Podcast appearances and mentions of emily well

In this new episode, Sarah sits down with Emily Shull to explore the complex relationship we have with money. They delve into why many people find this topic challenging and stressful, discussing common beliefs and narratives that shape our financial decisions. The conversation highlights how our upbringing and family culture influence our perceptions of money as adults, and the emotional aspects that play a significant role in our financial behaviors. Together, they address the taboo surrounding money and share insights on fostering open, healthy dialogues. By examining the difference between scarcity and abundance mentalities, Emily provides practical steps for entrepreneurs to begin healing their relationship with money, ultimately guiding them to align their wallets with their true purpose. Tune in for a compassionate discussion around a dry topic: money! Here's what we talked about: The reason so many people have a difficult relationship with money and why it causes stress. Common money beliefs or narratives that people develop and how they influence financial decisions. How upbringing and family culture shape the way we view and interact with money as adults. The role of emotion in financial behaviors and how we can become more aware of it. Why money is such a taboo topic and how we can start having more open and healthy conversations about it. The impact of scarcity mentality versus abundance mentality on our relationship with money and how to shift towards abundance. Practical steps people can take to begin healing their relationship with money. A teaser for what we'll work on during the Collab workshop on October 2nd.   --- Intro with music NEW 2022 + 4 [00:00:00] Sarah: [00:01:00] [00:02:00] [00:03:00] [00:04:00] [00:05:00] Hi, Emily. It's good to see you, hear you. We we see each other regularly because we're in this book lab. And so it's good to have this conversation just one on one with you on the Humane Marketing Podcast. Welcome. Emily: Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for inviting me, Sarah, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Sarah: Yeah, talking about a taboo, money, right? You, you made that your topic, so we're gonna dive right in and I'm gonna ask, start by asking you why Why is it a taboo? Why do so many people struggle with this [00:06:00] topic of money? What have you seen in your work? Emily: Yeah, that's a great question. Money, our relationship with money is so complicated. Because what we're taught about money is that it's just math, it's numbers, it's accounting, it's logical. So you should be able to learn about it easily, make good decisions. And that's what it's all about, you know, making things add up, but our relationship with money. It's actually something that we feel inside of us. It's very emotional. It has a very long history that's been starting since the time that we were born. And so it's, it's a difficult and complicated and taboo relationship because it's so filled with emotions and are very deeply personal history. And so what I do as a holistic money coach is help people connect these two things.[00:07:00] Their rational mind that wants to make good decisions with money that has intentions for their lives and wants to fulfill them and this emotional side that sometimes contains these unconscious drivers that are keeping us from reaching the goals that we that we want for ourselves. Sarah: Yeah, you called them unconscious drivers, I guess. Is that the same thing as limiting beliefs, something else that we often hear limiting Emily: belief. Yeah, you can, you can identify them in different ways. Another, another way to think about that is that it's different parts of ourselves. When we're making a money decision, we have all these different parts that want to chime in and have a say in that. And so. 1 is the logical part that says, no, we don't need another sweater. And then another part comes in and says, oh, but oh, but this makes me feel so cozy. And it reminds me of what it was [00:08:00] like to feel like, really warm and snuggly as a child. And then another part that's kind of shaming and saying, no, why are you even having this conversation? You know, we don't need this. You need to be responsible. So there are many ways to think about this. unconscious part. Sarah: It's interesting. So it's, it's conscious, unconscious left brain, right brain, maybe mind and heart. So it's always these yin and yang. You could probably also say that, you know, the yang part is, is the logical part. And the yin part is the more kind of like flowing and being in harmony and just using money. When it feels good, right? So yeah, it's, it's so interesting. So what, what are some examples of, of some of these beliefs that maybe we have formed in our childhoods? Because I think you did mention this story with money [00:09:00] starts in our, in our early years, right? Or maybe, and that's a question to you, maybe it actually goes even beyond that. Like, maybe it's our history that starts even before we were born and it goes into the history of our ancestors as well. I, I personally believe that. So curious to hear what you think, and then maybe you can give us some examples. Emily: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. Our relationship with money goes so far back. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So when we're born, our parents beliefs about money and everything that they experienced, which includes their parents beliefs and everything they experienced and back and back and back. That is all put upon us when we're born. So this is what we're born into. And this becomes our money beliefs. And 1 of 2 things happen. We either we usually [00:10:00] just take them on. We inherit them. They become ours until we mature and see different ways of being with money and then decide for ourselves how we want to be. Or we reject them, we say, we know this is totally not us. This is not the way we want to be. And so we do something completely different. But either way, it's an unconscious decision until we mature and. Really take a look at ourselves and our own experiences. Then we're able to tease apart. What is actually inherently mine? What are my values around money versus what I was born into my parents and the culture around me and what I find is that. It's so deeply personal, so there are so many layers of our origins with with money. We're affected by our environment. You know, the, the country we were born into our culture [00:11:00] has a big impact on how we think about money. If you think about some Asian cultures, save, you know, 30, 40 percent of their income in the United States. I think the savings rate is in the, in the single digits. So that's 1 impact. And then as you go narrower, then there's our parents and household that we grew up. You know, when I grew up, if we didn't eat out that much, but when we went even to a fast food restaurant, my mother was very frugal. So, you never ordered the big sandwich, you know, you never ordered the drink. You just got your drink at home. Whereas in another, you know, a friend of mine, you know, that wasn't the case for her. But it all really filters down to your own personal experiences. So what I find is that even though in our environment, and our parents play a big role in what we think about money, it's really our own lived experiences that have the biggest impact. And it's [00:12:00] usually related to something that happened, as when we were children, and that just hasn't been brought to light that hasn't been healed. So I'll give you an example of 1 person that I worked with. She came to me because for her money was always. A struggle, she just felt it felt heavy. It felt like no matter what she was doing, no matter how much income she was bringing in or what her assets were. It felt like a constant struggle. And this may have been surprising if you looked at her life from the outside, she was very intelligent and talented. She had multiple. Degrees, she was respected in her field of work, and she did all the things that you're supposed to do to to have a good relationship with money and to make it work. You know, she read books, she followed strategies she had a supportive partner, yet she still felt this constant struggle with money. Like she was. Yeah, like she was in it on her own, and that was always really hard. [00:13:00] Well, what we found during our work together was that it was tied to her loss of her sister when she was very young. So when she was about 10 years old, her sister, who was close in age, died, and her parents really turned inside at that time in their own grief. And so there was no space for her to, to express her grief and to process that. Yeah. Yeah. And then, in addition to that, her mother died when she was in her early 20s, and her father quickly remarried and really abandoned her after that. And so when, when we looked at her history, not just related to money, but her family history as well. It was really surprising how directly this was tied to the feeling of struggle. It was all about feeling abandoned and not having that family support that she needed at that very crucial age. So, I see this In my work with everyone that I [00:14:00] work with, it's it's not just about what is our money belief, but what very specific situation happened to us that brought that and usually it's not something we would ever associate with money. Sometimes it could be money related, but other times it's not. It's just a purely developmental wound that almost all of us have. Sarah: Yeah, I'm so glad you shared such a deep example because that really shows how deep this, this goes, right? How far back we need to go and, and how, how many layers we need to uncover. And it's very vulnerable. Work to, to go to these places because usually they're, they're not exactly happy moments at least from what I've seen because we talk about money in the marketing, like human program as well. And it's, it's usually not. the happy moments that created these limiting [00:15:00] beliefs, right? It's something that happened in our childhood that, yeah, was, was difficult, probably. Not always, but not always like, you know, as difficult as the example you shared. For me, it, it really had to do with not feeling guilty to be a business owner. Because my parents I, I grew up in a small hippie community, as, you know, Emily and, and, and like all the people in, in that community were from the working class. And so the the entrepreneurial world, or, you know, the people making money were not. Put in a good light. And so I, I just had to uncover that and go, Oh, but I can actually be an entrepreneur and make money in a good way for a good cause. And it's not money is not bad per se, right. It's the intention that, that counts. And so, yeah, just uncovering those. Those layers is so, [00:16:00] so important. I was thinking also when you were talking that you're, you were saying it's, you know, it's very personal and it truly is. And then often what happens in life, we, you know, find a partner and get together with someone else and we get married. And oftentimes today, if we're married, well, the money kind of merges, right? And then there's two human beings with completely different money stories, and that is not always easy to manage either. Do you sometimes work with couples as well, or, or does maybe not together, but. Is that a topic where it's like, oh, but I have this money story and he or she has this completely different money story? Emily: Absolutely. Yes. So I work with couples sometimes. It's often kind of like a can of worms because it is so difficult because, because we all have our own money [00:17:00] story that most of the time we're not even conscious of where our own money patterns come from. So you put two people together who are not conscious of where their money patterns come from, and it's, it's, it can be impossible to have really constructive Arrangements, I was going to say arguments, sometimes arguments or agreements or conversations about this, because you don't even know where it's coming from for yourself. So, the 1st step is to understand. Your own money history and then to understand where your partner is coming from. And that's the only way to move forward when it comes to money. But there are so many layers in that. And I find that couples. There's so much going on within a relationship so I don't do much couple work myself because of that. Sarah: I think it's probably borderline therapy there, and you're not a therapist, right? That's not the same thing, so, because I would argue that there's probably a lot of couple, work [00:18:00] that goes back to money. And so, yeah, that, that is definitely has to go into couple therapy and not, not just money, because like you said, most of them are probably not conscious that it's because of their different money stories that they have you know, relationship problems. Anyways, we, we digress, but, but it's yeah, it's interesting that it has, it didn't. Impact so many different aspects of our lives. And of course, here on this podcast, we talk about, you know, entrepreneurship but also marketing. And, and when I did this research and created the marketing, like we're human program, I really looked at this idea of abundance and how that impacts, yes, your. You know, beliefs about money, but then also your beliefs about marketing, meaning that if you come from a abundant [00:19:00] perspective, then marketing doesn't feel as heavy anymore because you don't feel like you have to push or persuade or, or, or manipulate even, right? Because you just feel like there's enough out there for me. And the same thing applies with money. But I'm curious, To, to hear your perspective on this often talked about topic between scarcity and abundance mindset, right? We're, we're hearing everywhere, Oh, you just have to have an abundant mindset, but how can we have that if we are, haven't healed our childhood wounds yet? Maybe. Emily: Yeah, I think it all goes back to the childhood wounds. So, yeah, so this example of talking about abundance versus scarcity. I think it's, it's always more helpful to get as as specific to your unique circumstances as possible. So, what I mean by that [00:20:00] is. Marketing. I'll give you an example from my own life. The first time that I marketed a program. Oh, my goodness. I was so resistant to sending an email to my network because I didn't have a list at that time. So it was just people that I knew. Talking about this free webinar that I was giving, I wasn't even asked them to buy anything, but I was so resistant and I tried to really figure out. Oh, my gosh, what is stopping me from doing this? And at 1st, I thought it was I thought it was. My, my environment of you know, my mother, I remember her telling the story when we were young of her father was in business with his brother and his brother somehow cheated him and became rich and my mother's family stayed poor. And so there was this belief that, you know, wealthy people are, you know, take advantage of people and I wanted to be a nice person, so maybe somehow this was related to my marketing challenge. But the more that I sat with that, I [00:21:00] realized there was something much deeper. So, it was this voice that I kept hearing when I was trying to send that email was I don't want to bother people. And so that was a much deeper message that I received growing up of feeling like I was bothering people when I was sharing something that maybe they didn't want to hear what I had to say. And so, instead of talking about, do I have a scarcity mindset or an abundant mindset, I think the most direct way to understand our behaviors, whether that's. You know, to do with managing money or marketing our business or selling our product. It's always going layer by layer to see where is this coming from? What is this feeling that I'm feeling in my body? When was the earliest time that I experienced this? What is this really about? Because when we get to the root and we heal that, then all the other behaviors [00:22:00] disappear. We're actually able to act in alignment with our true intentions. Transcribed Yeah, it really Sarah: is this domino effect, right, where you, when you go back, then all the other dominoes kind of start to fall in place and yes, Emily: and so much of what. Is out there as solutions is it's it helps in the moment. For example, if you have a fear of visibility, you know, you can try to talk yourself out of that. Oh, of course, these are my, this is my network. They won't be bothered by what I have to say. If they're not interested in my webinar, they simply won't attend. It's okay. I can send this email. So that might work in the moment and I can send the email and have my webinar. But then the next time I have to do it, it's all going to come back again and again. So if you're able to get to the root of it, then you won't need to take these steps again and again and again. And it yeah, it, it connects us more to who we [00:23:00] are more of our, our core self. And that's really the beauty of doing money work is that it. It makes you feel better, not just about money, but about yourself. And it connects you more to who you are. It's ironic because so many of us don't think of money as a spiritual thing. In fact, it's often thought of as the opposite of that. But in my opinion, doing money work is one of the most spiritual and personally connecting things that you can do because really to get to the root of it, you have to understand yourself on a level. And and become more compassionate for yourself on a level that you hadn't before. Sarah: What would you say to You know, some of the offers around money coaching they promise you, you know, a six figure business or a seven figure business, or, you know, they're promising you that you can manifest money [00:24:00] whenever you want because you now healed your childhood wounds. What do you think about that? Emily: Well, I think they usually don't talk about the childhood wounds. They talk about a strategy that they offer. That's going to get you the 6 figures. And strategy, it, it can only go so far. If you're not. If you can't implement it, because you're stuck, because you have all these unconscious, beliefs, then then it's not going to work. So then you just need to go a little bit deeper. I think most of these programs out there, they just don't go deep enough. And that's they work for people who are capable of implementing them. But if you're not, because you're stuck somehow, you need to understand where that stuckness is coming from and deal with that 1st. Sarah: Well, I would add that I think a good money coach just like any good coach [00:25:00] cannot make promises about, you know, you now making tons of money because you healed your money story. That's to me, not what money work is about. It's about. Yes, healing those wounds and, and, you know, helping you to live your fullest potential and have a healthy relationship to money, but there's no promise that. You know, you are in this lifetime meant to make a million dollars and, you know, maybe you don't even want that. So, so it's just like the two things are not related. It's like, it will help you yes, heal that, heal that story and, and, you know, maybe not spend everything every time you, you get money, but it's, it's not going to help you just have money fall from the sky either. Emily: Yeah, a lot. Yes. That's a really good point. So I do see that some money coaches are really like wealth coaches. Like they want you to be wealthy and that is their goal for you. [00:26:00] And my goal for people that I work with is to help them feel more calm around money. Like their, their money goals are their business, right? I know desire or, you know, yeah, it's completely up to them. When you, yeah, as a coach, if you go into it thinking, well, you're, you know, you should be rich and I'm going to teach you how, well, that's different from having a healthy relationship with money. That's just. I'm going to make you wealthy. Sarah: Yeah. Emily: Yeah. Sarah: I'm glad we clarified that. So what would you say are kind of the next steps for people who are listening? How can they start on their own to heal their money story? Emily: Yeah, so paying attention to what you're feeling in your body when these money challenges are coming up is a great place to start. [00:27:00] Journaling, drawing, those are great places to begin to understand what's really going on beneath, peeling back some of those layers. Yeah. And. Sarah: I remember your, your workshops in the Circle Expo with, with drawing people, people love those. I think it's, it's when we tap into, like we said before, into the unconscious or the, the heart or the, you know, the, the right brain that's when kind of these, inhibitors maybe, yeah, fall away and we can just really let the emotions out and that, and yeah, people really enjoyed that, letting out the creativity to think about their money. Emily: Yeah, drawing is such a great avenue to explore what's really going on behind the scenes, because when we draw, we think in whole [00:28:00] images, and that includes all of the emotional undercurrents of what's going on. So that that's why that that exercise is usually so powerful because it's so simple. I do want to say when you say creativity, it is a creative process, but you don't, you don't have to think of yourself as a creative or artistic person in order to do this. You know, drawing with stick figures, which is the only thing I'm capable of, is perfectly fine and will, and will get you to that emotional the emotional space that you're looking for as well. Sarah: Yeah, that's great. So you're coming into the Humane Marketing Circle for a collab workshop that is open to the public and well attended by the community members as well. Can you give us a little teaser on what we'll do on October Emily: 2nd? Sure. We're, you, we're going to discover where our money beliefs come from learn how to identify unhelpful money beliefs. [00:29:00] And then learn how to free yourself from unhelpful money beliefs so that you can align your actions with your goals. So we'll be doing that. I'll do a little presentation, but there also be breakout rooms and exercises that we're going to do to begin to explore our own origins of our money behaviors. Sarah: Yeah, can't wait. I think the, the, the beauty of these workshops is that they're really hands on. So it's, yes, it's a presentation. Yes, it's content that you provide, but then like you said, we have the time to go into breakout rooms and talk to other humans and, and really apply directly, because I feel like. When we attend the webinar and we get bombarded by great ideas and inspiration. But then if we don't actually do something with it right away, sometimes it just goes in here and out on the other side. Right. So I really look forward to to this workshop and. Maybe we'll be doing some drawing and as well, [00:30:00] who knows? But yeah, can't wait. So if you are listening to this and would like to join us, humane. marketing forward slash workshop is the link that you can sign up for. As I said, this is usually reserved to the community. But these collab workshops are open and you can join with a small donation and Emily will share all her wisdom there. So can't wait, Emily you Emily: tap into your own wisdom. Sarah: Yes, that's true. Yes, exactly. Yeah, because maybe that's where we can end. I really feel like. You know, this whole money conversation, even though money is something external that we use with other people, and that kind of brings us or, or ties us into the world outside, it really is this inner job that has to do with it. Yeah. Solving or, or [00:31:00] healing some stuff inside first, right? Yep. Very well said. Yeah. Great. Well, what a delight. Thank you so much for being here today. Do please share with people where they can find you and I think you have an assessment you want to share as well. Emily: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Sarah. So you can find me on my website, me, myself, and money. com. And there you can find a, I think it's a pop up. So it'll just, it'll gently appear after a few seconds. It's my money assessment. So you can assess your relationship with money. And we're used to seeing this in terms of, you know, do you have investments? Do you have savings? All these practical categories. But what my assessment does is help you understand more holistically what your relationship is with money based on what your relationship is with yourself. Sarah: Mm. Emily: Yeah. Sarah: That, that's a, definitely a good starter. And then it gives us [00:32:00] a result based on, on the answers we gave on, yeah, I, I'm curious. I'm going to have to take it. It's like, Oh, you're in love or no, you're, you know, breaking up or it'd be, it'd be good to understand the results after the, the assessment. Wonderful. Well, thanks so much, Emily, for being here. And yeah. Please do sign up for the workshop, again, humane. marketing. com forward slash workshop. And can't wait to see you on October 2nd. See you then. Thanks, Sarah. Thank [00:33:00] [00:34:00] [00:35:00] [00:36:00] [00:37:00] [00:38:00] [00:39:00] [00:40:00] [00:41:00] [00:42:00] [00:43:00] you.

Episode #353 Get ready for a magical journey as Torie Brown Hunt returns to The Disney Crush Podcast with a trip report like no other. With her daughter and 8 nieces along for the ride, some experiencing the wonder of Walt Disney World for the first time. Don't miss this enchanting episode.  www.thedisneycrush.com thedisneycrush@gmail.com www.patreon.com/thedisneycrush   Favorite park and why   Hadley: Magic Kingdom because the rides were the biggest and best and the most   Emily: I would say my favorite park was EPCOT although I think we all agreed that it was only fun because we had an Auntie that bought us all the good snacks and knew all the best spots. I also loved Animal Kingdom, I think it's kind of a sleeper hit and I can imagine if you're not an animal person you could probably take it or leave it. I genuinely couldn't believe they had real animals though. So cool! I think I like both of those because they are the least like Disneyland which I went to many times growing up. They felt like entirely new theme park experiences.    Alyse: If I had to pick a favorite park it would probably be Epcot because it surprised me the most and there was so much different stuff to see which was awesome.    Callie: My favorite park was definitely Hollywood studios because I loved all the rides there because they were exciting and at the end of the day it cooled down and was super nice and pretty sunset    Elynn: I can't decide between Epcot or Hollywood Studios I like Epcot because of all the things to see. I liked Hollywood for the ride and how pretty it was during sunset.   Addisen: Animal Kingdom- Felt the most balanced with big and small rides. I felt like we could get everything done and it wasn't as busy. More shaded and didn't feel rushed.   Leilani: My favorite park is Epcot because of the food and the immersive experience with all of the cultural aspects! I love that they have things from the specific countries and how they sell things from the actual places and not just all Disney themed things! Animal kingdom is a close second for me though!   Favorite Attraction   Hadley: Tron because it was really fast and fun   Emily: Well, one of my favorite rides at Disneyland is Rise of the Resistance but it is essentially the same at Disney World so I'm going to say Avatar Flight of Passage. There really is nothing quite like it, and it's incredibly immersive. I would recommend it to literally everyone I know. Even if you don't like the Avatar movies that almost doesn't matter, it's just a cool ride.    Elynn: Tower of terror   Addisen: Guardians of the Galaxy, gotta love the 80s music   Leilani: My favorite ride is flight of passage because it really feels like you're flying and the views it takes you on are so magical and I wish I could actually go there! I love the details of the breathing of the banshee, the water droplets when you go over the water, and the scents of flowers, grass, and water! It feels like you're really there!   Favorite food    Hadley: Chinese potstickers and egg rolls with soy sauce   Emily: I'm a Dole Whip girly. It's hands down the best thing at both Disney parks and I HAVE to get one any time I go. Other than that I think I liked the gyoza and egg rolls we go (don't remember where but I'm sure Torie knows). I watch those things pretty regularly in my day to day life but there is something about being exhausted and sweaty sitting on the floor eating them that made it magical.    Alyse: Best food were the potstickers in China or the chocolate crepe in France.    Callie: The best food was the food from the Sci-Fi restaurant and I got a American burger and fries and fried pickles    Elynn: The Dole Whip swirl float or the purple moose cake at Animal Kingdom    Addisen: Hazelnut crepes in France. I will be dreaming about that forever.   Leilani: This is a hard one because I am a foodie just like my mama, but the ratatouille galette was so good and the Texas toast brisket sandwich and the Mac and cheese at the Regal Eagle was unexpectedly amazing! The lemon sorbet from Italy was extra refreshing in the extreme heat though for sure.   What surprised you most   Hadley: How decorated everything was and that everything was perfectly made to match a theme   Emily: How NOT tired I was at the end of the trip. I woke up the day we were flying home and was like “I could do it again today”. I was also impressed with how eventually you just accept the heat and forget about it. I don't think anyone complained about how hot it was and we were always so busy that you could even really think about it. Cooling cloths and hand held fans were definitely our life savers though!    Alyse: What surprised me was how detailed everything was but especially the lines for rides. Compared to Disneyland everything was more interactive and interesting to look at. Also just the technology and engineering that takes place to make the parks happen.   Callie: The thing that surprised me the most was Epcot because I had no idea that it was going to be decorated to well and that made it fun to see   Elynn: I was surprised how much I enjoyed Epcot, I thought I wouldn't like it that much because I like thrill rides.   Addisen: Epcot, only park I haven't been to before. I haven't heard many people talk about it but I was so cool. Underrated   Leilani: The Nemo sea ride in Epcot surprised me the most because I was not expecting a whole entire aquarium after the ride! That was such a cool surprise and I had never seen a manatee in my life and they're a lot bigger and cuter than I would've expected haha   Rope drop or sleep in?   Hadley: Rope Drop   Emily: Rope drop 100%. I'm all here for it. That being said, I am a morning person, but it's SO MUCH cooler in the morning and you can get so many things done before the lines get crazy. It's absolutely worth it in the summer.    Alyse: #Ropedrop, sleep is for the weak    Callie: I think Rope dropping is better because it's cooler in the morning and you are able to get some of the longer line rides done early on  Elynn: Definitely rope drop.   Addisen: Rope drop. The cool morning makes all the difference.   Leilani: I know you're expecting me to say sleep in, but because of the extreme heat in July, rope dropping is the move. My body just hates waking up that early hahaha. But in December and may I'm sleeping in for sureeeeee   Most cherished memory:   Hadley: The third time riding tower of terror and pretending to control it   Emily: This has nothing to do with the parks, but I will always remember how easy it was to connect and relate to everyone, even after not seeing people for years. This was definitely different than seeing people at family reunions, we all just got to be completely ourselves and discover that we all are very much the same. Before we all left I said “I really don't think you could have this much fun on a trip without doing it with people you vibe with as much as we do”. I will always remember how close this made us.    Alyse: The evening at Hollywood studios and magic kingdom, re-riding tower of terror and Tron but also being able to see everything at night   Callie: The night at Hollywood studios and riding tower of terror 3 times    Elynn: Hanging out at night at Hollywood and Magic kingdom, riding Tower of Terror and Tron 3 times, and seeing the parks at night.   Addisen: Sitting down to eat or have snacks and just being able to talk with everyone.    Leilani: My favorite memory was all of us walking through the rain together any time it rained. It felt so good when it rained and I loved splashing in the puddles! Being able to talk to everyone and connect in a deeper level is for sure the best part of the trip. It was so much fun to be able to get to know everyone for who they are just as girls being girls     Alyse's Rankings:   Day one Triceratops spin - 4/10 3.5/10 Dinosaur (time travel) - 7/10 7.75/10 Expedition Everest - 9/10 9.2/10 Kali River Rapids - 5/10 5.25/10 Safari - 9/10 9.5/10 Flight of passage - 10/10 Navi River Journey - 8/10 It's Tough to be a bug - 6/10   Pandoran Juice - 7/10 Yak & Yeti Cafe yogurt parfait - 3/10   Day Two Soaring - 6/10 Guardians of the Galaxy - 10/10 Ratatouille - 5/10 Grand fiesta - 3/10 Imagination figment - 2/10 Finding Nemo - 4/10 Aquarium - slay/10 Living with the land - 3/10 put to sleep Frozen ever after - 7/10   France - Hazelnut chocolate crepe - 9/10 France bakery - 8/10 Japanese snacks - 7/10 Italy - gelato - 7/10 China - Potstickers eggs roll - 9/10 Canada - Maple popcorn 4/10   Day Three Mickey Minnie - 7/10 Slinky dog - 6/10 Toy Story Mania - 8/10 Swirling Saucers - 3/10 Tower of Terror - 9/10 Frozen sing along - 6/10 Rocking roller coaster - 8/10 Rise of resistance - 9/10 Star Tours - 5/10 Smugglers run - 7/10   Raspberry tart - 7/10 Churro - 8/10 Sci Fi theater - 7/10 Gelato - 9/10 Day Four Rides/shows Buzz - 6/10   Day Four Buzz - 6/10 People mover - 4/10 Tiana's Bayou Adventure - 9/10 Pirates of the Caribbean- 7/10 Tron - 9.5/10 Space mountain - 7.5/10 7 dwarfs - 7.5/10 Winnie the Pooh - 4/10 Barnstormer - 4/10 Jungle cruise - 8/10 Haunted mansion - 7/10   Starlight cafe - 7.5/10 Pizza egg rolls - 8/10

During her first labor, Emily experienced a hyperactive uterus where she had constant squeezing with no breaks and minimal dilation. She was at a birth center but after exhausting all coping options decided to transfer to the hospital. After receiving an epidural and Pitocin, then detecting meconium, Emily was ready to consent to a Cesarean. Emily's second birth was a planned Cesarean, then her third and fourth births were both VBACs. Emily describes how even though her provider was the same for both vaginal deliveries, her experiences were so different. With her third, Emily had a beautiful pushing stage and easy recovery. However, pushing with her fourth felt rushed and she experienced a fourth-degree tear. Meagan and Emily share the importance of making your preferences known in every aspect of labor and delivery so your support team can speak up when you are not able to. Needed WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Meagan: Hello, Women of Strength. We have a 2VBA2C story for you today. We were just talking about it before we started recording all of the acronyms. I was like, “Oh, you're a VBAC after two C-sections story.” And your baby is 8– wait, did I see that right? 8 months? Emily: He's 9 months now. Meagan: 9 months. Emily: He's almost a year. 8 months, 9 months, 10 months, somewhere around there. Meagan: Still very little, still very fresh so I'm excited for you to share his story and your other babies' stories. We have Emily by the way. This is Emily. Hello, Emily. Emily: Hi. Meagan: Remind me. Where are you located? Emily: I'm in Texas. Meagan: Okay, you're in Texas. Awesome. Okay you guys, we're going to share her stories. We do have a Review of the Week so I want to hurry and get into that and then we'll jump into Emily's stories. This Review is from Rachel and it says, “Thanks for giving me the confidence to have a VBAC. I am glad I found this amazing podcast when I was newly pregnant with baby number two. After a long, traumatic experience that ended in a C-section, I was cautiously hopeful that I would have a VBAC. Using information that I learned from hearing other people's stories on The VBAC Link, I felt confident and prepared for the birth of my son. On October 9, 2020” so that was four years ago, “I had a beautifully redemptive VBAC and welcomed our boy into the world. Thank you so much for helping me achieve my dream.” Women of Strength, that review is for you. You and your stories and your participation in the community and on Instagram and all the places is seriously what builds this community up and helps these other Women of Strength find the courage just like she said and find the education.I'm so excited for you, Rachel. Congrats and as always, if you have time to leave a review, please do so. It helps other Women of Strength find stories. Meagan: Okay, Ms. Emily. Let's get into this. So you have four babies now. Emily: Yes. My oldest is about to be 7 and my youngest is 8 months or so. Meagan: Okay, so you were having your first C-section as I was pregnant with my VBA2C baby. Emily: Yeah, it was 2017. Meagan: When you had him? Emily: When I had her. I had three girls and then my youngest is a boy. Meagan: Yes. My VBA2C was in 2016 so just right before, yeah. Awesome. Okay, well I'm going to turn the time over to you. Emily: Sure. So my first pregnancy, I actually found out I was pregnant on my honeymoon when we were in Mexico. Meagan: Oh my gosh. Emily: Yeah. I was stressed out and working out a bunch and all of this planning the wedding. I expected my period to come while we were there so I'm like, “Oh, it's going to be the worst. I have all of these white clothes and I'm going to be on the beach and I'm going to have my period.” It just didn't come so it was right at the start of our honeymoon. I was like, “Let's take a test. I don't want to be drinking margaritas for the rest of the week,” then of course, I was. We came back from the honeymoon with another big announcement. I feel like a lot of people's stories is that you didn't know any better and you just showed up at the hospital and you did what the doctor said. I was the exact opposite at that point. I was reading all of the things. I read the Ina May book. I had a midwife at a birth center and I was going to the chiropractor constantly. I was doing all of the things to be ready to give birth at the birth center without medication and all of that. That's just not how it ended up. I think I was around 36 weeks and she was breech. I was going to the chiropractor all of the time trying to get her to turn. I was doing Spinning Babies. I was doing acupuncture. I was going upside down all of the time. I was finding swimming pools to do handstands and all of the things. I did moxibustion where you smoke–Meagan: Uh-huh, on your Bladder 6. Emily: She was still breech so my midwife set me up with the breech guy. People come to him from all over to do breech vaginal deliveries so I started seeing him. This was when we were living in Houston so I started seeing him and we did all of the things to try and get her to turn and ended up having a version. I went in. I had an epidural. They manually turned her and then afterward, they were monitoring me in the room and the nurses were like, “Okay, well do you want to be induced now?” I was like, “Nope. I've got a plan. I'm going home.” So I left the hospital after that. She stayed head down and then I went to 42 weeks and at about 42 weeks, I went into labor but my labor was weird. I was getting contractions but there was no break between them. It was just constant, squeezing pressure. I was texting my midwife asking, “I don't know what to do. I can't time them. There is no in-between.” It was mostly my back and after, I think it was 3 hours and I was like, “I can't do this. This is too weird.” I didn't have any guidance for what to do if you're not able to– they weren't broken up at all. Meagan: Were you dehydrated at all? Emily: No, I don't think so. I'm not sure. We finally went into the birthing center and it stayed that way for a really long time. We were there throughout the night. I was on a birthing ball and my husband was just elbow into my back for hours. I couldn't sleep because it was just constant pain. I tried the Rebozo scarf. We did all kinds of things while I was there. I will say though, I should have had a doula because my midwife kind of just left the room and was gone. She was somewhere in the center probably sleeping. I don't know. She would come in every once in a while and we were really just left to our own devices in there. We had done I think it was a six-week class. We went in every week trying to prepare. Yeah, we were just in this room together in the middle of the night really tired and in a lot of pain not knowing what to do to get this going. At one point, I was on an IV. She had given me all of the pain stuff that they can give you. At one point, she was like, “I've done all of my–” I wish I could remember. Meagan: I've exhausted all my tools type thing. Emily: Yeah, I've given you as many doses as I can in a time period. We did the catheter. That came out at some point. I think it was Monday when I went in there and then Wednesday when I ended up leaving there. At one point, she was checking to see. She was looking at my cervix and my water broke. There was a bunch of meconium and it was green crazy. She just looked at me and was like, “I think it's probably time for you to go.” I got back in the car in rush-hour traffic in Houston and headed to the hospital. There was a nurse in the back seat with me holding my IV bag. My husband drove us there. She had called the doctor who did my version so I had already met him and known him and known that he was pretty progressive as well doing breech vaginal deliveries and I know he did breech twin deliveries. He was a very cool guy so I felt good about that. We went. He was like, “All right. Let's do an epidural. You can sleep. You can relax and all these things.” That's what we did. I think I had the epidural for 8 hours and I was at 6 centimeters. They were like, “Okay, what about Pitocin?” I feel like they did give me a lot of time and I hate the saying “give me” but they gave me a lot of time and by the end of it, I was exhausted. I was done and ready to get her out. I only made it to 6 centimeters after all of that. It was 3 days of labor. By that time, just get her out of there. She was almost 10 pounds. She was big. Yeah. The C-section, that all went fine. I found recovery to be especially hard. My body was already so tired. Meagan: Exhausted. Emily: Exhausted. I wasn't prepared for it. I didn't expect it to be as painful as it was, but yeah. I know some people kind of just pop right up after and are moving around. That was not my experience. That was my first. I feel like I had 10 experiences in one. I did the midwife birth center thing. They tried to get my labor going with an epidural. I had already been there for an epidural once so by the time I was getting the second one, it was whatever, and then the C-section also all in that one pregnancy. Yeah. I feel like it was three births in one.But yeah, then we got pregnant with my second. I talked to my midwife again. She was like, “I don't do VBACs,” so the first person I called was the guy who did my C-section and my version. I said, “I want to do a VBAC.” He was like, “All right.” He was very cool about it and awesome. It was another really easy pregnancy. I got to the end. I was 41 weeks. Meagan: So you carry longer. Emily: Yes. I was 41 weeks with her and I went in for an appointment and they did a sonogram and I was like, “Please can you check my cervix? I just have to know where I'm at.” Yeah, I hadn't dilated at all and he was like, “Well, your sonogram's estimating that she's going to be 10 pounds also.” My mom had been in town at that point. They were trying to be there for the birth and helping me with my toddler and she had to leave the next day because my sister was being induced in Dallas. She had been staying with me for that whole last two weeks and it was like a now or never she's going to be gone. I'm already 41 weeks. I was also teaching and so every day, I was walking into work so pregnant. 1000 comments like, “You're still here? You're still pregnant?” It just felt like I was sick of it. Then hearing the 10 pounds, I was like, “All right. Let's just have a C-section I guess.” He left that up to me. I feel like he would have if I said. He wasn't even doing cervical checks at that point. It was me who asked for it. He left it up to me and he agreed when I said, “Okay. I guess we'll just do a C-section.” That one was different because it was scheduled. We went in the next morning. It was easy, breezy, and a little bit better of a recovery since I wasn't already so exhausted at that point. But yeah. I had a newborn and a toddler and a C-section again. It was rough. It kept opening because I was picking up my toddler. I went back to work I think when my second was six weeks old. Yeah. It was a lot. Those were my first two C-sections. Very different experiences for both of them with the same doctor. Then COVID happened and I finished the school year teaching online when COVID happened and my husband was working in oil and gas. We decided we were going to move to my parents' ranch. I finished the school year online from there and he was working with my dad. My dad does custom home building so that was something he wanted to get into. It was kind of the perfect segue out of there. Meagan: Mhmm. So where were your first two babies born? Emily: Houston. Meagan: In Houston. For people who are interested in breech, are you willing to share that provider's name? Emily: Yes. His name is Dr. Alfredo Gei. Meagan: Okay. Emily: Yeah. I mean, he was great. I don't know if he's still working or not down there, but he was awesome. He was a very, very cool guy. He was very calm, very respectful, friendly, and all of the things. Meagan: Yeah. Yes, good. Emily: Yeah. We moved up to my parents' ranch in Glen Rose, Texas. I finished the school year online. I decided I would stay home with my two kids. I think by the end of that summer, we were ready to have our third. It was perfect timing. I was staying home. We had my parents there. My husband had an easier work obligation working with my dad and all of that so I got pregnant with my third. That pregnancy was wild. We had a lot going on. I guess it was my first experience having a pregnancy that didn't go super smoothly and whatever test and all of the normal things you do like blood testing if you choose to do that. Everything came back weird so I'd have to go in and retest. I think at one point in the beginning, they thought she might have Down Syndrome so it was like, “Well, you can do the amnio to find out or you can wait until that anatomy scan.” I spent that time just waiting until 20 weeks to find out if she had Down Syndrome or not. I tried to do the gender test, one of those home ones. My first two were a surprise and with her, I just wanted to know. I needed something. I wanted to know what was going on in there. We did one of those gender tests and it came back inconclusive. Whatever could go wrong was going wrong with the pregnancy. I had found an OB/GYN who was VBAC-friendly who worked with a group of midwives so it was him and a bunch of midwives. I started seeing him and them because I thought– oh, I didn't even mention. When I had my second baby, they predicted her to be 10 pounds. She was 7 pounds. It made me so mad. It made me so mad. Meagan: Okay, so now I have a question for you because we talk about third-trimester ultrasounds. At 41 weeks, that is normal because they do non-stress tests and all of those things. Would you have chosen a different situation or would the scenario be the same because of your mom and convenience and all of that? Emily: That's a good question. I would like to say that I would have at least given myself a couple more days at that point, just a couple more days to see maybe. I always think, What if I had gone into labor in that next couple of days instead of the C-section? Would she have come out easier being 7 pounds and not 10 pounds? Of course, I thought, Maybe it's my pelvis. Big baby, small pelvis, and all of these things. I don't know. It's hard to say. I was really ready to have her. Meagan: Absolutely and you were given an opportunity. That goes to speak where you are in your pregnancy. That's a vulnerable state. That's a very vulnerable state. But you had her and it was an okay C-section and your mom was there and all sorts of things. Emily: Yeah. She came out and then they brought me back to the room and my mom was there. She got to meet the baby then drove all the way back up to Dallas and my sister had hers. They are a day apart. Meagan: Aww, that is so fun. Emily: Anyway, with my third, I was seeing him and I had some weird blood testing results and weird stuff happening at the beginning. It was the end of COVID sort of so COVID started around spring break. I got pregnant around that summer and by the next spring, it had been quite a while but hospitals and stuff still had all of those weird rules in place about people being in the room and all of the things. It was the tail end of that. My husband got to come in for the anatomy scan. He was there with me in the room when she did all of the scanning and everything and then he had to leave when the doctor came in. He went and waited outside in the car and the doctor came in and my first question obviously was, “Did you see any Down Syndrome markers?” They said, “No.” They didn't see that, but her head circumference and her cerebellum were measuring in the first percentile. The normal range is 1-100 and she was right there on the cusp of being abnormally small. He dropped that bomb on me while I was in there by myself. He waited until my husband had left. He told me that I was going to need to go and see a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and then I could come back after that. I left that appointment just in shambles not knowing what was going on or what to expect or what that meant and then I had to wait for an appointment to see a maternal-fetal medicine specialist. At that point, I just threw the whole VBAC idea out the window. It was all about what was going on with the baby and keeping the baby healthy and all of those things. My mom is a NICU nurse so I was like, “Well, I'm going to give birth at the hospital that she works with because if my baby goes into the NICU, I want her to be there, and all of these women that I had known her working with for 30 years.” I went to see a maternal-fetal medicine specialist. I switched providers and hospitals and I went to where my mom was working. I went in and they measured her cerebellum for the rest of my pregnancy. It was every other week or so I would go in and they measured. She stayed on that very tail end the entire time. I want to say that she might have reached the 6th percentile by the end in growth so it was still pretty precarious not really knowing what the deal was there. But by all accounts, she was healthy. They weren't giving me any kind of diagnosis or suspicions about anything. She kept falling in the normal range which meant they weren't going to do any further testing. They could have done an MRI or something on my stomach at one point but they didn't do any of that. I think around 34 weeks, I had an appointment and I was just like, “You know, if we're good to have a VBAC, I still want to do that.” I just looked at my provider and was like, “This was my plan. I don't see why it still can't be my plan. I've got two toddlers at home. I really can't have another surgery. I don't want to do that.” She was like, “Okay. Awesome.” I was expecting a fight. Meagan: You're like, you do. You really, really do. You expect this, “No” or “But, well–”. Those are the things that you automatically assume so when you have a provider who's like, “Okay, cool,” you're like, wait what? It throws you off. Emily: Yeah. I left there with a skip in my step. Meagan: I bet you did. Emily: Right after that, I contacted a friend of mine who is a doula and I started working with her. She shared your podcast with me so I was listening, listening, listening to as many episodes as I could in those couple of weeks and it was very helpful. I'm not a confrontational person or even a person who previously was good at advocating so I was mostly listening. I already knew what the hospital situation looked like. I already knew what a C-section looked like so I was really listening for how do these conversations happen with doctors and what does that look like when you're advocating for yourself? What are the words that I need to use? I listened for a lot of those kinds of examples of this is what I can say if she says this. This is what I can come back with or suggest if this happens. So that was very helpful for me to just go in and can we do a Foley? Can we do a Cook's? Meagan: To feel prepared to have that conversation. Emily: Yeah. I know at one point, they wanted to schedule an induction and I said, “Well, what if I just don't come?” She was like, “Well, we can't drive to your house and bring you,” kind of response. “What if I don't want to do Pitocin and all of this? Can you do a Foley or a Cook's?” I really came into those appointments with more of a two-sided conversation and not just “We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this.” I remember I got there at my 36-week appointment and my nurse was like, “Okay, go get undressed.” I didn't get undressed. I just sat there with all my clothes. She came back in and I was like, “I don't want that. I don't want my cervix checked.” Meagan: Good job. Emily: Yeah, she didn't know what to do with that. She was like, “I think she's going to want to look.” I was like, “Well, why?” Meagan: I don't want it. Emily: “I don't want to know. It's going to get me in my head. What's going to change if I'm 36 weeks?” Obviously, that was the norm there to start doing that at that point. What happens if I'm 1 centimeter? What happens if I'm 3? I'm still going to go home. I remember that was the first time I did something out of the norm there. I didn't even say the whole doula thing since it was the end of COVID. They were still working out who was allowed in so I asked for a doula and they didn't know if they could even have them so we were asking the hospital for hospital policies and calling up there asking all kinds of questions. By the time we did show up, everybody there was like, “She's here. She's here.” My mom worked there too so it felt a little bit like maybe everyone else was walking on eggshells with me because– Meagan: Because of your mom too. Emily: Well, my mom too. She was working that day so I probably couldn't have had her if she had come in as an extra person with us, but she was working and so she just showed up in our room in her scrubs and everything. I went into labor. Meagan: What gestation on this one?Emily: I was 37 weeks. Meagan: Whoa! So way earlier. Emily: Yes, way earlier. It was Easter. I started having contractions during the whole Easter thing. I'm hiding eggs struggling around the yard and I went to bed that night thinking, This feels like it's it. They were not painful but they were stronger than the regular Braxton Hicks so I went to bed and I think at 3:00 or so in the morning, they started waking me up. I tried to keep sleeping until 6:00 in the morning. I woke my husband up and was like, “You've got to figure out getting the kids to school and stuff. We're going to be going into the hospital.” It was about an hour drive. So I got in the bath. My doula told me to get in the bath and she gave me some different positions and stuff to do so I did all of that and that sped things along a whole lot. I did some curb walking and then yeah, I showed up at the hospital ready to have her and I want to say I was in labor there for three or four hours. I asked to speak to the– is it the anesthesiologist who does the epidurals and stuff? Meagan: Yep. Emily: I told her that I wanted a walking epidural. A lot of people don't know that there is a range. You can have it on full blast or you can have just a little bit. She gave me a very light epidural. I was able to still move in the bed and get in different positions. They had the bar over the bed at one point. They wanted to do an internal monitor at some point because my heartbeat and the baby's heartbeat, they could not figure out where to put the strap. I declined that. The nurse really just had to stay in there with it pressed to my stomach for hours. Yeah, that's what we did. I moved around. There was a peanut ball at some point and then yeah. They checked my cervix and my water broke. I don't know if that was on purpose or not, but I then had another water break at a cervical check and things went pretty quickly after that. I think I pushed through three contractions. Right before I started pushing, my OB came in and said she was leaving and that another doctor would be coming in. I was like, “Does he know? Is he cool?” I was so confused. But yeah, he came in and he was great. He asked if I wanted a mirror. I know that he was using oil and he had a hot compress and whatever. Meagan: That's awesome. Emily: He let me pull her out so I reached down and I grabbed her. It was all very cool. We were blasting Enya's Sail Away. It was a whole vibe. Meagan: I love that. Oh my gosh, I can just picture it all. Emily: It was very easy. Hardest pregnancy, easiest labor and birth. Yeah, she came out. I would say she slid out, but pushing wasn't hard. I could see what was happening. I don't know. I felt very comfortable. Meagan: Good. Emily: I felt ready. Meagan: Good. At the end, was anything going on with her? Emily: Yes. That's another whole long story. She didn't pass her newborn hearing screening so when they do the hearing test, it's a couple of days after you have the baby. She didn't pass and they thought, Oh, she might have fluid in her ears and this and that. You'll have to go back and do it again in a week or so. We went back and did it again and she didn't pass again. We had to go to the Children's Hospital and they did another type of hearing test and we found out that she was deaf. Yeah, we went down the whole hearing aid route and that. Healthwise besides her hearing, she was having a really hard time holding her head up. I think we started having a PT come when she was 4 weeks because her head was just flopping all over. I guess she was diagnosed with a gross motor delay and so we did PT until she started walking at 2.5. We had the option of doing genetic testing and all of that to find out the reason for the hearing loss and we just kind of thought, What's it going to change? She's still not going to be hearing after all of these tests so whatever. We will just deal with what we've got going on right now. She got hearing aids at 4 months. We were going in and they would do all kinds of tests and stuff. She still wasn't responding to any sound so they wanted to do cochlear implants and in order to do that, you have to have an MRI. They look at everything structurally to make sure you are a good candidate for cochlear implants. They look at the nerve and the ear canal and all of those things. They came back and they said, “She can get them. She's a good candidate for that, but here's what we saw with her brain on the MRI.” She had white matter abnormalities which are just when they go in and they look, if you have all of these white spots, they indicate inactivity so she had a bunch of that that they couldn't explain and she had a cyst somewhere in there on some groove. I have forgotten all of the lingo at this point. They wanted to find out what the cause of all of those things were. They also didn't want to give her cochlear implants if they thought that these areas were going to grow so then we started doing all of the genetic and DNA testing. They wanted us to wait a year to do her next MRI and the cochlear implants to make sure in that year time period they didn't grow at all. We were just like, “We can't do that. One, we can't wait a year to find out if our child has this thing that's taking over her brain and two, it's a critical time for learning language and speech and all of those things.” We settled with 6 months so we waited another 6 months. We did another MRI. They checked. Nothing grew. She was still making growths and learned to crawl and all of those things. She just did everything about a year behind. Yeah, we did cochlear implants and we all learned sign language and that's how we communicate. Yeah, it's been 3 years now. She just started the deaf preschool last week. Meagan: Awesome. Emily: And now bringing it home with baby number four. Meagan: Baby number four who is 9 months old? Emily: Yes. He was a surprise. We had a lot going on with my third daughter. I've got Eloise who is 7, Violet who is 5, and Matilda who just turned 3. We thought, Maybe we'll have another. Let's see what's going on with her. Let's get her into kindergarten. Let's get her speaking and signing and all of these things. Then we had surprise baby number four. He ended up being a boy so that was fun. He was born in July of last year. Meagan: Okay. Emily: During all of that, our insurance had changed so I couldn't go back to the same OB/GYN and I went to another one at that same hospital. After I had my third, my hormones were just so wild and crazy and I had a lot of anxiety and obviously stress from all that was going on with her. I went in and I was like, “I just want to figure out what's going on with my hormones.” I remember the doctor asked me about my previous pregnancies and births and stuff. I told her, “I actually had a VBAC with Dr. So and so at this hospital.” She said, “Oh, if you want to do that again, you've got to go somewhere else because we don't do that here.” Meagan: But you're like, “But I did do it here.” Emily: I was like, “Don't worry about it because I don't want to have another one.” Of course, a few months after that, I ended up getting pregnant again so our insurance had changed yet again. If you have a baby who has special needs, you've got to get the insurance thing figured out all the time. We changed again. I was able to go back to the same doctor so when I was pregnant with him, I saw her and she was like, “I'm guessing you're going to want another VBAC.” I said, “You're right.” Same thing. I didn't let them check my cervix. I didn't have a late-term sonogram. I went into labor with him. I got induced. That's right. I got induced with him. Yeah, yeah. I was 41 weeks again. Meagan: Okay. Emily: I was so expecting another early one and then I got to 41 weeks and we started talking about inductions and stuff. I said, “If I come in and do this, I'm going to want to do Foley or something again.” So that's what we did. That put me into labor right away. I think I was 1 centimeter so they were able to put that in and it just went from there. I will say this about the fourth with the same provider. I specifically in my birth plan said, “No students.” I feel like I had already done all of that. I had already allowed all of them. I had paid my dues to society by letting them in. I had a student who did my epidural with my second. I was done. I was done with that. I didn't want a bunch of people in the room. When it was time to put in the Foley, she wasn't available so they were like, “Do you mind if a resident does it?” I'm like, “That's fine.” The question was raised about breaking my water. I think I was over 6 centimeters at that point when they were asking about breaking my water and I was like, “Eh.” I talked to my doula. She was there again. I talked to my doula about it and we decided that was okay to get things moving along. They said, “Oh, well she's not available still. Can a resident come in and do that?” I was like, “Okay.” Then it was time to push and deliver and a whole team of people came in. I was in the thick of it. I had another really low-dose epidural so I was still feeling a lot. I also thing one thing about the low-dose epidural managing pain and staying on top of pain is a real thing and you can reach a certain point where there's not much you can do about it where you are too far. That's where I got with that. Even though I had the epidural, I was too far along at that point for it to do much. I was like, “Turn it up. Turn it up.” It wasn't making any difference so just know that's something that does happen. When it was time to push, my doctor on her wheelie stool just scooted out of the way and someone else showed up. Meagan: What? Again? Emily: From the background and it was like, “Push, push, push!” The vibes were very different. I'm not sure why that happened because as far as I'm concerned, nothing was happening with me medically and nothing was happening with him medically to necessitate me to push vigorously. I had not been pushing for hours. I got him out in under 30 minutes. It felt like there was this need for me to get him out of there and get him out quickly. I'm not sure why that happened. So I guess it was a resident who was down there. There was no oil this time. There was no hot compress this time. There was more pulling during the pushing part and I ended up tearing fourth degree all the way. It was awful. Same provider, different experience. She's retired now. I wouldn't go as far to say that I'd recommend her to other people having a VBAC. I think she was more– what's the word? Not VBAC-friendly. Meagan: Tolerant. Emily: Tolerant. I think she didn't think I was going to get there so she said yes thinking that's not how it was going to go and we'd never get to that point where I was in labor there ready to push. That's what happened both times so it was thrust upon her also. She's not a bad doctor or anything. That's my one takeaway from that one. You're pushing and there's a lot of people in the room and there's a lot going on and you're very much focused. I wish that I or someone else in the room had said, “Oh wait, what's happening down there? Why is this person coming in? Why are we doing this so quickly? What's this need to rush?” Yeah. That's my takeaway from that one. At the end of the day, I had an easy pregnancy and an easy delivery. I did have another vaginal, but it also came with some bad as well. It was a bad recovery for me for sure. Meagan: You know, I think that's something to note. Like you said, you got your vaginal birth and everything, but not every vaginal birth always ends with an easy recovery or an easy experience or even a positive experience so it does help to have that support team but here you go. Still even then at the last second, you got switched out on like you did last time too. That's weird. I'm like, was she not confident in delivering babies or what? That's interesting. Emily: I don't know. I'm not sure. Of course, afterward, I'm like, If she had stayed sitting there, would I have torn as much? Meagan: Exactly, yeah. Emily: If I was pressured to go so quickly, would I have torn as much? I left that one feeling, What just happened? I talked to my doula afterward about it and she was like, “You know, I wish I had said something,” but unless we had talked about it before, for her to stop a doctor in the middle of what they are doing without me having already told her, “Hey, I don't want this,” it's weird. Meagan: It's a really tricky situation. As a doula, I will say it's very tricky when you're like, I don't like what I'm seeing, but she's not saying anything and didn't say anything to me before this. I would assume she doesn't like this, but at the same time, yeah. Like you said, it's tricky. You don't want to step on people's toes. You don't want to change the atmosphere. It doesn't sound like the atmosphere was exactly peaceful either, but yeah. Gosh. That's hard. Emily: Yeah. It was another unexpected thing. I hadn't prepared for that scenario. I had it in my birth plan that I didn't want students, but then I had said yes to them for these things, so I can see how we got there, but yeah. For those wondering, I pushed him out to Shania Twain's Man I Feel Like a Woman. There were some good vibes in there. Meagan: I'm loving all of your music choices. That is amazing. Oh my gosh. Well, I'm sorry that it was that type of an ending. I am happy for you that you were able to have both of your vaginal births. But it's such a good takeaway and a great note. Women of Strength, think about those things too even with pushing, what you are wanting. Talk about this to your team. “If nothing's wrong, if nothing is emergent, I need it to be this way,” because that is for sure tricky. I wanted to talk about way into the first birth. I wanted to give a couple of suggestions for people who are having a hyperactive uterus where the uterus is just too active. It's not releasing. Sometimes that can be a baby's position working through and trying to get into the right position and the uterus is trying to help but a lot of the time it can be due to things like dehydration or I know that sometimes if there's a UTI or an infection or something like that, that can cause a hyperactive uterus. Sometimes people just have hyperactive uteruses but with a uterus that is just not letting go like yours, something that a midwife a long time ago within my doula career suggested to a client of mine was called cramp bark. Cramp bark, yeah. It's a tincture and you can take it. It can try to help relax the uterus so if you are having really long prodromal labor or like Emily where her uterus just wouldn't give up and it was just constant– and you said it was in your back. Emily: I had that wrap-around experience. It was like, I'm in a whole lot of pain but it's right here in my back. It never eased up. No, and then I wasn't dilating at the same time after all of this time of being like that. I think it was definitely her positioning. She was sunny-side up by the time the C-section did happen. Meagan: That's what I was thinking. Were you dehydrated or was it a positional thing? A positional factor can do that. Sometimes the uterus needs to relax so we can work with position. I know you were working with position but your uterus wasn't giving up. Sometimes you can increase your hydration, but cramp bark and always, always, always ask your provider about it, but it was actually something that a midwife and I think Julie took it with one of her babies with her prodromal labor too and it helped her as well. I just wanted to bring back that note of if you're having that hyperactive uterus, there could be a few things like hydration, position, maybe it's an infection that is undetected or maybe you've just got a great uterus that likes to keep squeezing. Thank you so much for sharing all of your beautiful stories. I'm so happy for you and congratulations. Emily: Thank you for having me. ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Emily: Hello艾米丽：你好Jackie: So Emily, tell me first of all um… how many credit cards do you have?杰姬：那么艾米丽，首先告诉我，你有多少张信用卡？Emily: Well, Jackie, I don't actually have a credit card um… but I've got a debit card.艾米丽：嗯，杰姬，我其实没有信用卡，但我有一张借记卡。Jackie: Ah… ok, so it means that the money comes…杰姬：啊……好的，所以这意味着钱来自……Emily: Um… it just comes straight from my bank, really.艾米丽：嗯……其实就是直接从我的银行账户里出来的。Jackie: Ok. What do you usually use your debit card for?杰姬：好的。你通常用你的借记卡做什么？Emily: Um… I use it mostly um… just to get money out of a cash machine.艾米丽：嗯……我主要用它从自动取款机取钱。Jackie: From the bank.杰姬：从银行。Emily: From the bank exactly, exactly.艾米丽：从银行，没错，没错。 Um… it depends where I am though, sometimes I can use my debit card when I go shopping in the supermarket.嗯……不过，这取决于我在哪里，有时候我可以在超市购物时使用我的借记卡。Jackie: And in other shops as well?杰姬：在其他商店也可以吗？Emily: Yes. Um… some small shops don't take debit cards. Um… but, nowadays, many do.艾米丽：是的。有些小店不接受借记卡，但现在，很多店都接受了。Jackie: Do you use it, Emily, do you use your debit card for buying things online?杰姬：你用它吗，艾米丽，你用借记卡在网上购物吗？Emily: Yes, sometimes. Um… I usually buy flights online: it's much easier, I find, and much quicker…艾米丽：是的，有时会。我通常在网上购买机票：我觉得这样更容易，也更快……Jackie: …than going to travel agents.杰姬：……比去旅行社更方便。Emily: Exactly, exactly. Um… sometimes, I find books, some books online as well.艾米丽：没错，没错。有时候，我也会在网上买书。Jackie: Do you use Amazon?杰姬：你用亚马逊吗？Emily: Yes, I do.艾米丽：是的，我用。Jackie: Mmm. Do you buy clothes online?杰姬：嗯。你在网上买衣服吗？Emily: No, I don't, I don't.艾米丽：不，我不买，我不买。Jackie: But… but, ok, so you use your debit card online…杰姬：但是……但是，好吧，所以你在网上使用借记卡……Emily: Mmm艾米丽：嗯Jackie: …do you worry about that? Do you worry about the security?杰姬：……你担心吗？你担心安全吗？Emily: Um… yes, sometimes I do. Um… luckily, nothing has happened so far, but when I was a student, I had a problem er… with someone copying my debit card and they spent a lot of my money on first class train tickets around the UK.艾米丽：嗯……是的，有时我会担心。幸运的是，到目前为止还没有发生什么，但当我还是学生时，我遇到过一个问题……有人复制了我的借记卡，他们在英国各地用我的钱购买了一等火车票。Jackie: Oh, no.杰姬：哦，不。Emily: I know, it was awful.艾米丽：我知道，那真是太糟糕了。Jackie: Did you lose the money?杰姬：你损失了那些钱吗？Emily: I lost it for a bit. Um… but then the bank paid it back to me, thank goodness, but I felt very stressed at the time.艾米丽：我暂时失去了那些钱。不过后来银行把钱还给了我，谢天谢地，但当时我感到非常有压力。Jackie: Mmm… I can imagine. So, when was the last time you used your card?杰姬：嗯……我能想象。那么，你上次使用借记卡是什么时候？Emily: Actually, about two hours ago, in fact.艾米丽：其实，就在大约两个小时前。Jackie: Oh, really?杰姬：哦，真的吗？Emily: Yeah艾米丽：是的Jackie: What… what did you buy?杰姬：你……你买了什么？Emily: Um… I… I just took money out of my, out of the bank machine….艾米丽：嗯……我……我只是从银行自动取款机里取了钱……Jackie: Oh ok.杰姬：哦，好吧。Emily: …really.艾米丽：……真的。Jackie: Ok. Do you think, do you think Emily, that you buy more things because you have your debit card or not?杰姬：好的。你认为，艾米丽，你因为有借记卡而买更多东西吗？Emily: Um… it's an interesting question Jackie. Um… I think everything is much easier with the debit card because you can… you always have money on you in the sense that you've always got plastic money on you.艾米丽：嗯……这是个有趣的问题，杰姬。我认为有了借记卡，所有事情都更容易了，因为你可以……你身上总是有钱，意思是你总是有电子支付货币在身上。Jackie: Have… have you, have you sometimes been in a shop or seen something online and you bought it because it's… it's been easier to use your card?杰姬：你有没有，有时在商店里或者在网上看到某些东西然后买了，因为……用卡更方便？Emily: Um…. yes, but I… I always… I think some people don't see a card as money…艾米丽：嗯……是的，但我……我总是……我认为有些人不把卡看作是钱……Jackie: Mmm杰姬：嗯Emily: …and I think, I've always seen it as being real money. I think, may be that's a good thing or else I would've spent all my money a long time ago. So, um… it is easier, but I still always know when I'm spending money.艾米丽：……而且我认为，我一直把它看作是真钱。我认为，也许这是件好事，否则我早就把所有的钱花光了。所以，嗯……这更容易，但我还是一直知道自己在花钱。Jackie: So, you're a… you're a careful user of a debit card.杰姬：所以，你是……你是个谨慎使用借记卡的人。Emily: Yes, yes. I think I am.艾米丽：是的，是的。我认为我是。Jackie: Very sensible, Emily. 杰姬：非常明智，艾米丽。

Upcoming Event!How Can Mindfulness Help You Reach Financial Independence?Do you want to reduce money anxiety, but don't know who to trust?Would you like to learn how to set up and manage your own retirement plan?Do you want to know how we create a passive income stream you can't outlive?If yes, join us and learn how to answer the 4 critical financial independence questions:Am I on track for financial independence?What do I need to do to get on track?How do I design a mindful investing portfolio?How do I manage that portfolio and my income over time through changing markets?Learn more: https://courses.mindful.money/financial-independence-bootcampEmily Laura Derr is the Founder of Grassroots Impact Creative Coach, where she helps creative people break through resistance and coaches creative businesses to craft messaging and build community. Today, Emily joins the show to discuss the concept of resistance, where it comes from, and best practices on how to overcome it both as an artist and a businessperson. Emily touches on the proclivity artists tend to have to devalue their work and what they can do to address that. She talks about the power of process over outcome and provides advice on how artists can identify their ideal customers.

