't do it at that level, at that scale, ten years ago, twenty years ago. It's a now moment.Jerod Santo: Yeah. Swyx, can you give us an example of something learned in public? Do you basically mean like blog when you've learned something, or ask questions? What does learning in public actually mean when it comes to -- say, take a technology. Maybe you don't understand Redux. I could raise my hand on that one... [laughter] How could I learn that in public?Shawn Wang: There are a bunch of things that you can try. You can record a livestream of you going through the docs, and that's useful to maintainers, understanding "Hey, is this useful or not?" And that's immediately useful. It's so tangible.I actually have a list -- I have a talk about this on the blog post as well... Just a suggestion of things you can do. It's not just blogging. You can speak, you can draw comics, cheatsheets are really helpful... I think Amy Hoy did a Ruby on Rails cheatsheet that basically everyone has printed out and stapled to their wall, or something... And if you can do a nice cheatsheet, I think that's also a way for you to internalize those things that you're trying to learn anyway, and it just so happens to benefit others.So I really like this idea that whatever content you're doing, it's learning exhaust, it's a side effect of you learning, and you just happen to put it out there; you understand what formats work for you, because you have abnormal talents. Especially if you can draw, do that. People love developers who can draw. And then you just put it out there, and you win anyway just by doing it. You don't need an audience. You get one if you do this long enough, but you don't need an audience right away. And you win whether or not people participate with you. It's a single-player game that can become a multiplayer game.Specifically for Redux - you know, go through source code, or go through the docs, build a sample app, do like a simple little YouTube video on it... Depending on the maturity, you may want to try to speak at a meetup, or whatever... You don't have to make everything a big deal. I'm trying to remove the perception from people that everything has to be this big step, like it has to be top of Hacker News, or something. No. It could just be helpful for one person. I often write blog posts with one persona in mind. I mean, I don't name that person, but if you focus on that target persona, actually often it does better than when you try to make some giant thesis that shakes the world...Adam Stacoviak: [20:22] Yeah. Too often we don't move because we feel like the weight of the move is just too much. It's like "How many people have to read this for me to make this a success for me?" You mentioned it's a learning exhaust... And this exhaust that you've put out before - has it been helpful really to you? Is that exhaust process very helpful to you? Is that ingrained in the learnings that you've just gone through, just sort of like synthesize "Okay, I learned. Here's actually what I learned"?Shawn Wang: Yeah. This is actually an opportunity to tie into that second brain concept which maybe you wanted to talk a little bit about. Everything that you write down becomes your second brain. At this point I can search Google for anything I've ever written on something, and actually come up on my own notes, on whatever I had. So I'm not relying on my memory for that. Your human brain, your first brain is not very good at storage, and it's not very good at search; so why not outsource that to computers? And the only way to do that is you have to serialize your knowledge down into some machine-readable format that's part of research. I do it in a number of places; right now I do it across GitHub, and my blog, and a little bit of my Discord. Any place where you find you can store knowledge, I think that's a really good second brain.And for Jerod, I'll give you an example I actually was gonna bring up, which is when I was trying to learn React and TypeScript - like, this goes all the way back to my first developer job. I was asked to do TypeScript, even though I'd never done it before. And honestly, my team lead was just like "You know TypeScript, right? You're a professional React dev, you have to know TypeScript." And I actually said no, and I started learning on day one.And what I did was I created the React to TypeScript cheatsheet, which literally was just copy-pasteable code of everything that I found useful and I wish I knew when I was starting out. And I've just built that over time. That thing's been live for three years now, it's got like 20,000 stars. I've taught thousands of developers from Uber, from Microsoft, React and TypeScript. And they've taught me - every time they send in a question or a PR... I think it's a very fundamental way of interacting, which is learning in public, but specifically this one - it's open source knowledge; bringing up our open source not just to code, but to everything else. I think that's a fundamental feedback loop that I've really enjoyed as well.Break: [22:31]Jerod Santo: One of the things I appreciate about you, swyx, is how you are always thinking, always writing down your thoughts... You've been watching and participating in this industry now for a while, and you've had some pretty (I think) insightful writings lately. The first one I wanna talk about is this API Economy post. The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy. You say "Developers severely underestimate the importance of this to their own career." So I figure if that's the case, we should hear more about it, right?Shawn Wang: [laughs] Happy to talk about it. So what is the API economy? The API economy is developers reshaping the world in their image. Very bold statement, but kind of true, in the sense that there is now an API for everything - API for cards, API for bank accounts, API for text, API for authentication, API for shipping physical goods... There's all sorts of APIs. And what that enables you to do as a developer is you can call an API - as long as you know REST or GraphQL these days, you know how to invoke these things and make these things function according to the rest of your program. You can just fit those things right in. They're a very powerful thing to have, because now the cost of developing one of these services just goes down dramatically, because there's another company doing that as a service for you.I wrote about it mainly because at Netlify we were pitching serverless, we were pitching static hosting, and we were pitching APIs. That's the A in JAMstack. But when I google "API economy", all the search results were terrible. Just horrible SEO, bland, meaningless stuff that did not speak to developers; it was just speaking to people who like tech buzzwords. So I wrote my own version. The people who coined it at Andreessen Horowitz, by the way, still to this day do not have a blog post on the API economy. They just have one podcast recording which nobody's gonna listen. So I just wrote my version.Jerod Santo: You're saying people don't listen to podcasts, or what?Shawn Wang: [laughs] When people are looking up a term, they are like "What is this thing?", and you give them a podcast, they're not gonna sit down and listen for 46 minutes on a topic. They just want like "Give me it, in one paragraph. Give me a visual, and I'm gonna move on with my day." So yeah, whenever I see an opportunity like that, I try to write it up. And that's the light side; a lot of people talk about the light side. But because it's a personal blog, I'm empowered to also talk about the dark side, which is that as much as it enables developers, it actually is a little bit diminishing the status of human expertise and labor and talent. So we can talk a little bit about that, but I'm just gonna give you time to respond.Jerod Santo: [28:05] Hm. I'm over here thinking now that you're not at Netlify, I'm curious - this is tangential, but what's your take on JAMstack now? I know you were a professional salesman there for a while, but... It seems like JAMstack - we've covered it for years, it's a marketing term, it's something we've already been doing, but maybe taking it to the next level... There's lots of players now - Netlify, Vercel etc. And yet, I don't see much out there in the real world beyond the people doing demos, "Here's how to build a blog, here's how to do this, here's my personal website", and I'm just curious... I'm not like down on JAMstack, but I just don't see it manifesting in the ways that people have been claiming it's going to... And maybe we're just waiting for the technology to catch up. I'd just love to hear what you think about it now.Shawn Wang: Yeah. I think that you're maybe not involved in that world, so you don't see this, but real companies are moving on to JAMstack. The phrasing that I like is that -- JAMstack has gone mainstream, and it's not even worth talking about these days, because it's just granted that that's an option for you... So PayPal.me is on the JAMstack, there's large e-commerce sites... Basically, anything that decouples your backend from your frontend, and your frontend is statically-hosted - that is JAMstack.I actually am blanking on the name, but if you go check out the recent JAMstack Conf, they have a bunch of examples of people who've not only moved to JAMstack, but obviously moved to Netlify, where they're trying to promote themselves.Jerod Santo: Sure, yeah.Shawn Wang: So yes, it's true that I'm no longer a professional spokesperson, but it's not true that JAMstack is no longer being applied in the enterprise, because it is getting adoption; it's moved on that boring phase where people don't talk about it.One thing I'll say - a thesis that I've been pursuing is that JAMstack is in its endgame. And what do I mean by that? There's a spectrum between the previous paradigm that JAMstack was pushing back on, which is the all-WordPress/server-render-everything paradigm, and then JAMstack is prerender-everything. And now people are filling in--Jerod Santo: In the middle.Shawn Wang: ...I'm gonna put my hands in the Zoom screen right now. People are filling that gap between fully dynamic and fully static. So that's what you see with Next.js and Gatsby moving into serverless rendering, partial rendering or incremental rendering... And there's a full spectrum of ways in which you can optimize your rendering for the trade-offs of updating your content, versus getting your data/content delivered as quickly as possible. There's always some amount of precompilation that you need to do, and there's always some amount of dynamicism that you have to do, that cannot be precompiled. So now there is a full spectrum between those.Why I say it's the end game is because that's it, there's nothing else to explore. It's full-dynamic, full-static, choose some mix in the middle, that's it. It's boring.Jerod Santo: Hasn't that always been the case though? Hasn't there always been sites that server-side render some stuff, and pre-render other things? You know, we cache, we pre-render, some people crawl their own websites once, and... I don't know it seems like maybe just a lot of excitement around a lot of things that we've been doing for many years.Shawn Wang: [laughs] So first of all, those are being remade in the React ecosystem of things, which a lot of us lost when a lot of the web development industry moved to React... So that's an important thing to get back.I mean, I agree, that's something that we've always had, pre-rendering, and services like that, caching at the CDN layer - we've always had that. There's some differences... So if you understand Netlify and why they're trying to push distributed persistent rendering (DVR), it's because caching is a hard problem, and people always end up turning off the cache. Because the first time you run into a bug, you're gonna turn off the cache. And the cache is gonna stay off.So the way that Netlify is trying to fix it is that we put the cache in Git, essentially. Git is the source of truth, instead of some other source of truth distributed somewhere between your CDN and your database and somewhere else. No, everything's in Git. I'm not sure if I've represented that well, to be honest... [laughter]Adam Stacoviak: Well, good thing you don't work for Netlify anymore. We're not holding you to the Netlify standard.Shawn Wang: [31:58] Exactly. All I can say is that to me now it's a good thing in the sense that it's boring. It's the good kind of boring, in the sense of like "Okay, there's a spectrum. There's all these techniques. Yes, there were previous techniques, but now these are the new hotness. Pick your choice." I can get into a technical discussion of why this technique, the first one, the others... But also, is it that interesting unless you're evaluating for your site? Probably not...Jerod Santo: Well, it does play into this API economy though, right? Because when you're full JAMstack, then the A is your most important thing, and when the A is owned by a bunch of companies that aren't yours - like, there's a little bit of dark side there, right? All of a sudden, now I'm not necessarily the proprietor of my own website, to a certain degree, because I have these contracts. I may or may not get cut off... There's a lot of concerns when everybody else is a dependency to your website.Shawn Wang: Yeah. So I don't consider that a dark side at all.Jerod Santo: No, I'm saying to me that seems like a dark side.Shawn Wang: Yeah, sure. This is the risk of lock-in; you're handing over your faith and your uptime to other people. So you have to trade that off, versus "Can you build this yourself? And are you capable of doing something like this, and are you capable of maintaining it?" And that is a very high upfront cost, versus the variable cost of just hiring one of these people to do it for you as a service.So what I would say is that the API economy is a net addition, because you as a startup - the startup cost is very little, and if you get big enough where it makes sense for you to build in-house - go ahead. But this is a net new addition for you to turn fixed costs into variable costs, and start with a small amount of investment. But I can hire -- like, Algolia was started by three Ph.D's in search, and I can hire them for cents to do search on my crummy little website. I will absolutely do that every single day, until I get to a big enough point where I cannot depend on them anymore, and I have to build my own search. Fine, I'll do that. But until then, I can just rely on them. That's a new addition there.Jerod Santo: One hundred percent. So what then do you think is the darker side? You mentioned it, but put a finer point on it.Shawn Wang: Yeah. The dark side is that there are people -- like, when I call an Uber ride, Uber is an API for teleportation, essentially. I'm here, I wanna go there. I press a button, the car shows up. I get in the car, get off, I'm there. What this papers over is that the API is calling real actual humans, who are being commoditized. I don't care who drives the car, I really don't. I mean, they may have some ratings, but I kind of don't care.Jerod Santo: That was the case with taxis though, wasn't it?Shawn Wang: That was the case with taxis, for sure. But there's a lot of people living below the API, who are economically constrained, and people who live above the API, developers, who have all the upside, essentially... Because the developers are unique, the labor is commoditized. My DoorDash pickers, my Instacart deliverers - all these are subsumed under the API economy. They're commodities forever, they know it, and there's no way out for them, unless they become developers themselves. There's a class system developing below and above the API. And the moment we can replace these people under the API with robots, you better believe we'll do that, because robots are way cheaper, and they complain less, they can work 24 hours, all this stuff.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Shawn Wang: So that's the dark side, which is, yeah, as a developer now - fantastic. I can control most parts of the economy with just a single API call. As a startup founder, I can develop an API for literally anything, and people will buy it. The downside is human talent is being commoditized, and I don't know how to feel about that. I think people are not talking enough about it, and I just wanna flag it to people.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Adam Stacoviak: So dark side could mean a couple things. One, it could mean literally bad; dark as synonymous with bad. Or dark as in shady. And we're not sure, it's obscured in terms of what's happening. And so let's use an Instacarter or a Dasher - to use their terminology. I happen to be a DoorDash user, so I know they're called Dashers; that's the only reason I know that. It's not a downplay, it's just simply what the terminology is...[35:59] You could say it's below the API, but I wonder, if you've spoken with these people, or people that live in what you call below the API, because I would imagine they're not doing that because they're being forced. Like, it's an opportunity for them.Shawn Wang: Oh, yeah.Adam Stacoviak: And I remember when I was younger and I had less opportunity because I had less "above the API" (so to speak) talent... And I do agree there's a class here, but I wonder if it's truly bad; that dark is truly bad, or if it's just simply obscure in terms of how it's gonna play out.Shawn Wang: This is about upside. They will never get to that six figures income with this thing.Adam Stacoviak: Not that job.Jerod Santo: No.Shawn Wang: It's really about the class system, which is the dark side. You don't want to have society splinter into like a serving class and whatever the non-serving class is. It's also about the upside - like, I don't see a way for these people to break out unless, they really just take a hard stop and just go to a completely different career track.Jerod Santo: Right.Adam Stacoviak: Here's where I have a hard time with that... I'm not pushing back on that you're wrong, I'm just wondering more deeply...Shawn Wang: Sure.Adam Stacoviak: I imagine at one point in my life I was a DoorDasher.Shawn Wang: Yeah.Adam Stacoviak: I washed dishes, I did definitely unique jobs at a young age before I had skill. And so the path is skill, and as long as we have a path to skill, which you've show-cased through FreeCodeCamp in your path, then I think that dark side is just simply shady, and not bad.Shawn Wang: Okay.Adam Stacoviak: And I'm just trying to understand it, because I was truly a DoorDasher before DoorDash was available. I washed dishes, delivered papers, I had servant-level things; I was literally a server at a restaurant before... And I loved doing that kind of work, but my talents have allowed me to go above that specific job, and maybe even the pay that came with that job. I've served in the military before, got paid terrible dollars, but I loved the United States military; it's great. And I love everybody who's served in our military. But the point is, I think the path is skill, and as long as we have a pathway to skill, and jobs that can house that skill and leverage that skill to create new value for the world, I just wonder if it's just necessary for society to have, I suppose, above and below API things.Jerod Santo: Until we have all the robots. Then there is nobody underneath. At that point it's all robots under the API.Shawn Wang: Yes, and that is true in a lot of senses, actually. Like, farming is mostly robots these days. You do have individual farmers, but they're much less than they used to be. I don't know what to say about that, shady or dark... I think it's just -- there's no career track. You have to go break out of that system yourself. Thank God there's a way to do it. But back in the day, you used to be able to go from the mailroom to the boardroom.Adam Stacoviak: I see.Shawn Wang: I see these stories of people who used to be janitors at schools become the principal. Companies used to invest in all their people and bring them up. But now we're just hiring your time, and then if you wanna break out of that system - good luck, you're on your own. I think that that lack of upward mobility is a problem, and you're not gonna see it today. It's a slow-moving train wreck. But it's gonna happen where you have society split in two, and bad things happen because of it.Adam Stacoviak: I mean, I could agree with that part there, that there definitely is no lateral movement from Dasher to CEO of DoorDash.Shawn Wang: It's just not gonna happen.Adam Stacoviak: Or VP of engineering at DoorDash. I think because there is no path, the path would be step outside of that system, because that system doesn't have a path. I could agree with that, for sure.Jerod Santo: Yeah. I mean, the good news is that we are creating -- there are paths. This is not like a path from X to Y through that system, but there are other alternate paths that we are creating and investing in, and as well as the API gets pushed further and further down in terms of reachability - we now have more and more access to those things. It's easier now, today, than it ever has been, because of what we were talking about, to be the startup founder, right? To be the person who starts at CEO because the company has one person in it, and they're the CEO. And to succeed in that case, and become the next DoorDash.Adam Stacoviak: True.Jerod Santo: So there are opportunities to get out, it's just not a clear line... And yeah, it takes perhaps some mentorship, perhaps ingenuity... A lot of the things that it takes to succeed anyway, so...Shawn Wang: [40:05] I'll give a closing note for developers who are listening, because you're already a developer... So the analogy is if you're above the API, you tell machines what to do; if you're below the API, machines tell you what to do. So here's the developer analogy, which is there's another division in society, which is the kanban board. If you're below the kanban board, the kanban board tells you what to do. If you're above it, you tell developers what to do. [laughs]Jerod Santo: There you go.Shawn Wang: So how do you break out of that class division? I'll leave it out to you, but just keep in mind, there's always layers.Jerod Santo: I love that.Adam Stacoviak: I love the discussion around it, but I'm also thankful you approached the subject by a way of a blog post, because I do believe that this is interesting to talk about, and people should talk about it, for sure. Because it provides introspection into, I guess, potentially something you don't really think about, like "Do I live below or above the APi?" I've never thought about that in that way until this very moment, talking to you, so... I love that.Break: [40:58]Jerod Santo: So another awesome post you have written lately is about Cloudflare and AWS. Go - not the language, the game Go... I know very little about the language, and I know even less about the game... And Chess... How Cloudflare is approaching things, versus how AWS and Google and others are... Given us the TL;DR of that post, and then we'll discuss.Shawn Wang: Okay. The TL;DR of that post is that Cloudflare is trying to become the fourth major cloud after AWS, Azure and GCP. The way they're doing it is fundamentally different than the other three, and the more I've studied them - I basically observed Cloudflare for the entire time since I joined Netlify. Netlify kind of is a competitor to Cloudflare, and it's always this uncomfortable debate between "Should you put Cloudflare in front of Netlify? Netlify itself is a CDN. Why would you put a CDN in front of another CDN?" Oh, because Netlify charges for bandwidth, and Cloudflare does not. [laughter]Jerod Santo: It's as simple as that.Shawn Wang: And then there's DDOS protection, all that stuff; very complicated. Go look up the Netlify blog post on why you should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify, and decide for yourself. But Netlify now taking on AWS S3 - S3 is like a crown jewel of AWS. This is the eighth wonder of the world. It provides eleven nines of durability. Nothing less than the sun exploding will take this thing down... [laughs]Jerod Santo: Right? You know what's funny - I don't even consider us at Changelog AWS customers; I don't even think of us that way. But of course, we use S3, because that's what you do. So yeah, we're very much AWS customers, even though I barely even think about it, because S3 is just like this thing that of course you're gonna use.Shawn Wang: There's been a recent history of people putting out S3-compatible APIs, just because it's so dominant that it becomes the de-facto standard. Backblaze did it recently. But Cloudflare putting out R2 and explicitly saying "You can slurp up the S3 data, and by the way, here's all the cost-benefit of AWS egress charges that's what Matthew Prince wrote about in his blog post is all totally true, attacks a part of AWS that it cannot compromise on and just comes at the top three clouds from a different way, that they cannot respond to.[44:17] So I always like these analogies of how people play destruction games. I'm a student of destruction, and I study Ben Thompson and Clay Christensen, and that entire world, very quickly... So I thought this was a different model of destruction, where you're essentially embracing rather than trying to compete head-on. And wrapping around it is essentially what Go does versus chess, and I like -- you know, there's all these comparisons, like "You're playing 2D chess, I'm playing 3D chess. You're playing chess, I'm playing Go." So Cloudflare is playing Go by surrounding the S3 service and saying "Here is a strict superset. You're already a consumer of S3. Put us on, and magically your costs get lower. Nothing else about it changes, including your data still lives in AWS if you ever decide to leave us." Or if you want to move to Cloudflare, you've just gotta do the final step of cutting off S3.That is a genius, brilliant move that I think people don't really appreciate, and it's something that I study a lot, because I work at companies that try to become the next big cloud. I worked at Netlify, and a lot of people are asking, "Can you build a large public company on top of another cloud? Our second-layer cloud is viable." I think Vercel and Netlify are proving that partially it is. They're both highly valued. I almost leaked some info there... When does this go out? [laughs]Jerod Santo: Next week, probably...Shawn Wang: Okay, alright... So they're both highly valued, and - like, can they be hundred-billion-dollar companies? I don't know. We don't know the end state of cloud, but I think people are trying to compete there, and every startup -- I nearly joined Render.com as well. Every startup that's trying to pitch a second-layer cloud thesis is always working under the shadows of AWS. And this is the first real thesis that I've seen, that like "Oh, okay, you not only can credibly wrap around and benefit, you can actually come into your own as a fourth major cloud." So I'm gonna stop there... There's so many thoughts I have about Cloudflare.Jerod Santo: Yeah. So do you see that R2 then -- I think it's a brilliant move, as you described it... As I read your post, I started to appreciate, I think, the move, more than I did when I first read about it and I was like "Oh, they're just undercutting." But it seems they are doing more than just that. But do you think that this R2 then is a bit of a loss leader in order to just take a whole bunch of AWS customers, or do you think there's actually an economic -- is it economically viable as a standalone service, or do you think Cloudflare is using it to gain customers? What are your thoughts in their strategy of Why?Shawn Wang: This is the top question on Twitter and on Hacker News when they launch. They are going to make money on this thing, and the reason is because of all the peering agreements that they've established over the past five years. As part of the normal business strategy of Cloudflare, they have peering agreements with all of the ISPs; bandwidth is free for them. So... For them in a lot of cases. Again, I have to caveat all this constantly, because I should note to people that I am not a cloud or networking expert. I'm just learning in public, just like the rest of you, and here's what I have so far. So please, correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll learn from it.But yeah, I mean - straight on, it's not a loss leader. They plan to make money on it. And the reason they can is because they have worked so hard to make their cost structure completely different in AWS, and they've been a friend to all the other ISPs, rather than AWS consuming everything in its own world. Now you're starting to see the benefits of that strategy play out. And by the way, this is just storage, but also they have data store, also they have service compute, all following the same model.Jerod Santo: So what do you think is a more likely path over the next two years? Cloudflare --Adam Stacoviak: Prediction time!Jerod Santo: ...Cloudflare steals just massive swathes of AWS customers, or AWS slashes prices to compete?Shawn Wang: So I try not to do the prediction business, because I got out of that from the finance days... All I'm doing is nowcasting. I observe what I'm seeing now and I try to put out the clearest vision of it, so the others can follow.I think that it makes sense for them to be replicating the primitives of every other cloud service. So in 2017 they did service compute with Cloudflare Workers. In 2018 they did eventually consistent data store. In 2019 - website hosting; that's the Netlify competitor. In 2020 they did strongly-consistent data store, with Durable Objects. In 2021 object storage. What's next on that list? Go on to your AWS console and go shopping. And instead of seven different ways to do async messaging in AWS, probably they're gonna do one way in Cloudflare. [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: [48:34] A unified API, or something like that...Jerod Santo: Yeah, they'll just look at AWS' offerings, the ones they like the best, and do it that way, right?Shawn Wang: Yeah, just pick it up.Adam Stacoviak: Maybe the way to get a prediction out of you, swyx, might be rather than directly predict, maybe describe how you win Go.Shawn Wang: How you win Go...Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, what's the point of Go? How do you win Go? Because that might predict the hidden prediction, so to speak.Shawn Wang: Okay. For listeners who don't know Go, let me draw out the analogy as well. So most people are familiar with chess; individual chess pieces have different values and different points, and they must all support each other. Whenever you play chess, you need the Knight to support the pawns, something like that... Whereas in Go, you place your pieces everywhere, and they're all indistinguishable from each other. And it's more about claiming territory; at the end of the day, that's how you win Go, you claim the most territory compared to the others... And it's never a winner-take-all situation. Most likely, it's like a 60/40. You won 60% of the territory and your competitor has 40% of the territory. That's more likely a mapping of how cloud is gonna play out than chess, where winner-takes-all when you take the King. There's no King in the cloud, but--Jerod Santo: Are you sure...?Shawn Wang: ...there's a lot likely of territory claiming, and Cloudflare is really positioned very well for that. It's just part of the final realization that I had at the end of the blog post. And partially, how you take individual pieces of territory is that you surround all the pieces of the enemy and you place the final piece and you fill up all the gaps, such that the enemy is completely cut off from everything else and is surrounded. And that's what R2 does to S3 - it surrounds S3, and it's up to you to place that final piece. They call it, Atari, by the way, which is the name of the old gaming company, Atari. They have placed AWS S3 in Atari, and it's up to the customers to say "I'm gonna place that final piece. I'm gonna pay the cost of transferring all my data out of S3 and cut S3 off", and they cut off all the remaining liberties. So how do you win in Go? You claim the most amount of territory, and you surround the pieces of the enemy.Adam Stacoviak: Which, if you thought maybe that was oxygen, the territory, you might suck the oxygen away from them, so they can't live anymore, so to speak... And maybe you don't take it by killing it. Maybe you sort of suffocate it almost, if their space becomes small enough; if you take enough territory and it begins to shrink enough, it's kind of like checkmate, but not.Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's also a concept of sente in Go, which is that you make a move that the opponent has to respond to, which is kind of like a check, or checkmate -- actually, not; just the check, in chess. And right now, AWS doesn't feel the need to respond. Cloudflare is not big enough. Like, these are names to us, but let's just put things in numbers. Cloudflare's market cap is 36 billion, AWS' market cap is 1.6 trillion; this is Amazon's total market cap. Obviously, AWS is a subset of that.Jerod Santo: Sure.Shawn Wang: So your competitor is 40 times larger than you. Obviously, Cloudflare is incentivized to make a lot of noise and make themselves seem bigger than it is. But until AWS has to respond, this is not real.Adam Stacoviak: Nice.Jerod Santo: So as a developer, as a customer of potentially one or both of these... Let's say you have a whole bunch of stuff on S3 - I'm asking you personally now, swyx - and R2 becomes available... Is that a no-brainer for you, or is there any reason not to use that?Shawn Wang: You're just adding another vendor in your dependency tree. I think for anyone running silicon bandwidth, it is a no-brainer.Jerod Santo: Yeah. So over the course of n months, where n equals when they launch plus a certain number - I mean, I think this is gonna end up eventually on Amazon's radar, to where it's gonna start affecting some bottom lines that important people are gonna notice. So I just wonder - I mean, how much territory can Cloudflare grab before there's a counter-move? It's gonna be interesting to watch.Shawn Wang: [52:12] So Ben from Vantage actually did a cost analysis... Vantage is a startup that is made up former AWS Console people; they're trying to build a better developer experience on top of AWS. They actually did a cost analysis on the R2 move, and they said that there's probably a hundred billion dollars' worth of revenue at stake for Amazon. So if they start to have a significant dent in that, let's say like 40%, AWS will probably have to respond. But until then, there's nothing to worry about. That's literally how it is in Amazon; you have to see the numbers hit before you respond.Jerod Santo: Yeah. It hasn't even been a blip on the radar at this point, the key metrics to the people who are important enough to care are watching. You said you started watching all of these CDNs. Of course, you worked at Netlify... You take an interest in backends. There's something you mentioned in the break about frontenders versus backend, and where you've kind of been directing your career, why you're watching Cloudflare so closely, what you're up to now with your work... Do you wanna go there?Shawn Wang: Let's go there. So if you track my career, I started out as a frontend developer. I was developing design systems, I was working with Storybook, and React, and all that... Then at Netlify I was doing more serverless and CLI stuff. At AWS more storage and database and AppSync and GraphQL stuff... And now at Temporal I'm working on a workflow engine, pure backend. I just went to KubeCon two weeks ago...Jerod Santo: Nice!Shawn Wang: What is a frontend developer doing at KubeCon...?Adam Stacoviak: New territory.Shawn Wang: It's a frontend developer who realizes that there's a career ceiling for frontend developers. And it's not a polite conversation, and obviously there are exceptions to frontend developers who are VPs of engineering, frontend developers who are startup founders... And actually, by the way, there's a lot of VC funding coming from frontend developers, which is fantastic for all my friends. They're all getting funded, left, right and center. I feel left out. But there is a Career ceiling, in a sense that survey a hundred VPs of engineering, how many of them have backend backgrounds, and how many of them have frontend backgrounds? And given that choice, what's more likely for you and your long-term career progression? Do you want to specialize in frontend or do you want to specialize in backend? Different people have different interests, and I think that you can be successful in whatever discipline you pick. But for me, I've been moving towards the backend for that reason.Adam Stacoviak: Describe ceiling. What exactly do you mean when you say "ceiling"?Shawn Wang: Career ceiling. What's your terminal title.Jerod Santo: Like your highest role, or whatever. Highest salary, highest role, highest title...Adam Stacoviak: Gotcha.Shawn Wang: Like, straight up, how many VPs of engineering and CTOs have backend backgrounds versus frontend.Jerod Santo: Yeah. I mean, just anecdotally, I would agree with you that it's probably 8 or 9 out of 10 CTOs have -- is that what you said, 8 or 9?Shawn Wang: Yeah, yeah. So there's obviously an economic reasoning for this; it's because there's a bias in the industry that frontend is not real development, and backend is. And that has to be combated. But also, there's an economic reasoning, and I always go back to the economics part, because of my finance background... Which is that your value to the company, your value to the industry really depends on how many machines run through you. You as an individual unit of labor, how much money do you control, and how much machine process, or compute, or storage, or whatever runs through you. And just straight-up frontend doesn't take as much. [laughs] Yes, frontend is hard, yes, design is hard, yes, UX is crucially important, especially for consumer-facing products... But at the end of the day, your compute is being run on other people's machines, and people don't value that as much as the compute that I pay for, that I need to scale, and therefore I need an experienced leader to run that, and therefore that is the leader of my entire eng.Jerod Santo: I wonder if that changes at all for very product-focused orgs, where I think a lot of frontenders, the moves are into product design and architecture, and away from - not software architecture, but product design. And it seems like maybe if you compare - not VP of engineering, but VP of product, you'd see a lot of former frontenders.Shawn Wang: [56:03] Yeah.Jerod Santo: Maybe that's their path. Do you think that's --Shawn Wang: Totally. But you're no longer a frontend dev. You suddenly have to do mocks...Jerod Santo: Yeah, but when you're VP of engineering you're not a backend dev either.Shawn Wang: Yeah.Jerod Santo: So you're kind of both ascending to that degreeShawn Wang: Backends devs will never report to you, let's put it that way.Jerod Santo: Okay. Fair.Shawn Wang: [laughter] But somehow, frontend devs have to report to backend devs, for some reason; just because they're superior, or something. I don't know, it's just like an unspoken thing... It's a very impolite conversation, but hey, it's a reality, man.Jerod Santo: So do you see this personally, or do you see this by looking around?Shawn Wang: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Yeah. You felt like you had reached a ceiling.Shawn Wang: Well, again, this is very impolite; there's a ton of ways to succeed, and there are definitely exceptions. Emily Nakashima at Honeycomb - former frontend person, now VP of engineering. I don't know, I could have done that. I have interest in backend and I'm pursuing that. So I will say that - this is a soft ceiling, it's a permeable ceiling. It's not a hard ceiling.Jerod Santo: Sure.Shawn Wang: But there's a ceiling though, because you can see the numbers.Adam Stacoviak: What is it in particular the VP of engineering does that would make a frontender less likely to have that role? What specifically? I mean, engineering is one of the things, right? Commanding the software... Which is not necessarily frontend.Jerod Santo: Well, frontend is also an engineering discipline.Adam Stacoviak: I guess it kind of depends on the company, too. Honeycomb is probably a different example.Shawn Wang: I haven't been a VP of engineering, so I only have some theories. I suggest you just ask the next VP of engineering that you talk to, or CTO.Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Yeah. That'd be a good one to start asking people.Adam Stacoviak: What do you do here? What is it you do here?Shawn Wang: What is it you do here?Jerod Santo: Exactly.Shawn Wang: [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Well, I just wondered if there was a specific skillset that happens at that VP of engineering level that leads more towards a backender being more likely than a frontender to get hired into the role.Shawn Wang: I think there's some traditional baggage. Power structures persist for very long times... And for a long time UX and frontend was just not valued. And we're like maybe five years into the shift into that. It's just gonna take a long time.Jerod Santo: I agree with that. So tell us what you're up to now. You said you're doing workflows... I saw a quick lightning talk; you were talking about "React for the backend." So you're very much taking your frontend stuff into the backend here, with React for the backend. Tell us about that.Shawn Wang: Let's go for it. So at Netlify and at AWS I was essentially a developer advocate for serverless. So this is very cool - it does pay-as-you-go compute, and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it. But something that was always at the back of my mind bothering me, that serverless does not do well, is long-running jobs. It just does not do well. You have to chain together a bunch of stuff, and it's very brittle; you cannot test it... It's way more expensive than you would do in a normal environment.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Shawn Wang: And it made me realize that in this move to take apart everything and make everything as a service, we have gained scalability, but we've lost basically everything else. And what I was trying to do was "How do we reconstruct the experience of the monolith? What are the jobs to be done?" When you break it down, what does a computer do for you, and what is not adequately addressed by the ecosystem?I went through the exercise... I wrote a blog post called "Reconstructing the monolith, and I actually listed it out." So what are the jobs of cloud for a computer? You want static file serving, you want functions, you want gateway, you want socket management, job runners, queue, scheduler, cold storage, hot storage. There's meta jobs like error logging, usage logging, dashboarding, and then edge computing is like a unique to cloud thing. But everything else, you can kind of break it up and you can locate it on one machine, or you can locate it on multiple machines, some of them owned by you, some of them not owned by you.The thing that serverless -- that had a whole in the ecosystem was job running. Not good. Basically, as an AWS developer right now, the answer is you set a CloudWatch schedule function, and you pull an endpoint, and that should read some states from a database, and check through where you are, and compute until the 15-minute timeout for Lambda, and then save it back in, and then wait for the next pull, and start back up again. Super-brittle, and just a terrible experience; you would never want to go this way.[01:00:08.13] The AWS current response to that is AWS Step Functions, which is a JSON graph of what happens after the other, and this central orchestrator controls all of that. I think we could do better, and that's eventually what got me to temporal. So essentially, this blog post that I wrote - people found me through that, and hired both our head of product and myself from this single blog post. So it's probably the highest ROI blog post I've ever written.Jerod Santo: Wow. That's spectacular.Shawn Wang: It's just the VC that invested in Temporal. So what Temporal does is it helps you write long-running workflows in a doable fashion; every single state transition is persisted to a database, in idiomatic code. So idiomatic Java, idiomatic Go, idiomatic JavaScript, and PHP. This is different from other systems, because other systems force you to learn their language. For Amazon, you have to learn Amazon States Language. For Google Workflows - Google Workflows has a very long, very verbose JSON and YAML language as well.And these are all weird perversions of -- like, you wanna start simple; JSON is very simple, for doing boxes and arrows, and stuff like that... But you start ending up having to handwrite the AST of a general-purpose programming language, because you want variables, you want loops, you want branching, you want all that god stuff. And the best way to model asynchronous and dynamic business logic is with a general-purpose programming language, and that's our strong opinion there.So Temporal was created at Uber; it runs over 300 use cases at Uber, including driver onboarding, and marketing, and some of the trips stuff as well. It was open source, and adopted at Airbnb, and Stripe, and Netflix, and we have all those case studies on -- DoorDash as well, by the way, runs on the Uber version of Temporal.Jerod Santo: There you go, Adam.Shawn Wang: And yeah, they spun out to a company two years ago, and we're now trying to make it as an independent cloud company. And again, the

