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On episode 150 of This Week in Space, it's our Listener Special edition! Not only do we answer your questions and respond to your comments, but we lined up a number of your most tummy-tickling space jokes in the humor shooting gallery. This one is more fun than wearing new shoes! Join us as we talk about asteroid 2024YR4, the Space Launch System's prospects, Katy Perry in space, the newest lunar missions, the X-37B "secret shuttle," Apollo-era flight director Gene Kranz and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, solar sails, the cage match between Elon and astronaut Andreas Morgenson, and the best meteor shower of the year! Headlines Asteroid 2024 YR4 no longer a threat - The Earth-shattering asteroid that briefly had a record high 3.2% chance of impact has been downgraded to a 1 in 20,000 risk after pre-discovery data was analyzed, sparing Barstow and the rest of Earth. SLS faces uncertain future - Even long-time supporters like Scott Pace (former National Space Council secretary) are suggesting an "off-ramp" from the SLS rocket to commercial providers, signaling a potential shift in NASA's approach to lunar missions. Lunar Trailblazer mission communication issues - The recently launched lunar orbiter briefly lost contact after launch on a Falcon 9 but has since established a heartbeat. Blue Origin announces all-female crew for NS-31 - The upcoming mission will feature singer Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez, and four other accomplished women, marking the first all-female crew since Valentina Tereshkova's solo flight in the 1960s. Blue Ghost lunar landing imminent - Firefly Aerospace's first moon lander is scheduled to touch down on March 2nd, joining two other private landers (from Intuitive Machines and ispace) headed to the moon in the coming weeks. Listener Questions X-37B space plane purpose - The hosts discussed the secretive Space Force vehicle that's been in orbit for 908 days, likely testing technologies like hall thrusters and conducting reconnaissance. Elon Musk vs. astronauts controversy - The hosts addressed the Twitter/X confrontation between Elon Musk and astronauts (including Andreas Morgensen) regarding claims that astronauts were "stranded" on the ISS for political reasons. Gene Kranz's impact during Apollo - Rod shared his experience interviewing the legendary flight director, highlighting Kranz's "dictum" speech after the Apollo 1 fire and his transition to a more reflective persona later in life. Meeting Buzz Aldrin - The hosts described Aldrin as passionate, technically brilliant, and candid about his personal struggles, with Tariq sharing how Aldrin was the subject of his first professional space article in 1999. Solar sail technology potential - They discussed the success of Planetary Society's LightSail 2 and other solar sail missions, lamenting that the technology hasn't been utilized more extensively for deep space missions. Best meteor showers to observe - The hosts recommended the Perseids (August), Geminids (December), and Leonids (November) as the most impressive annual meteor showers, emphasizing the importance of dark skies for optimal viewing. Convincing moon landing deniers - They discussed the challenge of persuading conspiracy theorists, citing evidence including Soviet tracking confirmation and modern lunar reconnaissance photos showing Apollo landing sites. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Download or subscribe to This Week in Space at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit
On episode 150 of This Week in Space, it's our Listener Special edition! Not only do we answer your questions and respond to your comments, but we lined up a number of your most tummy-tickling space jokes in the humor shooting gallery. This one is more fun than wearing new shoes! Join us as we talk about asteroid 2024YR4, the Space Launch System's prospects, Katy Perry in space, the newest lunar missions, the X-37B "secret shuttle," Apollo-era flight director Gene Kranz and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, solar sails, the cage match between Elon and astronaut Andreas Morgenson, and the best meteor shower of the year! Headlines Asteroid 2024 YR4 no longer a threat - The Earth-shattering asteroid that briefly had a record high 3.2% chance of impact has been downgraded to a 1 in 20,000 risk after pre-discovery data was analyzed, sparing Barstow and the rest of Earth. SLS faces uncertain future - Even long-time supporters like Scott Pace (former National Space Council secretary) are suggesting an "off-ramp" from the SLS rocket to commercial providers, signaling a potential shift in NASA's approach to lunar missions. Lunar Trailblazer mission communication issues - The recently launched lunar orbiter briefly lost contact after launch on a Falcon 9 but has since established a heartbeat. Blue Origin announces all-female crew for NS-31 - The upcoming mission will feature singer Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez, and four other accomplished women, marking the first all-female crew since Valentina Tereshkova's solo flight in the 1960s. Blue Ghost lunar landing imminent - Firefly Aerospace's first moon lander is scheduled to touch down on March 2nd, joining two other private landers (from Intuitive Machines and ispace) headed to the moon in the coming weeks. Listener Questions X-37B space plane purpose - The hosts discussed the secretive Space Force vehicle that's been in orbit for 908 days, likely testing technologies like hall thrusters and conducting reconnaissance. Elon Musk vs. astronauts controversy - The hosts addressed the Twitter/X confrontation between Elon Musk and astronauts (including Andreas Morgensen) regarding claims that astronauts were "stranded" on the ISS for political reasons. Gene Kranz's impact during Apollo - Rod shared his experience interviewing the legendary flight director, highlighting Kranz's "dictum" speech after the Apollo 1 fire and his transition to a more reflective persona later in life. Meeting Buzz Aldrin - The hosts described Aldrin as passionate, technically brilliant, and candid about his personal struggles, with Tariq sharing how Aldrin was the subject of his first professional space article in 1999. Solar sail technology potential - They discussed the success of Planetary Society's LightSail 2 and other solar sail missions, lamenting that the technology hasn't been utilized more extensively for deep space missions. Best meteor showers to observe - The hosts recommended the Perseids (August), Geminids (December), and Leonids (November) as the most impressive annual meteor showers, emphasizing the importance of dark skies for optimal viewing. Convincing moon landing deniers - They discussed the challenge of persuading conspiracy theorists, citing evidence including Soviet tracking confirmation and modern lunar reconnaissance photos showing Apollo landing sites. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Download or subscribe to This Week in Space at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Host | Matthew S WilliamsOn ITSPmagazine
Host | Matthew S WilliamsOn ITSPmagazine
Hoje é dia de sobre carreira! No episódio de estreia da série especial do podcast, conversamos com Erika Nagamine, Golden Jacket da AWS, sobre a sua trajetória, sobre as suas decisões, e sobre o poder que a curiosidade teve para lhe impulsionar ao longo de toda a sua carreira. Vem ver quem participou desse papo: Paulo Silveira, o host que gosta de certificação André David, o cohost que está rolando até agora Erika Nagamine, Arquiteta de Soluções Especialista em Dados & AI - Analytics na AWS
Hoje é dia de falar de nuvem! Neste episódio, exploramos a surpreendente relação entre a AWS e a Amazon Brasil, e as importantes questões ligadas a dimensionamento, escalabilidade e, é claro, segurança quando o assunto é nuvem. Vem ver quem participou desse papo: André David, o host que fica ligado em palavrinhas-chave Vinny Neves, co-host e Tech Lead na UsTwo Bruno Toffolo, Principal Software Development Engineer na Amazon Gaston Perez, Principal Solutions Architect na AWS
We return to the 2024 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium for part two of our coverage. Astronaut and NIAC external council member Mae Jemison honors Lou Friedman, the co-founder of The Planetary Society, for his contributions to the space community and the NIAC program. Then Kenneth Carpenter from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues pitch their plan for an Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager. Steven Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and his team tell us about their plan for an add-on to large-scale water mining operations on Mars to screen for introduced and alien life. We close out with Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, in What's Up, as we celebrate LightSail 2 being announced as one of the winners of this year's Gizmodo Science Fair. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2024-niac-part-2See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Una vela solare è un tipo di propulsione spaziale che utilizza la pressione della luce solare per muovere una nave spaziale. Questa propulsione spaziale innovativa si basa su larghe vele solari, spesso fatte di materiali riflettenti come Mylar o Kapton, che catturano il momentum dei fotoni del Sole, fornendo una spinta costante e senza necessità di carburante. A differenza dei sistemi tradizionali a propellente, le vele solari sono più efficienti per missioni di lunga durata e possono accelerare gradualmente fino a raggiungere velocità elevate. Alcuni progetti come il LightSail hanno sfruttato questa tipologia di propulsione spaziale innovativa delle vele solari. Il progetto Breakthrough Starshot è un'iniziativa ambiziosa che punta a dimostrare questa tecnologia. Mirando a inviare piccole sonde verso Alpha Centauri (in particolare verso Proxima Centauri), il sistema stellare più vicino al nostro, Breakthrough Starshot prevede l'utilizzo di vele solari ultra-sottili e robuste. Queste vele solari saranno spinte da raggi laser potenti, permettendo alle sonde di raggiungere una frazione significativa della velocità della luce. __________________
This week Ted and Charlie celebrate episode 195 without Rony. Our guest is Matthew Celia, of Lightsail VR, who produced Eli Roth's "Faceless Lady," which is now on Meta Quest TV for those with VR headsets. It's the first stereoscopic piece of it's six-episode series. In the news, Google IO drops its Sora competitor, Veo, and using Google Maps to "paint the world with data." Open AI has made a big step in humanizing chatbots, giving them expressive voices, and reducing latency, creating an experience much like the movie "Her." Matthew walks us through the super-widescreen 180 production, the lessons they took from Cinemascope, and how they found the crazy castle location in Ireland that was their primary location. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar!Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!https://linktr.ee/thisweekinxr Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sponsor: Remove your personal information from the web at JoinDeleteMe.com/FP20 and use code FP20 for 20% offDeleteMe international Plans: https://international.joindeleteme.com======Episode 6: When heated, sodium emits energy via visible light at 2.1eV (or 589 nm wavelength). So, if you make an engine that heats up sodium, you can tune a solar cell to exactly that frequency and capture light efficiently — giving you the portability of a battery with the energy density of hydrocarbons.======(00:00) - Intro(00:32) - Danielle's Background(04:40) - Early Interest in Energy and Fusion Research(08:14) - Leaving Academia to Become an Entrepreneur(11:40) - Starting LightSail and Innovating in Compressed Air Energy Storage(15:35) - Reflecting on LightSail and Compressed Air Energy Storage(19:48) - Limitations of Batteries, Engines, and Fuel Cells(22:30) - The Vision for Portable, Energy-Dense Power Generation(27:16) - Rethinking Combustion and Light Generation for Compact Power(31:56) - How the New Power Generation Process Works(37:58) - Managing High Temperatures and System Components(42:26) - Recirculating Heat for Higher Efficiency(48:38) - Theoretical Limits and Practical Challenges(52:50) - Engineering Solutions to Minimize Losses(58:32) - The Experimental Approach to Rapid Learning(01:02:54) - Balancing Exploratory Work with Systematic Testing(01:07:40) - Developing the Craftsmanship of Research(01:11:15) - Managing Company Priorities while Preserving Creativity(01:15:18) - Advice for Learning and Advancing Technology(01:18:36) - Building Real Projects and Sharing Knowledge(01:22:10) - Conclusion======Links:Christian Keil – https://twitter.com/pronounced_kyleDanielle Fong – https://twitter.com/DanielleFong Lightcell Energy – https://www.lightcellenergy.com/======Production and marketing by The Deep View (https://thedeepview.co). For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email team@firstprinciples.fm======Checkout the video version here → http://tinyurl.com/4fh497n9
Guest | Marshall Eubanks, Chief Scientists, Space Initiatives Inc. [@AsteroidEnergy] On Twitter | https://twitter.com/tm_eubanks?On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmeubanks/On Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/tmeubanksHost | Matthew S WilliamsOn ITSPmagazine
Guest | Marshall Eubanks, Chief Scientists, Space Initiatives Inc. [@AsteroidEnergy] On Twitter | https://twitter.com/tm_eubanks?On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmeubanks/On Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/tmeubanksHost | Matthew S WilliamsOn ITSPmagazine
В свежем выпуске мы обсудили множество актуальных новостей об AWS за последнее время (Q1-Q2 2023): LightSail for Research - новый сервис для начала работы с Data Science в AWS с низким порогом входа. Обновления в Amazon Aurora - новая ценовая модель без отдельной оплаты операций ввода-вывода, возможные экономии до 40%. AWS S3 Object Lambda - теперь возможно запускать лямбда-функции при GET-запросах к объектам S3. AWS User Notifications - новый сервис для получения объединенных нотификаций от более чем 100 AWS-сервисов. Обзор Amazon CodeWhisperer - генеративный AI-ассистент для ускорения написания кода. Рассмотрены возможности Amazon Service Catalog для автоматизации развертывания стандартных инфраструктурных компонентов. Улучшения видимости ресурсов VPC на новой ресурс-карте. Как всегда, в подкасте много интересных подробностей и примеров. Заходите на наш канал, слушайте, оставляйте отзывы! Упомянутые telegram каналы: https://t.me/aws_notes и https://t.me/awsweekly Если у вас есть вопросы, предложения темы, пишите мне в LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/vedmich/ или телеграмм https://t.me/ViktorVedmich
We sit down with Nico Waisman to discuss vulnerability research and other security-related topics! In the Security News: Windows MSI tomfoolery, curl turns 8...point owe, who doesn't need a 7" laptop, glitching the ESP, your image really isn't redacted or cropped, brute forcing pins, SSRF and Lightsail, reversing D-Link firmware for the win, ICMP RCE OMG (but not really), update your Pixel and Samsung, hacking ATMs in 2023, breaking down Fortinet vulnerabilities, Jamming with an Arduino, it 315 Mega hurts, analyzing trojans in your chips, and the 4, er 1, er 3, okay well how to suck at math and the 4 Cs of Cybersecurity! All that, and more, on this episode of Paul's Security Weekly! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Visit https://securityweekly.com/acm to sign up for a demo or buy our AI Hunter! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw777
In the Security News: Windows MSI tomfoolery, curl turns 8...point owe, who doesn't need a 7" laptop, glitching the ESP, your image really isn't redacted or cropped, brute forcing pins, SSRF and Lightsail, reversing D-Link firmware for the win, ICMP RCE OMG (but not really), update your Pixel and Samsung, hacking ATMs in 2023, breaking down Fortinet vulnerabilities, Jamming with an Arduino, it 315 Mega hurts, analyzing trojans in your chips, and the 4, er 1, er 3, okay well how to suck at math and the 4 Cs of Cybersecurity! All that, and more, on this episode of Paul's Security Weekly! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw777
We sit down with Nico Waisman to discuss vulnerability research and other security-related topics! In the Security News: Windows MSI tomfoolery, curl turns 8...point owe, who doesn't need a 7" laptop, glitching the ESP, your image really isn't redacted or cropped, brute forcing pins, SSRF and Lightsail, reversing D-Link firmware for the win, ICMP RCE OMG (but not really), update your Pixel and Samsung, hacking ATMs in 2023, breaking down Fortinet vulnerabilities, Jamming with an Arduino, it 315 Mega hurts, analyzing trojans in your chips, and the 4, er 1, er 3, okay well how to suck at math and the 4 Cs of Cybersecurity! All that, and more, on this episode of Paul's Security Weekly! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Visit https://securityweekly.com/acm to sign up for a demo or buy our AI Hunter! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw777
In the Security News: Windows MSI tomfoolery, curl turns 8...point owe, who doesn't need a 7" laptop, glitching the ESP, your image really isn't redacted or cropped, brute forcing pins, SSRF and Lightsail, reversing D-Link firmware for the win, ICMP RCE OMG (but not really), update your Pixel and Samsung, hacking ATMs in 2023, breaking down Fortinet vulnerabilities, Jamming with an Arduino, it 315 Mega hurts, analyzing trojans in your chips, and the 4, er 1, er 3, okay well how to suck at math and the 4 Cs of Cybersecurity! All that, and more, on this episode of Paul's Security Weekly! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw777
When we think about science on TV, most of us think of Bill Nye. Host of "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" in the 1990s and multiple shows since then, Bill is the CEO of The Planetary Society and star of the new "The End is Nye" on Peacock. Join Rod and Tariq as they sit down with Bill to discuss his origins, talking science to the world, The Planetary Society's Lightsail 2 project, and much more. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Bill Nye Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
When we think about science on TV, most of us think of Bill Nye. Host of "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" in the 1990s and multiple shows since then, Bill is the CEO of The Planetary Society and star of the new "The End is Nye" on Peacock. Join Rod and Tariq as they sit down with Bill to discuss his origins, talking science to the world, The Planetary Society's Lightsail 2 project, and much more. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Bill Nye Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
When we think about science on TV, most of us think of Bill Nye. Host of "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" in the 1990s and multiple shows since then, Bill is the CEO of The Planetary Society and star of the new "The End is Nye" on Peacock. Join Rod and Tariq as they sit down with Bill to discuss his origins, talking science to the world, The Planetary Society's Lightsail 2 project, and much more. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Bill Nye Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Rose and Elliott look at the activity of the Sun, what the surface looks like and the importance of magnetic fields. From coronal mass ejections, to flares and sunspots, they discover all the weather you can expect on the Sun before looking at how it can be used to drive spacecraft with solar sails.Find us at throughthetelescope.co.ukLinks relating to this episode:Near-live images of the Sun and its features: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dashboard/Solar cycles: https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Solar_cycle_25_the_Sun_wakes_upLightSail: https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/lightsailMusic:"Nowhere Land" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Uma visão completa da solução VPS da AWS. O Lightsail é um híbrido de VPS e Cloud Computing que permite iniciar em Cloud com preço fixo e migrar para o EC2 de forma fácil e rápida.Você ainda pode usufruir das vantagens de estar na nuvem da AWS e rodar Elastic Load Balancer, containers, banco de dados MySQL e Postgres de forma gerenciada e muito mais.Além de tudo isso você ainda tem templates de NodeJS, LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP), Magento, Django, Jumla, Wordpress e muito mais.O curso AWS 2.0 está sendo preparado com muito cuidado e dedicação para atender às principais demandas de mercado para profissionais e empreendedores de tecnologia.Inscreva-se agora para aproveitar todas as vantagens do pré-lançamento:https://www.uminventorqualquer.com.br/curso-aws/Inscreva-se no Canal Wesley Milan para acompanhar os Reviews de serviços AWS:https://bit.ly/3LqiYwgInscreva-se no Canal Wesley Milan em Inglês e recomende a seus amigos gringos:https://bit.ly/3LqFjtAMe siga no Instagram: https://bit.ly/3tfzAj0LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesleymilan/Podcast: https://bit.ly/3qa5JH1
La nave espacial LightSail 2 de la Sociedad Planetaria ha vuelto a entrar en la atmósfera de la Tierra, completando con éxito su misión de demostrar el vuelo por luz para naves espaciales pequeñas. LightSail 2 volvió a entrar en algún momento el 17 de noviembre, según las predicciones orbitales. El reingreso completa una misión de casi tres años y medio, durante los cuales LightSail 2 demostró que podía cambiar su órbita utilizando el suave empuje de la luz solar, una técnica conocida como navegación solar. LightSail 2 demostró que las naves espaciales pequeñas pueden transportar, desplegar y utilizar velas solares relativamente grandes para la propulsión.