There is nothing more human than storytelling. In this bonus Voice & Ai episode, Anne is joined by award-winning voice actor Emily Lawrence, Co-Founder of The Professional Audiobook Narrators' Association. They discuss the financial vs. social implications of Ai voices, creating a community for audiobook narrators, and why human-ness is an essential part of storytelling… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast for another episode of the AI and voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to bring special guest Emily Lawrence to the show. Emily is an award-winning actor and writer that's narrated more than 425 audiobooks for publishers such as McMillan, Harper Collins, Penguin, Random House, Simon and Schuster, and many more. She's incredibly proud to be the co-founder and chair of the newly formed Professional Audiobook Narrators Association, or PANA, as everybody has come to know it. Her greatest loves are storytelling and reading of course. So narrating audiobooks is a dream come true for her. And her other passions include traveling, LARPing, aerial surf, fostering kittens, and chocolate. So I have a lot to talk to you about because I love cats. We know that. I have three of them. And so I just love the fact that you foster kittens. Emily: I do. Anne: And thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to have you here. Emily: Well, thank you for having me. Anne: Yes. Emily: Happy to be here. Anne: So in addition to the kitties, um, I need to ask you for a more complete description. I have never heard of this, but that might not be a surprise. LARPing. Emily: A-ha. Anne: For those BOSSes in the audience that may not be familiar with that, what is that? Emily: Uh, so LARPing stands for live action role play, and it's the nerdiest thing you've never heard of. Anne: I kinda love that. Emily: Um, so basically it's like -- people tend to be more familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, so it's basically like that, which is a kind of like you're role-playing out a video game kind of, only in Dungeons and Dragons, you sit around a table, and you talk about everything you're doing and you like roll dice to simulate fighting and whatever. And in LARPing, you actually role-play everything. So it's like a bunch of nerds in a park with like foam weapons. Anne: I love it. Emily: Fighting each other. Anne: I love it. That's great. Well, look, hey, the nerdier, the better as far as I'm concerned. Emily: Yeah, no, I love it. Anne: That's fantastic. So again, it's great to get to know the you behind the association that has been newly formed. How old is PANA now? Emily: Uh, well we opened to members, I think it was October 21st or -- Anne: Wow. Emily: -- thereabouts. Anne: Fantastic. So tell me, you know, I'm very excited to hear about this because I think it's probably about time, right, in the audiobook world, that there is an association that is vested in the interests of the community. Talk to me about that. Emily: Yeah. Well, I mean, there have been other organizations such as the Audio Publishers Association, which really represents publishers. Anne: Right. Emily: But narrators and other people in the industry can be members. And then obviously there's SAG-AFTRA which represents narrators as a labor union, but SAG-AFTRA also represents everybody else. Anne: Sure. Emily: So there was no organization that really was dedicated to narrators specifically. And I think you're right. It was about time and long overdue. Anne: So, I know that there's a lot involved in creating an organization. Tell me a little bit about that story and how did that begin? I mean, what was -- were there issues that were coming up in the audiobook world that you were saying, you know what, we need an organization to really take care of our community? Emily: Yeah. There have been talks for many years of -- among narrators of feeling unrepresented in various places and in various ways. And then obviously with the rising danger, I guess, or whatever of AI, I certainly felt like, okay, somebody has to do something. And so earlier this year, there were a lot of conversations in Narrator, Facebook, and other groups just kind of like that made me feel like, okay, we need to organize. We need to come together. And so I did that. Anne: And have a voice. I love that. Well, hey, it's one thing to talk, right, to sit around in groups and talk. I have so much respect for the fact that you pulled something together. I mean, there's a lot of work involved in that. Emily: Yeah. It was definitely a lot of work. I am very grateful to have my co-founder Emily Ellet with me through the whole process. And so we kind of started talking like about what this would be and how the community needs it. And then we just kind of did it. Anne: Well, I -- Emily: Here we are. Anne: You know, I love it. I was looking at your website, which for those BOSSes out there that want to check them out, it is pronarrators.org. I love your statement on who we are. I just think that your mission statement is providing opportunities for raising awareness of the narrator within public consciousness. And you have so many wonderful things that represent that this organization is going to be doing for narrators. Tell me a little bit about the initiatives for those things. Emily: Sure. Well, we're certainly very ambitious. We have a lot of really big plans, mostly around three things really. One is education, education both of narrators in order to raise narration standards throughout the industry, but also education of the public, and education in the industry about narrator needs and the fact that we exist because -- Anne: Sure. Emily: -- a lot of people listen to audiobooks and don't give a second thought to the performer who's bringing that story to life for them. And that's obviously important to us that, especially when you're talking about having humans versus robot narrators, you know, for people to recognize that we're human to begin with is probably really important there. So education in general is a big focus for us. Uh, we also have a focus on advocacy, which is kind of our umbrella term for all of the things that we want to do to help our industry thrive with human narrators as part of the mix, and the changes that we would like to see in order to help make that happen. And then the last one would be just community, fostering a community. As I kind of pointed out before, there was no organization that really represented narrators specifically, and only -- and we have a really wonderful, giving community. I mean, honestly, the narrator community is some of the most wonderful, friendly, open, supportive people I've ever met. You know, for a bunch of people who are essentially competitors, we're all so supportive of each other. We all help each other out all the time. And it felt like it would be really wonderful to have an organization that sort of formally recognizes, celebrates, expands, and strengthens that. Anne: So what sort of -- do you have events planned for things that you've -- meetings coming up, events, community outreach, what sorts of things do you have planned for the future? Emily: So we've got lots of plans. Um, everything's just in the beginning stages. We're a member-driven organization. So we operate entirely on volunteer labor. And so our committees have only just started. I mean, they all had their first meeting last month. And so everything is in its infancy. We're just getting started, but we've got big plans for example, community events to get together both in person and online and sort of, you know, build friendships, but also network and things like that. We have plans for an award ceremony that is going to be community-driven and peer-reviewed. So kind of like the Audies, which is our current Oscars essentially meets like the SAG Award. So it will be like a peer-reviewed award show, but that has different sort of categories than typical award shows that really focus in on celebrating our community in a different way, which I think I'm really excited about. Anne: Plans on collaborating or is it a possibility to do any type of collaborative work with the union? Emily: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We've reached out to both the APA and SAG-AFTRA announcing our existence -- Anne: Right. Emily: -- and saying that we would really like to work with them to further our mutual goals, and both of them have responded very positively -- Anne: Excellent. Emily: -- and very supportive. And so we really do look forward to working with existing organizations to move everyone forward. Anne: So in terms of membership, so if I wanted to be a member, are there requirements, are there -- do you vet your members? What's involved if I wanted to become a member? Emily: Sure. Anne: Because I personally don't do audiobooks and don't hold that against me. I -- just not in my genre, but I know so many people that are just so passionate about the craft of audiobooks and narrating. So if I wanted to be a member, could I, or what is the process? Emily: So members are -- you're eligible for membership if you have recorded at least one audiobook -- Anne: Okay. Emily: -- that is available on some sort of commercial platform. Anne: Okay. Emily: So it's a very low, you know, if you've narrated one book, you can join. There's dues that have to pay, but then you're a voting member. Anne: Okay, great. Emily: If you do not qualify for a membership, we also are creating sponsorship tiers. So we'll have sponsorship tiers -- Anne: Okay. Emily: -- for -- Anne: Nice. Emily: -- other people in the industry like directors, proofers, editors, et cetera. And those are not ready yet, but once they are, there'll be sort of different ways to support the industry and get benefits and like access to events and things like that for doing stuff. Anne: Got it. Are you an official nonprofit organization? Emily: Okay. So we are operating as a nonprofit. We cannot apply for our nonprofit status until we file our first tax return. Anne: Got it. Emily: So -- Anne: Got -- well, I know that it's an involved thing, which is one of the reasons why -- I've, I've served on the boards of many nonprofits. So I know how involved it can be, which is again, why I have a lot of respect for you taking the initiative to put this together for the community. There's so much work involved in nonprofit, and I know how important volunteers and volunteer efforts go. It's so hard when everybody is busy to take the time and be able to help out in an organization like this. And I really look forward to the success of PANA because I know a lot of organizations that start off with the best of hopes. And then it turns into something where it is an awful lot of work and maybe more work than people anticipate. And so I know how it can be hard to progress. Emily: Well, it's definitely more work than I anticipated. Anne: Yup. Emily: I'm committed. So I'm there. And I know my co-founder Emily Ellet is also very committed, and we have a wonderful board. We've put together a board of some of the most respected -- Anne: Oh yes. Emily: -- people in our industry, and they are all very committed also. Everyone has expressed a sort of surprised at how much work it really is. Anne: Right, yeah. Emily: But, um, you know, everybody has affirmed to me multiple times, as recently as yesterday, that like, you know, we're in this and we're going to make this work. Anne: Well, I think having a voice for the audiobook industry is so important, especially with things that develop within our own industry. I mean, not just in audiobooks, but in the voiceover industry as a whole, we are facing changes, and I've known this because I've done my AI and voice series for at least 30 episodes now. So there are things that are, you know, impending and coming into this industry that we as professionals need to understand, and I don't know, evolve or work with or not, or form an educated strategy in order to co-exist, let's say, with them. So I will talk about the AI elephant in the room, which is AI. And what are your thoughts? I know that it's, it's scary for a lot of us that this technology is coming. And so what is your position on behalf of PANA in regards to let's say the evolution of AI and AI narrators? Emily: Well, we are a pro-narrator organization, pro-human narrator. Anne: Sure. Emily: And so we are dedicated to supporting human narrators however we can. We have a lot of ideas about how to address this, but I think the board has expressed our first priority to be education, because I think that a lot of narrators don't really understand all of the possible risks right now. I think it's wonderful that you're doing this, you know, you're, series to educate people. Um, but I think that we have a task ahead of us just to make sure that people fully understand -- Anne: yeah. Emily: -- what everything is. Like -- Anne: Sure. Emily: -- for example, a lot of people don't understand the difference between creating an artificial voice, like a clone of someone, and machine learning, which I don't know if you've covered in your series, but that's a really big thing that people need to be aware of. Anne: Yeah. Emily: So we have a lot of ideas about how to address that first and foremost, but also I think, you know, a lot of people -- just today I was seeing on Facebook, people posting like, oh, I listened to this, and it's actually not that terrible and blah, blah, blah. And so I think that it's important that we stay ahead of the game. You know, we can't let the robots catch up to us. We have to stay better. But also I think that, I mean, for me personally, this is not like PANA's official position or anything, but me personally, I think that a lot of the conversation is revolving around like dollars and cents. You know, publishers and whoever are going to do what makes the most economic sense to them. And if it's cheaper, consumers will follow suit. And there's just, it's kind of all about money and jobs and the things that general AI conversations are about. Anne: Yeah. Emily: But I think that with our field, it's not only about our jobs, it's also about the art of storytelling. Anne: Sure. Emily: Something that -- Anne: Agreed. Emily: -- I mean verbal storytelling is as old as language. It's like, we've been doing it as humans for forever. And that's, I mean, to me, that's what's at stake here. Like, yes, I would like to have a job. I would like to be able to do what I love to do for the rest of my life. But I'm equally as worried about, you know, the power of literature and stories and what it means to have, you know, just from like a moral, ethical standpoint to have robots sharing the human experience that they literally can't understand because they're an algorithm. And so I think that that is something that needs to be more part of the conversation for everyone, because what we do is an art. Anne: Sure, absolutely. Emily: And even if a robot is possible, it can never actually express anything human. And I think that that's important to me. Anne: Right. I agree with you. And I think that the consuming public has a lot to say, obviously, right? We are a market-driven kind of industry. What the consumer wants, right, or is it marketable to consumers or is it not? I mean, do consumers want to be able to listen to an audiobook and have a human? Like, is it meaningful to have a human or maybe for certain types of audiobooks, does it matter if it's a human or not? There's so many questions about that. Is there any type of book that you feel might be okay with something that's not human? Emily: Um, no, personally I don't because -- Anne: Well, and that makes complete sense. Emily: I mean, sure. I mean, obviously I have a certain point of view, but I think, you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, well, it's more suited for non-fiction. I think that that's kind of insulting, like -- Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: -- yes non-fiction does not involve character voices and things like that. Anne: Right. Emily: So from that perspective, it's easier for a robot to do, but I don't know, I've narrated nonfiction too. It's every bit as human. I think that authors would generally be insulted to hear that like, nonfiction is less human than fiction. I mean, I think it's all part of the human experience. Anne: Sure. Emily: It's all part of something that human beings have spent hours or months or years putting together. And they deserve a human voice to express that. Anne: Well, and you're talking to, you know, my specialty corporate narration and e-learning, so I understand that completely. I mean, to me, I mean, I want there to be a human teacher behind the mic. Emily: Sure. Anne: I want there to be, you know, I'm a company, I want there to be a human that's expressing my mission statement or my objective. And again, it comes to people responding and saying, well, you know, it's what the market wants. Or I guess for me, if I'm just one little person, me, I'm not going to necessarily stop the progression of technology. And so in terms of how I need to, I guess, evolve or work with technology that's, that may be encroaching on, let's say genres that I, you know, specialize in, I have to try to think of it in terms of, okay. So are there certain types that might be okay? A lot of times, you know, it's like, why do consumers go to outlets like the -- Fiverr, right, to get their voiceover? Because they don't have a value necessarily, or they don't -- Emily: Sure. Anne: -- or they have a certain value associated with that job. So could this not be the future lower end of -- Emily: Yeah. Lower budget production -- Anne: -- consumer -- yeah, lower budget. Emily: I mean, look, there are already people who are driven by money, you know -- Anne: Yup, yup. Emily: -- want the cheapest product, and they're hiring brand new narrators on indie platforms -- Anne: Yup. Emily: -- for like a quarter of the standard rate -- Anne: Right. Emily: -- or less, you know? Like those people already exist. Will those people start doing robots instead? Anne: Yeah. Emily: Maybe. Anne: Yeah. Emily: You know, who can stop that? Anne: Yeah, exactly. Emily: But I think yes, that is a concern because the more artificially narrated audiobooks that are put in the market, the more consumers get used to it, the harder it is -- Anne: Yeah. Emily: -- to argue our position. Anne: Exactly. Yeah. Emily: It's all concerning. I do agree that there's a certain element that I don't know how much control we have, but I also think that there will always be an element of high budget productions -- Anne: Yes. Emily: -- that will always have a human narrator. Anne: Oh, I completely agree with you. I mean, I don't think that there's ever going to be -- and I'm a tech girl. I worked in technology for 20 years. I do believe that there's always, there's always going to be a place for the human still in voiceover. And I think that narrators that have been for years, you know, telling stories and audiobooks, I mean, that is a level of acting that cannot be reached right now by any type of AI voice. Emily: Oh no. Anne: And I don't know that the public wants -- Emily: No. Anne: -- to be, necessarily feel like they've been duped either. Emily: Sure. Anne: So if they're listening to an audiobook, and they think it might be a human, so I think it's all speculation right now trying to figure out how -- like how long will it take? How far will it go and how human will it sound? And I guess my argument has always been well, humans are developing it. So I think you will always have those people that want to take it to the point where, oh my gosh, is this a deepfake? They'll always try to get there. But I like to think that technology is good inherently, and that because humans are developing technology, it will develop to a point that will help humans and not necessarily take them down or, you know, erase an industry. So I do believe that there will always be a space for a human actor in voiceover. I just don't know how far the AI will go in five to ten years, let's say,. Emily: Sure. But I will say that -- okay. So the way that these algorithms work, right, is that they find the middle ground, right? So they'll always be passible. They'll never be award worthy. Right? They're never going to take acting risks. They're never going to be able to, I mean, unless they have an engineer sit there and like tweak them for every moment, at which case, like just have a voice actor do it. Anne: Well, yeah. Sometimes there is a lot of tweaking involved, that's for sure. Emily: Yeah. So it's like, they'll just, they'll never be able to cry. You know, they'll never really be able to make a listener cry or feel that connected because they're not connected. You know, they're an algorithm. So they'll make the baseline choice, the easy, safe choice, because that's, you know, when you're talking about machine learning or it's studying thousands and thousands and thousands of performances, no two narrators are the same. We wouldn't make the same choices on the same book. So they're going to pick the baseline, which I think means that it will never be as good, no matter what, inherently it'll never be as good as the best narrators. So that's why we need to make all narrators, or at least narrators who want to make a living doing this, the best that they can be, because I don't think machines can ever really, truly catch up with anything that is off the cusp and beautiful and you know, like human, and they'll never be that. Anne: What if -- now here's my what if, because I do know of technology called speech-to speech where it can mimic. So what about an actor who, you know, has great acting skills, and they can act a baseline model, right? And then other voices can be applied on top of that. I mean, it's scary. I've heard it. Emily: Basically have a human narrate the book, but then put someone else's voice on their performance? Anne: Yeah, that is a mimic. So that would make it sound pretty much human, but with somebody else's voice or maybe with a different language. Emily: Well, I mean, if you're doing that, at least that actor is getting paid to do it -- Anne: Right. Emily: -- because they'd have to custom record that book. Anne: Exactly. Emily: Um, so that's, uh, a less scary proposition to me. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: But um, yeah, I mean, I guess that's a possibility. I think the -- what we're more concerned about or most concerned about anyway, is machine learning, which will completely replace humans entirely. So like right now, most of the AI voices are licensed, where it's basically like they have somebody sit in a studio for a few days, and then from there they extrapolate whatever texts they want to be able to put on that person's habits. But machine learning would be like, they can listen to the thousand most popular in audiobooks and narrators of all time and sort of create an algorithm based out of that. Anne: Yes. Emily: And they'll never have to license. They'll never have to pay a single human for that. I think that's the biggest fear is completely taking us out of the equation. I think when it comes to licensing your voice or what you just mentioned, where it's like you record the book and then they put some celebrity's voice on it or something, I mean, personally, I am against those things. But I can see why some people might feel like there's more wiggle room in those. Again, that is not my personal opinion. I want to stop all of this, nip this on the bud. But if we're at a point where it's like, that's all that's left to us, at least there are still humans involved. Anne: Yeah. Well, and I think, again, if we're thinking about how we can evolve with it, if, if that becomes part of it, and I do know that that technology exists. I don't know at this point -- you've got people, you've got other companies that are not voiceover that are creating this technology. So how can we work with those companies or do we choose not to work with those companies right, in order to -- Emily: Sure. Anne: -- stay ahead, right? Is that a possibility? Emily: Um, okay. My personal feeling is I don't support anyone doing that because, and I have more to say, but like, because I feel like that's just kind of giving in. It's, you know, you get a sum of money, which is enough for a few years, and you're basically giving up your whole career in trade, and the careers of all of your colleagues, because how many of those, how many people's voices are they really going to need to license? So ultimately, and I understand that everyone's situation is different and, you know, I shouldn't judge, but ultimately it's a very self-serving decision to do that. And so I personally, and this is my personal opinion, don't feel like I can support those things. However, if someone's going to do it, I think there's a lot of important ways to protect yourself and to protect others in the industry. So I know that our union is working on licensing agreements that would be union. As far as I know, every one of these that I've heard of or seen advertisements for or whatever is non-union. And there's a reason for that. It's because they're taking advantage of people who are vulnerable. Anne: Sure. Emily: And they're taking advantage of people who need the money and who think, oh my gosh, a year's salary for a few days in the booth? Of course, I'm going to do that. Not realizing or not thinking through the consequences. You know, there's a reason that they don't want these contracts to be union because the union would want to, for example, limit how many times that person's voice can be used. Can they make a hundred audiobooks from that person's voice versus a thousand or a million from the same person's voice? You know, they're going to try to put limits on it to make it more equitable and spread it out. And these companies don't want to do that. There was no advantage to them for doing that. And then there's other things like, well, I've talked a bunch about machine learning, which if people don't know, I really highly recommend looking into it. But if you license your voice, and there's no provision in your contract which says that they can't use that for machine learning, they can take that voice and not only use it for clone or whatever, but they can use it to create a totally synthetic voice that they'll never have to pay anyone a dime for. You know, there's a lot of risks, and that's part of why we want to do an educational series is if you're going to do this, which I personally strongly recommend and hope that you won't, but if you will, please at least be smart about it. You know, there are companies involved like, you know, Google and whatever that have really deep pockets, and they can offer the kind of money that a lot of people would have a really hard time turning down. But you also have to remember that there's a lot more at stake here than your wallet or even your career. Um, so we just, if you're going to do it, you have to be smart about it and you have to read those contracts with a fine tooth comb. Anne: So I totally, totally understand all of that. Absolutely. What about the possibility of, as an organization, having a voice and going to these companies and saying -- I want to say it's like in the video gaming industry, when musicians would create music for video games, fighting for their creative licensing rights. What about that sort of thing? Like, and I understand, I mean, Google and you know that a lot of the big companies have a lot of voices already, not even voice actors, right? Just voices -- Emily: Right, yeah. Anne: -- that they're using to learn, right. They're using to put into machine learning and learn and test and create other voices. If as an organization, you could be a strong voice in saying, hey, you know what, anybody's voice that's used really you should be asking permission. There should be compensation. There should be -- Emily: Right. Anne: -- you know -- Emily: We should be getting royalties. Anne: Right, exactly. Emily: You know, like with any contract, you should have a limited period of time -- Anne: Exactly. Emily: -- where you can -- Anne: Exactly. Emily: You can't license in perpetuity, you should get six months or whatever, you know, like, I totally agree. That's part of why, if these contracts are going to happen, they should be union. Anne: Yeah. Emily: And that's why they don't -- they don't want to give us that, they don't. Um, they just want to give us a sum of money that is like an absolute fraction of what we would deserve for doing that kind of work. Anne: I have spoken with some companies who say that they are not those companies. You know, they say that they are for -- Emily: Well, of course they say -- Anne: Well, okay. But that's the thing though, is that, do you assume that all companies are not ethical? You know what I mean, in this game? Emily: I think honestly, I think any company doing this nonunion and not offering the protections and the compensation that any actor doing this deserves it, I don't think that's ethical. This is my personal opinion. I'm not speaking for PANA. Anne: Oh, no, no. Emily: I don't think it's ethical to offer a desperate actor a year salary and have their voice in perpetuity to use -- Anne: I agree. Emily: -- for whatever you want. You know? Anne: I agree with that. And I totally agree with that. And I think that that is absolutely where voice actors need to, you know, they need to be aware of these things that, you know, these companies that are for TTS. For me, that's a big red flag. And if you have a contract or you have a company that wants to pay you for, you know, 3000 lines of whatever, I absolutely believe that you should have a lawyer on that. Um, I say I would not take the job. However, if you go to these AI companies, I'm going to say independently and, you know, and try to work with them, or if there's an organization that can be on a board -- there is an organization right now that is working towards policies and legal contracts that will be in protection of the voice acting community. So I feel like there could be power in that as well. Emily: Sure. Anne: And especially from the audiobook narrators industry as well, because you guys are a -- you're a large community, and you have strong voices, and you work closely with the union. And I think that that is a wonderful thing. And I think that if you can get in on the ground floor of those usage policies, which everybody should have, right? And then, you know, ultimately, you know, fight the good fight hopefully so that the companies now understand, because I think in my research, I'm just going to say, there's a lot of AI companies out there that don't understand the voice acting industry. They don't understand like I actually had to say, no, there's usage. There's -- Emily: Right. Anne: -- you know, there's usage here for how long. And we have contracts that, you know, we can't use our voice for this company, because we're already committed to this company. Emily: Sure. Anne: And there's a lot of education, not just for us, but -- Emily: But for them. Anne: -- on their side as well. And I think that if you have a strong community of voices, that might be something to consider. Like you said, education, maybe education for AI companies as well. Emily: Sure. I -- Anne: Yeah. Emily: -- I would certainly be open to that. Anne: Yeah. Emily: And another one that we haven't mentioned, but that is definitely a concern, at least for me, would be having some sort of limitations on the content that they -- Anne: Yes, absolutely. Emily: -- could use voices for. Anne: Yup, yup. Emily: Like for example, you know, I'm, I'm Jewish. Anne: Yup. Emily: I would be horrified if my voice was used to narrate Nazi propaganda. Anne: Yup. Emily: You know, like that's just -- so I think any, any contract that is like in perpetuity with no limitations is unethical to me -- Anne: Yup. Emily: -- because that's just not how it should work. Anne: Oh yeah. Emily: Am I -- Anne: I agree. Emily: Am I open to working with AI companies to create a more equitable compensation system? Personally I think that that's SAG-AFTRA's job. If I ever hear of an AI company actually having union agreements with SAG-AFTRA, I would feel more kindly towards that AI company. I have yet to hear of that. I would potentially be open to that kind of effort, but honestly, I feel like that's putting the cart before the horse. I don't think we should give up the fight yet. I think we have enough good arguments and resources on our side to not necessarily have to get to that point yet. Anne: Okay. Well, I think that you've definitely got some strong arguments there, and I, I have also been in the forums and I hear what people say, and I understand. I myself have done so much research, probably a little bit more with the companies maybe than others, which is the only reason I bring up the point that there are companies who say that they are ethical and say that they will, you know, your license or your voice belongs to you. It's licensed to you. We will not use it in our machine learning, right? Only with your permission and only if you are compensated fairly, so. Emily: I mean, that's good. Good on those companies. Anne: Yeah. Well, I'm hoping that more companies will, with things, you know, with the unfortunate, but actually now fortunate episode that happened to -- maybe not fortunate. I don't know if I would call it that, but that happened with Bev Standing, right, with her suit against TikTok and the fact that it got settled, it does set a precedent. And so it's unfortunate sometimes that bad things have to happen in order for, right, resulting policies and standards and laws to come into play. You know, the whole thing with the Anthony Bourdain movie, right? Why resurrecting a voice without the permission? I think that there are bad things that happen. However, good things can come out of it afterwards in order to build laws. And I think that that's kind of where we might be in this crazy world of AI. And it seems like AI has just sprung up in the last couple of years like crazy. Emily: Sure. Anne: So I do believe after my research, for me, I think it comes to educating the companies, the AI companies about us and about what we need and about what our rights should be as actors. And I, I'm hoping that my involvement in this podcast is going to also have a voice that can help affect that. And so that they will see that we do need to license our voice. We do need to be fairly compensated. And, you know, I can only hope that my little part in it has something to do with maybe getting things the way that would be fair and equitable to us. Emily: Sure. I mean, I hope that, I hope that your efforts are successful. I do think that, I would like to think that these companies are just unaware or something. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: And I'm sure some of them are, but I also think that some of them are very clever. Anne: Yeah, of course. Emily: And I know there are, for example, I can think of certain companies in the audiobook world who say, well, we won't -- they are clever in the way that they deceive people. You know, they'll say, well, we're not using our data to clone your voice, but they won't say that they're not using the data for machine learning or other things, you know? Like, and I think that, because I think that if we could get companies to do union contracts, that would certainly order it, you know, equivalent. That would certainly be a step forward. But I also think that educating voice actors to understand all of this stuff -- because it is complicated -- Anne: Sure. Emily: - and it's not necessarily natural to a lot of people. I think that's important too, because like right now there are companies where we're -- actors and publishers are literally giving data to and not really recognizing how it could be used. Anne: Agreed, agreed. Emily: And so that's a problem. Anne: I think we always have though, you know what I mean? I'm going to say long before this AI craziness, I think also, you know, there have been devices that have been listening to us and capturing our voices for a long time now. Emily: Sure. Anne: And so it's, I think it's good that we all are educated on it. And I just wanna give a shout-out to the organization, which I'm a part of, and anybody, if you're interested in joining them, it's called the Open Voice Network, which is based on creating standards for anything voice. And there are some companies who create AI voices that are in this organization, but it's all for the good of the voiceover world as well, to make sure that we are fairly compensated and hopefully, you know, we have a set of standards that can work for everyone. So that's openvoicenetwork.org. Maybe that's something that, you know, uh, BOSSes out there, you want to take a look at. I love, love, love what you're doing with PANA. I mean, thank you really. It's, I know how hard it is to bring an organization up and get these things going and moving and being productive. So congratulations to you guys. I think it's an amazing thing you're doing for the audiobook community, and I think it's wonderful what you're doing. Emily: Thank you. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: Appreciate that. Anne: So tell us how people can find out more about your organization and you? Emily: Sure. Uh, pronarrators.org is our website. We are @pronarrators on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and I'm Emily Lawrence. And you can find me at emilylawrence.com. Anne: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Emily, for spending time with us today. BOSSes, go check out pronarrators.org. Thanks again so much for joining us. I'm going to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL. You too can connect and network like a BOSS. Find out more ipdtl.com, and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks so much. Bye! Emily: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

About EmilyEmily is an Android engineer by day, but makes tech jokes and satires videos by night. She lives in San Francisco with two ridiculously fluffy dogs.Links: Uber: https://eng.uber.com/ Blog: https://www.emilykager.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyKager TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shmemmmy 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: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance query 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 OLAP and OLTP—don't ask me to pronounce 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's episode is a little bit off of the beaten path because, you know, normally we talk to folks doing things in the world of cloud. What is cloud, you ask? Great question. Whatever someone's trying to sell you that day happens to be cloud.But it usually looks like SaaS products, Platform as a Service products, Infrastructure as a Service products, with ridiculous names because no one ever really thought what that might look like to pronounce out loud. But today, we're going in a completely different direction. My guest is Emily Kager, a senior Android engineer at a small scrappy startup called Uber. Emily, thank you for joining me.Emily: Thanks for having me.Corey: So, I'm going to outright come out and say it I know remarkably little about, I don't even want to say the mobile ecosystem in general, but even Android specifically because I fell down the iPhone hole a long time ago, and platform lock-in is a very real thing. Whenever you start talking about technical things, that generally tends to sail completely past me. You're talking about things like Promises and whatnot. And it's like, oh, that sounds suspiciously close to JavaScript, a language that I cannot make sense of to save my life. And it's clear you know an awful lot about what you're doing. It's also clear, I don't know, a whole heck of a lot about that side of the universe.Emily: Well, that's good because I don't know much about the cloud.Corey: Exactly. Which sounds like well, we don't have a whole lot of points of commonality to have a show on, except for this small little thing, where recently, I decided in an attempt to recapture my lost youth and instead wound up feeling older than I ever have before, I joined the TikToks and started making small videos that I would consider humorous, but almost no one else will. And okay, great. I give it a hearty, sensible chuckle and move on, and then I start scrolling to see what else is out there. And I started encountering you, kind of a lot.And oh, my God, this is content that it's relatable, it is educational, dare I say, and most of all, it's engaging without being overbearing. And this is a new type of content creation that I hadn't really spent a lot of time with before. So, I want to talk to you about that.Emily: Awesome. I want to apologize for having to see my face as you're just scrolling throughout your day, but happy to chat about it. [laugh].Corey: No, no, it's—compared to some of the things I wind up on the TikTok algorithm, it is ridiculous. I think it's about 80% confident that I'm a lesbian for some Godforsaken reason. Which hey, power to the people. I don't think I qualify, but you know, that's just how it works. And what I found really interesting about it, what does tie it back to the world of cloud, is that a recurring theme of this show has been, since the beginning, where does the next generation of cloud-engineering-type come from?Because I've been in this space, almost 20 years, and it turns out that my path of working to help desk until you realize that you like the computers, but not so much being screamed at by the general public, then go find a unicorn job somewhere you can bluff your way into because the technical interviewer is out sick that day, and so on and so forth, isn't really a path that is A) repeatable by a whole lot of people, and B) something that exists anymore. So, how do people who are just entering the workforce now or transitioning into tech from other fields learn about this stuff? And we've had a bunch of people talking about approaches to educating people on these sorts of things, but I don't think I've ever spoken to someone who's been as effective at it in minute or less long videos as you are.Emily: That's super kind. Yeah, I think there's actually a whole discussion and joke set on TikTok of people's parents suggesting why don't you just go slide your resume under the CEOs door? Like, why don't you just go get a job [laugh] that way? I think the realities of—what year are we in? 2022? [laugh]—Corey: All year long, I'm told.Emily: Yeah, [laugh] yeah. Yeah. I think that's not going to be the reality anymore, right? You can't just go shake hands with the CEO and work your way up from the mailroom and yeah, that's not the way anymore. So yeah, I think I, you know, started just putting some feelers out, making educational content mostly about my own experiences as a change career person in the tech world.I have some, I would say interesting perspectives on how to enter the industry, you know, either through undergrad or after undergrad, so. And it's done really well. I think people are really interested in tech is a career at this point. Like, it's kind of well known that they're good jobs, well paid, and, you know, pretty, like, good work-life balance, most of the time. So yeah, the youth are interested.Corey: It's something that offers a path forward that lends itself to folks with less traditional backgrounds. For example, you have a master's degree; I have an eighth-grade education on paper. And, yes, I'm proof-positive that it is possible to get into this space and, by some definitions, excel in it without having a degree, but let's also be clear, here, I have the winds of privilege at my back, and I was stupendously lucky. It is harder to do without the credential than it is with the credential.Emily: Yep.Corey: But the credential is not required in the same way that it is if I want to be a surgeon. Yeah, you're going to spend a lot of time in either school or prison with that approach. So, you have really two paths there; one is preferable over the other. Tech, it feels like there's always more than one way to get in. And there's always, it seems, as many stories as there are people out there about how they wound up approaching their own path to it. What was yours?Emily: Yeah. First of all, it's funny, you mentioned surgeons because I actually just today saw on my ‘For You' page some surgeons sharing, you know, their own suturing techniques. And I think it's a really interesting platform even, you know, within different fields and different subsets to kind of share information and keep up to date and connect with people in your own industry. So, beyond learning how to get into [laugh] an industry, it can also be helpful for other things. But sorry, I completely forgot the original question. How—what was my path? Is that what the question was?Corey: Yeah. How did you get here is always a good question. It's the origin stories that we sometimes tell, sometimes we wind up occluding aspects of it. But I find it's helpful to tell these stories just because, if nothing else, it reaffirms to folks who are watching or listening or reading depending on how they want to consume this, that when they feel like well, I tried to get a credential and didn't succeed, or I applied for a job and didn't get it, there are other paths. There is not only one way to get there.Emily: Yeah. And I think it's also super important to talk about failures that we've had, right? So, when I was in undergrad, I was studying neuroscience and I was pre-med. And I thought I wanted to go to med school, kind of decided halfway through, I was only lukewarm about it, and I don't think med school is the type of thing that you want to feel lukewarm about as you're [laugh] approaching, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and a ten-plus year commitment to schooling and whatever else, right? So yeah, I felt very lukewarm about the whole thing.Both my parents were doctors, so I just didn't really have exposure to many other careers or job options. I'm from a pretty, like, rural area, so tech had never really [laugh] occurred to me either. So yeah, then I decided to just take a year off after undergrad, felt super lost. I think when you're 22, everything feels so important, [laugh] and you look at everyone else who already has their first job at 22, and I was like, “Wow, I'm a huge failure. I'm never going to have a job.” Which is, you know, hilarious looking back because 22-year-olds are so young. And yeah, just decided to take a year off. I worked at a nonprofit. I hated it, hated the work. Decided, like I, you know, can never do this forever.Corey: I can't do nonprofit stuff. I'm going to do for-profit stuff. And it turns out that most—when you say nonprofit, it doesn't mean what I thought. It ap—usually means, you know, something that's dedicated to a charitable cause, not, you know, a VC-backed company that doesn't know how to make any money.Emily: Yeah. I mean, it could still be very corporate at nonprofit. After that, actually—Corey: Oh, yes. Money is the root of all good as well as evil.Emily: Yeah. And I actually had a task at the nonprofit where I was sorting a ton of things in spreadsheets. And I was like, wow, it'd be easy if there was just, like, some program I could write to, like, do this. So, I actually reached out to my brother, who was a computer science nerd—affectionately—and he helped me write some, like, Excel macros, and I was like, “This is so cool.” And I ended up taking a free course, CS50, which is great, by the way, great course, super high quality from Harvard, totally free to take online.And really liked it, so I did something a little crazy and decided to just dive right in. [laugh]. And I applied to a post-bacc program to kind of take all the courses that a CS undergrad would have taken just after. And that post-bacc turned into a master's program.Corey: And here you are now on the other side of having done it. If—sort of the dangerous questions: If you had known then what you know now, would you have gone down the same path, or would you have done something different to get into the space?Emily: Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard once you've kind of made it, to be like, “I would change all this.” I think I would probably try more things in undergrad. That would be the real answer to that. It obviously would have been a lot easier and more time-efficient if I didn't have to go back to school and do something. But that being said, I don't think that getting a post-bacc or a Master's is the only way into tech; it was just my path.And I try not to… I try not to promote other paths that I don't really know much about independently, right? So—on me. So—but plenty of people are successful going through boot camps or self-teaching, even, I think they're just much more difficult paths because the reality is, like, having a degree is still definitely an easier path when you show up to an interview and you can just kind of show your piece of paper, which, for better or worse, that's the reality sometimes.Corey: My wife's a corporate attorney, so I've been law adjacent for over a decade now, and one of the things that always struck me about that field is the big law approach is you go to a top-tier law school, you wind up putting your nose to the grindstone for all three years, and you hope to get an offer at one of the big law firms. And they all keep their salaries in lockstep. I think right now they're all—they just upgraded again to $235,000 a year starting. And if you don't get one of those rare, prestigious jobs at a number of select firms, it's almost a bimodal distribution where you're making somewhere between 60 and $80,000 a year to start somewhere else. It is the one path to make big money in law as you're fresh out of school, and there are no real do-overs in most cases.So, it's easy to apply that type of thinking to tech, and it's just not true. Talking to folks who have this dream of working at Google and they finally go through the interview process. And it turns out that oh no, they froze when asked to solve Fizz Buzz, or invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, or whatever ridiculous brainteaser question they're being asked, and, “Oh, no, my life is over.” And it's, you know, you can go to, I don't know, Stripe, two blocks down the street and try again. And if that doesn't work, Microsoft, or Amazon, or go down the entire list of tech companies you've heard of and haven't heard of, and they all compensate directionally the same way. It's not a one-shot, ‘this is it' moment in the same way. And I—Emily: Yeah.Corey: —I think that's a unique thing to tech right now.Emily: Yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of kids—I say kids, but really, like, you know, 18 to 20-year-olds—Corey: Oh, believe me, after being on TikTok for a couple of weeks, let me say that every one of you are children, to my perspective. I am now Grandpa Quinn over here.Emily: [laugh]. I'll take it. Yeah, but a lot of them have reached out like, “I didn't get hired at FAANG right out of school. Is my life over? Is my career over?” And I've never worked at a FAANG. [laugh]. I'm pretty happy. I definitely think I have a successful career, and I almost think I'm better for not having gone right into it, you know?I think it can be great for some people. There's great, you know… definitely great salaries, great mentorship options, but it's not the only option. And I think maybe tech is unique in that way, but there's just so many good companies to work at, and so many great opportunities, you really don't need to go to the name brand in the same way that maybe you would have to in law. It's funny you say that because my partner is also a lawyer [laugh] and [crosstalk 00:13:00]—Corey: Oh, dear. We should start a support group of our own, on some level.Emily: I know, yeah. He just went through the whole big law recruiting thing. So, I know much about that. [laugh].Corey: It's always an experience. The way that I have found across the board as well is there's also a shared, I guess, esprit de corps almost across the industry. I mean, you are on the Android side of the world, and I historically was on the DevOps side of the universe, although now mocking cloud services—but not the way test engineers say when they use the term ‘mocking'—is what I do. But there are shared experiences that tie us together, and that's part of what I found so interesting about a lot of your content.Because yes, there is some of the deep dive stuff into Android and, cool, sails right over my head—I hear the whistling sound vaguely as it goes over—but then there's other stories about things that are unique—that are, I guess, a shared experience. For me, one of the things that tied all of tech together, regardless of where in the ecosystem you fit in, is a shared sense of being utterly intimidated to hell by the miracle of Git, where it's like, Git's entire superpower is making you feel dumb. Doesn't matter who you are, from someone who doesn't know what Git is all the way to Linus himself. Someone is go—at some point, you're going to look at it and wonder, “What the hell is going on?” It's just a question of how far you get along the path before it changes your understanding of the universe.And I wound up starting to give talks, in the before times, at front-end conferences about this, which you want to talk about dispiriting things. I would build slides like, you know, a DevOps person would: Black Helvetica text on a white slide. Everyone else has these beautifully pristine, great slides. I have 20 minutes to go.How can I fix it? Change the font to Comic Sans because if you're going to have something that looks crappy, make it look like it was intentionally so.Emily: And did it work?Corey: Oh, it worked swimmingly. It was fantastic. I like the idea of being able to reach people in different areas, no matter where they are in their journey, and one of the things that appeals to me about TikTok in general in your content in particular, is it seems like we have something of a shared perspective on, getting people's attention is required in order to teach them something, and I think we both use the same vehicle for that, which is humor.Emily: Yeah, I would agree. I think the other interesting thing I just wanted to touch on; you were talking about is, we don't really know too much about each other's fields in tech. And I think when you're talking to a younger audience, maybe who you want to get interested in tech, it's really hard to communicate all the different avenues into tech that they can take. And this is something that I'm still struggling with because I know my experience as an Android developer, a mobile developer, I probably medium I understand, you know, back end development, but I don't think I could explain to a college student why or what even is, [laugh] you know, cloud development and how they could get involved in that, or all these other fields that I just really don't know much about. And I think that's kind of what ties a lot of people in tech together as well, right? Because we know our little corners of the world, and you have to start to get comfortable with the things that you don't know. And I think that's really hard to explain to [laugh] the younger generation as you're trying to get them excited about things.Corey: Oh, yeah. And the reality, too, of what we tell people and how the world works is radically different. Like, I want to learn a technology that will absolutely last for an entire career and then some, and I want to be able to be employed anytime, anywhere, at any company. The easy slam dunk answer that I think will not change in either of our lifetimes is Microsoft Excel. It powers the world.People think I'm kidding, but it is the IDE of back-office processes and communications. If Excel were to go away or even worse, Microsoft were to change Excel's interface, people would be storming Redmond by noon.Emily: Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, right? Like, it's hard to tell people—because people will tell to me, “Well, do you have to keep learning things?” And I'm like, “Yeah. You got to keep learning things, like, all the time.”But I don't think that should be, you know, a deterrent from the career; it's just a reality. But to try to manage, like, the fears a lot of people have coming into tech and also encouraging them to still, you know, try it, go after it, I think that's something I struggle with when I'm creating my content for—towards, like, younger people. [laugh].Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: Something I found on Twitter is that among other things that Twitter has going on for it, it doesn't do nuance, it does, effectively, things that are black and white, yes or no, it's always a binary in many respects. And one of those is that, like, should—like, is passion or requirement for working in tech. And there's the, “Yes, you absolutely have to be passionate for this and power through it.” And the answer, “No, you don't need to be passionate about it's okay to do it for the money and not kill yourself working 20 hours a day.” And from my perspective, I take a more moderate stance, which is how you get both sides of that argument to hate you, but it's, I don't think you need to have this all-consuming drive for tech, but I do think you need to like it.Emily: Oh yeah.Corey: I think you need to enjoy what you're doing or it's going to feel like unmitigated toil and misery, and you will not be happy in the space. And if you're not happy, really is the rest of it all worth it?Emily: I think that applies to most careers, though, right? Like that—definitely, when I was looking to switch careers, that was the main thing I was looking for. Number one was like, you know, pretty solid salary. And number two was, do I just not hate it? [laugh]. And I think if you're doing anything and you hate it, you're going to be miserable, right?Like, even if you're doing it to make a paycheck if you actually hate every single day when you wake up in the morning and you dread, you know, going to bed because the next morning, you have to wake up and do it again, like, you're going to be miserable. But I do think, yeah, like, to your point, there's a middle ground in all this, right? You don't have to dream about tech, but I think you do have to realize that, yeah, if you're going to be in this industry for decades, you're going to have to be able to learn and be interested enough in things that, you know, learning isn't a huge slog either. So.Corey: I've never understood the folks who don't want to learn as they go through their career because it just seems like a recipe to do the same thing every year for 40 years, and then you retire with what 40 years of experience—one year experience repeated 40 times. It's a… any technology or any disruption change happens, and suddenly you're in a very uncomfortable situation when we're talking about knowledge workers.Emily: Yeah, I think people—you know, I think we talk a lot about, like, imposter syndrome in our industry right? So, I think people already feel like maybe, “I don't know anything so why would I put myself out there and learn new things?” I mean, I definitely sometimes struggle with this where I'm like, “I'm very comfortable [laugh] in, like, what I do day-to-day. I know what I'm doing.” So yeah, when you have to learn, like, a totally new language or new architecture, whatever, it can feel very overwhelming to be like, wow, I actually am, you know, super stupid. [laugh]. But it's just new things, right? You're learning new things, and—Corey: Like, “Find the imposter. Oh, no, it's me.” Yes, it's a consistent problem.Emily: But it's a really powerful thing to acknowledge that you can feel stupid and you can ask questions and you can be new to something, and that's, like, totally valid. And I started taking a new language course a year or two ago, and showing up every day and speaking a new language and feeling like an idiot, it was actually super empowering because everyone in the class is doing it, you know? We didn't know the language and we were just, you know, talking gibberish to each other, and that's fine. We were learning.Corey: The emotional highs and lows are also—they hit quickly. I have never felt smarter or dumber in a two-minute span of each other than when working on technology. It's one of those, “I will never understand how this works—oh my God, it works. I'm a genius. Just kidding. It doesn't work. Nevermind. Forget everything I just said.” It's a real emotional roller coaster.Emily: [laugh]. There's only two ends of the spectrum, right? Like, there's no middle ground in this situation. It's, “I'm a genius,” or, “I should quit and never work on technology ever again.”Corey: So, I've been experimenting on TikTok a bit and you've been on it significantly longer. You have, as of this recording, something in the direction of 65,000 followers on the TikToks. I have a bit more than that on the Twitters, which only took me a brief 14 years to do. So, great. I've noticed that as I wind up—as you hit certain inflection points on Twitter, your experience definitely changes, when—as far as just, like, the unfortunate comments coming out of the woodwork.Like, I was making fun of LinkedIn at some point, and then there was some troll comment in the comments, and I looked at who the commenter was and it was the official LinkedIn brand account. And okay, well, that's novel, but all right. I'd like to add them to my professional network on TikTok. So, there we go. But have you noticed inflection points as well, in your—experience changes on the platform as you continue to grow?Emily: Yeah. I think—I saw something once that Twitter is only fun if you have less than, like, [laugh] 5000 followers or something. So, I think we both surpassed that a while ago. And yeah, I think it can be a very interesting experience as you start to gain followers. And to be honest, like, I'm on both platforms, just to kind of make content.It's a very, like, creative outlet for me. I don't necessarily care that much about how many followers I have. But it is an interesting progression to see, like, you know, you get a little bit of engagement, and it's usually, like, a back and forth; you're kind of like actually connecting to people, and then as you kind of surpass maybe five or ten-thousand followers, there's all these people who come in who you don't know who they are, they don't know who you are, they make assumptions about you, they are saying really mean things that I think just because you have, like, a high follower account that they're like, “I can say whatever I want to this person.” And it's definitely an interesting change. I think over the years—because I've been fairly public for a number of years now—you kind of get more immune to it. I'm sure you feel the same way, but you're like, whatever, just kind of brush off a lot of these things. But—Corey: Oh, yeah. You become more of a persona to people than an actual person.Emily: Yeah.Corey: And that is—Emily: Yeah.Corey: —people forget that—you know, everyone yells at you about, “That was an unkind thing, express more empathy all the ti”—I mean, you get that all the time when you get—when set a slight foot wrong. And they're right—don't think I'm saying otherwise—but they're not expressing a lot of empathy for you at the same time, either. So, it's one of those you have to disengage and disconnect on certain levels and just start to ignore it. But it's been a wild ride.Emily: I used to wonder, I used to see, like, accounts that have you know, 50, 60,000 followers on Twitter back when I was a smaller account, and they didn't—they never tweeted, and I was like, “How'd they get so many followers? They never tweet.” And now I understand. It's that they gained that many followers and then they left. [laugh]. They're done.Corey: [unintelligible 00:23:18] like, “This platform sucks now.” And it's—a lot of folks, like, “Oh, Twitter's not as good as it used to be.” It's like, well hang on. Has the platform itself changed or has your exposure to it changed? And it's a question that doesn't really have a great answer or way to find out, but it's… it's been a—it's an ongoing struggle for folks. And I do have empathy for that. I try to avoid getting involved in pile-ons wherever possible.Emily: Yeah. That's been a new change for me, too. I think a lot of my early brand on Twitter—as dumb as that word is—was, you know, kind of finding, like, misogynists in tech and really, like, creating a pile-on on them. And, you know, I think there is a space for calling out bad behavior in the industry, but you want to be careful because really, there are other people on the other side of the screen. And unless someone's really implying—like, unless they're really intending ill intent, you know, I think I've kind of now moved less towards that type of [laugh] pile-on. It is fun though. That's the thing. It's fun.Corey: Plus the algorithm rewards engagement. Say horrifying things and get a bunch of attention and more followers. But you don't necessarily want to participate in that.Emily: Yeah, exactly. And that's the other thing I realized that if someone is really saying something stupid, me bringing attention to it is only going to amplify it more. So. Especially as you gain followers and you have more of an audience to whatever you quote, tweet, or retweet, or comment on, right? So.Corey: As I look at, like, the sheer amount of content that you've put out—it's weird because if someone asked me this question, I don't know that I would have a good answer, but I am curious. You are consistently exploring new boundaries in terms of the humor, the content, the topics, the rest. How do you come up with it?Emily: This is going to be a really unsatisfying answer. [laugh]. I don't know. [laugh]. I'm a runner, and a lot of times when I'm running I don't use headphones. A lot of people say I'm sociopathic because I just am by myself in the world, and—this is such, like, a weird answer—but yeah, I just kind of—I'm thinking about things, usually I'm like digesting my day, things that happened, things that were annoying.And to be honest, I think it's pretty easy to identify things that are relatable, right? So, a lot of the gripes that all engineers have, right? So, you're like, “Wow, it was really annoying that I had to make a ticket in Jira today.” And you can kind of think about how is it annoying, and how can I make this funny and relatable to someone else? So—and to be hon—like, when I had, you know, a group of coworkers that I worked really closely in my last job, I would just send them the jokes, and then if they thought it was funny, I would just, like, post it on Twitter.And that's kind of… you know, it's just, like, the basic chit-chat that you do. But now we're all remote, so I found an outlet through Twitter and TikTok, where I would just express all my, you know, stupid engineering jokes to the world. [laugh]. Whether they want it or not.Corey: Something I found is that—and it always has frustrated me, and I figured, one day, I too, would figure out how to solve for this. And no. There are things I will tweet out that I think are screamingly funny and hilarious, and no one cares. Conversely, I'll jot off something right before I dive into a meeting, and I'll come back and find out it's gone around the internet three times. And there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, other than that my sense of humor is not quite dialed into exactly where most folks in this industries are. It's close enough that could be overlooked, but I still feel like the best jokes go unappreciated.Emily: Oh, I agree. I mean, I send jokes by friends all the time that I'm like, “I'm posting this,” and it gets, like, you know, 20 likes. And I don't even care. I think, you know—I think that's the—you know can—you start to learn as a content creator that you're like, “I'm going to put out the content that I want to put out and hope other people find it funny, but at the end of the day, I don't really care.” So, I'm laughing at my own jokes. I'll admit that. So. I think they're funny. My—Corey: [crosstalk 00:26:58]—Emily: —[crosstalk 00:26:58] funny, too.Corey: —for me because if—I'm keeping myself engaged, otherwise it gets boring, and I lose interest in the sound of my own voice, which is just a terrible sin for me. So, it's—I have to keep it engaging or I'll lose interest.Emily: Yeah, exactly.Corey: Do you find when you're trying to put together content, that—for TikTok, for example—that you've come up with something that, “Huh, this doesn't really fit the video format. Maybe it's more of a blog post or something else.” Do you find that one content venue feeds another? Do you reuse content across multiple platforms? And if so—Emily: Yeah.Corey: —what have you learned from all that?Emily: That's an interesting question. I think—I do maintain a blog, but I don't post so often on it, and I find that the—for the more serious content I'm making that's not jokes, right? I think TikTok just really hits a different audience. Like, people don't find my blog, it's not discoverable, maybe they're not checking it, and I think definitely the younger audience prefers to consume things in video content. And a lot of my content is also aimed towards people who maybe are exploring tech who don't work in tech yet, and so to really hit them, they probably aren't following me and they probably don't know who I am, they probably don't even know what to look for in my blog.So, for example, I have a blog post all about how I transitioned into tech, blah, blah, blah, and people still ask me all the time on TikTok, “How did you transition into tech? How did you”—I'm like, “It's in my blog.” On my—like, you know, linked my bio. But you still have to just kind of—I think, like, I tend to just recreate the content into the different platforms. And it can be a bit tedious, but I try to keep my blog up to date with, like, different stories of things that have happened to me. But these days, I mostly just post on TikTok, to be honest. [laugh].Corey: I had the same problem, but content reuse saved me. I started writing a long-form blog post of roughly 1000 to 1500 words every week, then reading it into a microphone. It became the AWS Morning Brief podcast and emailing out to the newsletter as well. So, it's one piece of content used three different times, which was awesome, but then there's the other side of it, which is, I need to come up with an interesting idea or concept or something to talk about for 1000 words every week, like clockwork. And one of the things that made this way easier is a tip I got from Scott Hanselman that I have been passing on whenever it seems appropriate—like in this conversation—which is if you find yourself explaining something a third time, turn it into a blog post because then you'll just be able to link people to the thing that you wrote where you go into significantly more depth around what you're talking about than you can in a two-tweet exchange, and that in turn, gives you a place to dump that stuff out.And I found that has worked super well for me because once I've written it and gotten it out, I also often find I stopped making the same reference all the time because now I've said it, I've said my piece. Now, I can move on and come up with a second analogy, or a new joke or something.Emily: Yeah. I've also found that um—that's a great idea from Scott; he's also great on the TikToks [laugh]—Corey: Oh, yes he is.Emily: —[crosstalk 00:29:45] [laugh]. Building his account. Yeah, I think another interesting thing is, specifically on TikTok and Twitter because it's more of a conversation between you and your community, I tend to get a lot of ideas just from people asking me questions, right? So, in the comments of something, it could be related to the video I just made and it really helps me expand upon, you know, what I was just saying and maybe answer a follow-up question in a different video. Or maybe it's just a totally unrelated question.So, someone finds, you know, one of my comedy videos and is like, “Hey, you work in tech. Like, what is that like in San Francisco?” Right? So, I think I've found a ton of inspiration just from community people and really what they're asking for, right? Because at the end of the day, you want to make content that people actually care about and want to know the answers to.Corey: Yeah, seems like that does help. If it's, “How do I wind up building a following or getting a lot of traffic or the rest?” And it's Lord knows, once you have a website that has a certain amount of Google juice, you just get besieged by random requests from basically every channel. “Hey, I saw this great article linked to a back issue of the newsletter talking about this thing. Would you mind including my link to it, this would help your readers.” And it's just it's a pure SEO scam.And it's yeah, I don't—my approach to SEO has been this, again, ancient, old-timey idea of I'm going to write compelling original content that ideally other people find valuable and then assume that the rest is going to take care of itself. Because, on some level, that is what all these algorithms are trying to do is surface the useful stuff. I feel like as long as you hold to that, you're not going to go too far wrong.Emily: No, that's true. Also, something funny about reusing content is sometimes I'll post a joke on Twitter, and if it does well, I'll make it into a video format. And you know, sometimes I change the format of the joke around, whatever. But I—a couple times this happened—I'll post something on Twitter, and then, like, a day or two later, I'll make a TikTok about it, and a lot of people will come in and be like, “I already saw this joke on Twitter.” And they won't know it's from me, so they're basically accusing me of joke stealing when really I'm just content-raising is what I should tell them. But it is funny. [laugh].Corey: That's happened me a couple times on Twitter. People are like, “Hey, that's a stolen joke.” And then they'll google it and they'll dig it out. Like, “Here's the original—oh, wait, you said it two years ago.” “Yeah. No one liked it then, so here we are.” “If you liked it then, why didn't you blow it up like you did now?” So.Emily: They remembered it from two years ago, but they didn't remember it was yours. [laugh].Corey: At some level, I feel like I could almost loop my Twitter account and just let it continue to play out again for the next seven years, and other than the live-streaming stuff and the live-tweeting various events, I feel like it would do fairly well, but who knows.Emily: Yeah. Yeah. But at the end of the day, I think there's also a finite amount of funny tech jokes, and we're all just kind of recycling each other's jokes at some point. So, I don't get too offended by that. I'm like, “Sure. We all made the same joke about NFTs. Great.” Like, I don't care. [laugh].Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.Emily: [crosstalk 00:32:36] been fun.Corey: If people want to learn more and appreciate some of that awesome content, where's the best place to find you?Emily: Yeah, I'm on the Twitters and the TikToks, just like you.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:32:45].Emily: Had a great time. Thank you so much for having me again.Corey: No, thank you for coming. Emily Kager, senior Android engineer at Uber. 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 that links to a TikTok video of you ranting for a solid minute, but because computers and phones alike are very hard, you're using the wrong camera, and we just get that video of your floor.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.