The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you're enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show. On today's episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos King are going to talk about the Elixir Conference. Amos talks about his ordeal to reach the Elixir Conference, his flight continuously got canceled, and the entire journey was hectic for him. From the scariest landing to nonstop flights getting canceled, rescheduled, and re-routed, Sean's travel ordeal covers all. Episode Highlights:  Amos gives detailed insights about his talk and pre-preparation. He has a habit of continuously improving his speech and slides, and this is precisely what he did when he got the extra time due to flight cancellations and re-routing.  Amos received a lot of positive feedback, and he had a wonderful experience at the conference. For him, it was nice to be around people again post-pandemic.  Amos suggests before giving a speech, and you don't have to write out the entire talk, write notes for things that you need to say in a specific way.  Sean talks about a funny incident that happened in QCON 2014, and he explains why he has a meme and a Russian Fake Facebook account.  While giving a talk at the vendor track at QCON, which is a big industry very expensive enterprise technology conference type thing, Sean made a funny posture with his hands.  At the QCON, the photographers have a talent for catching speakers with their hands and really interesting and kind of disturbing positions. Sean tried hard not to make any postures, but the photographer still got a funny picture that later got circulated as a meme.  Amos explains how nerves are set up; you can use nerves to deploy to your servers if you want to. Because you just have to have something that can run Linux. So now you have B partitions that automatically swap over if one fails. So you can use the nerves hub to deploy to your servers. You just have to build a nerves image for whatever server you have.  Sean and Amos explain how you can accomplish really great things when your tools are well built.  Amos says there have been a lot of things that the nerves team and working on nerves has brought back to the ecosystem as a whole.  Sean feels that there is a lot of good stuff going right now, but there is also a long way to go before you can really feel like, hey, this out of the box or very close to out of the box new Elixir project, it is going to have metrics tracing, logging, built in. So, Sean feels that he just has to add his own flavor for this particular project and make that part of his engineering process.  Sean talks about a crypto finance company and one of its major functions, i.e., trading.  Sean explains how there are multiple systems within an infrastructure that interacts as part of the process.  As soon as you know your product is viable, you get feedback to give users better experiences, says Amos.  Sean explains how one can directly correlate to the cost of the server, and one can save memory.  Talking about his side projects, Sean said his project capacity planner became one of his major projects.  Sometimes you just have to turn people away in order to serve anyone, says Sean.  There are a bunch of products without the sort of visibility to their customers even those products do not have value or not apparent value like the content distribution networks (CDN).  While talking about passing the acceptance test, Sean says to Amos that you can build these kinds of things that look like single-page apps, but they are completely server-side driven, and you can manage this state and Elixir, and that is great. 3 Key Points 1. Amos says that at the conference, they mainly talked about whenever you are doing acceptance tests driver browser or really any system that you have to wait for things like transitions so that as a user, you might not think about. 2. Amos talks about his coding journey and how he learned the basics of programming. 3. Sean explains how virtuous feedback cycles make your business successful in addition to your technical side. Tweetable Quotes  “You should not take more food than you can eat, but you also don't have to eat everything like don't make yourself miserable. It's not good for your health.” – Amos  “Computer is often faster than what the dropdown will actually open in the browser so.” – Sean Cribbs  “The very first code that I traded run was also the most complicated.” – Amos  “If you learn with small talk, you're probably in the right place.” – Amos  “Categorically deploying Elixir does not exist.”- Amos  “If people know how to measure their systems, then they can get in a situation where they fire up 96 of the largest instances on their cloud provider and don't care about the cost.” – Sean Resources Mentioned:  Podcast Editing

Welcome (back) to the Not Carrie Bradshaw Podcast! In this episode, Jessica is chatting with Shana Minei Spence, MS, RDN, CDN, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist based in New York. Shana is breaking down some of the most common misconceptions about nutrition, explaining why Health at Any Size is a more sustainable approach to nutritional wellness and more. Check out Shana's website here: https://www.thenutritiontea.com/about and follow her on Instagram @thenutritiontea Be sure to like, comment, SUBSCRIBE, rate, and review, and if you like what you heard and want to support this podcast, become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/notcarrieb

Hi Guys! It's been a few weeks since I put out an episode and just wanted to come on here and share some thoughts! One of my favorite books is called Feel the Fear and Do it Anyways - written by Susan Jeffers - http://www.susanjeffers.com/home/detailtemplate.cfm?catID=2234 I needed to be re inspired. I needed to remember why I do what I do here. One of my very first blog posts on my website is right here: https://gilaglassberg.com/self-help-roadmap-favorite-books/ and included in this list is this book. It definitely changed the way I thought about fear and challenging myself. As Charlene Aminoff says - Hashem (G-d), wants you to stretch, not stress. And as one of my favorite people, Perl Abramowitz, explains - bechirah -choice - is- 49.5% of things are too easy for you, 49.5% of things may be too hard for you, but that 1% in the middle is where you stretch and push. Chanukah is a time where we see the light in the darkness. Where we celebrate our personal and communal victories. I wanted to share with you what was going on in my head and hopefully it will be helpful for you. If you have gained from this episode or any of my content, please leave a rating and review and share it with those who can benefit. This is how the podcast moves up on Apple Podcast and more people can hear this information. Feel free to reach out with comments, questions and any feedback at gilaglassberg18@gmail.com. Have a great day and thank you for being here! -Gila Glassberg, MS, RDN, CDN, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor If you are ready to make peace with food and never say diet again, check out my website www.gilaglassberg.com and apply for a free 20 minute clarity call. I look forward to hearing from you! https://gilaglassberg.com/scheduling/ If you'd like to learn more about what I do, follow me on Instagram @gila.glassberg.intuitiveRD. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Tina-Marie Springham is a Canadian-born actor & voice-over artist currently based in Vancouver. She spent ten years living/working as a songwriter/singer/recording artist in Los Angeles, penning lyrics for songs that went on to become Top20 & Top10 Adult Contemporary singles, with several of them being placed in TV shows (currently in syndication around the world). Working between L.A & Vancouver, Tina-Marie has established herself as a force to bereckoned with in the North American indie film industry. As well as working consistently in film and TV, Tina-Marie can be heard in many voice-over roles in the narration, animation, corporate/commercial world, as well on Audible.com. Some of her work includes Voluspa (USA), VirtaMed (EU), Theravue (USA), BC Knowledge Network, Ocean of Good (CDN) The Return (USA) and many more. Tina-Marie was also a force in the highly competitive world of fitness and personal training industry. Competing in several different federations between 2011 and 2016 in the Figure & Fitness category. She quickly advanced from novice to National Level, by winning 12 first and second place trophies and one Overall Title during her competition career. Returning now to her first love of acting and focusing solely now on her career. When in between filming she studies her craft and writes. Audiences can see Tina-Marie in upcoming feature films ‘Broken' (USA), 'Blue Hour' (CDN), and 'Prof' (CDN), with 4 other projects currently in post and set for release in 2021. You can also see her in the award winning short films ‘A Calling', ‘Amphora' and ‘Header', to name a few. Others to watch for coming out later in 2021 are 'Sterling Road' (CDN), ‘Through Darkness, I See You' (CDN), & ‘Complete Reality' (CDN). Tina-Marie has booked projects well into 2021 and there seems to be no slowing her down anytime soon in spite of a pandemic. Tina-Marie has sights set on the other side of the camera as well to facilitate her innate desire to tell stories. She is in the infancy stages of writing and developing projects where she will boldly step into writing and directing. Outline of the Episode: ● [02:09] The Brief Introduction about Tina Marie Springham. ● [02:52] When did do you decide to peruse an acting career? ● [05:13] How you betrayed your character? ● [07:09] Actor, Writer and Director relationship. ● [09:37] How much you relate to the character? ● [11:22] What is the dream role you looking for? ● [14:24] How you tackle the auditions? ● [19:04] Do you watch your acting afterwards? ● [21:27] Where was you evolution of selecting a career? ● [26:40] Was there any red flags during the auditions? ● [34:59] Have you got too many auditions in a single day? ● [38:15] What is the longest time you took a character back with you? ● [40:28] What is your favorite conspiracy theory? ● [42:23] What life hack you knows that everyone does it wrong? ● [45:00] What is your guilty pleasure? ● [46:56] What is your least favorite 80,s movie that everybody likes?  Catch Tina-Marie Springham! Website: www.tinamariespringham.com/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/tinamariespringham LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinamariespringham/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinamariespringham Connect with AmigosPC!Website: https://www.amigospc.net Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/TwoandahalfAmigos Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amigospc Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmigosPC Check out Official AmigosPC Merch at: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/amigospc?ref_id=24626 Join the conversation with the Amigos by becoming a member of Amigos pc get direct access to our discord and other cool free stuff https://amigospc.supercast.tech/

On this episode of the Alix Turoff Nutrition podcast, Alix sits down with Deborah Malkoff-Cohen, MS, RD, CDN, CDE. Deborah is the founder of City Kids Nutrition and NYCeatwell, nutrition consultation services for children and adults. Known for her innovative approach to spooning nutritional knowledge into tiny bellies, Deborah is passionate about helping kids achieve physical and emotional health. Whether she is writing nutritional menus for schools in New York City or counseling families in the kitchen on how to best nourish their children, Deborah has committed her life to spreading the message of proper nutrition.   Currently, Deborah's nutritional expertise spans many ages and diagnoses. She works both privately (City Kids Nutrition/NYCeatwell) and has been with the City's Early Intervention Program for almost 15 years, helping children with special need and diagnoses from birth to three with various nutritional needs. Additionally, she has created the Dietitian role for the myFace Center for Craniofacial Care at the Hansjörg Wyss Department of Plastic Surgery at NYU Langone Health, where she counsels families with newborn and adults with cleft lip/palate and craniofacial conditions requiring special diets after undergoing extensive surgeries. Lastly, Deborah is also a Certified Diabetes Educator and an expert on CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitors), Insulin Pump Management, Gestational Diabetes and all things blood sugar related. Deborah is sought after as an industry expert and always being quoted in the media.    To learn more about Deborah Connect with her on instagram (@debmcohenRD) Visit her website www.NYCeatwell.com Follow her on Facebook   Resources: Get the 5 week Flexible Nutrition Starter Kit Apply for Alix's 12 week small group coaching program Apply for Alix's 1:1 coaching program Follow Alix on Instagram  Join Alix's private Facebook group Download your FREE Happy Hour Survival Guide Buy Alix's book on Amazon Shop my favorite products on Amazon Contact Alix via email   Be sure you're subscribed to this podcast to automatically receive your episodes!!!    If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love it if you would take a minute to leave a rating and review! Subscribe to The Alix Turoff Nutrition Podcast   Discount Codes: Built Bar: Use the code ALIX for 10% off your order Legion Athletics: Use the code Alix for 20% off your order

This is our third Kaizen episode in which Adam, Jerod & Gerhard talk about GitOps the wrong way, ask questions with Honeycomb and realise that they must be holding the CDN wrong, and the effort that has been going into moving all changelog.com static files from regular volumes to an S3-like object store. If you like a good yak shake, listening to this one is a lot more fun than doing it. Gerhard is most excited about the Ship It Christmas gifts that we have been preparing for you. While GitHub Codespaces is not going to be part of the upcoming Christmas special episode, today's talk covers why investing in a Codespaces integration is worth it. Changelog #459 and Backstage #20 are related to this topic.

Good morning! The common theme between these two very different projects, is they are both working to reach the everyone. Including those thought to be out of reach and out of touch. Human DAO is launching it's token on December 1, 2021 with a mission to equip the low to no income people of the world with the tools/P2E characters necessary to dive into web 3.0 games like Axie Infinity to earn income for themselves and their communities. Theta is creating a system of decentralized Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to replace CDN's like Cloudflare and Fastly to bring those CDN right into your neighborhood and in your home. This will enable ultra fast video streaming to meet the current and future demands of games, and the metaverse as it grows exponentially in size. Is all of this a good thing? Is this overreach? What it is will include AI? As always, I try to present some ideas and let you take it from there. Sources: https://medium.com/@TheHumanDAO/degen-meets-do-good-92cd80ffba2e https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/11/19/is-theta-crypto-going-to-make-you-richer/ https://medium.com/theta-network/theta-network-an-essential-infrastructure-for-metaverse-development-2cf78f1c1e04 https://decentral.games/blog/decentral-games-partners-with-theta-network-to-expand-metaverse-livestream-events