Mat Kaplan, host of Planetary Radio for The Planetary Society, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about the 20th anniversary of the show, his upcoming retirement, and what it's been like to cover space in this way for all those years.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 85 - The Highest I've Been (with Mat Kaplan) - YouTubeVisibly Loose Nuts - UNISEX | WeMartians PodcastDr. Pete Flavored Soda - SodaStreamPlanetary Radio | The Planetary SocietyInterview with Louis Friedman | The Planetary SocietyPlanetary Society on Twitter: “It's official: LightSail 2 has reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up, as expected. What a phenomenal mission this was! We are proud of everything this spacecraft accomplished, and of all the people who made it happen.”Follow MatMat_Kaplan (@PlanRad) / TwitterPlanetary Radio | The Planetary SocietyPlanetary Society (@exploreplanets) / TwitterFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop
She has been heard on Planetary Radio more than any other guest. Linda Spilker returns in her new role as the Voyager project scientist, following the legendary Ed Stone's half-century in that job. Linda provides an update on the interstellar journey. The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 may be only hours from the end of its very successful mission. LightSail Program Manager Bruce Betts makes a special up-front appearance to prepare us for this milestone. And incoming Planetary Radio host Sarah Al-Ahmed introduces The Planetary Academy, a terrific new opportunity for young explorers. Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-linda-spilker-voyagerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 rocketed into orbit three years ago. Society CEO Bill Nye, chief operating officer Jennifer Vaughn, and LightSail program manager Bruce Betts join Mat Kaplan for a look at the long road to this award-winning mission, the current status of the spacecraft, and what's ahead. Society editorial director Rae Paoletta provides a sneak peek at the June Solstice edition of The Planetary Report, and digital community manager Sarah Al-Ahmed shares highlights of the just-completed meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Take your shot at winning Bruce's new book about the solar system in this week's What's Up segment. There's more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-lightsail-2-third-anniversary-nye-betts-vaughn See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
About JamesJames has been part of AWS for over 15 years. During that time he's led software engineering for Amazon EC2 and more recently leads the AWS Commerce Platform group that runs some of the largest systems in the world, handling volumes of data and request rates that would make your eyes water. And AWS customers trust us to be right all the time so there's no room for error.Links Referenced:Email: jamesg@amazon.comTranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning-fast processing power, courtesy of third-gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general-purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. “Screaming in the Cloud” listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And I've been angling to get someone from a particular department at AWS on this show for nearly its entire run. If you were to find yourself in an Amazon building and wander through the various dungeons and boiler rooms and subterranean basements—I presume; I haven't seen nearly as many of you inside of those buildings as people might think—you pass interesting departments labeled things like ‘Spline Reticulation,' or whatnot. And then you come to a very particular group called Commerce Platform.Now, I'm not generally one to tell other people's stories for them. My guest today is James Greenfield, the VP of Commerce Platform at AWS. James, thank you for joining me and suffering the slings and arrows I will no doubt be hurling at you.James: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.Corey: So, let's start at the very beginning—because I guarantee you, you're going to do a better job of giving the chapter and verse answer than I would from a background mired deeply in snark—what is Commerce Platform? It sounds almost like it's the retail website that sells socks, books, and underpants.James: So, Commerce Platform actually spans a bunch of different things. And so, I'm going to try not to bore you with a laundry list of all of the things that we do—it's a much longer list than most people assume even internal to AWS—at its core, Commerce Platform owns all of the infrastructure and processes and software that takes the fact that you've been running an EC2 instance, or you're storing an object in S3 for some period of time, and turns it into a number at the end of the month. That is what you asked for that service and then proceeds to try to give you as many ways to pay us as easily as possible. There are a few other bits in there that are maybe less obvious. One is we're also responsible for protecting the platform and our customers from fraudulent activity. And then we're also responsible for helping collect all of the data that we need for internal reporting to support some of the back-ends services that a business needs to do things like revenue recognition and general financial reporting.Corey: One of the interesting aspects about the billing system is just how deeply it permeates everything that happens within AWS. I frequently say that when it comes to cloud, cost and architecture are foundationally and fundamentally the same exact thing. If your entire service goes down, a few interesting things happen. One, I don't believe a single customer is going to complain other than maybe a few accountants here and there because the books aren't reconciling, but also you've removed a whole bunch of constraints around why things are the way that they are. Like, what is the most efficient way to run this workload?Well, if all the computers suddenly become free, I don't really care about efficiency, so much is, “Oh, hey. There's a fly, what do I have as a flyswatter? That's right, I'm going to drop a building on it.” And those constraints breed almost everything. I've said, for example, that S3 has infinite storage because it does.They can add drives faster than we're able to fill them—at least historically; they added some more replication services—but they're going to be able to buy hard drives faster than the rest of us are going to be able to stretch our budgets. If that constraint of the budget falls away, all bets are really off, and more or less, we're talking about the destruction of the cloud as a viable business entity. No pressure or anything.James: [laugh].Corey: You're also a recent transplant into AWS billing as a whole, Commerce Platform in general. You spent 15 years at the company, the vast majority of that over an EC2. So, either it was you've been exiled to a basically digital Siberia or it was one of those, “Okay, keeping all the EC2 servers up, this is easy. I don't see what people stress about.” And they say, “Oh, ho ho, try this instead.” How did you find yourself migrating over to the Commerce Platform?James: That's actually one I've had a lot from folks that I've worked with. You're right, I spent the first 15 or so years of my career at AWS in EC2, responsible for various things over there. And when the leadership role in Commerce Platform opened up, the timing was fortuitous, and part of it, I was in the process of relocating my family. We moved to Vancouver in the middle of last year. And we had an opening in the role and started talking about, potentially, me stepping into that role.The reason that I took it—there's a few reasons, but the primary reason is that if I look back over my career, I've kind of naturally gravitated towards owning things where people only really remember that they exist when they're not working. And for some reason, you know, I enjoy the opportunity to try to keep those kinds of services ticking over to the point where people don't notice them. And so, Commerce Platform lands squarely in that space. I've always been attracted to opportunities to have an impact, and it's hard to imagine having much more of an impact than in the Commerce Platform space. It underpins everything, as you said earlier.Every single one of our customers depends on the service, whether they think about it or realize it. Every single service that we offer to customers depends on us. And so, that really is the sort of nexus within AWS. And I'm a platform guy, I've always been a platform guy. I like the force multiplier nature of platforms, and so Commerce Platform, you know, as I kind of thought through all of those elements, really was a great opportunity to step in.And I think there's something to be said for, I've been a customer of Commerce Platform internally for a long time. And so, a chance to cross over and be on the other side of that was something that I didn't want to pass up. And so, you know, I'm digging in, and learning quickly, ramping up. By no means an expert, very dependent on a very smart, talented, committed group of people within the team. That's kind of the long and short of how and why.Corey: Let's say that I am taking on the role of an AWS product team, for the sake of argument. I know, keep the cringe down for a second, as far as oh, God, the wince is just inevitable when the idea of me working there ever comes up to anyone. But I have an idea for a service—obviously, it runs containers, and maybe it does some other things as well—going from idea to six-pager to MVP to barely better than MVP day-one launch, and at some point, various things happen to that service. It gets staff with a team, objectives and a roadmap get built, a P&L and budget, and a pricing model and the rest. One the last thing that happens, apparently, is someone picks the worst name off of a list of candidates, slaps it on the product, and ships it off there.At what point does the billing system and figuring out the pricing dimensions for a given service tend to factor in? Is that a last-minute story? Is that almost from the beginning? Where along that journey does, “Oh, by the way, we're building this thing. Maybe we should figure out, I don't know, how to make money from it.” Factor into the conversation?James: There are two parts to that answer. Pretty early on as we're trying to define what that service is going to look like, we're already typically thinking about what are the dimensions that we might charge along. The actual pricing discussions typically happen fairly late, but identifying those dimensions and, sort of, the right way to present it to customers happens pretty early on. The thing that doesn't happen early enough is actually pulling the Commerce Platform team in. but it is something that we're going to work this year to try to get a little bit more in front of.Corey: Have you found historically that you have a pretty good idea of how a service is going to be priced, everything is mostly thought through, a service goes to either private preview or you're discussing about a launch, and then more or less, I don't know, someone like me crops up with a, “Hey, yeah, let's disregard 90% of what the service does because I see a way to misuse the remaining 10% of it as a database.” And you run some mental math and realize, “Huh. We're suddenly giving, like, eight petabytes of storage per customer away for free. Maybe we should guard against that because otherwise, it's rife with misuse.” It used to be that I could find interesting ways to sneak through the cracks of various services—usually in pursuit of a laugh—those are getting relatively hard to come by and invariably a lot more trouble than they're worth. Is that just better comprehensive diligence internally, is that learning from customers, or am I just bad at this?James: No, I mean, what you're describing is almost a variant of the Defender's Dilemma. They are way more ways to abuse something than you can imagine, and so defending against that is pretty challenging. And it's important because, you know, if you turn the economics of something upside down, then it just becomes harder for us to offer it to customers who want to use it legitimately. I would say 90% of that improvement is us learning. We make plenty of mistakes, but I think, you know, one of the things that I've always been impressed by over my time here is how intentional we are trying to learn from those mistakes.And so, I think that's what you're seeing there. And then we try very hard to listen to customers, talk to folks like you, because one of the best ways to tackle anything it smells of the Defender's Dilemma is to harness that collective creativity of a large number of smart people because you really are trying to cover as much ground as possible.Corey: There was a fun joke going around a while back of what is the most expensive environment you can get running on a free tier account before someone from AWS steps in, and I think I got it to something like half a billion dollars in the first month. Now, I haven't actually tested this for reasons that mostly have to do with being relatively poor compared to, you know, being able to buy Guam. And understanding as well the fraud protections built into something like AWS are largely built around defending against getting service usage for free that in some way, shape or form, benefits the attacker. The easy example of that would be mining cryptocurrency, which is just super-economic as long as you use someone else's AWS account to do it. Whereas a lot of my vectors are, “Yeah, ignore all of that. How do I just make the bill artificially high? What can I do to misuse data transfer? And passing a single gigabyte through, how much can I make that per gigabyte cost be?” And, “Oh, circular replication and the Lambda invokes itself pattern,” and basically every bad architectural decision you can possibly make only this time, it's intentional.And that shines some really interesting light on it. And I have to give credit where due, a lot of that didn't come from just me sitting here being sick and twisted nearly so much as it did having seen examples of that type of misconfiguration—by mistake—in a variety of customer accounts, most confidently my own because it turns out that the way I learn things is by screwing them up first.James: Yeah, you've touched on a couple of different things in there. So, you know, maybe the first one is, I typically try to draw a line between fraud and abuse. And fraud is essentially trying to spend somebody else's money to get something for free. And we spent a lot of time trying to shut that down, and we're getting really good at catching it. And then abuse is either intentional or unintentional. There's intentional abuse: You find a chink in our armor and you try to take advantage of it.But much more commonly is unintentional abuse. It's not really abuse, you know. Abuse has very negative connotations, but it's unintentionally setting something up so that you run up a much larger bill than you intended. And we have a number of different internal efforts, and we're working on a bunch more this year, to try to catch those early on because one of my personal goals is to minimize the frequency with which we surprise customers. And the least favorite kind of surprise for customers is a [laugh] large bill. And so, what you're talking about there is, in a sufficiently complex system, there's always going to be weaknesses and ways to get yourself tied up in knots.We're trying both at the service team level, but also within my teams to try to find ways to make it as hard as possible to accidentally do that to yourself and then catch when you do so that we can stop it. And even more on the intentional abuse side of things, if somebody's found a way to do something that's problematic for our services, then you know, that's pretty much on us. But we will often reach out and engage with whoever's doing and try to understand what they're trying to do and why. Because often, somebody's trying to do something legitimate, they've got a problem to solve, they found a creative way to solve it, and it may put strain on the service because it's just not something we designed for, and so we'll try to work with them to use that to feed into either new services, or find a better place for that workload, or just bolster what they're using. And maybe that's something that eventually becomes a fully-fledged feature that we offer the customers. We're always open to learning from our customers. They have found far more creative ways to get really cool things done with our services than we've ever imagined. And that's true today.Corey: I mean, most of my service criticisms come down to the fact that you have more-or-less built a very late model, high performing iPad, and I'm out there complaining about, “What a shitty hammer this thing is, it barely works at all, and then it breaks in my hand. What gives?” I would also challenge something you said a minute ago that the worst day for some customers is to get a giant surprise bill, but [unintelligible 00:13:53] to that is, yeah, but, on some level, that kind of only money; you do have levers on your side to fix those issues. A worse scenario is you have a customer that exhibits fraud-like behavior, they're suddenly using far more resources than they ever did before, so let's go ahead and turn them off or throttle them significantly, and you call them up to tell them you saved them some money, and, “Our Superbowl ad ran. What exactly do you think you're doing?” Because they don't get a second bite at that kind of Apple.So, there's a parallel on both sides of this. And those are just two examples. The world is full of nuances, and at the scale that you folks operate at. The one-in-a-million events happen multiple times a second, the corner cases become common cases, and I'm surprised—to be direct—how little I see you folks dropping the ball.James: Credit to all of the teams. I think our secret sauce, if anything, really does come down to our people. Like, a huge amount of what you see as hopefully relatively consistent, good execution comes down to people behind the scenes making sure. You know, like, some of it is software that we built and made sure it's robust and tested to scale, but there's always an element of people behind the scenes, when you hit those edge cases or something doesn't quite go the way that you planned, making sure that things run smoothly. And that, if anything, is something that I'm immensely proud of and is kind of amazing to watch from the inside.Corey: And, on some level, it's the small errors that are the bigger concern than the big ones. Back a couple years ago, when they announced GP3 volumes at re:Invent, well, great, well spin up a test volume and kick the tires on it for an hour. And I think it was 80 or 100 gigs or whatnot, and the next day in the bill, it showed up as about $5,000. And it was, “Okay, that's not great. Not great at all.” And it turned out that it was a mispricing error by I think a factor of a million.And okay, at least it stood out. But there are scenarios where we were prepared to pay it because, oops, you got one over on us. Good job. That's never been the mindset I've gotten about AWS's philosophy for pricing. The better example that I love because no one took it seriously, was a few years before that when there was a LightSail bug in the billing system, and it made the papers because people suddenly found that for their LightSail instance, they were getting predicted bills of $4 billion.And the way I see it, you really only had to make that work once and then you've made your numbers for the year, so why not? Someone's going to pay for it, probably. But that was such out-of-the-world numbers that no one saw that and ever thought it was anything other than a bug. It's the small pernicious things that creep in. Because the billing system is vast; I had no idea when I started working with AWS bills just how complicated it really was.James: Yeah, I remember both of those, and there's something in there that you touched on that I think is really important. That's something that I realized pretty early on at Amazon, and it's why customer obsession is our flagship leadership principle. It's not because it's love and butterflies and unicorns; customer obsession is key to us because that's how you build a long-term sustainable business is your customers depend on you. And it drives how we think about everything that we do. And in the billing space, small errors, even if there are small errors in the customer's favor, slowly erode that trust.So, we take any kind of error really seriously and we try to figure out how we can make sure that it doesn't happen again. We don't always get that right. As you said, we've built an enormous, super-complex business to growing really quickly, and really quick growth like that always acts as kind of a multiplier on top of complexity. And on the pricing points, we're managing millions of pricing points at the moment.And our tools that we use internally, there's always room for improvement. It's a huge area of focus for us. We're in the beginning of looking at applying things like formal methods to make sure that we can make very hard guarantees about the correctness of some of those. But at the end of the day, people are plugging numbers in and you need as many belts and braces as possible to make sure that you don't make mistakes there.Corey: One of the things that struck me by surprise when I first started getting deep into this space was the fact that the finalized bill was—what does it mean to have this be ‘finalized?' It can hit the Cost and Usage Report in an S3 bucket and it can change retroactively after the month closed periodically. And that's when I started to have an inkling of a few things: Not just the sheer scale and complexity inherent to something like the billing system that touches everything, but the sheer data retention stories where you clearly have to be able to go back and reconstruct a bill from the raw data years ago. And I know what the output of all of those things are in the form of Cost and Usage Reports and the billing data from our client accounts—which is the single largest expense in all of our AWS accounts; we spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year just on storing all of that data, let alone the processing piece of it—the sheer scale is staggering. I used to wonder why does it take you a day to record me using something to it's showing up in the bill? And the more I learned the more it became a how can you do that in only a day?James: Yes, the scale is actually mind-boggling. I'm pretty sure that the core of our billing system is—I'm reasonably confident it's the largest or one of the largest data processing systems on the planet. I remember pretty early on when I joined Commerce Platform and was still starting to wrap my head around some of these things, Googling the definition of quadrillion because we measured the number of metering events, which is how we record usage in services, on a daily basis in the quadrillions, which is a billion billions. So, it's just an absolutely staggering number. And so, the scale here is just out of this world.That's saying something because it's not like other services across AWS are small in their own right. But I'm still reasonably sure that being one of a handful of services that is kind of at the nexus of AWS and kind of deals with the aggregate of AWS's scale, this is probably one of the biggest systems on the planet. And that shows up in all sorts of places. You start with that input, just the sheer volume of metering events, but that has to produce as an output pretty fine-grained line item detailed information, which ultimately rolls up into the total that a customer will see in their bill. But we have a number of different systems further down the pipeline that try to do things like analyze your usage, make sensible recommendations, look for opportunities to improve your efficiency, give you the ability to slice and dice your data and allocate it out to different parts of your business in whatever way it makes sense for your business. And so, those systems have to deal with anywhere from millions to billions to recently, we were talking about trillions of data points themselves. And so, I was tangentially aware of some of the scale of this, but being in the thick of it having joined the team really just does underscore just how vast the systems are.Corey: I think it's, on some level, more than a little unfortunate that that story isn't being more widely told, more frequently. Because when Commerce