This episode came about as our friend Emily was "Goodwill Hunting" and our conversation that began on Gaslighting in America. We laugh and we get scared and we ultimately feel empowered to live a good life, one in which we support each other and are mentally, physically, and socially healthy and good and we laugh again. Join this conversation about gaslighting, existential guilt crisis, how to deal with gaslighting at work and with friends and family, and also poop emojis. You will LOVE your new friend Emily Powell Gilliam! Emily Powell Gilliam is a designer of play objects and founder of Why & Wiser, creating artful games and gifts for clever kiddos and their grownups. To reach Emily:http://www.epgdesign.co/ http://www.whyandwiser.com/ https://www.instagram.com/epgdesignco/ Transcript [00:00:00] Emily: I had lots of ways of dealing with her. And for four years that was enough. And then, you know, I S I just like, it wore me down and my own, like physical, well, mental first health, and then physical health, just like, you know, went over a cliff, like, and told that if I wanted to be considered for promotion, I needed to work on being softer, use shorter words, be less aggressive. And that I intimidated the owner basically like be more female. [00:00:47] Matt: See that that's weird because , when you were describing it, I was like, oh my God, where are you coming across as, too passive? And that's why they didn't consider you for a manager because they didn't see you as a manager type, but they just saw you as a rabble rouser, and a troublemaker, but then why not just, can you, I mean, it's, it's a weird thing. [00:01:04] Emily: Well, if they canned me, they would have to pay unemployement. and my twin, is far less straightforward as a person because I'm not, [00:01:14] Matt: you're not a shrinking violet. [00:01:16] Emily: I'm not even a violet, I'm like a thistle My husband was like, you can't, you can't stay there. And then my therapist was like, you're literally doing physical damage to your body from the extended, stress of dealing with this [00:01:35] Fawn: Th

Emily Bahna a Managing Director at thoughtbot who leads the Lift Off team, where they focus on really leaning into the core of the company. The team works with new founders to launch new products or they work with existing companies that want to build out a new service or open up a new area to generate revenue for their business. But, the thing that ties Lift Off together, is that they start at ground zero to build upon an idea and actually build the first version product to get it out live into the marketplace. Follow Emily on Twitter (https://twitter.com/emilybahna) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebahna/). thoughtbot's Lift Off team (https://thoughtbot.com/lift-off) Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Emily Bahna, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Lift Off team. Emily, thanks for joining me. EMILY: Thank you. CHAD: So at this point, we've talked with a few of the different managing directors at thoughtbot about their teams. And Lift Off is one of the largest teams that we have. And so what is it that Lift Off actually does? EMILY: Lift Off is focused in on really leaning into the core of thoughtbot. We work with new founders launching new products or work with existing companies that want to build out a new service or open up a new area to generate revenue for their business. But I think the thing that ties Lift Off together is that we are starting at ground zero building upon an idea and actually building the first version product and getting it out into the marketplace. CHAD: And oftentimes, those are pretty significant endeavors. The last episode that came out was with Dawn at Ignite who is more on the validation, early stage, getting things that are fairly straightforward into market as quickly as possible usually in a matter of months. But Lift Off the endeavors are usually quite a bit more significant than that, right? EMILY: Yeah. I would say that the difference between validation...we're beyond the stage of validation. We're working with clients who are ready to build a foundation. They really need to put in the infrastructure that's going to take their product and get it ready to scale into the future. So they really need to make that investment into the longer-term strategy. They need to know what's realistic to build first. But they also have to keep an eye on the long road ahead of building something that can be something that can set out to grow down the road as well. CHAD: I guess another way of putting it is that Ignite often works with brand new teams, brand new companies creating something for the first time. And Lift Off typically works with existing companies who have existing significant revenue who want to do something new, either a new business or a new product, or maybe they have an existing web product and they're going into mobile for the first time. That's another way of putting it, right? EMILY: It could be. I think that when people are ready to move into the Lift Off space, it's about having the investment, the right kind of funding to move in that direction. Sometimes we do work with new founders that have a significant amount of funding, but a lot of times it is folks that are at the enterprise level that are building a new service line. They've got validation and market research already done. And they're building out a completely new line of business that they need to explore and set a new foundation in place. CHAD: Do you have some examples of clients that have been projects of Lift Off? EMILY: Yeah. We've been doing a lot of really interesting work in the health tech space, a lot of interest in improving patient experience. So we worked with a company called Relias in terms of moving them into a new service line that they'd never been in before, really focusing on improving patient care for therapists, physical therapy therapists. We've also worked with an organization called Groups Recover Together, building out a mobile application for an organization that helps people recover from substance abuse. And we also are working with an organization called Airrosti. That is also an organization that helps in the physical therapy space, so improving patient exercises or rehabilitation through an improved mobile experience, virtual experience to improve overall patient outcomes. CHAD: I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of the projects that we work on in Lift Off are in the health tech space because that combination of...like you were saying, a lot of what Lift Off does is really build products that are complex and that are going to scale and have a certain scale fairly quickly and need to really think about more of a platform that's going to be iterated upon into the future. And once you get into a highly regulated industry like health or finance or something, there are so many factors at play, especially if you're an existing business going into that. There's lots to consider. The projects are more complex. And so having a team of people that are focused on working in that kind of environment and know the challenges of doing that and an integrated design and development team who's comfortable operating in that space, I think that that's why it's not a coincidence. EMILY: Yeah. I think there's also a lot of great energy in that space right now to move it to the next level. And to be honest, the pandemic really accelerated the need for improvements in patient engagement and allowing therapists or physicians to be able to care for patients in a virtual setting. It also is true not just in health tech, but as you mentioned, we've been actively working with a lot of FinTech companies as well, building out mobile experiences for companies that are helping people get out of debt or working in even some of these new areas like cryptocurrency and things that are changing pretty rapidly in the marketplace and being able to respond to that. But kind of working in a really complex environment some particular industries that have specific compliance security needs in order to be able to serve their customers in a safe way. So working through a lot of those challenges is what's really important and having a team that can navigate through those levels of complexity. CHAD: I've talked with the other managing directors about the benefits of our new focus teams and how working on a similar project allows the team members to focus. The other aspect of it is there are parts of what we did under the studio model. And it may have been like there'd be one Lift Off project within...I think we should mention that you used to be the Managing Director of the Durham Studio. And it was a relatively small team working with local clients. And so you may only have one of these kinds of clients a year or maybe even less. And so building up an expertise but also meeting the needs of those particular clients there wasn't enough work there, for example, to hire someone with a specific skill set or knowledge if it's only going to be few and far between. And that's been true in Lift Off because we used to, at thoughtbot, not really have product managers. Everyone was designers and developers. And that was because only a subset of our projects really needed a product manager at the table. For the most part, a lot of those smaller projects or the boost-style projects are just developers or designers working directly with a stakeholder. And so, within Lift Off, we've built a product management practice because of that specialized need within these kinds of projects, right? EMILY: Yeah, I think just like you said, the ability to really focus in on the first version product is looking at ways that we could improve our process there and provide more support that's really needed for these kinds of engagements. So what we have seen with the more complex MVPs is a lot of these clients need reliability. They need to know that what they're building is the...They need to have more support in terms of the management of that, having someone who's dedicated to being able to straddle between the business objectives and working with the team navigating some of these more complex compliance issues, security issues, and keeping that on track. Also, we've been leaning into improving our practices around defining what first version product is. We've been using design sprints to really help align both business owners and the team to determine what are the biggest risk factors? How do we define what we're actually going to build and start building that roadmap? And we've been leaning into those best practices and actually improving upon it. And so we've looked at that and built out a discovery sprint that is not just a week-long but really extends that out to about three weeks to give us more time to do more user research, dive a little deeper through the design sprint exercises, but then bring in engineering, bringing an interdisciplinary team to look at the problem from both a product management point of view, a design point of view, and a development point of view to really determine the first version product roadmap and give more clarity to our clients and a clearer sense of what we can accomplish in the first. CHAD: I can speak to this firsthand because I was advising and working on a project that started before we reorganized into teams and effectively playing that role. But as the project went on, not that we did a terrible job, but it became overwhelming for me with my other responsibilities and spending a couple of days a week. A couple of days a week is sufficient on a smaller project, but on a much larger project, it's essentially a full-time job to do all of that work. [chuckles] And I just didn't have enough time to be able to do that, let alone then provide a real active management of the roadmap six-plus months out. So a very lightweight process with not a lot of definition works when that period is then over in 6 to 12 weeks, and you have something [chuckles] in the market. When you're trying to plan and trying to coordinate work and trying to give clarity around a product and everything that's six-plus months out, it's a whole nother ball game. And it requires a whole nother level of effort, and the clients want that. And so being able to give it to them not only makes them more successful and more confident and feeling like they have that reliability, but it also then puts our team in a better supported set up for success and that kind of thing because they have what they need, and the client has what they need. And everyone's able to really come together and collaborate on building and launching a great product. EMILY: Yeah. I think we're always looking at ways that we can improve our process, and as we are taking on more of the complex projects recognizing the need for this role. What's really exciting is the interest in the product management role. It's been an opportunity for our team members. We've had two senior developers who've wanted to move into that role. And it's been an amazing transformation of with them, similar to you, having that background, the hands-on background of understanding what it means to be a developer on a project but then being able to transition to a different role on the project and get more involved on the business side of things. But that's been extraordinarily successful in making that transition and providing the support that the team needs in order to be successful. So in some ways, it's like we were trying to do that job without really defining it. But now that it's been defined, just recognizing the value that that role plays on these types of projects and seeing the opportunity to even improve it. CHAD: I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one on one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one on one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. So we have a bunch of positions open in Lift Off. But product management is one of those positions that we're looking for people, right? EMILY: Yeah. We are actually opening up a position for Director of Product Management because the role is so critical to the work that we're doing, just like...I feel like we're extending our design and development model but then adding this third tier of product management, which is just as important in terms of the team that works best for these types of projects. It's having that interdisciplinary core of product management, design, and development working together for new products. A lot of it is really having that high-level oversight, the business strategy integrated in with the folks that can specialize in the development and the design piece. Having to look at the problem from those three different points of view just provides a level of reliability for clients that they just can't get with a single point of view. CHAD: What is the size of the product management team now? EMILY: Right now? Let's see. I think we've got about five. We have four or five active product managers right now. CHAD: So tell us more about the ideal Director of Product Management. What do you think that they would be? Able to lead a team that size while also evolving our product management process and doing product management themselves? EMILY: Yeah. I think I'm bringing in somebody who can help us improve our product management process specifically for first version products and really looking at it, and really shaping it, and pulling in the best practices, and really shaping it for the clients that we have I think is one thing I'm looking for the director to do. I'm also looking at the director to upskill our team. Like I said, there are a lot of folks like developers and designers that are actually interested in moving into that role and building up a potential career pathway for folks that may want to move into that area and to ensure that they are successful with that. And then growing the team, we are hoping to be able to...I think we've got five active projects right now, so being able to grow our projects and to grow the team so that we can support those kinds of projects on an ongoing basis. So really extending that out and then working collaboratively with our design and development directors to look at how we can collectively put together best practices around first version products. CHAD: Awesome. Well, what's on your radar now? What's next for Lift Off besides hiring a Director of Product Management? EMILY: [laughs] That's definitely number one. I think what is up next is really focusing in on teamwork. How do we work collectively as a team? Are there ways to improve our process to better serve our clients? We've done a lot of things in the past year. Like I'd mentioned before, we've improved our design sprints and extended them to become discovery sprints. Those are just names, but it's really the beginning stages of kicking off a project more successfully. Looking at ways that we can improve our customer experience and being able to serve clients in a better way, improving our product management across the board for all our projects, looking at ways that throughout the first version product for our clients what other ways can we better support our clients? Either through go-to-market strategies or helping them recruit permanent team members onto their team. But I think what's next for Lift Off is really examining how we service clients and looking at ways that we can actually make it even better. CHAD: Cool. Well, I want to change gears a little bit and ask you about you. EMILY: [laughs] CHAD: So your background, I think it's important to say is as a designer, right? EMILY: Yeah, that's one of my backgrounds. [laughter] CHAD: Okay, you have a varied background. But what were you doing when you joined thoughtbot and moved into the Managing Director role? And how has that evolved over time? EMILY: I think it's really interesting. You're always leaning into something. And as you look back at your past, even if it doesn't seem to make sense, you're always gravitating to something that is your North Star. Before I joined thoughtbot, I actually ran my own agency, which was called UX-Shop. And it was a team of one; it was me. As I was building up that agency, I recognized that I couldn't do it all. The types of projects that I wanted to work on were more complex. And so, when I started UX-Shop, I would be pulling in talent to create the type of team that would make that project more successful. It was hard to continually do that in a way where I had to recruit talent [laughs] and secure projects as well without having them as permanent employees. When I joined thoughtbot, it was an opportunity where I had access to amazing talent. And I could really focus in on building that, first off doing it in the Raleigh, Durham office where we went from a team of four to I think we grew the team to about nine. And starting to really grow that office to transitioning to this new model where we went from a team of nine to...I don't know the exact number, but I think it's like 25, 28. We're heading toward the 30 mark. So it's a significantly larger team with the ability to really focus in on the kind of projects that I actually really love, which is new product design and development but going after those more complex projects. And I think when I start looking back at my own career, I'm just starting to see patterns of the same focus but the opportunity to dive into it in a bigger way, in a more challenging way, and starting to tackle that. So thoughtbot's really given me the opportunity to take that ambition and actually apply it with the opportunity to have the talented team to be able to execute on those types of projects. CHAD: How has going from a team of one to a team of four to a team of nine to a team of pushing 30...are there things that you've needed to evolve in your own skillset or experiences? EMILY: Yeah. I think certainly building leadership skills, understanding how to work through a lot of challenges on what makes a team work really well together, making sure that we've got the guidelines and structures in place. There are a lot of things that I've grown just having the opportunity to work through some of those challenges. But also, in some ways, growing into a larger team has made some things a little easier. But it was nice having that progression from a smaller team to a larger team. I don't know if I would have been as successful with growing to a team of 30 right off the bat without being able to work in that smaller space, kind of learn my lessons, and then build upon those and grow that unit, get better at what I was doing. The reason why Lift Off is really starting to thrive is understanding that that foundation is built upon a lot of trial and error and just learning how to navigate and improve my own personal leadership skills. CHAD: Are there any particular resources that you called upon in order to do that? EMILY: So certainly reaching out to folks who are in similar positions. There's a strong community here where I live in Durham, talking to a lot of founders or folks in the leadership space who are growing teams. I've had some coaching with executive coaching that's helped quite a bit, especially when I've been in situations that I just wanted to make sure that I was handling them in the right way. And then, of course, having access to the folks at thoughtbot like you, Chad, and people that I can talk to and get advice on how to navigate tricky situations have all been contributing to my education and making me a better leader in this space. CHAD: Would you recommend coaching to other people? EMILY: I would. I think it's a real opportunity for you to...there's a lot of things that you don't really know that you don't know. And there's a lot of ways of approaching things in a different way on how you communicate. That is the difference between really getting through and solving a problem versus having a situation arise and escalate and become problematic. And it's a little bit of understanding how to frame things in a thoughtful way. It's also an opportunity to understand that sometimes you just need to have some space to think before responding and understanding how to navigate complexity, especially in today's world where leadership there's so much going on, transitioning to remote. There are different things that are pulling at us in different aspects and just really understanding the human element of your teams. So having someone who you can talk to in a way that you can share those ideas and get a different perspective, I think, is really helpful. CHAD: Yeah. Well, if folks want to get in touch with you or Lift Off, what's the best places for them to do that? EMILY: Well, there's always my email, emily@thoughtbot.com. I think just reaching out to me directly is the best place. I'm always happy to talk about Lift Off or have an intro coffee call with folks that are interested in what we do. So that's the best way to get in touch with me. CHAD: Excellent. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Special Guest: Emily Bahna.

This conversation covers: Mirage's role as an API mocking library, the value that it offers for developers, and who can benefit from using it. How Mirage empowers front end developers to create production-ready UIs as quickly as possible. How Mirage evolved into an API mocking library  How Mirage differs from JSON Server  Sam's relationship to Mirage, and how it fits in with his business. Sam also talks about open source business models, and whether Mirage could work as a SaaS offering. One interesting use case for Mirage, which involves demoing software and driving sales. Links Mirage Sam's teaching site Follow Sam on Twitter Subscribe to Sam's YouTube Channel TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to the Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily, I'm your host, and today I'm chatting with Sam Selikoff. Thank you so much for joining us, Sam.Sam: Thanks for having me.Emily: Yeah. So, today, we're going to do something a little bit different, and we're going to talk about positioning for open source projects. A lot of people talk about positioning for companies, which is also really important. And they don't always think about how positioning is important for open source. Open source maintainers often don't like to talk about marketing because you're not selling anything. But you are asking people to give you their time which, at least for some people, is actually more valuable than their money. And that means you have to make a compelling case for why it's worth it to contribute to your project, and also why they should use it, why they should care about it? So, anyway, we're going to talk with Sam, about Mirage. But first, I should let you introduce yourself. Sam, thank you so much for joining me, and can you introduce yourself a little bit?Sam: Sure. My name is Sam Selikoff. These days, I spend most of my time teaching people how to code in the form of videos on my YouTube channel, and my website, embermap.com. Most of it is front end web development focused. So, we focus on JavaScript. I have a business partner who also works with me. And then we also do custom app development, you know, some consulting throughout the year.Emily: Cool. And then tell me a little bit about Mirage.Sam: Yeah, so Mirage is the biggest open source project I've been a part of since falling into web development, I'd say about eight years ago, I got into open source pretty early on in programming, kind of what made me fall in love with web development and JavaScript. So, I was starting to help out and just get involved with existing projects and things that I was using. Eventually, I made my way to TED Talks, the conference company where I was a front end developer, and that's actually where I met my business partner, Ryan. And we were using Ember.js, which is a JavaScript framework, and we had lots of different apps at TED that were helping with various parts of publishing talks, and running conferences, and all that stuff. And we were seeing some common setup code that we were using across all these apps to help us test them, and that's where Mirage came from. There was another project called Pretender, which helped you mock out servers so that you could test your front end against different server states. And we first wrapped that with something called Pretenderify, and then it grew in complexity. So, I was working on it on my learning Wednesdays, renamed it to Mirage, and then I've been working on it basically ever since. And then, the other big step, I guess, in the history is that originally was an Ember only project, and then last year, we worked on generalizing it so that it can be used by React developers, React Native developers, Vue developers, so now it's just a general-purpose JavaScript API mocking library.Emily: So, we would say that the position is an API mocking library. And—does that sound right?Sam: Yeah. If I had to say what it is, I would say it's a mocking library that helps front end developers mock out backend API's so that they can develop and test the user interfaces without having to rely on back end services.Emily: Why does that matter?Sam: It matters because back end services can be very complicated, there can be multiple back end services that need to run in order to support a UI, and if you're a front end developer, and you just want to make a change and see what the shopping cart looks like when it's empty. What does the shopping cart look like when there's one item? What does it look like when there's 100 items, and we have to have multiple pages? All three of those states correspond to different data in some back end service, usually in a database. And so, for a front end developer, or anyone working on the user interface, really, it can be time-consuming and complex to put that actual server in that state that they need to help them develop the UI. That can involve anything from running, like, a Rails server on their computer to getting other API's that other teams manage into the state they need to develop the UI. So, Mirage lets them mock that out and basically have a fake server that they control and they can put into any state they need. So, it's like a simplified version of back end services that the front end developer can control to help them develop and test the UI.Emily: And when you first started Mirage, did you think of it as an API mocking library?Sam: Not exactly. We used it mostly because of testing. So, in a test, it's usually a best practice to not have your test rely on an actual network. You want to be able to run your test suite of your user interface anywhere, let's say on an airplane or something like that. So, if your user interface relies on live back end services, that's usually where you would bring in a mocking library. And then you would say, okay, when the user visits amazon.com/cart, normally, it would go try to fetch the items in your cart from a real server, but in the test, we're going to say, “Oh, when my app does that, let's just respond with zero items. And then in this next test, when my app does that, let's respond with three items.” So, that's the motivation originally, is in a testing environment, giving the UI developer control over that. And then what happened was that it was so useful, we started using it in development as well, just to help during normal times, just because it was faster than working with the real back end services.Emily: Do you think there are any other projects that do something similar?Sam: Yeah, for sure. I think the most popular one is called JSON Server, which is a popular open source library that lets a front end developer put some data in a file, and then you point JSON Server to it, and then it just gives you an instant mock server you can use to help develop your app.Emily: So, what's the difference between Mirage and JSON Server?Sam: The difference is that JSON Server is made—it's really optimized for giving you a development—kind of a fake server as fast as possible, but it comes with a certain format that it gives you the data in. So, what ends up happening is that it can help you get feedback and build your UI faster, but eventually, you're going to need to point your app at a real API server, whatever you planning on using in production. And so the way JSON Server works might not correspond—in fact, often doesn't correspond with your actual API. So, Mirage fills that gap because Mirage is designed to be able to faithfully reproduce any production API; there's ways to customize how the data comes back so that it matches so that as you're developing your actual user interface against Mirage, you can have confidence that it'll work once you switch over to production.Emily: Is Mirage slower than other options?Sam: Not performance-wise because they're all JavaScript code that runs in the browser, but JSON Server is really optimized for just getting started as fast as possible because it comes with all of those pre-baked conventions about how the data is going to be moving back and forth. So, with Mirage—it can be faster, it depends—but with Mirage, you need to learn a little bit more in order to understand how to faithfully reproduce your production API. But I think it's faster because in the long run, if you're writing code against a mock server that doesn't match the interface of your production API, then you're just going to be having to change that application code that you're writing.Emily: How much do you talk to other people in the Mirage community, and talk about how they're actually using it?Sam: I felt more in touch with the users when it was an Ember project only because Ember is a more niche-type community. Whereas now, there's folks using it in React and Vue, like I was saying, and Angular. And so, we get issues almost every day on the project. It's not like a mega-popular project, but it does have enough people using it that people will ask questions, or open an issue almost every single day. And so I try to stay in touch with the users through that, basically. And then when I went to conferences—you know, before 2020—I would love to talk with people about it, or people would just bring it up. That's kind of how a lot of people know me on the internet. So, I would say that I do it in kind of a passive way. I haven't actively gone out to talk to them, partly because it's an open source project so it doesn't contribute to our revenue. We have some ideas for how that might happen one day, but as of right now, we can't justify doing proper product development on it in the sense of spending time doing customer interviews and stuff because it's a free project right now.Emily: That is my next question, which is, how does it fit in with your business in the larger sense? You know, how you put food on the table? And what are your goals for the project?Sam: A good question. I mean, it's really aligned with our overall mission of, of everything that we do because me and my business partner, Ryan, we really want to just help people get better at UI development, we want it to be easier, we want to help empower more people to do it because we think it's powerful tool in the world, and it's just too hard right now; there's so many things that are hard about it. So, that goes back to our consulting and our teaching; mainly our teaching. That's our main mission. And then Mirage is really—the purpose of Mirage is to enable front end developers to do more kind of with less, so they don't have to run a Docker container or get an SQL database up just to change some CSS for a given server state. So, it fits into that mission. I've been doing open source long enough to know the pattern, and it happens over and over again, where people work on something, it gets popular enough that they start opening issues, and it becomes a maintenance burden for the maintainers, and then they try to stay up late closing issues, they get burned out, and then the project kind of rots. So, that's something that happens a lot in open source. And so, over the last five years or so of working on Mirage, I've been more involved, or sometimes step back if I need to spend more time on other things, but I'm really interested in making it sustainable, and I know some people in the open source community who have made their projects sustainable financially, other with a pro plan, or support plan, or different related services. So, if we could snap our fingers, that would be what would happen, and that's what we're working on now.Emily: Which one of those open source business models do you think is most appropriate?Sam: At this point, we basically are trying to not guess that answer because we think the way to find out which one it is, is to get a critical mass of users and listen to what they're saying. So, on our podcast, we interviewed Mike Perham from Sidekick, who runs Sidekiq and Sidekiq Pro in the Rails community for about 10 years, and he makes really good money. Sidekiq Pro came about because the enterprise customers of Sidekiq were asking for more robust job servers and all this kind of stuff, so there was a natural path for him to making a pro version that he could sell to enterprise clients. And so that's worked out really well for him, and the rest of the community gets to use the base version for free. And I love that because I do love this zero-cost to entry to open source. And then my other friend, Adam Wathan who works on Tailwind, he's made money to help Tailwind be sustainable through education and courses, and then more recently, a project called Tailwind UI, which is pre-built UI components with Tailwind. And that, again, came about from people asking for that after he was working on Tailwind. So, I think the best way to do it is to get that critical mass of users to the point where you know what they're asking for, you hear over and over again, and then it makes sense to go forward with that.Emily: There's also a third option, which is a cloud service, and I'm just curious—like a complete SaaS offering—have you ever considered that?Sam: Absolutely. There's a really cool opportunity there for Mirage because your Mirage server usually lives alongside your front end code so that when every individual front end developer pulls the project down, starts working on it locally, they're running their own Mirage server. But some of the things that people have done organically with Mirage is, create a certain configuration of a server state—let's say for a demo—so let's say they create a shopping cart, or let's say they're working on a financial piece of software, and they need to show what it looks like with three clients and four contracts, and here are the products that we sold and how much money they are. People will make up a Mirage scenario with that specific set of data that their salespeople take and use on sales calls. And that way, again, the user interface looks fully realistic, it's a fully working UI that is talking to Mirage, but now you don't have to worry about the actual back end servers going down or anything like that. And so, we've had this thought of a hosted Mirage, basically like a Mirage cloud, where even non-technical people could tweak the data there, and then again, they don't have to get involved with ops people or anything like that. And that could be really powerful. So, there's a ton of ideas there. I think our hesitation with our company, Embermap, it's worked to some extent, but it's not grown to the point where it can sustain us, and so that's partly because of the market issue, Ember being a little smaller. So, we're nervous to jump into any particular solution before we feel there's a proven market need for it. And so that's why, even though we have a lot of these fun ideas that I think could really work out, we first want to wait until we get that critical mass, the audience size that we'd feel comfortable could sustain a business.Emily: How many people is that? What is the audience size?Sam: That's a tough question. Let's say Mirage cloud was the goal. I think instead of waiting to a certain point, and then trying to build Mirage cloud, we would do a few things in the interim that would be little experiments and lower risk. So, I think the first thing would be, let's say, a Mirage course. And if we can sell a course on Mirage—or even we make a free Mirage course—that gets enough attention, that would tell us that there is enough of a need there, that the positioning resonates, that people are seeing it's a valuable thing, and that would tell us, okay, let's try the next thing. So, we've been trying to do that. I make some YouTube videos over this last year, and I've been tweeting more about it and the work we've been doing, and so all of those are little experiments that I'm trying to pay attention to what resonates. Again, we have users who really love Mirage, and it's changed their workflow, but it's not at the point where I feel like it's a slam dunk and it makes sense to go on the next phase. So, I think there's been some frictions with Mirage, as we've brought it out to the wider JavaScript community. So, we have some things we want to tweak, and then ship a 1.0, and then I think maybe a 10 video course, would be a good next step, and just see the response to that, and basically take it from there.Emily: Yeah. It's always interesting to think like, how will that you have reached the critical mass?Sam: Yeah, I mean—Emily: Hard. Sam: It's really hard. And there's other strategies. I mean, a lot of businesses just have an idea and go try it out. There's this book I read, called Nail It and Scale It, and they talked about finding a problem. And we've have had some users of Mirage who use it at big, bigger companies, and it's really a big part of their workflow. And we've thought about, “Hey, what if we were to build something for them that we could generalize?” They actually have a need for something like a Mirage cloud because every time they develop a feature, they have to sit down with their product people, and their front end developer will basically run through all these different Mirage scenarios to show them how the feature works in every case, and they would love to be able to just send a link to a hosted version where they could do that. So, we've thought about building that kind of thing. But again, it's just a big risk. And then the market risk is there. So, what I've seen, I feel like, working in the past few years with a small circle of small business people and open source that I hang out with is this audience-first approach. So, it's like, if you're delivering a lot of value in the form of open source, and education, and talks, and you build an audience that believes what you have to say, and likes your opinion on things, likes your point of view, and again, resonates with the value of your work, then it becomes more and more obvious. You have a lot of people giving you feedback, you start seeing the same thing over and over. And that's just what we do with developing Mirage itself. We know a lot of what we work on next is driven by the same issues that come up, the same problems that come up in the issues, over and over again. So, I think it is hard to know, but it's one of those lukewarm things. And basically, right now, it feels too early. You know?Emily: And do you feel like, when you say to somebody, let's say, somebody who isn't involved with Mirage at the moment, maybe you're at a developer meetup or something, and you say, “I created Mirage. It's an API mocking library.” Do you have an aha moment? Are they like, “Oh, yeah. I know what that is. I know why you would use that.”Sam: Mm-hm. Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. There is a form of position I feel like, sometimes, really resonates well with people, which is like, “Don't get blocked by your back end developers.” So, if you're a front end developer, and the API is not ready, you can still build your app, including all the dynamic parts of it which would normally require a real server to be running. So, you're the front end developer, and you're trying to wire up the interface, and what happens when you click save on a cart, and it saves it in the back end, and then you show a success message. But your API is not ready, and you're working with another team that's working on the API, so you're kind of frustrated because you're stuck and you feel like you can't do anything, well, that's where Mirage can come in because you don't have to wait on them at all. You can just build it out yourself with Mirage. It's much simpler because it abstracts away all the complexity of a real server enough that you can actually build your UI against this kind of faithful reproduction of the back end. So, people really like that. And then people really like the testing use cases as well. They get confused about the best way to test user interfaces in this new distributed world we're living in where you're maybe working on a React app, and the back end is a separate API that's also serving up iPhone clients and things like that. So, there's really multiple apps involved with running a website like amazon.com. So, the question is, how do you test the front end? And Mirage is a great answer for that as well. And that's where it originally came from, so.Emily: Yeah. I can definitely see the positioning is sort of like a way for front end developers to decrease their dependence on their back end colleagues.Sam: Yeah, exactly. It's hard because there's a lot that it helps you with. And the people who use Mirage the most and have used it the most, it's really transformed their workflow because it lets the front end developer just move so much faster. So, it's really just, like, the fastest way to build a front end. That's really what the whole point of—every change we make to the library, every decision that went into it, it's how to empower a front end developer to build a production-ready user interface as fast as possible. And that includes accounting for all these different server states that are usually a pain in the butt to get.Emily: I'm just taking notes. I mean, that that actually sounded really powerful. Like, “Mirage lets front end developers work as fast as possible,” basically. It's fairly high level, but ultimately, that is a pretty compelling value statement.Sam: Yeah. And I believe it to be true, too. And I mean, that's how—I mean, I've been working on apps recently, and I still use Mirage because it's just faster than using a real server because it's right there in your code. It's right alongside your front end code, so you don't have to switch over to another process running, or open up a browser and see it; it's all right there. If you want to switch from being an admin to being a user, it's like you just uncomment a line alongside the code that you're already writing. So, I truly believe it is the best way to build a user interface. I think the positioning question is interesting because that is high-level. Sometimes developers in open source, they just want to know what it is, so there are some people who would see, “Just tell me what it is.” “It's an API mocking library.” “Okay, got it.” And that's what they want to know. “And what makes it different from other API mocking libraries?” Okay, we can talk about that. But then there's other people I think, who could stand to benefit from it, and if they saw, “Mirage is an API mocking library,” they're going to be like, “I don't really need that.” But then they go back to their job, and they have to work on their app, and they find themselves spinning up a Docker container, going to auth0 to sign in just so they can run their app in an authenticated state, and it's like, Mirage would actually be perfect for this. You could just mock all that stuff out in Mirage once, all your front end developers could use it. And now anytime you want to just work on your app in an auth state, it's just right there in Mirage, you don't have to deal with any of the complexities of the production services.Emily: Yeah. I mean, I also like the idea of sort of the fastest way to build a front end app.Sam: Yeah.Emily: Or to build a UI. The fastest way to build a UI.Sam: Yeah. That is, that's nice. I mean, it's interesting. It's a pretty interesting thing to say, and it's pretty compelling, and it's like, if you can back it up, that's a pretty strong claim.Emily: Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that I also talk to clients about—so I work with all technical founders, usually, and we're often really focused on features, all the cool features, but—you don't have to ignore the features, but you sort of use them to prove that the thing that you're talking about, that the value you say you provide is not BS. But you still want to connect the dots. Like you were saying, sometimes even the most technical person is like, “Oh, a mocking library. But I don't need that.” They're not going to necessarily connect the dots that, like, “Oh, that's going to make my workflow way simpler.” Sam: Right.Emily: Does everybody know what a mocking library is? Like, everybody who needs one?Sam: Mm, depends. If you're a front end developer. I mean, these days, people are becoming more and more specialized, so there's some front end developers who don't even deal with the data fetching side of an app at all. They're working on a part of the app that already has the data, and they're just working on maybe styling, layout, things like that, but they're never writing code or refactoring code that actually interacts with the server. And then even if you are doing that, you might not be writing tests. So, a lot of people just do the lowest friction thing, which is, just point their local UI at whatever server they can. Maybe their company has a staging server or maybe they run one locally in development and they just build it like that. But again, that's the lowest friction, but it's slow because now you're running a Rails server. If you want to change the data, you have to know how to do it in Rails, and you have to run different commands. And then it comes to testing, it's really hard, too. So, I think most people would know, if you were to say, “Yeah, it mocks out the API.” Most people would know that. But people might have different conceptions of what that means. So, there are some approaches to mocking—or stubbing, or faking, there's some technical difference between those terms, but for the purpose of this conversation, it's just faking out that functionality—there's some people who would hear that and say, “Oh, okay, I get it. A function that my code calls when it normally goes to the server, I'm going to replace it with a different function that returns this fake data.” But Mirage works differently because it operates at the boundary of the app. So, when you mock your API with Mirage, you don't have to change anything about your application because it intercepts the network request before it goes to the server. So, that's another big benefit of Mirage, that Mirage has over other solutions for mocking out network functionality is that your application code stays exactly the same. And that's an important point because the whole goal with Mirage is to be the fastest way to build a production-ready user interface. And by production-ready, I mean an interface that can be plugged into your production API and you'll have confidence that it works. So, that boundary thing is another important point of Mirage. So, that would maybe be the one thing that people could mean different things when they say ‘mocking.' But by and large, I would say most front end developers would understand if you said ‘API mocking,' what they mean.Emily: And do you think they generally are also able to figure out what that's used for, why they should care?Sam: Yeah, that's the thing is that that's where I think the real opportunity is because I think, if you were to say ‘API mocking,' people are going to immediately go to testing because that's the kind of environment where you would want to mock the API so you have control over it. But people who haven't used Mirage or something like Mirage, don't realize how powerful it can be, to mock it just during your normal development flow. So, again, once people use it and get it, they use Mirage for everything; it's just part of their workflow. I just start up my UI, I'm running Mirage in a specific scenario, and if I need to see the UI in a different state, I just changed my Mirage scenario, or put some new data in there, or empty out the database there. And so it totally affects your whole workflow because now you're just disconnected from the back end services. So, I think a lot of people aren't doing that. They are just stuck—you know, they're just used to the hassle of getting these three services up and running just so that they can run their UI, and it's a pain in the butt. I mean, I was just talking to someone on another podcast, and he was saying it's the same thing. And it's really hard when they onboard new people because they have to get them set up with all these auth keys just so they can run the front end, even though they don't really care about the auth setup, they just want to start working on this page. So, again, the companies that have used Mirage and adopted it don't have any of those problems because the Mirage server is right there with the user interface, and they don't have to worry about it. So, I think that is a big gap that we could probably do a lot better job of closing with information on the homepage, or examples, or something like that.Emily: So, Mirage also helps new hires get up to speed a lot faster, or get productive, I should say?Sam: So, yeah. If you were hired by Facebook, and you're a front end developer, and your first task is to update the way the colors look on the home feed, to get that running on your computer so you can make changes and see how it looks in the code, at many companies—probably most companies—it's going to involve a lot of moving pieces because you have this React app on the front end, but it has to fetch data from somewhere so you can see how it works. Maybe they have a server that is just used for development that the person can point to. But again, if you have this shared hosted server, you only get what's on there; maybe you don't have an easy way to change what data it gives you. So, usually, front end developers need to see a dynamic user interface in all these different states. But if you're using a shared server, you don't get all those different states. But it's easier to set up because it's already set up. So, the alternative is to say, “All right, Sam, you're new here. Let's get you set up so that you can run a copy of Facebook locally.” So, that usually involves a ton of steps. I mean, I've seen that take, like, a week just to get all the pieces that are required to run the back end up so that you can actually power your front end. So, yeah, companies definitely, definitely have a problem with this. They have a problem with shared staging servers, I've talked to tons of people over the years who hate their staging servers, the back end teams, the ops teams hate them because everyone's always trying to change it for the salespeople to go take demo calls or for people to test. And so basically a shared server like that is just a nightmare because it's basically another production server to maintain that your internal team is trying to use and people want it to do different things. So, that's why Mirage is nice because it's just local to the code, and every front end developer can just tweak it in exactly the way they need for what they're doing at that time. So, I think that's a big opportunity as well.Emily: One of the most interesting things, I think, about this conversation is that you've touched on this idea of salespeople doing demos, and I really like that because it's so different. It's such a different use case.Sam: Yeah. We had a thought about that, actually because we were talking to a handful of companies—did interviews with them, actually, a couple years ago—and we're like, this could be a cool product. And it's like, just the easiest way to show off your software. And again, we've even done consulting for companies that have had basically another server, just for the purposes of a demo. And again, it's just a pain in the butt because it's another production server to manage, you have to reset the database after each call you do, and with Mirage is not like that; it just restarts with the app. It's just heavier, it's a real server to manage, where again if you just need to show off the UI, you can do it with Mirage. So, we thought about doing that. It's an interesting use case, for sure.Emily: I think it's a really good illustration of how you can take the same technology, and reposition it, basically, to do something totally different, have a totally different set of value proposition. The people who would be actually benefiting from its use would be totally different. I mean, you have salespeople versus front end developers.Sam: Yep. We've thought about that. What would that look like to market to those people? And maybe one way you could do it would be, you know, the salespeople get frustrated because they want to just change the numbers in this part of the app on the spreadsheet summary because they know it's going to help them communicate the value to the people that they're talking to, but now they have to go and ask some back end developer or someone on the ops team, “Hey, can you change this database column so that my demo works better?” What if they had a Mirage-powered demo and they could tweak the Mirage data, maybe in some interface themselves, without having to involve anybody. And that's pretty compelling because Mirage, again, is designed to work with any API. So, no matter what your tech stack is on the back end, Mirage works for the front end team. And so now the back end team can do all their stuff, they can be switching from Rails to Elixir, they can be switching to Go or microservice architecture, and they have all this stuff going on, so they're the only ones who really know how to actually get this number from 100 to 200 in the system. Like, it's complicated. And so that's, again, a benefit of just having Mirage because, on the sales calls, the people are just wanting to show what it looks like when the data is a certain way. So, yeah, that was definitely a use case that we didn't anticipate at all.Emily: Yeah. And even you could have five salespeople trying to do calls at the same time and—Sam: Exactly.Emily: Wanting to have different data reflected, and I'm sure that's just like—Sam: A nightmare. I mean, people have told us just, it's the worst. Basically, the shared staging server is a—yeah, it's a huge problem for a lot of teams.Emily: It's so interesting. Well, anyway, taking us back from the rabbit hole, although it—I mean, it really is interesting, and just fascinating how you could change this to be something that's targeted at that totally different market.Sam: Right.Emily: To wrap up. I mean, I was thinking about how you're saying that the fastest way to build a production-ready UI, that possibly is the most powerful thing I think you've said.Sam: Yeah. We actually—I think that's how we had it when we first did the redesign of the site. And it was like, I don't know if that stuck in the sense of, what does production-ready mean? “Oh, I'm already writing production-ready code.” But then it's like, you have to—like you said, connect the dots and explain how you're not writing production-ready code unless the way you're mocking your API is matching your production API, so we kind of switched it to what it says now, which is, “Build complete front end features, even if your API doesn't exist.” Which basically came from the mouth of someone who was using it, and when they had their aha moment that was what they were saying. I've been thinking if we get to the 1.0 launch, I think I would want to go back to something like that because I do think it's compelling. So, “It's the fastest way to develop a UI, test it, and then share a working demo of it,” because that's is really the motivation for the library. So, yeah, it might be interesting to think about doubling down on that as the unique value proposition.Emily: Yeah. I'm curious what your immediate plans are.Sam: So, we've been working on this REPL playground area of the site where people can learn Mirage and see examples, and we can share them and stuff. So, that will hopefully—you'll see a lot of that kind of thing in the JavaScript community. If you go to Svelte, which is another front end framework, you can create little sandboxes and play around with Svelte and learn it. So, it's a really good way to learn things and just see how it works quickly right in the browser without having to install anything. So, we're about wrapping that up. And then I think it'll just be a matter of carving out the time to go through some of the issues and bugs that people have found, and getting it to a point where we feel good about slapping a 1.0 on it. At which point, we can take a look at all the feature requests and all the issues that people have run into and figure out okay, where do we want to focus our time? Again, considering, like, is there a story here where we can make it sustainable, and hopefully, dedicate more of our time to it? Because that's really, again, I think it's the biggest impact work I've done in my career so far, but it's just, sustainability in open source is tough. So, it's a matter of not jumping too early on any particular idea for how to sustain it and monetize it: if it's a pro version, if it's a support plan, people have asked for all these things, but not maybe in the strongest numbers that would make me feel comfortable diving in on that. But I do believe that it can work because I believe it's a really good idea and I know a lot of companies have gotten a lot of value from it. So, that's what our short term plan is.Emily: Well, fabulous. Thanks so much for talking about Mirage. This has been really interesting.Sam: Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, and I appreciate your input. It was fun to revisit the positioning stuff. It's been a while, so it's always good to be thinking about that.Emily: All right. I have one last question for you, which is what is an engineering tool you can't live without?Sam: These days, it's got to be Tailwind. It's a styling framework. And it's just really excellent. So, I would not want to work on a site without it because it would just be painful. So, [laugh] I love Tailwind. Yeah, it's a really good library.Emily: All right, cool. Well, thank you so much. And—oh, what—the very last thing it should be, how can listeners find you, follow you, keep up with you?Sam: Yeah, best place is Twitter, at @samselikoff. And I'm also making YouTube videos more and more these days: youtube.com/samselikoff. So, those would be the places to go.Emily: Right. Excellent.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier—that's O-M-I-E-R—or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The conversation covers:  Tracy's thoughts on how the relationship between open-source and cloud-native should be described. The advantages and disadvantages to an organization using open-source. Some of the major risks associated with using open-source, and why companies should approach with caution.   Why CI/CD is a rising security concern for open-source organizations.Tracy also provides her thoughts on how businesses are handling the CI/CD pipeline today, and where the trend is heading. Some of the unresolved challenges related to continuous delivery that currently exist. Tracy's advice for companies that are just starting to develop an open-source contribution strategy. How companies should approach topics like open-source strategizing and building open-source communities. The common mistakes that individuals and companies make when nurturing open-source communities. Tracy also comments on mistakes that people are making with continuous delivery. Links CloudBees: https://www.cloudbees.com/ Continuous Delivery Foundation: https://cd.foundation/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tracymiranda  Emily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. Today, I'm chatting with Tracy Miranda. Tracy, thank you so much for joining me.Tracy: Hi, Emily. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.Emily: So, as usual, I just want to start off with having you introduce yourself, both what you do, where you work, but also, like, some details, what does this actually mean? How do you actually spend your day?Tracy: Yeah, so I'm the director of open-source CloudBees, and I'm also the board chair at the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which is an open-source foundation, which is home to projects like Jenkins, and Spinnaker, and Tecton, and Jenkins X. So, basically, I'm a big fan of all things open-source, which in day-to-day means I'm doing anything which is related to building communities. So, either involved with code, or building communities and through conferences, or sometimes just the boring governance stuff around open-source.Emily: What is the boring governance stuff around open-source?Tracy: So, I guess it is just trying to get folks moving in the same direction, and reminding people that it's sometimes more than just code. And whether it's updating a code of conduct, and one of the things we've seen and—okay, I wouldn't call this boring; it's actually taken over a bit in open-source communities, but it's sort of different from the code, but it's the whole terminology updates. We've seen a lot of open-source communities have become more aware about wanting to be better about using terms like ‘master' and ‘slave' and move away from that. That being said, it's not that easy, so there's a lot to do in getting people on the same page and ready to move forward even before you can start changing a line of code.Emily: Since the topic of the podcast is cloud-native, obviously, open-source and cloud-native are related. In fact, some people think that cloud-native must be open-source. Where do you fall on that spectrum? How do you think the relationship between open-source and cloud-native should be described?Tracy: Yeah, I think that they're pretty distinct things. So, cloud-native is all about using the Cloud effectively and having technology which takes advantage of modern architectures to give you things like rapid elasticity, or on-demand self-service. And that's distinct from open-source, which is around the licensing, and it's become more about communities, as well. But I think because Kubernetes has been the most successful cloud-native project that is open-source, I guess there's become this very, very strong association which, in my mind, is a very, very good thing because I think open-source communities are really the way to drive innovation very, very quickly across the industry.Emily: And this may seem sort of obvious, but what are some of the advantages and disadvantages to an organization in using open-source?Tracy: Yes. So, I think—well, lots—virtually every company uses open-source, and the first thing people can see as the benefits are just the engineering efficiencies. So, using technologies which, say aren't core to the business, but then building on top of those and taking advantage of the features rather than dedicating their own engineering resources to developing them. I used to work as a consultant, and I would go from company to company, and usually, they would be adopting open-source when they wanted to get away from an in-house project where the people or person who had written it had left the company. So, I think there's a lot to be said, as well, for sustainability of technology: that communities and open-source communities are really good at sustaining projects over the long term, and therefore kind of the best bet for technology that's going to live on beyond individuals or even companies, acquisitions, or whatever.Emily: Do you think there are any risks to using open-source? I'm even interested in hearing if there are risks that are not real, but that are perceived risks. And then even maybe some risks that people don't think about, but that are in fact, quite real.Tracy: Yes, yeah, no, absolutely there are risks. So, it's wise for companies to approach with caution. I think the risks sort of depend on which side—like, are you looking to just use open-source that someone else has written, or are you contributing something, which might be key to your company, but then you're saying, “Okay, I'm going to do this in an open way,” which brings us to one of those common perceived myths, that someone, like a cloud provider, is then going to take your open-source software and do a better job of making money around it, so thereby just ruining your entire business model.And I think the other area where we tend to see a lot of dialogue around, is always around open-source security. For a long time, people used to, sort of, make out that this was different from closed source security, somehow. Security through obscurity meant that closed-source was better than open-source, which is clearly not the case. You can have secure open-source software, not secure open-source software. It just really depends on the project and the practices.Emily: And then also, I thought we'd talk a little bit specifically about this CI/CD work that you do. How important is CI/CD, do you think, in the pursuit of being cloud-native?Tracy: Yes, no, I think CI/CD has just risen to the top as one of the key concerns. And I think, part of the reason—when you're doing things in a cloud-native way it means that your systems are very distributed; you don't necessarily know where the services are running, it's typically not on-premise, and suddenly it becomes very important to understand how do you do this integration, and how do you then deliver that software in a way that is both quick, and that is not going to—you can do it in a safe way, so it's not going to break every time you do releases. And I think we're seeing that it really is at the forefront. Like last year, we started the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which is an open-source foundation, and the mission there is to increase the world's capacity to ship software securely and at speed. And the uptake from folks has been really well. Everyone's grappling and trying to figure out, what does CI/CD look like in the Cloud? What does it mean to be cloud-native CI/CD?Emily: And from the perspective of an end-user, what do you think are some of the, still, unresolved challenges related to continuous delivery?Tracy: Yeah, it's very challenging. Everything is changing under enterprise's feet. And it's not just the tools we're using, is also the skills we expect people to have, the way we organize a team. And traditionally, it's been very, very hard to decommission software or deprecate it, but what we're seeing in the industry now is that everything is changing really rapidly. You take something like Kubernetes and it has a new release, like, every three months and then nine months later, that's deprecated. So, people are having to make changes in enterprise situations at a rate that they just previously didn't come anywhere close to, and that's pretty challenging when you're having to deal with the changing tools, and processes, and people all at the same time, all while keeping your business up and running.Emily: In terms of the whole CI/CD pipeline, do you think most end-users experience that as being mature? Is it sort of figured out, or is it something that they continue to struggle with?Tracy: I think everybody has a CI… certainly CI… many people have sort of cracked, and they've got their systems set up. And then the delivery side, it just, kind of, varies. And I think it depends; we see a lot of folks who are really trying to figure out pipelines and are really trying to figure out what that looks like in a cloud-native world, and they haven't figured out, what does it mean for things to be highly available? What does it mean to be able to scale at any level? So, everybody's got something, but I think we've only just scratched the surface of what's possible with today's technology.Emily: Where do you think it's going in the future?Tracy: Yeah, I think, like in the same way we're having this big shift, everybody's got monoliths, and the problem with the monolith is that you can't do the speed and security at the same time. So, if you think about the key metrics people use today, there's two on speed, “Which is how quickly can you deploy?” And, “What's your lead time for changes?” And then for the safety, it's, “How long would it take you to restore services, if something went wrong?” And, “What is your change failure rate? How often are things going wrong every time you push code?” So, in the bid to get really good at those metrics, I think people have realized that monoliths cause a lot of problems, and it's much easier to meet these capabilities if you've got microservices are smaller batches of code, each, which do a specific thing, and there's less chance of things falling over when you make changes because there's not all these huge dependencies. Now, however, when you do start having all these different microservices with, let's say, a web of dependencies, things start to get really complicated. So, now you don't have, perhaps, one CI/CD pipeline, you have a pipeline per microservice. And then we start to say, “Okay, what is the definition of the application even? Is it all these microservices? Which version is it?” And then things like configuration management start to enter the picture, especially if you've got dependencies on things, let's say, outside your company, or open-source. So, I think it's a lot for people to grapple with, like, how to truly do microservices, and how the definition of an application is going to evolve. And I think for CI/CD, we can't keep doing what we've done in the sense of traditionally, folks have written a pipeline by hand, and you'd write a pipeline for your monolith. But now you've got all these different microservices. You want to start thinking about how can you have a pipeline auto-generated for them.Emily: I wanted to actually shift and talk more about open-source communities as well since I know that's a large part of what you do. My first question is, what would you say to a company that's starting to think not just about consuming open-source, but developing a strategy to contribute to open-source? What do you advise companies who are just starting that journey?Tracy: Yeah, no, I think for companies, it's a really good thing. I think open-source can give you a lot of strategic advantages, especially if you're coming in strong, and you're looking to be a leader in a space. And if we talk about category creation, you can use open-source almost as a weapon to drive the industry in a specific direction. So, I think what is important for companies is to be very deliberate about this strategy because open-source strategies can be almost counterintuitive, especially to folks who haven't done it before. This idea that you're giving away assets for free, or making them open. So, it's really important to have all the stakeholders in the company on the same page, and really understanding that this is a long-term thing where you'll have these benefits and not something where you start off and you do sort of half-heartedly.Emily: Are there two or three, sort of, primary open-source strategies?Tracy: Yeah, no, I think—[00:13:42 unintelligible] I think you can break it down. So, people would talk about the Red Hat model, which is really hard to reproduce but everything was open-source, and then they have this whole—they layered on top of that with a lot of services, and things. And then there's the open-core model where you're separating an open-source portion of the product, and then you add on a lot of features and things that add value that aren't being produced in the open-source. So, I think there's those, and then the new one that we're starting to see more of is—just looking much more at SaaS platforms. So, you have some open-source code, but your real—where you're making money is by offering it as a service.Emily: And how does that differ for a company whose core business isn't software? So, for example, if you're something like a Home Depot, and almost undoubtedly you use open-source software. If Home Depot wants to start contributing as well, as part of their company strategy, what should they know? What should a company like that think about as strategies?Tracy: Yeah, no, I think that's a great point because we do see a lot of companies contributing, and actually a lot of innovation is coming from companies who use software, but they have a different focus. And I think one good example, as well, is Capital One, who have a lot of open-source they contribute and maintain. And it's different, it's separate from, kind of, the main banking function. So, I think, again, for companies like that, it's just mapping out the strategy, being very deliberate in is there some sort of monetization around this, or is it more—you know, we see a lot of companies who want to do it to be seen as leaders in the field, and to, sort of, share some innovation to be seen as an attractive place, as well, for people to work with, and just to really drive that industry to help the innovation and to help make it a good place to be. So, I think the same things apply there, although maybe the business models allow, perhaps, for a bit more freedom. And we often find in those companies, they will have open-source program offices, which is a dedicated set of people who will map out the strategy and pull the whole company along in the same direction.Emily: Obviously, a big part of open-source is building a community. How do you do this? How do you herd the cats in a way that advances your project? And I'm actually curious, I don't know if you have a perspective on this from both somebody—an individual starting a project, and a company that wants to create a community around a particular project?Tracy: Yeah, no, I think that's a really great question. And people are always attracted to, I think, you want to start out with the big idea: why is your project going to do things better than before, or what's nicer about it? So, I think you have to start with, I guess you'd call it, like, you're [00:16:58 unintelligible] for your open-source project; the reason people are going to be attracted to it, and they're going to come and say, “Actually, I want to be part of this.” Because I think people do want to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They also want to see other people contributing, and everybody pulling their weight, and not necessarily any kind of biases for specific companies. So, the more open you can make it, the more transparent you can be about how things happen, people love to—if they're committing, and folks in open-source do commit fully—they want to know that they're not going to be taken advantage of, that they can do that, and they can really change the way the project is going to—they can feel the change they're going to make. So, I think it's important just to go to those principles of openness and transparency, and to let people participate. I think sometimes having clear ways—like with Jenkins, we saw that originally it really thrived because people could write their plugins, and they could make it their own, and they could share them and show them to their friends. And it's the same idea with GitHub, things that make developers look good as well, while they're contributing to open-source always makes for very, very successful projects.Emily: What do you think are common mistakes that people—individuals or companies make around nurturing the community?Tracy: Yeah, I think the mistakes are always connected to control and wanting to control too much or in a too specific way. And you could almost—I don't know if this is a good analogy, but it's almost like, I guess, parenting, in a way. You might be tempted to be very regimented and say, “Okay, your child can do this, or they can't do that.” But then you sort of lose out in finding out where could this go? How big could this grow? So, I think it's finding the right level of control so that the project can take on a life of its own and be used in ways that perhaps you couldn't even imagine. I think that's when the real magic happens. But it does take a leap of faith and understanding that you will be able to reap some business benefit out of this if that is your aim as well.Emily: Do you think that that's easier for individuals or for companies to achieve?Tracy: I think it depends on what people are going into it for. And for individuals, I think often it's they want to share their idea with the world or they want to build a reputation, which is very synonymous with doing the project. Having said that, individuals can have the same issues around wanting to control it, but I think there's perhaps a different monetization emphasis which would make it easier.Emily: Actually, I had a similar question related to continuous delivery which is, do you find that there are common mistakes that you see people making?Tracy: Yes. And some of the mistakes, I guess—one of the most common mistakes is a pretty boring one. And I know why it happens, but [laughs] it's just around documentation, to be honest. And it's the, “Okay, we're going to write the code, and then we're not going to necessarily document it or share the way people can either get involved or use a project.” And it's just—documentation is hard. Good documentation is really hard. Things keep changing, and it's boring to go keep updating them. But it's so incredibly important, and some of the most successful open-source projects have always provided that kind of self-service set of docs where people don't have to be asking the same questions over and over again. They really can go off and feel empowered to do things and to do things and not feel like they're getting it wrong or wasting their time, which I think is really important when building community. So, yeah, just write good docs, everybody.Emily: And do you think there's anything else specifically related to how companies approach continuous delivery, that there's something that a lot of them are not doing right?Tracy: With continuous delivery, especially today where everybody's in a really, kind of, tricky situation where they're trying to make this move to using cloud-native technologies because the benefits are so huge, but at the same time, all these technologies are coming very thick and fast, and nobody's sure—people have tried technologies which are now no longer used, so this is a bit of fear of saying, “Okay, is this going to be a safe bet? And at the same time, while I'm trying to decide if that's the right technology to use, I'm having to restructure my teams, and change of habits is really hard, and we've got all these additional environments we're having to deliver software for.” So, it's a huge challenge, and everything has to be done in balance: you have to get the tools, and you have to get the technology, and you have to get the people right. You can't do any one of those and hope it's going to work, you have to do this juggling act within your organization. And that's massively, massively challenging, especially when you are trying to change long-held behaviors and habits people have, and just ask them to do things in a different way.Emily: Do you think technology is more challenging, or people skills organization is more challenging?Tracy: Yeah, I think the thing with technology that is more challenging today is, especially in the CI/CD space, we have a lot of different types of tools. And we don't have standard ways to talk about—like, we don't have standardization of terms, so different things have different meanings to different people. So, you might say ‘a pipeline' but it might mean—the scope might change depending on who you're talking to. And so it's really hard for people to understand, how do I connect these different tools together? There's very poor interoperability, as well, which is another thing the Continuous Delivery Foundation wants to try and solve. So, I think those are key areas. Security is another one, which makes it really hard when you break things up. And no one's taking responsibility for the interaction between different platforms of different open-source technology written by different people, that becomes really tricky. So, I think we do need solutions at a community level, and we need communities working together closer to tackle this proliferation, and lack of interoperability, and new security concerns that we have to deal with as an industry.Emily: Is there anything else that I didn't think to ask that you'd like to add?Tracy: Yeah, no. I think what we're doing in the Continuous Delivery Foundation, if I can say a little bit about that, it is a relatively new open-source foundation. And I think it's a good place to bring people together where we're trying to tackle these issues. So, things like interoperability, we have an interoperability working group. And one of the first things that happened in that group as people would come together and talk about the different tools, is that we spontaneously realized we needed to define the tools. And there was a page set up where everybody could write down the definition of how their tool—use different terms. You know, is it a step? Or what do you call it in your tool? So, we have this what we call, like, the Rosetta Stone, of CI/CD tools. So, it compares across—whether it's all kinds of Git providers or pipeline orchestration tools, was the different terminology. And I think from there, we're going to look to see how we can standardize as an industry, just to make it simpler for people because I think—I would really hate to be someone new coming into the industry today and trying to figure out where to start, which tool to try out because the amount of noise and confusion is at all-time high levels.Emily: That's absolutely fair. And in fact, speaking of tools, my next question is, what tool do you really rely on? What engineering tool would you not be able to work without?Tracy: Yeah, well, they kind of say for developers, and I think this rings true for me as well, you're kind of in three places. You're in, like, GitHub and Slack, and then your development environment which use VS code, and like many people. So, those are, kind of, the three development environments. I think, when I look at CI/CD, and we look at new technology in the space that's, kind of, gaining quick adoption, there's two projects in CDF which are starting to really resonate. And one is Tekton, which came out of Google, and their Knative serverless platform. But that's looking to have these standardized building blocks for CI/CD pipelines. And then the other one is Jenkins X, which, incidentally, uses the building blocks of Tekton to stitch together a CI/CD experience, if you wish, that pulls in Kubernetes, and Helm, and all those other projects to give a really nice developer experience just generating pipelines for you, so you don't have to write things by hand, and giving you preview environments, and really just trying to take advantage of all the power that cloud-native affords you in delivering software.Emily: And then lastly, how can listeners connect with you or follow you?Tracy: Yeah, no, I think the best place is Twitter. So, find me Twitter at @tracymiranda, and in all the continuous delivery working groups, and the communities we're building there. So, find that on cd.foundation, and, yeah, come join the community. We're having some great conversations in the space.Emily: Well, thank you so much, Tracy, for joining us.Tracy: Yeah, thanks for having me. And yeah, really great conversation and questions.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier—that's O-M-I-E-R—or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The conversation covers:  The main function of an OSPO, and why Comcast has one. How Nithya approaches non-technical stakeholders about open-source.  Where the OSPO typically sits in the organizational hierarchy. The risk of ignoring open-source, or ignoring the way that open-source is consumed in an organization. Why every enterprise today is using open-source in some way or another. The relationship between cloud-native and open-source. Some of the major misconceptions about the role of open-source in major companies.  Common mistakes that companies make when setting up OSPOs. Why Nithya and her team rely heavily on the TODO Group in the Linux Foundation. Links: Comcast: https://www.xfinity.com/  Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/  TODO Group and The New Stack survey: https://thenewstack.io/survey-open-source-programs-are-a-best-practice-among-large-companies/  Trixter GitHub: https://github.com/tricksterproxy/trickster  Kuberhealthy GitHub: https://github.com/Comcast/kuberhealthy  Comcast GitHub: https://comcast.github.io/ Nithya Ruff Twitter: https://twitter.com/nithyaruff  TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, my name is Emily Omier, and today I'm chatting with Nithya Ruff, and she's joining us from the open source program office at Comcast. Nethya, thank you so much for joining us.Nithya: Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here, Emily. Thank you for inviting me.Emily: I want to start with having you introduce yourself, you run an open source program office. And if you could talk a little bit about what that is, and what you do every day.Nithya: So, just to introduce myself, I started working in open-source back in 1998, when open-source was still kind of new to companies and organizations. And from that point on, I've been working to build bridges between companies using open-source and communities where open-source is created. At Comcast, I have the pleasure of running our open source program office for the company, and I also sit on the board of the Linux Foundation and recently was elected chair. So, it gives me a chance to both look at the community side through the LF and through corporate use of open-source at Comcast.So, you also ask what does an OSPO do? What is an OSPO, and why does Comcast have one? So, an open source program office is a fairly new construct, and it started about 10, 11 years ago, when companies were doing so much open-source that they really couldn't keep track of all of the different areas of open-source usage, contribution, collaboration across their companies. And they felt that they wanted to have a little more coordination, if you will, across all of their developers in terms of policy for use, the process for contribution, and some guidelines around how to comply with open-source licenses and, on a more strategic note, to educate both executives as well as the company in terms of open-source and opportunities from a business engagement and a strategy perspective. So, you find that a lot of large companies typically have open source program offices. And we, frankly, have been using open-source for a very long time as a company, almost since the turn of the century, around 2005. And we started contributing and our number of developers started growing, and we didn't realize that we needed a center of excellence, which is what an open source program office is, where people can come to ask for help on legal matters—meaning compliance and license matters—ask for help in engaging with open-source communities, and generally come for all things open-source; be kind of a concierge service for all things open-source.Emily: And how long has Comcast had an OSPO?Nithya: I came on board in 2017 to start the OSPO, but as I mentioned before, we've done open-source organically throughout the company for many, many more years before I came on board. My coming on board just, kind of, formalized, if you will, the face of open-source work for the company to the outside world.Emily: You know, when we think about open-source in the enterprise, what sort of business opportunities and risks do you have to balance?Nithya: That's a great question. There are lots and lots of great business value and opportunity that companies get from open-source. And the more engaged you are with open-source, the more business value you'll get. So, if you're just consuming open-source, then clearly it reduces the cost of your development, it helps you get to market faster, you're using tried and tested projects that other companies have used and hundreds of developers around the world have used. So, you get a chance to really cut cost and go to market faster. But as you become more sophisticated in collaborating with other companies and contributing open-source back, you start realizing the benefit of, say leveraging a lot of other developers in maintaining code that you've contributed. You may start off at contributing a project, and you are often the only one bearing the burden of that project, and very soon, as it becomes useful to more and more people, you're sharing the burden with others, and you benefit from hundreds of new use cases coming into the code, hundreds of new features and functions coming in which you could never have thought of as a small team yourself. I believe that the quality of code improves when you're going to open-source something, it helps with recruitment and thought leadership because now candidates can actually see the kind of work that you do and the quality of work that you produce, and before that, they would just know that you were in this space, or telecom, or other areas, but they could not see the type of work that you did. And so, to me, from a business value, there's a tremendous amount of business value that companies get. On the risk side is the fact that you need to use it correctly, meaning you need to understand the license; you need to understand how you're combining your code with the proprietary code in your company; you need to understand if the code is coming from a good community, meaning a healthy community that is here to stay, and that has a good cadence of releases and is vibrant from an activity perspective; you need to also understand that you need to be engaged with the open-source community and understand where that particular project is going and to be able to sit at the table to influence or contribute to the positive direction of that project, and sustainability of that project. So, if you just consume and don't engage, or don't understand the license implications or contribute, I think you're not getting all of the value and you risk being considered a poor citizen in the community. And frankly, if people don't collaborate with you or cooperate with you, sending a patch upstream may take months to be accepted, as opposed to someone who's part of the community, who's accepted, who's seen as a good citizen. So, I think you've got to invest correctly through either an open source program office or a really intentional and thoughtful program to engage with the community in order to really mitigate risk, but also get the full benefit of working with open-source.Emily: And what do you find you have to educate the non-engineering stakeholders about, so the business leadership when you're talking about open-source?Nithya: That's also a very important function of an OSPO in my mind, is really making sure you have executive sponsorship and business buy-in for why open-source is a key part of the innovation process in the company. Because as you correctly said, there is a level of investment one needs to make, whether it is in an OSPO or in the compliance function, or for engineers to take the time to upstream their patches or to engage with communities. It all takes investment of time and money. And business needs to buy into why this is a benefit for the company, why this is a benefit for the business. And very often, I find that leadership gets it. In fact, some of my best sponsors and champions are executives. Our CTO, Matt Zelesko, completely gets why open-source is important for the business innovation, competitive advantage. And so, also my boss Jon Moore gets it. And I found that in a previous company where I was starting an open source program office, I had to work a little harder because it was a hardware company and they did not understand how working in open-source would fit into the engineering priorities. And so we had to, kind of, share more about how it allowed us to optimize software for our hardware, how it allowed us to influence certain key dependencies that we had in our product process, and that customers were asking for more open-source based software on our product. So, yes, building the business case is extremely important, and having sponsors at the business is extremely important. The other key constituent is legal, and working with your legal team hand-in-hand, and understanding their role in assessing risk and sharing risk with you, and your role as a business saying, “Is this an acceptable risk that I want to take on? And how do I work with this risk, but still get the benefits?” is as important. We have a great legal team here, and they work very closely with us, so we act as the first line of questions for our developers. And should they have any questions about, “Should I use this license? Or should I combine this license with this?” we then try to give them as many answers as we can, and then we escalate it to legal to bring them into the discussion as well. So, we act as a liaison between us and legal. So, to your point, it is important for the business to understand. And the OSPO does a great job in many of my companies that I've worked with to educate and keep business informed of what's happening on the open-source side.Emily: You mentioned working with developers; what is the OSPO's relationship with the actual developers on the team?Nithya: So, we don't have many developers on our team. In my OSPO, I have one developer who helps us with the automation and functioning of the open source program office tools and processes. Most of us are program managers, and community managers, and developer relations managers. The developers are our customer. So, I think of the developers in Comcast as our customer, and that we are advocates for them. And their need to use open-source in a frictionless way in their development process as our objective. So, we've worked very, very hard to make sure that the information they need, the processes they need are well oiled, and that they can focus on their core priority, which is getting products to market to really help our customers. And they don't need to become experts at compliance, they don't need to become experts at any of the functions that we do. We see them as our customer, so we act as advocates.Emily: Where exactly in the organizational hierarchy, or structure is the OSPO? Is it part of the engineering team?Nithya: Yes. I think that is the best place for an OSPO reside because you really are living with the engineering organization, and you're understanding their pain points, and you're understanding the struggles that they have, and what they need to accomplish, and their deadlines, et cetera. So, we live in the product and technology organization, under our CTO, who's also part of the engineering organization. So, I find that the best OSPOs typically reside in engineering or the CTO office, there are some that reside in legal or marketing. And whenever you decide, it tends to flavor the focus of your work. For us, the focus of our work is how can we help our developers be the best developers and use the best open-source components and techniques to get their work done?Emily: And what do you see is the risk that organizations take if they ignore open-source, they don't have this, sort of, conscientious investment in either an OSPO or some other way to manage the way open-source is consumed?Nithya: This is how I would put it. Everything that you see in technology development today, a lot of the software that we consume, whether it's from vendors, or through the Cloud—public cloud, private cloud—is made up of open-source software. There's a ton—I would say, almost 50, 60 percent of infrastructure software, especially data center, cloud, et cetera, is often open-source software. So, if you don't know the dependencies you have, if you don't know the stack that you're using and what components you have, you're working blindly. And you don't know if one of those stack's components is going to go away or going to change direction. So, you really need to be cognizant of knowing what you're using, and what your dependencies are and making sure that you're working with those open-source communities to stay on top of your dependencies. You're also missing out on really collaborating with other companies to solve common problems, solve them more effectively, more collaboratively. It's a competitive advantage, frankly, and if you don't intentionally implement some sort of an OSPO, or at least someone is tagged with directing OSPO type of work in the company, you're missing out on getting the best benefits of open-source.Emily: Do you think there are any enterprises that don't use open-source?Nithya: No. I believe that every single enterprise, knowingly or unknowingly, have some amount of open-source in their product, or in their tools, or in their infrastructure somewhere.Emily: And what percentage of enterprises have—this is obviously just going to be your best guess, but what percentage of enterprises have an OSPO?Nithya: I think it's a small percentage. New Stack and the TODO Group do a very, very good survey. I would refer us to that survey. And that gives you a sense of how many companies have an OSPO. I believe it's something like 45, 50 percent have OSPOs, and then another 10, 15 percent, say we intend to start one in the next two to three years. And then there's another, I don't know 30 percent that say, I have no intention of starting one. And the reason may be because they have a group of volunteers or part-time people across their organization who are fulfilling those functions between their legal team, and a couple of expert developers, and their communications team, they may think that they have solved the problem, so they don't need to have a specialized function to do this.Emily: I wanted to ask a little bit about the relationship between cloud-native and open-source. What do you see as that relationship?Nithya: If you ask anyone—and this is my opinion as well—that cloud-native technologies are very open-source-based. Look at Kubernetes, or Prometheus, or any of the technologies under the CNCF umbrella, or under any of the cloud-native areas, you find that most of them have their roots, or are created in the open-source way of development. So, it is an integral part of participation in cloud-native is knowing how to collaborate in an open-source way. So, it makes a lot of sense that CNCF is under the Linux Foundation, and it operates like an open-source project with governance, and technical body, and contributors. So, for us as well, being a cloud company—or a company that uses Cloud to host our infrastructure, and also a user of public cloud, we think that knowledge of open-source and how to work with open-source helps us work more effectively with the cloud ecosystem. And we have contributed components like Trickster, which is a Prometheus dashboard acceleration component. We've also contributed something called Kuberhealthy, which allows you to really orchestrate across Kubernetes clusters to open-source because we know that that's the way to function, and influence, and if you will, kind of take advantage of the ecosystems in the cloud-native technology stack. So, cloud-native is all built on open-source. So, that's the relationship in my mind.Emily: Yeah. I mean, I think actually, the Linux Foundation defines cloud-native as built on open-source software. I forget the exact words.Nithya: Yep. I think so, too.Emily: What do you think are some misconceptions out there, particularly among the enterprise users, about open-source and about the role of open-source in a major company?Nithya: There are a number of misconceptions. And we talked and touched upon a few before, but I think it's worth repeating it because you need to confront these misconceptions and start engaging with open-source if you want to compete with the other companies in your industry, who all are becoming digital companies and are digitally transformed. And they need to work with open-source as part of their digital framework. So, one of the misconceptions is that vendor-supplied software or products don't have any open-source in them. In fact, a lot of vendor-supplied software, maybe even from Microsoft has some open-source in them. Even from Apple, for example. If you look at the disclosure notices, you'll see that all of them consume open-source. So, whether you like it or not, there is open-source and you need to understand and manage it. The second is not knowing what your engineers are downloading and using, and hence what you're dependent upon as a company, and whether those components are healthy, and whether those communities are doing the right thing. You need to understand what you're using. It's like a chef: you need to know your components, and the quality of the food that you create will depend upon the components you use. You'll also need to understand licenses and watch needed to comply with those licenses, and need to put process in place to comply with those licenses. You also need to give back; it's not enough to just consume and not contribute back things like bug fixes, patches, and changes you make because you end up carrying all of that load with you as technical debt if you don't upstream it. And, frankly, you also consume, so you should give back as well. It's not sufficient to just take but not give. The last one is that open-source is free. And so, many people are attracted to open-source because they think, “Ah. I don't have to pay any license fees. I can just get it, I can run it anywhere I want, and I can change it,” et cetera. But the fact of the matter is if you want to use it correctly, you do need to invest in a team that knows how to support itself, knows how to work with the community to get patches or make change happen, you need to build that knowledge in the house, and you do need to have some cost of ownership associated with using open-source. So, these are some of the major misconceptions that I see in companies that are not engaging with open-source.Emily: And what do you see as, in your experience, some of the mistakes that companies can make, even when they're in the process of setting up an OSPO? What have you learned—maybe what mistakes have you made that you wish you could go back in time and undo—and what advice would you give to somebody who was thinking about setting up an OSPO?Nithya: Couple of mistakes that come to mind is releasing a piece of code that's not been well thought through, or properly documented, or with the correct license. And you find that you get a lot of criticism for poor quality code, or poorly released projects. You end up not having anyone wanting to work with the project or contributing to the project, so the very intent of getting it out there so that others could use and collaborate with you is lost. And then sometimes companies have also made announcements saying that they want to release a particular piece of software, and they backtrack and they change their mind and they say, “No, we're not going to release it anymore.” And that looks really poor in the community because there are people who are depending upon it or wanting it, and it can affect the reputation of a company. There was one more thing which I was going to say is, is really not being a good player. For instance, keeping a lot of the conversations inside the company, in terms of governing a project or roadmap for a project, and not being transparent and sharing the direction of the project or where it's going with the community. For an open-source project, is really bad. It can affect how you're perceived and how you're trusted or not trusted in the community. So, it's important to understand the norms of open-source, which is transparency, collaboration, contribute small pieces often, versus dumping a big piece of code or surprising the community. So, all of these things are important to consider. And, frankly, an OSPO, helps you really understand how community behaves: we often do a lot of education on how to work with community inside the company, and we also represent the company's interests in communities and foundations and say, “This is where we are going. This is where we need your help.” And the more transparent you are, the better you can work with community. So, those are some areas where I've seen companies go wrong.Emily: And when a developer who works at Comcast contributes to a project is he or she contributing as an individual or as part of the company? And how is that, sort of, almost, tension navigated?Nithya: Most companies have a policy that any work that you do during your workday or on work equipment, is company property, right? And so it's copyrighted as Comcast, and most of our developers will contribute things under their Comcast email id. And that's fairly normal in the industry. And there are times when developers want to do work on their own time for their own pet projects, and they can do it under their personal emails and their personal equipment. So, that's where the industry draws the line. Of course, there are some companies that are very loose about this type of demarcation, and some companies are incredibly tight depending upon the industry they're in, regulated versus high tech. But we are very encouraging of our developers to contribute code, whether on their own time or during company time, and we make the process extremely easy. We have a very lightweight process where they submit a request to contribute, and the OSPO shepherds that contribution through legal, through security, through other technical reviewers, and all in the interest of making sure we provide guardrails for the developer so that he or she does it successfully and looks good when they make the contribution. So, 95 percent of the time, we approve requests for contributions. So, very, very rarely do we say, “This is not approved,” because we think it's the right thing to do to give back and to share some of the work that we do with others, just like we get the benefit of using others' work.Emily: Is there anything else that you want to add about what OSPOs do, what they bring to the business, the relationship between cloud-native and open-source, anything that I haven't thought to ask that I should have?Nithya: The OSPO, if you will, is a horizontal function that cuts across the entire enterprise development and helps coordinate and direct the intelligent and judicious use of open-source. So, that's why it touches all of the software development tools, apps, vendor-supplied software, public clouds, internal clouds, et cetera. Wherever open-source is used, which is everywhere, we touch it. And we also serve as the external face of the company to the open-source community so that the open-source community has one place that they can come to for questions, or to give feedback on something they're doing, or to ask a license question, or to ask for sponsorship or support for a conference or a foundation. So, it really makes open-source navigation very, very effective for the community, as well as for inside the company. So, I'm a huge, huge fan of OSPO. I also love running an OSPO, and the kind of people that are typically in an OSPO. They tend to be very versatile, very general, they can pivot from legal to development matters to marketing and communications to really assisting a developer navigate something challenging. So, they're very versatile and terrific type of people. They also tend to have very high EQ and tend to make sure that they have a service mentality when they take care of questions that come in. So, I would say an OSPO is a great role for someone who wants to help and wants to know the breadth of software development.Emily: It sounds like you're making a recruitment pitch.Nithya: Uh, yeah. I don't have any openings right now, but I'm always encouraging and mentoring other OSPOs. I do at least one or two consultations with other OSPOs because we enjoy what we do as an OSPO and we want to help other OSPOs be successful.Emily: I mean, is it hard to find people to work in OSPOs?Nithya: It's kind of hard, in the sense that there are not too many people who do this work. So, I know, practically, I know all of the OSPO leadership and people who do this line of work in the industry. And it takes—some who come from a developer background. They have grown up as a developer using open-source and know the pains that they faced inside their company using open-source and not having certain processes or certain support or tools, and they go out to change the world in that way. I came from a different direction. I came from strategy and product management, and I came with the notion of, “How do I connect the dots better across the organization? How do I make sure that people know what to do and how to build relationships?” So, I came from that perspective. Frankly, I think it's something that innately people have, which is the ability to absorb a lot of different types of knowledge and connect the dots and work to change things. You don't have to be born in open-source to be a good OSPO person. You just need to have a desire to help developers.Emily: Was there any tools—it doesn't, obviously, have to be a software development tool, but any tools that you could not do your work without?Nithya: More than tools, I would say the organization that we rely on very heavily is the TODO Group in the Linux Foundation because it is a group of other OSPO people. And so it's been a great exchange of ideas and support, and tips, and best practices. The couple of tools that we use very, very heavily, and the love using, clearly, is something like GitHub or GitLab which helps you coordinate and collaborate on software development and documentation, et cetera. The other tool we use a lot to build community inside the company is things like Slack, or Slack equivalents because it helps you create communities of interest. So, when we are doing something around CNCF, we have a CNCF channel. We have a very, very large open-source channel that people come in and ask questions, and the whole community gets involved in helping them. So, I would say those are two really good tools that I like, and we use a lot in our function. And the TODO Group I think is a fabulous organization.Emily: And where should listeners go to learn more and/or to follow or connect with you?Nithya: There are two places I would say. comcast.github.io is where we publish all of our open-source projects, and you can see the statement we make about open-source. We also feature job openings at Comcast as well as our Innovation Fund, which is a grant-based fund request, so people can make a request for us to contribute money towards their project, or to research. And I'm on Twitter at @nithyaruff.Emily: Well, thank you so much, Nithya. This has been really fabulous.Nithya: Thanks, Emily. And thank you for helping me share my enthusiasm for what an open-source office is, and why everybody needs one.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier—that's O-M-I-E-R—or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