About RachelRachel Stephens is a Senior Analyst with RedMonk, a developer-focused industry analyst firm. RedMonk focuses on how practitioners drive technological adoption. Her research covers a broad range of developer and infrastructure products, with a particular focus on emerging growth technologies and markets. (But not crypto. Please don't talk to her about NFTs.)Before joining RedMonk, Rachel worked as a database administrator and financial analyst. Rachel holds an MBA from Colorado State University and a BA in Finance from the University of Colorado.Links: RedMonk: https://redmonk.com/ Great analysis: https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/09/30/a-new-strategy-r2/ “Convergent Evolution of CDNs and Clouds”: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/06/10/convergent-evolution-cdns-cloud/ “Everything is Securities Fraud?”: https://cafe.com/stay-tuned/everything-is-securities-fraud-with-matt-levine/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rstephensme TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinkstCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead  to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous non-sense.   Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. The last time I spoke to Rachel Stephens over at RedMonkwas in December of 2019. Well, on this podcast anyway; we might have exchanged conversational tidbits here and there at some point since then. But really, if we look around the world there's nothing that's materially different than it was today from December in 2019, except, oh, that's right everything. Rachel Stephens, you're still a senior analyst at RedMonk, which hey, in this day and age, longevity at a company is something that is almost enough to occasion comment on its own. Thanks for coming back for another round, I appreciate it.Rachel: Oh, I'm so happy to be here, and it's exciting to talk about the state of the world a few years later than the last time we talked. But yeah, it's been a hell of a couple years.Corey: Really has, but rather than rehashing pandemic stuff because I feel like unless people have been living in a cave for the last couple of years—because we've all been living in caves for the last couple of years—they know what's up with that. What's new in your world? What has changed for you aside from all of this in the past couple of years working in one of the most thankless of all jobs, an analyst in the cloud computing industry?Rachel: Well, the job stuff is all excellent and I've had wonderful time working at RedMonk. So, RedMonk overall is an analyst firm that is focused on helping people understand technology trends, particularly from the view of the developer or the practitioner. So, helping to understand how the people who are using technologies are actually driving their overall adoption. And so there has been all kinds of interesting things that have happened in that score in the last couple of years. We've seen a lot of interesting trends, lots of fun things to look at in the space and it's been a lot.On a personal side, like a week into lockdown I found out that I was pregnant, so I went through all of locking down and the heart of the pandemic pregnant. I had my maternity leave earlier this year and came back and so excited to be back in. But it's also just been a lot to catch up on in the space as you come back from leave which I'm sure you are well familiar with.Corey: Yes, I did the same thing, slightly differently timed. My second daughter Josephine was born at the end of September. When did your kiddo arrive on the scene to a world of masked strangers?Rachel: So, I have an older daughter who just turned four, and then my youngest is coming up on his first birthday. He was born in December.Corey: Excellent. It sounds like our kids are basically the same age, in both directions. And from my perspective, at least looking back, what advice would I give someone for having a baby in a pandemic? It distills down to ‘don't,' just because it changes so much, it's no longer a trivial thing to have a grandparent come out and spend time with the kid. It's the constant… drumbeat of is this over? Is this not over?And that manifested a bunch of different ways. And I'm glad that I got the opportunity to take some time off to spend time with my family during that timeframe, but at the same time, it would've great if there were options such as not being stuck at home with every rambunctious—at the time—three-year-old as I went through that entire joy of having the kid.Rachel: Yeah. No, for the longest time, my thing was like, okay, like, there's no amount of money you could pay me to go back to middle school. I would never do it. And my new high bar there is no amount of money that you could pay me to go back to April 2020. That was the hardest month of my entire life was getting through that, like, first trimester, both parents at home, toddler at home, nowhere to go, no one to help. That was a [BLEEP] hard month. [laugh] that was bad.Corey: Oh, my God, yes, and we don't talk about this because we're basically communicating with people on social media, and everyone feels bad looking at social media because they're comparing their blooper reel with everyone else's highlights. And it feels odd on some level to complain about things like that. And let's be very clear as a man, I wind up in society getting lauded for even deigning to mention that I have children, whereas when mothers wind up talking about anything even slightly negative it's, “Oh, you sound like a bad mom.” And it is just one of the most abhorrent things out there in the world, I suppose. It's a strange inverted thing but one of the things that surprised me the most when I was expecting my first kid was looking at the different parenting forums, and the difference in tone was palpable where on the dad forums, everyone is super supportive and you got this dude it's great. You're fine. You're doing your best.Sure, these the occasional, “I gave my toddler beer and now people yell at me,” and it's, “What is wrong with you asshole?” But everyone else is mostly sane and doing their best. Whereas a lot of the ‘mommy' forums seem to bias more toward being relatively dismissive other people's parenting choices. And I understand I'm stereotyping wildly, not all forums, not all people, et cetera, et cetera, but it really was an interesting window into an area that as a stereotypical white man world, I don't see a lot of places I hang out with that are traditionally male that are overwhelmingly supportive in quite the same way. It was really an eye-opening experience for me.Rachel: I think you hit on some really important trends. One of the things that I have struggled with is—so I came into RedMonk—I've had a Twitter account forever, and it was always just, like, my personal Twitter account until I started working at RedMonk five years ago. And then all of a sudden I'm tweeting in technical and work capacities as well. And finding that balance initially was always a challenge.But then finding that balance again after having kids was very different because I would always—it was, kind of, mix of my life and also what I'm seeing in the industry and what I'm working on and this mix of things. And once you started tweeting about kids, it very much changes the potential perception that people have of who you are, what you're doing. I know this is just a mommy blogger kind of thing.You have to be really cognizant of that balance and making sure that you continue to put yourself in a place where you can still be your authentic self, but you really as a mom in the workspace and especially in tech have to be cognizant of not leaning too far into that. Because it can really damage your credibility with some audiences which is a super unfortunate thing, but also something I've learned just, like, I have to be really careful about how much mom stuff I share on Twitter.Corey: It's bizarre to me that we have to shade aspects of ourselves like this. And I don't know what the answer is. It's a weird thing that I never thought about before until suddenly I find that, oh, I'm a parent. I guess I should actually pay attention to this thing now. And it's one of those once you see it you can't unsee it things and it becomes strange and interesting and also more than a little sad in some respects.Rachel: I think there are some signs that we are getting to a better place, but it's a hard road for parents I think, and moms, in particular, working moms, all kinds of challenges out there. But anyways, it's one of those ones that is nice because love having my kids as a break, but sometimes Mondays come and it's such a relief to come back to work after a weekend with kids. Kids are a lot of work. And so it has brought elements of joy to my personal life, but it has also brought renewed elements of joy to my work life as really being able to lean into that side of myself. So, it's been a good year.Corey: Now that I have a second kid, I'm keenly aware of why parents are always very reluctant to wind up—the good parents at least to say, “Oh yeah, I have X number of kids, but that one's my favorite.” And I understand now why my mom always said with my brother and I that, “I can't stand either one of you.” And I get that now. Looking at the children of cloud services it's like, which one is my favorite?Well, I can't stand any of them, but the one that I hate the most is the Managed NAT Gateway because of its horrible pricing. In fact, anything involving bandwidth pricing in this industry tends to be horrifying, annoying, ill-behaved, and very hard to discipline. Which is why I think it's probably time we talk a little bit about egress charges in cloud providers.You had a great analysis of Cloudflare's R2, which is named after a robot in Star Wars and is apparently also the name of their S3 competitor, once it launches. Again, this is a pre-announcement, yeah, I could write blog posts that claim anything; the proof is really going to be in the pudding. Tell me more about, I guess, what you noticed from that announcement and what drove you to, “Ah, I have thoughts on this?”Rachel: So, I think it's an interesting announcement for several reasons. I think one of them is that it makes their existing offering really compelling when you start to add in that object store to something like the CDN, or to their edge functions which is called their Workers platform. And so, if you start to combine some of those functionalities together with a better object storage story, it can make their existing offering a lot more compelling which I think is an interesting aspect of this.I think one of the aspects that is probably gotten a lot more of the traction though is their lack of egress pricing. So, I think that's really what took everyone's imaginations by storm is what does the world look like when we are not charging egress pricing on object storage?Corey: What I find interesting is that when this came out first, a lot of AWS fans got very defensive over it, which I found very odd because their egress charges are indefensible from my point of view. And their response was, “Well, if you look at how a lot of the data access patterns work this isn't as big of a deal as it looks like,” and you're right. If I have a whole bunch of objects living in an object store, and a whole bunch of people each grab one of those objects this won't help me in any meaningful sense.But if I have one object that a bunch of people grab, well, suddenly we're having a different conversation. And on some level, it turns into an interesting question of what differentiates this with their existing CDN-style approach. From my perspective, this is where the object actually lives rather than just a cache that is going to expire. And that is transformative in a bunch of different ways, but my, I guess, admittedly overstated analysis for some use cases was okay, I store a petabyte in AWS and use it with and without this thing. Great, the answer came out to something like 51 or $52,000 in egress charges versus zero on Cloudflare. That's an interesting perspective to take. And the orders of magnitude in difference are eye-popping assuming that it works as advertised, which is always the caveat.Rachel: Yeah. I remember there was a RedMonk conversation with one of the cloud vendors set us up with a client conversation that want to, kind of, showcase their products kind of thing. And it was a movie studio and they walked us through what they architecturally have to do when they drop a trailer. If you think about that thing from this use case where all of a sudden you have videos that are all going out globally at the same time, and everybody wants to watch it and you're serving it over and over, that's a super interesting and compelling use case and very different from a cost perspective.Corey: You'll notice the video streaming services all do business with something that is not AWS for what they stream to end-users from. Netflix has its own Open Connect project that effectively acts as their own homebuilt CDN that they partner with providers to put in their various environments. There are a bunch of providers that focus specifically on this. But if you do the math for the Netflix story at retail pricing—let's be clear at large scale, no one pays retail pricing for anything, but okay—even assuming that you're within hailing distance of the same universe as retail pricing; you don't have to watch too many hours of Netflix before the data egress charges cost more than you're paying a month than subscription. And I have it on good authority—read as from their annual reports—that a much larger expense for Netflix than their cloud and technology and R&D expenses is their content expenses.They're making a lot of original content. They're licensing an awful lot of content, and that's way more expensive than providing it to folks. They have to have a better economic model. They need to be able to make a profit of some kind on streaming things to people. And with the way that all the major cloud providers wind up pricing this stuff, it's not tenable. There has to be a better answer.Rachel: So, Netflix calls to mind an interesting antidote that has gone around the industry which is who can become each other faster? Can HBO become Netflix faster, or can Netflix become HBO faster? So, can you build out that technology infrastructure side, or can you build out that content side? And I think what you're talking to with their content costs speaks to that story in terms of where people are investing and trying to actually make dents in their strategic outlays.I think a similar concept is actually at play when we talk about cloud and CDN. We do have this interesting piece from my coworker, Steve O'Grady, and he called it “Convergent Evolution of CDNs and Clouds.” And they originally evolved along separate paths where CDNs were designed to do this edge-caching scenario, and they had the core compute and all of the things that go around it happening in the cloud.And I think we've seen in recent years both of them starting to grow towards each other where CDNs are starting to look a lot more cloud-like, and we're seeing clouds trying to look more CDN-like. And I think this announcement in particular is very interesting when you think about what's happening in the CDN space and what it actually means for where CDNs are headed.Corey: It's an interesting model in that if we take a look at all of the existing cloud providers they had some other business that funded the incredible expense outlay that it took to build them. For example, Amazon was a company that started off selling books and soon expanded to selling everything else, and then expanded to putting ads in all of their search portals, including in AWS and eroding customer trust.Google wound up basically making all of their money by showing people ads and also killing Google Reader. And of course, Microsoft has been a software company for a lot longer than they've been a cloud provider, and given their security lapses in Azure recently is the question of whether they'll continue to be taken seriously as a cloud provider.But what makes Cloudflare interesting from this approach is they start it from the outside in of building out the edge before building regions or anything like that. And for a lot of use cases that works super well, in theory. In practice, well, we've never seen it before. I'm curious to see how it goes. Obviously, they're telling great stories about how they envision this working out in the future. I don't know how accurate it's going to be—show, don't tell—but I can at least acknowledge that the possibility is definitely there.Rachel: I think there's a lot of unanswered questions at this point, like, will you be able to have zero egress fees, and edge-like latencies, and global distribution, and have that all make sense and actually perform the way that the customer expects? I think that's still to be seen. I think one of the things that we have watched with interest is this rise of—I think for lack of a better word techno-nationalism where we are starting to see enclaves of where people want technology to be residing, where they want things to be sourced from, all of these interesting things.And so having this global network of storage flies in the face of some of those trends where people are building more and more enclaves of we're going to go big and global. I think that's interesting and I think data residency in this global world will be an interesting question.Corey: It also gets into the idea of what is the data that's going to live there. Because the idea of data residency, yes, that is important, but where that generally tends to matter the most is things like databases or customer information. Not the thing that we're putting out on the internet for anyone who wants to, to be able to download, which has historically been where CDNs are aiming things.Yes, of course, they can restrict it to people with logins and the rest, but that type of object storage in my experience is not usually subject to heavy regulation around data residency. We'll see because I get the sense that this is the direction Cloudflare is attempting to go in, and it's really interesting to see how it works. I'm curious to know what their stories are around, okay, you have a global network. That's great. Can I stipulate which areas my data can live within or not?At some point, it's going to need to happen if they want to look at regulated entities, but not everyone has to start with that either. So, it really just depends on what their game plan is on this. I like the fact that they're willing to do this. I like the fact they're willing to be as transparent as they are about their contempt for AWS's egress fees. And yes, of course, they're a competitor.They're going to wind up smacking competition like this, but I find it refreshing because there is no defense for what they're saying, their math is right. Their approach to what customers experience from AWS in terms of egress fees is correct. And all of the defensiveness at, well, you know, no one pays retail price for this, yeah, but they see it on the website when they're doing back-of-the-envelope math, and they're not going to engage with you under the expectation that you're going to give them a 98% discount.So, figure out what the story is. And it's like beating my head against the wall. I also want to be fair. These networks are very hard to build, and there's a tremendous amount of investment. The AWS network is clearly magic in some respects just because having worked in data centers myself, the things that I see that I'm able to do between various EC2 instances at full network line rate would not have been possible in the data centers that I worked within.So, there's something going on that is magic and that's great. And I understand that it's expensive, but they've done a terrible job of messaging that. It just feels like, oh, bandwidth in is free because, you know, that's how it works. Sending it out, ooh, that's going to cost you X and their entire positioning and philosophy around it just feels unnecessary.Rachel: That's super interesting. And I think that also speaks to one of the questions that is still an open concern for what happens to Cloudflare if this is wildly successful. Which, based off of people's excitement levels at this point, it's seems like it's very potentially going to be successful. And what does this mean for the level of investment that they're going to have to make in their own infrastructure and network and order to actually be able to serve all of this?Corey: The thing that I find curious is that in a couple of comment threads on Hacker News and on Twitter, Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince—who's always been extremely accessible as far as executives of giant cloud companies go—has said that at their scale and by which they he's referring to Cloudflare, and he says, “I assume that Amazon can probably get at least as decent economics on bandwidth pricing as we can,” which is a gross understatement because Amazon will spend years fighting over 50 cents.Great, but what's interesting is that he refers to bandwidth at that scale as being much closer to a fixed cost than something that's a marginal cost for everything that a customer uses. The way that companies buy and sell bandwidth back and forth is complex, but he's right. It is effectively a fixed monthly fee for a link and you can use as much or as little of that link as you want. 95th percentile billing aficionados, please don't email me.But by and large, that's the way to think about it. You pay for the size of the pipe, not how much water flows through it. And as long as you can keep the links going without saturating them to the point where more data can't fit through at a reasonable amount of time, your cost don't change. So, yeah, if there's a bunch of excitement they'll have to expand the links, but that's generally a fixed cost as opposed to a marginal cost per gigabyte.That's not how they think about it. There's a whole translation layer that's an economic model. And according to their public filings, they have something like a 77% gross margin which tells me that, okay, they are not in fact losing money on bandwidth even now where they generally don't charge on a metered basis until you're on the Cloudflare Enterprise Plan.Rachel: Yeah. I think it's going to just be really interesting to watch. I'm definitely interested to see what happens as they open this up, and like, 11 9s of availability feels like a lot of availabilities. It's just the engineering of this, the economics of this it feels like there's a lot of open questions that I'm excited to watch.Corey: You're onto my favorite part of this. So, the idea of 11 9s because it sounds ludicrous. That is well within the boundaries of probability of things such as, yeah, it is likely that gravity is going to stop working than it is that's going to lose data. How can you guarantee that? Generally speaking, although S3 has always been extremely tight-lipped about how it works under the hood, other systems have not been.And it looks an awful lot like the idea of Reed-Solomon erasure coding, where for those of us who spent time downloading large files of questionable legality due to copyright law and whatnot off of Usenet, they had the idea of parity files where they'd take these giant media files up—they're Linux ISOs; of course they are—and you'd slice them into a bunch of pieces and then generate parity files as well.So, you would wind up downloading the let's say 80 RAR files and, oh, three of them were corrupt, each parity file could wind up swapping in so as long as you had enough that added up to 80, any of those could wind up restoring the data that had been corrupted. That is almost certainly what is happening at the large object storage scale. Which is great, we're going to break this thing into a whole bunch of chunks. Let's say here is a file you've uploaded or an object.We're going to break this into a hundred chunks—let's say arbitrarily—and any 80 of those chunks can be used to reconstitute the entire file. And then you start looking at where you place them and okay, what are the odds of simultaneous drive failure in these however many locations? And that's how you get that astronomical number. It doesn't mean what people think of does. The S3 offers 11 9s of durability on their storage classes, including the One Zone storage class.Which is a single availability zone instead of something that's an entire region, which means that they're not calculating disaster recovery failure scenarios into that durability number. Which is fascinating because it's far, like, you're going to have all the buildings within the same office park burn down than it is all of the buildings within a hundred square miles burn down, but those numbers remain the same.There's a lot of assumptions baked into that and it makes for an impressive talking point. I just hear it as, oh yeah, you're a real object-store. That's how I see it. There's a lot that's yet to be explained or understood. And I think that I'm going to be going up one side and down the other as soon as this exists in the real world and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I'm just a little skeptical because it has been preannounced.The important part for me is even the idea that they can announce something like this and not be sued for securities fraud tells me that it is at least theoretically economically possible that they could be telling the truth on this. And that alone speaks volumes to just how out-of-bounds it tends to be in the context of giant cloud customers.Rachel: I mean, if you read Matt Levine, “Everything is Securities Fraud?“ so, I don't know how much we want to get excited about that.Corey: Absolutely. A huge fan of his work. Corey: You know its important to me that people learn how to use the cloud effectively. Thats why I'm so glad that Cloud Academy is sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. They're a great way to build in demand tech skills the way that, well personally, I learn best which I learn by doing not by reading. They have live cloud labs that you can run in real environments that aren't going to blow up your own bill—I can't stress how important that is. Visit cloudacademy.com/corey. Thats C-O-R-E-Y, don't drop the “E.” Use Corey as a promo-code as well. You're going to get a bunch of discounts on it with a lifetime deal—the price will not go up. It is limited time, they assured me this is not one of those things that is going to wind up being a rug pull scenario, oh no no. Talk to them, tell me what you think. Visit: cloudacademy.com/corey,  C-O-R-E-Y and tell them that I sent you!Corey: So, we've talked a fair bit about what data egress looks like. What else have you been focusing on? What have you found that is fun, and exciting, and catches your eye in this incredibly broad industry lately?Rachel: Oh, there's all kinds of exciting things. One of the pieces of research that's been on my back-burner, usually I do it early summer, and it is—due to a variety of factors—still in my pipeline, but I always do a piece of research about base infrastructure pricing. And it's an annual piece of looking about what are all of the cloud providers doing in regards to their pricing on that core aspect of compute, and storage, and memory.And what does that look like over time, and what does that look like across providers? And it is absolutely impossible to get an apples-to-apples comparison over time and across providers. It just can't actually be done. But we do our best [laugh] and then caveat the hell out of it from there. But that's the piece of research that's most on my backlog right now and one that I'm working on.Corey: I think that there's a lot of question around the idea of what is the cost of a compute unit—or something like that—between providers? The idea of if I have this configuration will cost me more on cloud provider a or cloud provider B, my pet working theory is that whenever people ask for analyses like that—or a number of others, to be perfectly frank with you—what they're really looking for is confirmation bias to go in the direction that they wanted to go in already. I have yet to see a single scenario where people are trying to decide between cloud providers and they say, “That one because it's going to be 10% less.” I haven't seen it. That said I am, of course, at a very particular area of the industry. Have you seen it?Rachel: I have not seen it. I think users find it interesting because it's always interesting to look at trends over time. And in particular, with this analysis, it's interesting to watch the number of providers narrow and then widen back out because we've been doing this since 2012. So, we used to have [unintelligible 00:26:24] and HPE used to be in there. So, like, we used to—CenturyLink. We used to have this broader list of cloud providers that we considered that would narrow down to this doesn't really count anymore.And now why do you need to back out? It's like, okay, Oracle Cloud you're in, Alibaba, Tencent, like, let's look at you. And so, like, it's interesting to just watch the providers in the mix shift over time which I think is interesting. And I think one of just the broad trends that is interesting is early years of this, there was steep competition on price, and that leveled off for solid three, four years.We've seen some degree of competitiveness reemerge with competitors like Oracle in particular. So, those broad-brush trends are interesting. The specifics of the pricing if you're doing 10% difference kind of things I think you're missing the point of the analysis largely, but it's interesting to look at what's happening in the industry overall.Corey: If you were to ask me to set up a simple web app, if there is such a thing, and tell you in advance what it was going to cost to host, and I can get it accurate within 20%, I am on fire in terms of both analysis and often dumb luck just because it is so difficult to answer the question. Getting back to our earlier conversational topic, let's say I put CloudFront, Amazon's sorry excuse for a CDN, in front of it which is probably the closest competitor they have to Cloudflare as a CDN, what'll it cost me per gigabyte? Well, that's a fascinating question. The answer comes down to where are you visiting it from? Depending where on the planet, people who are viewing my website, or using my web app are sitting, the cost per gigabyte will vary between eight-and-a-half cents—retail pricing—and fourteen cents. That's a fairly wide margin and there's no way to predict that in advance for most use cases. It's the big open-ended question.And people build out their environments and they want to know they're making a rational decision and that their provider is not charging three times more than their competitor is for the exact same thing, but as long as it's within a certain level of confidence interval, that makes sense.Rachel: Yeah, and I think the other thing that's interesting about this analysis and one of the reasons that it's a frustrating analysis for me, in particular, is that I feel like that base compute is actually not where most of the cloud providers are actually competing anymore. So, like, it was definitely the interesting story early in cloud.I think very clearly not the focus area for most of us now. It has moved up an abstraction layer. It's moved to manage services. It has moved to other areas of their product portfolio. So, it's still useful. It's good to know. But I think that the broader portfolio of the cloud providers is definitely more the story than this individual price point.Corey: That is an interesting story because I believe it, and it speaks to the aspirational version of where a lot of companies see themselves going. And then in practice, I see companies talking like this constantly, and then I look in their environment and say, “Okay, you're basically spending 70% of your entire cloud bill on EC2 instances, running—it's a bunch of VMs that sit there.”And as much as they love to talk about the future and how other things are being considered and how their—use of machine learning in the rest, and Kubernetes, of course, a lot of this stuff all distills down to, yeah, it runs in software. It sits on top of EC2 instances and that's what you get billed for. At re:Invent it's always interesting and sad at the same time that they don't give EC2 nearly enough attention or stage time because it's not interesting, despite it being a majority of AWS bill.Rachel: I think that's a fantastic point, well made.Corey: I'll take it even one step further—and this is one where I think is almost a messaging failure on some level—Google Cloud offers sustained use discounts which apparently they don't know how to talk about appropriately, but it's genius. The way this works is if you run a VM for more than in a certain number of hours in a month, the entire month is now charged for that VM at a less than retail rate because you've been using it in a sustained way.All you have to do to capture that is don't turn it off. You know, what everyone's doing already. And sure if you commit to usage on it you get a deeper discount, but what I like about this is if you buy some reserved instances is or you buy some committed use discounting, great, you'll save more money, but okay, here's a $20 million buy. You should click the button on, people are terrified to click at that button because I don't usually get to approve dollar figure spend with multiple commas in them. That's kind of scary. So, people hem and they haw and they wait six months. This is maybe not as superior mathematically, but it's definitely an easier sell psychologically, and they just don't talk about it.It's what people say they care about when people actually do are worlds apart. And the thing that continually astounds me because I didn't expect it, but it's obvious in hindsight that when it comes to cloud economics it's more about psychology than it is about math.Rachel: I think one of the things that, having come from the finance world into the analyst world, and so I definitely have a particular point of view, but one of the things that was hardest for me when I worked in finance was not the absolute dollar amount of anything but the variability of it. So, if I knew what to expect I could work with that and we could make it work. It was when things varied in unexpected ways that it was a lot more challenging.And so I think one of the things that when people talked about, like, this shift to cloud and the move to cloud, and everyone is like, “Oh, we're moving things from the balance sheet to the income statement.” And everyone talked about that like it's a big deal. For some parts of the organization that is a big deal, but for a lot of the organization, the shift that matters is the shift from a fixed cost to a variable cost because that lack of predictability makes a lot of people's jobs, a lot more difficult.Corey: The thing that I always find fun is a thought exercise is okay, let's take a look at any given cloud company's cloud bill for the last 18 to 36 months and add all of that up. Great, take that big giant number and add 20% to it. If you could magically go back in time and offer that larger number to them as here's your cloud bill and all of your usage for the next 18 to 36 months. Here you go. Buy this instead.And the cloud providers laugh at me and they say, “Who in the world would agree to that deal?” And my answer is, “Almost everyone.” Because at the company's scale it's not like the individual developer response of, “Oh, my God, I just spent how much money? I've got to eat this month.” Companies are used to absorbing those things. It's fine. It's just a, “We didn't predict this. We didn't plan for this. What does this do to our projections, our budget, et cetera?”If you can offer them certainty and find some way to do it, they will jump at that. Most of my projects are not about make the bill lower, even though that is what is believed, in some cases by people working on these projects internally at these companies. It's about making it understandable. It's about making it predictable, it's about understanding when you see a big spike one month. What project drove that?Spoiler, it's almost always the data science team because that's what they do, but that's neither here nor there. Please don't send me letters. But yeah, it's about understanding what is going on, and that understanding and being able to predict it is super hard when you're looking at usage-based pricing.Rachel: Exactly.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me. If people want to hear more about your thoughts, your observations, et cetera, where can they find you?Rachel: Probably the easiest way to get in touch with me is on Twitter, which is @rstephensme that's R-S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S-M-E.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Rachel: Thanks for having me. This was great.Corey: Rachel Stephens, senior analyst at RedMonk. I'm Cloud Economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment, angrily defending your least favorite child, which is some horrifying cloud service you have launched during the pandemic.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The world of mokuhanga has a lot of moving parts. It's a machine that needs to be consistently monitored, updated and supervised. This is especially true when most mokuhanga practitioners are the ones working on every step to get their finished product. Many times we as mokuhanga artists tend to overlook what goes into our tools; the barens, the brushes, pigments and paper, many of us simply wanting to get the work, “done.” Jon Lee, a printmaker, craftsperson and artist based in San Antonio, Texas goes a little deeper where most people don't. Jon makes barens, and brushes, and paper through his academic work as well as personally. In this episode of The Unfinished Print I speak to Jon Lee about how he approaches his work, how he builds and constructs his tools, his studying under master baren maker Gotō Hidehiko, and how all of this melds with his academic research. Please follow The Unfinished Print and my own print work on Instagram @popular_wheatprints, Twitter @unfinishedprint, or email me at theunfinishedprint@gmail.com Notes: may contain a hyperlink. Simply click on the highlighted word or phrase. Jon Lee  - The Print Center bio and Instagram page  University of Iowa - founded in 1847 U of I is a public research university. More information can be found here. Trinity University of San Antonio - founded in 1869, more info can be found, here. mezzotint -  a print made using copper plate and a “rocker.” Invented in the mid-17th Century. More info can be found, here from The National Portrait Gallery, England. hanji Korean mulberry paper - is a paper used, amongst other ways, for woodblock printmaking. It's a very dense and fibrous paper.  More info can be found, here. Tamarind Institute - dedicated to prints of all types, this institution began in 1960 as a lithography workshop in Los Angeles. More information can be found, here. Akira Kurosaki (1937-2019) - one of the most influential woodblock print artists of the modern era. His work, while seemingly abstract, moved people with its vibrant colour and powerful composition. He was a teacher and invented the “Disc Baren,” which is a great baren to begin your mokuhanga journey with. At the 2021 Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, Japan there is a tribute exhibit of his life works. Azusa Gallery has a nice selection of his work, here. McClains Woodblock Print Supply Co.  - based in Portland, Oregon McClains is the go to supplier of woodblock print tools in the United States. Their website can be found, here. My interview with Daniel Jasa of McClain's can be found, here. Gotō Hidehiko - is a baren maker and printmaker from Japan. He has conducted workshops at MI Lab, the mokuhanga residence program , for baren making. He has also conducted workshops at the Mokuhanga Conference several times, and will be there in 2021. His prints can be found, here. Jim  Croft bookbinder - bookbinder based in Idaho. His website can be found, here. Hon baren - is the traditional Japanese baren used in mokuhanga printmaking. David Bull has a concise description of it, here. Wood-like Matsumura - a supplier of tools and other necessities for woodblock printmaking based in Tōkyō. Website can be found, here. Meiji Period (1868-1912) - a period of upheaval and change as the Tokugawa military government toppled with a brand new government replacing it, based on a European model. For a fantastic book on the subject please read, Meiji and His World by Donald Keene (1922-2019). Taishō Period  (1912-1926) - a short lived period of Japanese modern history but an important one in world history. This is where the militarism of fascist Japan began to take seed, leading to The Pacific War (1931-1945). More info can be found, here. Hosho paper - a handmade paper from Japan used for printmaking. Some information can be found here. Yokohama - a port city located in the prefecture of Kanagawa in Japan. Made famous for its Chinatown, historical foreign settlement and ramen museum. Yokohama-e was a series of prints made from around 1850-1870 about the new foreign people coming into Japan. More info can be found, here. Bracken plant - a fern located throughout the world. More info can be found, here. mochi - glutinous rice cake made for holidays or simply for everyday enjoyment   bfk Rives - a cotton mould paper used for printmaking Hangul - is the written system of the Korean language with 10 consonants and 14 vowels. More info, here. King Sejong or Sejong The Great (1397-1450) - was the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897), and amongst other contributions to Korean culture, helped create the Hangul language. Shinjuku City - a ward in the city of Tōkyō famously known for its entertainment district, parks, and shopping.  More info can be found, here. Shibuya City - a ward in the city of Tōkyō also, famously known for its shopping and heavy tourism. More info can be found, here. urushi  - is a type of lacquer used  in Japanese lacquerware for hundreds of years especially in maki-e lacquer decoration. A very good blog posting by Woodspirit Handcraft has great information about urushi, here. David Bull size recipe (s) - can be found here. tempera - a pigment mixed with binder historically used throughout Europe and the Middle East. More info, here. gesso - a hard drying white paint used in priming canvas for work. More info can be found, here. Nakayama stone - a very famous sharpening stone which can fetch to upwards of 7,000 CDN, like here. From a region in Kyōto,  the stone requires little to no soaking in water. Japan Stone has more info, here. opening and closing credit background music:  By the almighty KRS One. ‘Outta Here' from the 1993 album Return of the Boom Bap.  © Popular Wheat Productions logo designed an produced by Douglas Batchelor and André Zadorozny  Disclaimer: Please do not reproduce or use anything from this podcast without shooting me an email and getting my express written or verbal consent. I'm friendly :) if you find any issue with something in the show notes please let me know. The opinions expressed in The Unfinished Print podcast are not necessarily those of Andre Zadorozny and of Popular Wheat Productions.  

Topics covered in this episode:Misconceptions about working with a registered dietitianHow can you refocus on intuitive eating?The relationship between trauma and disordered eatingWhy food is more than just fuelGuest Bio:Maria is a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN) and a Washington State certified dietitian-nutritionist (CDN) with a Master of Science degree in Human Nutrition and Food Science. She is the creator and owner of Inspired Eating, a virtual Health at Every Size® practice that helps people who feel anxiety and guilt around food, who engage in disordered eating thoughts and behaviors and those who are in eating disorder recovery make peace with food and eat in a supportive and nourishing way. Maria works with clients from a trauma-informed and Polyvagal Theory lens. Consults focus heavily on understanding behaviors, intuitive eating strategies, shifts in mindset and support.Maria is also a professional mountain ultra trail runner for the shoe company, La Sportiva. Her athletic accomplishments include North American Mountain Running Champion, Trail Half Marathon National Champion, and member of multiple U.S. teams competing throughout North America and Europe. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.Connect With Maria DalzotWebsite: www.mariadalzotRD.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mariadalzot/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mariadalzotRDTwitter: https://twitter.com/mariadalzotRD Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform

EP281 - Mark Mahaney, author and top internet analyst  Mark Mahaney is Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI, Research Division, he's one of the original and longest lasting internet analysts on Wall Street. He recently published “Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons from One of Wall Street's Top Tech Analysts.” We cover a variety of fun topics including the beginning of his career with with Mary Meeker. His initial evaluation of EBay. His long positions on Amazon, Netflix, and Priceline, and butting heads with Jim Cramer over Google. We also discuss what's next for Amazon, and where the best investments of the future might be. Episode 281 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, November 18th, 2021 http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:00] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 281 being recorded on Thursday November 18 20 21. I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:16] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners. Jason as you and the listeners know I am a huge scene in b.c. junkie and you can't turn on CNBC Durning Earth during earning Seasons without seeing Mark mahaney he is one of the top internet analyst. He was actually on recently talking about the artist previously known as Facebook meta Mark has a new book out called quote-unquote Nothing But net and is joining us tonight give listeners an early peek of what is sure to be the best seller in the bookmark covers some of our favorite companies including Amazon Apple Facebook / meta Google Netflix Twitter and Uber Mark welcome to the show. Mark: [0:56] Thanks for having me on guys. Jason: [0:58] Mark we are thrilled the chat with you is you know Scott is a huge Amazon fan boy so I anytime he gets a chance to talk Amazon he's excited. And I'm super excited because after tonight show I'm going to be smart enough to get rich like you and Scott so that's pretty pretty exciting for me. But before we jump into all that we always like to give listeners a little bit of a feel for our guests background and in your case I know I think you're officially the the oldest analysts on Wall Street is that true. Mark: [1:29] Well that's the oldest and longest lasting internet analyst on Wall Street but I don't look the part so how about we do that yes I've been covering Internet stock since 1998 do a series of bank said I started, working with this tremendous analysts her name was Mary Meeker her name is Mary Meeker and started the first Friday I was on Wall Street I got a call from the CFO of this tiny little online auction company that sold Pez dispensers and was looking to see whether any banks would be interested in their IPO that company was eBay so I wasn't there at the beginning of the internet but I was there pretty close to the beginning of the commercial for the public market to internet and it's been a fascinating ride and I thought there were a lot of lessons I could draw both from the successes the market and failures in the market and my personal successes and failures as a stock picker. Scot: [2:20] Cool what's so name some of the firm's so in my recollection you've probably worked at six firms like how many firms have you worked out over or that career. Mark: [2:30] Yeah now I don't want you to think I you know I jump around too much but I started off at Morgan Stanley also worked at Citibank Royal Bank of Canada. A small boot wonderful Boutique called American Technology research and I'm currently at evercore isi but I've been doing nothing but net. Hence the title of the book that's been my email tagline or always online is one of those two it's been my email tagline for 25 years but nothing but net and that's just doing my best to try to stay ahead of these internet stocks the early ones the the eBay's the Amazons the Yahoo excite if you might remember them infoseek. And then and then AOL and then and then later on some of the more Dynamic ones came out ended up with names like uber including most recently one you talked about Warby Parker so it's been a fascinating span and arguably one of the most dynamic. Parts of Wall Street I guess if you were working as an analyst on Wall Street. Or portfolio manager portfolio manager if you could have picked two sectors to be a part of to track over the last 25 years one of them has to have been the internet just how explosive it's been a been plenty of – explosions in there but there's been some wonderful wealth creation the other sector would probably be software just just too wonderful Industries I got lucky I was I was part of the internet. Scot: [3:49] Yeah I'm glad you didn't pick Mall Focus treats that would have been a bad choice. So you know as Jason mentioned there's kind of this auspicious title that you have of the oldest I would say wisest and most longest lasting internet unless. Tell us about some of the as you reflect in the book is kind of got some really good stories and you've been kind of on the front row seat of a lot of cool stuff maybe tell us what was your worst pick and best pick in the span of the career there. Mark: [4:22] Well I had a sale on Google it close to its IPO I was brought on to CNBC show and told by none other than Jim Jim Cramer that I was an analyst with a three-egg omelette on my face because of my cell phone call he was right I was wrong so you know one doesn't pretend one doesn't tend to forget moments like that on public television being told that you know you're pretty much an ass. But it does happen you know there are axes and then there are you know others and so I made plenty of mistakes I had to buy on Blue Apron although the lessons from that turned out to be different than I thought I got the call wrong but the lessons were different than I thought I kind of dissect that a little bit in the book. So those are some of my some of my worst calls I think my to my three best calls have frankly been sticking with a buy on Amazon for pretty much the last 15 years Netflix for the last 12 years and Priceline and now now booking for. [5:18] For a solid 12 years both Netflix of all three of those were really decades-long S&P 500 Best in Class stocks for a variety of different reasons and in the book I try to call out what were those reasons what were the what's that what's the pattern recognition so that you know we as investors can find the next Netflix and the next Amazon doesn't mean and Amazon and Netflix can't perform well from here but what are the things you can see in common that can help you as a stock picker you know kind of see ahead what really kind of started a lot of the the insights the idea of the book was this wonderful book that was written in 1980 called that one up on wall by Peter Lynch kind of a Bible or primer for anybody really looking to invest invest in the market with some wonderful advice and I really had any wrote it based on some wonderful examples of successful stocks and companies of his generation and I thought somebody needed to write one about our generation and you know these phenomenal money-making we know wealth-creating stocks that have. [6:19] That have soared the charts top the charts over the last 20 10 5 and even two years that have been dramatic dramatic winners from the covid crisis to I try to keep it long term in duration and frankly that's one of the big lessons I have in my book is. Is you know long-term I've found stocks do follow fundamentals they just do companies get bigger more Revenue more profits their stocks go higher almost always that's the case if you're a patient long-term investor so you can make money just investing you don't need to day trade and I think that was the last thing that really inspired me to write this book there about 15 million new. [6:53] Trading accounts that have opened up over the last two years you know the mean Traders the Robin Hood accounts and I just wanted to step back and say look you can have very good returns in the markets by buying high quality companies especially Tech and growth companies you don't have to day trade you can sleep better at night I got plenty of examples of companies that created wonderful. Shareholder returns over time and their stories you can take your time and really understand and stick with and anyway that's it this is this book is a little bit of little bit of personal Memoir but really more of a history of the Great. Companies and the ones that failed and then what are the lessons you can draw to apply going forwards. Jason: [7:32] Got it so I know it's not in your coverage area but you would have a buy on GameStop is that what you're saying no. I Nostalgia requires me to ask though I am staring right now at a pets.com. Puppet still in the box that's like sort of a Memento I have on my on my desk like we're you covering like those guys at the at the. Dot-com boom. Mark: [8:00] No no I didn't but I refer to that in the book and I make this I draw the comparison you know pets.com and smoke you know pets.com went public with trailing 12 month month revenues of 5 million I don't know if you heard that right five million dollars. [8:16] Trailing 12 months they had been an operating company for under two years I mean how that thing got out you know in hindsight is is is pretty shocking but wait a second go you know go forward 15 years and what came out. To e.com chewy.com went public with 3 billion in trailing sales and you knows the same sort of basic value proposition to Consumers it's just that the market was a lot bigger it allowed for a lot more scale and a bunch of other things came out o like cell phones smartphones cloud computing which allowed companies to scale up at much lower costs and so the markets really were proved out at that you know the time of pets.com there were three unknowns is there really an internet Market are there really good management teams and other really good business models today the first question is emphatically yes they are huge Market opportunities and they've been proven in in the Internet space advertising retail entertainment a lot of different ways you can cut it and there's some business models have generated enormous amounts of free cash flow and then there are yes of course there's always a few select excellent management teams who find that right combination it can be it's proven to be a great path to making money in stocks and chewy has been a stock that I've really liked since its IPO even though it's the next pets.com and that's the cynicism that people be placed in front of it when they went public. This was a very different puppy. Jason: [9:39] Yeah it does it seems like timing it seems obvious but timing is such a big. Part of all that you referenced Peter Lynch and I know you know there's. There's all the old Netflix stuff I actually started my career at Blockbuster entertainment and so in my in my industry everyone makes fun of Blockbuster that we got Netflix stand and all those sorts of things and I always have to point out. You know we sold Blockbuster for 18 billion dollars in 1995 like five years before Netflix was invented. Then it was a good business with a good exit you know every every business has it it's it's moment and it's time and you know the the railroads aren't the investment that they once were either. Mark: [10:28] Netflix is a fascinating story so let me let me let me jump to it a little bit you know one of the things the punchline of I asked people if you're going to remember one thing for my book I hope you'll still buy it but if you're going to remember one thing from my book it's dhq it's not DQ That's Dairy Queen dhq is dislocated high-quality companies and. You know time you mentioned timing I was thinking in terms of stock timing I thought those were your going to take us I think it's very hard to the time stocks but you know you can clearly see when stocks are dislocated I either traded off twenty Thirty forty percent so that's usually you know time if you think it's high quality asset and it dislocates them they all dislocate from time to time even the best highest quality names. That's when you can kind of Step In add the positions by the stock knowing that you in a way mitigated some of the valuation risk as investors your tries an investor you're trying to do two things mitigate valuation risk and mitigate fundamentals risk you know the chance that Revenue falls off a cliff margins get crushed the way you mitigate that fundamentals. Risk is to focus on companies with large Tam's excellent management teams great product Innovation and superb customer value prop and Netflix screen so well for me on those four things I'll just take this off super quickly if you don't mind. [11:42] The industry Vision so let's see Reed Hastings invented or started Netflix back in 1997 Netflix the name itself sort of implies that somehow we're going to be doing some streaming thing and this is a 1997 when it would have taken you four hours to download the first five minutes of Terminator like there was no streaming Market there but yet. [12:02] That was the premise of the company in 10 years later you know you look at the first initial interviews with Reed Hastings I mean this is where he was going to take the company all along so I was just giving him kudos for industry vision and the fact that he was willing to cannibalize his existing DVD business first dreaming business very few entrepreneurs can do that so management you know checks My Box customer value proposition the best way to tell whether a customer a company has a great value proposition is do they have pricing power will do people love it so much that they'll pay more for starting in 2014 Netflix started increasing pricing just about every other year and there's some ads accelerated that's a compelling that's evidence of compelling value proposition third is this product Innovation and you know they just don't have a lot of things not just streaming but there's a lot of these little tweaks that the side like binge watching you know kudos to Netflix for just rolling out new series all at once I mean practically invented binge-watching and of course you know they sort of invented the streaming thing or the people who founded music really did that but but Reed comes in a close close second on that and then you know I'm finally in terms of Tam's large Tam's total addressable markets. [13:13] You can add it up a couple of different ways but you know home entertainment video consumption it's it's a couple of hundred billion dollars in total you know Market opportunity and then who knows these things come along like smartphones and all of a sudden the majority of usage is on smartphones that tells you that these markets could be a lot bigger than we traditionally thought just like Spotify blew out the market for what really could be music advertising revenue and music subscription Revenue Netflix is did the same thing with me with Video subscription Revenue they blew up the tan they made it a lot bigger so that's right you know I love that story about the stories about Netflix I gave him a tremendous amount of Kudos I think the sometimes people under appreciate just because it's kind of a singular company just you know video video streaming I think they I think they don't get enough credit for what they've done and what they could still do because I think there's still one more one more trick up Reed Hastings sleeve and I think it's gaming and he's reached they've received such so much skepticism about this pivot or missing expansion in the gaming but you know management team to figured out dvd-by-mail streaming original content International expansion mount give them the benefit of the doubt that they can figure out an Innovative new way. To deliver gaming and therefore further increase their value proposition you'd want to stick with a company like that I stick with the stock like that. Scot: [14:34] Ever kind of a random question let's say there was I'll pick something at random a company that was Reinventing Car Care and making it mobile and digital would you call that a dhq. Mark: [14:45] I think that yes yes absolutely. Scot: [14:51] All right leading the witness. I do have to give you Kudos because in the Netflix section you do have a Star Wars reference you talk about the Disney death star which is which is appropriate because they now own the Death Star it's got a part of there is one of their IPs. Mark: [15:09] But by the way that was you know there were a couple of Netflix there's a rocky stock Rocky stock here that's right that's a that's a rocky stock for you it's had there were two times they miss Subs because of uncertainty over the price increases and they got some pushback it was an obvious that they had pricing power but they proved it over time and then they've got this great competitor risk with Disney and I think what the market missed on that this is just kind of leaving aside the book of just talking about stock picks is you know people are going to sign up for multiple streaming services now not now not five six or seven but they'll sign up for two or three if there's original content and they have original content I mean there's some things you will you have to sign up for Disney Plus for if you if people are like use God and you know dramatic. [15:52] Star Wars fans of course you can sign up for Disney plus but you know there's because its original content if you want to watch squid game there's one and one only place you can go for that and you know there's going to be another squid game or you know another show that just kind of breaks through the site-geist and by the way that's where Netflix is so I'll leave Netflix aside but I'm so struck by is this company shapes the Zeitgeist whether they can cause a run on chess board sales worldwide with the Queens Gambit a year ago where they can cause more people start studying Korean on Duolingo a language app which I actually like is the stock because they can you know they've introduced this show squid games like when a company reaches the Zeitgeist when they when they become almost like a lucky lexicon like they become a verb like I'm gonna google that or you know it's the Uber of this that or that you know that's that's something special and those are usually stocks that have gotten very long runways. Scot: [16:44] Yeah and I'm here in North Carolina and we have all these MBA we have all these universities and I was actually speaking earlier this week at MBA class over at Duke. And you know I have this whole little joke track that I do where I talk about my first company was profitable and I learned I could never raise VC because get the TV season that's a your profit we don't invest in property companies so yeah I often joke that I've been doing it wrong and ever since then I haven't made a dime. And I kind of thought it was those funny because you kind of. The internet sector was kind of early before SAS where and you point this out where there's kind of you know what we learned is there is an investor that loves Revenue growth and in a way that the opposite side of that coin is it can actually hurt you if you start to make profits maybe share with listeners that that you know probably many of them come from traditional businesses where that sounds nonsensical maybe maybe explain kind of what happened there. Mark: [17:41] Well I want to be I want to be on to get nuanced here which is you know I that chapter that says the most important thing out there is revenue revenue revenue you know for tech stocks and growth stock. But of course earnings and free cash flow matter it's that sometimes the public market is a lot longer term focused than people give it credit for Netflix is a great example that also is Amazon. I mean those those businesses had if you look at near-term valuation PE metrics price to free cash flow there's no way you would have bought those stocks. But what I think long-term growth investors realized is there's this you know when these get these assets that can grow their Top Line twenty to thirty percent Plus. From scale for multiple years like that can that creates an enormous amount of value over time and it's so rare I came up with something of a 20% rule you know it's one to two percent of the S&P 500 that can consistently grow at from scale their Top Line 20% which is like five times faster or six times faster than Global GDP growth so it's rare for good reasons but those companies dramatically outperformed the market because they're rare and it's not like growth and scale solve everything but geez they solve a lot of things I've yet to see it's got you know you go way back on this I'm sure you had these comments like Amazon will never turn a profit my first year on the street. [19:04] There's a person who's not one of the most influential investors out there put his finger in my chest. And said you know Amazon will never be profitable and you know I guess he must have been writing he was so smart but he was wrong because he didn't realize just what how powerful Amazon could be as it's scaled over time I mean you generate billions and billions in revenue and you can you can run over a lot of your fixed costs as long as you're not selling dollars for 95 cents you know if you're you know if you're selling them for a dollar and two cents and then you get scale against your fixed cost yeah scale will solve just about anything and I look at what happened with Amazon and I've looked at more much more recently its bring it up to up to date to Uber Uber just printed its first free cash flow quarter ever even though it's Rideshare businesses like down 40% since Pre-K covid levels how the heck did they do that because it took a lot of costs out of the business and then they had this delivery business that really scaled so look earnings matter it's just that when we look at tech stocks and growth stocks you know especially early on is IPOs they rarely go public. As profitable businesses the question you have to answer yourself is can they be profitable long-term are there companies that are already you know similar business models that are already are that's one way or their segments of the business that are already profitable. [20:19] Is there a reason that scale can't drive profitability for the company and the fourth what I call profitability Action question that detail this in a book is yo Are there specific steps steps that the management team can take to bring the product the company to profitability so I've yet to see a company. [20:36] And I'm sure there are some but I've yet to see one that hit the public markets that couldn't scale itself to profitability now some blew up. Well you know that's because they couldn't hit the enough scale so that's that's kind of my answer to the question of yes of course earnings and free cash flow matter at the end of the day that's what they're going to be valued on but just watch these companies that they really execute well they can take what looks like really aggressive valuations and overtime those valuations can turn awfully awfully attractive and a lot of times the stock wealth creation goes from point A to point B it doesn't start at point B. Jason: [21:10] Yeah the you know it's you mentioned then the Netflix. Effect on the cultural zygous fun fun stat on Queen's gamut it drove the sale of millions of chessboard and caused hundreds of people to start playing chess. I do one of the things that comes out strongest in in the book to me and that you alluded to upfront is sort of the difference between trading and investing. You know I always have people come up to me and they're like hey you know a lot about these retail companies what's a good investment and I'm like. I have no idea can you can you talk a little bit about sort of what you mean by sort of fundamental investing versus trading. Mark: [21:56] Well I sum it all up in the pithy expression don't play quarters I find playing quarters is almost a Fool's game the number of times I get questions you know what should I buy for the quarter and for little sophisticated institutional investors that could be I've got a position in. [22:15] Amazon or Google or Twitter and you know do I should I be you know heading into the position prior to earnings or you know facing back and adding to it more afterwards okay that's a different setup but if you're just playing a company for that quarter pop the problem is quarterly earnings reactions there's two things that drive them. Fundamentals great get the fundamentals right that it's expectations so the quarter trades are really about expectations you may get the quarter right you may be right that Nvidia or Roblox are going to have super strong quarters because I see how many of my friends kids are all over Roblox you maybe well right on that but you have to know you know what the market is actually expecting and numbers can go Revenue can accelerate but if the bar is higher than that then you're going to see these stocks trade off it happens a lot so I just unless you're unless you're a pro less you're in day in and day out. You know working working these stocks and really have a sense of where the expectations are. I think it's just a Fool's game to play play stocks just four quarters instead you know you want to stick with stocks for the you know you want to find an asset that you think is going to be. [23:29] Materially bigger in two to three years down the road and you think it's high quality based on some of the screens I threw out then stick with that name and don't try to play around the quarters and it's in fact sometimes you can use weakness or strength around the quarter to adjust your position but don't use it too initiator close out a position at the then you fall trap to these expectations game that is very hard to participate in if you're just a regular you know retail investor and you can make just as much money just staying invested in some of these great assets. Jason: [23:59] That is great advice and it's I certainly resonate with the sticking with the Investments I am curious though on the other end of that on the really long Horizon you mentioned you've you've been had a buy on Amazon for like 15 years. Wait. Like are you going to have a buying them for the next 15 years is that how I mean like does there come a point when they achieve their potential and you have to start worrying about them getting on the other side of the Hill. Mark: [24:26] Yeah I think you can I think you can one look for the fundamental towel and so I'm going to I'm going to spin over to another stock I talked about in the book Priceline. Which is actually the single best performing S&P 500 stock for like a 10 year period 2005 to 2015 phenomenal stock travel name everybody knows it William Shatner excetera although they're real secret sauce with what they did in European markets but. But that's a company that you know sustained premium growth like they were growing their bookings in the revenue 40 percent year over year for years and years and years and years and that's what powered that that that stock and when it stopped materially ah performed Market was when the growth rate decelerate it below 20%. [25:10] And so I don't want to you know create a hard and fast rule but I do feel strongly about this twenty percent rule 20 percent you know we're close to it you know don't don't Nick me at 19.8% you know could close to twenty percent is unusual rare growth. [25:23] And the markets usually pay up for that and when you see a company over time either because of Miss execution it happens or Market maturity and their growth rates you know kind of slide below 20% then that's when you reconsider your position that's a simplistic rule as a lot of caveats to that when I see with Amazon here is despite the size of this business I think they're still growing 20% for the next five years so in that if that's the case. [25:48] You know the simple rule of thumb is companies that can grow like. They can I like to see stocks that can double in in three years in order to do that you kind of have to do you know 20 to 25 percent earnings growth that's what a Maps out too. And you know you can double a stock in 3 years your handily beating the market in almost all time periods. And so when I see what it'll change my opinion really on Amazon is if I believe that this company is going to go X growth it's going to go you know well below 20 percent Revenue growth I just don't see that in the next couple of years given how much growth they have in retail in NE ws and cloud computing and in some of these really newer areas that I'm really interested in whether they really can crack the code on groceries and they can that's a large opportunity and business supplies Industrial Supplies I think that's a very underappreciated part of Amazon's business so I don't see myself changing my opinion on Amazon although you don't want things that we talked about this earlier that I love to see your founder LED companies that's no longer the case with with Amazon so that's you know at some level I've got slightly less conviction than the in the by case but I'm going to stick with it as long as the numbers prove out right and long as I can see this path that's consistent 20% Revenue. Scot: [26:59] Yeah and this is kind of breaking out of the book thing but since you brought up Amazon it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show if we didn't kind of double click on that what did any thoughts on the Q2 and Q3 earnings feels like they're slowing down a bit and feeling some of the labor and see what we call Supply pain on the show are you are you getting nervous about it or you think it's just a little one of their little kind of investment phases. Mark: [27:23] I called the six billion dollar kitchen sink that's how much lower their guidance was for operating income in the December quarter then then what the street was looking for like she was looking for close to eight billion and they guided to billions six billion dollar kitchen sink and they threw it all in there wage inflation you know you right you drive that route 95 on the east coast and you'll see Amazon Amazon is hiring Billboards up and down the East Coast Seaboard I did it recently so yeah they're aggressively hiring at higher wages that's impacting their margins there still some covid related cost shipping they're just not able to a sufficiently source and bring in product and so they have to bring in product into the the ports that aren't optimized for their distribution Network so just a lot of. [28:14] Positive blowing up now the question you have to ask yourself as an investor is are those are those cost increases elective structural discretionary temporary it's kind of like which of those are they the more that you can make a determination that the cost bikes are temporary the more you stick with the name if you think there's something structurally changed about Amazon okay that's different I don't think there's anything structurally changed about Amazon and certainly not its competitive position and then the last thing what I really like to see. [28:44] Frankly is this company. I mean the level of investment this company is making its distribution Network you know you talked about Facebook earlier they're dumping 10 billion into the metaverse which I think there's a there there but I don't know Amazon is dumping billions and billions into its own Logistics Network like they're doubling down on their core competency you bet I'll stick with that and what they're going to what's going to come out of that is even faster and faster delivery and they're going to prove out this concept what I call shipping elasticity the faster you ship the more that people are going to use you in a more of their of the more of their wallet and per-share you're going to Amazon's going to get so we're going to actually going to Super up one day delivery and then they're going to Super up super same day delivery and I think they'll be able to just grab more and more and offer more and more products to people so I like those kind of investment initiatives so I think a lot of that margin pressure by the way it was really due to these kind of elective investments in the infrastructure they added more distribution capacity the last two years than Walmart has in its history. That's how aggressive Amazon is being an eye you know my guess is that third we're going to see dramatic market share gains from Amazon in the next 12 months so I like those companies that kind of really lean in bendin and the double down on our core competency that's what the Amazon is doing now. Scot: [30:00] Yeah. The Press is making a lot of noise around Shopify versus Amazon and Shopify is kind of amplifying that with they're arming the rebels and everything. Jason Connor makes our I won't say his thing but he's not a believer in that I think it's kind of interesting in there's definitely no love lost between the company's what what's your take on that is that a real battle or is that just kind of genda by to kind of raise awareness for Shopify. Mark: [30:26] You have a quick point of view on that Scott. Scot: [30:29] I think Shopify becomes a Marketplace adjacent thinks that's crazy Jason what do you what I'll let you state your own opinion. Jason: [30:38] Yeah I mean I think Shopify is a phenomenal company and a good executor so I'm not throwing rocks at Shopify. They're to me they're not a competitor to Amazon they don't acquire customers they have no traffic there there. Piece of infrastructure and a great valuable piece of infrastructure but a piece of infrastructure. Doesn't draw any customers in so I call these people that are like oh man they're like Amazon they have all this aggregated gmv and they could sell ads to it and they can you know recruit more sellers because they have this this audience and all these things will they don't have any of those things they don't have a single b2c marketer. In their company and I would argue that's that's been one of Amazon's Court competencies is they've they use the flywheel to build this this huge audience that they get to sell all the. Their goods and services to so I just I don't think. They compete in any in any meaningful way and I think if Shopify were to try to become a true b2c company like Amazon. It would just be a phenomenal pivot it would be you know. Can't you know obviously they have the resources to fund trying for it but I'm not sure that's the best move for them. Mark: [31:57] Yeah I don't so I Do cover Shopify I've been really impressed with them I don't know them as well as I know Amazon but I've been super impressed. With them and terms of the product development and they are just providing more and more services to small Merchants so I think there's an are now bigger than eBay in terms of GM vo but I can never there's not enough disclosure to figure out so where's that GM D coming because I think some of that probably does come through eBay so a little bit of double counting that goes on in there but it's really impressive what they've pulled together whether they can actually aggregate demand in a way that Amazon has I think that's I think that's unlikely I think that's a very hard thing to do it's possible they do have a shop app I just, yeah I guess that's the action question we often ask ourselves do you think you're going to use the shop app to shop. [32:45] I don't think so I don't think people are going to do that but you know if they can get enough people to do that boy they will have really they will have some really circled it that you know because they got the infrastructure okay they're talking about building out fulfillment and doing fulfillment for people and spending a billion dollars on it sorry my friends you're gonna have to spend a heck of a lot more than a billion if you if you really want to you know compete. Because the bar is getting higher it's not getting lower it's getting higher in terms of funeral the speed of delivery eBay learn this the hard way and so shockfights Memphis spend a lot more than that so anyway there's a lot of wonderful things about Shopify and I don't know whether if you listening to slammed on by if you think they can build up an aggregate an audience I don't think they can so does it make doesn't make it a slam dunk by it's it's you know it's a deep three point shot put it that way. And you're not Steph Curry. Jason: [33:41] I think we're going back to the basketball references in the book. Yeah it you know I tend to agree I'm not I don't think the shop app you know has attracted an audience that uses it for shopping yet it's a shipping trapping tracking app at the moment. But the it is funny like there are lots of companies that facilitate huge amounts of gmv so I think of like. Excuse me and Akamai is a. Is a CDN that's that used by almost every retailer to help help sell stuff right and so if you said well what's the CD the gmv of Akamai well it's bigger than Amazons. Um but that doesn't mean that Akamai can compete with Amazon so yeah I don't know. [34:28] I do want to go back to Amazon earnings just briefly because I you know I think a lot of the Slowdown is kind of a covid blip and I don't know if you ever think of it this way but. They're there their times in history when. It feels like the external factors aren't a big influence and and you know some companies perform really well and other companies struggle so you know there could be a year when you see Home Depot doing really well and lows struggling and you say. There's something special about Home Depot that I might be interested in investing in at the moment it feels like the external environment for retail is having a. [35:07] Sort of a consistent effect on everyone right and so you look at the industry average is you look at all of them is on Spears and they all have sort of the same shape of deceleration. That Amazon has so it's to me it's hard to attribute that to some. Some fundamental flaw in Amazon but there is one thing I noticed this quarter that it was interesting and I wanted to get your opinion about because I know as an investor you like seeing companies that have pricing power. And you know of course Amazon famously raise the price of prime a while back and seems like that was wildly successful this quarter. They've raised the price for grocery delivery there now charging ten dollar delivery fees even for Prime members. And then this week we saw that they made a pretty substantial increase to the cost of f ba which is you know the fundamental service used by almost all marketplace hours and they they just raise the price of that by like five percent and I'm curious do you look at that as a good sign that hey. They have pricing power and they're doing so well that they can command those prices or to me it's a potential warning sign because I feel like Amazon is so. Zealous an advocate of the flywheel in the flywheel is all about driving costs down to get scale up I just was surprised to see some of these like price increases in in you know. Especially grocery which isn't super mature yet. Mark: [36:33] Well I'm not sure really of the answer to your question Jason it's a it's a it's a really good thoughtful question on the on the groceries I think they raised it because the unit economics were just not working for them in terms of grocery delivery that's that's my guess they also you know yet to have that get to really crack the code on the grocery business and so I sort of see that as they tried it and it just can't right size the economics of they got to charge more for it so I read that kind of negatively what did the raising fees to sellers. But my guess is it's a mixture of things but it's largely driven that my guess is that this largely driven off of Just Rising. [37:17] You know Rising infrastructure costs have been rising shipping costs I mean Rising the two costs that they called out specifically on the earnings call my recall is correct is our steel costs because of all of that dish construction they're doing with their fulfillment centers and trucking services and so my guess is that they've they're doing is not necessarily the right size the economics is I think the economics are working but because they want to try to keep their unit economics relatively intact. And that's sort of the way I think they thought about the raising the price of prime it wasn't they did it because they could. It's they did because they sort of had to like the costs are rising it's just that what I found interesting in terms of pricing power is van acceleration in in Prime ads you know post that price increase like that and so does Netflix to me Netflix is essentially raise fees use the fees to you know generate more Revenue by more content is like a flywheel that they've worked with their make the service more bringing more users allows them to get a little bit raised money just a little bit more so it's not so much raising fees to extract excess profits it's raising fees to further accelerate growth and the value proposition is strong enough that they can do that and not lose customers that's that's that that there's this is subtle nuance and maybe it's too salty but but I think it's an important it's important difference it's not it's no it's raising pricing not to raise margins it's raising pricing to fuel growth. [38:46] And when you so either way it's good I happen to think you you want to the the better one is the latter one is a more impressive the latter one is more impressive because you're raising pricing just to Goose your margins you know you just put a Target on your back. Scot: [39:03] Reading the book made me nostalgic and maybe we'll do a little bit of a lightning round but one of the companies you wrote about that I kind of forgot about and those interesting was Zulily I remember when they came on the scene and we were all like. They were all blown away by how fast they could just get product up right they had this thing where they could. They could have most of those kids so they'd get like all these little kid models in there and throw some clothes on them take a picture and then like changed outfit take another so they could do something like you know thousand different products an hour or something. What's your recollection on Zulily. Mark: [39:40] She really is that was one of my calls that didn't work and. So I and I learned some lessons from that I think to me the lesson I drew a to do with value proposition they had wonderful cohort disclosure in their S1 when they went public I mean it was truly impressive. And you know the they also raise kind of an analytical question because the first it's not too dissimilar to stitch fix today the first three or four million customers were extremely happy the question is. Were there another three to four million customers that could be extremely happy and the problem that Zulily faced is that it customer value proposition had one major flaw which is that you couldn't return product if you didn't like it they didn't they didn't accept returns oh I'm sorry there were two problems and there was no Speedy Delivery you know you could get stuff in seven days and 20 days. That was good for the first day of the first three to four million customers who are fine with that you break into the mainstream and you mean I can't return something if I don't like it you mean I gotta wait how many days until I get something like that ended up. [40:45] And it was very hard being the survey you really had to go with gut instinct on that to realize in advance that they were going to hit a wall in their growth. Geez when you saw what happened to their growth rate when they went public it was Triple digits six quarters later they were doing 10 percent Revenue growth they hit the wall because the value proposition. Wasn't strong enough and then they end up going going private that to me was kind of a lesson which is you know the. [41:10] Growth was impressive but that value proposition if it's not if they hadn't they didn't have it nailed down and you knew from the beginning I knew from the beginning what the two Falls were I just I didn't know when it would hit them and hit them earlier than I thought so you know it gives us another reason to really focus on how compelling do you think this value proposition is how many you know will that can the can a customer base double given the existing value prop. And that's one of the big lessons if I spin it a little bit I mean that's to me is and Scott you look through this entire history like you know the first decade of the internet the king of online retail wasn't Amazon it was eBay and they had like six times seven times the market cap of Amazon that's completely changed and why is it change and I think in part it's because of the value prop I mean Amazon just beat him on price selection and convenience year in and year out and that really mattered but a more recent example in my book. [42:02] In literally and figuratively is doordash and GrubHub and that's example many people will will know but grub have that great business model wonderful investor Centric business model High margins and doordash had this you know generating tons of losses but they had the better value prop because they had more restaurants selection and the end of the day that they want and they were able to scale up and generate serve reasonable profits over time that was the case where my quick tag line is you know customer-centric companies. Beat investor Centric companies most of the time in market cap and market share Amazon versus eBay, GrubHub versus doordash those two examples really drilled that less than to me. Jason: [42:48] Yeah I've been fighting those companies because you know there. They're like increasingly overlapping with a lot of my Commerce clients and like you know a big. A big sort of disruption and commerce right now is all these ultra-fast delivery services and you know it seems pretty clear that doordash and Uber are both gonna want to play directly in that space so it seems like some of those those sectors are on a collision course to chase that Tam. Mark: [43:15] I think you're right Jason I also think Amazon I mean you're talking about logistics like that's Amazon's competency so whether you need to. Whether you're going to vertically integrate and do that or whether you going to do that virtually you know Foo you know a gig economy Network. I don't know which which is going to work better long-term but yeah and you know it's going to raise the bar and make it more and more expensive for anybody to operate in that in that segment I have a bias that Amazon in the end wins that but it's big enough of a market it's so early stage that you can have multiple winners for the next five years I don't know that you can have multiple winners for the next 10 years. Jason: [43:56] Yeah there was a funny question in the Amazon earnings call someone asked about ultra-fast delivery in the CFO kind of I thought brilliantly threw some shade on it he's like. He said something to the effect of we like where we are and ultrafast like we have one hour delivery on about 178,000 skews right now and we're you know we're going to continue to scale that and I don't know how many people follow this but all of the competitors in this space are are desperately trying to figure out how to do one hour delivery for like 7000 skus. So so like they're you know they definitely are gonna be able to leverage the infrastructure there and I'm sure they're making some big investments in that space too. Another area that's that's been kind of interesting lately and I know you've been following this little bit is obviously there are all these privacy changes and the depreciation of the third-party cookies and especially the IDF a you know mobile privacy changes. That Apple has instituted and that obviously had a pretty pronounced impact on the value of some companies like Snap recently A View you have a opinion there is that. Is that a blip or is that a systemic change. Mark: [45:08] I think it's a big pothole in the road. But it's not there but the but the it's a big pothole in the road but it's not a bridge that it's not a collapsed bridge that get that mountain out. Yeah so poor that hey yes. Yes it is yeah that's it that's pretty I mean that's a big pothole that idea Fay allowed Facebook to offer amazing attribution to millions and millions and millions of businesses and now that's gone and and and to their credit to Facebook's credit they warned about it for a year two snaps discredit they didn't warn about it ever and so that's why their stock went off you know 22 decline 25 percent whereas Facebook stock even the numbers came in weaker than expected you know kind of fell off to the 3% and by the way then is traded up above where it was at earnings time so what I mean very intrigued by is I think it will be a son of that idea of a. [46:12] You know child of idea say I like I think there's so much at stake here both from the advertising platforms like Facebook you know and Google's to some extent a little bit and Snapchat but also for you know the millions of marketers out there who you don't you were able to thank thanks to Facebook use of people's privacy data you know from right or wrong I mean that's what that's what they they did I mean this help Merchants really know which of their campaigns worked and allow them to you know run creative and that creative could be automatically you know a be tested abcdefgh like 8 times 8 different ways in which ever those creatives work best. You could actually beat successful one of them then you can just pivot all of the dollars behind that one campaign you know campaign h for campaign be your campaign e.e. and that's just a wonderful way to help these small businesses you know really succeed and that's been taken away now you know there's I think there's first a little bit of shock shoot I can't get the attribution I had I'm going to pull a my marketing dollars but marketers got a market. [47:13] And I think you're going to see those dollars come back and my guess is that Facebook and other companies are going to find some way to do. Better targeting they may not quite get to idea that a type of levels but they were going to be able to do some sort of audience targeting they also have a lot of first-party data but they'll be able to do it in a way that doesn't that you know respect people's privacy and yeah you'll see those dollars come back so that's why I referred to as a pothole I it's a big pothole it's but it's not that it's not a bridge that just collapsed you know you're going to be you can they can they got stuck in that pothole more than anybody else but you know the cranes there whatever they're getting a tow trucks they're they're getting out of it they got to do some nobody work they'll fix the car and it'll be back on the road in part because they've got the talent to do it but in part because there are millions of small businesses that are given to going to give them the incentive to do it because they'll get those marketing dollars back once they figure out some of the idea that a. Jason: [48:09] Yeah I always like to remind people that are like The Skys Falling on the advertising industry that you know. It wasn't very long ago that we had much worse targeting than than we have in digital even with idea of a I mean targeting used to be deciding which publication you were going to print your ad in. And they still got a lot of money in the advertising industry so like I kind of suspect that that marketers are going to figure out you know the best ways to invest their money even if it maybe isn't quite as. As real-time as people got used to for a short while. Mark: [48:42] I think you're right Jason. Scot: [48:45] So Mark you in the book you recap kind of this awesome 25-year career and you know one of the things I've learned is if you're in the game of making predictions you know that it's kind of humbling but then you kind of slowly but surely get better at it right you never get to kind of you know a hundred percent but over time you get better and like like for example you learned the lesson of. The companies that are customer focused to do better than investor focused think founder based in that kind of as you as you take those backward 25-year learnings and project them forward what are some of the things that you get excited about looking out the next five or ten years. Mark: [49:23] Well in terms of Trends even the next year or two I think whoever solves. Marketing attribution is going to be worth a lot more in two years than they are today just because there's so many businesses so many marketers that will pay for that. So I you know so that's that's kind of a debt that whoever whoever fills in the pothole that's going to be a very valuable company it's going to be a lot more valuable to years and it is today my guess is that there's gonna be Facebook so I'm interested in that then there's thing this thing called The Medic verse which I don't know this is just virtual reality just renamed do a Google Trends search on metaverse just watch that just spiked up in the last love so you know you kudos to the person who came up with that idea may be excited maybe Jason or Scott maybe was you I. Jason: [50:09] It's just a rebranded second life. Mark: [50:12] Okay and. But but you know the fact that it was two things that kind of struck me there's some pretty big companies throwing a lot of big money at metaverse you know Facebook Microsoft there's a bunch of others and then there's this Roblox generation people young people who are perfectly comfortable living in the meta verse in virtual reality and. [50:38] You know participating in concerts safely and you know and shopping and communicating and entertaining and learning. [50:49] And learning through the metaverse and so you know we knows 8 18 year olds you know get out into the real world you know they're going to be perfectly comfortable in the meadow verse maybe not the way you know not the way that we will naturally be but you know though they'll help us figure it out and so so I'm really intrigued by the metaverse I think it is going to take 5 to 10 years because that to really develop and I'm trying to trying to figure it out who the big winners are but but I'm very intrigued by that. [51:18] Yeah I'm also got one of those oculist you know I've gotten two different versions Generations the it's the iterations of the Oculus Rift and you know i-i've always it's kind of like when I first saw the Kindle you know the first Kindle I ever got was pretty darn kludgy but you know I just love the idea that you could just download any book on the your kludgy device will you know whenever you whenever you were in a Wi-Fi area and and I and you and you just saw how that device got better and better each iteration and so I just think about that with these with these virtual reality headsets I mean they're clumpy their clunky their kludgy it's kind of embarrassing to be have a picture of you taking them but you know just you can imagine already know how much they've improved over the last couple of years and just think ahead is it possible the next five to seven years it's going to be just it's going to be like putting on a pair of sunglasses I think that's what we should be thinking about if you can easily put on a pair of sunglasses and and enter the metaverse and have you know share a virtual you know in presence experience that sounds but that sounds odd or not but you can do that, I think a lot of people will do that and you know the education the work applications around that so I'm very intrigued by that. Jason: [52:28] So you're saying that that could be chewy.com to Google Glasses pets.com. Mark: [52:36] Yes yes I love that yes I hadn't thought about that way yeah and by the way I've got my Google Glass here you know I'm. Got that I got that early version I got the Amazon Fire Phone you know but just be the the early failures sometimes see these I mean they're kind of in the right direction I don't know exactly what there's a there's a backstory to Google Glass that we only partially know but anyway they have the concept is there and and you know the big iterations that these products do get better and as they get better easier cheaper lighter cooler you know like Main Street cooler not Silicon Valley cooler then then markets can appear. Scot: [53:17] I think that's something the three of us have in common I think the three of us are probably the only people that ordered and probably still own an Amazon Fire Phone. Jeff Ellis. Mark: [53:29] And I've Got My Socks.com puppet to it's in my office I put the hits I got it as a warning. Scot: [53:31] I have one of those too yeah we all I guess we all have one of those too. Jason: [53:36] That that puppet ended up being the most valuable asset from pets.com sidenote like I don't know if you followed it but there was there was there was a whole intellectual property fight with Triumph the comedy dog and all that stuff yeah. Unattended value unintended value creation. Scot: [53:53] Mark were you you know we've used up about an hour of your time we really appreciate you coming on the show to tell us about the book when's it come out where can people find it do you do you want them to order from that Seattle bookstore that we've been chatting about. Mark: [54:09] So yeah and thanks Scott Jason I've always enjoyed listening to your show I did tell you it beginning I your analysis recently all birds and Warby Parker I took the heart because I initiated Warby Parker as an analyst but I after after I've seen what your thoughts were on it. So thanks for having me on the show and to talk about the book nothing but Net 10 Timeless stock-picking lessons from one of wall Street's top Tech analyst I just like to nothing but net on a big Hoops fan. And my kids are hoops and that's been my email pack lines there's a lot of meaning for me in that that title it is available wherever fine literature is sold it is available on Amazon it's the it's a top bestseller now and in the business category so I've been I've been just it was just a it was a labor of love for me and throw like a chance to talk with both of you about it because you've lived through the sister just as much as I have and it's fascinating the lessons we can draw from. Jason: [55:01] Well Mark is been entirely our privilege and it's a great sign that you know just halfway through your career you had enough material for an amazing book so I can't wait to read the the sequel after the next half. Mark: [55:13] All right I will talk with will do it again in 25 years. Jason: [55:18] I'm booking it right now. Scot: [55:20] Bring our sock puppet are and pets.com puppets in our Amazon Fire Phone. Mark: [55:24] That's. Jason: [55:25] Yeah everyone else will be living in the metaverse at that point in no one's going to get it but it's cool. But Mark really appreciated your time and until next time happy commercing!