Platform has job postings that are available on the website, you read it and it's very vague. It doesn't tend to give hard numbers about a lot of these things, and people who don't play in these waters can easily be forgiven for thinking the way that you folks do your job is you fire up one of those 24 terabyte of RAM instances that—you know, those monstrous things that you folks offer—and what do you do next? Well, Microsoft Excel. We have a special high memory version that we've done some horse-trading with our friends over at Microsoft for.It's, yeah, you're several steps beyond that, at this point. It's a challenging problem that every one of your customers has to deal with, on some level, as well. But we're only dealing with the output of a lot of the processing that you folks are doing first.James: You're exactly right. And a big focus for some of my teams is figuring out how to help customers deal with that output. Because even if you're talking about couple of orders of magnitude reduction, you're still talking about very large numbers there. So, to help customers make sense of that, we have a range of tools that exist, we're investing in.There's another dimension of complexity in the space that I think is one that's also very easy to miss. And I think of it as arbitrary complexity. And it's arbitrary because some of the rules that we have to box within here are driven by legislative changes. As you operate more and more countries around the world, you want to make sure that we're tax compliant, that we help our customers be tax compliant. Those rules evolve pretty rapidly, and Country A may sit next to Country B, but that doesn't mean that they're talking to one another. They've all got their own ideas. They're trying to accomplish r—00:22:47Corey: A company is picking up and relocating from India to Germany. How do we—James: Exactly.Corey: —change that on the AWS side and the rest? And it's, “Hoo boy, have you considered burning it all down and filing an insurance claim to start over?” And, like, there's a lot of complexity buried underneath that that just doesn't rise to the notice of 99% of your customers.James: And the fact that it doesn't rise to the notice is something that we strive for. Like, these shouldn't be things that customers have to worry about. Because it really is about clearing away the things that, as far as possible, you don't want to have to spend time thinking about so that you can focus on the thing that your business does that differentiates you. It's getting rid of that undifferentiated heavy lifting. And there's a ton of that in this space, and if you're blissfully unaware of it, then hopefully that means that we're doing our job.Corey: What I'm, I think, the most surprised about, and I have been for a long time. And please don't take this as an insult to various other folks—engineers, the rest, not just in other parts of AWS but throughout the other industry—but talking to the people who work within Commerce Platform has always been just a fantastic experience. The caliber of people that you have managed to attract and largely retain—we don't own people, they do matriculate out eventually—but the caliber of people that you've retained on your teams has just been out of this world. And at first, I wondered, why are these awesome people working on something as boring and prosaic as billing? And then I started learning a little bit more as I went, and, “Oh, wow. How did they learn all the stuff that they have to hold in their head in tension at once to be able to build things like this?” It's incredibly inspiring just watching the caliber of the people that you've been able to bring in.James: I've been really, really excited joining this team, as I've gotten other folks on the team because there's some super-smart people here. But what's really jumped out to me is how committed the team is. This is, for the most part, a team that has been in the space for many years. Many of them have—we talk about boomerangs, folks who live AWS, go spend some time somewhere else and come back and there's a surprisingly high proportion of folks in Commerce Platform who have spent time somewhere else and then come back because they enjoy the space, they find that challenging, folks are attracted to the ability to have an impact because it is so foundational. But yeah, there's a super-committed core to this team. And I really enjoy working with teams where you've got that because then you really can take the long view and build something great. And I think we have tons of opportunities to do that here.Corey: It sounds ridiculous, but I've reached out to team members before to explain two-cent variances in my bill, and never once have I been confronted with a, “It's two cents. What do you care?” They understand the requirement that these things be accurate, not just, “Eh, take our word for it.” And also, frankly, they understand that two cents on a $20 bill looks a little different on a $20 million bill. So yeah, let us figure out if this is systemic or something I have managed to break.It turns out the Cost and Usage Report processing systems don't love it when there's a cost allocation tag whose name contains an emoji. Who knew? It's the little things in life that just have this fun way of breaking when you least expect it.James: They're also a surprisingly interesting problem. So like, it turns out something as simple as rounding numbers consistently across a distributed system at this scale, is a non-trivial problem. And if you don't, then you do get small seventh or eighth decimal place differences that add up to something that then shows up as a two-cent difference somewhere. And so, there's some really, really interesting problems in the space. And I think the team often takes these kinds of things as a personal challenge. It should be correct, and it's not, so we should go make sure it is correct. The interesting problems abound here, but at the end of the day, it's the kind of thing that any engineering team wants to go and make sure it's correct because they know that it can be.Corey: This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen manage databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud.To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: On the one hand, I love people who just round and estimate—we all do that, let's be clear; I sit there and I back-of-the-envelope everything first. But then I look at some of your pricing pages and I count the digits after the zeros. Like, you're talking about trillionths of a dollar on some of your pricing points. And you add it up in the course of a given hour and it's like, oh, it's $250 a month, most months. And it's you work backwards to way more decimal places of precision than is required, sometimes.I'm also a personal fan of the bill that counts, for example, number of Route 53 zones. Great. And it counts them to four decimal places of precision. Like, I don't even know what half of it Route 53 zone is at this point, let alone something to, like, ah the 1,000th of the zone is going to cause this. It's all an artifact of what the underlying systems are.Can you by any chance shed a little light on what the evolution of those systems has been over a period of time? I have to imagine that anything you built in the early days, 16 years ago or so from the time of this recording when S3 launched to general availability, you probably didn't have to worry about this scope and scale of what you do, now. In fact, I suspect if you tried to funnel this volume through S3 back then, the whole thing would have collapsed under its own weight. What's evolved over the time that you had the billing system there? Because changes come slowly to your environment. And frankly, I appreciate that as a customer. I don't like surprising people in finance.James: Yeah, you're totally right. So, I joined the EC2 team as an engineer myself, some 16 years ago, and the very first thing that I did was our billing integration. And so, my relationship with the Commerce Platform organization—what was the billing team way back when—it goes back over my entire career at AWS. And at the time, the billing team was similar, you know, [unintelligible 00:28:34] eight people. And that was everything. There was none of the scale and complexity; it was all one system.And much like many of our biggest, oldest services—EC2 is very similar, S3 is as well—there's been significant growth over the last decade-and-a-half. A lot of that growth has been rapid, and rapid growth presents its own challenges. And you live with decisions that you make early on that you didn't realize were significant decisions that have pretty deep implications 15 years later. We're still working through some of those; they present their own challenges. Evolving an existing system to keep up with the growth of business and a customer base that's as varied and complex as ours is always challenging.And also harder but I also think more fun than a clean sheet redo at this point. Like, that's a great thought exercise for, well, if we got to do this again today, what would we do now that we've learned so much over the last 15 years? But there's this—I find it personally fascinating challenge with evolving a live system where it's like, “No, no, like, things exist, so how do we go from there to where we want to be next?”Corey: Turn the billing system off for 18 months, rebuild—James: Yeah. [laugh].Corey: The whole thing from first principles. Light it up. I'm sure you'd have a much better billing system, and also not a company left anymore.James: [laugh]. Exactly, exactly. I've always enjoyed that challenge. You know, even prior to AWS, my previous careers have involved similar kinds of constraints where you've got a live system, or you've got an existing—in the one case, it was an existing SDK that was deployed to tens of thousands of customers around the world, and so backwards compatibility was something that I spent the first five years of my career thinking about it way more detail than I think most people do. And it's a very similar mindset. And I enjoy that challenge. I enjoy that: How do I evolve from here to there without breaking customers along the way?And that's something that we take pretty seriously across AWS. I think SimpleDB is the poster child for we never turn things off. But that applies equally to the services that are maybe less visible to customers, and billing is definitely one of them. Like, we don't get to switch stuff off. We don't get to throw things away and start again. It's this constant state of evolution.Corey: So, let's say that I were to find a way to route data through a series of two Managed NAT Gateways and then egress to internet, and the sheer density of the expense of that traffic tears a hole in the fabric of space-time, it goes back 15 years ago, and you can make a single change to how the billing system was built. What would it be? What pisses you off the most about the current constraints that you have to work within or around?James: I think one of the biggest challenges we've got, actually, is the concept of an account. Because an account means half-a-dozen different things. And way back, when it seemed like a great idea, you just needed an account; an account was your customer, and it was the same thing as the boundary that you put all your resources inside. And of course, it's the same thing that you're going to roll all of your usage up and issue a bill against. And that has been one of the areas that's seen the most evolution and probably still has a pretty long way to go.And what's interesting about that is, that's probably something we could have seen coming because we watched the retail business go through, kind of, the same evolution because they started with, well, a customer is a customer is a customer and had to evolve to support the concept of sellers and partners. And then users are different than customers, and you want to log in and that's a different thing. So, we saw that kind of bifurcation of a single entity into a wide range of different related but separate entities, and I think if we'd looked at that, you know, thought out 15 years, then yeah, we could probably have learned something from that. But at the same time, when AWS first kicked off, we had wild ambitions for it, but there was no guarantee that it was going to be the monster that it is today. So, I'm always a little bit reluctant to—like, it's a great thought exercise, but it's easy to end up second-guessing a pretty successful 15 years, so I'm always a little bit careful to walk that line. But I think account is one of the things that we would probably go back and think about a little bit more.Corey: I want to be very clear with this next question that it is intentionally setting up a question I suspect you get a lot. It does not mirror my own thinking on the matter even slightly, but I get a version of it myself all the time. “AWS bills, that sounds boring as hell. Why would you choose to work on such a thing?” Now, I have a laundry list of answers to that aren't nearly as interesting as I suspect yours are going to be. What makes working on this problem space interesting to you?James: There's a bunch of different things. So, first and foremost, the scale that we're talking about here is absolutely mind-blowing. And for any engineer who wants to get stuck into problems that deal with mind-blowingly large volumes of data, incredibly rich dimensions, problems where, honestly, applying techniques like statistical reasoning or machine learning is really the only way to chip away at it, that exists in spades in the space. It's not always immediately obvious, and I think from the outside, it's easy to assume this is actually pretty simple. So, the scale is a huge part of that.Corey: “Oh, petabytes. How quaint.”James: [laugh]. Exactly. Exactly I mean, it's mind-blowing every time I see some of the numbers in various parts of the Commerce Platform space. I talked about quadrillions earlier. Trillions is a pretty common unit of measure.The complexity that I talked about earlier, that's a result of external environments is another one. So, imposed by external entities, whether it's a government or a tax authority somewhere, or a business requirement from customers, or ourselves. I enjoy those as well. Those are different kinds of challenge. They really keep you on your toes.I enjoy thinking of them as an engineering problem, like, how do I get in front of them? And that's something we spend a lot of time doing in Commerce Platform. And when we get it right, customers are just unaware of it. And then the third one is, I personally am always attracted to the opportunity to have an impact. And this is a space where we get to hopefully positively impact every single customer every day. And that, to me is pretty fulfilling.Those are kind of the three standout reasons why I think this is actually a super-exciting space. And I think it's often an underestimated space. I think once folks join the team and sort of start to dig in, I've never heard anybody after they've joined, telling me that what they're doing is boring. Challenging, yes. Is frustrating, sometimes. Hard, absolutely, but boring never comes up.Corey: There's almost no service, other than IAM, that I can think of that impacts every customer simultaneously. And it's easy for me to sit in the cheap seats and say, “Oh, you should change this,” or, “You should change that.” But every change you have is so massive in scale that it's going to break a whole bunch of companies' automations around the bill processing in different ways. You have an entire category of user persona who is used to clicking a certain button in this certain place in the console to generate the report every month, and if that button moves or changes color, or has a different font, suddenly that renders their documentation invalid, and they're scrambling because it's not their core competency—nor should it be—and every change you make is so constricted, just based upon all the different concerns that you've got to be juggling with. How do you get anything done at all? I find that to be one of the most impressive aspects about your organization, bar none.James: Yeah, I'm not going to lie and say that it isn't a challenge, but a lot of it comes down to the talent that we have on the team. We have a super-motivated, super-smart, super-engaged team, and we spend a lot of time figuring out how to make sure that we can keep moving, keep up with the business, keep up with a world that's getting more complicated [laugh] with every passing day. So, you've kind of hit on one of the core challenges there, which is, how do we keep up with all of those different dimensions that are demanding an increasing amount of engineering and new support and new investment from us, while we keep those customers happy?And I think you touched on something else a little bit indirectly there, which is, a lot of our customers are actually pretty technical across AWS. The customers that Commerce Platform supports, are often the least technical of our customers, and so often need the most help understanding why things are the way they are, where the constraints are.Corey: “A big bill from Amazon. How many books did you people buy last month?”—James: [laugh]. Exactly.Corey: —is still very much level of understanding in some cases. And it's not because they're dumb; far from it. It's just, imagine that some people view there as being more to life than understanding the nuances and intricacies of cloud computing. How dare they?James: Exactly. Who would have thought?Corey: So, as you look now over all of your domain, such as it is, what sucks the most? What are you looking to fix as far as impactful changes that the rest of the world might experience? Because I'm not going to accept one of those questions like, “Oh, yeah, on the back-end, we have this storage subsystem for a tertiary thing that just annoys me because it wakes us up once in a whi”—no, no, I want something customer-facing. What's the painful thing you're looking at fixing next?James: I don't like surprising customers. And free tier is, sort of, one of those buckets of surprises, but there are others. Another one that's pretty squarely in my sights is, whether we like it or not, customer accounts get compromised. Usually, it's a password got reused somewhere or was accidentally committed into a GitHub repository somewhere.And we have pretty established, pretty effective mechanisms for finding all of those, we'll scan for passwords and credentials, and alert customers to those, and help them correct that pretty quickly. We're also actually pretty good at detecting when an account does start to do something that suggests that it's been compromised. Usually, the first thing that a compromised account starts to do is cryptocurrency mining. We're pretty quick to catch those; we catch those within a matter of hours, much faster most days.What we haven't really cracked and where I'm focused at the moment is getting back to the customer in a way that's effective. And by that I mean specifically, we detect an account compromised super-quickly, we reach out automatically. And so, you know, a customer has got some kind of contact from us usually within a couple of hours. It's not having the effect that we need it to. Customers are still being surprised a month later by a large bill. And so, we're digging into how much of that is because they never saw the contact, they didn't know what to do with the contact.Corey: It got buried with all the other, “Hey, we saw you spun up an S3 bucket. Have you heard of what S3 is?” Again, that's all valuable, but you have 300-some-odd services. If you start doing that for every service, you're going to hit mail sending limits for Gmail.James: Exactly. It's not just enough that we detect those and notify customers; we have to reduce the size of the surprise. It's one thing to spend 100 bucks a month on average, and then suddenly find that your spend has jumped $250 because you reused the password somewhere and somebody got ahold of it and it's cryptocurrency-mining your account. It's a whole different ballgame to spend 100 bucks a month and then at the end of the month discover that your bill is suddenly $2,000 or $20,000. And so, that's something that I really wanted to make some progress on this year. Corey: I've really enjoyed our conversation. If people want to learn more about how you view these things, how you're approaching some of these problems, or potentially are just the right kind of warped to consider joining up, where's the best place for them to go?James: They should drop me an email at jamesg@amazon.com. That is the most direct way to get hold of me, and I promise I will get back to you. I try to stay on top of my email as much as possible. But that will come straight to me, and I'm always happy to talk to folks about the space, talk to folks about opportunities in this team, opportunities across AWS, or just hear what's not working, make sure that it's something that we're aware of and looking at.Corey: Throughout Amazon, but particularly within Commerce Platform, I've always appreciated the response of, whenever I report something, no matter how ridiculous it is—and I assure you there's an awful lot of ridiculousness in my bug reports—the response has always been the same: “Tell me more. Help me understand what it is you're trying to achieve—even if it is ridiculous—so we can look at this and see what is actually going on.” Every Amazonian team has been great about that or you're not at Amazon very long, but you folks have taken that to an otherworldly level. I just want to thank you for doing that.James: I appreciate you for calling that out. We try, you know, we really do. We take listening to our customers very seriously because, at the end of the day, that's what makes us better, and that's how we make sure we're in it for the long haul.Corey: Thanks once again for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.James: Yeah, thanks for having me on. I've enjoyed it.Corey: James Greenfield, VP of Commerce Platform at AWS. 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—possibly on YouTube as well—about how you aren't actually giving this five-stars at all; you have taken three trillions of a star off of the rating.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