This conversation covers: The advantages of using a distributed data storage model. How Storj is creating new revenue models for open-source projects, and how the open-source community is responding. The business and engineering reasons why users decide to opt for cloud-native, according to Ben. Viewing cloud-native as a journey, instead of a destination — and some of the top mistakes that people tend to make on the journey. Ben also talks about the top pitfalls people make with storage and management. Why businesses are often caught off guard with high storage costs, and how Storj is working to make it easier for customers.  Avoiding vendor lock-in with storage. Advice for people who are just getting started on their cloud journey. The person who should be responsible for making a cloud journey successful. Links: Storj Labs: https://storj.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/golubbe GitHub: https://github.com/golubbe TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, my name is Emily Omier. I'm your host, and today I'm chatting with Ben Golub. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.Ben: Oh, Thank you for having me.Emily: And I always like to just start off with having you introduce yourself. So, not only where you work and what your job title is, but what you actually spend your day doing.Ben: [laughs]. Okay. I'm Ben Golub. I'm currently the executive chair and CEO of Storj Labs, which is a decentralized storage service. We kind of like to think of it as the Airbnb of disk drives, But probably most of the people on your podcast who, if they're familiar with the, sort of, cloud-native space would have known me as the former CEO of Docker from when it was released up until a few years ago. But yeah, I tend to spend my days doing a lot of stuff, in addition to family and dealing with COVID, running startups. This is now my seventh startup, fourth is a CEO.Emily: Tell me a little bit, like, you know, when you stumble into your home office—just kidding—nobody is going to the office, I know. But when you start your day, what sort of tasks are on your todo list? So, what do you actually spend your time doing?Ben: Sure. We've got a great team of people who are running a decentralized storage company. But of course, we are decentralized in more ways than one. We are 45 people spread across 15 different countries, trying to build a network that provides enterprise-grade storage on disk drives that we don't own, that are spread across 85 different countries. So, there's a lot of coordination, a lot of making sure that everybody has the context to do the right thing, and that we stay focused on doing the right thing for our users, doing the right thing for our suppliers, doing the right thing for each other, as well.Emily: One of the reasons I thought it'd be really interesting to talk with you is that I know your goal is to, sort of, revolutionize some of the business models related to managing storage. Can you talk about that a little bit more?Ben: Sure. Sure. I mean, obviously, there's been a big trend over the past several years towards the Cloud in general, and a big part of the [laughs] Cloud is storage. Actually, AWS started with S3, and it's a $90 billion market that's growing. The world's going to create enough data this year to fill a stack of CD-ROMs, to the orbit of Mars and back. And yet prices haven't come down, really, in about five years, and the whole market is controlled by essentially three players, Microsoft, Google, in the largest, Amazon, who also happen to be three of the five largest companies on the planet. And we think that data is so critical to everything that we do that we want to make sure that it doesn't stay centralized in the hands of a few, but that we, sort of, create a more, sort of, democratic—if you will—way of handling data that also addresses some of the serious privacy, data mining, and security concerns that happen when all the data is held by only a few people.Emily: With this, I'm sure you've heard about digital vegans. So, people who try to avoid all of the big tech giants—Ben: Right, right.Emily: Does this make it possible to do that?Ben: Well, so we're more of a back end. So, we're a service that people who produce-consumer-facing services use. But absolutely, if somebody—and we actually have people who want to create a more secure way of providing data backup, more secure way of enabling data communications, video sharing, all these sorts of things, and they can use us and service those [laughs] digital vegans, if you will.Emily: So, if I'm creating a SaaS product for digital vegans, I would go with you?Ben: I would hope you'd consider us, yeah. And by the way, I mean, also people who have mainstream applications use us as well. I mean, so we have people who are working with us who may have sensitive medical data on people, or people who are doing advanced research into areas like COVID, and they're using us partially because we're more secure and more private, but also because we are less likely to be hacked. And also because frankly faster, cheaper, more resilient.Emily: I was just going to ask, what are the advantages of distributed storage?Ben: Yeah. We benefit from all the same things that the move towards cloud-native in general benefits from, right? When you take workloads, and you take data, and you spread them across large numbers of devices that are operated independently, you get more resilience, you get more security, you can get better performance because things are closer to the edge. And all of these are benefits that are, sort of, inherent to doing things in a decentralized way as opposed to a centralized way. And then, quite frankly we're cheaper. I mean, because of the economics and doing this this way, we can price anywhere from a half to a third of what the large cloud providers offer, and do so profitably for ourselves.Emily: You also offer some new revenue models for open-source projects. Can you talk about that a little bit more?Ben: Sure, I mean, obviously I come from an open-source background, and one of the big stories of open-source for the past several years is the challenges for open-source companies in monetizing, and in particular, in a cloud world, a large number of open-source companies are now facing the situation where their products, completely legally but nonetheless, not in a fiscally sustainable way, are run by the large cloud companies and essentially given away as a loss leader. So, that a large cloud company might take a great product from Mongo or Redis, or Elastic, and run it essentially for free, give it away for free, not pay Mongo, Elastic, or Redis. And the cloud companies monetize that by charging customers for compute, and storage, and bandwidth. But unfortunately, the people who've done all the work to build this great product don't have the opportunity to share in the monetization. And it makes it really very hard to adopt a SaaS model for the cloud companies, which for many of them is really the best way that they would normally have for monetizing their efforts. So, what we have done is we've launched a program that basically turns it on its head and says, “Hey, if you are an open-source project, and you integrate with us in a way that your users send data to us, we'll share the revenue back with you. And as more of your users share more data with us, we'll send more money back to you.” And we think that that's the way it should be. If people are building great open-source projects that generate usage and revolutionize computing, they should be rewarded as well.Emily: How important is this to the open-source community? How challenging is it to find a way to support an open-source project?Ben: It's critical. I mean, if you look at the most—I'd start by saying two-thirds of all cloud workloads are open-source, and yet in the $180 billion cloud market, less than $5 billion [unintelligible] going back to the open-source projects that have built these things. And it's not easy to build an open-source project, and it takes resources. And even if you have a large community, you have developers who have families, or [laughs] need to eat, right? And so, as an open-source company, what you really want to be able to do is become self-sustaining. And while having contributions is great, ultimately, if open-source projects don't become self-sustaining, they die. Emily: A question just, sort of, about the open-source ethos: I mean, how does the community about open-source feel about this? It is obvious developers have to eat just like everybody else, and it seems like it should be obvious that they should also be rewarded when they have a project that's successful. But sometimes you hear that not everybody is comfortable with open-source being monetized in any way. It's like a dirty word.Ben: Yeah. I mean, I think [unintelligible] some people who object to open-source being monetized, and that tends to be a fringe, but I think there's a larger percentage that don't like the notion that you have to come up with a more restrictive license in order to monetize. And I think unfortunately a lot of open-source companies have felt the need to adopt more restrictive licenses in order to prevent their product being taken and used as a loss leader by the large cloud companies. And I guess our view is, “Hey, what the world doesn't need is a different kind of license. It needs a different kind of cloud.” And that's, and that's what we've been doing. And I think our approach has, frankly, gotten a lot of enthusiasm and support because it feels fair. It's not, it's not trying to block people from doing what they want to do with open-source and saying, “This usage is good, this is bad.” It's just saying, “Hey, here's a new viable model for monetizing open-source that is fair to the open-source companies.”Emily: So, does Storj just manage storage? Or, where's the compute coming from?Ben: It's a good question. And so, generally speaking, the compute can either be done on-premise, it can be done at the end. And we're, sort of, working with both kinds. We ourselves don't offer a compute service, but because the world is getting more decentralized, and because, frankly, the rise of cloud-native approaches, people are able to have the compute and the storage happening in different places.Emily: How challenging is it to work with storage, and how similar of an experience is it to working with something like AWS for an end-user? I just want to get my app up.Ben: Sure, sure. If you have an S3 compatible application, we're also S3 compatible. So, if you've written your application to run on AWS S3, or frankly, these days most people use the S3 API for Google and Microsoft as well, it's really not a big effort to transition. You change a few lines of code, and suddenly, the data is being stored in one place versus the other. We also have native libraries in a lot of different languages and bindings, so for people who want to take full advantage of everything that we have to offer, it's a little bit more work, but for the most part, our aim is to say, “You don't have to change the way that you do storage in order to get a much better way of doing storage.”Emily: So, let me ask a couple questions just related to the topic of our podcast, the business of cloud-native. What do you think are the reasons that end users decide to go for cloud-native?Ben: Oh, I think there are huge advantages across the board. There are certainly a lot of infrastructural advantages: the fact that you can scale much more quickly, the fact that you can operate much more efficiently, the fact that you are able to be far more resilient, these are all benefits that seemed to come with adopting more cloud-native approaches on the infrastructure side if you will. But for many users, the bigger advantages come from running your applications in a more cloud-native way. Rather than having a big monolithic application that's tied tightly to a big monolithic piece of hardware, and both are hard to change, and both are at risk, if you write applications composed of smaller pieces that can be modified quickly and independently by small teams and scale independently, that's just a much more scalable, faster way to build, frankly, better applications. You couldn't have a Zoom, or a Facebook, or Google search, or any of these massive-scale, rapidly changing applications being written in the traditional way.Emily: Those sound kind of like engineering reasons for cloud-native. What about business reasons?Ben: Right. So, the business reasons [unintelligible], sort of, come alongside. I mean, so when you're able to write applications faster, modify them faster, adapt to a changing environment faster, do it with fewer people, all of those end up having real big business benefits. Being able to scale flexibly, these give huge economic benefits, but I think the economic benefits on the infrastructure side are probably outweighed by the business flexibility: the fact that you can build things quickly and modify them quickly, and react quickly to changing environment, that's [unintelligible]. Obviously, again, you use Zoom as an example. There's this two-week period, back in March, where suddenly almost every classroom and every business started using Zoom, and Zoom was able to scale rapidly, adapt rapidly, and suddenly support that. And that's because it was done in a more—in a cloud-native way.Emily: I mean, it's interesting, one of the tensions that I've seen in this space is that some people like to talk a lot about cost benefits. So, we're going to move to cloud-native because it's cheap, we're going to reduce costs. And then there's other people that say, well, this isn't really a cost story. It's a flexibility and agility, a speed story.Ben: Yeah, yeah. And I think the answer is it can be both. What I always say, though, is cloud-native is not really a destination, it's a journey. And how far we go along with that path, and whether you emphasize the operational side versus—or the infrastructural side versus the development side, it sort of depends on who you are, and what your application is, and how much it needs to scale. And it's absolutely the case that for many companies and applications if they try to look like Google from day one, they're going to fail. And they don't need to because it's—the way you build an application that's going to be servicing hundreds of million people is different than the way you build an application, there's going to be servicing 50,000 people.Emily: What do you see is that some of the biggest misconceptions or mistakes that people make on this journey?Ben: So, I think one is clearly that they knew it as an all or nothing proposition, and they don't think about why they're going on the journey. I think a second mistake that they often make is that they underestimate the organizational change that it takes to build things in the cloud-native way. And obviously, the people, and how they work together, and how you organize, is as big transition for many people as the tech stack that you'd use. And I think the third is that they don't take full advantage of what it takes to move a traditional application to run it in a cloud-native infrastructure. And you can get a lot of benefits, frankly, just by containerizing or Docker-izing a traditional app and moving it online.Emily: What about specifically related to storage and data management? What do you think are some misconceptions or pitfalls?Ben: Right. So, I think that the challenge that many people have when they deal with storage is that they don't think about the data at rest. They don't think about the security issues that are inherent in having data that can be attacked in a single place, or needs to be retrieved from a single place. And part of why we built Storj, frankly, is a belief that if you take data and you encrypt it, and you break it up into pieces, and you distribute those pieces, you actually are doing things in a much better way that's inherent, that you're not dependent on any one data center being up, or any one administrator doing their job correctly, or any password being strong. By reducing the susceptibility to single points of failure, you can create an environment that's more secure, much faster, much more reliable. And that's math. And it gets kind of shocking to see that people who make the journey to cloud-native, while they're changing lots of other aspects of their infrastructure and their applications, repeating the same mistakes that people have been making for 30 years in terms of data access, security, and distribution.Emily: Do you think that that is partially a skills gap?Ben: It may be a skills gap, but it's also, frankly, there's been a dearth of viable other options. And I think that—we frequently when I'm talking with customers, they all say, “Hey, we've been thinking about being decentralized for a while, but it just has been too difficult to do.” Or there have been decentralized options, but they're, sort of, toys. And so, what we've aimed to do is create a decentralized storage solution that is enterprise-grade, is S3 compatible, so it's easy to adopt, but that brings all the benefits of decentralization.Emily: I'm also just curious because of the sort of organizational changes that need to happen. I mean, everybody, particularly in a large organization, is going to have these super-specific areas of expertise, and to a certain extent, you have to bring them all together.Ben: You do. Right. You do have to. And so I'm a big believer in you pick pilot projects that you do with a small team, and you get some wins, and nothing helps evangelize change better than wins. And it's hard to get people to change if they don't see success, and a better world at the end of the tunnel. And so, what we've tried to do, and what I think people doing in the cloud-native journey often do, is you say, “Let's take a small low-risk application or small, low-risk dataset, handle it in a different way, and show the world that it can be done better,” right? Or, “Show our organization that it can be better.” And then build up not only muscle memory around how you do this, but you build up natural advocates in the organization.Emily: Going back to this idea of costs, you mentioned that Storj can reduce costs substantially. Do you think a lot of organizations are surprised at how much cloud storage costs?Ben: Yes. And unfortunately, it's a surprise that comes over time. I mean, you… I think the typical story if you get started with Cloud. And there's not a lot of large upfront costs when your usage is low. So, yeah, so you start with somebody pulling out their credit card and building their pilot project, and just charging themselves directly to charging themselves directly to—you know, charging their Amazon, or their Google, or their Microsoft directly to their credit card, then they move to paying through a centralized organization. But then as they grow, suddenly, this thing that seemed really low price becomes very, very expensive, and they feel trapped. And data, in particular, has this—in some ways, it grows a lot faster than compute. Because, generally speaking, you're keeping around the data that you've created. So, you have this base of data that grows so slowly that you're creating more data every day, but you're also storing all the data that you've had in the past. So, it grows a lot more exponentially than compute, often. And because data at rest is somewhat expensive to move around, people often find themselves regretting their decisions a few months into the project, if they're stuck with one centralized provider. And the providers make it very difficult and expensive to move data out.Emily: What advice would you have to somebody who's at that stage, at the just getting started, whipping out my credit card stage? What do you do to avoid that sinking feeling in your stomach five months from now?Ben: Right. I mean, I guess what I would say is that don't make yourself dependent on any one provider or any one person. And that's because things have gotten so much more compatible, and that's on the storage side by the things that we do, on the compute side by the use of containers and Docker. You don't need to lock yourself in, as long as you're thoughtful at the outset.Emily: And who's the right person to be thinking about these things?Ben: That's a good question. So, you know, I'd like to say the individual developer, except developers for the most part, they have something that they want to build, [laughs] they want to get it built as fast as possible and they don't want to worry about infrastructure. But I really think it's probably that set of people that we call DevOps people that really should be thinking about this, to be thinking not only how can we enable people to build and deploy and secure faster, but how can we build and secure and deploy in a way that doesn't make us dependent on centralized services?Emily: Do you have other pieces of advice for somebody setting out on the “Cloud journey,” in quotes, too basically avoid the feeling, midway through, that they messed up.Ben: So, I think that part of it is being thoughtful about how you set off on this cloud journey. I mean, know where you want to end up, I think this [unintelligible]. You want to set off on a journey across the country, it's good to know that you want to end up in Oregon versus you want to end up in Utah, or Arizona. [unintelligible] from east to west, and making sure your whole organization has a view of where you want to get. And then along the way, you can say, “You know what? Let's course-correct.” But if you are going down on the cloud journey because you want to save money, you want to have flexibility, you don't want to be locked in, you want to be able to move stuff to the edge, then thinking really seriously about whether your approach towards the Cloud is helping you achieve those ends. And, again, my view is that if you are going off on a journey to the Cloud, and you are locking yourself into a large provider that is highly centralized, you're probably not going to achieve those aims in the long run.Emily: And then again, who is the persona who needs to be thinking this? And ultimately, whose responsibility is it to make a cloud journey successful?Ben: So, I think that generally speaking, a cloud journey past these initial pilots where I think pilots are often, it's a small team that are proving that things can be done in a cloud-native way, they should do whatever it takes to prove that something can be done, and get some successes. But then I think that the head of engineering, the Vice President of Operations, the person who's heading up DevOps should be thoughtful, and should be thinking about where the organization is going, from that initial pilot into developing the long-term strategy.Emily: Anything else that you'd like to add?Ben: Well, these are a lot of really good questions, so I appreciate all your questions and the topic in general. I guess I would just add, maybe my own personal bias, that data is important. The cloud is important, but data is really important. And as, you know, look at the world creating enough data this year to fill a stack of CD-ROMs, to the orbit of Mars and back, some of that is cat videos, but also buried in there is probably the cure to COVID, and the cure for cancer, and a new form of energy. And so, making it possible for people to create, and store, and retrieve, and use data in a way that's cost-effective, where they don't have to throw out data, that is secure and private, that's a really noble goal. And that's a really important thing, I think, for all of us to embrace.Emily: Just a couple of final questions. The first one, I just like to ask everybody, what is your favorite can't-live-without software engineering tool?Ben: Honestly, I think that collaboration tools, writ large, are important. And whether that's things like GitHub, or things like video conferencing, or things like shared meeting spaces, it's really the tools enable groups of people to work together that I think are the most important.Emily: Where can people connect with you or follow you?Ben: Oh, so I'm on Twitter, @golubbe, G-O-L-U-B-B-E. And that's probably the best place to initially reach out to me, but then I [blog], and I'm on GitHub as well. I'm not that great [unintelligible].Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was a great conversation.Ben: Oh, thank you, Emily. I had a great conversation as well.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier—that's O-M-I-E-R—or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The conversation covers:  Josh's role as CTO of Fugue, a leading cloud security and compliance provider for engineers.  The difference between cloud security and data center security — and why old school approaches to security don't work in the cloud.  How engineers and security specialists can best communicate with business leaders about how to approach security, and how Fugue can help.  Who should be the person in charge of setting up Fugue, running reports, and communicating results across an oragnization. The people who tend to lose their job when a cloud security breach occurs.  Why cloud security requires organizational change, and how companies are adapting to prevent issues.  The importance of upskilling employees and making sure they have the appropriate knowledge to solve cloud challenges.  Why the cloud has the possibility to be more secure than a data center. Josh also talks about cloud perception, and why some are still viewing the cloud as scarier than the data center.  What Joshn considers to be the most effective hacking strategies for cybercriminals.  The relationship between security and compliance, and how organizations should approach that relationship.  Why there is no such thing as a perfect security posture.  Links Fugue: https://www.fugue.co/  Customer write-up on G2: https://www.g2.com/products/fugue/reviews/fugue-review-4269523 Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshstella LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-stella-949a9711/ Fugue Blog: https://www.fugue.co/blog Fugue Masterclass: https://resources.fugue.co/cloud-security-masterclass-registration Fugue Office Hours: https://resources.fugue.co/cloud-infrastructure-security-office-hours TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm chatting with Josh Stella. Josh, thanks so much for joining us.Josh: Well, Emily, thanks so much for having me.Emily: Of course. I always like to start the same. Can you just introduce yourself and your company, and tell me a little bit about what the company does, and then also what you do?Josh: Sure. So, Fugue does cloud security for public cloud providers like AWS, and Azure, and Google. Prior to founding Fugue, I worked at AWS as a principal solutions architect primarily focused on national security; Department of Defense, and similar things. My background is I'm a programmer and I'm a software architect, and I've kind of lived between national security kinds of work and high tech in startups. And so what Fugue does is we'll tell you all about the security posture of your cloud environments, and teach you where you have weaknesses that hackers can exploit; we help you close those, and then we can actually keep things from having those misconfigurations going forward. So, that's a little bit about us. If you're a developer, you can use our forever free developer version, and we work with a lot of enterprises folks like SAP, and big organizations, too.Emily: So, were you involved with setting up the super-secret CIA cloud that AWS was involved in?Josh: I was not personally. A very close colleague of mine was actually working very closely on that, but no, I was not directly involved in that.Emily: Okay, you probably couldn't talk about it, even if you were so. [laughs].Josh: No comment.Emily: Anyway, I always like to ask also, what do you actually do? Like, you get up in the morning, presumably, you don't go to an office anymore, but—Josh: Oh, true. True, yeah. Whether going to an office or not, my days are… so I started out founding the company with my co-founder, Andrew Wright. And for a while, I was the CEO when we were in the kind of R&D phase, but then I always intended to hire a really great CEO, which we did a couple of years ago, Phillip Merrick, and I became the CTO. And there are different kinds of CTO. My main functions are, like, I get up in the morning, I go read the news about any breaches in Cloud that have happened, and then I try to recreate them whenever possible, if there's enough information, because the attack vectors on Cloud are completely different than in the data center, and are inobvious to folks. So, when you read about a breach, and you see that they use the identity and access management service almost like a network, to get to S3, that's really interesting and it's really important so that Fugue can protect our customers. So, I spent a fair amount of time doing that. I do work every day with the product team. Occasionally, I will weigh in fairly strongly on an engineering topic, but a lot of times our engineers are just very, very good and we've hired experts and all their areas so I work with them, but it's usually just to give advice and some guidance. And I do a fair amount of writing, and I do a fair amount of teaching classes online: we have a masterclass series on Cloud security that has been very well received. And then the research I do into how cloud exploits are actually being done by recreating those in my own environments, I use those both in the classes and of course, Fugue as our product can then have protections built-in against them. So, I'd say that's a lot of what I do.Emily: I wanted to ask a little bit more about this difference between cloud security and data center security. Can you go into that a little bit more? And then also, what do people miss in that difference?Josh: Okay, so I'm going to start at the prosaic and kind of go to the sublime a little bit, but the most simple way to think about the difference is in the data center days, you really had a network perimeter. So, you've got a big pile of servers, they're racked and there are switches that that connect them together, and then there's this layer of security at the, kind of, perimeters of the network where the data center network connects to, whether it's the corporate network, or another data center, or the internet. And that kind of perimeter defense slash defense in-depth idea meant when you were talking about data center security, the primary things you were thinking about were, “What's happening on my network?” And, “Are the servers—or the physical devices that are actually running compute stuff—are they secure?” Well, it turns out in the Cloud, almost none of that matters that much, and the reason is—so I think Gartner recently said, like, over 90 percent of cloud exploits are due to misconfigured cloud services. So, that the data center, you had, like, piles of baryonic matter. You had actual servers in racks, you would replace them every three years, maybe five years on a recap cycle. And so it was moving slowly, and to get to those things, you had to kind of penetrate those layers of network perimeter and defense in depth. Well, on the Cloud if you stand up an S3 bucket, for example—and the press loves to pick on S3 breaches because well, a lot of people store data in S3, but very often these breaches are much more complex than just a misconfigured S3 bucket—but Gartner said the vast majority—and this is what we see, and what I saw at AWS—of hacker success in Cloud is looking for misconfigured cloud services, and then exploiting those. So, wherein the old days you might have been really concerned: “Do I have a bunch of packets coming in from an IP address that's known to have botnet activity on it?” And if so, I'll try to shut off that flow of packets, and, “Are my server operating systems patched?” And things like that. You definitely still want to keep your patch levels up, but a more typical cloud exploit would be something like finding API keys in an insecure place so that the attacker can modify your cloud infrastructure, and goes in and steals the backup of a database, or installs crypto mining software inside your infrastructure. So, it's a really big topic, but you really have to think about it very differently. You have to think about it as a software engineer more than as a security engineer. You have to think about it less as, “I'm protecting things,” and more as, “I'm configuring them properly. I'm making the Cloud safe by configuring it properly.” This is why we teach masterclasses. There's a very long list of ways to get those things wrong.Emily: Do you think in general, people are aware of these differences, and this idea that you have to think about security differently? Like, how much is that percolating through to people who are not in—they're not living and breathing this cloud computing space?Josh: It has not dawned on as many people as I wish it had. [laughs]. There are still a lot of folks who think using old school approaches to security will work on Cloud. And there are a number of problems with that. One is that the skills needed to do this stuff properly on Cloud are more like software engineering, engineering skills, and less analyst skills. So, when you can configure all of your compute resources via APIs, which is how the Cloud works, you're going to automate—I can build a global network while I'm talking to you by typing in the background. You could not do that in the data center. So, I don't see enough people being aware, not fully. And the worst thing that I see—well, and it's particularly bad if you don't understand what the threat is and what the attack surfaces are because, guess what, the attackers are all automated and very clever, and they will get you—but the next bad thing I see is when people try to force the Cloud to act like a data center in order to use the old ideas about how to do security. And that removes all the advantages of the Cloud, and it also never works.Emily: That's interesting. Obviously, this podcast is about the business of cloud and cloud-native, and security is sort of ultimately a business problem.Josh: Yep.Emily: How do people talk about security when they're talking, not just inside the engineering department, but also with business leaders, and how can engineers—or security specialists—how can they communicate, “This is the way we need to approach security. This is why. This is what we need to do and why?” How do people make sure there's not some stuff that gets lost in translation?Josh: What I recommend is that—and this is why we—it's one of the reasons why we built Fugue, is we give people tools for doing this—what I would recommend is kind of base camp one on climbing the Cloud security mountain is just understanding your current security posture; understanding whether what you have built in the Cloud is safe. And I can pretty much guarantee to every listener that, you know, we had a new customer write a nice write-up on Fugue in G2 saying, “Fugue is going to hurt your feelings the first time you run it.” We're going to tell you about a whole bunch of stuff that should scare you, and we're going to present that visually, and that's something you can take to a boss. You can say, “Hey, I used this free tool and it says we have, like, 90 things configured in ways that hackers exploit. We should go fix those, and by the way, we should keep keeping track of this.” And so I think presenting the information, rather than it being vague, quantifying it and having evidence, in my experience—in general in life around business decisions—is much better than having an opinion or winning an argument. So, get some data, show it to your boss, and go start fixing stuff. [laughs].Emily: So, my next question is who should do this? I mean, I think there's often a question related to security, and particularly you were just saying part of the issue with cloud security is that there's a little bit of a shift of responsibility, but who should be the one that's setting up Fugue, and running these reports, and talking to their boss about this problem?Josh: Yeah. So, it varies because organizations are struggling with where these things should live. What I believe is the concern with security, as you pointed out, is fundamentally a business concern. It's: “are my systems doing what is intended for whom it is intended, and only that?” So, that has to begin with the folks that are building the systems. So, very often at Fugue, what we'll see with the more sophisticated customers we have, the DevOps team will want this stuff baked in really early in the software development lifecycle, and they might even be doing that kind of independently of the security team, but the security team usually also has a role as does the compliance team. So, what we believe is that this should be implemented throughout the entire software development lifecycle from when people are writing their infrastructure's code or building infrastructure in the development environments, all the way through to monitoring and production, and doing audit reports for SOC 2 compliance or whatever. Generally, with Fugue—depending on the organization—we will either find folks who really care about what we do in the DevOps team, or in the security team. And the way we like to talk about it is any engineer who is concerned with security—whatever their title and role—can benefit from understanding cloud security and being more effective at it.Emily: When there is a cloud security breach, who loses their job?Josh: Uh, well, quite a few CSOs. If it's the kind that hits the Wall Street Journal, usually the CSO is not going to be around. And if you can agree with what I'm saying, which is that building stuff correctly and not misconfiguring cloud is the most critical thing to get right for cloud security CSOs don't generally have authority over how people build software. And I think this is a disconnect that really needs to be addressed in every organization. If you get breached, you might say, “Well, that's the chief information security officer's job to keep those from getting breached.” In the old days, that meant the security organization adding in those layers of perimeter defenses and trying to capture things. Well, now it means, you know, Global 2000 or Fortune 500, there are thousands of developers, any one of whom might be building a new network right now, or a whole new application and all of its attendant infrastructure. So, I think we're going through a period where that shift in technology has created a shift in responsibilities, or maybe a shift in the ability to do the right things and where that needs to happen, but the old ways of thinking about how information technology was built and secured aren't helping. So, the CSO gets fired, but it's usually not their fault is my opinion. [laughs].Emily: What would you think—I mean, everything I talked about with moving to Cloud and moving to cloud-native, there's all these technical changes, but there's also all these organizational changes. How does cloud security require organizational change? And how successful do you see companies being at adapting not just tech, but also organizations?Josh: Well, I mean I think that is the important part. The tech is there: we built Fugue, there's other tools out there, there's other things you can use, there is great technology for this. The struggle is with the organization and how to implement it, and how to operationalize it, and build it into workflows. So, I think that as far as how well people are doing with it: it's highly variable, and it's even highly variable within organizations. So, you might find a sort of pocket of people who are very clued in to how you should be thinking about this and dealing with it in the same company where another group is still thinking, our firewalls and our intrusion detection systems are good enough, or are more important than they are. So, it really comes down to whether you are thinking in a cloud-native way. And I think that the Cloud is not a pile of remote data centers. It is a global distributed computer that you can program and configure. And that's really what we're talking about when you build an air-quotes, “network,” Amazon aren't running around and plugging wires into switches. That's just a configuration. It's just a configuration of that big distributed computer, and so we have to think about this from a software engineering perspective. Now, the good news is there, that—well as it relates to the organization, a lot of security organizations don't have a lot of developers in them, and so this looks confusing and scary. And that always creates challenges. If people are intimidated by something or it's out of their comfort zone, that actually creates organizational friction. But I'm here to tell you, the Cloud is potentially—if done well—Cloud is the most secure way to do computing ever invented by humans, and for a really simple reason: you can control it all through APIs. Now, that means I can build a global network in five minutes and you might not notice, but it also means I can write programs that are constantly aware of everything and know how to get things right. So, it is a big organizational challenge, a lot of folks that are trying to, kind of, adapt their traditional data center teams may not be aware that you probably have people on your teams that are really trying their level best but don't have the most appropriate skills for the problem that is now required to be solved.Emily: Skilling up is always a big challenge, as is reorganizing and reconceptualizing how you work and how you work together.Josh: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the—it gets really complex because organizational structure has a whole lot more inertia than technology, and for lots of reasons: somebody has been here for 15 years and wants to get promoted, or hasn't been promoted and has a whole team and a budget, and who's going to pay for this, and who's going to chip into this, and which managers need to change their ideas about what they own and are responsible for? And I'm not trying to be pejorative here. That's all real stuff. The Cloud has effectively turned security on it's head. It used to be the infrastructure and security teams would go build secure environments, and then application developers would deploy into those environments. And now all of a sudden, application developers run a script or a program, and it builds the “infrastructure”—air quotes, again. We're really configuring a big, existent thing—but all of a sudden, in five minutes, you have what it would have been weeks and months of procurement, and discussion, and controls on what was being built. So, when you have a change that radical, you probably can expect—you should expect—that a lot of people are going to be challenged by that and probably won't tell you that they are because people don't like to admit when they don't understand something. So, skilling people up is really, really important. What we try to do in the masterclass series is give people new ways to think about these topics. I can't teach you everything I know about cloud security in a series of classes that are only an hour every other week or something, which is about what we do, but I can tell you how to take apart the problems and really think about them. And guess what? Even if you don't already know how to do that, you can learn it, and it's interesting, and it's fun.Emily: I wanted to go back to something else that you said about Cloud having the possibility to be more secure than a data center. How do you think that figures—if at all—into organizations' decision to move into the Cloud? I mean, how aware are they that this actually could be more secure?Josh: Highly variable. Some understand that. Most don't. Most are still viewing Cloud as, kind of, scarier than the data center because their mindset hasn't shifted. So, for example, with Fugue, you can tell Fugue, “Tell me everywhere I have a dangerous misconfiguration.” And we will show that to you on an automatically generated map, like a Google map of your infrastructure. We'll show you physically, visually where that is. Well, how would you do that, even that simple thing from a Cloud—Fugue perspective, in the data center? You would have to typically do what's called a data call, and get a bunch of human beings to answer questions and plug data into spreadsheets, and when I worked in national security, we would get these data calls, and you'd be given, like, a week. Well, Fugue can do that every five minutes, in about five minutes. So, even out of the gate, the fact that you can use computer software to interrogate the other computer software means you can automate it, and you can be much more thorough. Humans, also, are terrible at keeping lists of details. Computers are great at it, so we can use them for that. But then as you extend further—and we have this diagram of climbing a mountain of cloud security—so the very first base camp, sort of, at the foot of the mountain is just understanding what you have and what's wrong. But as you go up, you want to start doing some other things: you want the system to automatically tell you any time something changes, and any time something changes in a dangerous way. And then with Fugue, we've, kind of, taken this to its logical conclusion—and we're unique in this regard. This is actually what we started with when we first founded the company, and why we did so much R&D—you can tell Fugue, if anything is misconfigured, automatically heal it back to a known good configuration. Fully self-healing infrastructure is something that was totally elusive for decades in the data center because there weren't consistent APIs over these things. So, not a lot of people are ready to think that way, but that's where this is all going.Emily: So, is this kind of like how people are more afraid to fly in an airplane because they're not in control, but they have no problem getting into their car, even though you're, like, dramatically more likely to die in a car accident.Josh: That is an awesome analogy and I'm going to steal it. Yeah, it really is a lot like that. I think that in the history of automated systems in computer security, a lot of claims were made that couldn't be backed up with tech because we did not have these very consistent APIs that the Clouds have. If you were trying to do automated security in a data center, you probably got burned. So, in a way—and I don't want to strain your analogy too much, but I might a little bit—early flight was not so safe. Until you really get into the '60s and '70s, you should probably have been nervous getting on an airplane in 1937 or 1945, but by the time we really had figured it out, it became tremendously safer—as you point out—than driving a car. And I think that folks are just starting to realize it. But you have to trust the system, you have to trust the automation, and that takes time and building trust. But I'm here to tell you, this can now be done in a way that will work highly effectively and it is the future. The bad guys are all automated, okay? The hackers are running scripts, and programs and botnets constantly to find anything you have facing the internet that has any exploit they know how to use. So, they just get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and look through a log of all of your and everyone else's stuff that you got something wrong on, and they point another program that and exploit it. Well, if you're not using automation and they are, you're doomed.Emily: Yeah, I wanted to ask, so if you went over to The Dark Side and decided to be a hacker, what would you do? What do you think are the most effective hacks? You don't have to go in detail, of course, but I'm just curious what you've learned.Josh: Sure. I mean, there's a lot of ways to do this stuff. I mentioned two of the most common ways are finding—so if everything is driven by APIs, if you can get a hold of the API keys—essentially the login information, the ability to access APIs—if you can get a hold of those, then whoever's stuff is using those APIs you can now get to. And so you see a lot of that, folks using bad engineering practices and putting keys in source code, and it's showing up in GitHub, and people searching GitHub for keys. Or doing things like having unencrypted backup snapshots of file systems sitting out there and in those file system backups there being keys. That's something bad guys do a lot. You should be using things like IAM, and key rotation, and putting everything in KMS, and doing best practices there, and never ever, ever having API keys stored in source code or on a disk or anywhere that the bad guy might find, it even later. I mean, there was a breach last year of actually a cloud security company—not us—where that's exactly what the bad guys did. They found—I won't name names—but they found some keys, and then they managed to get into the company's cloud environment—and this is really a cool hack. Instead of—the keys they found gave them access to the production database, but they didn't go into it. Why didn't they go into it? Because they're probably monitoring the production database. But those same keys allowed the bad guys to stand up another database cluster with a backup of the production database. Like that is such a cloud-native hack, you would never have hackers—well, I can't say never, but it would be extraordinarily difficult to imagine hackers breaking into a data center and then standing up a new compute cluster to steal data from so that it wouldn't be monitored because that would be obvious. But in Cloud, that's probably happening all day, every day where people are building stuff, and that's why something like Fugue becomes important. So, there's lots of ways you can go about it, and honestly, one of the most fun parts of my job is reading about those things and seeing how hackers are going about it because I'm telling you, they are more clever and more cloud-native than most of the people that are trying to prevent them coming in, and I'm often just very impressed and, kind of, I'm not happy anyone's data got stolen, but I can appreciate a good hack and there's some really clever ones out there. IAM relationships is another big one to look at. People still think of IAM—identity and access management stuff—as being identity. And it is, but now it's the identity of compute resources, and it forms a network that sidesteps the TCP/IP-based network, and so if you can surf that network, nobody's probably monitoring it and you can get a lot of places. So, I can't answer more succinctly than that, but those are a couple of ways.Emily: Before we go, I wanted to ask you about the relationship between security and compliance. So, even if security is clearly a business problem, compliance is, like, even more into that business-y category. Can you just talk a little bit about the relationship between security and compliance and how organizations need to think about that relationship?Josh: Well, it's a good question. So, historically—at least in the environments that I worked in—compliance and audit were, sort of, at the end of the development process as a sort of gating function. In the national security world, you need to get what's called an ATO, an authority to operate, and an ATO requires going through a NIST certification and accreditation against the 800-53 compliance family standard, and that's a big manual process with a human team, and Excel spreadsheets, and big documents and so on. And it makes sense. You do want to try to prevent bad stuff from happening. Well, in Cloud—and then security was kind of different in that security were the folks who were doing things like monitoring firewall configurations and doing packet capturing at those perimeters that don't exist anymore, and doing intrusion detection, and making sure people's laptops didn't have unapproved applications on them. So, these worlds were a little separated. In Cloud, they're actually much more closely related, and they should be. And the beauty of that is, when you look at these compliance standards, like NIST 800-53, like SOC 2, like PCI, or GDPR, or HIPAA, or any of them—we cover a whole bunch of them—they're going to give you a whole lot of good advice from a security perspective. So, you can now, using automation and tools like Fugue, rather than having this dreaded audit come, or CNA process at the end of your development cycle that's going to add weeks to—of friction before you can deploy as you fix errors, you can just constantly be using those compliance standards to check your work in an automated way. So, you build a little, you find out that, “Well, am I breaking any NIST rules?” You know, NIST is going to tell you—well that NIST implemented correctly, like in Fugue, Fugue's going to tell you, “NIST says you have to have all your data be encrypted at rest everywhere,” And we're going to look across hundreds of cloud resource types and tell you if anywhere, you have data that's not being encrypted at rest. So, it really changes the game on Cloud because now compliance through automation, so it's not this manual audit at the end anymore, you can now have it completely automated and baked into the software development lifecycle instead of doing a week-long audit at the end. In five minutes, you get that feedback, and you can keep doing it iteratively. Compliance can actually become a massive help to getting things secure all the way through the lifecycle. And in fact, I would point folks to a good friend of ours, was the guest star of a class about a week ago, and he's an expert on bringing cloud environments into compliance. And he taught a whole class on that, I'd recommend that. The final thing I'll say, though, is all those CIS benchmark, and NIST, and all those, there's lots of good stuff in there, but what we've learned from recreating these cloud hacks, is that the hackers are ahead of the compliance standards and the security teams. And so in Fugue, we bake in what we call Fugue Best Practices, and really what that is, is a collection of stuff that will tell you if you're vulnerable to the kind of hack that you read about in the news recently. And you're not necessarily going to get that—you won't get a complete picture of that with things like NIST, and CIS, and so on. However, they're awesome; they're going to tell you a lot. I hope that answered the question. I hope I answered the correct question there. [laughs].Emily: Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, it sounds like you can be completely compliant and still get hacked, but I think everybody knows that, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect security posture.Josh: That is very true. The security posture is going to be helped by looking at compliance standards. There are other things we know are dangerous that are not in the compliance standards, and that's why we put those—and by the way, those things are actually in the totally free forever version of Fugue; you can go see if you're vulnerable to this because the compliance bodies are, kind of, slower-moving, and we can be faster. But then there's another third category, which is hackers doing stuff that no one predicted they would do. And guess what? They're good at that. There's a reason why hacking used to mean a clever program, and now the means breaking into your stuff because they do it through cleverness, through deep technical expertise. So, you're not going to be able to predict what they're going to do, and that's their job. And therefore you have to employ other tactics than just compliance. You have to employ things like drift detection: noticing if anything changed in the environment's configuration. And again in Cloud, 90 percent of what you should care about is configuration of Cloud. Not logs, not packets going over networks. Those are leaky abstractions on Cloud. They don't capture—there is no real perimeter, so you really have to be thinking about configuration. And you want to use compliance standards, you want to use predictive rules, but then you also need to keep track of what's going on. So, for example, if I saw a compute instance change its IAM role association, I would immediately—if I got a notification that that happened, I would be immediately looking into that because that has the potential to be a devastating attack, and probably the biggest breach anyone has ever heard of, that's how it happened. So, we now predict that in Fugue Best Practices, but you really need to get things right from a security and compliance perspective, but then keep in mind that the hackers are going to do things that you're not predicting, and that's why we do drift detection and self-healing in Fugue because you just can't think of every bad thing they might do to you.Emily: I think also part of what you're saying is just don't think of compliances as exclusively this hurdle that you have to jump through, but also think of it as almost like a tool that you can use, a set of best practices that you can use throughout the process.Josh: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about what's happening now with Cloud. It's stuff that used to be this onerous data call, and you have to fill out forms. You can just use—so, okay. I'm a programmer. I'm not a security engineer as a background, I'm a very security-focused programmer and software architect. When I'm writing a program, I have tools that tell me where I'm being dumb. That's, like, 80 percent of the job is your tools telling you where you've made errors, and then the other 20 percent is you catching the errors the tools weren't smart enough to find. So, for example, just to use a, kind of, goofy, trivial example, if I were to try to multiply your name times a date, if I have a decent programming compiler, or interpreter, or debugger, it's going to tell me, “You probably don't want to multiply a name by a date. You're probably not going to get a result that is sensible.” So, it's going to tell me where I've made a mistake. With Fugue and similar technologies, that can now be done for security and compliance. And we use the compliance families to provide that guidance. So, in the same way that a programmer in the past would see, “I've made a cast error on types,” or something, now with using Fugue, Fugue will tell you, “Hey, you made a security error on that firewall rule.” With Cloud, and APIs, and automation tools like Fugue, security and compliance become highway builders, not tollbooth operators. They contribute to velocity rather than taking it away, and I think that's really exciting.Emily: I just have a couple, sort of, last questions for you. The first one is what tool could you not live without, or I should say, do your job without?Josh: Well, to be honest with you. The most important tool I use, other than things like web browsers that are just par for the course, is just having a great text editor. [laughs]. And programmers out there will understand why I'm saying that. And I got to say, I was an Emacs guy for, like, 20 some years, but VS Code is really, really good. I love what Microsoft's doing these days with the programming tools, and so I'll choose VS Code. I love it.Emily: And then how can listeners connect with you, follow you, read more?Josh: Oh, cool, yeah. So, on Twitter, I'm @joshstella. They can email me, I'm Josh, J-O-S-H@Fugue, F-U-G-U-E.co. I'm on LinkedIn. And if you ping me on any of those—I mean, the main thing I would suggest is keeping track of our blog, and the masterclass series, and we also do office hours. I mean, we take education really, really seriously at Fugue and trying to educate folks about what we have learned. And so hopefully people will find those things valuable. A lot of folks have.Emily: Well, thank you so much, Josh, for joining us.Josh: Well, yeah. Again, thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation, Emily.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier—that's O-M-I-E-R—or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The conversation covers:  Gou's role as CTO of Portworx, and how he works with customers on a day to day basis. Common pain points that Gou talks about with customers. Gou explains how he helps customers create agile and cost-effective application development and deployment environments. The types of people that Gou talks to when approaching customers about cloud native discussions. Why customers often struggle with infrastructure related problems during their cloud native journeys, and how Gou and his team help. Common misconceptions that exist among customers when exploring cloud native solutions. For example, Gou mentions moving to Kubernetes for the sake of moving to Kubernetes.  Gou's thoughts on state — including why there is no such thing as an end-to-end stateless architecture. Some cloud native vertical trends that Gou is noticing taking place in the market.  The issue of vendor lock-in, and how data and state fit into lock-in discussions.  Gou's opinion on where he sees the cloud native ecosystem heading. Links Portworx: https://portworx.com/  Portworx Blog: https://portworx.com/blog/ Gou Rao Email: mailto:gou@portworx.com  TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I'm your host Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Gou Rao. Gou, I want to go ahead and have you introduce yourself. Where do you work? What do you do?Gou: Sure. Hi, Emily, and hi to everybody that's listening in. Thanks for having me on this podcast. My name is Gou Rao. I'm the CTO at Portworx. Portworx is a leader in the cloud-native storage space. We help companies run mission-critical stateful applications in production in hybrid, multi-cloud, and cloud-native environments.Emily: So, when you say you're CTO, obviously that's a job title everyone, sort of, understands. But what does that mean you spend your day doing?Gou: Yeah, it is an overloaded term. As a CTO, I think CTOs in different companies wear multiple hats doing different things. Here at Portworx, technically I'm in charge of this company strategy and technical direction. What does that mean in terms of my day to day activities? And it's spending a lot of time with customers understanding the problems that they're trying to solve, and then trying to build a pattern around what different people in different industries and companies are doing, and then identifying common problems and trying to bring solutions to market, by working with our engineering teams, that sort of address, holistically, the underlying areas that I see people try and craft solutions around, whether it's enabling an agile development environment for their internal developers, or cost optimization, there's usually some underlying theme, and my job is to identify what that is, and come up with a meaningful solution that addresses a wide segment of the market.Emily: What are the most common pain points that you end up talking to customers about?Gou: Over the past, I think, eight-plus years or so—I think the enterprise software space goes through iterations in the types of problems that are being solved. Over the past eight-plus years or so, it really has been around this—we use this term cloud-native—enabling cloud-native environments. And what does that really mean? In talking to customers, what this is really meant recently is enabling an agile application development and deployment environment. And let's even define what that is. Me as an application developer, I have to rely on traditional IT techniques where there's a separate storage department, compute department, networking department, security department, and I have to interact with all of them just to develop and try out an application. But that really is impeding me as a developer from how fast I can iterate and build product and get it out there, so by and large, the common underlying theme has been, “Make that process better for me.” So, if I'm head of infrastructure how can I enable my developers to build and push product faster? So, getting that agility up in a sense where it makes—cost-wise, too, so it has to make cost sense—how do I enable an efficient, cost-efficient development platform? That has been the underlying theme. That sort of defines a set of technologies that we call cloud-native, and so orchestration tools like Kubernetes, and storage technologies like, hopefully, what we're doing at Portworx, these are all aimed at facilitating that. That's been sort of what we've been focused on over the past couple of years.Emily: And when you talk to customers, do they tend to say, “Hey, we need to figure out a way to increase our development velocity?” Or do they tend to say, “We need a better solution for stateful applications?” What's the type of vocabulary that they're attempting to use to describe their problems, and how high-level do they usually go?Gou: That's a good question. Both. So, the backdrop really is, “Increase my development velocity. Make it easier for me to put product out there faster.” Now, what does it take to get there? So, the second-order problems then become do I run in the public cloud, private cloud? Do I need help running stateful applications? So, these are all pillars that support the main theme here, which is increasing development velocity. So, the primary umbrella under which our customers are operating under is really around increasing the development velocity in a way that makes cost sense. And if you double-click on that and look at the type of problems that they're solving, they would include, “How do I efficiently run my applications in a public cloud? Or a hybrid cloud? How do I enable workflows that need to span multiple clouds?” Again because maybe they're using cloud provider technologies, like either compute resources, or even services that a cloud provider may be offering, so that, again, all of this so that they can increase their development velocity.Emily: And in the past, and to a certain extent now, storage was somewhat of a siloed area of expertise. When you're talking to customers, who are you talking to in an organization? I mean, is it somebody who's a storage specialist or is it someone who's not?Gou: No, they're not. So, that's been one of the things that have really changed in this ecosystem, which is the shift away from this kind of like, hey, there's a storage admin and a storage architect, and then there's a compute admin or BM admin or a security admin, that's really not who are driving this because if you look at that—that world really thinks in terms of infrastructure first.Actually, let me just take a step back for a second. One of the things that has actually changed here in the industry is this: a move from a machine-centric organization to an application-centric organization. So, let me explain what that means. Historically, enterprises have been run by data centers that have been run by a machine-centric control plane. This is your typical VMware type of control plane where the most important concept in a data center is a machine. So, if you need storage, it's for a machine. If you need an IP address, it's for a machine. If you want to secure something, you're securing a machine. And if you look at it, that really is not what an enterprise or business is trying to solve. What enterprises and businesses are trying to do is put their product out there faster. And so for them, what is more important? It's an application. And so what it's actually changed here? And one of the things that defines this cloud-native movement, at least in my mind, is this move from a machine-centric control plane to an application-centric control plane where the first-class citizen or the most important thing in an enterprise data center is not a machine, it's an application. And really, that's where technologies like Kubernetes and things like that come in.So, now your question is, who do we talk to? We don't talk to a storage administrator or machine-centric administrator; we talk to the people that are more focused on building and harnessing that application-centric control plane. So, these are people like a cloud architect, or it's a CIO level—or a CTO level driven decision to enable their application developers to move faster. These are application owners, application architects, it's that kind of people. You had an additional question there which is, are they storage experts? And so by definition, these people are not. So, they know they need storage, they know they need to secure their applications, they know they need networking, but they're not experts in any one of those domains. There are more application-level architects and application experts.Emily: Do you find that there tends to be some knowledge gaps? If so, is there anything that you keep sort of repeating over and over again when you have these conversations?Gou: So, it's not about having a knowledge gap, it's more about solving an infrastructure problem—which is what storage is—is not necessarily their primary task. So, in a sense that they're not experienced with that, they know that they need infrastructure support, they know they need storage support, and networking support, but they expect that to be part of the core platform. So, one of the things that we've had to do—and I suspect others in this cloud-native ecosystem—is to take all of that the heavy lifting that storage software would do and then package it in such a way that it's easy to consume by application architects; easy to consume by people that are putting together this cloud-native platform. So, dealing with things like drive failures, or how do I properly [unintelligible] my data or RAID protect my data, or how do I deal with backups? These are things that they kind of know they need me to do, but they're not really experienced with it, and they expect the cloud-native software platforms to handle that functionality for them. So, in other words, doing the job of a storage admin, but in a form of software has been really important.Emily: Do you find that there's any common misconceptions out there?Gou: Yeah. With any new technology or evolving space, I think there are bound to be some misconceptions in how you approach things. So, just moving to Kubernetes for the sake of moving to Kubernetes, for instance, is a common—or improperly embracing is as a common mistake that we see. You really need to think about why you're moving to this platform, and if you're really doing it to embrace developer agility. For instance, one mistake we see, and this is especially true with the ecosystem we work in because Portworx is enabling storage technologies in Kubernetes. We see people try and take Kubernetes and leverage legacy infrastructure tools like either NFS or connecting their Kubernetes systems to storage arrays—which are really machine-centric storage arrays—over protocols like iSCSI, and you kind of look at that, and what is the problem with that? And one way I like to describe it is if you take an agile platform like Kubernetes, and then you make that platform rely on legacy infrastructure, well, you're kind of bringing down the power of Kubernetes to the lowest common denominator here, which is your legacy platform. And your Kubernetes platform is only going to be as agile as the least nimble element in the stack. And so a mis-pattern that we see here is where people try and take them, and then they say, “Well, geez, I'm not getting the agility out of Kubernetes, I don't really see what all the fuss about this is. I'm still moving IT tickets around, and make developers still rely on storage admins.” And then we have to tell them, “Well, that's because you've kind of tied your Kubernetes platform down to legacy infrastructure, and let's now think about modernizing that infrastructure.” And that's sort of—I do find myself in a spot where we have to educate the partners about that. And they eventually see that and hopefully, that's why they work with us.Emily: Why do you think they tend to make that mistake?Gou: It's what's lying around, right? It's the ease of just leveraging the tools and the equipment you already have, not really fully understanding the problem all the way through. It takes time for people to try out a pattern—take Kubernetes, try and see what you have lying around, connect it to learn from mistakes. And so that really takes some time. They look at others to see what others are doing, and it's not immediately evident. I think, with any new technology, there's always some learning that goes along with it.Emily: Well, let's talk a little bit about stateful apps in general. Why do people need stateful apps? What business problem do stateful apps deal with, or make it possible to solve that you just can't do with stateless?Gou: Sure. Yeah very rarely is there really something that is a stateless app, so unless you're doing some sort of ephemeral experiment—and there are certain use cases for that—especially in enterprises, you always rely on data. And data is essentially your state in some shape or form, whether it's short-lived state, long-lived state, there's always some state and data that's involved in an application. And people try to think of things in terms of stateless, and what that really means is, they're punting the state problem to some other part of their overall solution; it doesn't really go away. What do I mean by that? Well, if you put all your stateless apps on your cloud-native platform, where did the state go? You're probably dealing with it in some VM or some bare-metal machine. It didn't really go away; it's there, and you're still left with trying to connect to it, and access it, and manage it. And then you start wondering, what kind of northbound impact is that having on your, what you think is your stateless side of things. And it has an impact. Anytime you need to make changes to your data structure, it's not like your stateless side of things is not impacted, so it kind of halts the entire pipeline. So, what we see happening as a pattern is people finally understanding that there's really no such thing as an end-to-end stateless architecture—especially in enterprises—and that they need to embrace the state and manage it in a cloud-native way. And so, that's really where a lot of this talk you see around these days, around how do you manage stateful applications in Kubernetes, that's where that is coming from. How do you govern it? How do you enforce things like RBAC on it? How do you manage its accessibility? How do you deal with its portability, because state has gravity? These are the main topics these days that people have to think about.Emily: Can you think of any misconceptions other than the ones that you've just mentioned that are specifically related to state?Gou: Sure. I think costs—well, less a misconception than I think not fully appreciating or understanding the impact that this would have, and it really is around cost and especially when running in the public cloud. People underestimate the cost associated with state in the public cloud, and especially when you're enabling an agile platform, with agility comes—really determines automation, and people tend to do a lot of things and so, when you have a lot of state laying around, the cost can add up. Simple example is if you have a lot of volumes that are sitting around in, let's say, Amazon, well, you're paying for those bills. And density is another related concept, which is, if you're running thousands of applications, and thousands of databases, or thousands of volumes, how do you manage that with not spending that much money on the resources? How do you virtually manage that? So, cost planning in the public cloud is something that I see is so commonly overlooked or not really fully thought through. And it does come to bite people down the line because those bills stack up quickly. So, coming up with an architecture where that is well thought through becomes really important.Emily: When do people tend to think about state when they're thinking about a digital transformation towards cloud-native?Gou: I think, Emily, state is something that is front and center of any enterprise architecture because it really—look at it this way, any application you're going to build, generally speaking, revolves around the data structures and the data it operates on. You really typically start with—and there's a few different ways in which you start with cracking your application stack, right? One is you start with the user experience, like what end-user experience you want to fulfill, what is the problem you're solving? Another core element is then what are the data structures needed to solve that problem? So, state becomes an important thing right from day one. Now, in terms of managing it, people can choose to defer that problem saying, “I'm not going to deal with managing the state in my cloud-native platform.” This goes to your comment about stateless architectures. Again, if they do that, then they're punting the problem until the point where they actually need to implement it and manage it in production. Either way, that problem comes up. You're thinking about the data structures and development time for sure, you can avoid that. In terms of embracing how you're going to run it, it definitely comes into place as you're rolling up your application as you're getting close to production because somebody has to manage that.Emily: And there are probably people out there who would argue, hey, cloud-native means stateless. What would you say to those people?Gou: Yeah, I think we've had this debate many years ago, too. This notion of ‘twelve-factor applications' is kind of where it started, and I think people realized that, unless you're dealing with an architecture where state is sort of a small subset of the overall product offering, where really a lot of value is in maybe your UI, or it's a web app where people are interacting with each other and there's just a small amount of data sitting in a database that's recording a few messages, there really is no such thing as a safe plus architecture. So, in that case, what you could do is you architect your database, maybe just once and you're really not touching it—any changes you're making to your application are more cosmetic—then you can put your state somewhere else and an external database, have an endpoint that your applications interact with. Keep in mind, though, that still—that's not stateless; you've just put your state outside of your cloud-native platform. But what I would say to your question, what would you say to somebody that says that's the way to do things, my point is that's not how enterprise applications and architectures work. They're more complex than that, and the state is more central, the data is more central to the application, where changes intimately involve changing how your data structure is organized, changing tables around. In that case, it doesn't make sense to treat that outside of your cloud-native stack: because you're making so many changes to it, you're then going to lose the agility that the cloud-native platform can offer compared to bringing those microservice databases into your Kubernetes platform, letting the developers make the data structure changes they need to do as frequently as they need to, all within the same platform, within the same control plane. That makes a better enterprise architecture.Emily: Sort of a different type of question. But I'm just curious if there's anything that continues to surprise you about the cloud-native ecosystem, even about your conversations with customers, what continues to surprise you, but also what continues to surprise them?Gou: I was a little bit more surprised a couple of years ago, but does continue to surprise me is the mixing of the cloud-native and the legacy tools that still happens, and it's not just with storage, I see the same thing happening around security, or even networking. And some of that, not so much as surprise as and it makes less sense to me—and eventually I think people realize it—that they make this change, and then it sort of looks like a lateral move to them because they didn't get the agility they wanted. If somebody has to roll out an application and they have to sit through a machine type of security audit, for instance, if they're doing security, and they're not leveraging the new tools that do container-native security, those kinds of things do raise a flag and trying to work with our partners and customers and trying to point these things out, I still do see some of that happening. And I think it has been getting better over time because people learn from their peers within their industries, whether it's banking—you'll see banks kind of look at each other, and they develop similar architectures. It's a close-knit ecosystem, for instance.Emily: Actually, do you see any specific trends that are vertical-specific?Gou: So, industry-specific, right? So, for instance, in the financial sector, they're certainly trends, whether it's embracing hybrid-cloud technologies, and they kind of do things similarly. An example is, some industries are okay with completely relying on one single cloud provider. Generally speaking—and I'm just giving an example in the financial space—we've seen that not be the case, where they kind of want more of a multi-cloud or cloud-neutral platform, they probably will run on-prem and in the public cloud, but they don't want to be locked into a particular cloud provider. And so that's, for example, a trend in that industry. So, yeah, different industries have different kinds of specific features that they're looking for and architectures that they're circling around.Emily: You brought up lock-in. Lock-in is a big topic with a lot of people, but often the idea of data gravity doesn't make its way into the primary conversations about lock-in. How does data and state fit into these lock-in discussions?Gou: That's a really good point, and I'll break down into two things. So, data has gravity, and ultimately if you have petabytes of data sitting around somewhere, it becomes harder and harder to move that, but even before that, one of the most important things that we try and teach people, and I think people, kind of, realize this themselves is lock-in starts even before the data gravity has become an issue. It starts with, is your enterprise architecture or platform itself, just completely relying on a particular provider's APIs and offerings? And that's where we really caution our customers and partners to say, that's the layer at which you want to build your—that's your demarcation point, which is run your services in a cloud provider but don't lock your architecture around relying on that cloud provider providing those services. So, instance as database, if you're running a database, it's better to run your database on your platform in the public cloud, as opposed to putting all of your data in the cloud providers database because then you're really locked in, not just by way of data, but even by way of your enterprise architecture. So, that's one of the first things that I think people are looking for which is, how do I build this cloud-agnostic platform? Forget cloud-native, but cloud-agnostic platform where I can run all of my databases at ease, but I've not locked in my database to a cloud provider. Once you do that, then you can start breaking up your applica—especially in enterprises, it's not like you just have one very large database; you typically have many, many, many small databases, so it becomes easy to start with portability, and you can have sets of your—if you need to—applications run in different cloud providers and your ways to connect these and this is the notion of hybrid-cloud, which is becoming real.Emily: What do you see as the future? Where do you see this ecosystem going?Gou: You know, there's a lot happening in different segments, right. And 5G, for example, is a huge enabler of Kubernetes, or consumer of cloud-native technologies, and there's just a lot happening over there. Just around edge to core compute, and patterns that are emerging with how you move data from the edge to the core or vice versa, and how you distribute data at the edge. So, there's a lot of innovations happening there in the 5G space. Every segment has something interesting going on. From Portworx's standpoint, what we're doing over the next couple of years and helping people in two main areas.I mentioned 5G, so enabling workflows that are truly cloud-native. What do I mean by that? Driven by Kubernetes, that allow the developers to create higher-level workflows where they can either move data between Kubernetes clusters—again, it doesn't have to be between cloud providers; just to take a step back for a second. Whenever somebody is running a cloud-native platform, what we find is that it's not like an enterprise has one very large Kubernetes clusters. Typically people are managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters, so whether they're doing blue/green deployments, or they just have different clusters for different types of applications, or they're compartmentalized for different departments, we find that people having to move and facilitate movement of applications between clusters is very important. So, that's an area where we're focusing on; certainly makes sense in the 5G space.The other area is around putting in more AI into the platform. So, here's an example. Does every enterprise out there, does every developer need to be—if they're running stateful applications, do they need to become a database expert to run it? And our answer is no. We want to bring in this notion of self-driving technologies into stateful applications where—hopefully with the Portworx software—if you're running stateful applications, the Portworx software is managing the performance of the database, maybe even the sharding of the database, the vertical and horizontal scaling of it, monitoring the database for performance problems, hotspots, reacting to it. We've introduced some technologies like that already over the past couple of years. An example is capacity management. What we've found is—and I think you asked this question early on—people that are running stateful applications on their Kubernetes platform, they're not storage experts. People routinely make mistakes when it comes to capacity planning. One of the things that we found is people had underestimated how much space they're going to use or how much storage they're going to use, and so they ran out of capacity in their cloud-native platform. Why should it be their problem to deal with that? So, we added software that's intelligent enough to detect these kind of cases and react to it. Similarly, we'll do the same thing around vertical scaling, reducing hotspots. And bringing in that kind of intelligence and little platform is something not just Portworx but we expect other people in this ecosystem to solve.Emily: Do you think there's any business problems that customers talk about that you don't have a good answer to? Or that you don't think the ecosystem has a good answer to, yet?Gou: Yeah, no, it's a good question. So, making the platform simple. So, the simplicity is one aspect. I think we do see enterprises struggling with the cloud-native space being slightly complex enough with so many technologies out there. Kubernetes itself, certainly, it has its own learning curve. So, making some of those things more simple and cookie-cutter so that enterprises can simply focus on just their application development, that is an area that needs to still be worked on. And we see enterprises, I wouldn't say really struggling, but trying to wrap their head around how to make the platform more simple for their developers. There are projects in the cloud-native space that are focused on this. I think a lot of this is going to come down to establishing a set of patterns for different use-cases. The more material and examples that are out there and use-cases that are out there will certainly help.Emily: Do you have an engineering tool that you can't live without? If so, what is it?Gou: [laughs]. My go-to is obviously GDB. It's our debugger environment. I certainly wouldn't be able to develop without that. When I am looking into insights into how a certain customer's environment is doing, Prometheus and Grafana are, sort of, my go-to tools in terms of looking at metrics, and application performance health, and things like that.Emily: How could listeners connect with you or follow you?Gou: On our site portworx.com, P-O-R-T-W-O-R-X-dot-com. We frequently blog on that site; that would be a good way to follow what we're up to and what we're thinking. I certainly respond to people via email. So, reach out to me if you have any questions. I'm pretty good replying to that: Gou—that's G-O-U—at portworx.com. I don't nearly tweet as much as our PR team would like me to tweet so there's not too much information there, unfortunately.Emily: Thank you so much for joining us on The Business of Cloud Native.Gou: Thank you, Emily. Thanks for having me.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier, that's O-M-I-E-R, or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The conversation covers: Some of the pain points and driving factors that led Jón and his partners to launch Garden. Jon also talks about his early engineering experiences prior to Garden. How the developer experience can impact the overall productivity of a company, and   why companies should try and optimize it. Kubernetes shortcomings, and the challenges that developers often face when working with it. Jón also talks about the Kubernetes skills gap, and how Garden helps to close that gap.  Business stakeholder perception regarding Kuberentes challenges.  The challenge of deploying a single service on Kubernetes in a secure manner — and why Jón was surprised by this process.  How the Kubernetes ecosystem has grown, and the benefits of working with a large community of people who are committed to improving it.  Jón's multi-faceted role as CEO of Garden, and what his day typically entails as a developer, producer, and liaison.  Garden's main mission, which involves streamlining end-to-end application testing.  Links: Company site: https://garden.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonedvald Kubernetes Slack: https://slack.k8s.io/ Transcript:Emily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host Emily Omier. And today I'm chatting with Jón Eðvald. And, Jón, thank you so much for joining me.Jón: Thank you so much for having me. You got the name pretty spot on. Kudos.Emily: Woohoo, I try. So, if you could actually just start by introducing yourself and where you work in Garden, that would be great.Jón: Sure. So, yeah, my name is Jón, one of the founders, and I'm the CEO of Garden. I've been doing software engineering for more years than I'd like to count, but Garden is my second startup. Previous company was some years ago; dropped out of Uni to start what became a natural language processing company. So, different sort of thing than what I'm doing now. But it's actually interesting just to scan through the history of how we used to do things compared to today. We ran servers out of basically a cupboard with a fan in it, back in the day, and now, things are done somewhat differently. So, yeah, I moved to Berlin, it's about four years ago now, met my current co-founders. We all shared a passion and, I guess to some degree, frustrations about the general developer experience around, I guess, distributed systems in general. And now it's become a lot about Kubernetes these days in the cloud-native world, but we are interested in addressing common developer headaches regarding all things microservices. Testing, in particular, has become a big part of our focus. Garden itself is an open-source product that aims to ease the developer experience around Kubernetes, again, with an emphasis on testing. When we started it, there wasn't a lot of these types of tools around, or they were pretty early on. Now there's a whole bunch of them, so we're trying to fit into this broad ecosystem. Happy to expand on that journey. But yeah, that's roughly—that's what Garden is, and that's… yeah, a few hop-skips of my history as well.Emily: So, tell me a little bit more about the frustration that led you to start Garden. What were you doing, and what were you having trouble doing, basically?Jón: So, when I first moved to Berlin, it was to work for a company called Clue. They make a popular period tracking app. So, initially, I was meant to focus on the data science and data engineering side of things, but it became apparent that there was a lot of need for people on the engineering side as well. So, I gravitated into that and ended up managing the engineering team there. And it was a small operation. We had more than a million daily active users yet just a single back end developer, so it was bursting at the seams. And at the time running a simple Node.js backend on Heroku, single Postgres database, pretty simple. And I took that through—first, we adopted containers and moved into Docker Cloud. Then Docker Cloud disappeared, or was terminated without—we had to discover that by ourselves. And then Kubernetes was manifesting as the de facto way to do these things. So, we went through that transition, and I was kind of surprised. It was easy enough to get going and get to a functional level with Kubernetes and get everything running and working. The frustration came more from just the general developer experience and developer productivity side. Specifically, we found it very difficult to test the whole application because we had, by the end of that journey, a few different services doing different things. And for just the time you make a simple change to your code to it actually having been built, deployed, and ultimately tested was a rather tedious experience. And I found myself building tools, bespoke tools to be able to deal with that, and that ended up being sort of a janky prototype of what Garden is today. And I realized that my passion was getting the better of me, and we wanted to start a company to try and do better.Emily: Why do you think developer experience matters?Jón: Beyond just the, kind of, psychological effect of having to have these long and tedious feedback loops—just as a developer myself, it kind of grinds and reduces the overall joy of working on something. But in more concrete material terms, it really limits your productivity. You basically, you take—if your feedback loop is 10 times longer than it should be, that exponentially reduces the overall output of you as an individual or your team. So, it has a pretty significant impact on just the overall productivity of a company.Emily: And, in fact, it seems like a lot of companies move to Kubernetes or adopt distributed systems, cloud-native in general, precisely to get the speed.Jón: And, yeah, that makes sense. I think it's easy to underestimate all the, what are often called these day-two problems, when—so, it's easy enough to grok how you might adopt Kubernetes. You might get the application working, and you even get to production fairly quickly, and then you find that you've left a lot of problems unsolved, that Kubernetes by itself doesn't really address for you. And it's often conflated by the fact that you may be actually adopting multiple things at the same time. You may be not only transitioning to Kubernetes from something analogous, you may be going from simpler, bespoke processes, or you might have just a monolith that didn't really have any complicated requirements when it comes to dev tooling and dev setups. So, yeah, you might be adopting microservices, containers, and Kubernetes all at the same time, and I can say a lot of good things about Kubernetes, but it leaves, definitely, a lot of gaps in terms of the experience, especially for the application developer. So, you have these different kinds of developers, and we're kind of gradually, and somewhat clumsy sometimes, moving from a world where would have the application developer, and then you would have the operators, and you would kind of throw things over a fence. And now we're trying to fuse these a little bit, and you end up with this combination of different people with different strengths, and different skill sets and the [00:07:03 infra], and often termed DevOps engineers—I know that makes some people cringe. It's just what we see out there, that's a job title that we're seeing more and more—they are at home with this sort of a thing, and they maybe have time and patience to tinker with something like Kubernetes, whereas your application developer, they just want to get that feature out. So, you end up with these two different disciplines where one is basically trying to unblock the other. And we're definitely made progress. And I like to think what we are building helps, and all the other tools that are kind of overlapping in our space. But I still see a lot of this frustration with both having to adopt this more DevOps mindset, and also just the frustrations with Kubernetes specifically, and all the actual technologies that are in play these days.Emily: And to what extent do you think this sub-optimal developer experience is about a skills gap?Jón: I think that's definitely a part of it. I mean, we have both current and prospective customers in all kinds of different companies coming from different backgrounds, and some more old school and rigid than others. And I would say, for companies where the divide was really crisp—like, you had the application developer, and then you had the operator—then basically the mentality, understandably, for the application developer, they just want to work on their code, and not have to worry about networking ports, and ingresses, and all the low-level primitives of Kubernetes. It's a whole new thing to learn, and the perception is that it's more getting in the way of them getting stuff done. They don't really need the power for their immediate needs. The power is maybe something that the operator really enjoys, and has a strong need for.Emily: Do you think tools like Garden help close the skills gap?Jón: I think so. It definitely makes it more palatable at the start; it's easier to get going, you get some guide rails, and you get some higher-level abstractions that are maybe familiar to you, so you're not completely overwhelmed by all the different options, and flags and whatnot that you need for all the Kubernetes, YAML, et cetera, and you can ease into it. So, I think that's really helpful. Another thing that I think is really helpful is, so instead of this separation—[00:09:33 crowbar] separation between developer and operator, people coming from the operations side, part of their role now is to empower the developer, so the developer becomes their customer. I think it, in some sense, always was that way, but now they are more focused on the developer experience, and unblocking, and creating, often, these internal tools and internal abstractions that buffer this skills gap, I guess, a little bit. And we see all kinds of variations on how people actually go about it. With Garden, what we hope to achieve is for—there's usually a team that is responsible for the developer experience of an organization, and they can just hand tools like that to the team. And maybe there's a little bit of a dotted line between what the application developer is responsible for and what they should know, but they should still be familiar enough with the concept so that they can start to perceive the infrastructure and the general systems architecture of the application as part of the application and not this separate concern. Yeah, I mean, I definitely would hope that were helpful in this regard.Emily: Yeah, and I was going to ask, actually, what your opinion about this is, you know about how familiar an application developer actually needs to be with Kubernetes.Jón: I think unless there is substantial investment at their company in abstracting these things away from the developer, they need to have at least a cursory understanding of how all this set up. Maybe they're not responsible for actually making the Kubernetes manifest, maybe they're working in some kind of a templated fashion, or they have a little bit of a buffer between the low-level configuration of everything and what they're working on in a day-to-day, but they'll get stuck pretty quickly and it will create a lot of friction if they just don't know at all how the thing works. I think it's also just important for any, kind of, distributed systems developers to understand what the primitives are, even if you don't know which flag to use for this and that to actually achieve what you want to achieve, understanding the dynamics and understanding—you know, as a developer, you're meant to understand basically how a computer works, you know, the general layout of a computer, CPU or memory, and you have some notion of how the network works. This is maybe a layer on top of that similar to how you are familiar with how an operating system works, you should have basic familiarity over how Kubernetes works and just the general layout of a cloud-native ecosystem. Which I think is reasonable.Emily: And then when we think about business stakeholders in a company, so people who are outside of the IT department, how do they perceive this challenge? Do they understand how developers might struggle with moving to Kubernetes? Do they understand the stakes of getting developer experience right?Jón: I think a lot of the time they find out in the process. I think, for better or for worse, this cloud-native ecosystem was kind of jumpstarted, and people were sold on the idea a little bit before it was actually palatable for day-to-day development and actually running in production. So, you have an ecosystem running around trying to make this into a pleasant experience, but part of that meant that there have been—especially the early adopters, I can only imagine, but even companies adopting Kubernetes now, yeah, they maybe have the wrong picture of what it actually takes to do this successfully, and we've definitely seen—I mean, I'm kind of in that group myself. I adopted Kubernetes fairly early on. Well,-ish; it was about three years ago. And once you get past day one, as it were, there is a lot of surprises, and I think that could have done with a little bit more education, and maybe the motivation to get people on board kind of clouded that a little bit. No pun intended. So, yeah, I think it's more common than not that people have had to find that out along the way. Maybe that's probably getting better now. I think people have a—both the tooling is actually better so that gap isn't as wide as it was, but also to general awareness, I think there's enough stories out there where people have really struggled with the adoption, and struggled with productivity somewhere along the way, or after the adoption process. Yeah. Does that answer the question? [laughs].Emily: Absolutely. And actually, I'm curious, what were some of the surprises for you?Jón: I'm still surprised every now and then. I've been working, I've been developing against Kubernetes, full-time pretty much—well, to the extent that I can develop full time over the last couple of years—and worked with it as an end-user before that, and I'm still finding new and interesting ways in which something can fail. And just a simple example, just the act of deploying a single service onto Kubernetes, you need to write up a few different YAML files. Doing that in a secure manner is not exactly obvious, and is nowhere near secure by default, so you have to, kind of, discover that, or pay some security providers to really help you with that. The number of ways in which a service deployment can fail is just—it's still—it keeps rising. [laughs]. I found a new one just yesterday. Like, “Oh, actually, here's an interesting condition. I hadn't come across that before.” So, the abstractions are fairly low-level, and you have to be able to navigate that. And I would much prefer higher-level abstractions that encapsulate all the—even if it's just encapsulating all the different failure modes of starting a container, that would be super helpful. But I think that's one thing that people keep stumbling on. And just to deploy a single service, there's a lot of different bells and whistles that you need to be kind of faintly aware of, and they—you will keep discovering them as you keep working with it. It's been both an interesting experience, and it's definitely put a lot of life into this developer ecosystem, but it's also been quite frustrating since myself and a lot of other developers out there are stuck having to deal with this and discover all these different things gradually. Does that make sense?Emily: Absolutely, but I'm going to ask another question, which is, what about pleasant surprises?Jón: I think I mentioned one earlier. One of the pleasant surprises is how quickly this ecosystem has formed, and a huge community of people, and really putting a lot of effort into making the whole experience better, and adding any functionality that doesn't come out of the box, as it were. I think it's been really interesting to observe that ecosystem manifest. Yeah, I think that's probably the most interesting positive thing that comes to mind. I think it's been interesting to see all kinds of different, ostensibly competing companies work together in many ways. Just the general power of the open-source movement has definitely come to light which has been great. I feel like the attitudes just in our user community, and the user community generally—just go to the Kubernetes Slack, or you have discussions on GitHub issues or all kinds of, you know, one or more of these open-source projects and ecosystem. Like, just general morale, and helpfulness, and collaborative nature has been really interesting to watch, and I've really enjoyed that.Emily: I'm going to ask, just sort of a very different question, which is, I always like to ask my guests what their job actually entails. Everyone has a job title, and it doesn't always provide lots of visibility into what you actually do during the day. So, what does somebody like you, who's the CEO of a startup, what do you actually do when you get into the office? What does your day actually look like?Jón: So, it has evolved a lot. Let's put it that way. And I wear many hats for sure. So, my background is I'm an engineer, that's kind of my comfort zone. I can write code and I can think about systems and all of that jazz, and that comes naturally to me. So, in my CEO role, I've been learning a lot on the go. So, these days, a lot of my time, I've spent maybe 30, 40 percent of my time coding these days, which is just about average. Sometimes it's a little bit more, sometimes it's almost not at all. And that's probably going to fluctuate and, over time, decrease. I think the most important part of my role is to generally engage with the ecosystem, and that involves reading, talking to people, talking to investors, talking to other people in my industry, talking to customers, kind of trying to build a mental map of this world we live in, and try and figure out how that translates into our product roadmap for us, and try and communicate what's important, what's urgent for the team to think about. So, I'm kind of this liaison between the external world and the internal world that is our team in many different ways. I think that consumes a lot of my time. And then working on content, working with our marketing manager, joining sales calls, supporting customers, working with our designer trying to figure out what's our brand identity, and how should that evolve. Yeah, I'm kind of a nexus of a lot of different things, which I really enjoy. Sometimes exhausting, don't get me wrong. But yeah, I like to think that I'm connecting dots.Emily: So, I wanted to also ask a little bit more about what Garden does, and particularly how is the testing that you do, how is it different from what you would get in just a normal CI tool?Jón: Right. So, testing is definitely—it was always part of the picture when we started. I think when we started working on Garden, we maybe tried to solve too many problems. That's pretty common startup mistake, I guess. And we're focusing more and more on testing. And so, I'm happy to elaborate on that. So, the way people do testing today—and this I derive from both personal experience and talking to a lot of our current and prospective customers—it's very common to, well A) not to it in any meaningful way. That's surprisingly common still, or to unit test the individual components of an application. But that falls short in a number of different ways when working with just microservices in general. And in these cloud-native scenarios, you tend to have a lot of different moving parts. And what we're trying to address is how easily you can test your application end-to-end; how you can spin up your own ad hoc instance of an application, the full application with all the different services, even the ones you do not working on; and how you can write tests such that they actually test the interaction between services and not through mocking and stubbing them, or bending over backwards to do these contract testing and things like that. That certainly helps mitigate these things, but the cloud-native ecosystem actually bring—and Kubernetes, and just the declarative nature of how we define and deploy applications today—actually creates a lot of opportunities. You can now feasibly spin up a whole instance of an application with all different services that comprise your back end, and you can run tests from within there. And Garden really helps to make that efficient and easy to use for developers. So, the comparison to CI naturally comes up, and Garden in a certain sense blurs the line between a developer tool that you use in the inner loop or locally from your laptop, and the process that happens in your CI. We don't aim to replace CI; that's a pretty saturated market. We just want to focus on the testing and previewing side of it. And what Garden does, which is unique, is that it allows you to describe every part of your stack, how it's built, how is deployed, and how it's tested, and we compose this into what we call the Stack Graph. So, we have this directed graph of all the different things that need to happen between just a bunch of Git repositories and a fully running, tested system. And where that comes in really handy is when you make a small change—you push a pull request or you're just testing locally by yourself—we know which parts of your stack actually are affected by that change, so you don't need to run a full battery of all of your different tests, you end-to-end tests. You can actually just automatically trigger the few parts that need to be rebuilt, redeployed, and retested. So, it's making it viable to actually run integration tests and end-to-end tests as part of your development workflow, and it also makes it much easier for the developer to cross between the inner loop—working on the code themselves—and getting it to pass through CI because that's often an arduous process, just getting things to pass testing in CI, because it may work fine on your laptop, or you may only have a small subset of the system that you're working on, and then you have to make another commit and push to get, and then the CI pipeline runs again. That can take an arbitrarily long amount of time. And instead, you can just run Garden test, or run a specific test suite from your laptop and have it work much the same way in CI as when you're developing locally.Emily: Do you have anything that you can think of that you'd like to add about this general topic of the surprises and misconceptions that come up around cloud-native and Kubernetes?Jón: It's generally been a pleasant experience. And it's been really motivating to see all this activity in this space. There's definitely lots of activity, lots of small startups and big companies trying to figure out better ways to do things. And I think it's fun to be a part of it. I think, who's to say how it's all going to shake out, but I don't remember it being quite like this pre-cloud-native, and I'm very much looking forward to, at the end of this journey, that we as an ecosystem kind of are going through that we will have something that really materially changes how we develop distributed systems, not just in the context of Kubernetes—because that's a specific technology that works for a specific type of customer—but rather taking it further and keeping this collaborative note, even when we go past what's the technology of the day.Emily: All right, so one bonus question, what is your favorite engineering tool that you could not live without? Or I should say that you could not do your work without? Maybe you could live without it.Jón: Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think probably the most central tool that I have in terms of my development is Google. The thing is, as a developer, there's just no way you can know all the things. You don't remember every API. Like, I keep looking at the same thing over and over again, and being able to have all this information just at my fingertips, I think that's something that I would—well actually both have a hard time living without, and engineering without. And notable mentions, I've really enjoyed working with [00:25:33 VS Code] as of late. We code in TypeScript, which is slightly unusual, but I've also become a fan of that. There's probably a number of smaller tools that I'm forgetting to mention that I use all the time, but just being able to find whatever I need at any time, that's probably the most revolutionary thing to come up over the last decade.Emily: Where could listeners connect with you or follow you?Jón: So, I'm on Twitter, not the most active on Twitter, but I'm always—if you follow me, I probably just follow you back and try and get into the conversation that way. You can reach me there directly. Also, if you just want to ping me—so on Twitter, @jonedvald, just my name as it's printed. You can find the community for Garden itself through our website, Garden.io. We have a Slack channel on the Kubernetes Slack, just #Garden. And yeah, please reach out. I'd love to chat. If you're interested in using Garden or not, I'm always trying to be more engaged with the community, and that doesn't have to be Garden-related necessarily.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining us on The Business of Cloud Native.Jón: Thank you so much for having me.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about the business of cloud native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier, that's O-M-I-E-R, or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Highlights from this episode include:  Key market drivers that are causing Cloud Comrade's clients to containerize applications — including the role that the global pandemic is playing.   The pitfalls of approaching cloud migration with a cost-first strategy, and why Andy doesn't believe in this approach.  Common misconceptions that can arise when comparing cloud TCO to on-premise infrastructure. How today's enterprises tend to view cloud computing versus cloud-native. Andy also mentions a key requirement that companies have to have when integrating cloud services. Andy's thoughts on build versus buy when integrating cloud services at the enterprise level. Why cloud migration is a relatively safe undertaking for companies because it's easy to correct mistakes. Why businesses need to re-think AI and to be more realistic in terms of what can actually be automated.  Andy's must-have engineering tool, which may surprise you. Links: Cloud Comrade LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-comrade/ Follow Andy on Twitter: @andywaroma Connect with Andy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyw/ TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm here with Andy Waroma. Andy, I just wanted to start with having you introduce yourself.Andy: Yeah, hi. Thanks, Emily for having me on your podcast. My name is Andy Waroma, and I'm based in Singapore, but originally from Finland. I've been [unintelligible] in Singapore for about 20 years, and for 11 years I spent with a company called SAP focusing on business software applications. And then more recently, about six years ago, I co-founded together with my ex-colleague from SAP, a company called Cloud Comrade, and we have been running Cloud Comrade now for six years and Cloud Comrade focuses on two things: number one, on cloud migrations; and number two, on cloud managed services across the Southeast Asia region.Emily: What kind of things do you help companies understand when you're helping with cloud migrations? Is this like, like, a lift and shift? To what extent are you helping them change the architecture of their applications?Andy: Good question. So, typically, if you look at the Southeast Asian market, we are probably anywhere between one to two years behind that of the US market. And I always like to say that the benefit that we have in Southeast Asia is that we have a time machine at our disposal. So, whatever has happened in the US in the past 18 months or so it's going to be happening also in Singapore and Southeast Asia. And for the first three to four years of this business, we saw a lot of lift and shift migrations, but more recently, we have been asked to go and containerize applications to microservices, revamp applications from monolithic approach to a much more flexible and cloud-native approach, and we just see those requirements increasing as companies understand what kind of innovation they can do on different cloud platforms.Emily: And what do you think is driving, for your clients, this desire to containerize applications?Andy: Well, if you asked me three months ago, I probably would have said it's about innovation, and business advantage, and getting ahead in the market, and investing in the future. Now, with the global pandemic situation, I would say that most companies are looking at two things: they're looking at cost savings, and they are also looking at automation. And I think cost savings is quite obvious; most companies need to know how they can reduce on their IT expenditure, how they can move from CAPEX to OPEX, how they can be targeting their resources up and down depending on the business demand what they have. And at the same time, they're also not looking to hire a lot of new people into their internal IT organization. So, therefore, most of our customers want to see their applications to be as automated as possible. And of course, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and everything else helps them to achieve that somewhat. But first and foremost, of course, it's about all services that Cloud provides in general. And then once they have been moving some of those applications and getting positive experiences, that's where we typically see the phase two kicking in, going into cloud-native microservices, containers, Kubernetes, Docker, and so forth.Emily: And do you think when companies are going into this, thinking, “Oh, I'm going to really reduce my costs.” Do you think they're generally successful?Andy: I don't think in a way that they think they are. So, especially if I'm looking at the Southeast Asian markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and perhaps other countries like Vietnam, Myanmar, and Cambodia, it's a very cost-conscious market, and I always, also like to say that when we go into a meeting, the first question that we get from the customers, “How much?” It is not even what are we going to be delivering, but how much it's going to cost them. That's the first gate of assessment. So, it's very much of an on-premise versus clouds comparison in the beginning.And I think if companies go in with that type of a mindset, that's not necessarily the winning strategy for them. What they will come to know after a while is that, for example, setting up disaster recovery systems on an on-premise environment, especially when a separate location is extremely expensive, and doing something like that on the Cloud is going to be very cost-efficient. And that's when they start seeing cost savings. But typically, what they will start seeing on Cloud is a process cost-saving, so how they can do things faster, quicker, and be more flexible in terms of responding to end-user demands.Emily: At the beginning of the process, how much do you think your customers generally understand about how different the cost structure is going to be?Andy: So, we have more than 200 customers, and we have done more than 500 projects over the six years, and there's a vast range of customers. We have done work with companies with a few people; we have done companies with Fortune 10 organizations, and everything in between, in all kinds of different industries: manufacturing, finance, insurance, public sector, industrial level things, nonprofits, research organizations. So, we can't really say that each customer are same. There are customers who are very sophisticated and they know exactly what they want when going to a cloud platform, but then there are, of course, many other customers who need to be advised much more in the beginning, and that's where we typically have tools and processes in place where we can assess what is the right proposed strategy for our customers. And then we discuss these ideas in our workshops, and then let the customer decide what will be the best way for them forward, [unintelligible] cost, timelines, and then also potential product risks.Emily: Are there any common themes around things that companies tend to not understand correctly, or misconceptions that let's say, just come up often; maybe not all the time, but frequently?Andy: Yeah. I think the most common misconception is that we work a lot with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and other cloud platform providers. And typically, when customers are looking to migrate across, they might have virtualized their on-premise environment, and they're looking at the virtual machine to virtual machine cost comparison: how much does it cost them to run one virtual machine on on-premise versus running it on clouds. And when they do that, usually the TCO calculations, they will start breaking down the cost the customer's not taking into consideration all the security that they get with these cloud platforms, the network aspects of it, the compliance aspects, like for example, compliance certifications, regulatory aspects, and all of these things. So, if the customer was to a total TCO of what they're getting on cloud versus what they're getting on their on-premise environment, then they would actually see the huge cost-saving benefits that they are getting. But, at the moment, many of the customers just look at virtual machine to virtual machine comparison, which in our opinion, is wrong.Emily: So, it can be really hard for companies to do this, sort of, apples to apples comparison because they're not taking everything into account?Andy: Yeah, to be fair to them, many times you only start getting some of those benefits, of Cloud if you completely decommission your on-premise data center, but if you still the on-premise data center costs and you have to cloud costs, then you can't fully exploit the benefits of Cloud.Emily: Do you see any common misconceptions related to how you would have answered three months ago, where related to innovation, or agility?Andy: I think we have seen a huge influx of projects coming to us right now, and I see that a lot of companies who have been sitting on the fence in the previous years, they have now realized that the economic situation is changing very, very rapidly. And it doesn't matter if they have been the market leader, or one of the challengers, they need to do something. And previously, many companies felt that the best approach would be to go to, maybe, one of the large consulting providers, and just get something from them regardless of the price, or alternatively, go and shop around with 10, 15, 20 different vendors and try and squeeze the best price out of them, and [unintelligible] the implementation at the lowest possible cost. I think now, with the pandemic and economic situation, I feel that many companies have been rationalizing their IT strategy, their strategy they're suspending, and what they are doing is that they are trying to find what is the most suitable vendor given the current situation, forego lengthy RFP processes, do something quickly on Cloud, do some kind of TOC, if it looks good for them, then let's just get going, don't waste internal resources, don't waste external resources, and try to achieve something quickly.Emily: Do you feel like, in general, your clients tend to understand the difference between just cloud computing and cloud-native?Andy: Um, I think that definition is probably hazy. I think it's probably also maybe somehow hazy for me, [laughs], and I think in some cases, the cloud platform providers want to keep it that way as well. Typically, the customers that we are dealing with is relatively traditional enterprises, and we always advise them that rather than doing a lot of transformation on on-premise first, why don't we just help you to lift and shift and move you to cloud, and once you're on Cloud, you can start doing all kinds of experimentation there with cloud-native services. And it's not just about moving these companies to cloud-native services, which have certain benefits, like for example, serverless technologies that reduces the costs a lot, it also requires the companies to have a pretty clear understanding of their internal processes, and then also, critically, an understanding of the roles and responsibilities within those organizations because when you start deploying software and applications in a different way onto a cloud platform, the technology is one part of it, but the process and people is the other part of it, and if the organizations internally are not ready to change the process, they won't be able to reap the benefits of cloud-native services, otherwise.Emily: And how challenging do you think it is for companies to do the sort of, organizational work to match this sort of change in the way they work together with a different technology?Andy: I think it is very challenging, and we see a big skill gap there. Many companies, even large companies, they might have issues of attracting talent. And typically, one of the reasons is that even if the companies are wanting to do something on Cloud, they typically choose one Cloud Platform only, and many IT people who are wanting to get into this space or wanting to be in cloud computing. They don't want to focus just on one cloud platform. They want to be focused on multiple different platforms, and they want to understand what are the differences between, let's say, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other providers, and that's why people who are really skilled, they probably end up in consulting companies like ours and other companies. And that's, I believe, is the whole reason of our existence is that many companies cannot do these things in-house, and therefore, they would like to outsource the initial work, and then also the ongoing work terms of managed services to the companies like us.Emily: Do companies often ask you, “Should we build this internally? Should we outsource this for somebody else to do? Should we buy a tool that does this automatically?” Is that a question that they have, and how do you sort of evaluate an answer?Andy: [unintelligible] this depends a little bit on the industry. So, for example, there are a number of so-called unicorns, in the region, and these companies have very big IT departments, in-house development department, in-house, they might have thousands of developers, and they feel that the best way for those companies to create differentiation in the market is to build by themselves. But we deal also with a lot of, like I mentioned before, with traditional manufacturing companies, for instance, and there they will go for packaged applications such as SAP, Oracle, .NET applications, and I think that's the best approach for them, rather than start building something in-house, which would not necessarily make sense for them, given the fact that these costs are not in IT industry, but they are in, let's say, in food and beverages industry. But they've certainly built, and like to build some services on top of those traditional software packages, and analytics and analytical reports, for example, predictive forecasting, and that's something that will bring about uniqueness to their organization, to their process, and competitive advantage. And that are mostly things that they're exploring on the Cloud, and weighing those options for that make sense to buy something prebuilt, or develop it in-house, or outsource it to some organization.Emily: What do you think your clients tend to be pleasantly surprised about? What ends up being a lot easier than they expect?Andy: First of all, IT has always been notorious for failed projects. There has been too many of those, and if you look at Cloud implementations, we really haven't had any. I think Cloud is safe in the sense that even if you have estimated, these are the compute requirements, or the storage requirements, or whatever it might be at the initial phase, and it turns out that assessment is wrong, then it's very easy to actually rectify that, and change the services, and if we brought up, let's say, an SAP on a certain types of instances and two days later, we find out that no, this instance was too big or too small, we can easily go and change that. That also, if I'm taking that SAP example, SAPs customers are typically wanting to move to SAP HANA at some point of the time, but they're unsure whether that makes sense for them from the organizational point of view and business point of view, and we tell them that why don't you just move to Cloud, and then we can provision new instances with SAP HANA. We can migrate your test environment to an SAP HANA environment, and then you can give it a go. So, Cloud allows you to do a lot of this experimentation, which then leads back to the pleasant surprise that there aren't really any failed IP projects, or even if they are failures, the failures are quite minute compared to some of the IT failures they might have seen in the past.Emily: Interesting. That's a pretty big upside.Andy: Definitely it is, and we have had some tough, difficult implementations in the past, big migration projects, but with the [unintelligible] from the customer side, and also internal resources, we have always been able to overcome them. And then, even if things are heated at some point of time, usually at the end of the day, the final project sign-off meetings are relatively pleasant and joyous.Emily: Do you see a major difference in strategy by industry? So, a technically sophisticated company versus a traditional manufacturing company, are they going to follow dramatically different strategies to build competitive advantage using technology?Andy: Mmm. So, we are really focused on the infrastructure, so when it comes to infrastructure, mine services, [security mine] services, and I'm looking at the infrastructure layer, typically the customers either just choosing to use something on Linux was choosing to use something on Windows. Maybe they use some server technologies and others, but from that point of view, you can't really tell, if you're looking to a customer's cloud console, whether they are a manufacturing company, or whether they are a finance organization. So, in that sense, there is no difference. Where the differences come in, though, is that we, for example, look at financial industries like banks, and insurance companies, that's where the governmental rules, and regulations, and compliance comes in, and there's a lot of paperwork outside of the cloud implementations that need to be done. There's a lot of guidelines that we need to follow, how to provision the infrastructure to be compliant to, let's say, banking or insurance regulations. That's one industry which is different from the others. Healthcare in the US, for example, there is HIPAA compliance, so how HIPAA compliant applications need to be built all the way from ground up, so that's also a significant difference. Third one is public sector. And so, like I mentioned before, almost half of our business is coming from public sector, and that's where, for instance, security, and compliance is extremely important, and it sometimes almost goes overboard to a certain extent, but I can understand why. And the security and networking requirements are extreme, and that's probably, for me, the most different industry out of all of them, customer-based that we have. And then the last one is multinational companies. Multinational companies have to adhere to their own IT policies, and audit requirements and they also have, many times, a lot of requirements that are relatively unique that they need to follow. Those are also different types of projects from the rest of them. Whether it's a media company, whether it's a manufacturing company, whether it's a research company or organization, I don't see too much differences in the way that they put the demands, and requirements on the infrastructure platform.Emily: And what do you say is something that your clients sometimes come to you looking for help with, that you still, kind of, don't have a great answer for?Andy: Machine learning. AI. A lot of companies talk about it, a lot of companies have been pitched about it, a lot of companies come to us, and said we want to do a machine learning project, and I said, “Well, fine. But what do you want to get out of those machine learning algorithms, and what do you want to build?” And essentially, once you start drilling down, what they want to have is this one red button when they press, and everything else can happen magically underneath to resolve all of their business problems. And I think all of us know that that's not how machine learning works. That's not how AI works, or at least it doesn't work like that right now. So, the expectations that vendors are setting what can be done with machine learning and AI, I think need to be revised. And also, customers need to be a bit more realistic in terms of the expectations what can be automated, what can be done through these new technologies versus what they've been doing in the past.Emily: Basically, if you want machine learning, you have to know it won't answer all of your questions. You have to know what you want answered, otherwise, you're not even asking the right questions.Andy: Pretty much. And also, machine learning, just like, also, analytics is that you require vast data sets that need to be ready from the organization, and the data sets need to be relatively clean as well, otherwise, it's hard to come up with models that are accurate, and the old fashioned saying of garbage in, garbage out is also very true, not just in analytics space, but also in the machine learning space.Emily: Is there anything else that you'd like to add about the topic of cloud-native and what companies get out of it in a business sense?Andy: I believe that we are living right now in 2020 in a very unique time, and at some point of time, when we start looking back, maybe in a few years from now, we'll start seeing that actually cloud-native started rocketing and taking off like no one expected in this year, is right now, it's happening. Every company is focusing on it one way or the other, and I think those companies that are taking advantage in this difficult economic times will be the winners once we come out of this economic and pandemic situation.Emily: I've actually heard that sentiment from many people, so that makes me think it's probably correct. Oh, my last question for you—I almost forgot—what is your can't-live-without engineering tool? So, is there a tool that you would find it difficult to impossible to do your job without?Andy: It still, after 30 years, its email. So, from that point of view it's, you know—but if I'm looking at our team, and what they're really focusing on right now, so working on things, like for example, Terraform, or an AWS site on CloudFormation tools, and that brings about automation. And the difficulty, sometimes, in Cloud is that there's so many different things that you can do. So, customers have a perception, when they go to Cloud, they do a one-off project, and then they're kind of done and dusted, and off they go and think about the next thing, but there's new services coming in all the time, and there is drift that happens on the cloud platform in terms of security, and ports, and network settings, and instances that gets loaded up and everything else, so you can only manage the cloud platform if you manage the [unintelligible] to automation. And I think that some of the [conflict] tools right now for us are starting to become tools like Terraform, from HashiCorp, CloudFormation from AWS, and similar kind of services from Google, and Microsoft that allows us to keep the platform in the kind of a compliance that the customer originally intended the platform to be.Emily: Where could listeners connect with you, or follow you?Andy: We have a pretty strong presence on LinkedIn. So, if you just search for Cloud Comrade on LinkedIn. So, that's where we post news about our industry, and our company, and our people, and our customers on a daily basis, and I would be looking forward to also connecting with your listeners.Emily: Well, thank you so much, Andy. That was very interesting to learn about what you do, and the types of companies that you work with, and what the Southeast Asian market, kind of, looks like.Andy: Thank you so much, Emily, for your invitation.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about the business of cloud native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier, that's O-M-I-E-R, or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Some highlights of the show include: The company's cloud native journey, which accelerated with the acquisition of Uswitch.  How the company assessed risk prior to their migration, and why they ultimately decided the task was worth the gamble. Uswitch's transformation into a profitable company resulting from their cloud native migration. The role that multidisciplinary, collaborative teams played in solving problems and moving projects forward. Paul also offers commentary on some of the tensions that resulted between different teams. Key influencing factors that caused the company to adopt containerization and Kubernetes. Paul goes into detail about their migration to Kubernetes, and the problems that it addressed.  Paul's thoughts on management and prioritization as CTO. He also explains his favorite engineering tool, which may come as a surprise.  Links: RVU Website: https://www.rvu.co.uk/ Uswitch Website: https://www.uswitch.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pingles GitHub: https://github.com/pingles TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Paul Ingles. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.Paul: Thank you for having me.Emily: Could you just introduce yourself: where do you work? What do you do? And include, sort of, some specifics. We all have a job title, but it doesn't always reflect what our actual day-to-day is.Paul: I am the CTO at a company called RVU in London. We run a couple of reasonably big-ish price comparison, aggregator type sites. So, we help consumers figure out and compare prices on broadband products, mobile phones, energy—so in the UK, energy is something which is provided through a bunch of different private companies, so you've got a fair amount of choice on kind of that thing. So, we tried to make it easier and simpler for people to make better decisions on the household choices that they have. I've been there for about 10 years, so I've had a few different roles. So, as CTO now, I sit on the exec team and try to help inform the business and technology strategy. But I've come through a bunch of teams. So, I've worked on some of the early energy price comparison stuff, some data infrastructure work a while ago, and then some underlying DevOps type automation and Kubernetes work a couple of years ago.Emily: So, when you get in to work in the morning, what types of things are usually on your plate?Paul: So, I keep a journal. I use bullet journalling quite extensively. So, I try to track everything that I've got to keep on top of. Generally, what I would try to do each day is catch up with anybody that I specifically need to follow up with. So, at the start of the week, I make a list of every day, and then I also keep a separate column for just general priorities. So, things that are particularly important for the week, themes of work going on, like, technology changes, or things that we're trying to launch, et cetera. And then I will prioritize speaking to people based on those things. So, I'll try and make sure that I'm focusing on the most important thing. I do a weekly meeting with the team. So, we have a few directors that look after different aspects of the business, and so we do a weekly meeting to just run through everything that's going on and sharing the problems. We use the three P's model: so, sharing progress problems and plans. And we use that to try and steer on what we do. And we also look at some other team health metrics. Yeah, it's interesting actually. I think when I switched from working in one of the teams to being in the CTO role, things change quite substantially. That list of things that I had to care about increase hugely, to the point where it far exceeded how much time I had to spend on anything. So, nowadays, I find that I'm much more likely for some things to drop off. And so it's unfortunate, and you can't please everybody, so you just have to say, “I'm really sorry, but this thing is not high on the list of priorities, so I can't spend any time on it this week, but if it's still a problem in a couple of weeks time, then we'll come back to it.” But yeah, it can vary quite a lot.Emily: Hmm, interesting. I might ask you more questions about that later. For now, let's sort of dive into the cloud-native journey. What made RVU decide that containerization was a good idea and that Kubernetes was a good idea? What were the motivations and who was pushing for it?Paul: That's a really good question. So, I got involved about 10 years ago. So, I worked for a search marketing startup that was in London called Forward Internet Group, and they acquired USwitch in 2010. And prior to working at Forward, I'd worked as a consultant at ThoughtWorks in London, so I spent a lot of time working in banks on continuous delivery and things like that. And so when Uswitch came along, there were a few issues around the software release process. Although there was a ton of automation, it was still quite slow to actually get releases out. We were only doing a release every fortnight. And we also had a few issues with the scalability of data. So, it was a monolithic Windows Microsoft stack. So, there was SQL Server databases, and .NET app servers, and things like that. And our traffic can be quite spiky, so when companies are in the news, or there's policy changes and things like that, we would suddenly get an increase in traffic, and the Microsoft solution would just generally kind of fall apart as soon as we hit some kind of threshold. So, I got involved, partly to try and improve some of the automation and release practices because at the search start-up, we were releasing experiments every couple of hours, even. And so we wanted to try and take a bit of that ethos over to Uswitch, and also to try and solve some of the data scalability and system scalability problems. And when we got started doing that, a lot of it was—so that was in the early heyday of AWS, so this was about 2008, that I was at the search startup. And we were used to using EC2 to try and spin up Hadoop clusters and a few other bits and pieces that we were playing around with. And when we acquired Uswitch, we felt like it was quickest for us to just create a different environment, stick it under the load balancer so end users wouldn't realize that some requests was being served off of the AWS infrastructure instead, and then just gradually go from there. We found that that was just the fastest way to move. So, I think it was interesting, and it was both a deliberate move, but it was also I think the degree to which we followed through on it, I don't think we'd really anticipated quite how quickly we would shift everything. And so when Forward made the acquisition, I joined summer of 2010, and myself and a colleague wrote a little two-pager on, here are the problems we see, here are the things that we think we can help with and the ways that technology approach that we'd applied at Forward would carry across, and what benefits we thought it would bring. Unfortunately because Forward was a privately held business—we were relatively small but profitable—and the owner of that business was quite risk-affine. He was quite keen on playing blackjack and other stuff. So, he was pretty happy with talking about probabilities of success.And so we just said, we think there's a future in it if we can get the wheels turning a bit better. And he was up for it. He backed us and we just took it from there. And so we replaced everything from self-hosted physical infrastructure running on top of .NET to all AWS hosted, running a mix of Ruby, and Closure, and other bits and pieces in about two years. And that's just continued from there. So, the move to Kubernetes was a relatively recent one; that was only within the last—I say ‘recent.' it was about two years ago, we started moving things in earnest. And then you asked what was the rationale for switching to Kubernetes—Emily: Let me first ask you, when you were talking with the owner, what were the odds that you gave him for success?Paul: [laughs]. That's a good question. I actually don't know. I think we always knew that there was a big impact to be had. I don't think we knew the scale of the upside. So, I don't think we—I mean, at the time, Uswitch was just about breaking even, so we didn't realize that there was an opportunity to radically change that. I think we underestimated how long it would take to do. So, I think we'd originally thought that we could replace, I think maybe most of the stuff that we needed replaced within six months. We had an early prototype out within two weeks, two or three weeks because we'd always placed a big emphasis on releasing early, experimenting, iterative delivery, A/B testing, that kind of thing. So, I think it was almost like that middle term that was the harder piece. And there was definitely a point where… I don't know, I think it was this classic situation of pulling on a ball of string where it was like, what wanted to do was to focus on improving the end-user experience because our original belief was that, aside from the scalability issues, that the existing site just didn't solve the problem sufficiently well, that it needed an overhaul to simplify the journeys, and simplify the process, and improve the experience for people. We were focusing on that and we didn't want to get drawn into replacing a lot of the back office and integration type systems partly because there was a lot of complexity there. But also because you then have to engage with QA environments, and test environments, and sign-offs with the various people that we integrate with. But it was, as I said, it was this kind of tugging on a ball of string where every improvement that we made in the end-user experience—so we would increase conversion rate by 10 percent but through doing that, we would introduce downstream error in the ways that those systems would integrate, and so we gradually just ended up having to pull in slightly more and more pieces to make it work. I don't think we ever gave odds of success. I think we underestimated how long that middle piece would take. I don't think we really anticipated the degree of upside that we would get as a consequence, through nothing other than just making releases quicker, being able to test and move faster, and focusing on end-user experience was definitely the right thing to focus on.Emily: Do you think though, that everybody perceived it as a risk? I'm just asking because you mentioned the blackjack, was this a risk that could fail?Paul: Well, I think the interesting thing about it was that we knew it was the right thing to do. So, again, I think our experience as consultants at ThoughtWorks was on applying continuous delivery, what we would today call DevOps, applying those practices to software delivery. And so we'd worked on systems where there weren't continuous integration servers and where people weren't releasing every day, and then we'd worked in environments where we were releasing every couple of hours, and we were very quickly able to hone in on what worked and discard things that didn't. And so I think because we've been able to demonstrate that success within the search business, I think that carried a great deal of trust. And so when it came to talking about things we could potentially do, we were totally convinced that there were things that we could improve. I think it was a combination of, there was a ton of potential, we knew that there was a new confluence of technologies and approaches that could be successful if we were able to just start over. And then I think also probably a healthy degree of, like, naive, probably overconfidence in what we could do that we would just throw ourselves into it. So, it's hard work, but yeah, it was ultimately highly successful. So, it's something I'm exceedingly proud of today.Emily: You said something really interesting, which is that Uswitch was barely profitable. And if I understand correctly, that changed for the better. Can you talk about how this is related?Paul: Yeah, sure. I think the interesting thing about it was that we knew that there was something we could do better, but we weren't sure what it was. And so the focus was always on being able to release as frequently as we possibly could to try and understand what that was, as well as trying to just simplify and pay back some of the technical debt. Well, so, trying to overcome some of the artificial constraints that existed because of the technology choices that people have made—perfectly decent decisions on, back in the day, but platforms like AWS offered better alternatives, now. So, we just focused on being able to deliver iteratively, and just keep focusing on continual improvement, releasing, understanding what the problems were, and then getting rid of those little niggly things. The manager I had at Forward was this super—I don't know, he just had the perfect ethos, and he was driven—so we were a team that were focused on doing daily experiments. And so we would rely on data on our spend and data on our revenue. And that would come in on a daily cycle. So, a lot of the rhythm of the team was driven off of that cycle. And so as we could run experiments and measure their profitability, we could then inform what we would do on the day. And so, we have a handful of long-running technology things that we were doing, and then we would also have other tactical things that he would have ideas on, he would have some hypothesis of, well, “Maybe this is the reason that this is happening, let's come up with a test that we can use to try and figure out whether that's true.” We would build something quickly to throw it together to help us either disprove it or support it, and we would put it live, see what happened, and then move on to the next thing. And so I think a lot of the—what we wanted to do is to instill a bit of that environment in Uswitch. And so a lot of it was being able to release quickly, making sure that people had good data in front of them. I mean, even tools like Google Analytics were something which we were quite au fait with using but didn't have broad adoption at the time. And so we were using that to look at site behavior and what was going on and reason about what was happening. So, we just tried to make sure that people were directly using that, rather than just making changes on a longer cycle without data at all.Emily: And can you describe how you were working with the business side, and how you were communicating, what the sort of working relationship was like? If there was any misunderstandings on either side.Paul: Yeah, it's a good question. So, when I started at Uswitch, the organizational structure was, I guess, relatively classical. So, you had a pooled engineering team. So, it was a monolithic system, deployed onto physical infrastructure. So, there was an engineering team, there was an operations team, and then there were a handful of people that were business specific in the different markets that we operated in. So, there was a couple of people that focused on, like, the credit card market; a couple of people that focused on energy, for example. And, I used to call it the stand-up swarm: so, in the morning, we would sit on our desks and you would see almost the entire office moved from the different card walls that were based around the office. Although there was a high degree of interaction between the business stakeholders, the engineers, designers, and other people, it always felt slightly weird that you would have almost all of the company interested in almost everything that was going on, and so I think the intuition we had was that a lot of the ways that we would think about structuring software around loosely-coupled but highly cohesive, those same principles should or could apply to the organization itself. And so what we tried to do is to make sure that we had multidisciplinary teams that had the people in them to do the work. So, for the early days of the energy work, there was only a couple of us that were in it. So, we had a couple of engineers, and we had a lady called Emma, who was the product owner. She used to work in the production operations team, so she used to be focused on data entry from the products that different energy providers would send us, but she had the strongest insight into the domain problem, what problem consumers were trying to overcome, and what ways that we could react to it. And so, when we got involved, she had a couple of ideas that she'd been trying to get traction on, that she'd been unable to. And so what we—we had a, I don't know, probably a, I think a half-day session in an office. So, we took over the boardroom at the office and just said, “Look, we could really do with a separate space away from everybody to be able to focus on it. And we just want to prove something out for a couple of weeks. And we want to make sure that we've got space for people to focus.” And so we had a half-day in there, we had a conversation about, “Okay, well, what's the problem? What's the technical complexity of going after any of these things?” And there's a few nuances, too. Like, if you choose option A, then we have to get all of the historical information around it, as well as the current products and market. Whereas if we choose option B, then we can simplify it down, and we don't need to do all of that work, and we can try and experiment with something sooner. So, we wanted it to be as collaborative as possible because we knew that the way that we would be successful is by trying to execute on ideas faster than we'd been able to before. And at the same time, we also wanted to make sure that there was a feeling of momentum and that we would—I think there was probably a healthy degree of slight overconfidence, but we were also very keen to be able to show off what we could do. And so we genuinely wanted to try and improve the environment for people so that we could focus on solving problems quicker, trying out more experiments, being less hung up on whether it was absolutely the right thing to do, and instead just focus on testing it. So, were there tensions? I think there were definitely tensions; I don't think there weren't tensions so much on the technical side; we were very lucky that most of the engineers that already worked there were quite keen on doing something different, and so we would have conversations with them and just say, “Look, we'll try everything we can to try and remove as many of the constraints that exist today.” I think a lot of the disagreement or tension was whether or not it was the right problem to be going after. So, again, the search business that we worked in was doing a decent amount of money for the number of people that were there, and we knew there was a problem we could fix, but we didn't know how much runway it would have. And so there was a lot of tension on whether we should be pulling people into focusing on extending the search business, or whether we needed to focus on fixing Uswitch. So, there was a fair amount of back and forth about whether or not we needed to move people from one part of the business to another and that kind of thing.Emily: Let's talk a little bit about Kubernetes, and how Uswitch decided to use Kubernetes, what problem it solved, and who was behind the decision, who was really making the push.Paul: Yeah, interesting. So, I think containers was something that we'd been experimenting with for a little while. So, as I think a lot of the culture was, we were quite risk-affine. So, we were quite keen to be trying out new technologies, and we'd been using modern languages and platforms like Closure since the early days of them being available. We'd been playing around with containers for a while, and I think we knew there was something in it, but we weren't quite sure what it was. So, I think, although we were playing around with it quite early, I think we were quite slow to choose one platform or another. I think in the end, we—in the intervening period, I guess, between when we went from the more classical way of running Puppet across a bunch of EC2 instances that run a version of your application, the next step after that was switching over to using ECS. So, Amazon's container service. And I guess the thing that prompted a bit more curiosity into Kubernetes was that—I forgot the projects I was working on, but I was working on a team for a little while, and then I switched to go do something else. And I needed to put a new service up, and rather than just doing the thing that I knew, I thought, “Well, I'll go talk to the other teams.” I'll talk to some other people around the company, and find out what's the way that I ought to be doing this today, and there was a lot of work around standardizing the way that you would stand up an ECS cluster. But I think even then, it always felt like we were sharing things in the wrong way. So, if you were working on a team, you had to understand a great deal of Amazon to be able to make progress. And so, back when I got started at Uswitch, when I talk about doing the work about the energy migration, AWS at the time really only offered EC2, load balancers, firewalling, and then eventually relational databases, and so back then the amounts of complexity to stand up something was relatively small. And then come to a couple of years ago. You have to appreciate and understand routing tables, VPCs, the security rules that would permit traffic to flow between those, it was one of those—it was just relatively non-trivial to do something that was so core to what we needed to be able to do. And I think the thing that prompted Kubernetes was that, on the Kubernetes project side, we'd seen a gradual growth and evolution of the concepts, and abstractions, and APIs that it offered. And so there was a differentiation between ECS or—I actually forget what CoreOS's equivalent was. I think maybe it was just called CoreOS. But there are a few alternative offerings for running containerized, clustered services, and Kubernetes seems to take a slightly different approach that it was more focused on end-user abstractions. So, you had a notion of making a deployment: that would contain replicas of a container, and you would run multiple instances of your application, and then that would become a service, and you could then expose that via Ingress. So, there was a language that you could use to talk about your application and your system that was available to you in the environment that you're actually using. Whereas AWS, I think, would take the view that, “Well, we've already got these building blocks, so what we want our users to do is assemble the building blocks that already exist.” So, you still have to understand load balancers, you still have to understand security groups, you have to understand a great deal more at a slightly lower level of abstraction. And I think the thing that seemed exciting, or that seems—the potential about Kubernetes was that if we chose something that offered better concepts, then you could reasonably have a team that would run some kind of underlying platform, and then have teams build upon that platform without having to understand a great deal about what was going on inside. They could focus more on the applications and the systems that they were hoping to build. And that would be slightly harder on the alternative. So, I think at the time, again, it was one of those fortunate things where I was just coming to the end of another project and was in the fortunate position where I was just looking around at the various different things that we were doing as a business, and what opportunity there was to do something that would help push things on. And Kubernetes was one of those things which a couple of us had been talking about, and thinking, “Oh, maybe now is the time to give it a go. There's enough stability and maturity in it; we're starting to hit the problems that it's designed to address. Maybe there's a bit more appetite to do something different.” So, I think we just gave it a go. Built a proof of concept, showed that could run the most complex system that we had, and I think also did a couple of early experiments on the ways in which Kubernetes had support for horizontal scaling and other things which were slightly harder to put into practice in AWS. And so we did all that, I think gradually it just kind of growed out from there, just took the proof of concepts to other teams that were building products and services. We found a team that were struggling to keep their systems running because they were a tiny team. They only had, like, two or three engineers in. They had some stability problems over a weekend because the server ran out of hard disk space, and we just said, “Right. Well, look, if you use this, we'll take on that problem. You can just focus on the application.” It kind of just grew and grew from there.Emily: Was there anything that was a lot harder than you expected? So, I'm looking for surprises as you're adopting Kubernetes.Paul: Oh, surprises. I think there was a non-trivial amount that we had to learn about running it. And again, I think at the point at which we'd picked it up, it was, kind of, early days for automation, so there was—I think maybe Google had just launched Google Kubernetes engine on Google Cloud. Amazon certainly hadn't even announced that hosted Kubernetes would be an option. There was an early project within Kubernetes, called kops that you could use to create a cluster, but even then it didn't fit our network topology because it wouldn't work with the VPC networking that we needed and expected within our production infrastructure. So, there was a lot of that kind of work in the early days, to try and make something work, you had to understand in quite a level of detail what each component of Kubernetes was doing. As we were gradually rolling it out, I think the things that were most surprising were that, for a lot of people, it solved a lot of problems that meant they could move on, and I think people were actually slightly surprised by that. Which, [laughs], it sounds like quite a weird turn of phrase, but I think people were positively surprised at the amount of stuff that they didn't have to do for solving a fair few number of problems that they had. There was a couple of teams that were doing things that are slightly larger scale that we had to spend a bit more time on improving the performance of our setup. So, in particular, there was a team that had a reasonably strong requirement on the latency overheads of Ingress. So, they wanted their application to respond within, I don't know, I think it was maybe 200 milliseconds or something. And we, through setting up the monitoring and other bits and pieces that we had, we realized that Ingress currently was doing all right, but there was a fair amount of additional latency that was added at the tail that was a consequence of a couple of bugs or other things that existed in the infrastructure. So, there was definitely a lot of little niggly things that came up as we were going, but we were always confident that we could overcome it. And, as I said, I think that a lot of teams saw benefits very early on. And I think the other teams that were perhaps a little bit more skeptical because they got their own infrastructure already, they knew how to operate it, it was highly tested, they'd already run capacity and load tests on it, they were convinced that it was the most efficient thing that they could possibly run. I think even over the long run, I think they realized that there was more work that they needed to do than they should be focusing on, and so they were quite happy to ultimately switch over to the shared platform and infrastructure that the cloud infrastructure team run.Emily: As we wrap up, there's actually a question I want to go back to, which is how you were talking about the shifting priorities now that you've become CTO. Do you have any sort of examples of, like, what are the top three things that you will always care about, that you will always have the energy to think about? And then I'm curious to have some examples of things that you can't deal with, you can't think about. The things that tend to drop off.Paul: The top three things that I always think about. So, I think, actually, what's interesting about being CTO, that I perhaps wasn't expecting is that you're ever so slightly removed from the work, that you can't rely on the same signals or information to be able to make a decision on things, and so when I give the Kubernetes story, it's one of those, like, because I'd moved from one system to another, and I was starting a new project, I experienced some pain. It's like, “Right. Okay, I've got to go do something to fix this. I've had enough.” And I think the thing that I'm always paying attention to now, is trying to understand where that pain is next, and trying to make sure that I've got a mechanism for being able to appreciate that. So, I think a lot of the things I try to spend time on are things to help me keep track of what's going on, and then help me make decisions off the back of it. So, I think the things that I always spend time on are generally things trying to optimize some process or invest in automation. So, a good example at the moment is, we're talking about starting to do canary deployments. So, starting to automate the actual rollout of some new release, and being able to automate a comparison against the existing service, looking at latency, or some kind of transactional metrics to understand whether it's performing as well or different than something historical. So, I think the things that I tend to spend time on are process-oriented or are things to try and help us go quicker. One of the books that I read that changed my opinion of management was Andy Grove's, High Output Management. And I forget who recommended it to me, but somebody recommended it to me, and it completely altered my opinion of what value a manager can add. So, one of the lenses I try to apply to anything is of everything that's going on, what's the handful of things that are going to have the most impact or leverage across the organization, and try and spend my time on those. I think where it gets tricky is that you have to go broad and deep. So, as much as there are broad things that have a high consequence on the organization as a whole, you also need an appreciation of what's going on in the detail, and I think that's always tricky to manage. I'm sorry, I forgot what was the second part of your question.Emily: The second part was, do you have any examples of the things that you tend to not care about? That presumably someone is asking you to care about, and you don't?Paul: [laughs]. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think it's that I don't care about it. I think it's that there are some questions that come my way that I know that I can defer, or they're things which are easy to hand off. So, I think the… that is a good question. I think one of the things that I think are always tricky to prioritize, are things which feel high consequence but are potentially also very close to bikeshedding. And I think that is something which is fair—I'd be interested to hear what other people said. So, a good example is, like, choice of tooling. And so when I was working on a team, or on a problem, we would focus on choosing the right tool for the job, and we would bias towards experimenting with tools early, and figuring out what worked, and I think now you have to view the same thing through a different lens. So, there's a degree to which you also incur an organizational cost as a consequence of having high variability in the programming languages that you choose to use. And so I don't think it's something I don't care about, but I think it's something which is interesting that I think it's something which, over the time I've been doing this role, I've gradually learned to let go of things that I would otherwise have previously thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in. And so you have to step back and say, “Well, actually I'm not the right person to be making a decision about which technology this team should be using. I should be trusting the team to make that decision.” And you have to kind of—I think that over the time I've been doing the role, you kind of learn which are the decisions that are high consequence that you should be involved in and which are the ones that you have to step back from. And you just have to say, look, I've got two hours of unblocked time this week where I can focus on something, so of the things on my priority list—the things that I've written in my journal that I want to get done this month—which of those things am I going to focus on, and which of the other things can I leave other people to get on with, and trust that things will work out all right?Emily: That's actually a very good segue into my final question, which is the same for everyone. And that is, what is an engineering tool that you can't live without—your favorite?Paul: Oh, that's a good question. So, I don't know if this is a cop-out by not mentioning something engineering-related, but I think the tool and technique which has helped me the most as I had more and more management responsibility and trying to keep track of things, is bullet journaling. So, I think, up until, I don't know, maybe five years ago, probably, I'd focus on using either iOS apps or note tools in both my laptop, and phone, and so on, and it never really stuck. And bullet journaling, through using a pen and a notepad, it forced me to go a bit slower. So, it forced me to write things down, to think through what was going on, and there is something about it being physical which makes me treat it slightly differently. So, I think bullet journaling is one of the things which has had the—yeah, it's really helped me deal with keeping track of what's going on, and then giving me the ability to then look back over the week, figure out what were the things that frustrated me, what can I change going into next week, one of the suggestions that the person that came up with bullet journaling recommended, is this idea of an end of week reflection. And so, one of the things I try to do—it's been harder doing it now that I'm working at home—is to spend just 15 minutes at the end of the week thinking of, what are the things that I'm really proud of? What are some good achievements that I should feel really good about going into next week? And so I think a lot of the activities that stem from bullet journaling have been really helpful. Yeah, it feels like a bit of a cop-out because it's not specifically technology related, but bullet journaling is something which has made a big difference to me.Emily: Not at all. That's totally fair. I think you are the first person who's had a completely non-technological answer, but I think I've had someone answer Slack, something along those lines.Paul: Yeah, I think what's interesting is there there are loads of those tools that we use all the time. Like Google Docs is something I can't live without. So, I think there's a ton of things that I use day-to-day that are hard to let go off, but I think the I think that the things that have made the most impact on my ability to deal with a stressful job, and give you the ability to manage yourself a little bit, I think yeah, it's been one of the most interesting things I've done.Emily: And where could listeners connect with you or follow you?Paul: Cool. So, I am @pingles on Twitter. My DMs are open, so if anybody wants to talk on that, I'm happy to. I'm also on GitHub under pingles, as well. So, @pingles, generally in most places will get you to me.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining me.Paul: Thank you for talking. It's been good fun.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.