https://cherylstelte.com/ With over twenty-five years of spiritual practice, study, teaching, and guiding Cheryl embraces her role in life to help people transform themselves and their lives, becoming who they truly are and shining with their purpose. Having suffered numerous throat chakra issues throughout her life, she has healed herself and stepped into her purpose. Cheryl Stelte is a spiritual teacher, healer, coach, and author who, in her early 30's suffered from depression. With a friend at the beach, she had her first of many, life-changing spiritual experiences when her deceased brother's spirit visited her and told her to start meditating. She later realized his guidance was to help her get off anti-depressants, and she did! Over the last 2.5 decades she has studied, practiced, and taught various forms of meditation. Her deep, life long love of nature and extended periods of time spent in forests, mountains and oceans drew her to where she trained through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and with other shamanic teachers. She has since developed Heart-Centered Shamanism. Cheryl is certified through IAMHeart as a teacher, mentor, coach, personal retreat guide, and Hurqalya Energy Healing practitioner. She is a reiki master, holds diplomas in acupressure (Cdn. Acupressure College), fashion design (Blanche MacDonald); certificates in interior design (Victoria, BC), elemental space clearing (Denise Linn), and hatha yoga teaching. She feels immensely rewarded in helping others heal and become empowered. Cheryl is a Canadian living in Denver, Colorado with her beloved husband Amin. She cherishes her two wonderful grown children, Dan and Charla, and their families and enjoys travel, hiking, kayaking, making duck liver pate, and most of all, helping others shine their light. With over twenty-five years of spiritual practice, study, teaching, and guiding Cheryl embraces her role in life to help people transform themselves and their lives, becoming who they truly are and shining with their purpose. Having suffered numerous throat chakra issues throughout her life, she has healed herself and stepped into her purpose. Cheryl Stelte is a spiritual teacher, healer, coach, and author who, in her early 30's suffered from depression. With a friend at the beach, she had her first of many, life-changing spiritual experiences when her deceased brother's spirit visited her and told her to start meditating. She later realized his guidance was to help her get off anti-depressants, and she did! Over the last 2.5 decades she has studied, practiced, and taught various forms of meditation. Her deep, life long love of nature and extended periods of time spent in forests, mountains and oceans drew her to where she trained through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and with other shamanic teachers. She has since developed Heart-Centered Shamanism. Cheryl is certified through IAMHeart as a teacher, mentor, coach, personal retreat guide, and Hurqalya Energy Healing practitioner. She is a reiki master, holds diplomas in acupressure (Cdn. Acupressure College), fashion design (Blanche MacDonald); certificates in interior design (Victoria, BC), elemental space clearing (Denise Linn), and hatha yoga teaching. She feels immensely rewarded in helping others heal and become empowered. Cheryl is a Canadian living in Denver, Colorado with her beloved husband Amin. She cherishes her two wonderful grown children, Dan and Charla, and their families and enjoys travel, hiking, kayaking, making duck liver pate, and most of all, helping others shine their light.

About MatthewMatthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks, which spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He's also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.Links: Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com Blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ Announcement of R2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ Blog.cloudflare.com: https://blog.cloudflare.com Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. Today, my guest is someone I feel a certain kinship with, if for no other reason than I spend the bulk of my time antagonizing AWS incredibly publicly. And my guest periodically descends into the gutter with me to do the same sort of things. The difference is that I'm a loudmouth with a Twitter account and Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, which is, of course, publicly traded. Matthew, thank you for deigning to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Matthew: Corey, it's my pleasure, and appreciate you having me on.Corey: So, I'm mostly being facetious here, but not entirely, in that you have very publicly and repeatedly called out some of the same things I love calling out, which is AWS's frankly egregious egress pricing. In fact, that was a title of a blog post that you folks put out, and it was so well done I'm ashamed I didn't come up with it myself years ago. But it's something that is resonating with a large number of people in very specific circumstances as far as what their company does. Talk to me a little bit about that. Cloudflare is a CDN company and increasingly looking like something beyond that. Where do you stand on this? What got you on this path?Matthew: I was actually searching through really old emails to find something the other day, and I found a message from all the way back in 2009, so actually even before Michelle and I had come up with a name for Cloudflare. We were really just trying to understand the pricing on public clouds and breaking it all down. How much does the compute cost? How much does storage cost? How much does bandwidth cost?And we kept running the numbers over and over and over again, and the storage and compute costs actually seemed relatively reasonable and you could understand it, but the economics behind the bandwidth just made no sense. It was clear that as bandwidth usage grew and you got scale that your costs eventually effectively went to zero. And I think it was that insight that led to us starting Cloudflare. And the self-service plans at Cloudflare have always been unlimited bandwidth, and from the beginning, we didn't charge for bandwidth. People told us at the time we were crazy to not do that, but I think that that realization, that over time and at scale, bandwidth costs do go to zero is really core to who Cloudflare is.Cloudflare launched a little over 11 years ago now, and as we've watched the various public clouds and AWS in particular just really over that same 11 years not only not follow the natural price of bandwidth down, but really hold their costs steady. At some point, we've got a lot of mutual customers and it's a complaint that we hear from our mutual customers all the time, and we decided that we should do something about it. And so that started four years ago, when we launched the Bandwidth Alliance, and worked with almost all the major public clouds with the exception of Amazon, to say that if someone is sending traffic from a public cloud network to Cloudflare's network, we're not going to charge them for the bandwidth. It's going across a piece of fiber optic cable that yeah, there's some cost to put it in place and maybe there's some maintenance costs associated with it, but there's not—Corey: And the equipment at the end costs money, but it's not cloud cost; it just cost on a per second, every hour of your lifetime basis. It's a capital expense that is amortized across a number of years et cetera, et cetera.Matthew: And it's a fixed cost. It's not a variable cost. You put that fiber optic cable and you use a port on a router on each side. There's cost associated with that, but it's relatively de minimis. And so we said, “If it's not costing us anything and it's not costing a cloud provider anything, why are we charging customers for that?”And I think it's an argument that resonated with almost every other provider that was out there. And so Google discounts traffic when it's sent to us, Microsoft discounts traffic when it's sent to us, and we just announced that Oracle has joined this discounting their traffic, which was already some of the most cost-effective bandwidth from any cloud provider.Corey: Oh, yeah. Oracle's fantastic. As you were announced, I believe today, the fact that they're joining the Bandwidth Alliance is both fascinating and also, on some level, “Okay. It doesn't matter as much because their retail starting cost is 10% of Amazon's.” You have to start pushing an awful lot of traffic relative to what you would do AWS before it starts to show up. It's great to see.Matthew: And the fact that they're taking that down to effectively zero if you're using us is even better, right? And I think it again just illustrates how Amazon's really alone in this at being so egregious in how they do that. And it's, when we've done the math to calculate what their markups are, it's almost 80 times what reasonable assumptions on what their wholesale costs are. And so we really do believe in fighting for our customers and being customer-centric, and this seems like a place where—again, Amazon provides an incredible service and so many things, but the data transfer costs are just completely outrageous. And I'm glad that you're calling them out on it, and I'm glad we're calling them out on it and I think increasingly they look isolated and very anti-customer.Corey: What's interesting to me is that ingress to AWS at all the large public tier-one cloud providers is free. Which has led, I think, to the assumption—real or not—that bandwidth doesn't actually cost anything, whereas going outbound, all I can assume is that one day, some Amazon VP was watching a rerun of Meet the Parents and they got to the line where Ben Stiller says, “Oh, you can milk anything with nipples,” and said, “Holy crap. Our customers all have nipples; we can milk them with egress charges.” And here we are. As much as I think the cloud empowers some amazing stuff, the egress charges are very much an Achilles heel to a point where it starts to look like people won't even consider public cloud for certain workloads based upon that.People talk about how Netflix is a great representation of the ideal AWS customers. Yeah, but they don't stream a single byte to customers from AWS. They have their own CDN called Open Connect that they put all around the internet, specifically for that use case because it would bankrupt them otherwise.Matthew: If you're a small customer, bandwidth does cost something because you have to pay someone to do the work of interconnecting with all of the various networks that are out there. If you start to be, though, a large customer—like a Cloudflare, like an AWS, like an Azure—that is sending serious traffic to the internet, then it starts to actually be in the interest of ISPs to directly interconnect with you, and the costs of your bandwidth over time will approach zero. And that's the just economic reality of how bandwidth pricing works. I think that the confusion, to some extent, comes from all of us having bought our own home internet connection. And I think that the fact that you get more bandwidth up in most internet connections, and you get down, people think that there's some physics, which is associated with that.And there are; that turns out just to be the legacy of the cable system that was really designed to send pictures down to your—Corey: It wasn't really a listening post. Yeah.Matthew: Right. And so they have dedicated less capacity for up and again, in-home network connections, that makes a ton of sense, but that's not how internet connections work globally. In fact, you pay—you get a symmetric connection. And so if they can demonstrate that it's free to take the traffic in, we can't figure out any reason that's not simply about customer lock-in; why you would charge to take data out, but you wouldn't charge to put it in. Because actually cost more from writing data to a disk, it costs more than reading it from a disk.And so by all reasonable accounts, if they were actually charging based on what their costs were, they would charge for ingress but they want to charge for egress. But the approach that we've taken is to say, “For standard bandwidth, we just aren't going to charge for it.” And we do charge for if you use our premium routing services, which is something called Argo, but even then it's relatively cheap compared with what is just standard kind of internet connectivity that's out there. And as we see more of the clouds like Microsoft and Google and Oracle show that this is a place where they can be much more customer-centric and customer-friendly, over time I'm hopeful that will put pressure on Amazon and they will eliminate their egress fees.Corey: People also tend to assume that when I talk about this, that I'm somehow complaining about the level of discounting or whatnot, and they yell at me and say, “Oh, well, you should know by now, Corey, that no one at significant scale pays retail pricing.” “Thanks, professor. I appreciate that, but four years ago, or so I sat down with a startup founder who was sketching out the idea for a live video streaming service and said, ‘There's something wrong with my math because if I built this on AWS—which he knew very well, incidentally—it looks like it would cost me at our scale of where we're hoping to hit $65,000 a minute.'” And I checked and yep, sure enough, his math was not wrong, so he obviously did not build his proof of concept on top of AWS. And the last time I checked, they had raised several 100 million dollars in a bunch of different funding rounds.That is a company now that will not be on AWS because it was never an option. I want to talk as well about your announcement of R2, which is just spectacular. It is—please correct me if I get any of this wrong—it's an object store that lives in your existing distributed-points-of-presence-slash-data-centers-slash-colo-slash-a-bunch-of-computers-in-fancy-warehouse-rooms-with-the-lights-are-always-on-And-it's-always-cold-and-noisy. And people can store data there—Matthew: [crosstalk 00:10:23] aisles it's cold; in the other aisles, it's hot. But yes.Corey: Exactly. But it turns out when you lurk around to the hot aisle, that's not where all the buttons are and the things you're able to plug into, so it's freeze or sweat, and there's never a good answer. But it's an object store that costs a fair bit less than retail pricing for Amazon S3, or most other object stores out there. Which, okay, great. That's always good to see competition in the storage space, but specifically, you're not charging any data transfer costs whatsoever for doing this. First, where did this come from?Matthew: So, we needed it ourselves. I think all of the great products at Cloudflare start with an internal need. If you look at why do we build our zero-trust solutions? It's because we said we needed a security solution that was fast and reliable and secure to protect our employees as they were going out and using the internet.Why did we build Cloudflare Workers? Because we needed a very flexible compute platform where we could build systems ourselves. And that's not unique to us. I mean, why did Amazon build AWS? They built it because they needed those tools in order to continue to grow and expand as quickly as possible.And in fact, I think if you look at the products that Google makes that are really great, it ends up being the ones that Google's employees use themselves. Gmail started as Caribou once upon a time, which was their internal email system. And so we needed an object store and the sometimes belligerent CEO of Cloudflare insisted that our team couldn't use any of the public cloud object stores. And so we had to build it.That was the start of it and we've been using it internally for products over time. It powers, for example, Cloudflare Images, it powers a lot of our streaming video services, and it works great. And at some point, we said, “Can we take this and make it available to everyone?” The question that you've asked on Twitter, and I think a lot of people reasonably ask us, “What's the catch?”Corey: Well, in my defense, I think it's fair. There was an example that I gave of, “Okay, I'm going to go ahead and keep—because it's new, I don't trust new object stores. Great. I'm going to do the same experiment twice, keep one the pure AWS story and the other, I'm just going to add Cloudflare R2 to the mix so that I have to transfer out of AWS once.” For a one gigabyte file that gets shared out for a petabyte's worth of bandwidth, on AWS it costs roughly $52,000 to do that. If I go with the R2 solution, it cost me 13 cents, all of which except for a penny-and-a-half are AWS charges. And that just feels—when you're looking at that big of a gap, it's easy to look at that and think, “Okay, someone is trying to swindle me somewhere. And when you can't spot the sucker, it's probably me. What's the catch?”Matthew: I guess it's not really a catch; it's an explanation. We have been able to drive our bandwidth costs down low enough that in that particular use case, we have to store the file, and that, again, that—there's a hard disk in there and we replicate it to make sure that it's available so it's not just one hard disk, but it's multiple hard disks in various places, but that amortized over time, isn't that big a cost. And then bandwidth is effectively zero. And so if we can do that, then that's great.Maybe a different way of framing the question is like, “Why would we do that?” And I think what we see is that there is an opportunity for customers to be able to use the best of various cloud providers and hook the different parts together. So, people talk about multi-cloud all the time, and for a while, the way that I think people thought about that was you take the exact same workload and you run it in Azure and AWS. That turns out not to be—I mean, maybe some people do that, but it's super rare and it's incredibly hard.Corey: It has been a recurring theme of most things I say where, by default, that is one of the dumbest things I can imagine.Matthew: Yeah, that isn't good. But what people do want to do is they want to say, “Listen, there's some really great services that Amazon provides; we want to use those. And there's some really great services that Azure provides, and we want to use those. And Google's got some great machine learning, and so does IBM. And I want to sort of mix and match the various pieces together.”And the challenge in doing that is the egress fees. If everyone just had a detente and said there's going to be no egress fees for us to be able to hook these various [pits 00:14:48] together, then you would be able to take advantage of a lot of the different technologies and we would actually get stronger applications. And so the vision of what we're trying to build is how can we be the fabric that can stitch the various cloud providers together so that you can do that. And when we looked at that, and we said, “Okay, what's the path to getting there?” The big place where there's the just meatiest cost on egress fees is object stores.And so if you could have a centralized object store, and you can say then from that object go use whatever the best service is at Amazon, go use whatever the best service is at Google, go use whatever the best service is at Azure, that then allows, I think, actually people to take advantage of the cloud in a way which is what people really should mean when they talk about multi-cloud. Which is, there should be competition on the various features themselves, and you should be able to pick and choose the best of all of the different bits. And I think we as consumers then benefit from that. And so when we're looking at how we can strategically enable that future, building an object store was a real key part of that, and that's part of what we're doing. Now, how do we make money off of that? Well, there's a little bit off the storage, and again, even [laugh]—Corey: Well, that is the Amazonian answer there. It's like, “Your margin is my opportunity,” is a famous Bezos quote, and I figure you're sitting there saying, “Ah, it would cost $52,000 to do that in Amazon. Ah, we can make a penny-and-a-half.” That's very Amazonian, you could probably get hired over there with that philosophy.Matthew: Yeah. And this is a commodity service, just [laugh] storing data. If you look across the history of what Cloudflare has done, in 2014, we made encryption free because it's absurd to pay for math, right? I mean, it's just crazy right?Corey: Or to pay for security as a value-add. No, that should be baked into whatever you're doing, in an ideal world.Matthew: Domain registration. Like, it's writing something down in a ledger. It's a commodity; of course it should go to whatever the absolute cost is. On the other hand, there are things that we do that aren't commodities where we are able to better protect people because we see so much traffic, and we've built the machine learning models, and we've done those things, and so we charge for those things. So commodities, we think over time, go to effectively, whatever their cost is, and then the value is in the actual intelligent services that are on top of it.But an object store is a commodity and so we should be trying to drive that pricing down. And in the case of bandwidth, it's effectively free for us. And so if we can be that fabric that connects the different class together, I think that makes sense is a strategy for us and that's why R2 made a ton of sense for us to build and to launch.Corey: There seems to be a lack of ability for lots of folks, at least on the internet to imagine a use case other than theirs. I cheated by being a consultant, I get to borrow other people's use cases at a high degree of turnover. But the question I saw raised was, “Well, how many workloads really do that much egress from static objects that don't change? Doesn't sound like there'd be a whole lot of them.” And it's, “Oh, my sweet summer child. Sure, your app doesn't do a lot of that, but let me introduce it to my friends who are hosting videos on their website, for example, or large images that get accessed a whole bunch of times; things that are written once and then read forever by the internet.”Matthew: And we sit in a position where because of the role that Cloudflare plays where we sit in front of a number of these different cloud providers, we could actually look at the use cases and the data, and then build products in order to solve that. And that's why we started with Workers; that's why we then built the KV store that was on top of that; we built object-store next. And so you can see as we're sort of marching through these things, it is very much being informed by the data that we actually see from real customers. And one of the things that I really like about R2 is in exactly the example that you gave where you can keep everything in S3; you can set R2 in front of it and put it in slurp mode, and effectively it just—as those objects get pulled out, it starts storing them there. And so the migration path is super easy; you don't have to actually change anything about your application and will cut your bills substantially.And so I think that's the right thing to enable a multi-cloud world where, again, it's not you're running the exact same workload in different places, but you get to take advantage of the really great tack that all of these companies are building and use that. And then the companies will compete on building that tech well. So, it's not just about how do I get the data in and then kind of underinvest in all of the different services that I provide. It's how can we make sure that on a service-by-service basis, you actually are having real competition over time. And again, I think that's the right thing for customers, and absolutely R2 might not be the right thing for every use case that's out there, but I think that it wi—enabling more competition is going to make the cloud better for everyone.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's always fun hearing it from Amazonians. It's, “You have a service that talks to satellites in orbit. You really think that's a general-purpose thing that every company out there has to deal with?” No. Well, not yet, anyway.It also just feels to me like their transfer approach is antithetical to almost every other aspect of how they have built their cloud. Amazonians have told me repeatedly—I believe them—that their network is effectively magic. The fact that you can get near line rate between any two points without melting various [unintelligible 00:20:14], which shows that there was significant thought, work, effort, planning, technology, et cetera, put into the network. And I don't dispute that. But if I'm trying to build a workload and put it inside of AWS, I can control how it performs tied to budget; I can have a lot of RAM for things that are memory intensive, or I can have a little RAM; I can have great CPU performance or terrible CPU performance.The challenge with data transfer is it is uniformly great. “I want to get that data over there super quickly.” Yeah, awesome. I'm fine paying a premium for that. But I have this pile of data right here. I want to get it over there, ideally by Tuesday. There's no good way to do that, even with their Snowball—or Snow Family devices—when you fill them with data and send them into AWS, yeah, that's great. Then you just pay for the use of the device.Use them to send data out of AWS, they tack on an additional per-gigabyte fee for getting the data out. You're training as a lawyer, you went to the same law school that my wife did, the University of Chicago, which, oh, interesting stories down that path. But if we look at this, my argument is that the way to do an end-run around this is to sue Amazon for something, and then demand access to the data you have living in their environment during discovery. Make them give it to you for free, though, they'd probably find a way to charge it there, too. It's just a complete lack of vision and lack of awareness because it feels like they're milking a cash cow until it dies.Matthew: Yeah, they probably would charge for it and you'd also have to pay a lot of lawyers. So, I'm not sure that's the cost [crosstalk 00:21:44]—Corey: Its only works above certain volumes, I figure.Matthew: I do think that if your pricing strategy is designed to lock people in to prevent competition, then that does create other challenges. And there are certainly some University of Chicago law professors out there that have spent their careers arguing why antitrust laws don't make any sense, but I think that this is definitely one of those areas where you can see very clearly that customers are actually being harmed by the pricing strategy that's there. And the pricing strategy is not tied in any way to the underlying costs which are associated with that. And so I do think that, especially as you see other providers in the space—like Oracle—taking their bandwidth costs to effectively zero, that's the sort of thing that I think will have regulators start to scratch their heads. If tomorrow, AWS took egress costs to zero, and as a result, R2 was not as advantaged as it is today against them, you know, I think there are a lot of people who would say, “Oh, they showed Cloudflare.” I would do a happy dance because that's the best thing [thing they can do 00:22:52] for our customers.Corey: Our long-term goals, it sounds like, are relatively aligned. People think that I want to see AWS reign ascendant; people also say I want to see them burning and crashing into the sea, and neither one of those are true. What I want is, I want someone in a few years from now to be doing a startup and trying to figure out which cloud provider they should pick, and I want that to be a hard decision. Ideally, if you wind up reducing data transfer fees enough, it doesn't even have to be only one. There are stories that starts to turn into an actual realistic multi-cloud story that isn't, at its face, ridiculous. But right now, you have to pick a horse and ride it, for a variety of reasons. And I don't like that.Matthew: It's entirely egress-based. And again, I think that customers are better off if they are able to pick who is the best service at any time. And that is what encourages innovation. And over time, that's even what's good for the various cloud providers because it's what keeps them being valuable and keeps their customers thinking that they're building something which is magical and that they aren't trapped in the decision that they made, which is when we talk to a lot of the customers today, they feel that way. And it's I think part of why something like R2 and something like the Bandwidth Alliance has gotten so much attention because it really touches a nerve on what's frustrating customers today. And if tomorrow Amazon announced that they were eliminating egress fees and going head-to-head with R2, again, I think that's a wonderful outcome. And one that I think is unlikely, but I would celebrate it if it happened.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: My favorite is people who don't do research on this stuff. They wind up saying, “Oh, yeah. Cloudflare is saying that bandwidth is a fixed cost. Of course not. They must be losing their shirt on this.”You are a publicly-traded company. Your gross margins are 76% or 77%, depending upon whether we're talking about GAAP or non-GAAP. Point being, you are clearly not selling this at a loss and hoping to make it up in volume. That's what a VC-backed company does. Is something that is real and as accurate.I want to, on some level, I guess, low-key apologize because I keep viewing Cloudflare through a lens that is increasingly inaccurate, which is as a CDN. But you've had Cloudflare Workers for a while, effectively Functions as a Service that run at the edge, which has this magic aura around it, that do various things, which is fascinating to me. You're launching R2; it feels like you are in some ways aiming at becoming a cloud provider, but instead of taking the traditional approach of building it from the region's outward, you're building it from the outward in. Is that a fair characterization?Matthew: I think that's right. I think fundamentally what Cloudflare is, is a network. And I remember early on in the pandemic, we did a series of fireside chats with people we thought we could learn from. And so was everyone from Andre Iguodala, the basketball player, to Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur, to we had a [unintelligible 00:25:56] governor and all kinds of things. And we these were just internal on off the record.And I got to do one with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. And I said, “You know, Eric, one of the things that we struggle with is describing what is Cloudflare.” And without hesitation, he said, “Oh, that's easy. You're the network I plug into and don't have to worry about anything else.” And I think that's better than I could say it, myself, and I think that's what it is that we fundamentally are: we're the network that fits together.Now, it turns out that in the process of being that network and enabling that network, we are going to build things like R2, which start to be an object store and starts to sort of step into some of the cloud provider space. And Workers is really just a way of programming that network in order to do that, but it turns out that there are a bunch of workloads that if you move them into the network itself, make sense—not going to be every workload, but a lot of workloads that makes sense there. And again, I think that you can actually be very bullish on all of the big public cloud providers and bullish on Cloudflare at the same time because what we want to do is enable the ability for people to mix and match, and change, and be the fabric that connects all of those things together. And so over time, if Amazon says, “We're going to drop egress fees,” it may be that R2 isn't a product that exists—I don't think they're going to do that, so I think it's something that is going to be successful for us and get a lot of new users to us—but fundamentally, I think that where the traditional public clouds think of themselves as the place you put data and you process data, I think we think of ourselves as the place you move data. And that's somewhat different.That then translates into it as we're building out the different pieces, where it does feel like we're building from the outside in. And it may be that over time, that put versus move distinction becomes narrower and narrower as we build more and more services like R2, and durable objects, and KV, and we're working on a database, and all those things. And it could be that we converge in a similar place.Corey: One thing I really appreciate about your vision because it is so atypical these days, is that you aren't trying to build the multifunction printer of companies. You are not trying to be all things to all people in every scenario. Which is impossible to do, but companies are still trying their level best to do it. You are staking out the bounds of where you were willing to start and where you're willing to stop, in a variety of different ways. I would be—how do I put it?—surprised if you at some point in the next five years come out with, “And this is our own database that we have built out that directly competes with the following open-source project that we basically have implemented their API and gone down that particular path.” It does not sound like it is in your core wheelhouse at that point. You don't need—to my understanding—to write your own database engine in order to do what you do.Matthew: Maybe. I mean, we actually are kind of working on a database because—Corey: Oh, no, here we go again.Matthew: [laugh]—and yeah—in a couple of different ways. So, the first way is, we want to make sure that if you're using Workers, you can connect to whatever database you want to use anywhere in the world. And that's something that's coming and we'll be there. At the same time, the challenge of distributed computing turns out not to be the computing, it turns out to be the data and figuring out how to—CAP theorem is real, right? Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance; you can pick any two out of the three, but you can't get all three.And so you there's always going to be some trade-off that's there. And so we don't see a lot of good examples. There's some really cool companies that are working on things in the space, but we don't see a lot of really good examples of who has built a database that can be run on a distributed workload system, like Cloudflare to it do well. And so our team internally needs that, and so we're trying to figure out how to build it for ourselves, and I would imagine that after we build it for ourselves—if it works the way we expect it will—that that will then be something that we open up.Our motivation and the way we think about products is we need to build the tools for our own team. Our team itself is customer zero, and then some of those things are very specific to us, but every once in a while, when there are functions that makes sense for others, then we'll build them as well. And that does maybe risk being the multifunction printer, but again, I think that because the customer for that starts with ourselves, that's how we think about it. And if there's someone else's making a great tool, we'll use that. But in this case, we don't see anyone that's built a multi-tenant, globally-distributed, ACID-compliant relational database.Corey: I can't let it pass on challenge. Sure they have, and you're running it yourself. DNS: the finest database in the world. You stuff whatever you want to text records, and now you have taken a finely crafted wrench and turned it into a barely acceptable hammer, which is what I love about doing that terrible approach. Yeah, relational is not going to quite work that way. But—Matthew: Yes. That's a fancy key-value store, right? So—and we've had that for a long time. As we're trying to build those things up, the good news is that, again, we've run data at scale for quite some time and proven that we can do it efficiently and reliably.Corey: There's a lot that can be said about building the things you need to deliver your product to customers. And maybe a database is a poor example here, but I don't see that your motivation in this space is to step into something completely outside your areas of expertise solely because there's money to be made over there. Well, yeah, fortune passes everywhere. The question is, which are you best positioned to wind up delivering an actual transformative solution to that space, and what parts of it are just rent-seeking where it's okay, we're going to go and wherever the money is, we're chasing that down.Matthew: Yeah, we're still a for-profit business, and we've been able to grow revenue well, but I think it is that what motivates us and what drives us comes back to our mission, which is how do you help build a better internet? And you can look at every single thing that we've done, and we try to be very long-term-oriented. So, for instance, when we in 2014 made encryption free, the number one reason at the time, when people upgraded for the free version of our service, the paid version of our service is they got encryption for that. And so it was super scary to say, “Hey, we're going to take the biggest feature and give it away for free,” but it was clearly the direction of history and we wanted to be on the right side of history. And we considered it a bug that the internet wasn't built in an encrypted way from the beginning.So, of course, that was going to head that direction. And so I think that we and then subsequently Let's Encrypt, and a bunch of others have said, it's absurd that you're charging for math. And again, I think that's a good example of how we think about products. And we want to continue to disrupt ourselves and take the things that once upon a time were reserved for our customers that spend $10 million-plus with us, and we want to keep pushing those things down because, over time, the real opportunity is if you do right by customers, there will be plenty of ways that you can earn some of their budget. And again, we think that is the long-term winning strategy.Corey: I would agree with this. You're not out there making sneakers and selling them because you see people spend a lot of money on that; you're delivering value for customers. I say this as one of your paying customers. I have zero problem paying you every month like clockwork, and it is the least cloud-like experience because I know exactly what the bill is going to be in advance, which is apparently not how things should be done in this industry, yadda, yadda, yadda. It is a refreshingly delightful experience every time.The few times I've had challenges with the service, it has almost always been a—I'll call it a documentation gap, where the way it was explained in the formal documentation was not how I conceptualize things, which, again, explaining what these complex things are to folks who are not steeped in certain areas of them is always going to be a challenge. But I cannot think back to a single customer service failure I've had with you folks. I can't look back at any point where you have failed me as a customer, which is a strange thing to say, given how incredibly efficient I am at stumbling over weird bugs.Matthew: Terrific to have you as a customer. We are hardly perfect and we make mistakes, but one of the things I think that we try to do and one of the core values of Cloudflare is transparency. If I think about, like, the original sins of tech, a lot of it is this bizarre secrecy which pervades the entire industry. When we make mistakes, we talk about them, and we explain them. When there's an error, we don't throw up a white page; we put up a page that has our logo on it because we want to own it.And that sometimes gets blowback because you're in front of it, but again, I think it's the right thing to do for customers. And it's and I think it's incredibly important. One of the things that's interesting is you mentioned that you know what your bill is going to be. If you go back and look at the history of hosting on the internet, in the early days of internet hosting, it looks a lot like AWS.Corey: Oh, 95th percentile transit billing; go for one five minutes segment over and boom, your bill explodes. Oh, I remember those days. Unkindly.Matthew: And it was super complicated. And then what happened is the hosting world switched from this incredibly complicated billing to much more simplified, predictable, unlimited bandwidth with maybe some asterisks, but largely that was in place. And then it's strange that Amazon came along and then has brought us back to the more complicated world that's out there. I would have predicted that that's a sine wave—Corey: It has to be. I mean—Matthew: —and it's going to go back and forth over time. But I would have predicted that we would be more in the direction of coming back toward simplify, everything included. And again, I think that's how we've priced our things from the beginning. I'm surprised that it has held on as long as it has, but I do think that there's going to be an opportunity for—and I don't think Amazon will be the leader here, but I think there will be an opportunity for one of the big clouds.And again, I think Oracle is probably doing this the best of any of them right now—to say, “How can we go away from that complexity? How can we make bills predictable? How can we not nickel and dime everything, but allow you to actually forecast and budget?” And it just seems like that's the natural arc of history, and we will head back toward that. And, again, I think we've done our part to push that along. And I'm excited that other cloud providers seem to be thinking about that now as well.Corey: Oh, yeah. What I do with fixing AWS bills is the same thing folks were doing in the 70s and 80s with long-distance bills for companies. We're definitely hitting that sine wave. I know that if I were at AWS in a leadership role, I would be actively embarrassed that the company that is delivering a better customer experience around financial things is Oracle of all companies, given their history of audits and surprising people and the rest. It is ridiculous to me.One last topic that I want to cover with you before we call it an episode is, back in college, you had a thesis that you have done an excellent job of effectively eliminating from the internet. And the theme of this, to my understanding, was that the internet is a fad. And I am so aligned with that because I'm someone who has said for years that emerging technologies are fads. I've said it about cloud, about virtualization, about containers. And I just skipped Kubernetes. And now I'm all-in on serverless, which means, of course it's going to fail because I'm always wrong on these things. But tell me about that.Matthew: When I was seven years old in 1980, my grandmother gave me an Apple ][+ computer for Christmas. And I took to it like a just absolute duck to water and did things that made me very popular in junior high school, like going to computer camp. And my mom used to sign up for continuing education classes at the local university in computer science, and basically sneak me in, and I'd do all the homework and all that. And I remember when I got to college, there was a small group of students that would come around and help other students set their computer up, and I had it all set up and was involved. And so, got pretty deeply involved in the computer science program at college.And then I remember there was a group of three other students—so they were four of us—and they wanted to start an online digital magazine. And at the time, this was pre-web, or right in the early days of the web; it was sort of nineteen… ninety-three. And we built it originally on old Apple technology called HyperCard. And we used to email out the old HyperCard stacks. And the HyperCard stacks kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and we'd send them out to the school so [laugh] that we—so we kept crashing the mail servers.But the college loved this, so they kept buying bigger and bigger mail servers. But they were—at some point, they said, “This won't scale. You got to switch technologies.” And they introduced us to two different groups. One was a printer company based out in San Francisco that had this technology called PDF. And I was a really big fan of PDF. I thought PDF was the future, it was definitely going to be how everything got published.And then the other was this group of dorky graduate students at the University of Illinois that had this thing called a browser, which was super flaky, and crashed all the time, and didn't work. And so of the four of us, I was the one who voted for PDF and the other three were like, “Actually, I think this HTML thing is going to be a hit.” And we built this. We won an award from Wired—which was only a print magazine at the time—that called us the first online-only weekly publication. And it was such a struggle to get anyone to write for it because browsers sucked and, you know, trying to get students on campus, but no one on campus cared.We would get these emails from the other side of the world, where I remember really clearly is this—in broken English—email from Japan saying, “I love the magazine. Please keep writing more for the magazine.” And I remember thinking at the time, “Why do I care if someone in Japan is reading this if the girl down the hall who I have a crush on isn't?” Which is obviously what motivates dorky college students like myself. And at that same time, you saw all of this internet explosion.I remember the moment when Netscape went public and just blew through all the expectations. And it was right around the time I was getting ready to graduate for college, and I was kind of just burned out on the entire thing. And I thought, “If I can't even get anyone to write for this dopey magazine and yet we're winning awards, like, this stuff has to all just be complete garbage.” And so wrote a thesis on—ehh, it was not a very good [laugh] thesis. It's—but one of the things I said was that largely the internet was a fad, and that if it wasn't, that it had some real risks because if you enabled everyone to connect with whatever their weird interests and hobbies were, that you would very quickly fall to the lowest common denominator. And predicted some things that haven't come true. I thought for sure that you would have both a liberal and conservative search engine. And it's a miracle to this day, I think that doesn't exist.Corey: Now, that you said it, of course, it's going to.Matthew: Well, I don't know I've… [sigh] we'll see. But it is pretty amazing that Google has been able to, again, thread that line and stay largely apolitical. I'm surprised there aren't more national search engines; the fact that it only Russia and China have national search engines and France and Germany don't is just strange to me. It seems like if you're controlling the source of truth and how people find it, that seems like something that governments would try and take over. There are some things that in retrospect, look pretty wise, but there were a lot more things that looked really, really stupid. And so I think at some level, I had to build Cloudflare to atone for that stupidity all those years ago.Corey: There's something to be said for looking back and saying, “Yeah, I had an opinion, and with the light of new information, I am changing my opinion.” For some reason, in some circles, it feels like that gets interpreted as a sign of weakness, but I couldn't disagree more, it's, “Well, I had an opinion based upon what I saw at the time. Turns out, I was wrong, and here we are.” I really wish more people were capable of doing that.Matthew: It's one of the things we test for in hiring. And I think the characteristic that describes people who can do that well is really empathy. The understanding that the experiences that you have lead you to have a unique set of insights, but they also create a unique set of blind spots. And it's rare that you find people that are able to do that. And whenever you do—whenever we do we hire them.Corey: To that end, as far as hiring and similar topics go, if people want to learn more about how you view things, and how you see the world, and what you're releasing—maybe even potentially work with you—where can they find you?Matthew: [laugh]. So, the joke, sometimes, internal at Cloudflare is that Cloudflare is a blogging company that runs this global network just to have something to write about. So, I think we're unlike most corporate blogs, which are—if our corporate blog were typical, we'd have articles on, like, “Here are the top six reasons you need a fast website,” which would just be, you know, shoot me. But instead, I think we write about the things that are going on online and our unique view into them. And we have a core value of transparency, so we talk about that. So, if you're interested in Cloudflare, I'd encourage you to—especially if you're of the sort of geekier variety—to check out blog.cloudflare.com, and I think that's a good place to learn about us. And I still write for that occasionally.Corey: You're one of the only non-AWS corporate blogs that I pay attention to, for that exact reason. It is not, “Oh, yay. More content marketing by folks who just feel the need to hit a quota as opposed to talking about something valuable and interesting.” So, it's appreciated.Matthew: The secret to it was we realized at some point that the purpose of the blog wasn't to attract customers, it was to attract potential employees. And it turns out, if you sort of change that focus, then you talk to people like their peers, and it turns out then that the content that you create is much more authentic. And that turns out to be a great way to attract customers as well.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Matthew: Thanks for all you're doing. And we're very aligned, and keep fighting the good fight. And someday, again, we'll eliminate cloud egress fees, and we can share a beer when we do.Corey: I will absolutely be there for it. Matthew, Prince, CEO, and co-founder of Cloudflare. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a rambling comment explaining that while data packets into a cloud provider are cheap and crappy, the ones being sent to the internet are beautiful, bespoke, unicorn snowflakes, so of course they cost money.