About CaseyCasey spends his days leveraging AWS to help organizations improve the speed at which they deliver software. With a background in software development, he has spent the past 20 years architecting, building, and supporting software systems for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.Links Referenced: “17 Ways to Run Containers in AWS”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-17-ways-to-run-containers-on-aws/ “17 More Ways to Run Containers on AWS”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/17-more-ways-to-run-containers-on-aws/ kubernetestheeasyway.com: https://kubernetestheeasyway.com snark.cloud/quinntainers: https://snark.cloud/quinntainers ECS Chargeback: https://github.com/gaggle-net/ecs-chargeback twitter.com/nektos: https://twitter.com/nektos TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone that I had the pleasure of meeting at re:Invent last year, but we'll get to that story in a minute. Casey Lee is the CTO with a company called Gaggle, which is—as they frame it—saving lives. Now, that seems to be a relatively common position that an awful lot of different tech companies take. “We're saving lives here.” It's, “You show banner ads and some of them are attack platforms for JavaScript malware. Let's be serious here.” Casey, thank you for joining me, and what makes the statement that Gaggle saves lives not patently ridiculous?Casey: Sure. Thanks, Corey. Thanks for having me on the show. So Gaggle, we're ed-tech company. We sell software to school districts, and school districts use our software to help protect their students while the students use the school-issued Google or Microsoft accounts.So, we're looking for signs of bullying, harassment, self-harm, and potentially suicide from K-12 students while they're using these platforms. They will take the thoughts, concerns, emotions they're struggling with and write them in their school-issued accounts. We detect that and then we notify the school districts, and they get the students the help they need before they can do any permanent damage to themselves. We protect about 6 million students throughout the US. We ingest a lot of content.Last school year, over 6 billion files, about the equal number of emails ingested. We're looking for concerning content and then we have humans review the stuff that our machine learning algorithms detect and flag. About 40 million items had to go in front of humans last year, resulted in about 20,000 what we call PSSes. These are Possible Student Situations where students are talking about harming themselves or harming others. And that resulted in what we like to track as lives saved. 1400 incidents last school year where a student was dealing with suicide ideation, they were planning to take their own lives. We detect that and get them help within minutes before they can act on that. That's what Gaggle has been doing. We're using tech, solving tech problems, and also saving lives as we do it.Corey: It's easy to lob a criticism at some of the things you're alluding to, the idea of oh, you're using machine learning on student data for young kids, yadda, yadda, yadda. Look at the outcome, look at the privacy controls you have in place, and look at the outcomes you're driving to. Now, I don't necessarily trust the number of school administrations not to become heavy-handed and overbearing with it, but let's be clear, that's not the intent. That is not what the success stories you have alluded to. I've got to say I'm a fan, so thanks for doing what you're doing. I don't say that very often to people who work in tech companies.Casey: Cool. Thanks, Corey.Corey: But let's rewind a bit because you and I had passed like ships in the night on Twitter for a while, but last year at re:Invent something odd happened. First, my business partner procrastinated at getting his ticket—that's not the odd part; he does that a lot—but then suddenly ticket sales slammed shut and none were to be had anywhere. You reached out with a, “Hey, I have a spare ticket because someone can't go. Let me get it to you.” And I said, “Terrific. Let me pay you for the ticket and take you to dinner.”You said, “Yes on the dinner, but I'd rather you just look at my AWS bill and don't worry about the cost of the ticket.” “All right,” said I. I know a deal when I see one. We grabbed dinner at the Venetian. I said, “Bust out your laptop.” And you said, “Oh, I was kidding.” And I said, “Great. I wasn't. Bust it out.”And you went from laughing to taking notes in about the usual time that happens when I start looking at these things. But how was your recollection of that? I always tend to romanticize some of these things. Like, “And then everyone's restaurant just turned, stopped, and clapped the entire time.” Maybe that part didn't happen.Casey: Everything was right up until the clapping part. That was a really cool experience. I appreciate you walking through that with me. Yeah, we've got lots of opportunity to save on our AWS bill here at Gaggle, and in that little bit of time that we had together, I think I walked away with no more than a dozen ideas for where to shave some costs. The most obvious one, the first thing that you keyed in on, is we had RIs coming due that weren't really well-optimized and you steered me towards savings plans. We put that in place and we're able to apply those savings plans not just to our EC2 instances but also to our serverless spend as well.So, that was a very worthwhile and cost-effective dinner for us. The thing that was most surprising though, Corey, was your approach. Your approach to how to review our bill was not what I thought at all.Corey: Well, what did you expect my approach was going to be? Because this always is of interest to me. Like, do you expect me to, like, whip a portable machine learning rig out of my backpack full of GPUs or something?Casey: I didn't know if you had, like, some secret tool you were going to hit, or if nothing else, I thought you were going to go for the Cost Explorer. I spend a lot of time in Cost Explorer, that's my go-to tool, and you wanted nothing to do with Cost Exp—I think I was actually pulling up Cost Explorer for you and you said, “I'm not interested. Take me to the bills.” So, we went right to the billing dashboard, you started opening up the invoices, and I thought to myself, “I don't remember the last time I looked at an AWS invoice.” I just, it's noise; it's not something that I pay attention to.And I learned something, that you get a real quick view of both the cost and the usage. And that's what you were keyed in on, right? And you were looking at things relative to each other. “Okay, I have no idea about Gaggle or what they do, but normally, for a company that's spending x amount of dollars in EC2, why is your data transfer cost the way it is? Is that high or low?” So, you're looking for kind of relative numbers, but it was really cool watching you slice and dice that bill through the dashboard there.Corey: There are a few things I tie together there. Part of it is that this is sort of a surprising thing that people don't think about but start with big numbers first, rather than going alphabetically because I don't really care about your $6 Alexa for Business spend. I care a bit more about the $6 million, or whatever it happens to be at EC2—I'm pulling numbers completely out of the ether, let's be clear; I don't recall what the exact magnitude of your bill is and it's not relevant to the conversation.And then you see that and it's like, “Huh. Okay, you're spending $6 million on EC2. Why are you spending 400 bucks on S3? Seems to me that those two should be a little closer aligned. What's the deal here? Oh, God, you're using eight petabytes of EBS volumes. Oh, dear.”And just, it tends to lead to interesting stuff. Break it down by region, service, and use case—or usage type, rather—is what shows up on those exploded bills, and that's where I tend to start. It also is one of the easiest things to wind up having someone throw into a PDF and email my way if I'm not doing it in a restaurant with, you know, people clapping standing around.Casey: [laugh]. Right.Corey: I also want to highlight that you've been using AWS for a long time. You're a Container Hero; you are not bad at understanding the nuances and depths of AWS, so I take praise from you around this stuff as valuing it very highly. This stuff is not intuitive, it is deeply nuanced, and you have a business outcome you are working towards that invariably is not oriented day in day out around, “How do I get these services for less money than I'm currently paying?” But that is how I see the world and I tend to live in a very different space just based on the nature of what I do. It's sort of a case study and the advantage of specialization. But I know remarkably little about containers, which is how we wound up reconnecting about a week or so before we did this recording.Casey: Yeah. I saw your tweet; you were trying to run some workload—container workload—and I could hear the frustration on the other end of Twitter when you were shaking your fist at—Corey: I should not tweet angrily, and I did in this case. And, eh, every time I do I regret it. But it played well with the people, so that does help. I believe my exact comment was, “‘me: I've got this container. Run it, please.' ‘Google Cloud: Run. You got it, boss.' AWS has 17 ways to run containers and they all suck.”And that's painting with an overly broad brush, let's be clear, but that was at the tail end of two or three days of work trying to solve a very specific, very common, business problem, that I was just beating my head off of a wall again and again and again. And it took less than half an hour from start to finish with Google Cloud Run and I didn't have to think about it anymore. And it's one of those moments where you look at this and realize that the future is here, we just don't see it in certain ways. And you took exception to this. So please, let's dive in because 280 characters of text after half a bottle of wine is not the best context to have a nuanced discussion that leaves friendships intact the following morning.Casey: Nice. Well, I just want to make sure I understand the use case first because I was trying to read between the lines on what you needed, but let me take a guess. My guess is you got your source code in GitHub, you have a Docker file, and you want to be able to take that repo from GitHub and just have it continuously deployed somewhere in Run. And you don't want to have headaches with it; you just want to push more changes up to GitHub, Docker Build runs and updates some service somewhere. Am I right so far?Corey: Ish, but think a little further up the stack. It was in service of this show. So, this show, as people who are listening to this are probably aware by this point, periodically has sponsors, which we love: We thank them for participating in the ongoing support of this show, which empowers conversations like this. Sometimes a sponsor will come to us with, “Oh, and here's the URL we want to give people.” And it's, “First, you misspelled your company name from the common English word; there are three sublevels within the domain, and then you have a complex UTM tagging tracking co—yeah, you realize people are driving to work when they're listening to this?”So, I've built a while back a link shortener, snark.cloud because is it the shortest thing in the world? Not really, but it's easily understandable when I say that, and people hear it for what it is. And that's been running for a long time as an S3 bucket with full of redirects, behind CloudFront. So, I wind up adding a zero-byte object with a redirect parameter on it, and it just works.Now, the challenge that I have here as a business is that I am increasingly prolific these days. So, anything that I am not directly required to be doing, I probably shouldn't necessarily be the one to do it. And care and feeding of those redirect links is a prime example of this. So, I went hunting, and the things that I was looking for were, obviously, do the redirect. Now, if you pull up GitHub, there are hundreds of solutions here.There are AWS blog posts. One that I really liked and almost got working was Eric Johnson's three-part blog post on how to do it serverlessly, with API Gateway, and DynamoDB, no Lambdas required. I really liked aspects of what that was, but it was complex, I kept smacking into weird challenges as I went, and front end is just baffling to me. Because I needed a front end app for people to be able to use here; I need to be able to secure that because it turns out that if you just have a, anyone who stumbles across the URL can redirect things to other places, well, you've just empowered a whole bunch of spam email, and you're going to find that service abused, and everyone starts blocking it, and then you have trouble. Nothing lasts the first encounter with jerks.And I was getting more and more frustrated, and then I found something by a Twitter engineer on GitHub, with a few creative search terms, who used to work at Google Cloud. And what it uses as a client is it doesn't build any kind of custom web app. Instead, as a database, it uses not S3 objects, not Route 53—the ideal database—but a Google sheet, which sounds ridiculous, but every business user here knows how to use that.Casey: Sure.Corey: And it looks for the two columns. The first one is the slug after the snark.cloud, and the second is the long URL. And it has a TTL of five seconds on cache, so make a change to that spreadsheet, five seconds later, it's live. Everyone gets it, I don't have to build anything new, I just put it somewhere around the relevant people can access it, I gave him a tutorial and a giant warning on it, and everyone gets that. And it just works well. It was, “Click here to deploy. Follow the steps.”And the documentation was a little, eh, okay, I had to undo it once and redo it again. Getting the domain registered was getting—ported over took a bit of time, and there were some weird SSL errors as the certificates were set up, but once all of that was done, it just worked. And I tested the heck out of it, and cold starts are relatively low, and the entire thing fits within the free tier. And it is reminiscent of the magic that I first saw when I started working with some of the cloud providers services, years ago. It's been a long time since I had that level of delight with something, especially after three days of frustration. It's one of the, “This is a great service. Why are people not shouting about this from the rooftops?” That was my perspective. And I put it out on Twitter and oh, Lord, did I get comments. What was your take on it?Casey: Well, so my take was, when you're evaluating a platform to use for running your applications, how fast it can get you to Hello World is not necessarily the best way to go. I just assumed you're wrong. I assumed of the 17 ways AWS has to run containers, Corey just doesn't understand. And so I went after it. And I said, “Okay, let me see if I can find a way that solves his use case, as I understand it, through a quick tweet.”And so I tried to App Runner; I saw that App Runner does not meet your needs because you have to somehow get your Docker image pushed up to a repo. App Runner can take an image that's already been pushed up and deployed for you or it can build from source but neither of those were the way I understood your use case.Corey: Having used App Runner before via the Copilot CLI, it is the closest as best I can tell to achieving what I want. But also let's be clear that I don't believe there's a free tier; there needs to be a load balancer in front of it, so you're starting with 15 bucks a month for this thing. Which is not the end of the world. Had I known at the beginning that all of this was going to be there, I would have just signed up for a bit.ly account and called it good. But here we are.Casey: Yeah. I tried Copilot. Copilot is a great developer experience, but it also is just pulling together tons of—I mean just trying to do a Copilot service deploy, VPCs are being created and tons IAM roles are being created, code pipelines, there's just so much going on. I was like 20 minutes into it, and I said, “Yeah, this is not fitting the bill for what Corey was looking for.” Plus, it doesn't solve my the way I understood your use case, which is you don't want to worry about builds, you just want to push code and have new Docker images get built for you.Corey: Well, honestly, let's be clear here, once it's up and running, I don't want to ever have to touch the silly thing again.Casey: Right.Corey: And that's so far has been the case, after I forked the repo and made a couple of changes to it that I wanted to see. One of them was to render the entire thing case insensitive because I get that one wrong a lot, and the other is I wanted to change the permanent 301 redirect to a temporary 302 redirect because occasionally, sponsors will want to change where it goes in the fullness of time. And that is just fine, but I want to be able to support that and not have to deal with old cached data. So, getting that up and running was a bit of a challenge. But the way that it worked, was following the instructions in the GitHub repo.The developer environment had spun up in the Google's Cloud Shell was just spectacular. It prompted me for a few things and it told me step by step what to do. This is the sort of thing I could have given a basically non-technical user, and they would have had success with it.Casey: So, I tried it as well. I said, “Well, okay, if I'm going to respond to Corey here and challenge him on this, I need to try Cloud Run.” I had no experience with Cloud Run. I had a small example repo that loosely mapped what I understood you were trying to do. Within five minutes, I had Cloud Run working.And I was surprised anytime I pushed a new change, within 45 seconds the change was built and deployed. So, here's my conclusion, Corey. Google Cloud Run is great for your use case, and AWS doesn't have the perfect answer. But here's my challenge to you. I think that you just proved why there's 17 different ways to run containers on AWS, is because there's that many different types of users that have different needs and you just happen to be number 18 that hasn't gotten the right attention yet from AWS.Corey: Well, let's be clear, like, my gag about 17 ways to run containers on AWS was largely a joke, and it went around the internet three times. So, I wrote a list of them on the blog post of “17 Ways to Run Containers in AWS” and people liked it. And then a few months later, I wrote “17 More Ways to Run Containers on AWS” listing 17 additional services that all run containers.And my favorite email that I think I've ever received in feedback was from a salty AWS employee, saying that one of them didn't really count because of some esoteric reason. And it turns out that when I'm trying to make a point of you have a sarcastic number of ways to run containers, pointing out that well, one of them isn't quite valid, doesn't really shatter the argument, let's be very clear here. So, I appreciate the feedback, I always do. And it's partially snark, but there is an element of truth to it in that customers don't want to run containers, by and large. That is what they do in service of a business goal.And they want their application to run which is in turn to serve as the business goal that continues to abstract out into, “Remain a going concern via the current position the company stakes out.” In your case, it is saving lives; in my case, it is fixing horrifying AWS bills and making fun of Amazon at the same time, and in most other places, there are somewhat more prosaic answers to that. But containers are simply an implementation detail, to some extent—to my way of thinking—of getting to that point. An important one [unintelligible 00:18:20], let's be clear, I was very anti-container for a long time. I wrote a talk, “Heresy in the Church of Docker” that then was accepted at ContainerCon. It's like, “Oh, boy, I'm not going to leave here alive.”And the honest answer is many years later, that Kubernetes solves almost all the criticisms that I had with the downside of well, first, you have to learn Kubernetes, and that continues to be mind-bogglingly complex from where I sit. There's a reason that I've registered kubernetestheeasyway.com and repointed it to ECS, Amazon's container service that is not requiring you to cosplay as a cloud provider yourself. But even ECS has a number of challenges to it, I want to be very clear here. There are no silver bullets in this.And you're completely correct in that I have a large, complex environment, and the application is nuanced, and I'm willing to invest a few weeks in setting up the baseline underlying infrastructure on AWS with some of these services, ideally not all of them at once because that's something a lunatic would do, but getting them up and running. The other side of it, though, is that if I am trying to evaluate a cloud provider's handling of containers and how this stuff works, the reason that everyone starts with a Hello World-style example is that it delivers ideally, the meantime to dopamine. There's a reason that Hello World doesn't have 18 different dependencies across a bunch of different databases and message queues and all the other complicated parts of running a modern application. Because you just want to see how it works out of the gate. And if getting that baseline empty container that just returns the string ‘Hello World' is that complicated and requires that much work, my takeaway is not that this user experience is going to get better once I'd make the application itself more complicated.So, I find that off-putting. My approach has always been find something that I can get the easy, minimum viable thing up and running on, and then as I expand know that you'll be there to catch me as my needs intensify and become ever more complex. But if I can't get the baseline thing up and running, I'm unlikely to be super enthused about continuing to beat my head against the wall like, “Well, I'll just make it more complex. That'll solve the problem.” Because it often does not. That's my position.Casey: Yeah, I agree that dopamine hit is valuable in getting attached to want to invest into whatever tech stack you're using. The challenge is your second part of that. Your second part is will it grow with me and scale with me and support the complex edge cases that I have? And the problem I've seen is a lot of organizations will start with something that's very easy to get started with and then quickly outgrow it, and then come up with all sorts of weird Rube Goldberg-type solutions. Because they jumped all in before seeing—I've got kind of an example of that.I'm happy to announce that there's now 18 ways to run containers on AWS. Because in your use case, in the spirit of AWS customer obsession, I hear your use case, I've created an open-source project that I want to share called Quinntainers—Corey: Oh, no.Casey: —and it solves—yes. Quinntainers is live and is ready for the world. So, now we've got 18 ways to run containers. And if you have Corey's use case of, “Hey, here's my container. Run it for me,” now we've got a one command that you can run to get things going for you. I can share a link for you and you could check it out. This is a [unintelligible 00:21:38]—Corey: Oh, we're putting that in the [show notes 00:21:37], for sure. In fact, if you go to snark.cloud/quinntainers, you'll find it.Casey: You'll find it. There you go. The idea here was this: There is a real use case that you had, and I looked at AWS does not have an out-of-the-box simple solution for you. I agree with that. And Google Cloud Run does.Well, the answer would have been from AWS, “Well, then here, we need to make that solution.” And so that's what this was, was a way to demonstrate that it is a solvable problem. AWS has all the right primitives, just that use case hadn't been covered. So, how does Quinntainers work? Real straightforward: It's a command-line—it's an NPM tool.You just run a [MPX 00:22:17] Quinntainer, it sets up a GitHub action role in your AWS account, it then creates a GitHub action workflow in your repo, and then uses the Quinntainer GitHub action—reusable action—that creates the image for you; every time you push to the branch, pushes it up to ECR, and then automatically pushes up that new version of the image to App Runner for you. So, now it's using App Runner under the covers, but it's providing that nice developer experience that you are getting out of Cloud Run. Look, is container really the right way to go with running containers? No, I'm not making that point at all. But the point is it is a—Corey: It might very well be.Casey: Well, if you want to show a good Hello World experience, Quinntainer's the best because within 30 seconds, your app is now set up to continuously deliver containers into AWS for your very specific use case. The problem is, it's not going to grow for you. I mean that it was something I did over the weekend just for fun; it's not something that would ever be worthy of hitching up a real production workload to. So, the point there is, you can build frameworks and tools that are very good at getting that initial dopamine hit, but then are not going to be there for you unnecessarily as you mature and get more complex.Corey: And yet, I've tilted a couple of times at the windmill of integrating GitHub actions in anything remotely resembling a programmatic way with AWS services, as far as instance roles go. Are you using permanent credentials for this as stored secrets or are you doing the [OICD 00:23:50][00:23:50] handoff?Casey: OIDC. So, what happens is the tool creates the IAM role for you with the trust policy on GitHub's OIDC provider, sets all that up for you in your account, locks it down so that just your repo and your main branch is able to push or is able to assume the role, the role is set up just to allow deployments to App Runner and ECR repository. And then that's it. At that point, it's out of your way. And you're just git push, and couple minutes later, your updates are now running an App Runner for you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning fast processing power, courtesy of third gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO, or hardware limitations, of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices, and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever.Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. "Screaming in the Cloud" listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G E T V U L T R.com/screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Don't undersell what you've just built. This is something that—is this what I would use for a large-scale production deployment, obviously not, but it has streamlined and made incredibly accessible things that previously have been very complex for folks to get up and running. One of the most disturbing themes behind some of the feedback I got was, at one point I said, “Well, have you tried running a Docker container on Lambda?” Because now it supports containers as a packaging format. And I said no because I spent a few weeks getting Lambda up and running back when it first came out and I've basically been copying and pasting what I got working ever since the way most of us do.And response is, “Oh, that explains a lot.” With the implication being that I'm just a fool. Maybe, but let's be clear, I am never the only person in the room who doesn't know how to do something; I'm just loud about what I don't know. And the failure mode of a bad user experience is that a customer feels dumb. And that's not okay because this stuff is complicated, and when a user has a bad time, it's a bug.I learned that in 2012. From Jordan Sissel the creator of LogStash. He has been an inspiration to me for the last ten years. And that's something I try to live by that if a user has a bad time, something needs to get fixed. Maybe it's the tool itself, maybe it's the documentation, maybe it's the way that GitHub repo's readme is structured in a way that just makes it accessible.Because I am not a trailblazer in most things, nor do I intend to be. I'm not the world's best engineer by a landslide. Just look at my code and you'd argue the fact that I'm an engineer at all. But if it's bad and it works, how bad is it? Is sort of the other side of it.So, my problem is that there needs to be a couple of things. Ignore for a second the aspect of making it the right answer to get something out of the door. The fact that I want to take this container and just run it, and you and I both reach for App Runner as the default AWS service that does this because I've been swimming in the AWS waters a while and you're a frickin AWS Container Hero, where it is expected that you know what most of these things do. For someone who shows up on the containers webpage—which by the way lists, I believe 15 ways to run containers on mobile and 19 ways to run containers on non-mobile, which is just fascinating in its own right—and it's overwhelming, it's confusing, and it's not something that makes it is abundantly clear what the golden path is. First, get it up and working, get it running, then you can add nuance and flavor and the rest, and I think that's something that's gotten overlooked in our mad rush to pretend that we're all Google engineers, circa 2012.Casey: Mmm. I think people get stressed out when they tried to run containers in AWS because they think, “What is that golden path?” You said golden path. And my advice to people is there is no golden path. And the great thing about AWS is they do continue to invest in the solutions they come up with. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.Corey: As am I.Casey: Yeah. I built so much time getting my perfect set of RSS feeds and then I had to find somewhere else to—with AWS, the different offerings that are available for running containers, those are there intentionally, it's not by accident. They're there to solve specific problems, so the trick is finding what works best for you and don't feel like one is better than the other is going to get more attention than others. And they each have different use cases.And I approach it this way. I've seen a couple of different people do some great flowcharts—I think Forrest did one, Vlad did one—on ways to make the decision on how to run your containers. And I break it down to three questions. I ask people first of all, where are you going to run these workloads? If someone says, “It has to be in the data center,” okay, cool, then ECS Anywhere or EKS Anywhere and we'll figure out if Kubernetes is needed.If they need specific requirements, so if they say, “No, we can run in the cloud, but we need privileged mode for containers,” or, “We need EBS volumes,” or, “We want really small container sizes,” like, less than a quarter-VCP or less than half a gig of RAM—or if you have custom log requirements, Fargate is not going to work for you, so you're going to run on EC2. Otherwise, run it on Fargate. But that's the first question. Figure out where are you going to run your containers. That leads to the second question: What's your control plane?But those are different, sort of related but different questions. And I only see six options there. That's App Runner for your control plane, LightSail for your control plane, Rosa if you're invested in OpenShift already, EKS either if you have Momentum and Kubernetes or you have a bunch of engineers that have a bunch of experience with Kubernetes—if you don't have either, don't choose it—or ECS. The last option Elastic Beanstalk, but let's leave that as a—if you're not currently invested in Elastic Beanstalk don't start today. But I look at those as okay, so I—first question, where am I going to run my containers? Second question, what do I want to use for my control plane? And there's different pros and cons of each of those.And then the third question, how do I want to manage them? What tools do I want to use for managing deployment? All those other tools like Copilot or App2Container or Proton, those aren't my control plane; those aren't where I run my containers; that's how I manage, deploy, and orchestrate all the different containers. So, I look at it as those three questions. But I don't know, what do you think of that, Corey?Corey: I think you're onto something. I think that is a terrific way of exploring that question. I would argue that setting up a framework like that—one or very similar—is what the AWS containers page should be, just coming from the perspective of what is the neophyte customer experience. On some level, you almost need a slide of have choose your level of experience ranging from, “What's a container?” To, “I named my kid Kubernetes because I make terrible life decisions,” and anywhere in between.Casey: Sure. Yeah, well, and I think that really dictates the control plane level. So, for example, LightSail, where does LightSail fit? To me, the value of LightSail is the simplicity. I'm looking at a monthly pricing: Seven bucks a month for a container.I don't know how [unintelligible 00:30:23] works, but I can think in terms of monthly pricing. And it's tailored towards a console user, someone just wants to click in, point to an image. That's a very specific user, there's thousands of customers that are very happy with that experience, and they use it. App Runner presents that scale to zero. That's one of the big selling points I see with App Runner. Likewise, with Google Cloud Run. I've got that scale to zero. I can't do that with ECS, or EKS, or any of the other platforms. So, if you've got something that has a ton of idle time, I'd really be looking at those. I would argue that I think I did the math, Google Cloud Run is about 30% more expensive than App Runner.Corey: Yeah, if you disregard the free tier, I think that's have it—running persistently at all times throughout the month, the drop-out cold starts would cost something like 40 some odd bucks a month or something like that. Don't quote me on it. Again and to be clear, I wound up doing this very congratulatory and complimentary tweet about them on I think it was Thursday, and then they immediately apparently took one look at this and said, “Holy shit. Corey's saying nice things about us. What do we do? What do we do?” Panic.And the next morning, they raised prices on a bunch of cloud offerings. Whew, that'll fix it. Like—Casey: [laugh].Corey: Di-, did you miss the direction you're going on here? No, that's the exact opposite of what you should be doing. But here we are. Interestingly enough, to tie our two conversation threads together, when I look at an AWS bill, unless you're using Fargate, I can't tell whether you're using Kubernetes or not because EKS is a small charge. And almost every case for the control plane, or Fargate under it.Everything else just manifests as EC2 spend. From the perspective of the cloud provider. If you're running a Kubernetes cluster, it is a single-tenant application that can have some very funky behaviors like cross-AZ chatter back and fourth because there's no internal mechanism to say talk to the free thing, rather than the two cents a gigabyte thing. It winds up spinning up and down in a bunch of different ways, and the behavior patterns, because of how placement works are not necessarily deterministic, depending upon workload. And that becomes something that people find odd when, “Okay, we look at our bill for a week, what can you say?”“Well, first question. Are you running Kubernetes at all?” And they're like, “Who invited these clowns?” Understand, we're not prying into your workloads for a variety of excellent legal and contractual reasons, here. We are looking at how they behave, and for specific workloads, once we have a conversation engineering team, yeah, we're going to dive in, but it is not at all intuitive from the outside to make any determination whether you're running containers, or whether you're running VMs that you just haven't done anything with in 20 years, or what exactly is going on. And that's just an artifact of the billing system.Casey: We ran into this challenge in Gaggle. We don't use EKS, we use ECS, but we have some shared clusters, lots of EC2 spend, hard to figure out which team is creating the services that's running that up. We actually ended up creating a tool—we open-sourced it—ECS Chargeback, and what it does is it looks at the CPU memory reservations for each task definition, and then prorates the overall charge of the ECS cluster, and then creates metrics in Datadog to give us a breakdown of cost per ECS service. And it also measures what we like to refer to as waste, right? Because if you're reserving four gigs of memory, but your utilization never goes over two gigs, we're paying for that reservation, but you're underutilizing.So, we're able to also show which services have the highest degree of waste, not just utilization, so it helps us go after it. But this is a hard problem. I'd be curious, how do you approach these shared ECS resources and slicing and dicing those bills?Corey: Everyone has a different approach, too. This there is no unifiable, correct answer. A previous show guest, Peter Hamilton, over at Remind had done something very similar, open-sourced a bunch of these things. Understanding what your spend is important on this, and it comes down to getting at the actual business concern because in some cases, effectively dead reckoning is enough. You take a look at the cluster that is really hard to attribute because it's a shared service. Great. It is 5% of your bill.First pass, why don't we just agree that it is a third for Service A, two-thirds for Service B, and we'll call it mostly good at that point? That can be enough in a lot of cases. With scale [laugh] you're just sort of hand-waving over many millions of dollars a year there. How about we get into some more depth? And then you start instrumenting and reporting to something, be it CloudWatch, be a Datadog, be it something else, and understanding what the use case is.In some cases, customers have broken apart shared clusters for that specific reason. I don't think that's necessarily the best approach from an engineering perspective, but again, this is not purely an engineering decision. It comes down to serving the business need. And if you're taking up partial credits on that cluster, for a tax credit for R&D for example, you want that position to be extraordinarily defensible, and spending a few extra dollars to ensure that it is the right business decision. I mean, again, we're pure advisory; we advise customers on what we would do in their position, but people often mistake that to be we're going to go for the lowest possible price—bad idea, or that we're going to wind up doing this from a purely engineering-centric point of view.It's, be aware of that in almost every case, with some very notable weird exceptions, the AWS Bill costs significantly less than the payroll expense that you have of people working on the AWS environment in various ways. People are more expensive, so the idea of, well, you can save a whole bunch of engineering effort by spending a bit more on your cloud, yeah, let's go ahead and do that.Casey: Yeah, good point.Corey: The real mark of someone who's senior enough is their answer to almost any question is, “It depends.” And I feel I've fallen into that trap as well. Much as I'd love to sit here and say, “Oh, it's really simple. You do X, Y, and Z.” Yeah… honestly, my answer, the simple answer, is I think that we orchestrate a cyber-bullying campaign against AWS through the AWS wishlist hashtag, we get people to harass their account managers with repeated requests for, “Hey, could you go ahead and [dip 00:36:19] that thing in—they give that a plus-one for me, whatever internal system you're using?”Just because this is a problem we're seeing more and more. Given that it's an unbounded growth problem, we're going to see it more and more for the foreseeable future. So, I wish I had a better answer for you, but yeah, that's stuff's super hard is honest, but it's also not the most useful answer for most of us.Casey: I'd love feedback from anyone from you or your team on that tool that we created. I can share link after the fact. ECS Chargeback is what we call it.Corey: Excellent. I will follow up with you separately on that. That is always worth diving into. I'm curious to see new and exciting approaches to this. Just be aware that we have an obnoxious talent sometimes for seeing these things and, “Well, what about”—and asking about some weird corner edge case that either invalidates the entire thing, or you're like, “Who on earth would ever have a problem like that?” And the answer is always, “The next customer.”Casey: Yeah.Corey: For a bounded problem space of the AWS bill. Every time I think I've seen it all, I just have to talk to one more customer.Casey: Mmm. Cool.Corey: In fact, the way that we approached your teardown in the restaurant is how we launched our first pass approach. Because there's value in something like that is different than the value of a six to eight-week-long, deep-dive engagement to every nook and cranny. And—Casey: Yeah, for sure. It was valuable to us.Corey: Yeah, having someone come in to just spend a day with your team, diving into it up one side and down the other, it seems like a weird thing, like, “How much good could you possibly do in a day?” And the answer in some cases is—we had a Honeycomb saying that in a couple of days of something like this, we wound up blowing 10% off their entire operating budget for the company, it led to an increased valuation, Liz Fong-Jones says that—on multiple occasions—that the company would not be what it was without our efforts on their bill, which is just incredibly gratifying to hear. It's easy to get lost in the idea of well, it's the AWS bill. It's just making big companies spend a little bit less to another big company. And that's not exactly, you know, saving the lives of K through 12 students here.Casey: It's opening up opportunities.Corey: Yeah. It's about optimizing for the win for everyone. Because now AWS gets a lot more money from Honeycomb than they would if Honeycomb had not continued on their trajectory. It's, you can charge customers a lot right now, or you can charge them a little bit over time and grow with them in a partnership context. I've always opted for the second model rather than the first.Casey: Right on.Corey: But here we are. I want to thank you for taking so much time out of well, several days now to argue with me on Twitter, which is always appreciated, particularly when it's, you know, constructive—thanks for that—Casey: Yeah.Corey: For helping me get my business partner to re:Invent, although then he got me that horrible puzzle of 1000 pieces for the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation landscape and now I don't ever want to see him again—so you know, that happens—and of course, spending the time to write Quinntainers, which is going to be at snark.cloud/quinntainers as soon as we're done with this recording. Then I'm going to kick the tires and send some pull requests.Casey: Right on. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate you starting the conversation. I would just conclude with I think that yes, there are a lot of ways to run containers in AWS; don't let it stress you out. They're there for intention, they're there by design. Understand them.I would also encourage people to go a little deeper, especially if you got a significantly large workload. You got to get your hands dirty. As a matter of fact, there's a hands-on lab that a company called Liatrio does. They call it their Night Lab; it's a one-day free, hands-on, you run legacy monolithic job applications on Kubernetes, gives you first-hand experience on how to—gets all the way up into observability and doing things like Canary deployments. It's a great, great lab.But you got to do something like that to really get your hands dirty and understand how these things work. So, don't sweat it; there's not one right way. There's a way that will probably work best for each user, and just take the time and understand the ways to make sure you're applying the one that's going to give you the most runway for your workload.Corey: I will definitely dig into that myself. But I think you're right, I think you have nailed a point that is, again, a nuanced one and challenging to put in a rage tweet. But the services don't exist in a vacuum. They're not there because, despite the joke, someone wants to get promoted. It's because there are customer needs that are going on that, and this is another way of meeting those needs.I think there could be better guidance, but I also understand that there are a lot of nuanced perspectives here and that… hell is someone else's workflow—Casey: [laugh].Corey: —and there's always value in broadening your perspective a bit on those things. If people want to learn more about you and how you see the world, where's the best place to find you?Casey: Probably on Twitter: twitter.com/nektos, N-E-K-T-O-S.Corey: That might be the first time Twitter has been described as a best place for anything. But—Casey: [laugh].Corey: Thank you once again, for your time. It is always appreciated.Casey: Thanks, Corey.Corey: Casey Lee, CTO at Gaggle and AWS Container Hero. And apparently writing code in anger to invalidate my points, which is always appreciated. Please do more of that, folks. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, or the YouTube comments, which is always a great place to go reading, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review in the usual places and an angry comment telling me that I'm completely wrong, and then launching your own open-source tool to point out exactly what I've gotten wrong this time.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
The 365 Days of Astronomy, the daily podcast of the International Year of Astronomy 2009
https://youtu.be/4wglbxajKpA Host: Fraser Cain ( @fcain )Special Guest: Tonight we are very excited to welcome Amber Dubill from JHUAPL, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, to the WSH. Amber has worked on both IMAP and DART, and also has a keen interest in advanced solar sail design concepts. Solar sails have long been theorized as being a viable means of spacecraft propulsion — eventually — and we do seem to be moving closer to their being a reality… In June 2019, the Planetary Society successfully launched their crowdfunded, proof-of-concept LightSail 2, and it is still going strong! In fact, you can check on its current status here: https://secure.planetary.org/site/SPa... Meanwhile, in Rochester NY, Dr. Grover Swartzlander from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was developing a new approach to solar sail design - one that could potentially allow spacecraft to photograph the poles of the sun for the first time! In April 2019 RIT and Dr. Swartzlander were awarded a 2019 NIAC Phase 2 award to explore the feasibility of diffractive solar sails! (https://www.rit.edu/news/nasa-announc...) As a mechanical engineering student at RIT, Amber worked closely with Dr. Swartzlander on the diffractive solar sail design, and their collaboration continues today. Amber started her experience on low cost, high risk CubeSats space at RIT as a student and at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). This evolved into research on advanced technology concepts for spacecraft. She has developed expertise in the use of solar sailing, and has become a champion for diffractive solar sailing through collaboration on NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. She continues working to further develop diffractive solar sailing technology: a new type of massless, infinite propulsion, that will enable spacecraft to sail around our Sun and view it like never before. To stay up to date with Amber's research, follow her on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-dubill) as well as on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/amber.dubill). You can learn more about Amber's and Dr. Swartzlander's collaboration in this podcast: https://soundcloud.com/rittigers/inte... Regular Guests: Dr. Moiya McTier ( https://www.moiyamctier.com/ & @GoAstroMo ) C.C. Petersen ( http://thespacewriter.com/wp/ & @AstroUniverse & @SpaceWriter ) Marie-Liis Aru ( https://www.bymarieliis.com/ & https://www.instagram.com/p/BL-0VW4Ah2j/?hl=en ) This week's stories: - KREEP on the Moon. - Neptune is cooling down. - Magellanic clouds smashing together! - Axiom Space AX-1 arrives at the ISS. Good? Bad? We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.
Tonight we are very excited to welcome Amber Dubill from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to the WSH. Amber has worked on both IMAP and DART, and also has a keen interest in advanced solar sail design concepts. Solar sails have long been theorized as being a viable means of spacecraft propulsion — eventually — and we do seem to be moving closer to their being a reality… In June 2019, the Planetary Society succesfully launched their crowdfunded, proof-of-concept LightSail 2, and it is still going strong! In fact, you can check on its current status here. Meanwhile, in Rochester NY, Dr. Grover Swartzlander from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was developing a new approach to solar sail design - one that could potentially allow spacecraft to photograph the poles of the sun for the first time! In April 2019 RIT and Dr. Swartzlander were awarded a 2019 NIAC Phase 2 award to explore the feasibility of diffractive solar sails! As a mechanical engineering student at RIT, Amber worked closely with Dr. Swartzlander on the diffractive solar sail design, and their collaboration continues today. Amber started her experience on low cost, high risk CubeSats space at RIT as a student and at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). This evolved into research on advanced technology concepts for spacecraft. She has developed expertise in the use of solar sailing, and has become a champion for diffractive solar sailing through collaboration on NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. She continues working to further develop diffractive solar sailing technology: a new type of massless, infinite propulsion, that will enable spacecraft to sail around our Sun and view it like never before. To stay up to date with Amber's research, follow her on LinkedIn as well as on Facebook. You can learn more about Amber's and Dr. Swartzlander's collaboration in this podcast. You can read more about the NIAC Phase II award for RIT here. **************************************** The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest. Want to support CosmoQuest? Here are some specific ways you can help: Subscribe FREE to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/cosmoquest Subscribe to our podcasts Astronomy Cast and Daily Space where ever you get your podcasts! Watch our streams over on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/cosmoquestx – follow and subscribe! Become a Patreon of CosmoQuest https://www.patreon.com/cosmoquestx Become a Patreon of Astronomy Cast https://www.patreon.com/astronomycast Buy stuff from our Redbubble https://www.redbubble.com/people/cosmoquestx Join our Discord server for CosmoQuest - https://discord.gg/X8rw4vv Join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew! - http://www.wshcrew.space/ Don't forget to like and subscribe! Plus we love being shared out to new people, so tweet, comment, review us... all the free things you can do to help bring science into people's lives.