Some of the highlights include:  Why Vodafone moved to a cloud native architecture. As Tom explains, the company was struggling to manage operations across more than 20 markets. They also needed to improve the customer experience, and foster customer loyalty.  Why their business and engineering teams were both in favor of cloud native. The benefits of deploying daily operational activities around a single cloud native platform.   An overview of where Vodavone currently is in their overall cloud native journey. Tom also explains how cloud native conversations have changed inside of the company throughout their journey, as various business units have caught on to the benefits of the cloud. Vodafaone's transition from outsourcing roughly 97 percent of their operations, to bringing 95 percent in house. Tom explains how this has improved efficiency and expedited time to market. The challenge that Vodafone faced in trying to apply legacy network security solutions to distributed and dynamic systems.  Tom's thoughts on why Vodafone's cloud native transition and modernization efforts have been crucial to their success over the last five years.  Links: Vodafone Group: https://www.vodafone.com/ Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-kivlin-5b469321 The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com  Tom's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomkivlin CNCF GitHub: https://github.com/cncf CNCF Slack: https://slack.cncf.io/ Kubernetes Slack: http://slack.kubernetes.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Tom Kivlin. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.Tom: You're welcome. No problem.Emily: Let's just start out with having you introduce yourself. What do you do? Where do you work, and what do you actually do during your workday?Tom: Sure. So, I'm a principal cloud orchestration architect at Vodafone Group. I work in the UK. And my day job consists of providing guidance and strategy and architectural blueprints for cloud-native platforms within Vodafone. So, that's around providing guidance to the software domains that are looking to adopt cloud-native architectures and methodologies and also to the more traditional infrastructure domains to try and help them provide their services in a more cloud-native manner to those modern teams.Emily: And what does that mean when you go into the office—or your home office, go into your dining room where your laptop is, I don't know—what do you actually do? What does an average day look like?Tom: It can vary. So, depending on the activity at the time, it could be anything from preparing a global policy that needs to go through the senior technology leadership team, to preparing some extremely detailed requirements for selection process or creating some infrastructures code, or the code artifacts for the deployment of cloud-native services, whether that's in our lab, or to help our services teams within Vodafone.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about what pain made Vodafone think about moving to cloud-native and Kubernetes.Tom: Primarily, it was the challenge of having 25 different markets, or 23 now. We launched a digital strategy to—so back in 2015, we launched a five-year strategy, which we wanted to massively increase the rollout of 4G, of converged network offerings, of improved customer experience. And we found that the traditional way of managing software was not supportive enough in our ambition. And so, having to choose cloud-native technologies, things like Kubernetes, but also the modern operating models, that was the driver: it was to improve our customer experience, and our customer-affecting KPIs, really.Emily: And when you say it wasn't supportive enough, what do you mean specifically?Tom: So, things like time to market, for example. So, if we wanted to offer a new service—so one of the things that 4G started the drive towards was a more granulated service offering to consumers, and so lots of different things could be offered. And if it took you six months to think of an idea and then have to go through—or even longer than six months to get to the point where that could be offered to customers, even if it was just a very minor feature within an existing product, then that's not going to engender customer loyalty. And so, things like the cloud-native mindset, where there's a much closer link between the engineering teams and the customer, there are much shorter periods of time between ideas coming in from the customers and then being delivered back to the customers as product features, that sort of time to market was really enabled by cloud-native technologies and mindsets.Emily: And how does having two dozen, more or less, different markets, how does that play into the decision A) to move to cloud-native in general, and managing the IT infrastructure?Tom: So, one of the things that's really driven it is trying to simplify and reuse artifacts. So, if you've got 23 markets all doing a different thing, then there's obviously a lot of duplication happening across the group, whereas if everyone's using the same technology in the same platforms—take Kubernetes as the example—everyone can write their software for that platform. Everyone can write their operational ecosystem around that platform. So, the deployment artifacts, the pipelines, the day two operational activities, they can all be based around that single cloud-native platform. And so, that enables a huge amount of efficiency from the operational side. And that in turn allows those engineering teams to focus on things that are adding value to the business and the customer instead of having to focus on fairly low-level tasks that are just keeping the lights on, if you like.Emily: What's different for each one of those markets?Tom: So, it might be something like language, it might be something as simple as that. It may be that the offerings are slightly tweaked. So, rather than, I don't know, as an example, rather than Spotify being included as a kind of add on, it might be some other service that's more relevant to that market. It may be that there are particular regulatory requirements that are specific to a market that needs to be considered within the product design and the engineering of it. And so, having a cloud-native response allows sharing and reuse of artifacts where we can, but still allows for that customization where it's required.Emily: Where would you say Vodafone is in the cloud-native journey? Do you feel like you've, mission accomplished?Tom: So, mission accomplished, as in the first step, yeah. So, we set out a goal in 2015, to get a certain number of our applications to the Cloud, and that's largely been reached, I think, especially with our customer channels, so that the kind of points of interaction with the customer, the huge number of those are cloud-native today. And things like automated customer interaction with chatbots, and the like, that's all added to the cloud-nativeness of the interaction. As part of our next iteration, we'll be looking for more cloud-native software and cloud-native platforms, and that will start extending into the network systems themselves, as well as the more digital and easily modernizable layers, if you like.Emily: What sort of business value do you feel like you're looking for as you move to the next step?Tom: So, primarily, it's going to be driven by customer satisfaction and customer affecting KPIs, like I said before. That's always what's driven the business metrics anyway. So, things like being able to support the demand of the customer. So, whether that's the new 5G services, for increased bandwidth. So, obviously, if our network systems themselves are cloud-native, then taking advantage of the auto-scaling, and the auto-healing, and the autonomic nature, then the customer experience, and the customer satisfaction will increase. Improving time to market, so again, part of 5G is that the whole notion of creating more differentiating services, and so if we can do that through the cloud-native mindset with product owners being much more closely engaged with customers, then that improves our product offerings. And we can optimize our network profitability by using cloud-native features like modern big data analytics, and even AI and automation to improve the operations of the network. At the end of the day, the business value is improved customer satisfaction, which improves our financial performance, obviously.Emily: And when you started out in 2015, who was pushing for moving to cloud-native? Was this the business saying, “Hey, how do we improve customer satisfaction?” Was it engineering saying, “Hey, here's an idea for something that could help us move faster?” Who was behind that?Tom: That's a good question. I think it's probably an element of both. It was the opposite of the push me, pull you, I guess. So, there was engineering pushing on an open door, I suppose you could say. So, Cloud was a bit of a buzzword around that time anyway, but I think it's fair to say the concepts of improved time to market, improved stability, the potential for improved security, improved automation, and repeatability, they were all relatively easy sells to product teams who want to be able to sell products to customers. And once you're able to explain what problems those concepts solve, I think it became a bit of a, like I say, pushing on an open door.Emily: Can you tell me a little bit about the process of explaining what problems these things solve? Was there anything that was getting lost in translation?Tom: Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I can recall—obviously, it's a company-wide thing. I'm never going to be aware of everything that happens—certainly, it's critical to try and understand what the target operating model is before trying to say, “Here's the technology solution to it.” So, I think some of the lessons that were learnt in the early stages were, rather than trying to say, “Here's the technology answer to a modern way of working that hasn't been agreed or adopted or even understood yet,” let's do that part first, so people understand how they need to work in this modern kind of culture. And then the technology answers then make a bit more sense to people because they're able to say, “Okay, I understand the problems that's solving now because I'm now working in that way of working.” So, that's probably the biggest learning point I would take from the previous five years.Emily: Do you feel like the conversation, how did it evolve from the first conversations over the course of the past five years, and then what's it like now?Tom: It's very different now. The concept of Cloud and cloud-native has become a given and very well understood across the business, even outside of technology. So, we talked to other business units, and they're quite comfortable in understanding the benefits of Cloud. And it's now about when they mature into cloud-native, and when they mature operating models, rather than if. And it's now talking and giving guidance about how to do it, rather than trying to sell the concept itself. So, it just feels like you're at that next stage of not having to sell the idea anymore, and more into the detail of how to implement that idea.Emily: What would you say were some of the biggest surprises? And let's start with thinking about some of the biggest surprises, not necessarily technically but organizationally, in how engineering was talking with the business, how people were working together. Was there anything about this journey that was unexpected?Tom: Not particularly. I think the biggest change that happened, which was possibly unexpected when we started, was the level of insourcing that we have undertaken to support the cloud-native operating models, the time to market, and the modern engineering teams. So, we used to be around 97 percent outsourced or something like that, in terms of building software that wasn't just vendor supplied. And for all that software now, we're more like 95 percent in-house. And so, that's quite a big change, and I think that probably surprised people that A) we needed to do it, and B) that we have done it, and relatively successfully got pretty wide-scale digital engineering functions across many markets now.Emily: And why do you think that matters?Tom: Because it gives us control of the roadmap, it gives us control of that time to market cadence, and it allows us to use the data that our teams understand and know about, and to share that with other markets. So, as I say, even though an engineering team might be in the UK, they can share what they've done, they can share the artifacts, they can share the data that's driven decisions and software activity with other markets within Vodafone. And that just improves that efficiency, again.Emily: Do you think insourcing also improves customer satisfaction KPIs?Tom: Certainly we've seen that. So, whether that's a correlation or causation is kind of for someone with more access to more data than I've got. But certainly, we've seen an increase in online sales, and our digital marketing is more data-driven. And that has happened in correlation with the in-sourcing of software engineering skillset, yeah.Emily: Do you have any specific examples that come to mind in, maybe you are able to react in a way that wouldn't have been possible if you'd been using the old system?Tom: I'm not aware of any specific examples, unfortunately.Emily: Was there anything about the move to Kubernetes, to cloud-native, that you expected to be difficult, and wasn't. So, that was easier than you expected?Tom: That's a good question. I suspect the provision of multiple clusters. Kubernetes is difficult. It's a complex system, hence why there are so many cluster management vendor offerings available. And I think we chose a couple of partners early on in the journey to help us with that, and I think that really helped, and it made Kubernetes a little less scary for the software teams who were using it. So certainly, I've heard feedback—this is anecdotal, rather than anything that's evidence-driven—actually, just being able to create clusters and deploy into them was easier than people had thought when they were learning about Kubernetes through the quick start tutorials and the like.Emily: Was there anything that sticks out as being far more difficult than expected? The more unpleasant surprises?Tom: I wouldn't necessarily call them unpleasant, but obviously there's going to be a transition period—which we're in—between the traditional data-center-centric networking and network security policies and concepts, and those that work with Cloud and cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes. And there have definitely been challenges in trying to apply the legacy approach to network security with a distributed and dynamic system like Kubernetes, where you can't give everything a static IP address or even have separate subnets within a cluster for segregation, for example. It has to be done in a different way. You can still apply the same controls, they just have to be done in a different way. So, I think that's one of a few challenges that we found that we've had to work through with different vendors, with engineering teams, and with our internal teams to try and update our guidance on how to apply those controls.Emily: And to what extent have there been organizational challenges, and how have you gotten over those?Tom: That's a tricky one to answer, really. I think it all comes down to the balance between understanding and buying into a strategy, but then applying that to application lifecycle and investment lifecycles. So, I think this is probably true for any company: just because a strategy says this is the thing to do, you got a roadmap for your portfolio of applications and services that you need to balance a limited budget. And so, that's been the biggest challenge, is to try and identify how much of each budget at various levels can be spent on strategic activity, and then for which services, and trying to keep that balance, and bearing in mind that there are lots of different things pulling on that same pot of money.Emily: And what have you learned about managing that?Tom: I think primarily that there needs to be a holistic view of strategic projects. It's quite difficult to put the onus on a local budget, to spend the money to do something strategic when the benefits are probably—and the business case is probably seen more widely than the individual budget area. But I think it differs between situations, and between markets, and what's happening. I think the primary thing is to understand the costs of the strategy upfront, and try and work those costs into whatever needs doing over the period.Emily: A slightly different question, which is, is there anything you feel like in the cloud-native journey that you're still working on solving, that you haven't really figured out yet?Tom: I'm not sure whether we haven't figured this out yet, but one of the things we're putting a lot of effort in at the moment, is the use of advanced data and analytics platforms to try and drive even more network automation, and network planning efficiencies. So, I think it was last year at Google Next, we announced a partnership with Google to make use of their data services. And there's a few projects ongoing within Vodafone to try and drive the amount of knowledge and useful information we can gather from the vast quantities of data we have about our services and the customers that use them because the more we can use that data, the more we can respond to customer need in a timely manner, whether that's reactively in terms of operational response or whether that's proactively in seeing trends that we can then meet a need that may be unsaid yet.Emily: And if you were to talk to another engineering leader who was trying to push through the open door as you were saying, what advice would you give them?Tom: The biggest bit of advice is to understand the current way of working for whichever area you're—is on the other side of the door, and understand their pain points because it's not always the same answer. So, generalizing, it may be that one area is more than happy to have a centralized global platform offering, whether that's within our data centers, or public cloud, or both. Another area, just the way it's managed, may require a more distributed model, where the services are offered on a more market specific level. And so, I think that that's the main thing, is to understand the specifics of that area that you're talking to because it will affect how you want to architect and onwardly deploy and manage that technology.Emily: It would affect not just how you want to architect the technology, but also how you want to communicate what your plan is, right?Tom: Absolutely. Yeah. So, in the first of the examples I gave, where an area might be happy with a centralized service, that probably means they're already using one. The way you would communicate that would be via that existing channel, if you like. Whereas on the flip side, that kind of channel may not exist, and therefore running the project or projects and communicating with stakeholders would be much more distributed.Emily: At Vodafone was there ever any challenge selling it, not just over to the business side, but also selling internally inside engineering teams? Or was everyone pretty gung ho to do this?Tom: No, there's always challenges. I think again, it goes back to understanding the pain points of an area and understanding why things are the kind of as they are today, which I guess is general for things outside of technology and outside of Vodafone generally is. If you understand the position of the person you're debating with, then you're more likely to reach a common understanding than if you go into it with your own point of view and being unwilling to listen. So, I think that's the main thing is just being willing to listen, to understand pain points, and to be able to react to those within a strategy. You'd hope that it's flexible enough to be able to meet a wide range of needs without needing to necessarily change the overall vision.Emily: How important do you think this cloud-native transition has been for Vodafone?Tom: I think it's been crucial. I think we couldn't have done what we've done in the last five years without it. So, there's a video that our group CTO has posted on LinkedIn recently which highlighted a few things around improved mobile KPIs, we've got 4G in 21 markets, we've got the largest 5G in Europe, and all of those improvements from time to market I've already mentioned, we simply couldn't have done that without a modernization program to move to cloud-native across a number of our systems. So, yes, that's partly a technology thing, but also, it is such a cultural thing, and having that modern way of working where you have your modern engineering teams who are closer to the customer, but they're also—the different mindset of a modern engineering company where you're not afraid to try new things, and if you fail, you learn from them. And I think that's all part of what I would class as cloud-native, and that has been, like I say, it's been crucial for us to be able to get where we have been.Emily: It's interesting to think cloud-native means if you fail, you learn from it. That's a fairly basic concept, and yet true. I can see how that is, sort of, part of being cloud-native.Tom: Yeah, it's one of those things is quite a basic thing, but I think in traditional ways of working, the focus on the availability of systems and the performance of systems can blind everyone to the possibilities outside of that particular area of focus. And it puts pressure on people at all levels to try and minimize periods of downtime or periods of low performance. And over time, people become less and less willing to be able to try new things, through fear of failing because just the way people work it's difficult to learn from those failings because it affects customers. And so, what cloud-native technologies enable because of the way things are orchestrated—things are dynamic, things are repeatable—it's very easy to try new things, and not affect all customers. Now, obviously, good software engineering practices help as well. But I think the cloud-native technologies and the ways of working really do support the whole “learn by failing” premise.Emily: Do you think it would have been possible to get the customer satisfaction KPIs that you did, without moving to cloud-native, in any other way?Tom: I think the only way you could have done is by a huge investment in people and the traditional technologies. It would have been a much more expensive and slower journey, in my opinion.Emily: Anything else that you want to add about your experience moving to cloud-native?Tom: No, I don't think so. I think one of the things—like I said before, the increase in automation, the increase in the modern technologies is just really helped with those customer affecting KPIs, and that has to be the drive for why you're doing it.Emily: All right, just a couple more questions, then. What is your can't-live-without engineering tool?Tom: Oh, that's a good question. Probably Python. I think so many people use it either as a cross-platform scripting tool to be able to automate things and get on the first step towards cloud-native, or it's such a key part of many cloud-native tools like things like Ansible and other tools, and it's used hugely within our data analytics domain to try and drive the usefulness of the data. So, yeah, that's probably the one I'd choose.Emily: And then this actually is the last question which is, how can listeners follow you or connect with you?Tom: So, I'm on Twitter at @tomkivlin. I'm also on LinkedIn. So, I'm Tom Kivlin, working for Vodafone Group. I am a member of the telecom user group within the CNCF. So, you can find them on GitHub and also in the… I think it's the CNCF or the Kubernetes Slack. And yeah, happy to share experiences and keep learning.Emily: Well, thank you so much. Again, this is Tom Kivlin, and we'll go ahead and wrap it up there. Thank you so much, Tom.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Some of the highlights of the show include:  The difference between cloud computing and cloud native. Why operations teams often struggle to keep up with development teams, and the problems that this creates for businesses. How Dave works with operations teams and trains them how to approach cloud native so they can keep up with developers, instead of being a drag on the organization.  Dave's philosophy on introducing processes, and why he prefers to use as few as possible for as long as possible and implement them only when problems arise.  Why executives should strive to keep developers happy, productive, and empowered.  Why operations teams need to stop thinking about themselves as people who merely complete ticket requests, and start viewing themselves as key enablers who help the organization move faster.  Viewing wait time as waste.  The importance of aligning operations and development teams, and having them work towards the same goal. This also requires using the same reporting structure.  Links: Company site: https://www.mangoteque.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmangot/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveMangot CIO Author page: https://www.cio.com/author/Dave-Mangot/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Dave Mangot. And Dave is a consultant who works with companies on improving their web operations. He has experience working with a variety of companies making the transition to cloud-native and in various stages of their cloud computing journey. So, Dave, my first question is, can you go into detail about, sort of, the nitty-gritty of what you do?Dave: Sure. I've spent my whole technical professional career mostly in Silicon Valley, after moving out to California from Maryland. And really, I got early into web operations working in Unix systems administration as a sysadmin, and then we all changed the names of all those things over the years from sysadmin to Technical Infrastructure Engineer, and then Site Reliability Engineer, and all the other fun stuff. But I've been involved in the DevOps movement, kind of, since the beginning, and I've been involved in cloud computing, kind of, since the beginning. And so I'm lucky enough in my day job to be able to work with companies on their, like you said, transitions into Cloud, but really I'm helping companies, at least for their cloud stuff, think about what does cloud computing even mean? What does it mean to operate in a cloud computing manner? It's one thing to say, “We're going to move all of our stuff from the data center into Cloud,” but most people you'll hear talk about lift and shift; does that really the best way? And obviously, it's not. I think most of the studies will prove that and things like the State of DevOps report, and those other things, but really love working with companies on, like, what is so unique about the Cloud, and what advantages does that give, and how do we think about these problems in order to be able to take the best advantage that we can?Emily: Dive into a little bit more. What is the difference between cloud computing and cloud-native? And where does some confusion sometimes seep in there?Dave: I think cloud-native is just really talking about the fact that something was designed specifically for running in a cloud computing environment. To me, I don't really get hung up on those differences because, ultimately, I don't think they matter all that much. You can take memcached, which was designed to run in the data center, and you can buy that as a service on AWS. So, does that mean because it wasn't designed for the Cloud from the beginning, that it's not going to work? No, you're buying that as a service from AWS. I think cloud-native is really referring to these tools that were designed with that as a first-class citizen. And there's times where that really matters. I remember, we did an analysis of the configuration management tools years back, and what would work best on AWS and things like that, and it was pretty obvious that some of those tools were not designed for the Cloud. They were not cloud-native. They really had this distinct feel that their cloud capabilities were bolted on much later, and it was clunky, and it was hard to work with, whereas some of the other tools, really felt like that was a very natural fit, like that was the way that they had been created. But ultimately, I think the differences aren't all that great, it just, really, matters how you're going to take advantage of those tools.Emily: And with the companies that you work with, what is the problem or problems that they are usually facing that lead them to hire you?Dave: Generally the question, or the statement, I guess, that I get from the CIOs and CTOs, and CEOs is, “My production web operations team can't keep up with my development teams.” And there's a lot of reasons why those kinds of things can happen, but with the dawn of all these cloud-native type things, which is pretty cool, like containers, and all this other stuff, and CI/CD is a big popular thing now, and all kinds of other stuff. What happens, tends to be is the developers are really able to take advantage of these things, and consume them, and use them because look at AWS. AWS is API, API, API. Make an API call for this, make an API call for that. And for developers, they're really comfortable in that environment. Making an API call is kind of a no brainer. And then a lot of the operations teams are struggling because that's not normal for them. Maybe they were used to clicking around in a VMware console, and now that's not a thing because everything's API, API, API. And so what happens is the development teams start to rocket ahead of the operations teams, and the operations teams are running around struggling to keep up because they're kind of in a brand new world that the developers are dragging them into, and they have to figure out how they're going to swim in that world. And so I tend to work with operations teams to help them get to a point where they're way more comfortable, and they're thinking about the problems differently, and they're really enabling development to go as quickly as development wants to go. Which, you know, that's going to be pretty fast, especially when you're working with cloud-native stuff. But I mean, kind of to the point earlier, we built—at one of the companies I worked at years ago—what I would say, like, a cloud environment in a data center, where everything was API first, and you didn't have to run around, and click in consoles, and try to find information, and manually specify things, and stuff like that; it just worked. Just like if you make a call for VM in AWS, an EC2 instance. And so, really, it's much more about the way that we look at the problems, then it is about where this thing happens to be located because obviously cloud-native is going to be Azure, it's going to be GCP, it's going to be all those things. There's not one way to do it specifically.Emily: What's the business pain that happens if the operations team can't keep up with the developers? What happens? Why is that bad?Dave: That's a great question. It really comes down to this idea of an impedance mismatch. If the operations teams can't keep up with the development teams, then the operations teams become a drag on the business. There's so much—if you read the state of DevOps reports that are put out by DORA research and—I guess, Google now, now that they bought it—but they show that these organizations that are able to go quickly: the organizations that are able to do deploys-on-demand, the organizations that are able to remediate outages faster, all those things play into your business's success. So, the businesses that can do that have higher market capitalization, they have happier employees, they have all kinds of fantastic business outcomes that come from those abilities, and so you don't want your operations team to be a drag on your organization because that speed of business, that ability to do things a lot more easily, let's even call it like a lot more cloud-native if you want, that has real market effects. That has real business performance impacts. And so, if you look at the DevOps way of looking at this—like I said, I've been pretty involved in the DevOps movement—really the DevOps is about all the different parts of the organization working together in concert to be able to make the organization a success. And the first way of DevOps, you're talking about systems thinking, you're looking at the overall flow of work through the system, and you want to optimize that because the faster we can get work flowing through the system, the faster we can deliver new features to our customers, bug fixes to our customers, all the things that our customers want, all the things that our customers love. And so if you're going to optimize flow of work through the system, you definitely don't want work slowing down inside the operations part of the system. That's bad for the business, and that's bad for your business outcomes.Emily: And how do you think companies realize that this is a problem? I mean, is it obvious or not?Dave: I think it's one of those things like I always talk to people about process right? When do we want to introduce process? a lot of startups are like, “We need more process here, we need more process there.” And my advice to everybody is always, use as little process as possible for as long as possible, and when you need that process, it will make itself known. The pain will be so obvious that you'll be like, “Okay, we can't do this anymore this way. We've run this all the way to the end, and now we have to change things, and now we have to introduce process here.” And I think that it becomes pretty obvious to certainly the companies that I work with. At one point where they're like, “This isn't working, I'm getting my development leadership coming to be saying ‘I'm waiting for this, I'm waiting for that. I'm waiting for this. I'm waiting for that. I don't have permission to do this. We're being blocked here.'” all the things that you don't want to be hearing from your development leaders because what they're expressing is their pain of being inhibited; their pain of being slowed down. And I think it's just, like, with the process thing, I think at some point, the pain becomes obvious enough that people say, “We have to do something.” I remember talking to one company, and I was like, “Well, what do you want out of this engagement? What's your end goal?” And they said, “We'd like it for our developers to show up every day and be really happy with the environment that they're working in.” And so, you can hear it there, right? Their developers are not happy. People are coming from other companies, and they're going to this company—and I certainly won't name who they are—but they're going to this company, and they're saying, “Hey, when I worked at this other place, I didn't have all this. I didn't have all these things stopping me. I didn't have all these things inhibiting me.” And so that's why, what I said in the beginning, it's things that I'm hearing from CEOs, and CTOs, and people in those positions because at some point that stuff is just bubbling up and bubbling up, and the amount of frustration just really makes itself known.Emily: Why do you think COOs care how happy their developers are?Dave: Well, I mean, there's tons of studies that show the happier your developers are, the more productive they are. I mean, look at the Google rework stuff about psychological safety. Google discovered after hiring a professional psychology researcher to determine who were their highest performing teams, their highest performing teams weren't the teams that had the most talented engineers; it wasn't the people who went to MIT; their highest performing teams weren't the ones who had the best boss, or the coolest scrum master, or anything like that. Their highest performing teams were the teams that had the most psychological safety. People who were able to operate in an environment where they felt free to talk about the things that maybe weren't going well, things that could be improved, crazy ideas they had to make improvements, stuff like that. And I don't think that you can be on a team that's unhappy and feel like there's a lot of psychological safety there. And so, I think those things are highly correlated to one another. So, I mean, obviously, the environment that's necessary for psychological safety goes far beyond whether or not my Kubernetes cluster is automatically deploying my Docker containers; that's certainly not the case. But I think it's important to recognize that if developers are in an environment where they feel empowered, and they're not being inhibited, and they can really focus on their work, and improving things, and making things better, that they're going to produce better work, and that's going to be better for companies and certainly their business outcomes.Emily: And bringing it back to cloud-native a little bit. Can you connect for me how a cloud-native type architecture helps bring operation teams up to speed or helps remove these roadblocks?Dave: Yeah. Well, I think it's a little bit of the reverse, right? I think that the successful operations teams are the ones who are enabling these cloud-native ways of looking at the world. I think there used to be this notion of, if you want something from operations, you open up a ticket, and then operations goes and they do the ticket, and then they come back to you and say, “It's done.” And then, this never-ending cycle of sending off something and then waiting, and then sending off something, and waiting. And in cloud-native environments, we don't have that. In cloud-native environments, people are empowered and enabled, to go off and deploy things, and test things, and remediate things, and do dark launching, and have feature flags, and all these other things that, even though we're moving quickly, we can do that safely. And I think that's part of the mind shift that has to happen for these operations teams, is they need to stop thinking about themselves as people who get things done, and they need to start thinking about themselves as people who are enabling the whole organization to go faster, easier, better. I always talked to my SREs—Site Reliability Engineers—who used to work for me, and I'd say, “You have two responsibilities and that's it. And this is, in order, your first responsibility is to keep the site up.” That sounds pretty normal, right? That's what most operations teams feel like they've been tasked with. And I'm like, “Your second responsibility is to keep the developers moving as fast as possible.” And so really, when you start taking that to heart, keeping developers moving as fast as possible, that's not closing tickets as fast as you can. That's not keeping the developer moving as fast as possible, that's enabling developers to have self-service tools, and have things where they want to get something done and it's very painless for them to do that. We used to launch EC2 instances at one of the companies I was working with, where we had gotten it down to a point where you just said what kind of machine you wanted, and then that was it; and you were done. And everything else got taken care of for you: all the DNS, all the security groups, routing, networking, DNS, like, everything was all taken care of, all the software was loaded. There wasn't anything to do but say what you wanted. And we actually were able to turn that tool over to the developers so they could launch all their own stuff. They didn't need us anymore. And I think that's really creating these cloud-native ideas. Certainly, a lot of that stuff is part of the cloud-native tooling, now. This was a few years ago, but really it's enabling the developers to go as fast as possible. We could have said, “Hey, you want a machine? Open up a ticket, and it's so easy for us to spin up a machine.” But we didn't do that. We took it to the next level, and we empowered them, and we allowed them to go quickly. And that's really the sort of mental shift that the operations teams have to make. How do we do that?Emily: I have to say, I have never been a developer, but whenever anyone talks about this process of submitting a ticket and waiting for it to get addressed, it just sounds like hell.Dave: Yeah. Well, if you look at it from a lean manufacturing, Toyota kind of thing, all that wait time is waste. In lean, they call that waste. It's a handoff: there's no work being accomplished during that time, and so it's waste in the system. And so Toyota is always trying to move towards—I can't remember they call. It, I think it was, like, one piece flow, or something like that where basically you want work to be happening at all times in the system, and you certainly don't want things sitting around. And so, developers don't want that either. Developers want to put things out there. They want to see, does this work? Does this not work? And when you enable developers to have that kind of power and have that ability to go really fast, there's all kinds of like things that we can enable for the business that help cost savings, better security, all kinds of stuff far beyond just simple, “Hey, here's more features. Here's more features.”Emily: How easy do you think it is for operations teams to sort of shift to think, like, “Our job is to make things as easy as possible for developers?”Dave: I don't think it's that hard, actually, mostly because if we're starting to look at things from a DevOps mindset, we're understanding that the whole goal is to optimize the entire system; it's not to optimize a single point in the system. And I always advocate that operations teams report up through the same reporting structure as the engineering teams do. The worst thing you can do is silo it off so all the operations teams report to the COO, and all the engineering teams report to the CTO. Like, that's awful because what you want to do is you want to align the outcome so that everybody's working towards the same goal, and now we can start to partner up together in order to be able to achieve those goals. And so, one of my favorite examples of this from, like, enabling the developers to go fast, and doing that in partnership with operations was, I worked at a company, and we had a storage system, and we were storing all this stuff in a database, and we were paying a lot of money to store all this data for our customers. And that's what the customers were paying us for, was to store their data. And so the developers had this idea that they wanted to try this other way of storing the data. And so, we worked with them—the operations teams work with them, “How do you want to do this? What kinds of things do you need? What's going to work best? Is this going to work best? Is that going to work best?” And we had a lot of collaboration, and, “Here's where we're going to launch these new things, and we're going to try them out. And this is how we're going to try them out.”And it wasn't a process that happened overnight: from beginning to end of this project, it probably took, I don't know, a year and a half or something like that, of iterating, and trying, and testing, and making sure it's safe, and all these other stuff. But in the end, we wound up shutting off the old database system and talking to the engineers about what that meant for the business. They said a conservative estimate would be that we saved the company 75 percent on storage costs. That's the conservative estimate. I mean, that's insane, right? 75 percent for their biggest cost. That was the biggest cost of the company, and we knocked it down by 75 percent, at minimum.And so this idea of enabling this cloud approach of going quickly, and taking advantage of all these resources, and moving fast without impediments, that can have some major impact. And it's not operations teams doing that; it's not development teams doing that; it's operations and development teams doing that together in partnership to achieve those pretty awesome business outcomes.Emily: In that particular case, who had the initial push? Who had this initial idea that let's figure out a better way to approach storage?Dave: Well, I mean, we got a challenge from the business. The business said, look at our costs. Look at what we're doing. Are there ways that we can improve this so that we can improve our profitability? And so it was a challenge. And I think the best thing about that is, it wasn't the business telling us how to do it; it wasn't people saying, here's what you should do. The business is saying, “If this is a problem, how do you solve it?” And then they, kind of, got out of our way and said, “Let the engineers do their engineering.” And I think that was kind of fantastic because the results were exactly what they wanted. But the business is going to look at the problems from a business perspective, and I think it's important that as engineers, we look at the problems from a business perspective as well. We're not showing up for work to have fun and play with computers. We're showing up at work to achieve an objective. That's why we get paid. If you want to hobby around with your computers, you can hobby around at home, but we're getting paid at work to achieve the goals of the business. And so, that was the way that they were looking at the problem, and that's the way that we wound up looking at the problem. Which is the correct way?Emily: Do you have any other notable examples that come to mind?Dave: Yeah, I mean, this idea of cloud and being able to go quickly, we had this one problem with that—actually, with that same database engine, which is hilarious, before we wound up replacing it, where we were upgrading the software from one version to another, and we're making a pretty big jump. And so, we spun up the new version of the software; we loaded the data on, and we started seeing how their performance was. And the performance was terrible. I mean, not just, we would have trouble with it; it was unusable. There was no way we could run the business with that level of performance. And we're like, “What happened? [laughs]. What did we do here?” And so, we went and looked in GitHub at the differences between the old version of the software, and the new version of software. And there was, like, 5000 commits that had happened between the old version and the new version. And so all we had to do was find out which of those 5000 commits was the problem. [laughs]. Which, that's a daunting task or whatever. But the operations team got down to it, and we built a bunch of tooling, and we started changing some things and making improvements so that we were able to spin up clusters of this software and run a full test suite to determine whether this problem still existed. And that was something we could do in 20 minutes. And so then we started doing what's called git bisecting, but we started searching in a certain kind of pattern, which I won't get into, for which of these—where was the problem? So, we would look, say in the middle, and then if the problem wasn't there in the middle, then we would look between the middle and the right. If it was there, then we would look between the middle and the left. And we kept doing this bisect, and within two days, we had found the exact commit that had caused the problem. And it was them subtracting, like, a nano from a milli, or something like that. But going back and talking to the CTO afterwards, I said, “You know, if we hadn't built these tools, and we hadn't had this ability to really iterate super quickly in the Cloud, what would you have done?” And he was like, “I have no idea.” He's like, “Maybe we would have spent a couple of days and then given up, maybe we would have just gone in a completely different direction.” But that ability to be able to work so effectively with these cloud tools, and so easily with these cloud tools, enabled us to do something that the business just would just not have had the opportunity to take advantage of at all. And so that was a major win for being able to have operations teams that think about these problems in a completely different way.Emily: It sounds like, in this particular company, the engineering teams and the business leaders were fairly well-aligned, and able to communicate pretty well about what the end goals are. How common do you find that is with your clients?Dave: I don't know. I think it's pretty variable. It depends on the organization. I think that is one of the things that I emphasize when I'm working with my clients is how important that alignment is. I sort of talked about it a little bit earlier, when I said you shouldn't have one group reporting to the CTO and another group reporting to the COO. But also, it's really important for leadership to be communicating this stuff in the proper way. One of the things I loved most about my experience working at Salesforce was, Marc Benioff was the CEO and he would publish what they call V2MOMs, which is like—oh boy, vision, values, metrics, obstacles, and measures, or something. I don't remember what the last thing was. But he would publish his V2MOM, which was basically his objectives for the next time period, whether it was quarterly, or yearly, I don't really remember. But then what would happen was the people that worked for him would look at his V2MOM, and they would write theirs about what they wanted to get accomplished, but showing how what they were doing was in support of what he wanted. And then the people below them would do the same thing. And the people below them would do the same thing. And what you were able to create was this incredible amount of alignment at a 16,000 person company, which is crazy, up and down the ladder so that everybody understands what they're doing, and how it fits into the larger picture, and what they're doing in support of the goals of the business, and the objectives of the business, and that goes all the way down to the most junior engineer. And I think having that kind of alignment is, I mean, it's obviously incredibly powerful. I mean, Salesforce is a rocket ship and has been for a long, long time. And Google does this for their OKRs, and that there was that thing that was popularized by Intel as well; there's a whole bunch of these things. But that alignment is phenomenal if you want to have a lasting, high performing organization.Emily: When you see companies that don't have that alignment, or even just, it seems like the engineering team maybe doesn't entirely understand where the business is going, or even the business doesn't understand what the engineering team is doing, what happens and where is the communication going wrong?Dave: I mean, you see the frustration. You see the fracturing. You see the silos. You see a lot of finger-pointing. I've definitely worked with some clients where the ops team hates the dev team; the dev team hates the ops team. I remember the dev team saying, “Ops doesn't actually want to do any work. They just want to invent stuff for themselves to work on. And that's how they want to spend their day.” And the ops team is saying, “The developers don't even understand anything about what we're doing, and they just want to go o—” you know, there's all these crazy, awful made up stories. And if you've ever read the book Crucial Conversations—they also have a course, or whatever—one of the things they talk about is you need to establish mutual purpose in order to have a difficult conversation. And I think that's really important for what we're talking about in the business: we need to establish mutual purpose, just we talked about with DevOps, there's only one goal. And the other thing that they say in that class, or in that book, is that when we are going to have a conversation with somebody that we are not getting along with, we invent a story that explains why they behave the way that they do, and every time we see something that validates that story, then it's even more evidence that that story is actually correct. The problem is, is it's a story. Like it's not real. It may seem real to us; it may feel real to us. But it's a story. It's something that we made up. And so, that's the kind of outcomes that you get when you have this fracturing, where you don't have this alignment up and down. You have people telling these stories like, “Operations doesn't want to do any real work. They just want to make stuff up for themselves to work on.” Which is, if you're not in that environment, if you're someone like you and me looking from the outside, that's absurd. But I can certainly see how you can make up a story that gets continually validated by what you see because you're looking for evidence that supports your story. That's part of what makes you think that you're right, is that you're always searching for this evidence. And so obviously, those are not going to be high performing organizations. That's why it's so important to get that kind of alignment.Emily: Going back to this idea of sort of moving to cloud-native, what do you think are some of the surprises or misconceptions that come up when teams are moving to more cloud-native approaches?Dave: I feel like my clients generally are not terribly surprised. I think by the time that someone's reaching out to me, they are feeling a lot of pain, and they know that things have to change, and they are looking for what are the ways that things have to change? I don't ever have to go into a client and convince them that they need to do it better. The clients that are coming to me, recognizing that they're having a problem, and so it's really just getting them to stop focusing on what we call an SRE toil, which is popularized by Google, which is—I don't remember the exact definition, but it's basically manual work that's devoid of enduring value, that's repetitive, it's automatable, it's just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat: we're not making improvements anymore. And so once we start to have this Kaizen mindset, this idea of continual improvement at all times, instead of just trying to keep the business running, that starts to enable all this kinds of stuff. And that's why we talked about building things in sort of a cloud-native manner. We're talking about that ability to go fast. We're talking about that ability to enable things, and part of that is this idea of continual improvement; this idea of always making things better. A lot of this comes out of Agile as well. I always talk to people about their sprint retrospectives, and I say, “It's your opportunity to make your team better. It's your opportunity to make your environment better. It's your opportunity to make your company better.” And I was like, “The worst thing that you could do in Agile is if in January of last year, and in January of this year, your team is just as good as it was.” That's terrible. Your team needs to be much better than it was. And so enabling developers to go quickly and all that other stuff. And putting all those things in place is a big part of that.Emily: Anything else that you want to add about this topic that I didn't think to ask?Dave: I mean, I think embracing these principles is really important. I think that if you look at the companies who are trying to go fast, and don't embrace these principles, these cloud-native ideas, or just even these cloud computing ideas, it basically becomes technical debt that keeps building up, and building up, and building up. And everybody knows accumulating tons of technical debt is not going to help your organization to move faster; it's not going to help you achieve all those great business outcomes that you want to get out of the State of DevOps report. And so I've seen situations where they have not been able to make that transition into this way of looking at the world, and the environment becomes really fragile; it becomes really brittle; it becomes really hard to make changes, and the only way is to make changes is to double down on the technical debt, and accumulate more of it, to the point where eventually they wind up spinning up an entire team whose sole purpose is to try to undo the mess that's been created. And you don't want that. You don't want to allocate a team to start unpacking your technical debt. You'd rather just not accumulate that technical debt as you're going along. And so I think it's really crucial for businesses that want to be successful in the long term that they start to embrace these ideas early. And obviously, if I'm a startup and I want to embrace a lot of these cloud-native things, that's a lot easier than if I'm a well-established company. I, in my consulting practice, I don't really work with startups because they don't tend to have these problems. They don't tend to accumulate a lot of technical debt because they are founded with this idea of going quickly and being able to empower developers and enable people to go quick. To your point earlier, the companies that I'm working with are the ones who are making this transition, where they've been running in the data center, or maybe they built an environment in the Cloud, but it's just not operating the way that they expected, and they're paying ridiculous amounts of money [laughs] to run stuff in AWS, where we thought, “Hey, what's going on? This isn't supposed to be this way.” But startups have the ability to do this much easier because they're unencumbered. And then as they grow, and they start to introduce more process because that stuff is inevitable that we're going to need to do that, that's when these things become even more important that we make sure that we're keeping them in mind and we're doubling down on them, and we're not introducing lean waste into the system and stuff like that, that will ultimately catch up with us.Emily: It's so true. All right, just a couple more questions. What is your favorite engineering tool?Dave: Ah. I mean, I'm supposed to give some kind of DevOps-y, it's not about the tools answer, but this week I think it was, on Twitter, I saw somebody else put up a SmokePing graph. And most people are not going to have heard of SmokePing. I worked at multiple ISPs in my career already, so the networking stuff is important to me. But wow, I love a SmokePing graph. And it's basically just a bunch of pings that are sent to some target, and then they're graphed when they come back, but instead of saying, “I sent one ping, and I came back with 20 milliseconds,” it sends 20, and then it graphs them all at that time point, so you can actually see density. It's basically before everybody came up with the idea of heat maps, this was one of the original heat map tools, and I still run SmokePing in my house just to see the performance of my home network going out to different parts of the internet, and that's definitely my favorite tool.Emily: Where can listeners connect with you? Website?Dave: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So, if people are interested in my business, I'm at mangoteque.com, M-A-N-G-O-T-E-Q-U-E. That was a fun name invented by Corey Quinn of The Duckbill Group and I loved it, and so I wound up using it. And they could also find me on LinkedIn obviously, or Twitter at @DaveMangot. M-A-N-G-O-T, and I post a lot on there about things that I've observed. I post a lot on there about DevOps. I post a lot on there about taking a scientific approach to a lot of the things we're doing, not just in terms of the scientific method, but like in terms of cognitive neuroscience, and things like that. And I also write a monthly column for CIO.com.Emily: Well, Dave, thank you so much for joining me.Dave: Thank you for having me, Emily, this was really fun.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