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Paige and I cover so much ground in this episode. We started off by speaking about where she lives - In Salt Lake City, Utah. I actually never met anyone that lived so that was an interesting place to start. Paige shares her story of leaving the Mormon faith and how, in many ways, that trauma can inform some of the way she practices. That, to me, is so interesting. I find that so many things overlap with Intuitive Eating. For some people - leaving diet culture - is like leaving so much of their identity. Paige has a unique philosophy when it comes to Intuitive Eating and someone who uses social media to promote their business. I specifically wanted to interview her after she announced that she will no longer be doing her very success podcast, Nutrition Matters. I couldn't believe that someone would voluntarily decide to do that. She explains in the podcast that when it didn't feel good anymore, she stopped. She wasn't just in it for the downloads, for the money and to fuel her ego. I respect this perspective so much and I feel Paige has so much to share about aligned based living. Check out the episode here on Youtube or on IGTV. If you want to hear the audio - download the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts! Paige Smathers is a registered dietitian nutritionist in private practice whose work revolves around helping people heal their relationships with food and their body. She specializes in eating disorders, chronic dieting, digestive health and the intersection of mindfulness and nutrition. She is the owner of Positive Nutrition®, which provides individual nutrition therapy and online courses for individuals, and mentorship and coaching for professionals. You can contact Paige at paige@positive-nutrition.com. Thank you for being here! If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share it with people who can benefit from this information! Don't forget to leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcast so more people can find this podcast. If you are ready to make peace with food, check out my website www.gilaglassberg.com. You can sign up for a free 20 minute consultation to make sure we are a good fit! I accept some insurances (Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Emblem and United Health Care only the Empire Plan). -Gila Glassberg, MS, RDN, CDN, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor If you are ready to make peace with food and never say diet again, check out my website www.gilaglassberg.com and apply for a free 20 minute clarity call. I look forward to hearing from you! https://gilaglassberg.com/scheduling/If you'd like to learn more about what I do, follow me on Instagram @gila.glassberg.intuitiveRD and my podcast, Get INTUIT with Gila. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Swizec is the author of the Serverless Handbook and a software engineer at Tia.Swizec Swizec's personal site Serverless Handbook AWS Lambda API Gateway Operating Lambda (The cold start problem) Provisioned Concurrency DynamoDB Relational Database Service Aurora Simple Queue Service CloudFormation CloudWatch Other serverless function hosting providers Gatsby Cloud Functions Vercel Serverless Functions Netlify Functions Cloud Functions for Firebase Related topics Serverless Framework Jamstack Lighthouse What is a Static Site Generator? What is a CDN? Keeping Server-Side Rendering Cool With React Hydration TypeScript TranscriptYou can help edit this transcript on GitHub.[00:00:00] Jeremy: Today, I'm talking to Swiz Teller. He's a senior software engineer at Tia. The author of the serverless handbook and he's also got a bunch of other courses and I don't know is it thousands of blog posts now you have a lot of them.[00:00:13] Swizec: It is actually thousands of, uh, it's like 1500. So I don't know if that's exactly thousands, but it's over a thousand.I'm cheating a little bit. Cause I started in high school back when blogs were still considered social media and then I just kind of kept going on the same domain.Do you have some kind of process where you're, you're always thinking of what to write next? Or are you writing things down while you're working at your job? Things like that. I'm just curious how you come up with that. [00:00:41] Swizec: So I'm one of those people who likes to use writing as a way to process things and to learn. So one of the best ways I found to learn something new is to kind of learn it and then figure out how to explain it to other people and through explaining it, you really, you really spot, oh shit. I don't actually understand that part at all, because if I understood it, I would be able to explain it.And it's also really good as a reference for later. So some, one of my favorite things to do is to spot a problem at work and be like, oh, Hey, this is similar to that side project. I did once for a weekend experiment I did, and I wrote about it so we can kind of crib off of my method and now use it. So we don't have to figure things out from scratch.And part of it is like you said, that just always thinking about what I can write next. I like to keep a schedule. So I keep myself to posting two articles per week. It used to be every day, but I got too busy for that. when you have that schedule and, you know, okay on Tuesday morning, I'm going to sit down and I have an hour or two hours to write, whatever is on top of mind, you kind of start spotting more and more of these opportunities where it's like a coworker asked me something and I explained it in a slack thread and it, we had an hour. Maybe not an hour, but half an hour of back and forth. And you actually just wrote like three or 400 words to explain something. If you take those 400 words and just polish them up a little bit, or rephrase them a different way so that they're easier to understand for somebody who is not your coworker, Hey, that's a blog post and you can post it on your blog and it might help others.[00:02:29] Jeremy: It sounds like taking the conversations most people have in their day to day. And writing that down in a more formal way. [00:02:37] Swizec: Yeah. not even maybe in a more formal way, but more, more about in a way that a broader audience can appreciate. if it's, I'm super gnarly, detailed, deep in our infrastructure in our stack, I would have to explain so much of the stuff around it for anyone to even understand that it's useless, but you often get these nuggets where, oh, this is actually a really good insight that I can share with others and then others can learn from it. I can learn from it. [00:03:09] Jeremy: What's the most accessible way or the way that I can share this information with the most people who don't have all this context that I have from working in this place. [00:03:21] Swizec: Exactly. And then the power move, if you're a bit of an asshole is to, instead of answering your coworkers question is to think about the answer, write a blog post and then share the link with them.I think that's pushing it a little bit.[00:03:38] Jeremy: Yeah, It's like you're being helpful, but it also feels a little bit passive aggressive.[00:03:44] Swizec: Exactly. Although that's a really good way to write documentation. One thing I've noticed at work is if people keep asking me the same questions, I try to stop writing my replies in slack and instead put it on confluence or whatever internal wiki that we have, and then share that link. and that has always been super appreciated by everyone.[00:04:09] Jeremy: I think it's easy to, have that reply in slack and, and solve that problem right then. But when you're creating these Wiki pages or these documents, how're people generally finding these. Cause I know you can go through all this trouble to make this document. And then people just don't know to look or where to go. [00:04:30] Swizec: Yeah. Discoverability is a really big problem, especially what happens with a lot of internal documentation is that it's kind of this wasteland of good ideas that doesn't get updated and nobody maintains. So people stop even looking at it. And then if you've stopped looking at it before, stop updating it, people stop contributing and it kind of just falls apart.And the other problem that often happens is that you start writing this documentation in a vacuum. So there's no audience for it, so it's not help. So it's not helpful. That's why I like the slack first approach where you first answered the question is. And now, you know exactly what you're answering and exactly who the audiences.And then you can even just copy paste from slack, put it in a conf in JIRA board or wherever you put these things. spice it up a little, maybe effect some punctuation. And then next time when somebody asks you the same question, you can be like, oh, Hey, I remember where that is. Go find the link and share it with them and kind of also trains people to start looking at the wiki.I don't know, maybe it's just the way my brain works, but I'm really bad at remembering information, but I'm really good at remembering how to find it. Like my brain works like a huge reference network and it's very easy for me to remember, oh, I wrote that down and it's over there even if I don't remember the answer, I almost always remember where I wrote it down if I wrote it down, whereas in slack it just kind of gets lost.[00:06:07] Jeremy: Do you also take more informal notes? Like, do you have notes locally? You look through or something? That's not a straight up Wiki. [00:06:15] Swizec: I'm actually really bad at that. I, one of the things I do is that when I'm coding, I write down. so I have almost like an engineering log book where everything, I, almost everything I think about, uh, problems I'm working on. I'm always writing them down on by hand, on a piece of paper. And then I never look at those notes again.And it's almost like it helps me think it helps me organize my thoughts. And I find that I'm really bad at actually referencing my notes and reading them later because, and this again is probably a quirk of my brain, but I've always been like this. Once I write it down, I rarely have to look at it again.But if I don't write it down, I immediately forget what it is.What I do really like doing is writing down SOPs. So if I notice that I keep doing something repeatedly, I write a, uh, standard operating procedure. For my personal life and for work as well, I have a huge, oh, it's not that huge, but I have a repository of standard procedures where, okay, I need to do X.So you pull up the right recipe and you just follow the recipe. And if you spot a bug in the recipe, you fix the recipe. And then once you have that polished, it's really easy to turn that into an automated process that can do it for you, or even outsource it to somebody else who can work. So we did, you don't have to keep doing the same stuff and figuring out, figuring it out from scratch every time.[00:07:55] Jeremy: And these standard operating procedures, they sound a little bit like runbooks I guess. [00:08:01] Swizec: Yep. Run books or I think in DevOps, I think the big red book or the red binder where you take it out and you're like, we're having this emergency, this alert is firing. Here are the next steps of what we have to check.[00:08:15] Jeremy: So for those kinds of things, those are more for incidents and things like that. But in your case, it sounds like it's more, uh, I need to get started with the next JS project, or I need to set up a Postgres database things like that. [00:08:30] Swizec: Yeah. Or I need to reset a user to initial states for testing or create a new user. That's sort of thing.[00:08:39] Jeremy: These probably aren't in that handwritten log book.[00:08:44] Swizec: The wiki. That's also really good way to share them with new engineers who are coming on to the team.[00:08:50] Jeremy: Is it where you just basically dump them all on one page or is it where you, you organize them somehow so that people know that this is where, where they need to go. [00:09:00] Swizec: I like to keep a pretty flat structure because, I think the, the idea of categorization outlived its prime. We have really good search algorithms now and really good fuzzy searching. So it's almost easier if everything is just dumped and it's designed to be easy to search. a really interesting anecdote from, I think they were they were professors at some school and they realized that they try to organize everything into four files and folders.And they're trying to explain this to their younger students, people who are in their early twenties and the young students just couldn't understand. Why would you put anything in a folder? Like what is a folder? What is why? You just dump everything on your desktop and then command F and you find it. Why would you, why would you even worry about what the file name is? Where the file is? Like, who cares? It's there somewhere.[00:09:58] Jeremy: Yeah, I think I saw the same article. I think it was on the verge, right?I mean, I think that's that's right, because when you're using, say a Mac and you don't go look for the application or the document you want to run a lot of times you open up spotlight and just type it and it comes up.Though, I think what's also sort of interesting is, uh, at least in the note taking space, there's a lot of people who like setting up things like tags and things like that. And in a way that feels a lot like folders, I guess [00:10:35] Swizec: Yeah. The difference between tags and categories is that the same file can have multiple tags and it cannot be in multiple folders. So that's why categorization systems usually fall apart. You mentioned note taking systems and my opinion on those has always been that it's very easy to fall into the trap of feeling productive because you are working on your note or productivity system, but you're not actually achieving anything.You're just creating work for work sake. I try to keep everything as simple as possible and kind of avoid the overhead.[00:11:15] Jeremy: People can definitely spend hours upon hours curating what's my note taking system going to be, the same way that you can try to set up your blog for two weeks and not write any articles. [00:11:31] Swizec: Yeah. exactly.[00:11:32] Jeremy: When I take notes, a lot of times I'll just create a new note in apple notes or in a markdown file and I'll just write stuff, but it ends up being very similar to what you described with your, your log book in that, like, because it's, it's not really organized in any way. Um, it can be tricky to go back and actually, find useful information though, Though, I suppose the main difference though, is that when it is digital, uh, sometimes if I search for a specific, uh, software application or a specific tool, then at least I can find, um, those bits there [00:12:12] Swizec: Yeah. That's true. the other approach I'd like to use is called the good shit stays. So if I can't remember it, it probably wasn't important enough. And you can, especially these days with the internet, when it comes to details and facts, you can always find them. I find that it's pretty easy to find facts as long as you can remember some sort of reference to it.[00:12:38] Jeremy: You can find specific errors or like you say specific facts, but I think if you haven't been working with a specific technology or in a specific domain for a certain amount of time, you, it, it can be hard to, to find like the right thing to look for, or to even know if the solution you're looking at is, is the right one. [00:13:07] Swizec: That is very true. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really have a solution for that one other than relearn it again. And it's usually faster the second time. But if you had notes, you would still have to reread the notes. Anyway, I guess that's a little faster, cause it's customized to you personally.[00:13:26] Jeremy: Where it's helpful is that sometimes when you're looking online, you have to jump through a bunch of different sites to kind of get all the information together. And by that time you've, you've lost your flow a little bit, or you you've lost, kind of what you were working on, uh, to begin with. Yeah. [00:13:45] Swizec: Yeah. That definitely happens.[00:13:47] Jeremy: Next I'd like to talk about the serverless handbook. Something that you've talked about publicly a little bit is that when you try to work on something, you don't think it's a great idea to just go look at a bunch of blog posts. Um, you think it's better to, to go to a book or some kind of more, uh, I don't know what you would call it like larger or authoritative resource. And I wonder what the process was for, for you. Like when you decided I'm going to go learn how to do serverless you know, what was your process for doing that? [00:14:23] Swizec: Yeah. When I started learning serverless, I noticed that maybe I just wasn't good at finding them. That's one thing I've noticed with Google is that when you're jumping into a new technical. It's often hard to find stuff because you don't really know what you're searching for. And Google also likes to tune the algorithms to you personally a little bit.So it can be hard to find what you want if you are, if you haven't been in that space. So I couldn't really find a lot of good resources, uh, which resulted in me doing a lot of exploration, essentially from scratch or piecing together different blogs and scraps of information here and there. I know that I spend ridiculous amounts of time in even as deep as GitHub issues on closed issues that came up in Google and answer something or figure, or people were figuring out how something works and then kind of piecing all of that together and doing a lot of kind of manual banging my head against the wall until the wall broke.And I got through. I decided after all of that, that I really liked serverless as a technology. And I really think it's the future of how backend systems are going to be built. I think it's unclear yet. What kind of systems is appropriate for and what kind of kind of systems it isn't.It does have pros and cons. it does resolve a lot of the very annoying parts of building a modern website or building upon backend go away when you go serverless. So I figured I really liked this and I've learned a lot trying to piece it together over a couple of years.And if combined, I felt like I was able to do that because I had previous experience with building full stack websites, building full stack apps and understanding how backends work in general. So it wasn't like, oh, How do I do this from scratch? It was more okay. I know how this is supposed to work in theory.And I understand the principles. What are the new things that I have to add to that to figure out serverless? So I wrote the serverless handbook basically as a, as a reference or as a resource that I wish I had when I started learning this stuff. It gives you a lot of the background of just how backends work in general, how databases connect, what different databases are, how they're, how they work.Then I talked some, some about distributed systems because that comes up surprisingly quickly when you're going with serverless approaches, because everything is a lot more distributed. And it talks about infrastructure as code because that kind of simplifies a lot of the, they have opposite parts of the process and then talks about how you can piece it together in the ends to get a full product. and I approached it from the perspective of, I didn't want to write a tutorial that teaches you how to do something specific from start to finish, because I personally don't find those to be super useful. Um, they're great for getting started. They're great for building stuff. If you're building something, that's exactly the same as the tutorial you found.But they don't help you really understand how it works. It's kind of like if you just learn how to cook risotto, you know how to cook risotto, but nobody told you that, Hey, you actually, now that you know how to cook risotto, you also know how to just make rice and peas. It's pretty much the same process.Uh, and if you don't have that understanding, it's very hard to then transition between technologies and it's hard to apply them to your specific situation. So I try to avoid that and write more from the perspective. How I can give somebody who knows JavaScript who's a front end engineer, or just a JavaScript developer, how I can give them enough to really understand how serverless and backends works and be able to apply those approaches to any project.[00:18:29] Jeremy: When people hear serverless, a lot of times they're not really sure what that actually means. I think a lot of times people think about Lambdas, they think about functions as a service. but I wonder to you what does serverless mean? [00:18:45] Swizec: It's not that there's no server, there's almost always some server somewhere. There has to be a machine that actually runs your code. The idea of serverless is that the machine and the system that handles that stuff is trans is invisible to you. You're offloading all of the dev ops work to somebody else so that you can full focus on the business problems that you're trying to solve.You can focus on the stuff that is specific and unique to your situation because, you know, there's a million different ways to set up a server that runs on a machine somewhere and answers, a, API requests with adjacent. And some people have done that. Thousands of times, new people, new folks have probably never done it.And honestly, it's really boring, very brittle and kind of annoying, frustrating work that I personally never liked. So with serverless, you can kind of hand that off to a whole team of engineers at AWS or at Google or, whatever other providers there are, and they can deal with that stuff. And you can, you can work on the level of, I have this JavaScript function.I want this JavaScript function to run when somebody hits this URL and that's it. That's all, that's essentially all you have to think about. So that's what serverless means to me. It's essentially a cloud functions, I guess.[00:20:12] Jeremy: I mean, there been services like Heroku, for example, that, that have let people make rails apps or Django apps and things like that, where the user doesn't really have to think about the operating system, um, or about creating databases and things like that. And I wonder, to you, if, if that is serverless or if that's something different and, and what the difference there might be. [00:20:37] Swizec: I think of that as an intermediary step between on prem or handling your own servers and full serverless, because you still have to think about provisioning. You still have to think of your server as a whole blob or a whole glob of things that runs together and runs somewhere and lives or lifts somewhere.You have to provision capacity. You have to still think about how many servers you have on Heroku. They're called dynos. you still have to deal with the routing. You have to deal with connecting it to the database. Uh, you always have to think about that a little bit, but you're, you're still dealing with a lot of the frameworky stuff where you have to, okay, I'm going to declare a route. And then once I've declared the route, I'm going to tell it how to take data from the, from the request, put it to the function. That's actually doing the work. And then you're still dealing with all of that. Whereas with full serverless, first of all, it can scale down to zero, which is really useful.If you don't have a lot of traffic, you can have, you're not paying anything unless somebody is actually using your app. The other thing is that you don't deal with any of the routing or any of that. You're just saying, I want this URL to exist, and I want it to run that function, that you don't deal with anything more than that.And then you just write, the actual function that's doing the work. So it ends up being as a normal jobs function that accepts a request as an argument and returns a JSON response, or even just a JSON object and the serverless machinery handles everything else, which I personally find a lot easier. And you don't have to have these, what I call JSON bureaucracy, where you're piping an object through a bunch of different functions to get from the request to the actual part that's doing the work. You're just doing the core interesting work.[00:22:40] Jeremy: Sort of sounds like one of the big distinctions is with something like Heroku or something similar. You may not have a server, but you have the dyno, which is basically a server. You have something that is consistently running, Whereas with what you consider to be serverless, it's, it's something that basically only launches on when it's invoked. Um, whether that's a API call or, or something else. The, the routing thing is a little bit interesting because the, when I was going through the course, there are still the routes that you write. It's just that you're telling, I guess the API gateway Amazon's API gateway, how to route to your functions, which was very similar to how to route to a controller action or something like that in other languages.[00:23:37] Swizec: Yeah. I think that part is actually is pretty similar where, I think it kind of depends on what kind of framework you end up building. Yeah, it can be very simple. I know with rails, it's relatively simple to define a new route. I think you have to touch three or four different files. I've also worked in large express apps where.Hooking up the controller with all of the swagger definitions or open API definitions, and everything else ends up being like six or seven different files that have to have functions that are named just right. And you have to copy paste it around. And I, I find that to be kind of a waste of effort, with the serverless framework.What I like is you have this YAML file and you say, this route is handled by this function. And then the rest happens on its own with next JS or with Gatsby functions, Gatsby cloud functions. They've gone even a step further, which I really like. You have the slash API directory in your project and you just pop a file in there.And whatever that file is named, that becomes your API route and you don't even have to configure anything. You're just, in both of them, if you put a JavaScript file in slash API called hello, That exports, a handler function that is automatically a route and everything else happens behind the scenes.[00:25:05] Jeremy: So that that's more of a matter of the framework you're using and how easy does it make it to, to handle routing? Whether that's a pain or a not.[00:25:15] Swizec: Yeah. and I think with the serverless frameworks, it's because serverless itself, as a concept makes it easier to set this up. We've been able to have these modern frameworks with really good developer experience Gatsby now with how did they have Gatsby cloud and NextJS with Vercel and I think Netlify is working on it as well.They can have this really good integration between really tight coupling and tight integration between a web framework and the deployment environment, because serverless is enabling them to spin that up. So easily.[00:25:53] Jeremy: One of the things about your courses, this isn't the only thing you focus on, but one of the use cases is basically replacing a traditional server rendered application or a traditional rails, django, spring application, where you've got Amazon's API gateway in front, which is serving as the load balancer.And then you have your Lambda functions, which are basically what would be a controller action in a lot of frameworks. and then you're hooking it up to a database which could be Amazon. It could be any database, I suppose. And I wonder in your experience having worked with serverless at your job or in side projects, whether that's like something you would use as a default or whether serverless is more for background jobs and things like that.[00:26:51] Swizec: I think the underlying hidden question you're asking is about cold starts and API, and the response times, is one of the concerns that people have with serverless is that if your app is not used a lot, your servers scale down to zero. So then when somebody new comes on, it can take a really long time to respond.And they're going to bail and be upset with you. One way that I've solved, that is using kind of a more JAM Stacky approach. I feel like that buzzword is still kind of in flux, but the idea is that the actual app front-end app, the client app is running off of CDNs and doesn't even touch your servers.So that first load is of the entire app and of the entire client system is really fast because it comes from a CDN that's running somewhere as close as possible to the user. And it's only the actual APIs are hitting your server. So in the, for example, if you have something like a blog, you can, most blogs are pretty static.Most of the content is very static. I use that on my blog as well. you can pre-render that when you're deploying the project. So you, you kind of, pre-render everything that's static when you deploy. And then it becomes just static files that are served from the CDN. So you get the initial article. I think if you, I haven't tested in a while, but I think if you load one of my articles on swizec.com, it's readable, like on lighthouse reports, if you look at the lighthouse where it gives you the series of screenshots, the first screenshot is already fully readable.I think that means it's probably under 30 or 40 milliseconds to get the content and start reading, but then, then it rehydrates and becomes a react app. and then when it's a react app, it can make for their API calls to the backend. So usually on user interaction, like if you have upvotes or comments or something like that, Only when the user clicks something, you then make an API call to your server, and that then calls a Lambda or Gatsby function or a Netlify cloud function, or even a Firebase function, which then then wakes up and talks to the database and does things, and usually people are a lot more forgiving of that one taking 50 milliseconds to respond instead of 10 milliseconds, but, you know, 50 milliseconds is still pretty good.And I think there were recently some experiments shared where they were comparing cold start times. And if you write your, uh, cloud functions in JavaScript, the average cold startup time is something like a hundred milliseconds. And a big part of that is because you're not wrapping this entire framework, like express or rails into your function. It's just a small function. So the server only has to load up something like, I don't know. I think my biggest cloud functions have been maybe 10 kilobytes with all of the dependencies and everything bundled in, and that's pretty fast for a server to, to load run, start no JS and start serving your request.It's way fast enough. And then if you need even more speed, you can go to rust or go, which are even faster. As long as you avoid the java, .net, C-sharp those kinds of things. It's usually fine.[00:30:36] Jeremy: One of the reasons I was curious is because I was going through the rest example you've got, where it's basically going through Amazon's API gateway, um, goes to a Lambda function written in JavaScript, and then talks to dynamoDB gives you a record back or creates a record and, I, I found that just making those calls, making a few calls, hopefully to account for the cold start I getting response times of maybe 150 to 250 milliseconds, which is not terrible, but, it's also not what I would call fast either.So I was just kind of curious, when you have a real app, like, are, are there things that you've come across where Lambda maybe might have some issues or at least there's tricks you need to do to, to work around them? [00:31:27] Swizec: Yeah. So the big problem there is, as soon as a database is involved, that tends to get. Especially if that database is not co-located with your Lambda. So it's usually, or when I've experimented, it was a really bad idea to go from a Vercel API function, talk to dynamo DB in AWS that goes over the open internet.And it becomes really slow very quickly. at my previous job, I experimented with serverless and connecting it to RDS. If you have RDS in a separate private network, then RDS is that they, the Postgres database service they have, if that's running in a separate private network, then your functions, it immediately adds 200 or 300 milliseconds to your response times.If you keep them together, it usually works a lot faster. ANd then there are ways to keeping them. Pre-warned usually it doesn't work as well as you would want. There are ways on AWS to, I forget what it's called right now, but they have now what's, some, some sort of automatic rewarming, if you really need response times that are smaller than a hundred, 200 milliseconds.But yeah, it mostly depends on what you're doing. As soon as you're making API calls or database calls. You're essentially talking to a different server that is going to be slower on a lambda then it is if you have a packaged pserver, that's running the database and the server itself on the same machine.[00:33:11] Jeremy: And are there any specific challenges related to say you mentioned RDS earlier? I know with some databases, like for example, Postgres sometimes, uh, when you have a traditional server application, the server will pool the connections. So it'll make some connection into your data database and just keep reusing them.Whereas with the Lambda is it making a new connection every time? [00:33:41] Swizec: Almost. So Lambdas. I think you can configure how long it stays warm, but what AWS tries to do is reuse your laptops. So when the Lambda wakes up, it doesn't die immediately. After that initial request, it stays, it stays alive for the next, let's say it's one minute. Or even if it's 10 minutes, it's, there's a life for the next couple of minutes.And during that time, it can accept new requests, new requests and serve them. So anything that you put in the global namespace of your phone. We'll potentially remain alive between functions and you can use that to build a connection pool to your database so that you can reuse the connections instead of having to open new connections every time.What you have to be careful with is that if you get simultaneous requests at actually simultaneous requests, not like 10 requests in 10 milliseconds, if you get 10 requests at the same millisecond, you're going to wake up multiple Lambdas and you're going to have multiple connection pools running in parallel.So it's very easy to crash your RDS server with something like AWS Lambda, because I think the default concurrency limit is a thousand Lambdas. And if each of those can have a pool of, let's say 10 requests, that's 10,000 open requests or your RDS server. And. You were probably not paying for high enough tier for the RDS server to survive that that's where it gets really tricky.I think AWS now has a service that lets you kind of offload a connection pool so that you can take your Lambda and connect it to the connection pool. And the connection pool is keeping warm connections to your server. but an even better approach is to use something like Aurora DB, which is also an on AWS or dynamo DB, which are designed from the ground up to work with serverless applications.[00:35:47] Jeremy: It's things that work, but you have to know sort of the little, uh, gotchas, I guess, that are out there. [00:35:54] Swizec: Yeah, exactly. There's sharp edges to be found everywhere. part of that is also that. serverless, isn't that old yet I think AWS Lambda launched in 2014 or 2015, which is one forever in internet time, but it's still not that long ago. So we're still figuring out how to make things better.And, it's also where, where you mentioned earlier that whether it's more appropriate for backend processes or for user-facing processes, it does work really well for backend processes because you CA you have better control over the maximum number of Lambdas that run, and you have more patience for them being slow, being slow sometimes. And so on.[00:36:41] Jeremy: It sounds like even for front end processes as long as you know, like you said, the sharp edges and you could do things like putting a CDN in front where your Lambdas don't even get hit until some later time. There's a lot of things you can do to make it where it is a good choice or a good I guess what you're saying, when you're building an application, do you default to using a serverless type of stack? [00:37:14] Swizec: Yes, for all of my side projects, I default to using serverless. Um, I have a bunch of apps running that way, even when serverless is just no servers at all. Like my blog doesn't have any cloud functions right now. It's all running from CDNs, basically. I think the only, I don't know if you could even count that as a cloud function is w my email signup forms go to an API with my email provider.So there's also not, I don't have any servers there. It's directly from the front end. I would totally recommend it if you are a startup that just got tens of millions of dollars in funding, and you are planning to have a million requests per second by tomorrow, then maybe not. That's going to be very expensive very quickly.But there's always a trade off. I think that with serverless, it's a lot easier to build in terms of dev ops and in terms of handling your infrastructure, it's, it takes a bit of a mind shift in how you're building when it comes to the actual logic and the actual, the server system that you're building.And then in terms of costs, it really depends on what you're doing. If you're a super huge company, it probably doesn't make sense to go and serverless, but if you're that. Or if you have that much traffic, you hopefully are also making enough money to essentially build your own serverless system for yourself.[00:38:48] Jeremy: For someone who's interested in trying serverless, like I know for myself when I was going through the tutorial you're using the serverless framework and it creates all these different things in AWS for you and at a high level I could follow. Okay. You know, it has the API gateway and you've got your simple queue service and DynamoDB, and the lambdas all that sort of thing.So at a high level, I could follow along. But when I log into the AWS console, not knowing a whole lot about AWS, it's creating a ton of stuff for you. And I'm wondering from your perspective for somebody who's learning about serverless, how much do they need to really dive into the AWS internals and understand what's going on there. [00:39:41] Swizec: That's a tough one because personally I try to stay away as much as possible. And especially with the serverless framework, what I like is configuring everything through the framework rather than doing it manually. Um, because there's a lot of sharp edges there as well. Where if you go in and you manually change something, then AWS can't allow serverless framework to clean up anymore and you can have ghost processes running.At Tia, we've had that as a really interesting challenge. We're not using serverless framework, we're using something called cloud formation, which is essentially. One lower level of abstraction, then serverless framework, we're doing a lot more work. We're creating a lot more work for ourselves, but that's what we have. And that's what we're working with. these decisions predate me. So I'm just going along with what we have and we wanted to have more control, because again, we have dev ops people on the team and they want more control because they also know what they're doing and we keep having trouble with, oh, we were trying to use infrastructure as code, but then there's this little part where you do have to go into the AWS console and click around a million times to find the right thing and click it.And we've had interesting issues with hanging deploys where something gets stuck on the AWS side and we can take it back. We can tear it down, we can stop it. And it's just a hanging process and you have to wait like seven hours for AWS to do. Oh, okay. Yeah. If it's been there for seven hours, it's probably not needed and then kills it and then you can deploy.So that kind of stuff gets really frustrating very quickly.[00:41:27] Jeremy: Sounds like maybe in your personal projects, you've been able to, to stick to the serverless framework abstraction and not necessarily have to understand or dive into the details of AWS and it's worked out okay for you. [00:41:43] Swizec: Yeah, exactly. it's useful to know from a high, from a high level what's there and what the different parts are doing, but I would not recommend configuring them through the, through the AWS console because then you're going to always be in the, in the AWS console. And it's very easy to get something slightly wrong.[00:42:04] Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, I know for myself just going through the handbook, just going into the console and finding out where I could look at my logs or, um, what was actually running in AWS. It wasn't that straightforward. So, even knowing the bare minimum for somebody who's new to, it was like a little daunting. [00:42:26] Swizec: Yeah, it's super daunting. And they have thousands, if not hundreds of different products on AWS. and when it comes to, like you mentioned logs, I, I don't think I put this in the handbook because I either didn't know about it yet, or it wasn't available quite yet, but serverless can all the serverless framework also let you look at logs through the servers framework.So you can say SLS function, name, logs, and it shows you the latest logs. it also lets you run functions locally to an extent. it's really useful from that perspective. And I personally find the AWS console super daunting as well. So I try to stay away as much as possible.[00:43:13] Jeremy: It's pretty wild when you first log in and you click the button that shows you the services and it's covering your whole screen. Right. And you're like, I just want to see what I just pushed. [00:43:24] Swizec: Yeah, exactly. And there's so many different ones and they're all they have these obscure names that I don't find meaningful at all.[00:43:34] Jeremy: I think another thing that I found a little bit challenging was that when I develop applications, I'm used to having the feedback cycle of writing the code, running the application or running a test and seeing like, did it work? And if it didn't, what's the stack trace, what, what happened? And I found the process of going into CloudWatch and looking at the logs and waiting for them to eventually refresh and all that to be, a little challenging. And, and, um, so I was wondering in your, your experience, um, how you've worked through, you know, how are you able to get a fast feedback loop or is this just kind of just part of it. [00:44:21] Swizec: I am very lazy when it comes to writing tests, or when it comes to fast feedback loops. I like having them I'm really bad at actually setting them up. But what I found works pretty well for serverless is first of all, if you write your backend a or if you write your cloud functions in TypeScript that immediately resolves most of the most common issues, most common sources of bugs, it makes sure that you're not using something that doesn't exist.Make sure you're not making typos, make sure you're not holding a function wrong, which I personally find very helpful because I have pretty fast and I make typos. And it's so nice to be able to say, if it's completely. I know that it's at least going to run. I'm not going to have some stupid issue of a missing semi-colon or some weird fiddly detail.So that's already a super fast feedback cycle that runs right in your IDE the next step is because you're just writing the business logic function and you know, that the function itself is going to run. You can write unit tests that treat that function as a normal function. I'm personally really bad at writing those unit tests, but they can really speed up the, the actual process of testing because you can go and you can be like, okay.So I know that the code is doing what I want it to be doing if it's running in isolation. And that, that can be pretty fast. The next step that is, uh, Another level in abstraction and and gives you more feedback is with serverless. You can locally invoke most Lambdas. The problem with locally running your Lambdas is that it's not the same environment as on AWS.And I asked one of the original developers of the same serverless framework, and he said, just forget about accurately replicating AWS on your system. There are so many dragons there it's never going to work. and I had an interesting example about that when I was building a little project for my girlfriend that sends her photos from our relationship to an IOT device every day or something like that.It worked when I ran SLS invoke and it ran and it even called all of the APIs and everything worked. It was amazing. And then when I deployed it, it didn't work and it turned out that it was a permissions issue. I forgot to give myself a specific, I am role for something to work. That's kind of like a stair-stepping process of having fast feedback cycles first, if it compiles, that means that you're not doing anything absolutely wrong.If the tests are running, that means it's at least doing what you think it's doing. If it's invoking locally, it means that you're holding the API APIs and the third-party stuff correctly. And then the last step is deploying it to AWS and actually running it with a curl or some sort of request and seeing if it works in production.And that then tells you if it's actually going to work with AWS. And the nice thing there is because uh serverless framework does this. I think it does a sort of incremental deploys. The, that cycle is pretty fast. You're not waiting half an hour for your C code pipeline or for your CIO to run an integration test, to do stuff.One minute, it takes one minute and it's up and you can call it and you immediately see if it's working.[00:47:58] Jeremy: Basically you're, you're trying to do everything you can. Static typing and, running tests just on the functions. But I guess when it comes down to it, you really do have to push everything, update AWS, have it all run, um, in order to, to really know. Um, and so I guess it's, it's sort of a trade-off right. Versus being able to, if you're writing a rails application and you've got all your dependencies on your machine, um, you can spin it up and you don't really have to wait for it to, to push anywhere, but, [00:48:36] Swizec: Yeah. But you still don't know if, what if your database is misconfigured in production?[00:48:42] Jeremy: right, right. So it's, it's never, never the same as production. It's just closer. Right? Yeah. Yeah, I totally get When you don't have the real services or the real databases, then there's always going to be stuff that you can miss. Yeah, [00:49:00] Swizec: Yeah. it's not working until it's working in production.[00:49:03] Jeremy: That's a good place to end it on, but is there anything else you want to mention before we go?[00:49:10] Swizec: No, I think that's good. Uh, I think we talked about a lot of really interesting stuff.[00:49:16] Jeremy: Cool. Well, Swiz, thank you so much for chatting with me today. [00:49:19] Swizec: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Lyrid is a server-less cloud computing API management platform with dynamic load balancing among Google, AWS, Microsoft, Lyrid cloud, and private cloud. Machine learning is deployed to assure best measured trade off of cost versus performance for services in cloud computing. Most customers are seeing savings up to 90% when transitioning from the traditional virtual machine to a hybrid of virtual machine + Lyrid. Lyrid provides developers with an end-to-end experience from local code to global deployment of serverless functions. Lyrid's Function Delivery Networks lets the customer have the CDN-like experience for their code: push it once to our server and we will distribute them across all clouds. For more information, visit lyrid.io If you have the next big idea, apply to the Expert Dojo Accelerator: www.expertdojo.com