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About PetePete does many startup things at Allma. Links: Last Tweet in AWS: https://lasttweetinaws.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/petecheslock LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecheslock/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined—as is tradition, for a post re:Invent wrap up, a month or so later, once everything is time to settle—by my friend and yours, Pete Cheslock. Pete, how are you?Pete: Hi, I'm doing fantastic. New year; new me. That's what I'm going with.Corey: That's the problem. I keep hoping for that, but every time I turn around, it's still me. And you know, honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone.Pete: Exactly. [laugh]. I wouldn't wish you on me either. But somehow I keep coming back for this.Corey: So, in two-thousand twenty—or twenty-twenty, as the children say—re:Invent was fully virtual. And that felt weird. Then re:Invent 2021 was a hybrid event which, let's be serious here, is not really those things. They had a crappy online thing and then a differently crappy thing in person. But it didn't feel real to me because you weren't there.That is part of the re:Invent tradition. There's a midnight madness thing, there's a keynote where they announce a bunch of nonsense, and then Pete and I go and have brunch on the last day of re:Invent and decompress, and more or less talk smack about everything that crosses our minds. And you weren't there this year. I had to backfill you with Tim Banks. You know, the person that I backfield you with here at The Duckbill Group as a principal cloud economist.Pete: You know, you got a great upgrade in hot takes, I feel like, with Tim.Corey: And other ways, too, but it's rude of me to say that to you directly. So yeah, his hot takes are spectacular. He was going to be doing this with me, except you cannot mess with tradition. You really can't.Pete: Yeah. I'm trying to think how many—is this third year? It's at least three.Corey: Third or fourth.Pete: Yeah, it's at least three. Yeah, it was, I don't want to say I was sad to not be there because, with everything going on, it's still weird out there. But I am always—I'm just that weird person who actually likes re:Invent, but not for I feel like the reasons people think. Again, I'm such an extroverted-type person, that it's so great to have this, like, serendipity to re:Invent. The people that you run into and the conversations that you have, and prior—like in 2019, I think was a great example because that was the last one I had gone to—you know, having so many conversations so quickly because everyone is there, right? It's like this magnet that attracts technologists, and venture capital, and product builders, and all this other stuff. And it's all compressed into, like, you know, that five-day span, I think is the biggest part that makes so great.Corey: The fear in people's eyes when they see me. And it was fun; I had a pair of masks with me. One of them was a standard mask, and no one recognizes anyone because, masks, and the other was a printout of my ridiculous face, which was horrifyingly uncanny, but also made it very easy for people to identify me. And depending upon how social I was feeling, I would wear one or the other, and it worked flawlessly. That was worth doing. They really managed to thread the needle, as well, before Omicron hit, but after the horrors of last year. So, [unintelligible 00:03:00]—Pete: It really—Corey: —if it were going on right now, it would not be going on right now.Pete: Yeah. I talk about really—yeah—really just hitting it timing-wise. Like, not that they could have planned for any of this, but like, as things were kind of not too crazy and before they got all crazy again, it feels like wow, like, you know, they really couldn't have done the event at any other time. And it's like, purely due to luck. I mean, absolute one hundred percent.Corey: That's the amazing power of frugality. Because the reason is then is it's the week after Thanksgiving every year when everything is dirt cheap. And, you know, if there's one thing that I one-point-seve—sorry, their stock's in the toilet—a $1.6 trillion company is very concerned about, it is saving money at every opportunity.Pete: Well, the one thing that was most curious about—so I was at the first re:Invent in-what—2012 I think it was, and there was—it was quaint, right?—there was 4000 people there, I want to say. It was in the thousands of people. Now granted, still a big conference, but it was in the Sands Convention Center. It was in that giant room, the same number of people, were you know, people's booths were like tables, like, eight-by-ten tables, right? [laugh].It had almost a DevOpsDays feel to it. And I was kind of curious if this one had any of those feelings. Like, did it evoke it being more quaint and personable, or was it just as soulless as it probably has been in recent years?Corey: This was fairly soulless because they reduced the footprint of the event. They dropped from two expo halls down to one, they cut the number of venues, but they still had what felt like 20,000 people or something there. It was still crowded, it was still packed. And I've done some diligent follow-ups afterwards, and there have been very few cases of Covid that came out of it. I quarantined for a week in a hotel, so I don't come back and kill my young kids for the wrong reasons.And that went—that was sort of like the worst part of it on some level, where it's like great. Now I could sit alone at a hotel and do some catch-up and all the rest, but all right I'd kind of like to go home. I'm not used to being on the road that much.Pete: Yeah, I think we're all a little bit out of practice. You know, I haven't been on a plane in years. I mean, the travel I've done more recently has been in my car from point A to point B. Like, direct, you know, thing. Actually, a good friend of mine who's not in technology at all had to travel for business, and, you know, he also has young kids who are under five, so he when he got back, he actually hid in a room in their house and quarantine himself in the room. But they—I thought, this is kind of funny—they never told the kids he was home. Because they knew that like—Corey: So, they just thought the house was haunted?Pete: [laugh].Corey: Like, “Don't go in the west wing,” sort of level of nonsense. That is kind of amazing.Pete: Honestly, like, we were hanging out with the family because they're our neighbors. And it was like, “Oh, yeah, like, he's in the guest room right now.” Kids have no idea. [laugh]. I'm like, “Oh, my God.” I'm like, I can't even imagine. Yeah.Corey: So, let's talk a little bit about the releases of re:Invent. And I'm going to lead up with something that may seem uncharitable, but I don't think it necessarily is. There weren't the usual torrent of new releases for ridiculous nonsense in the same way that there have been previously. There was no, this service talks to satellites in space. I mean, sure, there was some IoT stuff to manage fleets of cars, and giant piles of robots, and cool, I don't have those particular problems; I'm trying to run a website over here.So okay, great. There were enhancements to a number of different services that were in many cases appreciated, in other cases, irrelevant. Werner said in his keynote, that it was about focusing on primitives this year. And, “Why do we have so many services? It's because you asked for it… as customers.”Pete: [laugh]. Yeah, you asked for it.Corey: What have you been asking for, Pete? Because I know what I've been asking for and it wasn't that. [laugh].Pete: It's amazing to see a company continually say yes to everything, and somehow, despite their best efforts, be successful at doing it. No other company could do that. Imagine any other software technology business out there that just builds everything the customers ask for. Like from a product management business standpoint, that is, like, rule 101 is, “Listen to your customers, but don't say yes to everything.” Like, you can't do everything.Corey: Most companies can't navigate the transition between offering the same software in the Cloud and on a customer facility. So, it's like, “Ooh, an on-prem version, I don't know, that almost broke the company the last time we tried it.” Whereas you have Amazon whose product strategy is, “Yes,” being able to put together a whole bunch of things. I also will challenge the assertion that it's the primitives that customers want. They don't want to build a data center out of popsicle sticks themselves. They want to get something that solves a problem.And this has been a long-term realization for me. I used to work at Media Temple as a senior systems engineer running WordPress at extremely large scale. My websites now run on WordPress, and I have the good sense to pay WP Engine to handle it for me, instead of doing it myself because it's not the most productive use of my time. I want things higher up the stack. I assure you I pay more to WP Engine than it would cost me to run these things myself from an infrastructure point of view, but not in terms of my time.What I see sometimes as the worst of all worlds is that AWS is trying to charge for that value-added pricing without adding the value that goes along with it because you still got to build a lot of this stuff yourself. It's still a very janky experience, you're reduced to googling random blog posts to figure out how this thing is supposed to work, and the best documentation comes from externally. Whereas with a company that's built around offering solutions like this, great. In the fullness of time, I really suspect that if this doesn't change, their customers are going to just be those people who build solutions out of these things. And let those companies capture the up-the-stack margin. Which I have no problem with. But they do because Amazon is a company that lies awake at night actively worrying that someone, somewhere, who isn't them might possibly be making money somehow.Pete: I think MongoDB is a perfect example of—like, look at their stock price over the last whatever, years. Like, they, I feel like everyone called for the death of MongoDB every time Amazon came out with their new things, yet, they're still a multi-billion dollar company because I can just—give me an API endpoint and you scale the database. There's is—Corey: Look at all the high-profile hires that Mongo was making out of AWS, and I can't shake the feeling they're sitting there going, “Yeah, who's losing important things out of production now?” It's, everyone is exodus-ing there. I did one of those ridiculous graphics of the naming all the people that went over there, and in—with the hurricane evacuation traffic picture, and there's one car going the other way that I just labeled with, “Re:Invent sponsorship check,” because yeah, they have a top tier sponsorship and it was great. I've got to say I've been pretty down on MongoDB for a while, for a variety of excellent reasons based upon, more or less, how they treated customers who were in pain. And I'd mostly written it off.I don't do that anymore. Not because I inherently believe the technology has changed, though I'm told it has, but by the number of people who I deeply respect who are going over there and telling me, no, no, this is good. Congratulations. I have often said you cannot buy authenticity, and I don't think that they are, but the people who are working there, I do not believe that these people are, “Yeah, well, you bought my opinion. You can buy their attention, not their opinion.” If someone changes their opinion, based upon where they work, I kind of question everything they're telling me is, like, “Oh, you're just here to sell something you don't believe in? Welcome aboard.”Pete: Right. Yeah, there's an interview question I like to ask, which is, “What's something that you used to believe in very strongly that you've more recently changed your mind on?” And out of politeness because usually throws people back a little bit, and they're like, “Oh, wow. Like, let me think about that.” And I'm like, “Okay, while you think about that I want to give you mine.”Which is in the past, my strongly held belief was we had to run everything ourselves. “You own your availability,” was the line. “No, I'm not buying Datadog. I can build my own metric stack just fine, thank you very much.” Like, “No, I'm not going to use these outsourced load balancers or databases because I need to own my availability.”And what I realized is that all of those decisions lead to actually delivering and focusing on things that were not the core product. And so now, like, I've really flipped 180, that, if any—anything that you're building that does not directly relate to the core product, i.e. How your business makes money, should one hundred percent be outsourced to an expert that is better than you. Mongo knows how to run Mongo better than you.Corey: “What does your company do?” “Oh, we handle expense reports.” “Oh, what are you working on this month?” “I'm building a load balancer.” It's like that doesn't add the value. Don't do that.Pete: Right. Exactly. And so it's so interesting, I think, to hear Werner say that, you know, we're just building primitives, and you asked for this. And I think that concept maybe would work years ago, when you had a lot of builders who needed tools, but I don't think we have any, like, we don't have as many builders as before. Like, I think we have people who need more complete solutions. And that's probably why all these businesses are being super successful against Amazon.Corey: I'm wondering if it comes down to a cloud economic story, specifically that my cloud bill is always going to be variable and it's difficult to predict, whereas if I just use EC2 instances, and I build load balancers or whatnot, myself, well, yeah, it's a lot more work, but I can predict accurately what my staff compensation costs are more effectively, that I can predict what a CapEx charge would be or what the AWS bill is going to be. I'm wondering if that might in some way shape it?Pete: Well, I feel like the how people get better in managing their costs, right, you'll eventually move to a world where, like, “Yep, okay, first, we turned off waste,” right? Like, step one is waste. Step two is, like, understanding your spend better to optimize but, like, step three, like, the galaxy brain meme of Amazon cost stuff is all, like, unit economics stuff, where trying to better understand the actual cost deliver an actual feature. And yeah, I think that actually gets really hard when you give—kind of spread your product across, like, a slew of services that have varying levels of costs, varying levels of tagging, so you can attribute it. Like, it's really hard. Honestly, it's pretty easy if I have 1000 EC2 servers with very specific tags, I can very easily figure out what it costs to deliver product. But if I have—Corey: Yeah, if I have Corey build it, I know what Corey is going to cost, and I know how many servers he's going to use. Great, if I have Pete it, Pete's good at things, it'll cut that server bill in half because he actually knows how to wind up being efficient with things. Okay, great. You can start calculating things out that way. I don't think that's an intentional choice that companies are making, but I feel like that might be a natural outgrowth of it.Pete: Yeah. And there's still I think a lot of the, like, old school mentality of, like, the, “Not invented here,” the, “We have to own our availability.” You can still own your availability by using these other vendors. And honestly, it's really heartening to see so many companies realize that and realize that I don't need to get everything from Amazon. And honestly, like, in some things, like I look at a cloud Amazon bill, and I think to myself, it would be easier if you just did everything from Amazon versus having these ten other vendors, but those ten other vendors are going to be a lot better at running the product that they build, right, that as a service, then you probably will be running it yourself. Or even Amazon's, like, you know, interpretation of that product.Corey: A few other things that came out that I thought were interesting, at least the direction they're going in. The changes to S3 intelligent tiering are great, with instant retrieval on Glacier. I feel like that honestly was—they talk a good story, but I feel like that was competitive response to Google offering the same thing. That smacks of a large company with its use case saying, “You got two choices here.” And they're like, “Well, okay. Crap. We're going to build it then.”Or alternately, they're looking at the changes that they're making to intelligent tiering, they're now shifting that to being the default that as far as recommendations go. There are a couple of drawbacks to it, but not many, and it's getting easier now to not have the mental overhead of trying to figure out exactly what your lifecycle policies are. Yeah, there are some corner cases where, okay, if I adjust this just so, then I could save 10% on that monitoring fee or whatnot. Yeah, but look how much work that's going to take you to curate and make sure that you're not doing something silly. That feels like it is such an in the margins issue. It's like, “How much data you're storing?” “Four exabytes.” Okay, yeah. You probably want some people doing exactly that, but that's not most of us.Pete: Right. Well, there's absolutely savings to be had. Like, if I had an exabyte of data on S3—which there are a lot of people who have that level of data—then it would make sense for me to have an engineering team whose sole purpose is purely an optimizing our data lifecycle for that data. Until a point, right? Until you've optimized the 80%, basically. You optimize the first 80, that's probably, air-quote, “Easy.” The last 20 is going to be incredibly hard, maybe you never even do that.But at lower levels of scale, I don't think the economics actually work out to have a team managing your data lifecycle of S3. But the fact that now AWS can largely do it for you in the background—now, there's so many things you have to think about and, like, you know, understand even what your data is there because, like, not all data is the same. And since S3 is basically like a big giant database you can query, you got to really think about some of that stuff. But honestly, what I—I don't know if—I have no idea if this is even be worked on, but what I would love to see—you know, hashtag #AWSwishlist—is, now we have countless tiers of EBS volumes, EBS volumes that can be dynamically modified without touching, you know, the physical host. Meaning with an API call, you can change from the gp2 to gp3, or io whatever, right?Corey: Or back again if it doesn't pan out.Pete: Or back again, right? And so for companies with large amounts of spend, you know, economics makes sense that you should have a team that is analyzing your volumes usage and modifying that daily, right? Like, you could modify that daily, and I don't know if there's anyone out there that's actually doing it at that level. And they probably should. Like, if you got millions of dollars in EBS, like, there's legit savings that you're probably leaving on the table without doing that. But that's what I'm waiting for Amazon to do for me, right? I want intelligent tiering for EBS because if you're telling me I can API call and you'll move my data and make that better, make that [crosstalk 00:17:46] better [crosstalk 00:17:47]—Corey: Yeah it could be like their auto-scaling for DynamoDB, for example. Gives you the capacity you need 20 minutes after you needed it. But fine, whatever because if I can schedule stuff like that, great, I know what time of day, the runs are going to kick off that beat up the disks. I know when end-of-month reporting fires off. I know what my usage pattern is going to be, by and large.Yeah, part of the problem too, is that I look at this stuff, and I get excited about it with the intelligent tiering… at The Duckbill Group we've got a few hundred S3 buckets lurking around. I'm thinking, “All right, I've got to go through and do some changes on this and implement all of that.” Our S3 bill's something like 50 bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. It's a no, that really isn't a thing. Like, I have a screenshot bucket that I have an app installed—I think called Dropshare—that hooks up to anytime I drag—I hit a shortcut, I drag with the mouse to select whatever I want and boom, it's up there and the URL is not copied to my clipboard, I can paste that wherever I want.And I'm thinking like, yeah, there's no cleanup on that. There's no lifecycle policy that's turning into anything. I should really go back and age some of it out and do the rest and start doing some lifecycle management. It—I've been using this thing for years and I think it's now a whopping, what, 20 cents a month for that bucket. It's—I just don't—Pete: [laugh].Corey: —I just don't care, other than voice in the back of my mind, “That's an unbounded growth problem.” Cool. When it hits 20 bucks a month, then I'll consider it. But until then I just don't. It does not matter.Pete: Yeah, I think yeah, scale changes everything. Start adding some zeros and percentages turned into meaningful numbers. And honestly, back on the EBS thing, the one thing that really changed my perspective of EBS, in general, is—especially coming from the early days, right? One terabyte volume, it was a hard drive in a thing. It was a virtual LUN on a SAN somewhere, probably.Nowadays, and even, like, many years after those original EBS volumes, like all the limits you get in EBS, those are actually artificial limits, right? If you're like, “My EBS volume is too slow,” it's not because, like, the hard drive it's on is too slow. That's an artificial limit that is likely put in place due to your volume choice. And so, like, once you realize that in your head, then your concept of how you store data on EBS should change dramatically.Corey: Oh, AWS had a blog post recently talking about, like, with io2 and the limits and everything, and there was architecture thinking, okay. “So, let's say this is insufficient and the quarter-million IOPS a second that you're able to get is not there.” And I'm sitting there thinking, “That is just ludicrous data volume and data interactivity model.” And it's one of those, like, I'm sitting here trying to think about, like, I haven't had to deal with a problem like that decade, just because it's, “Huh. Turns out getting these one thing that's super fast is kind of expensive.” If you paralyze it out, that's usually the right answer, and that's how the internet is mostly evolved. But there are use cases for which that doesn't work, and I'm excited to see it. I don't want to pay for it in my view, but it's nice to see it.Pete: Yeah, it's kind of fun to go into the Amazon calculator and price out one of the, like, io2 volumes and, like, maxed out. It's like, I don't know, like $50,000 a month or a hun—like, it's some just absolutely absurd number. But the beauty of it is that if you needed that value for an hour to run some intensive data processing task, you can have it for an hour and then just kill it when you're done, right? Like, that is what is most impressive.Corey: I copied 130 gigs of data to an EFS volume, which was—[unintelligible 00:21:05] EFS has gone from “This is a piece of junk,” to one of my favorite services. It really is, just because of its utility and different ways of doing things. I didn't have the foresight, just use a second EFS volume for this. So, I was unzipping a whole bunch of small files onto it. Great.It took a long time for me to go through it. All right, now that I'm done with that I want to clean all this up. My answer was to ultimately spin up a compute node and wind up running a whole bunch of—like, 400, simultaneous rm-rf on that long thing. And it was just, like, this feels foolish and dumb, but here we are. And I'm looking at the stats on it because the instance was—all right, at that point, the load average [on the instance 00:21:41] was like 200, or something like that, and the EFS volume was like, “Ohh, wow, you're really churning on this. I'm now at, like, 5% of the limit.” Like, okay, great. It turns out I'm really bad at computers.Pete: Yeah, well, that's really the trick is, like, yeah, sure, you can have a quarter-million IOPS per second, but, like, what's going to break before you even hit that limit? Probably many other things.Corey: Oh, yeah. Like, feels like on some level if something gets to that point, it a misconfiguration somewhere. But honestly, that's the thing I find weirdest about the world in which we live is that at a small-scale—if I have a bill in my $5 a month shitposting account, great. If I screw something up and cost myself a couple hundred bucks in misconfiguration it's going to stand out. At large scale, it doesn't matter if—you're spending $50 million a year or $500 million a year on AWS and someone leaks your creds, and someone spins up a whole bunch of Bitcoin miners somewhere else, you're going to see that on your bill until they're mining basically all the Bitcoin. It just gets lost in the background.Pete: I'm waiting for those—I'm actually waiting for the next level of them to get smarter because maybe you have, like, an aggressive tagging system and you're monitoring for untagged instances, but the move here would be, first get the creds and query for, like, the most used tags and start applying those tags to your Bitcoin mining instances. My God, it'll take—Corey: Just clone a bunch of tags. Congratulations, you now have a second BI Elasticsearch cluster that you're running yourself. Good work.Pete: Yeah. Yeah, that people won't find that until someone comes along after the fact that. Like, “Why do we have two have these things?” And you're like—[laugh].Corey: “Must be a DR thing.”Pete: It's maxed-out CPU. Yeah, exactly.Corey: [laugh].Pete: Oh, the terrible ideas—please, please, hackers don't take are terrible ideas.Corey: I had a, kind of, whole thing I did on Twitter years ago, talking about how I would wind up using the AWS Marketplace for an embezzlement scheme. Namely, I would just wind up spinning up something that had, like, a five-cent an hour charge or whatnot on just, like, basically rebadge the CentOS Community AMI or whatnot. Great. And then write a blog post, not attached to me, that explains how to do a thing that I'm going to be doing in production in a week or two anyway. Like, “How to build an auto-scaling group,” and reference that AMI.Then if it ever comes out, like, “Wow, why are we having all these marketplace charges on this?” “I just followed the blog post like it said here.” And it's like, “Oh, okay. You're a dumbass. The end.”That's the way to do it. A month goes by and suddenly it came out that someone had done something similarly. They wound up rebadging these community things on the marketplace and charging big money for it, and I'm sitting there going like that was a joke. It wasn't a how-to. But yeah, every time I make these jokes, I worry someone's going to do it.Pete: “Welcome to large-scale fraud with Corey Quinn.”Corey: Oh, yeah, it's fraud at scale is really the important thing here.