This conversation covers: How Frame.io was faced with the decision to be cloud native or cloud-enabled — and the business and technical reasons why Frame.io chose to be cloud native.  How Abhinav successfully built a world class cloud-native security program from the ground up to protect Frame.io users' sensitive video content. Abhinav also talks about the special security considerations for truly cloud native applications.  Cloud native as a “journey without a destination.” In other words, there is no end point with cloud native transitions, because new technologies are always being developed. Why Abhinav is a firm believer in both ISEs and GitOps, and why he thinks the industry should embrace both of these strategies. The challenge of not only maintaining security in this type of environment, but also communicating security issues to various stakeholders with different priorities. Abinhav also talks about the role that specialists like AWS and machine learning experts can play in furthering security agendas. Common misconceptions about cloud native security. Frame.io's decision to roll out Kubernetes, and why they are also considering adding chaos engineering to fortify against unexpected issues. Tool and vendor overload, and the importance of trying to find the right tools that fit your infrastructure.  Links: Frame.io: https://frame.io/ Connect with Abhinav on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/absri/ The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com  TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Abhinav Srivastava. Abhinav, can you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us about where you work, and what you do.Abhinav: Thanks for having me, Emily. Hello, everyone. My name is Avinash Srivastava. I'm a VP and the head of information security and infrastructure at Frame.io. At Frame, I am building the security and infrastructure programs from ground up, making sure that we are secured and compliant, and our services are available and reliable. Before joining Frame.io, I spent a number of years in AT&T Research. There I worked on various cloud and security technologies, wrote numerous research papers, and filed patents. And before joining AT&T, I spent five great years in Georgia Tech on a Ph.D. in computer science. My dissertation was on cloud and virtualization security.Emily: And what do you do? What does an average day look like?Abhinav: Right. So, just to tell you where I answer the question where I work: so I work at Frame.io, and Frame.io is a cloud-based video review and collaboration startup that allows users to securely upload their video contents to our platform, and then invite teams and clients to collaborate on those uploaded assets. We are essentially building the video cloud, so you can think of us as a GitHub for videos. What I do when I get to office—apart from getting my morning coffee—as soon as I arrive at my desk, I check my calendar to see how's my day looking; I check my emails and slack messages. We use slack primarily within the company doing for communication. And then I do my daily standup with my teams. We follow a two-week sprint across all departments that I oversee. So, a standup gives me a good picture on the current priorities and any blockers.Emily: Tell me a little bit about the cloud-native journey at Frame.io? How did the company get started with containers, and what are you using to orchestrate now? How have you moved along in the cloud-native journey?Abhinav: We are born in the cloud, kind of, company. So, we are hosted in Amazon AWS since day one. So, we are in the cloud from the get-go. And once you are in the cloud, it is hard not to use tools and technologies that are offered, because our goal has always been to build secure, reliable, and available infrastructure. So, we were very, very mindful from the get-go that while we are in the cloud, we can choose to be cloud-native or just cloud-enabled. Means use tools, just virtual machines, or heavyweight virtual machines, and not to use container and just host our entire workload within that. But we chose to be cloud-native because, again, they wanted to boot up or spin up new containers very fast. As a platform we, as I mentioned, we allow users to upload videos, and once the videos are uploaded, we have to transcode those videos to generate different low-resolution videos. And that use case fits with the lightweight container model. So, from the get-go, we started using containerized microservices; orchestration layer; From AWS, their auto-scaling; automation infrastructure as a code; monitoring. so all those things were, kind of, no brainer for us to use because given our use case and given the way we wanted to be a very fast uploader and transcoder for all of our customers.Emily: This actually leads me to another question: have you guys seen a lot of scaling recently as a result of stay-at-home orders and work from home?Abhinav: Right. So, we are seeing a lot more people moving towards remote collaboration tools who are actually working in the production house since they have to work from home now. So, they are now moving to these kind of tools such as Frame.io. And we do see a lot more customers joining our platform because of that. From the traffic perspective, we did not see much increase in the web traffic or load our infrastructure, because we have always set up the auto-scaling and our infrastructure can always meet these peak demands. So, we didn't see any adverse effect on our infrastructure from these remote situations.Emily: What were some of the other advantages? Like you were talking about that you had the choice to be either cloud-enabled or truly cloud-native? What were the biggest, you know—and I'm interested, obviously in business rationale to the extent you can talk about it—for being truly cloud-native?Abhinav: So, from business perspective, again, a goal was to [basic] secure available and reliable production infrastructure to offer Frame.io services. But cloud-native actually helped us to faster time to market because our developers are just focusing on the business logic, deploying code. They were not worried about the infrastructure aspect, which is good. Then we're rolling out bug fixes very quickly through CI/CD platform, so that, again, we offer the better [good] services to our customer. Cloud-native helped us to meet our SLA and uptime so that our customer can access their content whenever they would like to. It also helped us securing our infrastructure and services, and our cost also went down because we were scaling up and down based on the peak demand, and we don't have to provide dedicated resources, so that's good there. And it also allowed us to faster onboard developers to our platform because we are using a lot of open source technologies, and so the developers can learn quickly—there are a lot more resources out there for them to learn. And it also helped us avoid vendor lock-in. We are relying on more and more open-source projects, CNCF [unintelligible] projects, so that has helped us. And more importantly, it is helping us stay competitive because in this industry—in this time—we would like to be available, we would like to be secure. So, for our customers to stay doing their job that they used to do in an office setting or in a non-remote setting, and we can continue providing help that they need.Emily: How has this changed the security story?Abhinav: So, obviously, security story is same what we have before because, I mean, we allow people to have upload their media content to our platform. So, that's very sensitive content. So, we always wanted to make sure that they stay secure. And for that, we have built a world-class security program from ground up, with emphasis on product security, cloud security, security data science, and also compliance and privacy program. So, we are doing what we used to do: making sure that content is still secure, our infrastructure follows the AWS security best practices, we can identify vulnerability within our application and fix it. So, again, as I said, that it hasn't changed much from security perspective, as far as Frame.io's daily operations are concerned.Emily: How does having a truly cloud-native application, how is that different from a security perspective from something that isn't cloud-native?Abhinav: So, security is very important whether you are cloud-enabled or cloud-native. So, security is very important for all the services. Being in the world of microservices and in the container, actually, it helped us to model the application behavior. For example, if you have one very big monolithic application, it does so many things, so it's really hard for you to know to find out what's the normal execution pattern. And when this application is going to—if it attacked, how it's going to behave, how is abnormal execution look like? But in the microservices world, since each application, each microservices is getting one job. So, you can create a good model of behavior of that container. Or even if you are monitoring their runtime behavior, you know that what kind of processes are going to be invoked from that container? What kind of network connections are going to be made? What are the files are going to be accessed by the services within the host, or within S3, or other resources? So, you know their interaction pattern—execution pattern, and that, you can qualify, both in terms of your security rules that you want to create on the infrastructure for those services, or you can create a better anomaly detection or machine learning models for those behavior. And we did both in our infrastructure to keep them secure.Emily: And how do conversations about security go when you talk with different stakeholders. I'm curious to know if there's any sort of miscommunications, or things that are lost in translation when you're talking about security with, say, the development team; with the business stakeholders; with platform engineers. What are some of the things—anything that gets lost in translation?Abhinav: So, there are two parts of this question. In general, having a discussion around cloud-native services and the security of cloud-native services. Because there are various ways you can deploy a service in the cloud, you can have a service deployed in the cloud just by running a bunch of VMs, or you can deploy it using cloud-native architecture where you have doing all those things. But the cloud-native architecture requires you to think of all the stages of the services. For example, how will SLAs, SLOs, SLIs look like for this service? Or, how do you monitor the service when it execute? How will you protect these services when you deploy them? What kind of resources are going to be accessed by this service? How will create their identity and management rules there? How would you deploy it and how would you create network rules for that so that you can do it in a principle of least privileged fashion, you can execute these services?So, you need to do proper planning that how would a new service going to interact with other services in the infrastructure. And these non-functional requirements are, many times, described poorly or not written at all because as a developer, you would like to create service and deploy service, and so that customer can use it. And these are the things behind the scenes we have to think about it. And we, as a team are working very actively to bridge this knowledge and semantic gap so that these things don't get lost in the translation when you're thinking about the service.Emily: What about when you talk to say, business stakeholders? Is there anything that gets lost in the translation?Abhinav: So, I mean, in the business sense, we always have to keep the discussion at a very high level. That, what's a use of service? Or, where we should deploy? Who are going to be the users? So, at that time, we don't want to talk about those underlying infrastructure-related issues because at the business level, we would like to know that how the service is going to function, and mostly functional requirements. But at the low level, we would like to think about that when we are about design these services, what are the things we have to worry about in order for that service to deploy securely and reliably?Emily: How important is security to Frame.io? Not every company thinks the same about security, I should say.Abhinav: And that's a great question. I think for us, security is very important. I know every company says that, but I think we truly mean that. So, we are close to 150 employees, but I was hired around when I was a [00:12:31 unintelligible] employee as a head of security. So, that shows that we care about security. And I have been building security from ground up. We got our SOC 2 Type II compliance when we was around 70 employees. And there are companies out there who are doing SOC 2, and they are thousand employees. So, we are GDPR compliant; we are working towards our CCPA compliance, and we are TPN compliant as well. TPN stand for Trusted Partner Network, which is the [same world] media, and entertainment companies, and industry users. And we were the first few companies who got that certification, also. So, we care about security very much because we allow users to upload their contents in our cloud and we make sure that those contents remain secure.Emily: And so, is there any tension that you feel between talking about security or making things as secure as possible, and either business stakeholders or other parts of the IT team?Abhinav: So, there is definitely attention. [laughs]. If I say no, then I would be lying because our goal—engineers or developers or service creators, they want to deploy the service. They will get satisfaction once the customer start using those services. And our job is to make sure to—we put some guardrails in place—or barriers in place so that we can vet the application, we can vet the service, we can do the proper testing, we can make sure that by deploying the service, we don't increase our exploitable surface. So, that kind of tension will always be there because, by nature, security's job is to make sure that whatever is deployed is secure. Our infrastructure is secure and the service owner's job is to deploy the service. But I think what we are trying to do in the organization, we are trying to take a risk-based approach because security is just another business function. The way sales is important, the way engineering is important, the same way that security is important. And there's a risk in this environment of not meeting sales targets, same way there's a risk of getting breached. So, how do we provide a risk-based methodology so that when we talk about security, we talk in terms of risk; we talk in terms of probabilities versus possibilities? Because there is always possibility of something going wrong, but what's the probability of something happening? And that basically gives us some way of talking to other business-holders saying that, “Okay, if you deploy the service the risk is high. But the risk is high because the likelihood of getting breached is high, but impact would be very low. So, since risk is the product of impact and likelihood, overall the risk is low.” But sometimes the risk is that chance of getting attacked is very low, but the impact could be very high. Again, you will have risk low because probability of actually happening that event is low. So, that basically gives us some common language we can use to talk to other business-holders because risk is being used as a language across other departments. We try to use the same language to convey cybersecurity risk as well.Emily: Since starting with Frame.io and building this security program from the ground up, what surprises have you encountered?Abhinav: I would say there were many surprises. First of all, I had those surprises because I come from a background from research and development. There, goal was to develop services, goal was to think about new security product, and goal was to think of attack and coming up with defenses for them. Having the responsibility of building the security program from ground up, or having to adjust this risk-based mentality was a big surprise because it's not that just because there is a bug, engineering is going to fix it. You have to show the impact of that bug. You should have a proper [unintelligible] associated with that. You have to show that what are the ways that bug can be launched. So, it means, just because you care about security, doesn't mean that everybody else cares about security. So, you have to keep the communication on. You have to always talking, you have to always adjusting, and you have to use the right language to the right person that you are talking to.Emily: What tips do you have about adjusting your language for different audiences and getting them to understand what you're talking about?Abhinav: So, one thing is to use risk-based methodology. That is saying that, “Oh, we have a bug, or we have a high priority bug.” I think saying that, “What is the impact of that bug? How would that bug be exploited in a real setting?” I think those things are important because people care about security, but then they have hundred other things to do, as well. So, how do you talk to their language? And also building the right team, as well. So, if you want to target product security, you have to have a product security specialist, who can understand these nuances; who can understand what are the different attacks. Some companies build a security team with many generalists. I took an approach where I'm building team with the specialists. So, for product security, I have two core product security engineers who have done this thing many times before. For cloud security, I have a specialist who knows about AWS Cloud and everything. For security data science, I have a machine learning expert. So, for each of those roles that you have mined, you try to fill the position with the right set of people. And coming back to this cloud-native security. I think one thing is very important in the cloud-native world, as I have realized lately, that infrastructure as a goal is very important piece for securing your cloud. It's not that I or the team don't know about it, but the temptation to do things quickly sometimes resorting to manual work instead of writing your Terraform or CloudFormation. So, you can do things quickly, but then the chances of you making error are also high. Because if you go to Terraform, you can follow the regular CI/CD process, you can have your pull request approved by somebody, and chances of finding a error quickly is high. And for security purposes, infrastructure code is a blessing. Because you can put proper guard rails in place to make sure that nobody does manual operation in the infrastructure, and everything goes through proper approval process, and that will—as a head of security if you know that if somebody wants to do anything or open any port in the infrastructure, two people are going to look at it and then they're going to have a dialogue with each other, and they're going to find out the real need for opening that port. Your life will be a lot simpler. Emily: What do you think are some misconceptions about cloud-native security, both inside the engineering department—so developers, for example—and then outside in the rest of the company?Abhinav: I think misconception that I view—and it's my opinion—is that the only thing that is important is deploying fast, or moving to production very fast. I think there are so many things has to be done behind the scene in order for you to move fast. And if you don't do those things, then it means that either you're going to break your application, or you're going to make your infrastructure insecure. So, for example, if you have a CI/CD set up and you want to deploy a business logic, and you think that, “Oh, I can code that thing in AWS Lambda functions.” AWS Lambda function is completely managed service. You went ahead and coded in Python, and your service is up and running. But now in doing so, what you did quickly that you forgot to follow the best practices that Lambda function has to be within the VPC; you need to generate an IAM role that has restricted permission; you have to make sure that proper security groups has to be attached to Lambda functions so that it is not open to www. And those things are part of misconception that, “Oh, if I have to do something, AWS allows that we can do it quickly.” That's what we are trying to do. We are trying to come up with a set of best practices for each of those resources as a team, writing documents, sharing with engineering that, “Okay, you want to do it? Sure, go ahead, do it, but just follow these best practices.” So, that even if you SAM or Terraform, whatever you want to use to deploy your application, make sure that best practices are always followed.Emily: Can you think of any misconceptions about cloud-native security that, say, somebody might have if they're coming from a legacy environment: managing security but in a very different type of environment.Abhinav: So, I mean, cloud-native security is all about making sure that your microservices are secure, the kind of access pattern they have, kind of network pattern they have. So, I think one misconception is that—you can think of misconception is, if you are coming from a monolithic world, where you have logged on your services, but just by assuming that you have a parameter between outside world and inside world, so your firewall rules are just like that between in and out. But that parameter is blurred now. There is no such thing as a “them versus us.” It's all blurred now. So, in the microservices world, instead of North/South traffic going up and down. You have to think about East/West traffic as well. So, making sure that your service communication are secure as well: you make sure you use proper cryptography, make sure your endpoints are authenticated so that your services are not compromised. Because if one service compromised, if you don't use proper control among those services, then your other services can be compromised very quickly. And that's the problem when we go from monolithic application to microservices.Emily: Do you think that people outside of the security team understand that distinction?Abhinav: I would say they do, to the extent that they know about it, but then when we have to actually implement it, there are always some concerns that it is going to slow down our application, it is going to introduce latency in the application. So, people do understand that okay parameter is going away, but to the extent that they know about it, but when you—again, when we start implementing it, there is always concern that how it's going to play out.Emily: Do you think Frame.io is fully cloud-native? Do you think there's anything that you could do to be more quote-unquote, “cloud native.”Abhinav: So, in my opinion, it is a journey without any destination. Just like security, you can never say, “I'm secure.” You will have to adjust your control based on the threats or attacks going on. In the same way, there is no end to transition to cloud-native because new technologies are coming, and we will have to evaluate new tools that can help us realize our business goals effectively. So, we are cloud-native, but still, we can do a lot more things, given time and resources. So, in some concrete world that we are doing right now, that we are creating more tools for developers to perform tasks themselves. So, creating more self-serve culture. As I said that moving towards more [IFC] model, and so on. And for that, we are setting up guardrails so that they can perform those operations within those boundaries without impacting security and reliability. We are also looking into ways to extend Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes is in itself a full cloud platform with a lot of possibilities. So, we are interested in making it more programmable for our environment. But these are ongoing things that we'll have to continue doing it.Emily: Do you have any other next steps that you could share? What's next in your journey?Abhinav: So, we rolled out Kubernetes in our infrastructure last December, and that move paid us off. So, we are building more tools on Kubernetes. As I said, that we are going towards more self-service style of architecture where developers can do a lot more things within those guardrails and we are also looking into ways to introduce chaos engineering in our environment because we do things fast, but we break things fast as well. [laughs]. So, one small configuration error can create severity zero alert. So, what we need is a good chaos engineering practices to simulate these areas, so that everybody can train on these events and know how to prevent and respond to such problems. That will reduce our incident resolution time as well.Emily: When—sort of last question: anything else that you would like to add?Abhinav: Two things, I think. One thing is we all should be going towards IFC and GitOps; infrastructure code and GitOps. If this is the one takeaway from this podcast, is that that's the way to go. I know manually doing work is tempting, but that creates problem down the road. So, life will be a lot simpler if we go with the IFC and GitOps. Second thing is that I feel this pain, and many other people are facing the same way, that there are too many tools and vendors out there. So, it's really hard to choose from what is going to work in your environment. CNCF is helping us by highlighting some of these projects by assigning proper maturity levels, like sandbox incubation, and graduated project, so on, but it still is very challenging to find the right tooling that fits your infrastructure. So, always make sure that when you choose a new technology, see how it's going to be working with your existing technologies because it's not that easy to throw away an existing thing because all these things that the tool that you try, it also complicates your security as well because you just do not know how it's going to play out when you deploy this new technology in your environment where the other tools and services are running. So, I think we have to evaluate all tools carefully to make sure that we understand its a security and reliability impact on our existing infrastructure.Emily: What is your can't live without engineering tool or security tool?Abhinav: Huh, that's a good question. Right now, one tool that I cannot live without is Falco. That is a runtime container monitoring solution. We invested a lot on it, and it is paying off in terms of the kind of alert it is generating, kind of visibility it is providing in our infrastructure. And one tool I can't leave off from both from security infrastructure perspective is Slack because we have done a lot of automation to bring all these alerts through Slack. So, all of our ops happen via Slack. So, I think these are the two tools I'm relying a lot in terms of visibility and in terms of response.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining me.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode of the Business Cloud Native, host Emily Omier talks with Jon Tirsen, who is engineering lead for storage at Cash App. This conversation focuses on Cash App's cloud native journey, and how they are working to build an application that is more scalable, flexible, and easier to manage.The conversation covers: How the need for hybrid cloud services and uniform program models led Cash App to Kubernetes.  Some of the major scaling issues that Cash App was facing. For example, the company needed to increase user capacity, and add new product lines.  The process of trying to scale Cash App's MySQL database, and the decision to split up their dataset into smaller parts that could run on different databases. Cash App's monolithic application, which contains hundreds of thousands of lines of code — and why it's becoming increasingly difficult to manage and grow.  How Jon's team is trying to balance product/ business and technical needs, and deliver value while rearchitecting their system to scale their operations. Why Cash App is working to build small, product-oriented teams, and a system where products can be executed and deployed at their own pace through the cloud. Jon also discusses some of the challenges that are preventing this from happening. How Cash App was able to help during the pandemic, by facilitating easy stimulus transfers through their service — and why it wouldn't have been possible without a cloud native architecture.  Links: Cash App: https://cash.app/ Square: https://squareup.com/us/en Jon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tirsen?lang=en Connect with Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tirsen/?originalSubdomain=au The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com  TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, I'm here chatting with Jon Tirsen.Jon: Happy to be here. My name is, as you said, Jon Tirsen, and I work as the engineering lead of storage here at Cash App. I've been at Cash for maybe four or five years now. So, I've been with it from the very early days. And before Cash, I was doing a startup, that failed, for five years. So, it's a travel guide in the mobile phone startup. And before that, I was at Google working on another failed product called the Google Wave, which you might remember, and before that, it was a company called ThoughtWorks, which some of you probably know about as well.Emily: And in case people don't know, the Cash App is part of Square, right?Jon: Yes. Cash App is where we're separating all the different products quite a lot these days. So, it used to be called just Square Cash, but now it has its own branding and its own identity, and its own leadership, and everything. So, we're trying to call it an ecosystem of startups. So, each product line can run its business the way it wants to, to a large degree.Emily: And so, what do you actually spend your day doing?Jon: Most of my days, I'm still code, and doing various operational tasks, and setting up systems, and testing, and that sort of thing. I also, maybe about half my day, I spend on more management tasks, which is reviewing documents, writing documents, and talking to people trying to figure out our strategy and so on. So, maybe about half my time, I do real technical things, and then the other half I do more management stuff.Emily: Where would you say the cloud-native journey started for you?Jon: Well, so a lot of Square used to run on-premises. So, we had our own data centers and things. But especially for Cash App, since we've grown so quickly, it started getting slightly out of control. We were basically outgrowing—we could not physically put more machines into our data centers. So, we've started moving a lot of our services over to Amazon in this case, and we want to have a shared way of building services that would work both in the Cloud and also in our data centers. So, something like Kubernetes and all the tools around that would give us a more uniform programming model that we could use to deploy apps in both of these environments. We started that, two, three years ago. We started looking at moving our workload out of our data centers.Emily: What were the issues that you were encountering? Give me a little bit more details about the scaling issues that we were talking about.Jon: There two dimensions that we needed to scale out the Cash App, sort of, system slash [unintelligible] architecture. So, one thing was that we just grew so quickly that we needed to be able to increase capacity. So, that was across the board. So, from databases to application servers, and bandwidth, everywhere. We need to just be able to increase our capacity of handling more users, but also we were trying to grow our product as well. So, at the same time, we also want to build and be able to add new features at an increased pace. So, we want to be able to add new product lines in the Cash App. So, for example, we built the Cash Card, which is a way you can keep your money in the Cash App bank accounts, and then you can spend that money using a separate card, and then we add a new functionality around that card, and so on. So, we also needed to be able to scale out the team to be able to have more people working on the team to build new products for our users, for our customers. Those are the two dimensions: we needed to scale out the system, but we also needed to have more people be able to work productively. So, that's why we started trying to chop up—we have this big monolith as most companies probably do, which that's I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in there. But we also wanted to move things out of that, to be able to have more people contribute productively.Emily: And where are you in that process?Jon: Well, [laughs], we're probably adding still adding code at an exponential rate to the monolith. We're also adding code at an exponential rate outside of the monolith, but it just feels so much easier to just build some code in the monolith than it is outside of it, unfortunately, which something we're trying to fix, but it's very hard. And it is getting a little bit out of hand, this monolith now. So, we have, sort of, a moratorium on adding new code to the monolith now, and I'm not sure how much of an effect that has made. But the monolith is still growing, as well as our non-monolith services as well, of course. Emily: When you were faced with this scaling issue, what were the conversations happening between the technical side and the business owners? And how is this decision made about the best way to solve this problem is x, is the Cloud, is cloud-native architecture?Jon: I think the business side—the product owners, product managers—they trust us to make the right decision. So, it was largely a decision made on the technical side. They do still want us to build functionality, and to add new features, and fix bugs, and so on. So, they want us to do that, but they don't really have strong influence on the technical choices we've made. I think that's something we have to balance out. So, how can we keep on giving the product side and the business side what they need? So, to keep on delivering value to them while we try to rearchitect our system so that we can scale out our operations on our side. So, it's a very tricky balance to find there. And I think so far, maybe we've erred on the side of keep on delivering functionality, and maybe we need to do more on the rearchitecting things. But yeah, that's always a constant rebalancing act we're always dealing with. Emily: Do you think that you have gotten the increased scalability? How far along are you on reaching the goals that you originally had?Jon: I think we have a pretty scalable system now, in terms of the amount of customers we can service. So, we can add capacity. If we can keep on adding hardware to it, we can grow very far. We've actually noticed that the last few weeks, we've had an almost unprecedented growth, especially with the Coronavirus crisis. Every single day, it's almost a record. I mean, there's still issues, of course, and we're constantly trying to stay on top of that growth, but we have a reasonably good architecture there. What I think is probably our larger problem is the other side, so the human side. As I said, we are still adding code to this monolith, which is getting completely out of hand to work with. And we're not growing our smaller services fast enough. It's probably time to spend more effort on rearchitecting that side of things as well.Emily: What are some of the organizational, or people challenges that you've run into?Jon: Yeah. So, we want to build smaller teams oriented around products. We see ourselves more of a platform on products these days: we're not just a single product. And we want to build smaller teams. That is, maybe we have one team that is around our card, and one team around our [unintelligible] trading and so on. And we want to have the smaller teams, and we want them to be able to execute independently. So, we want to be able to put together a cross-functional team of some engineers, and some UX people, and some product people, and some business people, and then they should be able to execute independently and have their own services running in our cloud infrastructure, and not have to coordinate too much with all of the other teams that are also trying to execute independently. So, each product can do its own thing, and own their own services, and deploy at their own pace, and so on. That's what we're trying to achieve, but as long as they still have to do a lot of work inside of our big monolith, then they can't really execute independently. So, one team might build something that actually causes issues with another team's products, and so on, and that becomes very complicated to deal with. So, we tried to move away from that, and move towards a model where a team has a couple of services that they own, and they can do most of their work inside of those services.Emily: What do you think is preventing you from being farther along than you are? Farther along towards this idea of teams being totally self-sufficient?Jon: Yeah, I think it's the million-dollar question, really. Why are we still seeing exponential growth in code size in our monolith, and not in our services? And I think it's a combination of many, many things. One thing I think, we don't have all of the infrastructure available to us in our cloud, in our smaller services. So, say you want to build a little feature, you want to add a little button that does something, and if you want to do that inside our monolith, that might take you two, three days. Whereas if you want to pull up a completely new service—I think we've solved it at an infrastructural layer, it's very quick and easy to just pull up a new service, and have it run, and be able to take traffic, and so on—but it's more of the domain-specific infrastructures of being able to access all the different data sets that you need to be able to access, and be able to shift information back to the mobile device. And all these things, it's very easy to do inside a monolith, but it's much harder to do outside of the monolith. So, we have to replicate a big set of what we call product platforms. So, instead of infrastructural platform is more product specific platform features like customer information, and be able to send information back to the client, and so on. And all those things have to be rebuilt for cloud services. We haven't really gotten all the way there yet.Emily: If I understood correctly from the case study with the CNCF, you sort of started the cloud-native journey with your databases.Jon: Yes, that was the thing that was on fire. Cash App was initially built as a hack week project, and it was never really designed to scale. So, it was just running on a single MySQL database for a really long time. And we actually literally put a piece of hardware on fire with that database. We managed to roll it, roll it off, of course, didn't take down our service, but it was actually smoking in our [laughs] data centers. It melted the service around it in its chassis. So, that was a big problem, and we needed to solve that very quickly. So, that's where we started.Emily: Could you actually go into that just a little bit more? I read the case study, but probably most listeners haven't. Why was the database such a big problem? And how did you solve it?Jon: Yeah, as I said, so we only had a single MySQL database. And as most people know, it's very hard to keep on scaling that, so we bought more and more expensive hardware. And since we were a mobile app, we don't get all the benefits from caching and replica reads, so most of the time, the user is actually accessing data that is already on the device, so they don't actually make any calls out to our back end to read the data. Usually, you scale out a database by adding replicas, and caching, and that sort of stuff, but that wasn't our bottleneck. Our bottleneck was that we simply could not write to the database, we couldn't update the database fast enough, or with enough capacity. So, we needed to shard it, and split up the data set into smaller parts that we could run on separate databases. And we used the thing called Vitess for that, which is a Cloud Native Foundation member, a product and [unintelligible] CNCF. And with Vitess, we were able to split up the database into smaller parts. It was quite a large project, and especially back then, Vitess was—it was quite early days. So, the Vitess was used to scale out YouTube and then it was open-sourced. And then, we started using it. I think, not long after that, it was also used by Slack. So now, currently Slack uses it for most of its data. And we started using it very early, so it was still kind of early days, and we had to build a lot of new functionality in there, and we had to port [00:15:20 unintelligible] make sure all of our queries worked with the Vitess. But then we were able to do shard splitting. So, without having to restart or have downtime in our app, we could split up the database into smaller parts, and then the Vitess would handle the routing of queries, and so on.Emily: If at all, how did that serve as the gateway to then starting to think about changing more of the application, or moving more into services as opposed to a monolith?Jon: Yeah, I think that was kind of orthogonal in some ways. So, while we scaled out the database layer, we also realized that we needed to scale out the human side of it. So, we have multiple teams being able to work independently. And that is something we haven't I think we haven't really gotten to completely, yet. So, while we've scaled out the database layer, we're not quite there from the human side of things.Emily: Why is it important to scale any of this out? I understand the database, but why is it important to get the scaling for the teams?Jon: Yeah, I mean, it's a very competitive space, what we're trying to do. We have a very formidable competitors, both from other apps and also from the big banks, and for us to be able to keep on delivering new features for our customers at a high pace, and be able to change those features to react to changing customer demands or, like during this crisis we are in now, and being able to respond to what our competitors are doing. I mean, that just makes us a more effective business. And we don't always know when we start a new product line where it's exactly going to lead us, we sort of look at what our customers are using it and where that takes us, and being able to respond to that quickly, that's something that is very hard if you have a big monolith that has a million lines of code and takes you several hours to compile, then it's going to be very hard for you to deliver functionality and make changes to functionality in a good time.Emily: Can you think of any examples where you're able to respond really quickly to something like this current crisis in a way that wouldn't have been possible with the old models?Jon: I don't actually know the details here. I live currently in Australia, so I don't know. But the US government is handing out these checks, right? So, you get some kind of a subsidy. And apparently, they were going to mail those out to a lot of people, but we actually stepped up and said, look, you can just Cash App them out to people. So, people sign up for a Cash App account, and then they can receive their subsidies directly into the Cash App accounts, or into their bank accounts via our payment rails. And we were able to execute on that very quickly, and I think we are now an official way to get that subsidy from the US government. So, that's something that we probably wouldn't have been able to do unless we've invested more to be able to respond to that so quickly, within just weeks, I think.Emily: And as Cash App has moved to increasingly service-oriented architectures and increasingly cloud-native, what has been surprisingly easy?Jon: Surprisingly easy. I don't think I've been surprised by anything being easy, to my recollection. I think most things have been surprisingly hard. [laughs]. I think we are still somewhat in the early days of this infrastructure, and there are so many issues; there's so many bugs; there's so many unknowns. And when you start digging into things, it just surprises you how hard. So, I work in the infrastructure team, and we try to provide a curated experience for our product teams, the product engineering teams, so we deal with that pain directly where we have to figure out how all these products work together, and how to build functionality on top of them. I think we deal with that pain for our product engineers. But of course, they are also running into things all the time. So, no, it is surprisingly hard sometimes, but it's all right.Emily: What do you think has been surprisingly challenging, unexpectedly challenging?Jon: Maybe I shouldn't be, but I am somewhat surprised how immature things still are. Just as an example, how hard it is, if you run a pod, in a EKS—Amazon Kubernetes cluster, and you just want to authenticate to be able to use other Amazon products like Dynamo, or S3, or something, this is still something that is incredibly hard to do. So, you would think that just having two products from the same vendor inside of the same ecosystem, you would think that that would be a no-brainer: that they would just work together, but no. I think we'll figure it out eventually, but currently, it's still a lot of work to get things to play well together.Emily: If you had a top-three wish list of things for the community to address, what do you think they would be?Jon: Yeah, I guess the out-of-the-box experience with all of these tools, so that they just work together really well, without having to manually set up a lot of different things, that'd be nice. I think I also, maybe this all exists, we haven't integrated all these tools, but something that struck me the other day, I was debugging some production issue—it wasn't a major issue, but it was an issue that had been an ongoing thing for two weeks—and I just wanted to see what change happened those two weeks ago. What was the delta? What made that change happen? And being able to get that information out of Kubernetes and Amazon—and maybe there's some audit logging tools and all this stuff, but it's not entirely clear how to use them, or how to turn them on, and so on. So, that's a really nice, user friendly, and easy to use kind of auditing, and audit trail tools would be really nice. So, that's one wish, I guess, in general: having a curated experience. So, if you start from scratch, and you want to get all of the best practice tools, and you want to get all the functionality out of a cloud infrastructure, there's still a lot of choices to make, and there's a lot of different tools that you need to set up to make them work together, Prometheus, and Grafana, and Kubernetes, and so on. And having a curated out-of-the-box experience that just makes everything work, and you don't have to think about everything, that would be quite nice. So, Kubernetes operators are great, and these CRDs, this metadata you can store and work with inside of Kubernetes is great, but unfortunately they don't play well with the rest of the cloud infrastructure at Amazon, at AWS. Amazon was working on this Amazon operator, which you would be able to configure other AWS resources from inside of the Kubernetes cluster. So, you could have a CRD for an S3 bucket, so you wouldn't need a Terraform. So right now, you can have Helm Charts and similar to manage the Kubernetes side of things, but then you also need Terraform stuff to manage the AWS side of things, but just something thing that unifies this, so you can have a single place for all your infrastructural metadata. That would be nice. And Amazon is working on this, and they open-sourced something like an AWS operator, but I think they actually withdrew it and they are doing something closed-source. I don't know where that project is going. But that would be really nice.Emily: Go back again to this idea of the business of cloud-native. To what extent do you have to talk about this with business stakeholders? What are those conversations look like?Jon: A Cash App, we usually do not pull in product and business people in these conversations, I think, except when it comes to cost [laughs] and budgeting. But they think more in terms of features and being able to deliver and have teams be able to execute independently, and so on. And our hope is that we can construct an infrastructure that provides these capabilities to our business side. So, it's almost like a black box. They don't know what's inside. We are responsible for figuring out how to give it to them, but they don't always know exactly what's inside of the box.Emily: Excellent. The last question is if there's an engineering tool you can't live without?Jon: I would say all of the JetBrains IDEs for development. I've been using those for maybe 20 years, and they keep on delivering new tools, and I just love them all.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining.Jon: Thanks for inviting me to speak on the podcast.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Some of the highlights of the show include The diplomacy that's required between software engineers and management, and why influence is needed to move projects forward to completion. Driving factors behind Ygrene's Kubernetes migration, which included an infrastructure bottleneck, a need to streamline deployment, and a desire to leverage their internal team of cloud experts. Management's request to ship code faster, and why it was important to the organization.  How the company's engineers responded to the request to ship code faster, and overcame disconnects with management. How the team obtained executive buy-in for a Kubernetes migration. Key cultural changes that were required to make the migration to Kubernetes successful. How unexpected challenges forced the team to learn the “depths of Kubernetes,” and how it helped with root cause analysis. Why the transition to Kubernetes was a success, enabling the team to ship code faster, deliver more value, secure more customers, and drive more revenue.  Links: HerdX: https://www.herdx.com/ Ygrene: https://ygrene.com/ Austin Twitter: https://twitter.com/_austbot Austin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austbot/ Arnold's book on publisher site: https://www.packtpub.com/cloud-networking/the-kubernetes-workshop  Arnold's book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Workshop-Interactive-Approach-Learning/dp/1838820752/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, and I am here with Austin Adams and Zack Arnold, and we are here to talk about why companies go cloud-native.Austin: So, I'm currently the CTO of a small Agrotech startup called HerdX. And that means I spend my days designing software, designing architecture for how distributed systems talk, and also leading teams of engineers to build proof-of-concepts and then production systems as they take over the projects that I've designed. Emily: And then, what did you do at Ygrene? Austin: I did the exact same thing, except for without the CTO title. And I also had other higher-level engineers working with me at Ygrene. So, we made a lot of technical decisions together. We all migrated to Kubernetes together, and Zack was a chief proponent of that, especially with the culture change. So, I focused on the designing software that teams of implementation engineers could take over and actually build out for the long run. And I think Zack really focused on—oh, I'll let Zack say what he focused on. [laughs].Emily: Go for it, Zach.Zach: Hello. I'm Zack. I also no longer work for Ygrene, although I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people who do. It was a fantastic company. So, Austin called me up a while back and asked me to think about participating in a DevOps engineering role at Ygrene. And he sort of said at the outset, we don't really know what it looks like, and we're pretty sure that we just created a position out of a culture, but would you be willing to embody it? And up until this point, I'd had cloud experience, and I had had software engineering experience, but I didn't really spend a ton of time focused on the actual movement of software from developer's laptops to production with as few hiccups, and as many tests, and as much safety as possible in between. So, I always told people the role felt like it was three parts. It was part IT automation expert, part software engineer, and then part diplomat. And the diplomacy was mostly in between people who are more operations focused. So, support engineers, project managers, and people who were on-call day in and day out, and being a go-between higher levels of management and software engineers themselves because there's this awkward, coordinated motion that has to really happen at a fine-grained level in order to get DevOps to really work at a company. What I mean by that is, essentially, Dev and Ops seem to on the surface have opposing goals, the operation staff, it's job is to maintain stability, and the development side's job is to introduce change, which invariably introduces instability. So, that dichotomy means that being able to simultaneously satisfy both desires is really a goal of DevOps, but it's difficult to achieve at an organizational level without dealing with some pretty critical cultural components. So, what do I spend my day on? The answer to that question is, yes. It really depends on the day. Sometimes it's cloud engineers. Sometimes it's QA folks, sometimes it's management. Sometimes I'm heads-down writing software for integrations in between tools. And every now and again, I get to contribute to open-source. So, a lot of different actual daily tasks take place in my position.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about this diplomacy between software engineers and management.Zach: [laughs]. Well, I'm not sure who's going to be listening in this amazing audience of ours, but I assume, because people are human, that they have capital O-pinions about how things should work, especially as it pertains to either software development lifecycle, the ITIL process of introducing change into a datacenter, into a cloud environment, compliance, security. There's lots of, I'll call them thought frameworks that have a very narrow focus on how we should be doing something with respect to software. So, diplomacy is the—well, I guess in true statecraft, it's being able to work in between countries. But in this particular case, diplomacy is using relational equity or influence, to be able to have every group achieve a common and shared purpose. At the end of the day, in most companies the goal is actually to be able to produce a product that people would want to pay for, and we can do so as quickly and as efficiently as possible. To do that, though, it again requires a lot of people with differing goals to work together towards that shared purpose. So, the diplomacy looks like, aside from just having way too many meetings, it actually looks like being able to communicate other thought frameworks to different stakeholders and being able to synthesize all of the different narrow-focused frameworks into a common shared, overarching process. So, I'll give you a concrete example because it feels like I just spewed a bunch of buzzwords. A concrete example would be, let's say in the common feature that's being delivered for ABC Company, for this feature it requires X number of hours of software development; X number of hours of testing; X number of hours of preparing, either capacity planning, or fleet size recommendations, or some form of operational pre-work; and then the actual deployment, and running, and monitoring. So, in the company that I currently work for, we just described roughly 20 different teams that would have to work together in order to achieve the delivery of this feature as rapidly as possible. So, the process of DevOps and the diplomacy of DevOps, for me looks like—aside from trying to automate as much as humanly possible and to provide what I call interface guarantees, which are basically shared agreements of functionality between two teams. So, the way that the developers will speak to the QA engineers is through Git. They develop new software, and they push it into shared code repositories, the way that the QA engineers will speak to people who are going to be handling the deployments—or at management in this particular case—is going to be through a well-formatted XML test file. So, providing automation around those particular interfaces and then ensuring that everyone's shared goals are met at the particular period of time where they're going to be invoked over the course of the delivery of that feature, is the “subtle art,”—air quotes, you can't see but—to me of DevOps diplomacy. That kind of help?Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Let's take, actually, just a little bit of a step back. Can you talk about what some of the business goals were behind moving to Kubernetes for Ygrene? Who was the champion of this move? Was it business stakeholders saying, “Hey, we really need this to change,” or engineering going to business stakeholders? Who needed a change. I believe that the desire for Kubernetes came from a bottleneck of infrastructure. Not so much around performance, such as the applications weren't performing due to scale. We had projected scale that we were coming to where it would cause a problem potentially, but it was also in the ease of deployment. It had a very operations mindset as Zack was saying, our infrastructure was almost entirely managed—of the core applications set—by outsourcing. And so, we depended on them to innovate, we depended on them to spin up new environments and services. But we also have this internal competing team that always had this cloud background. And so, what we were trying to do was lessen the time between idea to deployment by utilizing platforms that were more scalable, more flexible, and all the things that Docker gives with the Dev/Prod Parity, the ease of packaging your environment together so that small team can ship an entire application. And so, I think our main goal with that was to take that team that already had a lot of cloud experience, and give them more power to drive the innovation and not be bottlenecked just by what the outsourcing team could do. Which, by the way, just for the record, the outsourcing team was an amazing team, but they didn't have the Kubernetes or cloud experience, either. So, in terms of a hero or champion of it, it just started as an idea between me and the new CTO, or CIO that came in, talking about how can we ship code faster? So, one of the things that happened in my career was the desire for a rapid response team which, that sounds like a buzzword or something, but it was this idea that Ygrene was shipping software fairly slow, and we wanted to get faster. So, really the CIO, and one of the development managers, they were the really big champions of, “Hey, let's deliver value to the business faster.” And they had the experience to ask their engineers how to make that happen, and then trust Zack and I through this process of delivering Kubernetes, and Istio, and container security, and all these different things that eventually got implemented.Emily: Why do you think shipping code faster matters?Austin: I think, for this company, why it mattered was the PACE financing industry is relatively new. And while financing has some old established patterns, I feel like there's still always room for innovation. If you hear the early days of the Bridgewater Financial Hedge Fund, they were a source of innovation and they used technology to deliver new types of assets and things like that. And so, our team at Ygrene was excellent because they wanted to try new things. They wanted to try new patterns of PACE financing, or ways of getting in front of the customer, or connections with different analytics so they could understand their customer better. So, it was important to be able to try things, experiment to see what was going to be successful. To get things out into the real world to know, okay, this is actually going to work, or no, this isn't going to work. And then, also, one of the things within financing is—especially newer financing—is there's a lot of speed bumps along the way. Compliance laws can come into effect, as well as working with cities and governments that have specialized rules and specialized things that they need—because everyone's an expert when it comes to legislation, apparently—they decide that they need X, and they give us a time when we have to get it done. And so, we actually have another customer out there, which is the legislative bodies. So, they have to get the software—their features that are needed within the financing system out by certain dates, or we're no longer eligible to operate in those counties. So, one of it was a core business risk, so we needed to be able to deliver faster. The other was how can we grow the business?Emily: Zach, this might be a question for you. Was there anything that was lost in translation as you were explaining what engineering was going to do in order to meet this goal of shipping code faster, of being more agile, when you were talking to C level management? How did they understand, and did anything get lost in translation?Zach: One of the largest disconnects, both on a technical and from a high level speaking to management issue I had was explaining how we were no longer going to be managing application servers as though they were pets. When you come from an on-premise setup, and you've got your VMware ESXi, and you're managing virtual machines, the most important thing that you have is backups because you want to keep those machines exactly as they are, and you install new software on those machines. When Kubernetes says, I'm going to put your pods wherever they fit on the cluster, assuming it conforms with the scheduling pattern, and if a node dies, it's totally fine, I'm going to spin a new one up for you, and move pods around and ensure that the application is exactly as you had stated—as in, it's in its desired state—that kind of thinking from switching from infrastructure as pets to infrastructure as cattle, is difficult to explain to people who have spent their careers in building and maintaining datacenters. And I think a lot—well, it's not guaranteed that this is across the board, but if you want to talk about a generational divide, people that usually occupy the C level office chairs are familiar with—in their heyday of their career—a datacenter-based setup. In a cloud-based consumption model where it really doesn't matter—I can just spin up anything anywhere—when you talk about moving from reasoning about your application as the servers it comprises and instead talking about your application as the workload it comprises, it becomes a place where you have to really, really concretely explain to people exactly how it's going to work that the entire earth will not come crashing down if you lose a server, or if you lose a pod, or if a container hiccups and gets restarted by Kubernetes on that node. I think that was the real key one. And the reason why that actually became incredibly beneficial for us is because once we actually had that executive buy-off when it came to, while I still may not understand, I trust that you know what you're doing and that this infrastructure really is replaceable, it allowed us to get a little bit more aggressive with how we managed our resources. So, now using Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, using the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler, and leveraging Amazon EC2 Spot Fleets, we were only ever paying for the exact amount of infrastructure that was required to run our business. And I think that is usually the thing that translates the best to management and non-technical leadership. Because when it comes down to if I'm aware that using this tool, and using a cloud-native approach to running my application, I am only ever going to be paying for the computational resource that I need in that exact minute to run my business, then the budget discussions become a lot easier, because everyone is aware that this is your exact run-rate when it comes to technology. Does that make sense? Emily: Absolutely. How important was having that executive buy-in? My understanding is that a lot of companies, they think that they're going to get all these savings from Kubernetes, and it doesn't always materialize. So, I'm just curious, it sounds like it really did for Ygrene.Zach: There was two things that really worked well for us when this transformation was taking place. The first was, Ygrene was still growing, so if the budget grew alongside of the growth of the company, nobody noticed. So, that was one really incredible thing that happened that, I think, now having had different positions in the industry, I don't know if I appreciated that enough because if you're attempting to make a cost-neutral migration to the Cloud, or to adopt cloud-native management principles, you're going to probably move too little, too late. And when that happens, you run the risk of really doing a poor job of adopting cloud-native, and then scrapping that project, because it never materialized the benefit, as you just described, that some people didn't experience. And the other benefit that we had, I think was the fact that because there were enough incredibly senior technical people—and again, I learned everything from these people—working with us, and because we were all, for the most part, on the same page when it came to this migration, it was easy to have a unified front with our management because every engineer saw the value of this new way of running our infrastructure and running our application. In one non—and this obviously helps with our engineers—one non-monetary benefit that helped really get the buy-in was the fact that, with Kubernetes, our on-call SEV-1 pages went down, I want to say, by over 40 percent which was insane because Kubernetes was automatically intervening in the case where servers went down. JVMs run out of memory, exceptions cause strange things, but a simple restart usually fixes the vast majority of them. Well, now Kubernetes was doing this and we didn't need to wake somebody up in order to keep the machine running.Emily: From when you started this transition to when you, I should say, when you probably left the company, but what were some of the surprises, either surprises for you, or surprises for other people in the organization?Austin: The initial surprise was the yes that we got. So, initially I pitched it and started talking about it, and then the culture started changing to where we realized we really needed to change, and bringing Zack on and then getting the yes from management was the initial surprise. And—Emily: Why was that a surprise?Austin: It was just surprising because, when you work as an engineer—I mean, none of us were C suite, or Dev managers, or anything. We were just highly respected engineers working in the HQ. So, it was just a surprise that what we felt was a semi-crazy idea at the time—because Kubernetes was a little bit earlier. I mean, EKS wasn't even a thing from Amazon. We ran our Kubernetes clusters from the hip, which is using kops, which is—kops is a great tool, but obviously it wasn't managed. It was managed by us, mainly by Zach and his team, to be honest. So, that was a surprise that they would trust a billion-dollar financing engine to run on the proposal of two engineers. And then, the next ones were just how much the single-server, vertical scaling, and depending on running on the same server was into our applications. So, as we started to look at the core applications and moving them into a containerized environment, but also into an environment that can be spun up and spun down, looking at the assumptions the application was making around being on the same server; having specific IP addresses, or hostnames; and things like that, where we had to take those assumptions out and make things more flexible. So, we had to remove some stateful assumptions in the applications, that was a surprise. We also had to enforce more of the idea of idempotency, especially when introducing Istio, and [00:21:44 retryable] connections and retryable logic around circuit breaking and service-to-service communication. So, some of those were the bigger surprises, is the paradigm shift between, “Okay, we've got this service that's always going to run on the same machine, and it's always going to have local access to its files,” to, “Now we're on a pod that's got a volume mounted, and there's 50 of them.” And it's just different. So, that was a big—[laughs], that was a big surprise for us.Emily: Was there anything that you'd call a pleasant surprise? Things that went well that you anticipated to be really difficult?Zach: Oh, my gosh, yes. When you read through Kubernetes for the first time, you tend to have this—especially if somebody else told you, “Hey, we're going to do this,” this sinking feeling of, “Oh my god, I don't even know nothing,” because it's so immense in its complexity. It requires a retooling of how you think, but there have been lots of open-source community efforts to improve the cluster lifecycle management of Kubernetes, and one such project that really helped us get going—do you remember this Austin?—was kops.Austin: Yep. Yep, kops is great.Zach: I want to say Justin Santa Barbara was the original creator of that project, and it's still open source, and I think he still maintains it. But to have a production-ready, and we really mean production-ready: it was private, everything was isolated, the CNI was provisioned correctly, everything was in the right place, to have a fully production-ready Kubernetes cluster ready to go within a few hours of us being able to learn about this tool in AWS was huge because then we could start to focus on what we didn't even understand inside of the cluster. Because there were lots of—Kubernetes is—there's two sides of it, and both of them are confusing. There's the infrastructure that participates in the cluster, and there's the actual components inside of the cluster which get orchestrated to make your application possible. So, not having to initially focus on the infrastructure that made up the cluster, so we could just figure out the difference between our butt and the hole in the ground, when it came to our application inside of Kubernetes was immensely helpful to us. I mean, there are a lot of tools these days that do that now: GKE, EKS, AKS, but we got into Kubernetes right after it went GA, and this was huge to help with that.Emily: Can you tell me also a little bit about the cultural changes that had to happen? And what were these cultural changes, and then how did it go?Zach: As Austin said, the notion of—I think a lot—and I don't want to offer this as a sweeping statement—but I think the vast majority of the engineers that we had in Seattle, in San Jose, and in Petaluma where the company was headquartered, I think, even if they didn't understand what the word idempotent meant, they understood more or less how that was going to work. The larger challenge for us was actually in helping our contractors, who actually made up the vast majority of our labor force towards the end of my tenure there, how a lot of these principles worked in software. So, take a perfect example: part of the application is written in Ruby on Rails, and in Ruby on Rails, there's a concept of one-off tasks called rake tasks. When you are running a single server, and you're sending lots of emails that have attachments, those attachments have to be on the file system. And this is the phrase I always said to people, as we refactor the code together, I repeated the statement, “You have to pretend this request is going to start on one server and finish on a different one, and you don't know what either of them are, ahead of time.” And I think using just that simple nugget really helped, culturally, start to reshape this skill of people because when you can't use or depend on something like the file system, or you can't depend on that I'm still on the same server, you begin to break your task into components, and you begin to store those components in either a central database or a central file system like Amazon S3. And adopting those parts of, I would call, cloud-native engineering were critical to the cultural adoption of this tool. I think the other thing was, obviously, lots of training had to take place. And I think a lot of operational handoff had to take place. I remember for, basically, a fairly long stretch of time, I was on-call along with whoever was also on-call because I had the vast majority of the operational knowledge of Kubernetes for that particular team. So, I think there was a good bit of rescaling and mindset shift from the technical side of being able to adopt a cloud-native approach to software building. Does that make sense?Emily: Absolutely. What do you think actually were some of the biggest challenges or the biggest pain points? Zach: So, challenges of cultural shift, or challenges of specifically Kubernetes adoption?Emily: I was thinking challenges of Kubernetes adoption, but I'm also curious about the cultural shift if that's one of the biggest pain points.Zach: It really was for us. I think—because now it wouldn't—if you wanted to take out Kubernetes and replace it with Nomad there? All of the engineers would know what you're talking about. It wouldn't take but whatever the amount of time it would to migrate your Kubernetes manifests to Nomad HCL files. So, I do think the rescaling and the mindset shift, culturally speaking, was probably the thing that helped solidify it from an engineering level. But Kubernetes adoption—or at least problems in Kubernetes adoption, there was a lot of migration horror stories that we encountered. A lot of cluster instability in earlier versions of Kubernetes prevented any form of smooth upgrades. I had to leave—it was with my brother's—it was his wedding, what was it—oh, rehearsal dinner, that's what it was. I had to leave his rehearsal dinner because the production cluster for Ygrene went down, and we needed to get it back up. So, lots of funny stories like that. Or Nordstrom did a really fantastic talk on this in KubeCon in Austin in 2017. But the [00:28:57 unintelligible] split-brain problem where suddenly the consensus in between all of the Kubernetes master nodes began to fail for one reason or another. And because they were serving incorrect information to the controller managers, then the controller managers were acting on incorrect information and causing the schedulers to do really crazy things, like delete entire deployments, or move pods, or kill nodes, or lots of interesting things. I think we unnecessarily bit off a little bit too much when it came to trying to do tricky stuff when it came to infrastructure. We introduced a good bit of instability when it came to Amazon EC2 Spot that I think, all things considered, I would have revised the decision on that. Because we faced a lot of node instability, which translated into application instability, which would cause really, really interesting edge cases to show up basically only in production.Austin: One of the more notable ones—and I think this is the symptom of one of the larger challenges was during testing, one of our project managers that also helped out in the testing side—technical project managers—which we nicknamed the Edge Case Factory, because she was just, anointed, or somehow had this superpower to find the most interesting edge cases, and things that never went wrong for anyone else always went wrong for her, and it really helped us build more robust software for sure, but there's some people out there with mutant powers to catch bugs, and she was one of them. We had two clusters, we had lower environment clusters, and then we had production cluster. The production cluster hosted two namespaces: the staging namespace, which is supposed to be an exact copy of production; and then the production namespace, so that you can smoke-test legitimate production resources, and blah blah blah. So, one time, we started to get some calls that, all of a sudden, people were getting the staging environment underneath the production URL. Zach: Yeah.Austin: And we were like, “Uh… excuse me?” It comes down to—we eventually figured it out. It was something within the networking layer. But it was this thing, as we rolled along, the deeper understanding of, okay, how does this—to use a term that Zack Arnold coined—this benevolent botnet, how does this thing even work, at the most fundamental and most detailed levels? And so, as problems and issues would occur, pre-production or even in production, we had to really learn the depths of Kubernetes. And I think the reason we had to learn it at that stage was because of how new Kubernetes was, all things considered. But I think now with a lot more of the managed systems, I would say it's not necessary, but it's definitely helpful to really know how Kubernetes works down in the depths. So, that was one of the big challenges was, to put it succinctly, when an issue comes up, knowing really what's going on under the hood, really, really helped us as we discovered and learned things about Kubernetes.Zach: And what you're saying, Austin, was really illuminated by the fact that the telemetry that we had in production was not sufficient, in our minds, at least until very recently, to be able to adequately capture all the data necessary to accurately do root cause analyses on particular issues. In early days, there was far too much root cause analysis by, “It was probably this,” and then we moved on. Now having actually taken the time to instrument tracing, to instrument metrics, to instrument logs with correlation, we used, eventually, Datadog, but working our way through the various telemetry tools to achieve this, we really struggled being able to give accurate information to stakeholders about what was really going wrong in production. And I think Austin was probably the first person in the headquarters side of the company—I'm not entirely certain about some of our satellite dev offices—but to really champion a data-driven way of actually running software. Which, it seems trivial now because obviously that's how a lot of these tools work out of the box. But for us, it was really like, “Oh, I guess we really do need to think about the HTTP error rate.” [laughs].Emily: So, taking another step back here, do you think that Ygrene got everything that it expected, or that it wanted out of moving to Kubernetes?Austin: I think we're obviously playing up some of the challenges that we had because it was our day-to-day, but I do believe that trust in the dev team grew, we were able to deploy code during the day, which we could have done that in the beginning, even with vertically scaled infrastructure, we would have done it with downtime, but it really was that as we started to show that Kubernetes and these cloud-native tools like Fluentd, Prometheus, Istio, and other things like that when you set them up properly, they do take a lot of the risk out. It added trust in the development team. It gave more responsibility to the developers to manage their own code in production, which is the DevOps culture, the DevOps mindset. And I think in the end, we were able to ship code faster, we were able to deliver more value, we were able to go into new jurisdictions and markets quicker, to get more customers, and to ultimately increase the amount of revenue that Ygrene had. So, it built a bridge between the data science side of things, the development side of things, the project management side of things, and the compliance side of things. So, I definitely think they got a lot out of trusting us with this migration. I think that were we to continue, probably Zack and I even to this day, we would have been able to implement more, and more, and more. Obviously, I left the company, Zach left the company to pursue other opportunities, but I do believe we left them in a good spot to take this ecosystem that was put in place and run with it. To continue to innovate and do experiments to get more business.Zach: Emily, I'd characterize it with an anecdote. After our Chief Information Officer left the company, our Chief Operating Officer actually took over the management of the Technology Group, and aside from basically giving dev management carte blanche authority to do as they needed to, I think there was so much trust there that we didn't have at the beginning of our journey with technology and Ygrene. And it was characterized in, we had monthly calls with all of the regional account managers, which are basically our out-of-office sales staff. And generally, the project managers from our group would have to sit in those meetings and hear just about how terrible our technology was relative to the competition, either lacking in features, lacking in stability, lacking in design quality, lacking in user interface design, or way overdoing the amount of compliance we had to have. And towards the end of my tenure, those complaints dropped to zero, which I think was really a testament to the fact that we were running things stably, the amount of on-call pages went down tremendously, the amount of user-impacting production outages was dramatically reduced, and I think the overall quality of software increased with every release. And to be able to say that, as a finance company, we were able to deploy 10 times during the day if we needed to, and not because it was an emergency, but because it was genuinely a value-added feature for customers. I think that that really demonstrated that we reached a level of success adopting Kubernetes and cloud-native, that really helped our business win. And we positioned them, basically, now to make experiments that they thought would work from a business sense we implement the technology behind it, and then we find out whether or not we were right.Emily: Let's go ahead and wrap up. We're nearing the top of the hour, but just two questions for both of you. One is, where could listeners find you or connect with you? And the second one is, do you have a can't-live-without engineering tool?Austin: Yeah, so I'll go first. Listeners can find me on Twitter @_austbot, or on LinkedIn. Those are really the only tools I use. And I can't really live without Prometheus and Grafana. I really love being able to see everything that's happening in my applications. I love instrumentation. I'm very data-driven on what's happening inside. So, obviously Kubernetes is there, but it's almost become that Kubernetes is the Cloud. I don't even think about it anymore. It's these other tools that help us monitor and create active monitoring paradigms in our application so we can deploy fast, and know if we broke something. Zach: And if you want to stay in contact with me, I would recommend not using Twitter, I lost my password and I'm not entirely certain how to get it back. I don't have a blue checkmark, so I can't talk to Twitter about that. I probably am on LinkedIn… you know what, you can find me in my house. I'm currently working. The engineering tool that I really can't live without, I think my IDE. I use IntelliJ by JetBrains, and—Austin: Yeah, it's good stuff.Zach: —I think I wouldn't be able to program without it. I fear for my next coding interview because I'll be pretending that there's type ahead completion in a Google Doc, and it just won't work. So, yeah, I think that would be the tool I'd keep forever.Austin: And if any of Zach's managers are listening, he's not planning on doing any coding interviews anytime soon.Zach: [laughs]. Yes, obviously.Emily: Well, thank you so much. Zach: Emily Omier, thank you so much for your time.Austin: Right, thanks.Austin: And don't forget Zack is an author. He and his team worked very hard on that book.Emily: Zack, do you want to give a plug to your book?Zach: Oh, yeah. Some really intelligent people that, for some reason, dragged me along, worked on a book. Basically it started as an introduction to Kubernetes, and it turned into a Master's Course on Kubernetes. It's from Packt Publishing and yeah, you can find it there, amazon.com or steal it on the internet. If you're looking to get started with Kubernetes I cannot recommend the team that worked on this book enough. It was a real honor to be able to work with people I consider to be heavyweights in the industry. It was really fun.Emily: Thank you so much.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Some highlights of the show include The challenges of operating digital commerce at scale, including the need for resource pooling and resiliency — and how this caused Ant Financial to re-think their infrastructure.  Ant Financial's former approach to scaling, which was mostly manual, and highly resource-intensive.  How Kubernetes is expediting cloud development for Ant Financial. Haojie's thoughts on the global engineering skills gap, and China's growing cloud computing market including driving factors and barriers.  Why Ant Financial's migration has largely been a success — and why achieving operational security is now a top priority for the company.   How Ant Financial is managing disconnect between its engineers and business leaders.  The company's ongoing mission to migrate its systems and applications away from legacy architectures. Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haojiehang/ https://www.investopedia.com/tech/worlds-top-10-fintech-companies-baba/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: So, I always start the same way. Can you introduce yourself?Haojie: Hey, my name is Haojie Hang. I'm a product manager in the CTO office at Ant Financial. I work on the product and strategy side for, basically, the CTO and the other executive leaders, as well as leading a small product teams within the org to look at the frontier technology in the cloud and other infrastructure businesses.Emily: And can you tell me a little bit more about what Ant Financial does? And then, also, what do you do on a day to day basis? What do you do when you get into the office?Haojie: Yeah, I'll do a quick introduction about the Ant Financial business. It's not just one business or two business, it's a group of businesses that we innovate and we do, mostly in China, but we're also expanding very rapidly all over the world. So, Ant Financial is basically a group of businesses including credit for both consumers and the enterprise, as well as loan businesses, both consumer and enterprise businesses. We say that the parent organization is basically, we call it Alipay, it's the earliest business we do since 2004 when the business was basically born from Taobao, which is our parent company. So, in short, the Ant Financial Business has a lot of presence in the business of payments business, remittance, credit card, loans, securities, and many other businesses like intelligent technology, blockchain, pretty much everything you can imagine in the FinTech and financial services, we're in there.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about the cloud-native journey for Ant Financial. When did it start? Why did it start? What was some of the motivations behind moving to cloud-native?Haojie: Yeah, it's actually quite interesting. I joined Ant Financial in 2008, but actually, the entire company started to look at cloud-native technology quite early, in 2012. So, back then, people were just looking at these technologies around the world, mostly from the US, they look at this open-source community, look at what other companies are doing, how to use the cloud-native technology to help with their business in the peak time, so during event. There's online promotion event we're doing every year, called Double 11—Shuāng shíyī in Chinese. Every year, so we have a large amount of promotional events happening online, trying to help merchants and the customer is trying to sell and buy stuff in our Tmall and Taobao platform in very, very discounted price. So, for that promotion event online, we have to think about the resilience, the resource pooling, oftentimes the visits has to increase multiple times, sometimes over 100 times the increase compared to the normal time. So in that case, we have to think about how we can be very resilient and efficient infrastructure to support that business needs. So, this is a very large topic. And then, back then, there was a lot of focus and study in our cloud computing department. So, we started looking at this technology called Mesos in 2012. And then, we do a lot of experiments around this technology, but from the business perspective, it's still hard to justify the benefits of moving to Mesos completely. So, we have multiple teams doing a lot of research in Mesos, in Kubernetes, sometimes in our own technology stack, but there's not enough proof or enough confidence for us to move completely over to that technology, until the emergence of Docker container, this Docker technology. Then we started to look at our container infrastructure, really do the investigation around this technology, and understand why this is taking over so quickly over the world, from the business perspective, and from the technology perspective. If you look at the community of Docker, the thing does not really happen until 2015. But we are already in the game for about a year or two. So, we're actually quite happy about our original strategy, but it's just in terms of the research. We're actually a little bit behind in terms of moving to this cloud-native architecture. But as you can see, that I had an interview with CNCF. So, we are very happy about the results that we have right now. Pretty much the entire architecture we run within Ant Financial is, basically, on Kubernetes ecosystem. It's not just using the open-source version of it. We're doing a lot of customization around this open-source framework. Yeah, I can talk more about the details.Emily: Yeah. Well, let's back up just a little bit. I'm curious what you were doing to manage this scaling before? And how did that change? And what about the whole process changed? Like, how stressful is it now, compared to before?Haojie: The process was very manual, I would say. We have extremely large team of engineers, and DevOps, security teams. And oftentimes their responsibility are overlap. So, some engineers are doing security work, some engineers are doing basically operational work. I would say, some people really hated it because they have to be on the computer, look at monitor 24/7, making sure transactions succeeded. When the peak time happens, there's nothing wrong with it. Sometimes they have to keep their phone open 24/7, basically to make sure this thing will not fail, right? And then, just many parts of work has to—so in the previous way, the way we do this operation is quite manual. We don't have a mature system or methodology telling us what we should do first, we should do second, and what's what would you do after this. So, basically the collaboration chain was not there. Therefore, when issue happens, our operation team has to respond very quickly. But then, how can we quickly identify the problem, and make it a problem? That's a problem, right? So, we have to make sure every time we respond, we respond in a very effective manner. That's the problem. In the previous process when something unexpected happen, who had to engage with the entire team from product, engineering, operation, security, everybody has to get up and look at the problem together, which was quite inefficient. So, after we moved to this cloud-native architecture—it's not the standard cloud architect, it's, kind of—we have a lot of innovation on top of this, to make sure that's fitting to our tech community, to our businesses. So, we basically did a lot of innovation in the process to make sure after we had this transition, people are clear about the roles, what they should be responding, and then who should be doing what. That's quite important.Emily: And tell me a little bit more about some of the additional layers or some tools that you've built on top of Kubernetes, and how that's helped you be successful.Haojie: Yeah, so I can give you an example. So, when we look at Kubernetes technology in our intelligent technology, or intelligent cloud business units, we're thinking about how can we use Kubernetes for cloud deployment. Okay, so previously we are using Mesos to do that. But we found this technology that lots of people are familiar with this technology. And then, people are not very sure if Mesos is the right path for container management, resource management or cloud deployment. But when we move to the Kubernetes for cloud deployment, people are actually quite happy. We are seeing a decrease in the amount of—to stand up the cloud. And previously, it took us two to three weeks to build an entire cloud. But after we use the Kubernetes technology, we can do that in a week. Oftentimes, if the scale is smaller, we can do that within three days. That's quite important because people are confident about the community; about this technology. And then, from the users perspective, they are also more willing to invest in Kubernetes. Oftentimes, this is the chicken-egg problem, right? When more companies are hiring more this, these terms appears in the market, in the job descriptions, the more people are willing to learn. So, this is actually what we're seeing a very, very good cycle for me, from both a company perspective and the talent perspective. So, that's actually quite good. But the problem for us is, there's still not enough people, or we say, you know, good talents in the market that we can attract. Basically, we're seeing a shortage of great engineering talent in the market, after the cloud-native transition. So, we're still trying to think about how we can educate the internal audience in the technology community to help them quickly pick up this new technology in the cloud, as well as the practice behind the cloud-native architecture.Emily: You know, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the overall situation in China and that there's also this, sort of, skills gap. It sounds like it's just as present in China as it is in other parts of the world.Haojie: So, I would say in terms of the cloud computing, cloud-native tech community, it's pretty much—we had community forming as early as the rest of the world. But then, in early days, it was just a marketing term by people saying, oh, this is cloud, we want to learn something. But then really, from the business perspective, there's still not enough customer trying to pay for this technology. Oftentimes, the contract size was not large enough to feed engineers. That's what I say. And then, I think the trend of the serious adoption really happens in the past three to four years when a lot of startups coming out in the cloud businesses. There's a company called [QingCloud]. There's a company called [unlcear]. There's many other unicorns in China in the cloud computing space, and I think two of them just went public in the A-listed share recently. So, from that perspective, I would say, the cloud computing business is really maturing rapidly in the past two years. Because we see some unicorns really coming out of this game, besides Alibaba. I think, from that perspective, I will say, it's getting better and better. It's just in terms of the pay behavior, right? How much customers are willing to pay for this technology, pay for the services, pay for the products? I think it will still take some time to mature.Emily: To what extent do you see Chinese companies using cloud-native services and tools from Europe, from the United States, from elsewhere in the world? To what extent is it a segregated market? Like, the rest of the world doesn't use Chinese tools, Chinese companies don't use tools from the rest of the market.Haojie: It's a good question. To me, I'm coming from an engineering background, I believe open-source community is global. It's a global phenomenon. I think the world is connected. And I would never say that people in China, or Chinese companies, or—they only using technology businesses that created in China, this is not right. And often in many cases, there's not enough options, right? So, I think, even though Chinese companies and startups are trying to innovate very aggressively, but I think the world is still connected, they have to build on top of the innovation that's already happened in the rest of the world. So, in that case, I think we're still seeing a lot of collaboration across the globe. China, United States, for sure, Europe, other parts of the world. It's just how aggressive people are in terms of investing in frontier technology. And are they really seeing the benefits of using the frontier technology? There's question of technology innovation versus business innovation, right? Do you see the business value? Can you really see that in the next five years? I would say in China, most of the non-internet sector, they're quite short-sighted. They're still trying to survive, they're trying to make sure they are doing—they can become the top three, top five in their business. So, technology is oftentimes secondary. But for the leaders in that sector, they have to think about that quite early in order to become the top player in their sector. So, I think, the trend is that people are still collaborating academically and engineering side to make sure the right technology gets applied in the right scenario and trying to improve the technology at home.Emily: It's interesting that you mentioned that some Chinese companies might not focus as much on the technology. Do Chinese companies tend to consider moving to cloud-native, important for their business? Or a strategic move?Haojie: From the strategy perspective, yes. Every leader would definitely know about cloud computing, cloud-native architecture, they would definitely think about moving. It's just that internal execution when they think about moving seriously, they have to evaluate, do we have enough talent? How much business value am I getting out of this? Is it really helping? What is my budget? And all those kind of fears, problems. So, that's what backing them up because oftentimes they don't have enough budget. That's what I say in those non-internet sector. Because I've lived and worked in the US for a while. I think in the US, the non-internet sector are quite advanced in terms of the technology adoption, especially in cloud-native. It's quite easy for them to recruit, then build a large engineering team to work on cloud infrastructure software. But it's not the case in China because people are still trying to, especially the leader who can make the decision, they're still thinking about the ROI, the rate of returns, the rate of investments, for building a strong software teams, making sure they have the robust infrastructure running at the bottom level. So, they are still trying to figure out the budget, make sure they are profitable enough to afford that.Emily: Do you feel like Ant Financial got the business benefits out of the transition that it was looking for?Haojie: Yeah, as I mentioned, the entire organization are quite happy about the move because really, they are, kind of, [unintelligible] move in China. So, basically, even the non-engineering teams started to appreciate this, and talk about this technology, and trying to understand it deeper, because they see the entire organization are quite happy, especially from the business protective. As I mentioned, in the Double 11 event we have—last year in 2019, the GMV we had was 260 billion RMB in total, which is 25 percent growth compared to the last year. So, for that large amount of GMV, we supported the entire infrastructure, are building from our cloud infrastructure. It is quite massive. We don't have a infrastructure for that business, we have the infrastructure for the entire group, including Ant Financial and Alibaba. Basically the entire businesses is running in the cloud. We have very, very few siloed data centers and the infrastructure—you know, uh, data centers—basically, we have the entire thing running in single cloud. That's the largest achievement we had I think since 2019, which was one of the strategic goal we had, we achieved last year. And this year, we're putting a lot of emphasis in the secure operation. It has been one of the primary cloud business goal because when bad things happen, people are literally losing money. Imagine one of the transactions failed. It failed the entire country, right? Like, no one else in China or in the other part of the world can make a purchase from Alipay app. This is quite devastating. So, secure operation has been the only thing we focus on this year, I would say. I remember in some meetings, one of the leader mentioned, “If there's only thing we should do this year, it's secure operation.” We're trying to make sure we operate the entire business safely on top of our new cloud-native architecture, with the minimum amount of incidents and failures.Emily: And what do you think have been some of the challenges? What has been more difficult than you imagined in making this transition?Haojie: Yeah, I think for me, the most obvious point is that we still have a large amount of operating team engineers, and support team, and the product, and the entire organization, basically, to making sure the entire thing working seamlessly because I think it's very hard to quantify it. I think the overall efficiency in running the cloud-native architecture, we're still looking at that. Let me try to find a good example.Emily: Let me ask a question. What's gone unexpectedly well? Was there anything that you thought was going to be really challenging that wasn't?Haojie: Oh, I think after moving to the cloud-native architecture, the engineers are quite happy. They're working much, much harder. They're trying to do things much more quickly than we imagined. Basically, they are very aggressive, and very happy to see the leadership teams really buying this technology, and they're invest—want to invest seriously in this technology. They are building not only the engineering team but also the prod team, the entire organization around to cloud-native technology. So, oftentimes in order to persuade business leaders to do something serious in the technology, they have to spend a lot of time trying to evangelize to the leadership team to making sure they understand, oh, this is the right direction. We have to do this right. It takes oftentimes from six months to a year for them to really doing that. So, for that, I think it's quite successful. We see a very—basically I think the entire engineering culture has changed. People are looking at open-source community more aggressively. They think about how we should contribute back to the community. What community events should I support? What conferences should I go to? There's more and more discussion like that happening within the organization. And, I think, larger Ant Financial has become one of the sponsor in the events. We are one of the most active participants in the community, I think, since 2019, along with Alibaba. So, that's the positive side I'm seeing. People really start to form a culture on their own, especially in open-source community. Trying to be more present, trying to take more active position in the discussion, both within company and outside of company. So, that's actually quite the good. We're happy to see engineers are doing their work, and are doing it more aggressively.Emily: Do you feel like there's any sort of disconnect between the engineering teams and business leaders? Or do you feel like they're mostly on the same page?Haojie: Yeah, I would say there are still some gaps between the business leaders and the engineers. So, oftentimes, I would say the engineers are quite updated with what's going on in this community, in some new plugins, in some new components coming out of this Kubernetes ecosystem, but then the business leaders don't have enough time to to pay attention to this. So, it really depends on how confident they are about this technology. And how much more time do you want to put into this personally. I think the business leader will look at the numbers like KPIs, metrics, the number of accidents, the operating efficiencies, things like that, but that's in the business context, all right. The engineer leaders cares more about what kind of new technology we use, what kind of new technology we created on top of this ecosystem, and how many people are happy about using this technology? And how many more can we do from this transition? So, basically, they are disconnect. So, I think the good part in Ant Financial is that for business leaders, most of the business leaders are coming from engineering background, but they have a strong KPI in their work. And then, most of the engineer leaders has to learn business, because, in order to persuade business leaders to invest in this, they have to think from their perspective. I think, in terms of the communication, they're quite up to date. It's just in terms of the execution and the timelines there are some disconnected happen. Yeah.Emily: What would you say that business leaders are looking for that engineering teams might not be thinking about?Haojie: I think one example that I see is a business leader will think about the team building, the talent building, the culture, and the public image that we had in the public, especially in China. Yeah, let me give you an example. If the technology—if the company is not cool enough, from the technology, from engineering perspective, it's very hard to attract the top talent in engineerings from the business leader. Without strong engineering teams, we cannot execute. We cannot innovate. So, that's something they oftentimes think about when they try to invest in technology. But in terms of the execution, after the engineers gets on board, and work in Alibaba, in Ant Financial, that's something engineers have think about. How do they keep the talent? How do they make sure talents are happy? How do we make sure they are satisfied about what they do? So, I would say these two things have to work at the same time. You cannot have a strong image in technology, in frontier technology. But then, after the talent gets on board, they realize, oh, this is just great from outside, but from inside, we are still working on the legacy technology. It's operate very inefficiently internally, and how can we make sure people are dealing this? And I think that's quite important.Emily: Is there anything that you think is preventing you from moving further along in the cloud-native journey? Anything other than lack of human resources?Haojie: I would say that how can we securely move away from the legacy architecture, whether it's built privately or you built it using other vendor's technology? You know, for that kind of transition we're taking very seriously. We still have a large amount of systems and applications running on Oracle, running on, sometimes in MySQL, sometimes in other siloed stack. And we're not 100 percent. We're in one cloud, we're not 100 percent away from Oracle, MySQL or that type of, we consider legacy, architecture. So, the moving will still take some time. And so, how can we make sure the transition is successful? How can we make sure the transition is less painful? Is something we as the leaders and the business executives will think about because how do you how we can set up the right KPI and the right goal for engineers to feel happy about doing this work? I think that's one of the challenges. Oftentimes people, when they are placed into this kind of work, moving from legacy architecture, to new architecture, just very minimum business value we can see from this transition, right? So, we have to have the right—we have to set the enough goal to motivate them to do the work. That's something we have to really think about that in the long term. Because this is not like we do that for six months, a year. It's going to be an effort for the next three to four years. Imagine, Alipay business started in 2004, and it's been already 16 years. So, the transition was to happen over time. It's just, how we can make sure that the transition that it's less painful?Emily: Tell me just a little bit more about some of the custom capabilities that you built on top of Kubernetes.Haojie: We have our own internal monitoring architecture, which is quite advanced, I would say. And this kind of monitoring infrastructure is built for both developers and operators. I think that is something we invest extremely heavily because we cannot find any other alternatives in the market. I'll give you some background about this monitoring infrastructure. So, the entire tech stack was primarily built on Java stack, the thing starting from 2004. And now a lot of cloud-native technology are leveraging Go technology, right? So, the monitoring of Go is quite different from the monitoring of Java. We have different versions of JDK and JRE that we created—one of them was actually recently open-sourced called Dragon Well. You can check out on online, a lot of posts around that. So, we have to make sure the entire stack, from the application, middleware, in the mesh-level, container host, all the way down to compiler has to be monitored quite efficiently. Once anything happened, from the operation side or from the technology side, we have to quickly respond to identify in what layer the error happened. In order for that mitigation to be efficient, we have to make sure we are monitoring every single thing in the stack. As I mentioned, from the application, middleware, host level, all the way down to hardware level, sometimes a failure in hardware will cost the entire failure in our business. It's quite often. So, we have to make sure we are monitoring our own technology in a very good manner. And also imagine monitoring that amount of infrastructure in that massive scale. It's very challenging. I think before 2014, we had a lot of failure in our monitoring infrastructure. This is quite ridiculous, but this is what happened. So, we spent a lot of time to make sure we have the supporting infrastructure ready for that kind of businesses. That's quite important.Emily: Anything else that you'd like to add about either your own experience moving to cloud-native or some observations about how things are going in China in general?Haojie: I think from the strategy perspective, Chinese company or startups from China are doing quite well. It's just the market is quite different. For companies to survive and thrive in the Chinese market, they have to go with the customers, right? So, even though the innovation happens at the same level, the customers are not at the same level from what I see. But overall, I think the trend is quite positive, I think eventually, be it five years, or seven years, or ten years, Chinese companies, Chinese customers will be at the same level as the rest of the world: in the US, in the UK, in Australia, in the rest of the world. I think people are more and more aggressive, and they would like to allocate more and more budget into technology business. They realize the benefits of it, especially in the current outbreak. When people, they cannot go to work, but they still have to do something. The business has to survive. Like, they have to do something in order for the business to survive. So, from the business perspective, how can they build their strong online presence during the outbreak? Is actually quite important. Before the outbreak, I would say, in the retail business, there still some people think about, “Oh, how can we do this in our traditional manner? How can we open as many stores as possible.” They didn't really care about building a store online. From in Taobao or Tmall, [unintelligible] seriously. But during outbreak, people they have to stay at home. They have nowhere to go. But then the business, they still have to pay their employees. So, how can you do that? The only thing is going online. In order to go online, they have to build online infrastructure for their customers, for their employees, for them to work. So, that's quite—honestly, that's one of the trend I'm seeing: that people are paying more and more attention to work remotely, and use software, SAAS software without on-premise deployments. In that case, people, they are able to work wherever they go. Being at home, office, on the road, people are really interested in the benefits of SAAS, of cloud. I think that's something that I'm seeing. I think after this year, definitely the market of SAAS will become better and better because not only the technology is, but the business leaders will understand the value of using Zoom, using Ding Ding, using WeChat, to make sure their employees, they can work anywhere they want.Emily: Well, thank you so much. A couple finishing up questions. First of all, what is an engineering tool that you couldn't do your job without?Haojie: Do you mean, like, just tools for me to do some engineer work?Emily: Yeah. What's your favorite tool, something you just can't imagine working without?Haojie: We have a lot of tools innovated within the company. I don't think I can mention that in this podcast.Emily: Okay. No problem. And then, how can people connect with you if they want to?Haojie: At work, or outside of work?Emily: like on Twitter or on social media.Haojie: Yeah, I had a lot of invitation from LinkedIn, not so much on Twitter because I'm not active on Twitter. But I think people, they get to know me, oftentimes from word of mouth, they got introduced from other friends of mine, they want to understand about the technology adoption in China, especially in the cloud. Yeah, people oftentimes, which me from LinkedIn, that's the primary source.Emily: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat.Haojie: Thank you, Emily.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Violinist, singer, keyboardist and drummer Emily Wells is a producer and composer capable of producing a full band sound; her series of “symphonies” turned her voice and live-looped violin, drums, percussion, and effects into a one-woman orchestra. In 2019, she released her swirling and dramatic chamber-pop collection, This World Is Too _____ For You, complete with a string quintet and French horn. Now, Emily Wells has revisited some of those grand cinematic songs on her latest record, In the Dark Moving, which she recorded last summer as a project to hear the essence of those songs stripped down to voice and guitar. With Nina Simone on the wall of her home studio, Emily Wells joins us to share these songs in their most elemental form, along with a new song written this March - “I’m Numbers.”  "Rock N Roll Man" "Come on Doom, Let’s Party" "I’m Numbers" (Written while sheltering in place in March 2020)