Want your website to rank at the top of Google's search engine results pages? Start paying attention to core web vitals. In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Peaks Digital Marketing CEO David Finberg breaks down what Google's core web vitals are, why they matter, and how you can optimize your site for them. From compressing images to using a CDN, he covers all of it, in detail, with actionable information on helpful tools and systems that make it easy to improve your core web vitals.  

Brigitta Jansen, MS, CDN, practices Functional Medicine Nutrition in Connecticut. As a nutritionist, she aims to address the root cause of disease instead of just managing symptoms. She uses metabolic testing, hormone and food sensitivity testing, and autonomic response testing to determine root cause of chronic conditions. Her focus is to heal the gut with the functional medicine 5R program. She supports the body's innate ability to heal itself with personalized diets and supplement plans, as well as other natural therapies. Jansennutrition.com

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:03:20 - VMWare Tanzu 00:07:50 - Gustavo's Career in Security  00:12:00 - Early Days in Chaos Engineering 00:16:30 - Catzilla  00:19:45 - Expanding on SRE 00:26:40 - Learning from Customer Trends 00:29:30 - Chaos Engineering at VMWare 00:36:00 - Outro Links: Tanzu VMware: https://tanzu.vmware.com GitHub for SREDocs: https://github.com/google/sredocs E-book on how to start your incident lifecycle program: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/ebooks/establishing-an-sre-based-incident-lifecycle-program Twitter: https://twitter.com/stratus TranscriptJason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about chaos engineering and building reliable systems. In this episode, Gustavo Franco, a senior engineering manager at VMware joins us to talk about building reliability as a product feature, and the journey of chaos engineering from its place in the early days of Google's disaster recovery practices to the modern SRE movement. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for another episode. Today with us we have Gustavo Franco, who's a senior engineering manager at VMware. Gustavo, why don't you say hi, and tell us about yourself.Gustavo: Thank you very much for having me. Gustavo Franco; as you were just mentioning, I'm a senior engineering manager now at VMware. So, recently co-founded the VMware Tanzu Reliability Engineering Organization with Megan Bigelow. It's been only a year, actually. And we've been doing quite a bit more than SRE; we can talk about like—we're kind of branching out beyond SRE, as well.Jason: Yeah, that sounds interesting. For folks who don't know, I feel like I've seen VMware Tanzu around everywhere. It just suddenly went from nothing into this huge thing of, like, every single Kubernetes-related event, I feel like there's someone from VMware Tanzu on it. So, maybe as some background, give us some information; what is VMware Tanzu?Gustavo: Kubernetes is sort of the engine, and we have a Kubernetes distribution called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. So, one of my teams actually works on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. So, what is VMware Tanzu? What this really is, is what we call a modern application platform, really an end-to-end solution. So, customers expect to buy not just Kubernetes, but everything around, everything that comes with giving the developers a platform to write code, to write applications, to write workloads.So, it's basically the developer at a retail company or a finance company, they don't want to run Kubernetes clusters; they would like the ability to, maybe, but they don't necessarily think in terms of Kubernetes clusters. They want to think about workloads, applications. So, VMWare Tanzu is end-to-end solution that the engine in there is Kubernetes.Jason: That definitely describes at least my perspective on Kubernetes is, I love running Kubernetes clusters, but at the end of the day, I don't want to have to evaluate every single CNCF project and all of the other tools that are required in order to actually maintain and operate a Kubernetes cluster.Gustavo: I was just going to say, and we acquired Pivotal a couple of years ago, so that brought a ton of open-source projects, such as the Spring Framework. So, for Java developers, I think it's really cool, too, just being able to worry about development and the Java layer and a little bit of reliability, chaos engineering perspective. So, kind of really gives me full tooling, the ability common libraries. It's so important for reliable engineering and chaos engineering as well, to give people this common surface that we can actually use to inject faults, potentially, or even just define standards.Jason: Excellent point of having that common framework in order to do these reliability practices. So, you've explained what VMware Tanzu is. Tell me a bit more about how that fits in with VMware Tanzu?Gustavo: Yeah, so one thing that happened the past few years, the SRE organization grew beyond SRE. We're doing quite a bit of horizontal work, so SRE being one of them. So, just an example, I got to charter a compliance engineering team and one team that we call ‘Customer Zero.' I would call them partially the representatives of growth, and then quote-unquote, “Customer problems, customer pain”, and things that we have to resolve across multiple teams. So, SRE is one function that clearly you can think of.You cannot just think of SRE on a product basis, but you think of SRE across multiple products because we're building a platform with multiple pieces. So, it's kind of like putting the building blocks together for this platform. So then, of course, we're going to have to have a team of specialists, but we need an organization of generalists, so that's where SRE and this broader organization comes in.Jason: Interesting. So, it's not just we're running a platform, we need our own SREs, but it sounds like it's more of a group that starts to think more about the product itself and maybe even works with customers to help their reliability needs?Gustavo: Yeah, a hundred percent. We do have SRE teams that invest the majority of their time running SaaS, so running Software as a Service. So, one of them is the Tanzu Mission Control. It's purely SaaS, and what teams see Tanzu Mission Control does is allow the customers to run Kubernetes anywhere. So, if people have Kubernetes on-prem or they have Kubernetes on multiple public clouds, they can use TMC to be that common management surface, both API and web UI, across Kubernetes, really anywhere they have Kubernetes. So, that's SaaS.But for TKG SRE, that's a different problem. We don't have currently a TKG SaaS offering, so customers are running TKG on-prem or on public cloud themselves. So, what does the TKG SRE team do? So, that's one team that actually [unintelligible 00:05:15] to me, and they are working directly improving the reliability of the product. So, we build reliability as a feature of the product.So, we build a reliability scanner, which is a [unintelligible 00:05:28] plugin. It's open-source. I can give you more examples, but that's the gist of it, of the idea that you would hire security engineers to improve the security of a product that you sell to customers to run themselves. Why wouldn't you hire SREs to do the same to improve the reliability of the product that customers are running themselves? So, kind of, SRE beyond SaaS, basically.Jason: I love that idea because I feel like a lot of times in organizations that I talk with, SRE really has just been a renamed ops team. And so it's purely internal; it's purely thinking about we get software shipped to us from developers and it's our responsibility to just make that run reliably. And this sounds like it is that complete embrace of the DevOps model of breaking down silos and starting to move reliability, thinking of it from a developer perspective, a product perspective.Gustavo: Yeah. A lot of my work is spent on making analogies with security, basically. One example, several of the SREs in my org, yeah, they do spend time doing PRs with product developers, but also they do spend a fair amount of time doing what we call in a separate project right now—we're just about to launch something new—a reliability risk assessment. And then you can see the parallels there. Where like security engineers would probably be doing a security risk assessment or to look into, like, what could go wrong from a security standpoint?So, I do have a couple engineers working on reliability risk assessment, which is, what could go wrong from a reliability standpoint? What are the… known pitfalls of the architecture, the system design that we have? How does the architectural work looks like of the service? And yeah, what are the outages that we know already that we could have? So, if you have a dependency on, say, file on a CDN, yeah, what if the CDN fails?It's obvious and I know most of the audience will be like, “Oh, this is obvious,” but, like, are you writing this down on a spreadsheet and trying to stack-rank those risks? And after you stack-rank them, are you then mitigating, going top-down, look for—there was an SREcon talk by [Matt Brown 00:07:32], a former colleague of mine at Google, it's basically, know your enemy tech talk in SREcon. He talks about this like how SRE needs to have a more conscious approach to reliability risk assessment. So, really embraced that, and we embraced that at VMware. The SRE work that I do comes from a little bit of my beginnings or my initial background of working security.Jason: I didn't actually realize that you worked security, but I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and you've got a long career doing some really amazing work. So, you said you were in security. I'm curious, tell us more about how your career has progressed. How did you get to where you are today?Gustavo: Very first job, I was 16. There was this group of sysadmins on the first internet service provider in Brazil. One of them knew me from BBS, Bulletin Board Systems, and they, you know, were getting hacked, left and right. So, this guy referred me, and he referred me saying, “Look, it's this kid. He's 16, but he knows his way around this security stuff.”So, I show up, they interview me. I remember one of the interview questions; it's pretty funny. They asked me, “Oh, what would you do if we asked you to go and actually physically grab the routing table from AT&T?” It's just, like, a silly question and they told them, “Uh, that's impossible.” So, I kind of told him the gist of what I knew about routing, and it was impossible to physically get a routing table.For some reason, they loved that. That was the only candidate that could be telling them, “No. I'm not going to do it because it makes no sense.” So, they hired me. And the student security was basically teaching the older sysadmins about SSH because they were all on telnet, nothing was encrypted.There was no IDS—this was a long time ago, right, so the explosion of cybersecurity security firms did not exist then, so it was new. To be, like, a security company was a new thing. So, that was the beginning. I did dabble in open-source development for a while. I had a couple other jobs on ISPs.Google found me because of my dev and open-source work in '06, '07. I interviewed, joined Google, and then at Google, all of it is IC, basically, individual contributor. And at Google, I start doing SRE-type of work, but for the corporate systems. And there was this failed attempt to migrate from one Linux distribution to another—all the corporate systems—and I tech-led the effort making that successful. I don't think I should take the credit; it was really just a fact of, like you know, trying the second time and kind of, learned—the organization learned the lessons that I had to learn from the first time. So, we did a second time and it worked.And then yeah, I kept going. I did more SRE work in corp, I did some stuff in production, like all the products. So, I did a ton of stuff. I did—let's see—technical infrastructure, disaster recovery testing, I started a chaos-engineering-focused team. I worked on Google Cloud before we had a name for it. [laugh].So, I was the first SRE on Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage. I managed Google Plus SRE team, and G Suite for a while. And finally, after doing all this runs on different teams, and developing new SRE teams and organizations, and different styles, different programs in SRE. Dave Rensin, which created the CRE team at Google, recruited me with Matt Brown, which was then the tech lead, to join the CRE team, which was the team at Google focused on teaching Google Cloud customers on how to adopt SRE practices. So, because I had this very broad experience within Google, they thought, yeah, it will be cool if you can share that experience with customers.And then I acquired even more experience working with random customers trying to adopt SRE practices. So, I think I've seen a little bit of it all. VMware wanted me to start, basically, a CRE team following the same model that we had at Google, which culminated all this in TKG SRE that I'm saying, like, we work to improve the reliability of the product and not just teaching the customer how to adopt SRE practices. And my pitch to the team was, you know, we can and should teach the customers, but we should also make sure that they have reasonable defaults, that they are providing a reasonable config. That's the gist of my experience, at a high level.Jason: That's an amazing breadth of experience. And there's so many aspects that I feel like I want to dive into [laugh] that I'm not quite sure exactly where to start. But I think I'll start with the first one, and that's that you mentioned that you were on that initial team at Google that started doing chaos engineering. And so I'm wondering if you could share maybe one of your experiences from that. What sort of chaos engineering did you do? What did you learn? What were the experiments like?Gustavo: So, a little bit of the backstory. This is probably because Kripa mentioned this several times before—and Kripa Krishnan, she actually initiated disaster recovery testing, way, way before there was such a thing as chaos engineering—that was 2006, 2007. That was around the time I was joining Google. So, Kripa was the first one to lead disaster recovery testing. It was very manual; it was basically a room full of project managers with postIts, and asking teams to, like, “Hey, can you test your stuff? Can you test your processes? What if something goes wrong? What if there's an earthquake in the Bay Area type of scenario?” So, that was the predecessor.Many, many years later, I work with her from my SRE teams testing, for my SRE teams participating in disaster recovery testing, but I was never a part of the team responsible for it. And then seven years later, I was. So, she recruited me with the following pitch, she was like, “Well, the program is big. We have disaster recovery tests, we have a lot of people testing, but we are struggling to convince people to test year-round. So, people tend to test once a year, and they don't test again. Which is bad. And also,” she was like, “I wish we had a software; there's something missing.”We had the spreadsheets, we track people, we track their tasks. So, it was still very manual. The team didn't have a tool for people to test. It was more like, “Tell me what you're going to test, and I will help you with scheduling, I'll help you to not conflict with the business and really disrupt something major, disrupt production, disrupt the customers, potentially.” A command center, like a center of operations.That's what they did. I was like, “I know exactly what we need.” But then I surveyed what was out there in open-source way, and of course, like, Netflix, gets a lot of—deserves a lot of credit for it; there was nothing that could be applied to the way we're running infrastructure internally. And I also felt that if we built this centrally and we build a catalog of tasks ourselves, and that's it, people are not going to use it. We have a bunch of developers, software engineers.They've got to feel like—they want to, they want to feel—and rightfully so—that they wanted control and they are in control, and they want to customize the system. So, in two weeks, I hack a prototype where it was almost like a workflow engine for chaos engineering tests, and I wrote two or three tests, but there was an API for people to bring their own test to the system, so they could register a new test and basically send me a patch to add their own tests. And, yeah, to my surprise, like, a year later—and the absolute number of comparison is not really fair, but we had an order of magnitude more testing being done through the software than manual tests. So, on a per-unit basis, the quality of the ultimate tasks was lower, but the cool thing was that people were testing a lot more often. And it was also very surprising to see the teams that were testing.Because there were teams that refused to do the manual disaster recovery testing exercise, they were using the software now to test, and that was part of the regular integration test infrastructure. So, they're not quite starting with okay, we're going to test in production, but they were testing staging, they were testing a developer environment. And in staging, they had real data; they were finding regressions. I can mention the most popular testing, too, because I spoke about this publicly before, which was this fuzz testing. So, a lot of things are RPC or RPC services, RPC, servers.Fuzz testing is really useful in the sense that, you know, if you send a random data in RPC call, will the server crash? Will the server handling this gracefully? So, we fought a lot of people—not us—a lot of people use or shared service bringing their own test, and fuzz testing was very popular to run continuously. And they would find a ton of crashes. We had a lot of success with that program.This team that I ran that was dedicated to building this shared service as a chaos engineering tool—which ironically named Catzilla—and I'm not a cat person, so there's a story there, too—was also doing more than just Catzilla, which we can also talk about because there's a little bit more of the incident management space that's out there.Jason: Yeah. Happy to dive into that. Tell me more about Catzilla?Gustavo: Yeah. So, Catzilla was sort of the first project from scratch from the team that ended up being responsible to share a coherent vision around the incident prevention. And then we would put Catzilla there, right, so the chaos engineering shared service and prevention, detection, analysis and response. Because once I started working on this, I realized, well, you know what? People are still being paged, they have good training, we had a good incident management process, so we have good training for people to coordinate incidents, but if you don't have SREs working directly with you—and most teams didn't—you also have a struggle to communicate with executives.It was a struggle to figure out what to do with prevention, and then Catzilla sort of resolved that a little bit. So, if you think of a team, like an SRE team in charge of not running a SaaS necessarily, but a team that works in function of a company to help the company to think holistically about incident prevention, detection, analysis, and response. So, we end up building more software for those. So, part of the software was well, instead of having people writing postmortems—a pet peeve of mine is people write postmortems and them they would give to the new employees to read them. So, people never really learned the postmortems, and there was like not a lot of information recovery from those retrospectives.Some teams were very good at following up on extra items and having discussions. But that's kind of how you see the community now, people talking about how we should approach retrospectives. It happened but it wasn't consistent. So then, well, one thing that we could do consistently is extract all the information that people spend so much time writing on the retrospectives. So, my pitch was, instead of having these unstructured texts, can we have it both unstructured and structured?So, then we launch postmortem template that was also machine-readable so we could extract information and then generate reports for to business leaders to say, “Okay, here's what we see on a recurring basis, what people are talking about in the retrospectives, what they're telling each other as they go about writing the retrospectives.” So, we found some interesting issues that were resolved that were not obvious on a per retrospective basis. So, that was all the way down to the analysis of the incidents. On the management part, we built tooling. It's basically—you can think of it as a SaaS, but just for the internal employees to use that is similar to externally what would be an incident dashboard, you know, like a status page of sorts.Of course, a lot more information internally for people participating in incidents than they have externally. For me is thinking of the SRE—and I manage many SRE teams that were responsible for running production services, such as Compute Engine, Google Plus, Hangouts, but also, you know, I just think of SRE as the folks managing production system going on call. But thinking of them a reliability specialists. And there's so many—when you think of SREs as reliability specialists that can do more than respond to pages, then you can slot SREs and SRE teams in many other areas of a organization.Jason: That's an excellent point. Just that idea of an SRE as being more than just the operation's on-call unit. I want to jump back to what you mentioned about taking and analyzing those retrospectives and analyzing your incidents. That's something that we did when I was at Datadog. Alexis Lê-Quôc, who's the CTO, has a fantastic talk about that at Monitorama that I'll link to in the [show notes 00:19:49].It was very clear from taking the time to look at all of your incidents, to catalog them, to really try to derive what's the data out of those and get that information to help you improve. We never did it in an automated way, but it sounds like with an automated tool, you were able to gather so much more information.Gustavo: Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, we did this manually before, and so we understood the cost of. And our bar, company-wide, for people writing retrospectives was pretty low, so I can't give you a hard numbers, but we had a surprising amount of retrospectives, let's say on a monthly basis because a lot of things are not necessarily things that many customers would experience. So, near misses or things that impact very few customers—potentially very few customers within a country could end up in a retrospective, so we had this throughput. So, it wasn't just, like, say, the highest severity outages.Like where oh, it happens—the stuff that you see on the press that happens once, maybe, a year, twice a year. So, we had quite a bit of data to discuss. So, then when we did it manually, we're like, “Okay, yeah, there's definitely something here because there's a ton of information; we're learning so much about what happens,” but then at the same time, we were like, “Oh, it's painful to copy and paste the useful stuff from a document to a spreadsheet and then crunch the spreadsheet.” And kudos—I really need to mention her name, too, Sue [Lueder 00:21:17] and also [Yelena Ortel 00:21:19]. Both of them were amazing project program managers who've done the brunt of this work back in the days when we were doing it manually.We had a rotation with SREs participating, too, but our project managers were awesome. And also Jason: As you started to analyze some of those incidents, every infrastructure is different, every setup is different, so I'm sure that maybe the trends that you saw are perhaps unique to those Google teams. I'm curious if you could share the, say, top three themes that might be interesting and applicable to our listeners, and things that they should look into or invest in?Gustavo: Yeah, one thing that I tell people about adopting the—in the books, the SRE books, is the—and people joke about it, so I'll explain the numbers a little better. 70, 75% of the incidents are triggered by config changes. And people are like, “Oh, of course. If you don't change anything, there are no incidents, blah, blah, blah.” Well, that's not true, that number really speaks to a change in the service that is impacted by the incident.So, that is not a change in the underlying dependency. Because people were very quickly to blame their dependencies, right? So meaning, if you think of a microservice mesh, the service app is going to say, “Oh, sure. I was throwing errors, my service was throwing errors, but it was something with G or H underneath, in a layer below.” 75% of cases—and this is public information goes into books, right—of retrospectives was written, the service that was throwing the errors, it was something that changed in that service, not above or below; 75% of the time, a config change.And it was interesting when we would go and look into some teams where there was a huge deviation from that. So, for some teams, it was like, I don't know, 85% binary deploys. So, they're not really changing config that much, or the configuration issues are not trigger—or the configuration changes or not triggering incidents. For those teams, actually, a common phenomenon was that because they couldn't. So, they did—the binary deploys were spiking as contributing factors and main triggers for incidents because they couldn't do config changes that well, roll them out in production, so they're like, yeah, of course, like, [laugh] my minor deploys will break more on my own service.But that showed to a lot of people that a lot of things were quote-unquote, “Under their control.” And it also was used to justify a project and a technique that I think it's undervalued by SREs in the wild, or folks running production in the wild which is canary evaluation systems. So, all these numbers and a lot of this analysis was just fine for, like, to give extra funding for the scene that was basically systematically across the entire company, if you tried to deploy a binary to production, if you tried to deploy a config change to production, will evaluate a canary if the binary is in a crash loop, if the binary is throwing many errors, is something is changing in a clearly unpredictable way, it will pause, it will abort the deploy. Which back to—much easier said than done. It sounds obvious, right, “Oh, we should do canaries,” but, “Oh, can you automate your canaries in such a way that they're looking to monitoring time series and that it'll stop a release and roll back a release so a human operator can jump in and be like, ‘oh, okay. Was it a false positive or not?'”Jason: I think that moving to canary deployments, I've long been a proponent of that, and I think we're starting to see a lot more of that with tools such as—things like LaunchDarkly and other tools that have made it a whole lot easier for your average organization that maybe doesn't have quite the infrastructure build-out. As you started to work on all of this within Google, you then went to the CRE team and started to help Google Cloud customers. Did any of these tools start to apply to them as well, analyzing their incidents and finding particular trends for those customers?Gustavo: More than one customer, when I describe, say our incident lifecycle management program, and the chaos engineering program, especially this lifecycle stuff, in the beginning, was, “Oh, okay. How do I do that?” And I open-sourced a very crufty prototype which some customers pick up on it and they implement internally in their companies. And it's still on GitHub, so /google/sredocs.There's an ugly parser, an example, like, of template for the machine-readable stuff, and how to basically get your retrospectives, dump the data onto Google BigQuery to be able to query more structurally. So yes, customers would ask us about, “Yeah. I heard about chaos engineering. How do you do chaos engineering? How can we start?”So, like, I remember a retail one where we had a long conversation about it, and some folks in tech want to know, “Yeah, instant response; how do I go about it?” Or, “What do I do with my retrospectives?” Like, people started to realize that, “Yeah, I write all this stuff and then we work on the action items, but then I have all these insights written down and no one goes back to read it. How can I get actionable insights, actionable information out of it?”Jason: Without naming any names because I know that's probably not allowed, are there any trends from customers that you'd be willing to share? Things that maybe—insights that you learned from how they were doing things and the incidents they were seeing that was different from what you saw at Google?Gustavo: Gaming is very unique because a lot of gaming companies, when we would go into incident management, [unintelligible 00:26:59] they were like, “If I launch a game, it's ride or die.” There may be a game that in the first 24, or 48 hours if the customers don't show up, they will never show up. So, that was a little surprising and unusual. Another trend is, in finance, you would expect a little behind or to be too strict on process, et cetera, which they still are very sophisticated customers, I would say. The new teams of folks are really interested in learning how to modernize the finance infrastructure.Let's see… well, tech, we basically talk the same language, with the gaming being a little different. In retail, the uniqueness of having a ton of things at the edge was a little bit of a challenge. So, having these hubs, where they have, say, a public cloud or on-prem data center, and these of having things running at the stores, so then having this conversation with them about different tiers and how to manage different incidents. Because if a flagship store is offline, it is a big deal. And from a, again, SaaS mindset, if you're think of, like, SRE, and you always manage through a public cloud, you're like, “Oh, I just call with my cloud provider; they'll figure it out.”But then for retail company with things at the edge, at a store, they cannot just sit around and wait for the public cloud to restore their service. So again, a lot of more nuanced conversations there that you have to have of like, yeah, okay, yeah. Here, say a VMware or a Google. Yeah, we don't deal with this problem internally, so yeah, how would I address this? The answers are very long, and they always depend.They need to consider, oh, do you have an operational team that you can drive around? [laugh]. Do you have people, do you have staffing that can go to the stores? How long it will take? So, the SLO conversation there is tricky.a secret weapon of SRE that has definitely other value is the project managers, program managers that work with SREs. And I need to shout out to—if you're a project manager, program manager working with SREs, shout out to you.Do you want to have people on call 24/7? Do you have people near that store that can go physically and do anything about it? And more often than not, they rely on third-party vendors, so then it's not staffed in-house and they're not super technical, so then remote management conversations come into play. And then you talk about, “Oh, what's your network infrastructure for that remote management?” Right? [laugh].Jason: Things get really interesting when you start to essentially outsource to other companies and have them provide the technology, and you try to get that interface. So, you mentioned doing chaos engineering within Google, and now you've moved to VMware with the Tanzu team. Tell me a bit more about how do you do chaos engineering at VMware, and what does that look like?Gustavo: I've seen varying degrees of adoption. So, right now, within my team, what we are doing is we're actually going as we speak right now, doing a big reliabilities assessment for a launch. Unfortunately, we cannot talk about it yet. We're probably going to announce this on October at VMworld. As a side effect of this big launch, we started by doing a reliability risk assessment.And the way we do this is we interview the developers—so this hasn't launched yet, so we're still designing this thing together. [unintelligible 00:30:05] the developers of the architecture that they basically sketch out, like, what is it that you're going to? What are the user journeys, the user stories? Who is responsible for what? And let's put an architecture diagram, a sketch together.And then we tried to poke or holes on, “Okay. What could go wrong here?” We write this stuff down. More often than not, from this list—and I can already see, like, that's where that output, that result fits into any sort of chaos engineering plan. So, that's where, like—so I can get—one thing that I can tell you for that risk assessment because I participated in the beginning was, there is a level of risk involving a CDN, so then one thing that we're likely going to test before we get to general availability is yeah, let's simulate that the CDN is cut off from the clients.But even before we do the test, we're already asking, but we don't trust. Like, trust and verify, actually; we do trust but trust and verify. So, we do trust the client is actually another team. So, we do trust the client team that they cache, but we are asking them, “Okay. Can you confirm that you cache? And if you do cache, can you give us access to flush the cache?”We trust them, we trust the answers; we're going to verify. And how do we verify? It's through a chaos engineering test which is, let's cut the client off from the CDN and then see what happens. Which could be, for us, as simple as let's move the file away; we should expect them to not tell us anything because the client will fail to read but it's going to pick from cache, it's not reading from us anyways. So, there is, like, that level of we tell people, “Hey, we're going to test a few things.”We'll not necessarily tell them what. So, we are also not just testing the system, but testing how people react, and if anything happens. If nothing happens, it's fine. They're not going to react to it. So, that's the level of chaos engineering that our team has been performing.Of course, as we always talk about improving reliability for the product, we talked about, “Oh, how is it that chaos engineering as a tool for our customers will play out in the platform?” That conversation now is a little bit with product. So, product has to decide how and when they want to integrate, and then, of course, we're going to be part of that conversation once they're like, “Okay, we're ready to talk about it.” Other teams of VMWare, not necessarily Tanzu, then they do all sorts of chaos engineering testing. So, some of them using tools, open-source or not, and a lot of them do tabletop, basically, theoretical testing as well.Jason: That's an excellent point about getting started. You don't have a product out yet, and I'm sure everybody's anticipating hearing what it is and seeing the release at VMworld, but testing before you have a product; I feel like so many organizations, it's an afterthought, it's the, “I've built the product. It's in production. Now, we need to keep it reliable.” And I think by shifting that forward to thinking about, we've just started diagramming the architecture, let's think about where this can break. And how we can build those tests so that we can begin to do that chaos engineering testing, begin to do that reliability testing during the development of the product so that it ships reliably, rather than shipping and then figuring out how to keep it reliable.Gustavo: Yeah. The way I talked to—and I actually had a conversation with one of our VPs about this—is that you have technical support that is—for the most part, not all the teams from support—but at least one of the tiers of support, you want it to be reactive by design. You can staff quite a few people to react to issues and they can be very good about learning the basics because the customers—if you're acquiring more customers, they are going to be—you're going to have a huge set of customers early in the journey with your product. And you can never make the documentation perfect and the product onboarding perfect; they're going to run into issues. So, that very shallow set of issues, you can have a level of arterial support that is reactive by design.You don't want that tier of support to really go deep into issues forever because they can get caught up into a problem for weeks or months. You kind of going to have—and that's when you add another tier and that's when we get to more of, like, support specialists, and then they split into silos. And eventually, you do get an IC SRE being tier three or tier four, where SRE is a good in-between support organizations and product developers, in the sense that product developers also tend to specialize in certain aspects of a product. SRE wants to be generalists for reliability of a product. And nothing better than to uncover reliability for product is understanding the customer pain, the customer issues.And actually, one thing, one of the projects I can tell you about that we're doing right now is we're improving the reliability of our installation. And we're going for, like, can we accelerate the speed of installs and reduce the issues by better automation, better error handling, and also good—that's where I say day zero. So, day zero is, can we make this install faster, better, and more reliable? And after the installs in day one, can we get better default? Because I say the ergonomics for SRE should be pretty good because we're TKG SREs, so there's [unintelligible 00:35:24] and SRE should feel at home after installing TKG.Otherwise, you can just go install vanilla Kubernetes. And if vanilla Kubernetes does feel at home because it's open-source, it's what most people use and what most people know, but it's missing—because it's just Kubernetes—missing a lot of things around the ecosystem that TKG can install by default, but then when you add a lot of other things, I need to make sure that it feels at home for SREs and operators at large.Jason: It's been fantastic chatting with you. I feel like we can go [laugh] on and on.Gustavo: [laugh].Jason: I've gone longer than I had intended. Before we go, Gustavo, I wanted to ask you if you had anything that you wanted to share, anything you wanted to plug, where can people find you on the internet?Gustavo: Yeah, so I wrote an ebook on how to start your incident lifecycle program. It's not completely out yet, but I'll post on my Twitter account, so twitter.com/stratus. So @stratus, S-T-R-A-T-U-S. We'll put the link on the [notes 00:36:21], too. And so yeah, you can follow me there. I will publish the book once it's out. Kind of explains all about the how to establish an incident lifecycle. And if you want to talk about SRE stuff, or VMware Tanzu or TKG, you can also message me on Twitter.Jason: Thanks for all the information.Gustavo: Thank you, again. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. I really appreciate it.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

Luis Beute, VP Global Sales for Content Providers at Qwilt takes us through how he made the jump from telecommunications to CDN and moved halfway around the world to do it too. Focusing on how he has taken as many lessons from colleagues and partners as from managers and mentors, this was a really great insight into Luis and his approach to balancing work and life.

Shay is a serial entrepreneur who has founded 4 companies in the CDN and IT world, and for the last 5 years has been the managing partner of toDay Ventures, an Israeli seed-stage fund. In December 2020 he joined Merlin Ventures to stand up and run its efforts in Tel Aviv.

James is recording in a forest. Proof: https://twitter.com/JamesCridland/status/1451002189049040905Bryan Barletta runs https://soundsprofitable.com - go subscribe!Apple Podcasts explains how podcasts work: https://podnews.net/update/apple-podcast-downloads-explanationSpotify to hire hundreds of adsales staff: https://podnews.net/update/nms-facebook-podcasting#:~:text=Spotify%20is%20hiring%20hundreds%20of%20ad%20staffAdam Bowie: trends to watch for in podcasting. https://www.adambowie.com/blog/2021/10/top-10-podcast-trends-radiodays-europe-2021/John Spurlock's data about podcast CDN share: https://podnews.net/update/nms-facebook-podcasting#:~:text=John%20Spurlock%20has%20published%20podcast%20CDN%20shareAmit Shetty to leave the IAB: https://podnews.net/update/nms-facebook-podcasting#:~:text=has%20left%20the%20IAB%20TechLabAnd, of course, Boostagram CornerBuzzsprout Podcast hosting and a whole lot moreRiverside.FM Podcast recording made simple. The easiest way to record podcasts in studio quality from anywhere.

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object […] The post #214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3? appeared first on Storage Unpacked Podcast.

Welcome to “Inflammation Nation,” where the bigger picture of the many factors that affect our health and well-being tends to get overlooked. Additionally, as is the case when it comes to any over-inflated wellness buzzword, there are always plenty of people and places trying to sell us the magic cure-all… anti-inflammatory granola bar, anyone? When it comes to inflammation, it's safe to say that the implications of the word itself have gotten... over-inflamed. What do we need to pay attention to when it comes to inflammation in the body and what is just inflammatory language?HOST: Ella Dove, Director, Creative Development at Well+GoodGUESTS:Shana Spence, MS, RDN, CDN, Founder of The Nutrition TeaDr. Karol Watson, MD, PhD, FACC, Director of the UCLA Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Health ProgramTiffany Roe, MA, CMHC, Founder and Owner of Mindful CounselingWHAT WE TALKED ABOUT:Shana explains that when evaluating the state of our overall health and well-being, there's so much more to consider than just the food we eat. Find her here and check out The Nutrition Tea here.Dr. Karol Watson helps us separate the buzz from the word, and defines what inflammation in the body really means. You can find her here.Tiffany explains how placing “anti inflammatory foods” on a pedestal perpetuates diet culture–Plus, what we can do about it. Find her here and check out Mindful Counseling here.Check out the Harvard Medical School study, hereABOUT THIS PODCASTAt Well+Good HQ, we spend our days talking to and learning from the most interesting people in wellness—experts, thought-leaders and celebrities. On The Well+Good Podcast we're inviting you to join the conversation. With each episode, our hosts will dig into our most clicked on topics in order to reimagine what it means for you to live well. Tune in weekly to find the wellness that fits your frequency.You can also find us on our website on YouTube or social in between shows.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

IBD is not a condition that is easy to diagnose or treat. People who live with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis have needs that include guidance on nutrition. Diet is notoriously difficult to study but some research is starting to be done. Dannielle Jascot, MS, CNS, CDN, certified nutritionist and IBD patient talks over the recent results of the DINE-CD study, which compared the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and the Mediterranean Diet. Episode page and transcript: https://bit.ly/2YIaZXk Concepts discussed on this episode include: The Dine-CD Study and discussion of the results Local Crohn's and Colitis Foundation Chapters Buy Tickets to the Bottoms Up Event Find Dannielle Jascot on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Find Amber J Tresca at AboutIBD.com, Verywell, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Credits: Mix and sound design is by Mac Cooney. Theme music, "IBD Dance Party," is from ©Cooney Studio.

Part 1 (of 2) looking at a recent example of how The Innovator's Dilemma is playing out between the biggest clouds and the challenging upstarts.  SHOW: 554CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account phoenixNAP websitephoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud PlatformSHOW NOTES:The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)AWS's Egregious Egress (Cloudflare)Announcing Cloudflare R2 Object Storage (without Egress fees)Cloudflare's Disruption (Stratechery)Bandwidth AllianceCloudflare is eating the Cloud from outside in (swyx @ dev.to)Overview of AWS Infinidash (Did The Cloudcast predict R2?)Understanding Data Transfer in AWS (Last Week in AWS) ONE COMPANY'S PROFIT IS ANOTHER COMPANY'S OPPORTUNITYAs AWS transitions from long-time leaders to a new leadership team, many industry upstarts are looking for ways to pick away at their most profitable (and customer-problematic) services, with new capabilities that may unlock completely new business models for companies.CHEAPER NETWORKING, AGILE COMPUTING, and NEW COMPANY MODELSDisruption rarely happens because of better technology, but more often because of changing economics. (Gracely's Theorem) AWS has long had very expensive networking costs, but it's an area that really hasn't faced competition. AWS offered enough services that their customers made the choice to deal with the network costs vs. having to build things themselves.Being the “everything” thing in computing always has its pros and cons. Computing has historically (last 40yrs) been moving to more distributed, modular architectures.We've seen a number of companies begin to offer edge or serverless types of offerings (GitHub, Netlify, Google Run, various CDN offerings, New ideas always emerge from difficult times (e.g. COVID pandemic) that we didn't expect.Will this create a new round of acquisitions? Will it trigger price wars? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Snake Oilers: Get Signal Sciences in your CDN, automate canary generation and cloud your SIEM! Three solid pitches in this edition… In this edition of the Snake Oilers we'll hear pitches from three vendors: Brian Joe from Fastly talks about its integration of the Signal Sciences WAF into its CDN Ben Whitham and Dan Holman talk about HoneyTrace, a canary creation and monitoring automation play Anton Chuvakin from Google Cloud talks about cloud native SIEMs Links to everything we talked about are in the show notes. Show notes Web Application and API Protection | Fastly HoneyTrace- Detect and Track Data Thieves Chronicle Security - Chronicle Security Analytics Platform