Flutter your eyelashes Cerre os cílios (Emily and Adriana are chatting in the bathroom.) Emily e Adriana estao conversando no banheiro.) Emily: Adriana! Have I told you about the photos for the magazine? Emily: Adriana, eu te falei a respeito das fotos para revista? Adriana: What photos? What magazine? Adriana: Que fotos? Que revista? Emily: A magazine wants to take some pictures of my coffee bar for a series of articles called "Secret London". Emily: Uma revista quer tirar algumas fotografias da minha cafeteria para uma série de artigos chamados "Londres Secreta". Adriana: Wow! That's wonderfull! Adriana: Uau, isso é maravilhoso! Emily: Yes it is. They want to publicise the coffe bars where you can drink a cup of coffee in peace and quietly. Emily: Sim é. Eles querem dar publicidade as cafeterias onde você pode beber um café de forma tranquila e calma. Adriana: Good idea! Adriana: Boa ideia! Emily: They will use photographic models in the pictures. Imagine what a great publicity it will be for my business! Emily: Eles vão utilizar modelos fotográficos nas fotos. Imagine a grande publicidade que vai ser para o meu negócio! Adriana: Indeed. And it won't be so "secret" any more. Adriana: Sem dúvida. E ele não vai ser mais tão "secreto". Emily: Maybe they will want to to take pictures of me as well, and they may even ask me to be in an adveitisement. Emily: Talvez eles vão querer tirar fotografias minhas também, e eles podem até me pedir para sair no anúncio. Adriana: Why not? Adriana: Porque Não? Emily: I am only afraid that I won't be photogenic. Emily: Eu só tenho medo de que eu não seja fotogênica. Adriana: I can help you, if you want me to. A close friend of mine is a model. Adriana: Eu posso te ajudar, se você quiser. Uma grande amiga minha é modelo. Emily: Wonderful! I would like to look charming... Emily: Maravilha! Eu gostaria de parecer charmosa... Adriana: No problem. You can flutter your eyelashes, like this (Doing it.) This is very appealing... Adriana: Sem problemas. Você pode tremular os cílios assim (Fazendo o movimento.). Isso é muito atraente... Emily: How can I show surprise? Emily: Como eu posso demonstrar surpresa? Adriana: You can raise your eyebrows, like this (Doing it.) Adriana: Você pode elevar as sombrancelhas, assim (Fazendo o movimento). Emily: And when I get indignant? Emily: E quando eu ficar indignada? Adriana: Twitch your nose! (Doing it.) Adriana: Torce o nariz! (Fazendo o movimento.) Emily: Good! And what about self safisfaction? Emily: Bom! E que tal auto-satisfação? Adriana: Ah, that's my favourite one... you smirk and... if you are happy you be. [Doing it) (fazendo o movimento.) Adriana: Ah, esse é o meu favorito você sorri maliciosamente.. e se você tiver feliz você "acontece" (fazendo o movimento.) Emily: One last thing. How do I show disaproval? Emily: Uma última coisa. Como eu demonstro desaprovação? Adriana: Easy... you sniff.... is very effective. Adriana: Fácil... você funga... é muito eficaz. Emily: Well, I hope that's not necessary. Emily: Eu espero que isso não seja necessário. xxx Today we are going to talk about body language and facial expressions in particular. Hoje nós vamos falar a respeito de linguagem corporal e expressões faciais em particular. We will learn how to be charming and attractive. Nós vamos aprender como ser charmosos e atraentes. To show surprise or shock, to express nervousness, to show self satisfaction and happiness. Mostrar surpresa ou choque, expressar nervosismo, mostrar auto satisfação e felicidade. And lastly to show disapproval. As you have heard Emily is giving a unique opportunity. E por último, mostrar desaprovação. Como você ouviu foi dada a Emily uma oportunidade única. A magazine wants to publish a series of articles about secret London, and they plan to talk about her coffee bar too Uma revista quer publicar uma série de artigos a respeito da Londres Secreta, e pretende falar tamb

Thanks to the power of computer technology, you can browse the contents of a book you might like to buy online, without ever touching a physical copy of it until it’s already been bought and delivered. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could do that, but with real estate that doesn’t even exist yet? Recent Auggie winner Emily Olman thinks so, and she drops by to tell Alan all about how volumetric capture and photogrammetry will make that possible. Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is a great friend of mine, Emily Olman, CEO and co-founder of SpatialFirst, a prop tech startup and creators of PlaceTime, a mobile immersive property visualization application bringing spatial computing to real estate. Prior to this, Emily founded Hopscotch Interactive, a 3D VR marketing service company, to accelerate the adoption of new media and technology for property marketing using reality capture. She spent her career monetizing new media and developing new business models for Frontier Technologies. With a background in media sales, business, and property marketing, she believes that spatial interfaces will unlock properties’ full potential. Emily is a regular speaker on immersive real estate technology, both in the US and abroad. She’s just finished serving as the VR/AR Association’s San Francisco chapter co-president from 2016 to 2019. Yes, she’s got mad skills. Emily, welcome to the show! Emily: Hi! Thank you, Alan. Alan: Thanks so much for joining me. It’s been a long time since we saw each other, I think was at AWE. Emily: Yeah, it’s been a little bit, but it’s great to be chatting with you. Alan: Amazing. How’s everything going? Emily: Well, it’s great. And it’s been busy. And I feel like we are just heading into the most exciting time of the year. Things sometimes have their natural ebb and flow, in the summer months, for instance. But I think as we get towards the end of 2019, I think there’s some really exciting things that are gonna be happening. Alan: So tell us, tell us what’s been going on with you. You were the co-president of the San Francisco chapter, which is one of the big chapters of the VR/AR Association. And you’ve seen this industry come from nothing to where it is today, and it’s really starting to take off. So maybe just give us kind of a brief history of how you got into this industry, and where you’ve seen it come from? Emily: That’s a great segue into my perspective on the industry. I was fortunate to be running the San Francisco chapter of the VR/AR Association for a few years with Mike Boland. And we really got to see the industry start to go through many different shifts. But I would definitely also say that we got to where we are today because we really are standing on the shoulders of giants. And so the work that folks have been doing for decades in immersive technologies and virtual reality has really led to what’s enabled me to move from my passion for reality capture into creating a new interface and to be involved with very emerging technologies such as spatial computing. What’s kept me busy is having a startup. We started this company, SpatialFirst, about two years ago and have been working hard ever since to really make something unique that addresses the future of spatial computing for real estate. Alan: So when you say spatial computing for real estate. Walk us through what that means and why it’s important. Emily: As we know, when we are looking at spatial computing, this notion of we know exactly where a digital piece of con

Thanks to the power of computer technology, you can browse the contents of a book you might like to buy online, without ever touching a physical copy of it until it’s already been bought and delivered. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could do that, but with real estate that doesn’t even exist yet? Recent Auggie winner Emily Olman thinks so, and she drops by to tell Alan all about how volumetric capture and photogrammetry will make that possible. Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is a great friend of mine, Emily Olman, CEO and co-founder of SpatialFirst, a prop tech startup and creators of PlaceTime, a mobile immersive property visualization application bringing spatial computing to real estate. Prior to this, Emily founded Hopscotch Interactive, a 3D VR marketing service company, to accelerate the adoption of new media and technology for property marketing using reality capture. She spent her career monetizing new media and developing new business models for Frontier Technologies. With a background in media sales, business, and property marketing, she believes that spatial interfaces will unlock properties’ full potential. Emily is a regular speaker on immersive real estate technology, both in the US and abroad. She’s just finished serving as the VR/AR Association’s San Francisco chapter co-president from 2016 to 2019. Yes, she’s got mad skills. Emily, welcome to the show! Emily: Hi! Thank you, Alan. Alan: Thanks so much for joining me. It’s been a long time since we saw each other, I think was at AWE. Emily: Yeah, it’s been a little bit, but it’s great to be chatting with you. Alan: Amazing. How’s everything going? Emily: Well, it’s great. And it’s been busy. And I feel like we are just heading into the most exciting time of the year. Things sometimes have their natural ebb and flow, in the summer months, for instance. But I think as we get towards the end of 2019, I think there’s some really exciting things that are gonna be happening. Alan: So tell us, tell us what’s been going on with you. You were the co-president of the San Francisco chapter, which is one of the big chapters of the VR/AR Association. And you’ve seen this industry come from nothing to where it is today, and it’s really starting to take off. So maybe just give us kind of a brief history of how you got into this industry, and where you’ve seen it come from? Emily: That’s a great segue into my perspective on the industry. I was fortunate to be running the San Francisco chapter of the VR/AR Association for a few years with Mike Boland. And we really got to see the industry start to go through many different shifts. But I would definitely also say that we got to where we are today because we really are standing on the shoulders of giants. And so the work that folks have been doing for decades in immersive technologies and virtual reality has really led to what’s enabled me to move from my passion for reality capture into creating a new interface and to be involved with very emerging technologies such as spatial computing. What’s kept me busy is having a startup. We started this company, SpatialFirst, about two years ago and have been working hard ever since to really make something unique that addresses the future of spatial computing for real estate. Alan: So when you say spatial computing for real estate. Walk us through what that means and why it’s important. Emily: As we know, when we are looking at spatial computing, this notion of we know exactly where a digital piece of con

As the lead writer and head of content at BrainXchange, Emily Friedman has had ample chances to explore a lot of XR-related topics. She lets Alan pick her brain about a few of them, from getting millennials interested in trades, to democratizing knowledge, and how humanity will enter The Cloud. Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Emily Friedman from BrainXchange and Augmented World Expo. Emily Friedman is a New York based enterprise immersive, wearable and emerging technology advocate, journalist and facilitator. She’s Head of Content and the lead writer at BrainXchange, lead journalist and senior editor at Enterprisewear Blog, and head of marketing and communications for Augmented World Expo USA and AWE EU. To learn more about BrainXchange, you can visit brainxchange.com. And if you wanna learn more about AWE or Augmented World Expo, you can visit awexr.com. Welcome to the show, Emily. Emily: Thank you for having me. Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation, because you are writing everyday – or, not everyday, but what, a couple times a week? — on the enterprise wearables world. So maybe just kind of give us an overview of what is BrainXchange and AWE. Let’s start with that. Emily: Ok, I wish I were productive enough to write multiple articles a week. But there’s a lot going on. BrainXchange, we started out as a boutique events company, and we just happened to enter augmented reality at the right time. It was 2015, right after Google Glass, quote/unquote failed. And there were all these headlines, “Glasshole” articles. But if you read between the lines, it was clear that smartglasses weren’t a failure, and that enterprises were actually finding good use cases for it. So today we provide events, content, and other services all related to facilitating enterprise XR. Alan: You know, I’ve been at AWE a couple of times now. I lead the startup track this year. It’s an important conference for virtual/augmented/mixed reality and some may say it is the most important conference. It’s where everybody around the world gathers in. And I made this comment that if the building happened to collapse, basically the entire VR world would cease to exist, and we’d have to start over again. It was an amazing collection of some of the world’s smartest people working in this technology and enterprise. They seem to be really driving this technology forward. What are you seeing? Emily: Well, as for AWE, I think it’s a very important benchmarking event. Like you said, the entire industry gets together at that one point. What we’re seeing — and the reason we gravitated towards enterprise at first — is that that’s where the money is. I mean, that’s where the money has to be made, both for end users and the AR/VR companies themselves. At the end of the day, we cater to the enterprises and we talk to them every day. We get on the phone with Fortune 500 companies, the innovation people and all these different companies every day. And we listen to their pain points. AR/VR happens to offer a solution to a lot of their pain points. Alan: So what are some of the pain points? Let’s unpack that. Emily: Huge one is a shrinking workforce, that creates this need to train faster, better. So as the workforce ages — in manufacturing, I think the average age is like 40 to 50 now — and retires, not only do you need to attract new talent; you need to train them. As a millennial, this is actually pretty important to me. Learning a skill today just doesn’t get you as far as it did half a ce

As the lead writer and head of content at BrainXchange, Emily Friedman has had ample chances to explore a lot of XR-related topics. She lets Alan pick her brain about a few of them, from getting millennials interested in trades, to democratizing knowledge, and how humanity will enter The Cloud. Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Emily Friedman from BrainXchange and Augmented World Expo. Emily Friedman is a New York based enterprise immersive, wearable and emerging technology advocate, journalist and facilitator. She’s Head of Content and the lead writer at BrainXchange, lead journalist and senior editor at Enterprisewear Blog, and head of marketing and communications for Augmented World Expo USA and AWE EU. To learn more about BrainXchange, you can visit brainxchange.com. And if you wanna learn more about AWE or Augmented World Expo, you can visit awexr.com. Welcome to the show, Emily. Emily: Thank you for having me. Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation, because you are writing everyday – or, not everyday, but what, a couple times a week? — on the enterprise wearables world. So maybe just kind of give us an overview of what is BrainXchange and AWE. Let’s start with that. Emily: Ok, I wish I were productive enough to write multiple articles a week. But there’s a lot going on. BrainXchange, we started out as a boutique events company, and we just happened to enter augmented reality at the right time. It was 2015, right after Google Glass, quote/unquote failed. And there were all these headlines, “Glasshole” articles. But if you read between the lines, it was clear that smartglasses weren’t a failure, and that enterprises were actually finding good use cases for it. So today we provide events, content, and other services all related to facilitating enterprise XR. Alan: You know, I’ve been at AWE a couple of times now. I lead the startup track this year. It’s an important conference for virtual/augmented/mixed reality and some may say it is the most important conference. It’s where everybody around the world gathers in. And I made this comment that if the building happened to collapse, basically the entire VR world would cease to exist, and we’d have to start over again. It was an amazing collection of some of the world’s smartest people working in this technology and enterprise. They seem to be really driving this technology forward. What are you seeing? Emily: Well, as for AWE, I think it’s a very important benchmarking event. Like you said, the entire industry gets together at that one point. What we’re seeing — and the reason we gravitated towards enterprise at first — is that that’s where the money is. I mean, that’s where the money has to be made, both for end users and the AR/VR companies themselves. At the end of the day, we cater to the enterprises and we talk to them every day. We get on the phone with Fortune 500 companies, the innovation people and all these different companies every day. And we listen to their pain points. AR/VR happens to offer a solution to a lot of their pain points. Alan: So what are some of the pain points? Let’s unpack that. Emily: Huge one is a shrinking workforce, that creates this need to train faster, better. So as the workforce ages — in manufacturing, I think the average age is like 40 to 50 now — and retires, not only do you need to attract new talent; you need to train them. As a millennial, this is actually pretty important to me. Learning a skill today just doesn’t get you as far as it did half a ce

Emily states: "Hardest part of the job is coming up with solutions. It's one thing to identify what's wrong, it's entirely another thing to give clients an alternative solution that's accessible to start with but also reasonable for them to implement." Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Thanks to Gatsby for being a sponsor of the show. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Make sure you have a look at their site: https://www.gatsbyjs.org Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 90. It's going to be a bit different because it's been so hot where I've been that I could not go without turning off the air, ac unit, which means I could not actually record without making airplane noises in the back so I've invited Christopher Schmitt, a colleague of mine and previous guest of the show to be the guest host. So, I'll leave that to them in a moment. I'm Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show's for you. To get today's show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. I also want to thank Gatsby, a new sponsor of the show. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast and compelling websites without needing to become a performance expert. Christopher: Hello, everyone. My name is Christopher Schmitt. I am not Nic but I do welcome you to the Accessibility Rules podcast. Nic can't make it to the podcast this week, he is out traveling where it's so hot he can't actually have great audio. It's my understanding. So he asked me to guest host today. So, I'm really honored to do that. And, with us, today as a guest is Emily Lewis. Hello, Emily. Emily: Hi, Christopher. Christopher: Hey, great. You are also where it's really hot. Emily: It is. I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I think we're going to hit 100 F today. Christopher: Oh, well, nice. Emily: But, I have air conditioning so… Christopher: Yeah, we have air … we have silent running air conditioning, which is… which I am grateful every day as I am living in Austin, Texas now, so… yeah. We are actually celebrating the 28th day of 100 degrees Fahrenheit  in the summer. Emily: Ah, good times. Climate change. Christopher: Yeah, definitely. I think we have a parade a few months ago out here. But, yeah. Let's just get started with you so… Welcome to the podcast, Emily. To get started just tell me one thing most people don't know about you. Emily: I don't know. I'm a pretty transparent person and I've been fairly public within the web community in the past 10 years or so, so I guess if they don't know it about me I don't want them to. So… Christopher: That's Ari. I must admit, we have known each other for a long time, right? Emily: Yeah, yeah. Christopher: Right, I'm just checking in to make sure we are right on that one. We've known each other for a while. Emily: Full disclosure. Christopher: Did you know when we first met? Because I'm terrible with this. Emily: I do. You reached out to me to ask me to do one of your online summits. Christopher:  Oh really? Emily: … and then I happened to be going to South by Southwest later that year and you and Ari took us to BBQ. We didn't know you and it was a long road through backwoods and I was with Jason and he and I were looking at each other like, “I hope these people are safe” Christopher: And it turned out we're not. We …. No, actually, Texas chainsaw massacre was filmed like 45 minutes from where downtown Austin is so… Emily: I believe it. Christopher: So we usually do a … if we have people from out of town we … Ari, my girlfriend and so we should do… we invite people to BBQ. Especially for South by Southwest. So it's not... South by Southwest is not the web geek mecha it used to be, right? Emily: No, not anymore. Christopher: So that's like… I don't know… 80,000 people descend upon Austin whereas when I first started going it was more like 4,000 people going. So, it's a little different. Different scale of economies there. Emily: Yeah Christopher: So...And so yeah, one of the things we do… and, you know, you did a great job at the summit and you just have a great personality on stage. You're so thorough and I just… you know… every time… because, before accessibility, before working with Nic and Knowbility we ran a conference, a web conference company and every time I could, you know, I thought you'd be a good fit. I'd try to get you involved in some way, in some projects like that. So, just because you're very thorough and you have great stage performance. I mean, it's not a performance, I don't know what it is but it's just you have a … going on stage you do a great job. So.. yeah. Emily: Ah, thank you. It doesn't feel that way inside. Christopher: No? Oh no, it definitely does. It's like, I kind of … I tried stand up comedy and just all the little things. I think everyone else is now because every comic ha a podcast now and they talk about the process a lot more than they could, like in the ‘90s and whatever. And so, it's just amazing how much little things they have to do to win over a crowd and all the things they have to think about when you do that too. So, it's kind of refreshing in a way when you think about it. We are just speaking at conferences isn't our … it' normal in our industry but for a lot of other industries it's not normal. Emily: Right Christopher: Because our industry change so much. So, like,  when I was first starting out about it, there was 2 ways you could tell people you know what you're doing. One, you could actually write books about it or you go to conferences about it and then somewhere along the way something called Blogs happened. So that was networking. Right...so enough about me and all. So I'm honored to guest host the podcast with you, actually. Emily: Thank you Christopher: So, yeah. There are many definitions of the definitions on web accessibility. How do you define it? Emily: For me, it's really simple and aligns with my new job with Knowbility. It's equitable access. Making it possible for anybody to access digital information, digital experiences, commerce communities. All of it. Just making it possible. Christopher: So is there a difference between equal access and equitable access? Emily: Well, I think equal access equality is based on the same for everybody and equitable is providing the means for people to have accessibility maybe based on different needs. I think that's accurate. It's not … equitable is not making it the same for everybody, it's about building experiences that different people can use different ways but they can still fundamentally achieve the same goal. Christopher: Okay, sure. Okay. And where does your role fall within the work of web accessibility? Emily: So, right now I've only just recently shifted my career to really, really focus on accessibility so right now I'm doing auditing and assessments of sites and making recommendations for improvements. I'm getting to do a little bit of client support and client training. And, most recently I got to do some usability studies which were just awesome. And, it hasn't shown up too much because I'm still new to the job but advocacy and education that I think that is going to be a big part. So, social media, community engagement, writing, presenting… Christopher: So you're really excited about usability testing that you did. What about it did you like? Emily: I've never had a chance to watch someone interact with a website with speech to text software or eye-tracking software or you know if you've ever done like a ...you're testing screen magnification on our browsers we just resize the text but there's actual screen magnification software that's very different and I got to watch someone use that on their phone which was mind-blowing. So, just seeing first hand how someone is using a site in a different way than I ever have or seen anybody. So, it was eye-opening Christopher: How did you become aware of web accessibility and it's importance? Emily: It really kind of was just a job. One of my first jobs in web development was for a US federal agency. The USDA which is focused on agriculture, and I was a webmaster for one of their conservation sites and the bulk of that job as a webmaster, which tells you how old I am, was keeping the site up to date with 508 standards. So USDA staff would update the site and edit it and do things and I would go behind them to make sure that what they had done met those accessibility standards. It was kind of like an ongoing or rolling audit job. Christopher: Nice Emily: Yeah, so I at the time didn't really have a complete appreciation for the accessibility part of it. Like, I knew it was about accessibility but I didn't have that kind of connection I was just talking about with the user experience. But, I liked … it was a set of rules and I was a new developer trying to figure out how to be a developer so a lot of rules made a lot of sense and made my job easier. So, yeah, but I was attracted to the standards aspect of it before I really understood the accessibility aspect. Christopher: And do you feel like there's a difference between usability and accessibility? Emily: Well, yeah. Something can be technically accessible and not really usable. So, I feel like… my partner Jason - my boyfriend, they don't make a word for people who are in their mid 40's and aren't married but he does usability work for the government but accessibility is a part of it. So, fundamentally things have to meet accessibility and then on top of that, it goes through usability testing. So I guess that accessibility could be viewed as a part of usability. Christopher: Yeah I always have a tough definition there. There's a definition about it that separates usability from accessibility but when I started out it was always tough to separate the two as two distinct items. Because, I felt like if it's not accessible it's not usable, right? You can't have a good user experience if it's not accessible. It was always just like… it still is the barrier of what the difference is between those two. Emily: I honestly feel like our industry is still defining it. I mean, I see it with Jason all the time with his work and he works with the government which are really large projects with lots and lots of people and they're still trying to define this stuff. So, yeah, I think it's ongoing. It's sort of evolving as we understand this stuff. Christopher: Right, and our industry changes so fast, right? Emily: Oh my god yes. Christopher: 5 years ago we were not even talking about tablets. Like, you know. Emily: Yeah, and there's going to be so much more. I mean, as we are seeing now people having these … Echos and … I don't know, I don't have them in my house but these voice-activated devices and, you know, the more that stuff evolves the more our role, our jobs and the aspects of accessibility and usability are going to change too. It's hard to challenge it. Christopher: Yeah, it is. The conventional UIs, I mean with Echos, yeah, That's a bit of trouble, yeah. So, I do have them in my house So, um… Emily: They're watching you. Christopher: Yeah, I call them peeping Toms. That's what I call them. So… but, it is kind of weird but it's basically how much I hate light switches. And so that's why. I just like walking into a room and like, alright, turn it on and then sometimes I get a cold or the flu and you know, your throats sore or whatever and you're like “Man, I wish I had a light switch right now!” Emily: So that would be the thing that most people don't know about you. Your hatred of light switches. But now they do. Christopher: Now they do, yeah. I don't know what they know or don't already. Just, yeah, so...alright. What barriers did you or are you facing in terms of implementing accessibility? And how are you getting over them? Emily: Well, I mean, in my job now that I'm focused on accessibility it's a little different than when I ran an agency and accessibility was just … it really wasn't a priority for my job. So, today I feel like the hardest part of my job is coming up with solutions for some of the sites and interfaces that we work with because it's one thing to identify what's wrong. It's totally a different thing to give them alternatives solutions that's accessible to start with but also pretty reasonable for them to implement and on some level I can't help still being a client. You know, having worked with clients for so long. Like, you still have to support their overall design in business school. Christopher: Right Emily: I think that's incredibly hard. Christopher: Yeah I mean, it's .. it was like, Friday, I left work and I was trying to figure out in the back of my head … we tabulate what we do each day but they're kind of broad strokes. We don't have to do like a timesheet like what we do every hour and so I was trying to figure out where did my afternoon go. And, part of it, I realized on my way home I was like, “Oh yeah, I had to deconstruct this bad code example the client had used and then try to reformulate it into an accessible standards-based solution” and it took forever. Emily: Yup Christopher: Just to do that, right? And, it was a total time sink. Emily: Yup Christopher: Not like… I mean, it was good. It was a good challenge to do it but it still takes a long time to do that if it's not something easy code. It's amazing. And, I said this sarcastically last week. I was just impressed with the ability of the developers to avoid Semantic HTML. Emily: Yeah, I mean… Christopher: Yeah Emily: I was working on that same system with you and it was just, every day it was just an “Oh, that never would have occurred to me to do that.” Christopher: Yeah. Exactly. It was kind of crazy. But, yeah, I think that's also kind of our … like what we do is a benefit too. It's like we actually give alternatives to clients. I guess that's what we … that's kind of neat too. Emily: Yeah and I also like… you know we work with some really, really smart people who have a lot of experience and so, you know, watching what they do. How they make suggestions and solutions, really helps me expand what I might have considered in the first place, as a way to make a problem access… you know, solve it and make it accessible. So, yeah. I feel really lucky we have a lot of people who have so much more experience than I do. Christopher: What is your favorite word? Emily: Well, I don't know if this is like a PG-13 podcast so Nic can … I'll give you two options for Nic to choose from, but Christopher, you know this. Fuck is probably my favorite word. But, for the PG-13 listeners - ice cream. Ice cream makes me so happy. If someone says ice cream I'm instantly looking forward to it. Christopher: Oh man, you are going to enjoy Access-U, which is the conference that Knowbility puts on. It's for practical training purposes in accessibility. Ah, for the last two years they've brought an ice cream truck to the event. So, you will… Hopefully I made you happy and looking forward to May already. Emily: Alright now I'm like - I've got to get some ice cream today. Christopher: So, yeah. So like, I feel bad because Nic asked me this question and I just… I whiffed at it and so I didn't answer the question. And so, now that I have a second chance of sorts. If you don't mind me saying what my word is? Emily: Oh yeah, do it. Christopher: It's moist. Emily: Oh, you like that word? Christopher: Yeah, that's exactly why I like that word. Because everyone hates it. So, I feel like it says what it is in a way. It's like… it's kind of gross. Yeah. Emily: I like it for cake. Anything else just makes me think of humidity and discomfort. Christopher: Yeah, well I grew up in Florida. So I feel… Emily: Yeah, you love that, right? Christopher: Yeah, I just can't wait. Yeah. The move from Florida to Ohio which didn't happen in the end… I was just like, “What the heck. What's going on over here?” Christopher: What was your greatest achievement in terms of web accessibility? Emily: I really don't feel like I've achieved it yet. I mean, I've been doing front-end development, CMS development, project management for digital products for like 23 years or something like that and I've always built with standards of accessibility in mind but it's never… it's never been the focus. I've only just done that shift a few months ago so I haven't had a chance to do anything great. Christopher: I see ...I see some of your issue reports. I think you've done some great issue reports. Emily: You know, I will say that I used to have a podcast myself and it started, I guess about 8 or 9 years ago which was kind of early and we had transcripts right from the beginning. That was really important to me. Christopher: Yeah Emily: I don't know if that's a great achievement but it was a commitment that I felt was important. Christopher: Yeah, just think about how many podcasts there are that don't have transcripts. Emily: I don't understand that. Christopher: Yeah Emily: I really don't understand that. Christopher: Yeah, I felt bad because I don't have transcripts for my own podcasts that I used to run and I just … there was all this content that was just waiting to be discovered and all this content that's not been discovered. I mean, even though they have video of a podcast that they turn into audio and they don't have a transcript for it. Emily: Mmhmm, well I mean, it's an accessibility issue. But, there's business reasons for it. I mean, Google eats that up. Your podcast gets a tonne more exposure. I mean, our podcast was getting high… high up in the Google search results for almost all of our web topics. Because we had lots and lots of keywords. Christopher: Yeah. Emily: And also helps you consume the content in a different way. Like, maybe you can't listen to it and you want to scan the transcript for saline information. It just makes sense. Christopher: Yeah, I think so. Okay, cool. Well, that's awesome. Well, that's a good place for us to wrap up for now. But, thanks for being on the Accessibility Rules podcast. Emily: Thanks for having me. Christopher:  Okay, awesome. Until next time. Nic: Thanks for listening. Quick reminder, the transcript for this and all other shows are available on the show's website at https://a11yrules.com Big shoutout to my sponsors and my patrons. Without your support, I couldn't not continue to do the show. Do visit patreon.com/steenhout if you want to support the accessibility rules podcast. Thank you.

The Business of Life Podcast Hosts: Debbie Lundberg & Barbara Zant Digital Engineer: Brianna Connolly Music: www.bensound.com  TBOL_Emily_Farkas_Interview  Debbie: Hello and welcome! It's a spectacular time for another episode of The Business of Life Master Class. The podcast for people who thrive on opportunity, drive to get to results and seek input and ideas to quickly incorporate in life and in business. Hi there, it's Debbie Lundberg. Author and founder & CEO of Presenting Powerfully a Tampa, Florida based national firm providing individuals and organizations four things; Keynotes & Talks, Strategy & Facilitation, Teaming & Training and Executive Presence Coaching al contributing to the enhancement in communication, behaviors and relationships.  Barb: Hi, Barb Zant here. Corporate sales leader, founder of the lifestyle brand @thestayatworkmom and fashion stylist. As a lifetime learner it's all about the simple things and finding joy in things we do every single day. So Debbie who is this WOW community leader, that driven individual and all around impressive person who has chosen to make time for all of us today?   Debbie: Well Barb, this person comes to us as a Lieutenant Colonel, she is the deputy commander for the sixth maintenance group at the Macdill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida where we are today. She oversees the generation sustainment and the repair of 24 KC-135's and 3 C-37's the gulf stream B aircraft that supports worldwide aerial refueling, air lift and special assignment missions for the US and allied forces, as well as, providing direct support to combative commanders. She's married to a retired Lieutenant Colonel, can you imagine how organized they are? And together they have 2 sons. She got a degree from Michigan State University, Go Big 10, and a masters from Chapman University in California, where you're from Barb. So this is a genuine privilege to welcome a fellow Orange Theory loyalist, who has more metals than you could even imagine we couldn't possible share them all here, so impressive. She has been selected for promotion to Colonel effective May 1st, 2019. So let's get chatting with Emily Farkas.   Barb: Wow! Welcome Emily.  Emily: Thank you! Barb: Before Debbie gets started with the interview we like for our listeners to hear something special, unusual or defining about you that for some reason if we don't hear about it in our podcast we might not know about you. So Emily, do tell what is that one thing that no one knows?  Emily: Well thank you foremost thank you Debbie and Barb for choosing me among many of your professionals you have in the Tampa Bay area, I'm honored to join your podcast um and one thing that we wouldn't necessarily know about me right off the bat is that I am the first of my family to go to college. My Michigan State experience was uncharted territory, I didn't really have great mentors to reach back to so that experience was life changing for me. I hold that experience at Michigan State dear to my heart, I'm a loyal Spartan through and through um just because it did help and shape me to become the person I am today. Um another thing is that I can tear up the karaoke stage without one one drop of alcohol.   Debbie: What!? Really?  Emily: I can! I love karaoke, I love singing, I love music. I have a 1900's Grand Piano in my home that has traveled at least 6 times with us in the Air Force so it's a little bit of information for when you walk into my home and you see this Steinway and of course my boys are learning piano and it just has to happen.  Debbie: So it's not just a piece of furniture, it gets utilized?&

We sit down with FindSpark CEO, public speaker and educator Emily Miethner to share her journey and share tips for young professionals seeking to build their professional network.Learn more about Emily hereLearn more about FindSpark hereTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and yes, you're listening to a B-Side. Now yes, we've introduced the purpose of a B-Side before, but every episode is someone's first episode. So for our new folks, B-Sides are essentially random shows we have in-between our larger shows. These are much less structured and somehow even more lit--that's right, more lit--than our regularly scheduled shows. If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say more lit, watch this. Sound Man gonna give me some air horns right... here.[Sound Man complies]Zach: And then the beat's gonna change and drop right... here. Now, look, this particular episode we have a very special guest, okay? This guest is named Emily Miethner. Emily is a public speaker, a networker, social media subject matter expert, a consultant, and perhaps most notably she is the CEO of FindSpark, a certified women’s-owned business enterprise that connects employees to top diverse early-career talent and has produced more than 250 career programs and cultivated an online and active community of over 30,000--that's right, three zero, 000--young professionals and top employers including HBO, BuzzFeed, NBC Universal, L'Oreal, Showtime, Grey, Bustle, Ralph Lauren, and Univision, inspiring career optimism in diverse young professionals around the world and empowering them with actionable career changing tips and tools. Now, listen folks, before I even get Emily on the show, you heard me say all those names. You know I'm gonna get at least a couple of those names with Living Corporate. This is crazy. You see these names? Y'all hear these names? Anyway, Emily, welcome to the show. How are you?Emily: I'm doing really well. It's Friday, so I can't complain too much. Zach: That's right. Now Emily, talk to us about FindSpark. Where did the name come from and how did y'all begin?Emily: Absolutely. So we actually went through a name change. So our initial name used to be NY Creative Interns way, way back in the day, but that gives a little sneak peek into the inspiration behind starting it. So I was a creative young student myself at one point, and really during my college years is when I realized that there really weren't a lot of great career resources out there, especially ones that focused on networking and building relationships. And I found that to be immensely powerful and important in my own career even just starting out looking for internships and my first jobs, and so I knew that I wanted to create something that really emphasizes the importance of creating a strong network for yourself early on and also to create actually fun and enjoyable experiences in ways for employers to connect with talent and doing it in a very inclusive way where everyone can feel welcome, whether it was their, you know, first time networking or millionth time networking. And so I took the skills that I had in then planning and social media, and that's what I really used to start FindSpark and create these experience for people of all different backgrounds to get a better understanding of all the different types of career opportunities that are out there and get, you know, better access to them, regardless of, you know, where their starting point is.Zach: That's amazing. So as I mentioned in your introduction, and I hyped it up, but I don't really think it was hype. You've been able to connect with some fairly major names. So first off, major props to you and air horns are gonna be placed right... here [Sound Man throws 'em in] because of all these crazy amazing brands, but secondly, how did you do it? And wait, before you answer the second question, my third question is how can you hook up Living Corporate with some of these amazing names? 'Cause these names are crazy. Emily: Well, you know, I think the best place to start when you're building anything is, you know, with whatever semblance of a network that you do have. And so, you know, really I--when I was starting FindSpark, I talked to as many folks as I could that I already knew - friends, mostly friends from college, the people that I had met at events, you know? As you could guess, I'm a big event geek and I really--you know, really, really love events and personally go to many of them, and so I'm pretty--I was always putting myself out there, and when I had the idea for FindSpark I would just really talk to as many people as I could about it, and I think that's something that a lot of people get wrong when they're trying to start something is they think, "Well, I don't want to talk about it yet," or "It's not perfect yet," or "I don't want somebody to steal my idea," and things of that nature, and I think it's good to talk to as many people as possible because you never know how they might be able to help you. And so I really started by doing small events, inviting people that I knew or just inviting people that I found through my own research online, and, you know, when you have a really awesome mission of, you know, taking something that's usually really crappy, which is networking, and, you know, saying that, like, "Hey, this is actually gonna be enjoyable. It's gonna be a really great group, and you're gonna connect with folks who maybe are outside of your normal network." It's a pretty carrot to put in front of people, and by always--by always creating a very welcoming and inclusive environment from day one, we've just built an extremely diverse crowd and, you know, in the broadest sense. You know, not just gender and ethnicity, and so that really got the attention of employers, in addition to employers seeing that, like, "Wow, they're creating these really fun ways to connect with these candidates," and when I started it was I would say definitely more of a--it was harder to get jobs when I started FindSpark, you know? It was, like, right around--you know, off of, like, the 2008 tough times when it was hard for really anyone to get a job, but now it's really switched I think to be more of a candidate's marketplace, and so, you know, employers need to be competitive in terms of, you know, showing candidates why they're at the best place to work and have the best opportunities and opportunities for growth. And so that's--you know, that's what they really come to us for is to show that they're, you know, investing in, you know, new and different ways to connect with talent and not just going to, you know, the same top ten colleges and posting on their job board and, you know, getting referrals from people that, you know, they're going above and beyond to create experiences and opportunities for talent to connect with them.Zach: Was there ever a moment while building FindSpark that you said, "Wow, this is pretty special?"Emily: You know--well, I would say going back to, you know, all of these great partners that we've been able to work with, these great employers, I mean, I think every time we get to do something incredible--and, you know, whether or not it's a huge employer like, you know, Grey Advertising or NBC Universal, I mean, even the smaller companies where, you know, you probably haven't heard of them because they're not a consumer-facing name, but we know that they have incredible opportunities. And, you know, those moments where we are building something that's going to connect folks to, you know, a career or a life-changing, you know, opportunity or connection. I mean, those are always the best moments, and luckily they happen fairly often. So those are--yeah, I would say those moments where we're, you know, building these partnerships, getting them off the ground, and then also just, you know, the positive aftermath of them when, you know, you get the follow-ups of folks who have made positive connections and who you've had an impact on. I have a very wonderful starred inbox full of folks who, you know, have shared their successes, and that's always really, really exciting and rewarding.Zach: I bet. So, you know, you made mention earlier about making connections, right? You said it's a candidate's market and how, you know, employers are seeking to really--to get and acquire true talent. So I'm curious, what advice would you give organizations who are seeking to be more inclusive and diverse by hiring ethnically diverse millennial talent? And what have you seen work?Emily: Well, you know, I think one important thing is to realize the difference between diversity and inclusion, right? They're often paired together, and we even talk about--you know, at FindSpark we talk about how we support diversity and inclusion, but they are two different things, and so, you know, for us, our ideal clients and for the employers we're working with, we really want to make sure that they have the inclusion side down before they start partnering with us in an external way that's more focused on diversity. And we also do DNI consulting, and we'll work internally as, like, an adviser as well if they're at that, you know, internal stage because there's no point in attracting diverse talent or talent that might not be representative of, like, how your company make-up is as a whole if you're gonna get them in the door and then not be providing the support they need to thrive and to grow, because then they're just gonna leave. So, you know, doing those internal sort of audits first of what is the, you know, climate of inclusivity. Are your hiring practices or your interview practices and your onboarding practices as inclusive as they can be? You know, and really getting all of that back-end structure set up first before going on the external side. And if you have all of that, you know, internal stuff, you know, set up and you have that going, then in terms of the external side I would say, you know, of course it's inserting yourself into communities and places where there is--where there is diverse talent or talent that's not coming from the most obvious places. You know, FindSpark is a great partner because we have so many different schools represented in our community, and we focus on what we call early-career talent, so that's folks with about zero to five years of experience. So you're either (in repping?) current attendants of different schools or, you know, have graduated from them, but, you know, it can be easy to focus on just a few schools with, you know, a few top programs and that sort of thing, but, you know, you have to think beyond the obvious. And I would say the other thing is to give opportunities to folks on your team, to a diverse range of folks on your team, when it comes to thought leadership, when it comes to creating content, when it comes to having a say in what sort of partnerships or recruiting practices that you are doing because that's really important too for people to see externally that folks who are in your company already from diverse backgrounds are elevated and have the opportunity to, you know, make significant contributions and that sort of thing.Zach: No, absolutely. It's funny that you--it's interesting that you bring that up because, you know, to your point, it's not just about having black and brown folks in the audience. It's like, "Okay, well, who actually has the decision-making authority and power," right?Emily: Right, mm-hmm.Zach: So if you see a bunch of--I mean, not to be--like, not to be too crass, right, but, like, if you look at in the 1800s, like, plantations were very diverse, but they weren't inclusive, right? Like, you had black folks everywhere, but there was only so many--there was a certain group of people who were only in power, right? So it's like, how do you figure out and how do you include and make sure that people who are--who are not necessarily the majority still feel involved and empowered with the decision-making of what's really happening around? So to your point around the thought leadership and actually being able to say, "Look, I was able to contribute to something. I was actually able to point to something and say I actually had a hand in driving that." That's so important. So as you know, Living Corporate focuses on the experiences of under-represented people and groups in the workplace. In my experience, so much of networking is built off of who you know. Like, if you're a first-generation immigrant or if you're a black or Latinx person or et cetera, your social circles are drastically smaller than your white counterparts. What advice have you or influencers within FindSpark's network given to people of color as they seek to grow their network and navigate their careers?Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I also--in addition to FindSpark, I'm also an adjunct professor at a couple of colleges, and I teach career and social media courses. And they're different courses, different types of students. One is senior computer animation students at SVA. Another is a mix of different types of students at FIT, different grade levels, but an assignment that I give to both of them is to reach out and--reach out using only social media and the internet to get an informational interview with someone who you admire, and it's so simple, and as, you know, older folks, you and I--not too old, of course--but, you know, we understand that concept and that it's important and that you can do that, but younger people, especially younger people who might be coming from families who don't understand what they want to do or have, you know, no connections in the world where they want to go, it's not obvious that "Oh, I can just find someone whose work I admire and say hi and, like, ask them for their time?" Like, "What? I didn't even--what?" Like, "Really? Are you sure?" You know, especially younger--you know, at FIT a lot of my students are on the younger side. They may be, like, freshmen or sophomores, and, you know, they don't learn that kind of thing in high school. Like, they're not teaching the importance of networking. They're learning, like, how to take an SAT test and that kind of thing, and so they don't realize, like, how important it is to learn from other people and how open people are. And they're used to using social media for joking around with their friends and, like, being doofuses, and, you know--which I think is another misnomer that older people have, like "Oh, young people, they know all about how to use social media to do anything that they want," and yes, it's true that younger people are more--they are more digital natives in a sense. They know how to use the tools, like, logistically. Like, they would, like, more intuitively understand how to use different apps and Snapchat and all that kind of stuff, but that doesn't mean that they understand how they can use it professionally. And, you know, they have this whole other layer of--you know, a complete additional layer or many different layers of etiquette that they have to deal with. Like, "How do I present myself on all these different platforms to my professors, to my peers, to potential employers or mentors?" Et cetera, et cetera, and so just really empowering them that yes, you can use the internet, which is so amazing that you can reach out to so many different types of people so easily to connect with folks and really take ownership of building a network and getting them into the mindset that, you know, most people will not respond to them as well.Zach: Right.Emily: Because I--which, you know, I'm not just like, "Yes, the internet is magic, and you can get all of the people you want in your network so easily, and it's no big deal." Like, no. You know, I teach them it's possible, but it takes a lot of effort and it takes time, and of course you want to be creating great work on your own and show them that you're someone worth investing their time in because of, you know, your work ethic and things that you've created and done and that sort of thing, but that, you know, yes, a lot of people--most people will not respond to you or not get back to you, and that's okay, but the important thing is you try and you try in an authentic way, you know? By reaching out to people who you truly admire, you're gonna send better notes, you're gonna have better meetings because, you know, you truly admire them versus, like, "I'm gonna send the same message to 20 different people at Viacom 'cause I just want to take any job at Viacom," right? Like, that's not gonna work. So again, especially if you're not coming into a career with a built-in family network or a strong network from college, because maybe your campus is not one that companies come to and that sort of thing. Just knowing that there are so many people out there who want to help you and guide you and support you, and so it's just a matter of finding those people, you know? Looking across different platforms, and focus on people who have already shown an interest in helping others. You know, so those would be like people with podcasts or people who have blogs or people who are actively posting on social media or people who put their emails in their social media bios.Zach: Right. They do that for a reason.Emily: Yeah, and still people will be hesitant to reach out, you know? So focus on those types of people, people who do speaking engagements, who have written books. You know, there's different levels of that sort of thing, but those people are just more likely to be responsive as well. And so if you are someone who is from an underrepresented background as well, I would say, you know, it's important--well, really for anyone to just make yourself accessible to folks as well as being able to pay it forward.Zach: So again, I'm not trying to be a fan or too starstruck, but I see those names you've been able to connect with. How much of that has to do with you stepping out of your comfort zone and just putting yourself out there?Emily: Yeah. Well, I think it's huge, and I think what makes it easier is really knowing and having--knowing that you have something of value to offer, and also just really understanding why it will be valuable to, you know, the company or the person because, you know, at the end of the day everybody's got their own problems, and they want to look good, and they want to help their company grow. So, you know, when you're approaching anyone, whether it's for a partnership or you're just a person, like, looking for a job, you know, it's really understanding what their needs are and how you can help with that need and help solve that problem and, you know, ultimately make the person who vouched for you--again, whether that's the talent acquisition person or the person who's, you know, bringing on your company as a partner--you know, making them look good. Like, making them be like, "Wow, I'm so happy that I made this happen, that I brought this person on," or, you know, brought this partnership to life.Zach: Okay, so I don't want the interview to get too far away from us before I ask about what FindSpark has planned in 2019 and you letting us know where we can learn more about your organization and why professionals and employers alike should engage your platform.Emily: Awesome, of course. So, I mean, in terms of our plans, like, we have created so many incredible programs over the last year and are gonna be doing more and more in 2019, so, you know, we're doing a lot of custom partnerships with employers. One of my favorite recent examples is we worked with Grey Advertising to create a free eight-week portfolio school for aspiring creatives who have not already been through some sort of formal advertising program, whether through an official portfolio school or a well-known advertising college or university. So we brought a really, really diverse group of students who all had to apply to attend--apply to be a part of it. It was very competitive, and they had access to this incredible education from top creatives at Grey. They got to present final projects, their final campaign projects, to the chief worldwide creative officer at Grey. I mean, like, this was an incredibly, like, career and life-changing opportunity for those selected. So doing more and more programs like that where we are able to create these really meaningful connections and educational opportunities as well, and also we're doing more to support the inclusion side of employers and their initiatives as well. So our NBC Universal partnership we just did, not only did we bring in--create an event where we brought in 40 curated FindSpark members and candidates essentially, but the event also--they invited 40 folks from their young professionals network at NBC to come to this event as well and hear from this panel of incredible ad sales professionals at NBC Universal. So, you know, not only was it a great way to build a pipeline of potential candidates to bring into NBC, but for--you know, NBC has tons of employees with tons of potential too, and so curating, you know, a great group of those folks to also learn and network with the folks we brought in was really exciting. So again, doing more programs that also support that internal--like, we talked about, like, inclusion and providing opportunities for underrepresented talent inside and outside of the organization to excel and grow is, you know, what we're doing more and more of. And so in terms of where folks can learn more, definitely follow us on Instagram, and I know that's how we connected, so gotta give some shout out to the gram.Zach: That's right, shout out to the gram.Emily: We're at FindSpark on Instagram and every platform, [inaudible] make your Instagram feed a little bit more productive. But so fun, and then if you go to FindSpark.com/newsletter, if you're a young professional, an early-career professional, you can sign up to hear all about our opportunities, and FindSpark.com/employers is where you can learn more about partnering with us to connect with our [inaudible].Zach: That's awesome. Now, look, before we go, do you have any shout outs or final words?Emily: I would say always be connecting with people who you find interesting, and do it in a genuine way. And don't just connect with them, but always make sure that you're also creating time to maintain those relationships by practicing what I like to call unforced follow-up, which is, you know, when you see something, whether it's an Instagram post or an email or an article and you think--and you think of someone in your network, most people do that and they just think about them but then they move on with their day. If you take a couple of minutes when that happens to actually take the time to send it to that person or tag them in the post, send them an email with no intention other than just saying, "Hey, I thought of you," "This is the thing that made me think of you," that sort of thing will really help you maintain your network as well, which is super, super important.Zach: Always be connecting. I like that. We might have found the subtitle for this podcast, 'cause see, I think the episode--and tell me how you feel about the title of this podcast. This episode is gonna be Finding That Spark with Emily Miethner. Emily: I love it. Perfect.Zach: Okay. All right. Well, look, that does it for us, y'all. Thank you for joining us on the Living Corporate podcast. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at LivingCorporate, Twitter at LivingCorp_Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter through www.living-corporate.com. If you have a question you'd like for us to answer and read on the show, make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. This has been Zach, and you've been listening to Emily Miethner, CEO of FindSpark. Peace.Kiara: Living Corporate is a podcast by Living Corporate, LLC. Our logo was designed by David Dawkins. Our theme music was produced by Ken Brown. Additional music production by Antoine Franklin from Musical Elevation. Post-production is handled by Jeremy Jackson. Got a topic suggestion? Email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can find us online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and living-corporate.com. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Emily Olson Co-founder, Foodzie Date: June 29, 2009 Emily Olson: Foodzie [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I am the CEO of National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, and this is one of an ongoing series of interviews that we're doing with women who have started IT companies. We've got an especially exciting one today for all of you people who like to eat. Larry Nelson: Yeah. Lucy: And for people who like to create food, and people who like to eat. With me is Lee Kennedy who is the CEO and founder of Boulder Search, herself a serial entrepreneur and also a board member of NCWIT. And also, Larry Nelson, CEO of W3W3. Is that what you call yourself? Larry: Yeah, well, I call myself all kinds of things, but I'll take that. Lucy: CEO of W3W3. Hi, Larry. How are you? Larry: Oh, absolutely magnificent. I'm really excited about this, and as you said before, Brad and David Cohen are very proud of her. In a little conversation that I had with David Cohen about a month ago, I said, "Wow, they're doing so well". He said, "Well, you know, if you really think of it. They've got the natural product, the natural thing, and they're just tapping into the IT". So, they're very proud of you. Lucy: Today we're talking with Emily Olson. The reason why we're all so proud of Emily is that she's a TechStars alum, and her people who have listened to our Entrepreneurial Toolbox new series, they'll know from the interview with David Cohen all about TechStars. It's a wonderful program here in Boulder to help budding entrepreneurs. Emily is the co-founder of Foodzie. It's an online marketplace here you can discover and buy food directly from all kinds of passionate food producers and growers. Listeners will be very eager to know that Emily just got back from Seattle where - I read in her blog - she looked at all kinds of great food at Pike Street Market and all those other places that you like to go when you are in Seattle. Emily and her co-founders were chosen by "Business Week" as three of the most promising young entrepreneurs in tech for 2009. Larry: Wow. Lee Kennedy: That's exciting. Lucy: So, welcome, Emily. Emily Olson: Thanks, thanks. I'm glad to be here. Lucy: First, tell us, before we get into our questions about entrepreneurship, what's going on at Foodzie? Emily: Well, there's a lot of exciting things going on. We've been growing a bunch, in particular our producer base, and just getting more and more sellers on board who share their products. But more specifically, right now a lot of people want to find what's local to them and we have more filters for them because that's something that we're working on right now as far as things that we're building. And yeah, improving the way both with the tools that help our producers to sell and help people to find specifically what they're looking for so we can improve the site. Lucy: Well, and I hear you've got great customer service at Foodzie, really. Emily: We try, yeah. Lucy: Really taking care of customers, and I think Brad mentioned that you are always bribing people with chocolate over at TechStars. Lee: I remember that. Emily: I usually joke that that's how we got in. We brought some sea salt caramels and LUCA chocolate out of North Carolina. We brought those with us, and sort of, now it's the expectation that wherever we go we do bring food. So, yeah, they got to know us well and we got to feed everybody there at TechStars. Lucy: Well, that's wonderful. Let's just get right to our entrepreneurship questions. We could talk about Foodzie all day. It's just kind of making me hungry. Emily: That would be my world. Larry: I was going to warn the listeners. When you go to the Foodzie website, you will get hungry. Lucy: Oh, it's just beautiful. So, Emily, why don't you give a bit of history about how you got into technology, and how you came to start a technology company? What technologies are cool, et cetera? Emily: OK, so I was actually - I still am - in the food business, and that's where I found something that I was really passionate about. I was working for a specialty food retailer called The Fresh Market based on the East Coast, and I worked directly with the buyers there in helping to source products. And I also manage their e-commerce there. I just saw a disconnect, basically, the small producers who were trying to get into these stores. It was really hard for them because they often had limited distribution. They didn't have the margins built in and they couldn't make their way into these brick-and-mortar stores. What I really liked about technology and what the Internet provides was more of an open platform where you have unlimited shelf space, and you have all these opportunities to have more of these producers without the barriers and limitations you have of a brick-and-mortar store. And you also have the opportunity with video and a lot of the social media that we have going on to actually connect with these producers and get to know them better which we don't have the opportunity to do when there is just packaging sitting on the shelf. That's what got me the most excited about what I was doing, that I was passionate about, was using technology to make it better. Lucy: So you use technology to tell the stories of the producers in addition to showing what they're selling. Emily: Absolutely, yeah. So not only are we using technology, we're trying to make it easy for them to get on with a store, sell their products to a wider audience, but also to share their story which -- if you go to a farmer's market and you actually get to meet the person that makes the food, that's kind of what is the object behind a lot of these products, getting that story. I think we have the ability and the technology to replicate that as closely as possible. So, yeah, those are the things that got me really excited. Lucy: So, Emily, we're always curious why entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs. So, tell us a little bit about why entrepreneurship makes you tick and just what it is that you love about it. Emily: Well, initially it starts by being a problem that you want to solve and realizing that you are going to need to go and solve it yourself. I actually think that's where it was for me, while I saw I wasn't going to be able to do it, it turns out that it didn't exist and you have to create something. I think someone who is willing to take a risk and who likes creating, who likes building, who likes all of that, I think leads you into entrepreneurship. At least that's how it happened for me. Lucy: And do you find yourself continuing to take that role at Foodzie as looking for the new challenges that need to be solved? Emily: I think new challenges are presented every day. I think, yeah, absolutely, and I think what's really exciting when you mentioned customer service. We have a very close relationship with all of the producers that sell on our site, and we try to have a very close relationship with customers that buy. If you listen to them and you discover you what their needs are, then you can iterate and develop the product to their needs. I think that's the most exciting thing as an entrepreneur, that you can guide it and you can make those decisions to change something. With a small team you can make it happen pretty fast. So, I think that's something that gets really - I don't know - exciting to be able to say, "Hey, I want to do this," and just do it. Oftentimes in bigger companies, and when you're not an entrepreneur you can't quickly make those choices. So that's what has been a lot of fun for me. Larry: Wow, that's fantastic. You know, we've interviewed now dozens of wonderful women in the NCWIT Hero Series, and you certainly are one of the youngest. I can't help but ask this. Who influenced you the most? Who supported you, or did you have mentors or advisors? Emily: Well, I think early on when I was in high school I had a very strong mentor who was actually a chemistry teacher of mine, but he sort of just instilled in me that I could do anything that I want. And I think I took that with me through and into my career. And so I definitely had that foundation early on. As far as taking a risk, I think it's having the right support around you. My co-founders, Rob and Nik, knowing that you have the right team to start with when you go into business is huge. It allows you to overcome the initial roadblocks and obstacles that often stop people who have a great idea to actually follow through with it. So I think that was a huge thing for me early on, and then when we got to TechStars we had some incredible mentors that took us from the IP stage all the way, to whether it was working on price strategy or how we were going to market it or wanting it on an open platform or a closed platform and all of those questions we went through. We had just mentors who had been through it who built their businesses and could offer us really good advice and that took us, I think, several steps ahead of where we would have been on our own. Lucy: Well, and you know, your answer really points again to the critical role of the encouragement in young people's lives that teachers have, especially in high school and college, that the can give you that confidence to believe in yourself, no matter what you're working on. It's incredibly important the number of stories we've heard about math teachers or chemistry teachers or anybody else really making sure that you had confidence. So turning now to something that may be a little less positive, we like to ask people the challenges that they've had so far in their career and what the one toughest thing you had to do so far in your career. What might that be? Emily: One? [laughs] Larry: Oh, yeah, yeah. Lucy: Only one. Larry: We don't have two hours. [laughter] Emily: The hardest thing, I think, for me actually has been to find people to come on board that are just as passionate as you are as far as the entrepreneur and founder of a company. I think you take that for granted when you are an employee and you are excited. Now, running a business it's totally different, and I think finding those people... We've been really fortunate. We have two employees working now for Foodzie. One of them came to us and said that, "I want to be a Foodzie," and had everything that we needed. And I wasn't even looking for, but came to us. We've been searching for some other people that we want to join the team, but it's been really, really hard. I think we care a lot about the culture we're building and making sure that people believe in it. And so I would say that has such a direct impact on the business that finding the right people has probably been the hardest thing that we had to do. Lucy: It is hard finding good people that have that same passion that you do about the company you started. So, Emily, you had mentioned earlier in the interview that you got some great coaching from a chemistry teacher. We are always curious, what kind of coaching you would give young people, people in high school, college, early 20s, about entrepreneurship, and what advice you'd give them as far as starting a company or weathering through a company? Emily: I think that I had mentioned before about having the right team around you. I think that's absolutely critical, and I think oftentimes people get discouraged on an idea that seems really exciting to start. Then it often becomes "I can't do it" because you're missing pieces that can get you through that. And so I definitely think that above all else when you have a great idea, think about how you can round out your team. I think two to three founders to develop is the right number. It was three for us, and I think it was, perhaps, the perfect number because we rounded out the technology and marketing business side. So that's one thing. Surround yourself with the right team. But also find what you're really passionate about and make sure that this idea that you have is something you want to spend every day, all day, every weekend, thinking about for the next couple of years because it is all-consuming. When the days are really hard and long, if you're passionate about it and you really love what you're doing, it's a little bit easier. I know that's something for me. This is the space that I am truly, truly passionate about, and that work/life balance. Sometimes I confuse the two. Is this work? Is this life? I don't know. It's the same. So I think that finding something that you're passionate about is really important. Sometimes, I think that overused when people often say like, "Well, what the heck am I passionate about? I don't know. Am I passionate about this?" For me, I found I was passionate about food in college because I was putting off my homework and everything else to cook and do all these things that were related to food. And so I think if you're trying to look for what you're passionate about or trying to see if this idea you are going after is something you're passionate about. See if it's the kind of thing you would want to do, if you didn't have to work at all and you just had to retire and someone was going to pay your way and you had free time to do whatever. Would you want to be doing that? I think that's an important thing to think about. I think it is just really important when you're starting a business. Larry: Emily, you mentioned working eight days a week or something like that. Emily: [laughter]. Somewhere around there. Lee: He must be worried that you're working. Larry: Right, right. I know. I guess we can associate with that. Isn't that right, Lee? Lee: I was going to say that as being a serial entrepreneur, you've got to love it because you are doing it all the time, morning, noon and night. And if you don't love it, it's just gets to be a drag. Larry: And now I'm going to ask for a real tough question. Lucy: Oh, good. We are ready for it [laughter]. Larry: With all these... Emily: I already got that one [laughter] Larry: Oh, well, listen to this one. With all that you were talking about, how do you bring balance into your personal and your professional lives? Emily: If you're doing what you're passionate about, I think that the line is often blurred. I feel like I can go and do something like go to a cooking event and go and learn how to make chocolate truffles and that was just purely enjoyment for me. But I can tie it back to a business in a way, like I can write a blog about it or whatever might be. So for me, that's been it, because the line is kind of blurred. But even though I am passionate about what I do, I do have to disconnect and just not be doing something not related to the business. And I think for me it's going out nature. I've been fortunate the few places we operate Foodzie are in Colorado and San Francisco, California. Both have amazing outdoors and places to go and explore. And so I get to go offline and go do those kind of things like hiking in San Francisco, sailing and things like that. And also, try to plan it into your schedule. I think I've set a couple of goals for myself outside of just getting into nature. I want to learn how to play the guitar. I want to learn more about the American history and I want to join a soccer league. And that's for the entire year, but I try to work a little bit of accomplishing those every couple of weeks, so that I make sure I do those things. Lucy: Very wise. Larry: Yes, I'll say. I like that answer. Lucy: Plus I want some chocolate truffles. [laughs] Emily: That made you guys hungry, huh? Lucy: You keep bringing out the subject on chocolate that just really outstanding. Well it's really fascinating to listen to everything that you're saying, especially about the history of Foodzie. I know you have a very bright future. So this next question, which is our final question is kind of hard to ask. But what's next for you? It's hard to know, because you're right in the very beginning you started a wonderful company. But perhaps you can speculate a bit with us about what's next. Emily: Well, I think what's next is definitely something related to Foodzie. We'll be doing this for a good while. And I think our big vision is to help small food producers across this country succeed and stay in business. And we've really only scratched the surface in doing that. So we really want to just become partners with these producers and help them build their business. I know that's sort of a vague answer, but we want to have a big impact. We want to be a part of a movement that changes the way people eat in this country. And we think we can be, and I think technology has a lot to do with that. That and connecting people, giving these people the tools they need and getting people become aware of what they're doing. So yeah, I think that's it. Lucy: That's awesome. Larry: Yeah. Emily that's not vague, that's wonderful. Lucy: It's an awesome mission, I just wanted to personally know how small a producer because I'm kind of a gardener. [laughter] Lucy. I have way too much food. I give it to all my neighbors. Larry: So your website is Foodzie.com. Emily: Yeah, Foodzie.com. Larry: Wonderful. Lucy: And everybody needs to go visit and eat. Emily: Check out the chocolate section and I'm sure you'll find something that'll get you to start salivating. It's a pretty dangerous category. Lucy: Well, thank you very much, Emily, for talking with us and I just want to remind listeners where they can find these podcasts. They can find it at our website, NCWIT.org and w3w3.com. Larry: You bet. Lucy: Make sure that you pass this along to others. Emily, thank you very much. Lee: Thank you, Emily. Larry: Thank you. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Emily OlsonInterview Summary: Like many entrepreneurs, Emily Olson saw a niche, got an idea, and ran with it. Foodzie uses technology to share great food from smaller producers with a larger audience. Release Date: June 29, 2009Interview Subject: Emily OlsonInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 17:56