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I still remember a year ago now at re:Invent 2021 was it, or was it 2020? Whatever they came out with, I want to say it wasn't gp3, or maybe it was, regardless, there was a new EBS volume type that came out that you were playing with to see how it worked and you experimented with it—Pete: Oh, yes.Corey: —and the next morning, you looked at the—I checked Slack and you're like well, my experiments yesterday cost us $5,000. And at first, like, the—my response is instructive on this because, first, it was, “Oh, my God. What's going to happen now?” And it's like, first, hang on a second.First off, that seems suspect but assume it's real. I assumed it was real at the outset. It's “Oh, right. This is not my personal $5-a-month toybox account. We are a company; we can absolutely pay that.” Because it's like, I could absolutely reach out, call it a favor. “I made a mistake, and I need a favor on the bill, please,” to AWS.And I would never live it down, let's be clear. For a $7,000 mistake, I would almost certainly eat it. As opposed to having to prostrate myself like that in front of Amazon. I'm like, no, no, no. I want one of those like—if it's like, “Okay, you're going to, like, set back the company roadmap by six months if you have to pay this. Do you want to do it?” Like, [groans] “Fine, I'll eat some crow.”But okay. And then followed immediately by, wow, if Pete of all people can mess this up, customers are going to be doomed here. We should figure out what happened. And I'm doing the math. Like, Pete, “What did you actually do?” And you're sitting there and you're saying, “Well, I had like a 20 gig volume that I did this.” And I'm doing the numbers, and it's like—Pete: Something's wrong.Corey: “How sure are you when you say ‘gigabyte,' that you were—that actually means what you think it did? Like, were you off by a lot? Like, did you mean exabytes?” Like, what's the deal here?Pete: Like, multiple factors.Corey: Yeah. How much—“How many IOPS did you give that thing, buddy?” And it turned out what happened was that when they launched this, they had mispriced it in the system by a factor of a million. So, it was fun. I think by the end of it, all of your experimentation was somewhere between five to seven cents. Which—Pete: Yeah. It was a—Corey: Which is why you don't work here anymore because no one cost me seven cents of money to give to Amazon—Pete: How dare you?Corey: —on my watch. Get out.Pete: How dare you, sir?Corey: Exactly.Pete: Yeah, that [laugh] was amazing to see, as someone who has done—definitely maid screw-ups that have cost real money—you know, S3 list requests are always a fun one at scale—but that one was supremely fun to see the—Corey: That was a scary one because another one they'd done previously was they had messed up Lightsail pricing, where people would log in, and, like, “Okay, so what is my Lightsail instance going to cost?” And I swear to you, this is true, it was saying—this was back in 2017 or so—the answer was, like, “$4.3 billion.” Because when you see that you just start laughing because you know it's a mistake. You know, that they're not going to actually demand that you spend $4.3 billion for a single instance—unless it's running SAP—and great.It's just, it's a laugh. It's clearly a mispriced, and it's clearly a bug that's going to get—it's going to get fixed. I just spun up this new EBS volume that no one fully understands yet and it cost me thousands of dollars. That's the sort of thing that no, no, I could actually see that happening. There are instances now that cost something like 100 bucks an hour or whatnot to run. I can see spinning up the wrong thing by mistake and getting bitten by it. There's a bunch of fun configuration mistakes you can make that will, “Hee, hee, hee. Why can I see that bill spike from orbit?” And that's the scary thing.Pete: Well, it's the original CI and CD problem of the per-hour billing, right? That was super common of, like, yeah, like, an i3, you know, 16XL server is pretty cheap per hour, but if you're charged per hour and you spin up a bunch for five minutes. Like, it—you will be shocked [laugh] by what you see there. So—Corey: Yeah. Mistakes will show. And I get it. It's also people as individuals are very different psychologically than companies are. With companies it's one of those, “Great we're optimizing to bring in more revenue and we don't really care about saving money at all costs.”Whereas people generally have something that looks a lot like a fixed income in the form of a salary or whatnot, so it's it is easier for us to cut spend than it is for us to go out and make more money. Like, I don't want to get a second job, or pitch my boss on stuff, and yeah. So, all and all, routing out the rest of what happened at re:Invent, they—this is the problem is that they have a bunch of minor things like SageMaker Inference Recommender. Yeah, I don't care. Anything—Pete: [laugh].Corey: —[crosstalk 00:28:47] SageMaker I mostly tend to ignore, for safety. I did like the way they described Amplify Studio because they made it sound like a WYSIWYG drag and drop, build a React app. It's not it. It basically—you can do that in Figma and then it can hook it up to some things in some cases. It's not what I want it to be, which is Honeycode, except good. But we'll get there some year. Maybe.Pete: There's a lot of stuff that was—you know, it's the classic, like, preview, which sure, like, from a product standpoint, it's great. You know, they have a level of scale where they can say, “Here's this thing we're building,” which could be just a twinkle in a product managers, call it preview, and get thousands of people who would be happy to test it out and give you feedback, and it's a, it's great that you have that capability. But I often look at so much stuff and, like, that's really cool, but, like, can I, can I have it now? Right? Like—or you can't even get into the preview plan, even though, like, you have that specific problem. And it's largely just because either, like, your scale isn't big enough, or you don't have a good enough relationship with your account manager, or I don't know, countless other reasons.Corey: The thing that really throws me, too, is the pre-announcements that come a year or so in advance, like, the Outpost smaller ones are finally available, but it feels like when they do too many pre-announcements or no big marquee service announcements, as much as they talk about, “We're getting back to fundamentals,” no, you have a bunch of teams that blew the deadline. That's really what it is; let's not call it anything else. Another one that I think is causing trouble for folks—I'm fortunate in that I don't do much work with Oracle databases, or Microsoft SQL databases—but they extended RDS Custom to Microsoft SQL at the [unintelligible 00:30:27] SQL server at re:Invent this year, which means this comes down to things I actually use, we're going to have a problem because historically, the lesson has always been if I want to run my own databases and tweak everything, I do it on top of an EC2 instance. If I want to managed database, relational database service, great, I use RDS. RDS Custom basically gives you root into the RDS instance. Which means among other things, yes, you can now use RDS to run containers.But it lets you do a lot of things that are right in between. So, how do you position this? When should I use RDS Custom? Can you give me an easy answer to that question? And they used a lot of words to say, no, they cannot. It's basically completely blowing apart the messaging and positioning of both of those services in some unfortunate ways. We'll learn as we go.Pete: Yeah. Honestly, it's like why, like, why would I use this? Or how would I use this? And this is I think, fundamentally, what's hard when you just say yes to everything. It's like, they in many cases, I don't think, like, I don't want to say they don't understand why they're doing this, but if it's not like there's a visionary who's like, this fits into this multi-year roadmap.That roadmap is largely—if that roadmap is largely generated by the customers asking for it, then it's not like, oh, we're building towards this Northstar of RDS being whatever. You might say that, but your roadmap's probably getting moved all over the place because, you know, this company that pays you a billion dollars a year is saying, “I would give you $2 billion a year for all of my Oracle databases, but I need this specific thing.” I can't imagine a scenario that they would say, “Oh, well, we're building towards this Northstar, and that's not on the way there.” Right? They'd be like, “New Northstar. Another billion dollars, please.”Corey: Yep. Probably the worst release of re:Invent, from my perspective, is RUM, Real User Monitoring, for CloudWatch. And I, to be clear, I wrote a shitposting Twitter threading client called Last Tweet in AWS. Go to lasttweetinaws.com. You can all use it. It's free; I just built this for my own purposes. And I've instrumented it with RUM. Now, Real User Monitoring is something that a lot of monitoring vendors use, and also CloudWatch now. And what that is, is it embeds a listener into the JavaScript that runs on client load, and it winds up looking at what's going on loading times, et cetera, so you can see when users are unhappy. I have no problem with this. Other than that, you know, liking users? What's up with that?Pete: Crazy.Corey: But then, okay, now, what this does is unlike every other RUM tool out there, which charges per session, meaning I am going to be… doing a web page load, it charges per data item, which includes HTTP errors, or JavaScript errors, et cetera. Which means that if you have a high transaction volume site and suddenly your CDN takes a nap like Fastly did for an hour last year, suddenly your bill is stratospheric for this because errors abound and cascade, and you can have thousands of errors on a single page load for these things, and it is going to be visible from orbit, at least with a per session basis thing, when you start to go viral, you understand that, “Okay, this is probably going to cost me some more on these things, and oops, I guess I should write less compelling content.” Fine. This is one of those one misconfiguration away and you are wailing and gnashing teeth. Now, this is a new service. I believe that they will waive these surprise bills in the event that things like that happen. But it's going to take a while and you're going to be worrying the whole time if you've rolled this out naively. So it's—Pete: Well and—Corey: —I just don't like the pricing.Pete: —how many people will actively avoid that service, right? And honestly, choose a competitor because the competitor could be—the competitor could be five times more expensive, right, on face value, but it's the certainty of it. It's the uncertainty of what Amazon will charge you. Like, no one wants a surprise bill. “Well, a vendor is saying that they'll give us this contract for $10,000. I'm going to pay $10,000, even though RUM might be a fraction of that price.”It's honestly, a lot of these, like, product analytics tools and monitoring tools, you'll often see they price be a, like, you know, MAU, Monthly Active User, you know, or some sort of user-based pricing, like, the number of people coming to your site. You know, and I feel like at least then, if you are trying to optimize for lots of users on your site, and more users means more revenue, then you know, if your spend is going up, but your revenue is also going up, that's a win-win. But if it's like someone—you know, your third-party vendor dies and you're spewing out errors, or someone, you know, upgraded something and it spews out errors. That no one would normally see; that's the thing. Like, unless you're popping open that JavaScript console, you're not seeing any of those errors, yet somehow it's like directly impacting your bottom line? Like that doesn't feel [crosstalk 00:35:06].Corey: Well, there is something vaguely Machiavellian about that. Like, “How do I get my developers to care about errors on consoles?” Like, how about we make it extortionately expensive for them not to. It's, “Oh, all right, then. Here we go.”Pete: And then talk about now you're in a scenario where you're working on things that don't directly impact the product. You're basically just sweeping up the floor and then trying to remove errors that maybe don't actually affect it and they're not actually an error.Corey: Yeah. I really do wonder what the right answer is going to be. We'll find out. Again, we live, we learn. But it's also, how long does it take a service that has bad pricing at launch, or an unfortunate story around it to outrun that reputation?People are still scared of Glacier because of its original restore pricing, which was non-deterministic for any sensible human being, and in some cases lead to I'm used to spending 20 to 30 bucks a month on this. Why was I just charged two grand?Pete: Right.Corey: Scare people like that, they don't come back.Pete: I'm trying to actually remember which service it is that basically gave you an estimate, right? Like, turn it on for a month, and it would give you an estimate of how much this was going to cost you when billing started.Corey: It was either Detective or GuardDuty.Pete: Yeah, it was—yeah, that's exactly right. It was one of those two. And honestly, that was unbelievably refreshing to see. You know, like, listen, you have the data, Amazon. You know what this is going to cost me, so when I, like, don't make me spend all this time to go and figure out the cost. If you have all this data already, just tell me, right?And if I look at it and go, “Yeah, wow. Like, turning this on in my environment is going to cost me X dollars. Like, yeah, that's a trade-off I want to make, I'll spend that.” But you know, with some of the—and that—a little bit of a worry on some of the intelligent tiering on S3 is that the recommendation is likely going to be everything goes to intelligent tiering first, right? It's the gp3 story. Put everything on gp3, then move it to the proper volume, move it to an sc or an st or an io. Like, gp3 is where you start. And I wonder if that's going to be [crosstalk 00:37:08].Corey: Except I went through a wizard yesterday to launch an EC2 instance and its default on the free tier gp2.Pete: Yeah. Interesting.Corey: Which does not thrill me. I also still don't understand for the life of me why in some regions, the free tier is a t2 instance, when t3 is available.Pete: They're uh… my guess is that they've got some free t—they got a bunch of t2s lying around. [laugh].Corey: Well, one of the most notable announcements at re:Invent that most people didn't pay attention to is their ability now to run legacy instance types on top of Nitro, which really speaks to what's going on behind the scenes of we can get rid of all that old hardware and emulate the old m1 on modern equipment. So, because—you can still have that legacy, ancient instance, but now you're going—now we're able to wind up greening our data centers, which is part of their big sustainability push, with their ‘Sustainability Pillar' for the well-architected framework. They're talking more about what the green choices in cloud are. Which is super handy, not just because of the economic impact because we could use this pretty directly to reverse engineer their various margins on a per-service or per-offering basis. Which I'm not sure they're aware of yet, but oh, they're going to be.And that really winds up being a win for the planet, obviously, but also something that is—that I guess puts a little bit of choice on customers. The challenge I've got is, with my serverless stuff that I build out, if I spend—the Google search I make to figure out what the most economic, most sustainable way to do that is, is going to have a bigger carbon impact on the app itself. That seems to be something that is important at scale, but if you're not at scale, it's one of those, don't worry about it. Because let's face it, the cloud providers—all of them—are going to have a better sustainability story than you are running this in your own data centers, or on a Raspberry Pi that's always plugged into the wall.Pete: Yeah, I mean, you got to remember, Amazon builds their own power plants to power their data centers. Like, that's the level they play, right? There, their economies of scale are so entirely—they're so entirely different than anything that you could possibly even imagine. So, it's something that, like, I'm sure people will want to choose for. But, you know, if I would honestly say, like, if we really cared about our computing costs and the carbon footprint of it, I would love to actually know the carbon footprint of all of the JavaScript trackers that when I go to various news sites, and it loads, you know, the whatever thousands of trackers and tracking the all over, like, what is the carbon impact of some of those choices that I actually could control, like, as a either a consumer or business person?Corey: I really hope that it turns into something that makes a meaningful difference, and it's not just greenwashing. But we'll see. In the fullness of time, we're going to figure that out. Oh, they're also launching some mainframe stuff. They—like that's great.Pete: Yeah, those are still a thing.Corey: I don't deal with a lot of customers that are doing things with that in any meaningful sense. There is no AWS/400, so all right.Pete: [laugh]. Yeah, I think honestly, like, I did talk to a friend of mine who's in a big old enterprise and has a mainframe, and they're actually replacing their mainframe with Lambda. Like they're peeling off—which is, like, a great move—taking the monolith, right, and peeling off the individual components of what it can do into these discrete Lambda functions. Which I thought was really fascinating. Again, it's a five-year-long journey to do something like that. And not everyone wants to wait five years, especially if their support's about to run out for that giant box in the, you know, giant warehouse.Corey: The thing that I also noticed—and this is probably the—I guess, one of the—talk about swing and a miss on pricing—they have a—what is it?—there's a VPC IP Address Manager, which tracks the the IP addresses assigned to your VPCs that are allocated versus not, and it's 20 cents a month per IP address. It's like, “Okay. So, you're competing against a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet”—which is what people are using for these things now—“Only you're making it extortionately expensive?”Pete: What kind of value does that provide for 20—I mean, like, again—Corey: I think Infoblox or someone like that offers it where they become more cost-effective as soon as you hit 500 IP addresses. And it's just—like, this is what I'm talking about. I know it does not cost AWS that kind of money to store an IP address. You can store that in a Route 53 TXT record for less money, for God's sake. And that's one of those, like, “Ah, we could extract some value pricing here.”Like, I don't know if it's a good product or not. Given its pricing, I don't give a shit because it's going to be too expensive for anything beyond trivial usage. So, it's a swing and a miss from that perspective. It's just, looking at that, I laugh, and I don't look at it again.Pete: See I feel—Corey: I'm not usually price sensitive. I want to be clear on that. It's just, that is just Looney Tunes, clown shoes pricing.Pete: Yeah. It's honestly, like, in many cases, I think the thing that I have seen, you know, in the past few years is, in many cases, it can honestly feel like Amazon is nickel-and-diming their customers in so many ways. You know, the explosion of making it easy to create multiple Amazon accounts has a direct impact to waste in the cloud because there's a lot of stuff you have to have her account. And the more accounts you have, those costs grow exponentially as you have these different places. Like, you kind of lose out on the economies of scale when you have a smaller number of accounts.And yeah, it's hard to optimize for that. Like, if you're trying to reduce your spend, it's challenging to say, “Well, by making a change here, we'll save, you know, $10,000 in this account.” “That doesn't seem like a lot when we're spending millions.” “Well, hold on a second. You'll save $10,000 per account, and you have 500 accounts,” or, “You have 1000 accounts,” or something like that.Or almost cost avoidance of this cost is growing unbounded in all of your accounts. It's tiny right now. So, like, now would be the time you want to do something with it. But like, again, for a lot of companies that have adopted the practice of endless Amazon accounts, they've almost gone, like, it's the classic, like, you know, I've got 8000 GitHub repositories for my source code. Like, that feels just as bad as having one GitHub repository for your repo. I don't know what the balance is there, but anytime these different types of services come out, it feels like, “Oh, wow. Like, I'm going to get nickeled and dimed for it.”Corey: This ties into the re:Post launch, which is a rebranding of their forums, where, okay, great, it was a little crufty and it need modernize, but it still ties your identity to an IAM account, or the root email address for an Amazon account, which is great. This is completely worthless because as soon as I change jobs, I lose my identity, my history, the rest, on this forum. I'm not using it. It shows that there's a lack of awareness that everyone is going to have multiple accounts with which they interact, and that people are going to deal with the platform longer than any individual account will. It's just a continual swing and a miss on things like that.And it gets back to the billing question of, “Okay. When I spin up an account, do I want them to just continue billing me—because don't turn this off; this is important—or do I want there to be a hard boundary where if you're about to charge me, turn it off. Turn off the thing that's about to cost me money.” And people hem and haw like this is an insurmountable problem, but I think the way to solve it is, let me specify that intent when I provision the account. Where it's, “This is a production account for a bank. I really don't want you turning it off.” Versus, “I'm a student learner who thinks that a Managed NAT Gateway might be a good thing. Yeah, I want you to turn off my demo Hello World app that will teach me what's going on, rather than surprising me with a five-figure bill at the end of the month.”Pete: Yeah. It shouldn't be that hard. I mean, but again, I guess everything's hard at scale.Corey: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.Pete: But still, I feel like every time I log into Cost Explorer and I look at—and this is years it's still not fixed. Not that it's even possible to fix—but on the first day of the month, you look at Cost Explorer, and look at what Amazon is estimating your monthly bill is going to be. It's like because of your, you know—Corey: Your support fees, and your RI purchases, and savings plans purchases.Pete: [laugh]. All those things happened, right? First of the month, and it's like, yeah, “Your bill's going to be $800,000 this year.” And it's like, “Shouldn't be, like, $1,000?” Like, you know, it's the little things like that, that always—Corey: The one-off charges, like, “Oh, your Route 53 zone,” and all the stuff that gets charged on a monthly cadence, which fine, whatever. I mean, I'm okay with it, but it's also the, like, be careful when that happen—I feel like there's a way to make that user experience less jarring.Pete: Yeah because that problem—I mean, in my scenario, companies that I've worked at, there's been multiple times that a non-technical person will look at that data and go into immediate freakout mode, right? And that's never something that you want to have happen because now that's just adding a lot of stress and anxiety into a company that is—with inaccurate data. Like, the data—like, the answer you're giving someone is just wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't even give it to them if it's that wrong. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens this coming year. We're already seeing promising stuff. They—give people a timeline on how long in advance these things record—late last night, AWS released a new console experience. When you log into the AWS console now, there's a new beta thing. And I gave it some grief on Twitter because I'm still me, but like the direction it's going. It lets you customize your view with widgets and whatnot.And until they start selling widgets on marketplace or having sponsored widgets, you can't remove I like it, which is no guarantee at some point. But it shows things like, I can move the cost stuff, I can move the outage stuff up around, I can have the things that are going on in my account—but who I am means I can shift this around. If I'm a finance manager, cool. I can remove all the stuff that's like, “Hey, you want to get started spinning up an EC2 instance?” “Absolutely not. Do I want to get told, like, how to get certified? Probably not. Do I want to know what the current bill is and whether—and my list of favorites that I've pinned, whatever services there? Yeah, absolutely do.” This is starting to get there.Pete: Yeah, I wonder if it really is a way to start almost hedging on organizations having a wider group of people accessing AWS. I mean, in previous companies, I absolutely gave access to the console for tools like QuickSight, for tools like Athena, for the DataBrew stuff, the Glue DataBrew. Giving, you know, non-technical people access to be able to do these, like, you know, UI ETL tasks, you know, a wider group of a company is getting access into Amazon. So, I think anything that Amazon does to improve that experience for, you know, the non-SREs, like the people who would traditionally log in, like, that is an investment definitely worth making.Corey: “Well, what could non-engineering types possibly be doing in the AWS console?” “I don't know, jackhole, maybe paying the bill? Just a thought here.” It's the, there are people who look at these things from a variety of different places, and you have such sprawl in the AWS world that there are different personas by a landslide. If I'm building Twitter for Pets, you probably don't want to be pitching your mainframe migration services to me the same way that you would if I were a 200-year-old insurance company.Pete: Yeah, exactly. And the number of those products are going to grow, the number of personas are going to grow, and, yeah, they'll have to do something that they want to actually, you know, maintain that experience so that every person can have, kind of, the experience that they want, and not be distracted, you know? “Oh, what's this? Let me go test this out.” And it's like, you know, one-time charge for $10,000 because, like, that's how it's charged. You know, that's not an experience that people like.Corey: No. They really don't. Pete, I want to thank you for spending the time to chat with me again, as is our tradition. I'm hoping we can do it in person this year, when we go at the end of 2022, to re:Invent again. Or that no one goes in person. But this hybrid nonsense is for the birds.Pete: Yeah. I very much would love to get back to another one, and yeah, like, I think there could be an interesting kind of merging here of our annual re:Invent recap slash live brunch, you know, stream you know, hot takes after a long week. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. The real way that you know that it's a good joke is when one of us says something, the other one sprays scrambled eggs out of their nose. Yeah, that's the way to do it.Pete: Exactly. Exactly.Corey: Pete, thank you so much. If people want to learn more about what you're up to—hopefully, you know, come back. We miss you, but you're unaffiliated, you're a startup advisor. Where can people find you to learn more, if they for some unforgivable reason don't know who or what a Pete Cheslock is?Pete: Yeah. I think the easiest place to find me is always on Twitter. I'm just at @petecheslock. My DMs are always open and I'm always down to expand my network and chat with folks.And yeah, right, now, I'm just, as I jokingly say, professionally unaffiliated. I do some startup advisory work and have been largely just kind of—honestly checking out the state of the economy. Like, there's a lot of really interesting companies out there, and some interesting problems to solve. And, you know, trying to spend some of my time learning more about what companies are up to nowadays. So yeah, if you got some interesting problems, you know, you can follow my Twitter or go to LinkedIn if you want some great, you know, business hot takes about, you know, shitposting basically.Corey: Same thing. Pete, thanks so much for joining me, I appreciate it.Pete: Thanks for having me.Corey: Pete Cheslock, startup advisor, professionally unaffiliated, and recurring re:Invent analyst pal of mine. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment calling me a jackass because do I know how long it took you personally to price CloudWatch RUM?Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Mat Kaplan and six Planetary Society colleagues review a year full of accomplishments, firsts and exciting discoveries. Society CEO Bill Nye opens the show with a celebration of the James Webb Space Telescope's launch. Next is a round robin discussion with Jason Davis, Casey Dreier, Kate Howells, and Rae Paoletta. We close with Bruce Betts' recap of the LightSail 2 mission right after he offers a new What's Up space trivia contest. Explore more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2021-year-in-review. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The 365 Days of Astronomy, the daily podcast of the International Year of Astronomy 2009
Dr. Al Grauer hosts. Dr. Albert D. Grauer ( @Nmcanopus ) is an observational asteroid hunting astronomer. Dr. Grauer retired from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2006. travelersinthenight.org Today's 2 topics: - The Planetary Society has initiated and funded the LightSail. It is a loaf of bread sized spacecraft which will hitch a ride aboard a rocket being launched on another mission. - Recently (in 2015?) people from all over the world met in Italy to discuss ways that humans can prepare for the unlikely, but not impossible, situation that an object is on an impact trajectory with planet Earth. They were were presented with a hypothetical asteroid threat. We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.
Ein Raumschiff, das nur von der Sonne angetrieben wird; Segelflüge quer durch das Planetensystem: Genau dafür wurde jetzt ein neuer Meilenstein erreicht. Das Experiment LightSail 2 einer privaten Raumfahrtorganisation zeigt, dass Segeln im Weltall möglich ist. Werden Sonnensegel die Raumfahrt verändern?! Denn jetzt zieht auch die NASA nach. LightSail 2 Standort: https://secure.planetary.org/site/SPageNavigator/mission_control.html
It started with a question from a listener. The answer comes from Dawn mission chief engineer and mission director Marc Rayman. Marc also tells us about his new job as chief engineer for mission operations and science at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and shares his love of space exploration with Mat. LightSail 2 is still going strong! Program manager Bruce Betts opens this week's What's Up segment with a mission status report. Learn more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2021-mark-rayman-dawn-ceres See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
About AntAnt Co-founded A Cloud Guru, ServerlessConf, JeffConf, ServerlessDays and now running Senzo/Homeschool, in between other things. He needs to work on his decision making.Links: A Cloud Guru: https://acloudguru.com homeschool.dev: https://homeschool.dev aws.training: https://aws.training learn.microsoft.com: https://learn.microsoft.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamstan TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part my Cribl Logstream. Cirbl Logstream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. Simple right? As a nice bonus it not only helps you improve visibility into what the hell is going on, but also helps you save money almost by accident. Kind of like not putting a whole bunch of vowels and other letters that would be easier to spell in a company name. To learn more visit: cribl.ioCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I talk to someone about, “Oh, yeah, remember that time that you appeared on Screaming in the Cloud?” And it turns out that they didn't; it was something of a fever dream. Today is one of those guests that I'm, frankly, astonished I haven't had on before: Ant Stanley. Ant, thank you so much for indulging me and somehow forgiving me for not having you on previously.Ant: Hey, Corey, thanks for that. Yeah, I'm not too sure why I haven't been on previously. You can explain that to me over a beer one day.Corey: Absolutely, and I'm sure I'll be the one that buys it because that is just inexcusable. So, who are you? What do you do? I know that you're a Serverless Hero at AWS, which is probably the most self-aggrandizing thing you can call someone because who in the world in their right mind is going to introduce themselves that way? That's what you have me for. I'll introduce you that way. So, you're an AWS Serverless Hero. What does that mean?Ant: So, the Serverless Hero, effectively I've been recognized for my contribution to the serverless community, what that contribution is potentially dubious. But yeah, I was one of the original co-founders of A Cloud Guru. We were a serverless-first company, way back when. So, from 2015 to 2016, I was with A Cloud Guru with Ryan and Sam, the two other co-founders.I left in 2016 after we'd run ServerlessConf. So, I led and ran the first ServerlessConf. And then for various reasons, I decided, hey, the pressure was too much; I needed a break, and a few other reasons I decided to leave A Cloud Guru. A very amicable split with my former co-founders. And then yeah, I kind of took a break, took some time off, de-stressed, got the serverless user group in London up and running; ran a small conference in London called JeffConf, which was a take on a blog that Paul Johnson, who was one of the folks who ran JeffConf with me, wrote a while ago saying we could have called it serverless—and we might as well have called it Jeff. Could have called it anything; might as well have called it Jeff. So, we had this joke about JeffConf. Not a reference to Mr. Bazos.Corey: No, no. Though they do have an awful lot of Jeffs working over there. But that's neither here nor there. ‘The Land of the Infinite Jeffs' as it were.Ant: Yeah, exactly. There are more Jeffs than women in the exec team if I remember correctly.Corey: I think it's now it's a Dave problem instead.Ant: Yeah, it's a Dave problem. Yeah. [laugh]. It's not a problem either way. Yeah. So, JeffConf morphed into SeverlessDays, which is a group of community events around the world. So, I think AWS said, “Hey, this guy likes running serverless events for some silly reason. Let's make him a Serverless Hero.”Corey: And here we are. Which is interesting because a few directions you can take this in. One of them, most recently, we were having a conversation, and you were opining on your thoughts of the current state of serverless, which can succinctly be distilled down to ‘serverless sucks,' which is not something you'd expect to hear from a Serverless Hero—and I hope you can hear the initial caps when I say ‘Serverless Hero'—or the founder of a serverless conference. So, what's the deal with that? Why does it suck?Ant: So, whole serverless movement started to gather momentum in 2015. The early adopters were all extremely experienced technologists, folks like Ben Kehoe, the chief robotics scientist at iRobot—he's incredibly smart—and folks of that caliber. And those were the kinds of people who spoke at the first serverless conference, spoke at all the first serverless events. And, you know, you'd kind of expect that with a new technology where there's not a lot of body of knowledge, you'd expect these high-level, really advanced folks being the ones putting themselves out there, being the early adopters. The problem is we're in 2021 and that's still the profile of the people who are adopting serverless, you know? It's still not this mass adoption.And part of the reason for me is because of the complexity around it. The user experience for most serverless tools is not great. It's not easy to adopt. The patterns aren't standardized and well known—even though there are a million websites out there saying that there are serverless patterns—and the concepts aren't well explained. I think there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen.I think folks have focused far too much on the technical aspects of serverless, and what is serverless and not serverless, or how you deploy something, or how you monitor something, observability, instead of going back to basics and first principles of what is this thing? Why should you do it? How do you do it? And how do we make that easy? There's no real focus on user experience and adoption for inexperienced folks.The adoption curve, the learning curve for serverless, no matter what platform you do, if you want to do anything that's beyond a side project it's really difficult because there's no easy path. And I know there's going to be folks that are going to complain about it, but the Serverless Stack just got a million dollars to solve this problem.Corey: I love the Serverless Stack. They had a great way of building things out.Ant: Yeah.Corey: I cribbed a fair bit from what they built when I was building out my own serverless project of the newsletter production pipeline system. And that's awesome. And I built that, and I run it mostly as a technology testbed. But my website, lastweekinaws.com?I pay WP Engine to host it on WordPress and the reason behind that is not that I can't figure out the serverless pieces of it, it's because when I want to hire someone to do something that's a bit off the beaten path on WordPress, I don't have to spend $400 an hour for a consultant to do it because there's more than 20 people in the world who understand how all this stuff fits together and integrates well. There's something to be said for going in the direction the rest of the market is when there's not a lot of reason to differentiate yourselves. Yeah, could I save thousands of dollars a year in infrastructure costs if I'd gone with serverless? Of course, but people's time is worth more than that. It's expensive to have people work on these things.And even on the serverless stuff that I've built, if it's been more than six months since I've touched a component, someone else may have written it; I have to rediscover what the hell I was thinking and what the constraints are, what the constraints I thought existed there in the platform. And every time I deal with Lambda or API Gateway, I come away with a spiraling sense of complexity tied to all of it. And the vision of serverless I believe in, truly, but the execution has lagged from all providers.Ant: Yeah. I agree with that completely. The execution is just not there. I look at the situation—so Datadog had their report, “The State of Serverless Report” that came out about a month or two ago; I think it's the second year they've done it, now, might be the third. And in the report, one of the sections, they talked about tooling.And they said, “What's the most adopted tools?” And they had the Serverless Framework in there, they had SAM in there, they had CloudFormation, I think they had Terraform in there. But basically, Serverless Framework had 70% of the respondents. 70% of folks using Datadog and using serverless tools were using Serverless Framework. But SAM, AWS's preferred solution, was like 12%.It was really tiny and this is the thing that every single AWS demo example uses, that the serverless developer advocates push heavily. And it's the official solution, but the Serverless Application Model is just not being adopted and there are reasons for that, and it's because it's the way they approach the market because it's highly opinionated, and they don't really listen to end-users that much. And their CDK out there. So, that's the other AWS organizational complexity as well, you've got another team within AWS, another product team who've developed this different way—CDK—doing things.Corey: This is all AWS's fault, by the way. For the longest time, I've been complaining about Lambda edge functions because they are not at all transparent; you have to wait for a CloudFront deployment for it to update every time, only to figure out that in my case, I forgot a comma because I've never heard of a linter. And it becomes this awful thing. Only recently did I find out they only run at regional edge caches, not just in all of the CloudFront pop, so I said, “The hell with it,” ripped it out of everything I was using it with, and wound up implementing it in bog-standard Lambda because it was easier. But then rather than fixing that, they've created their—what was it—their CloudFront Workers. Or is it—is it CloudFront Workers, or is it CloudFront Functions?Ant: No, CloudFront Functions.Corey: I don't even remember it because rather than fixing the thing, you just released a different thing that addresses these problems in very different ways that aren't directly compatible. And it's oh, great, awesome. Terrific. As a customer, I want absolutely not this. It's one of these where, honestly, I've left in many cases with the resigned position of, if you're not going to take this seriously, why am I?Ant: Yeah, exactly. And it's bizarre. So, the CloudFront Functions thing, it's based on Nginx's [little 00:08:39] JavaScript engine. So, it's the Nginx team supporting it—the engine—which is really small number of users; it's tiny, there's no foundation behind it. So, you've got these massive companies reliant on some tiny organization to support the runtime of one of their businesses, one of their services.And they expect people to adopt it. And on top of that, that engine supports primary language is JavaScript's ES5 or ES2015, which is the 2015 edition of JavaScript, so it's a six-year-old version of JavaScript. You cannot use one JavaScript with it which also means you can't use any other tools in the JavaScript ecosystem for it. So basically, anything you write for that is going to be vanilla, you're going to write yourself, there's no tooling, no community to really leverage to use that thing. Again, like, why have you even done that? Why if you now gone off and taken an engine no one uses—they will say someone uses it, but basically no one uses—Corey: No one willingly uses or knowingly uses it.Ant: Yeah. No one really uses. And then decided to run that. Why not look at WebAssembly—it's crazy—which has a foundation behind it and they're doing great things, and other providers are using WebAssembly on the edge. I just don't understand the thought process—well, I say I don't understand, but I do understand the thought processes behind Amazon. Every single GM in Amazon is effectively incentivized to release stuff, and build stuff, and to get stuff out the door. That's how they make money. You hear the stories—Corey: Oh, it's been clear for years. They only recently stopped—in their keynotes every year—talking about the number of feature releases that they've had over the past 12 months. And I think they finally had it clued into them by someone snarky on Twitter—ahem—that the only people that feel good about that are people internal to AWS because customers see that and get horrified of, “I haven't kept up with most of those things. How many of those are important? How many of them are nonsense?”And I'm sure somewhere you have released a serverless that will solve my business problem perfectly so I don't have to build it together myself out of Lambda functions, and string, and popsicle sticks, but I'll never hear about it because you're too busy talking about nonsense. And that problem still exists and it's writ large. There's a philosophy around not breaking existing workloads—which I get; that's a hard problem to solve for—but their solution is, rather than fixing existing services will launch a new one that doesn't have those constraints and takes a different approach to it. And it's horrible.Ant: Yeah, exactly. If you compare Amazon to Apple, Apple releases a net-new product once a year, once every two years.Corey: You're talking about new generations of products, that comes out on an annualized basis, but when you're talking about actual new product, not that frequently. The last one—Ant: Yeah.Corey: —I can really think of is probably going to be AirPods, at least of any significance.Ant: AirTags is the new one.Corey: Oh, AirTags. AirTags is recent, which is a neat—but it's an accessory to the rest of those things. It is—Ant: And then there's AirPods. But yeah, it's once—because they—everything works. If you're in that Apple ecosystem, everything works. And everything's back-ported and supported. My four-year-old phone still works and had a five-year-old MacBook before this current one, still worked, you know, not a problem.And those two philosophies—and the Amazon folk are heavily incentivized to release products and to grow the usage of those products. And they're all incentivized within their bubbles. So, that's why you get competing products. That's why Proton exists when CodeBuild and CodePipeline, and all of those things exist, and you have all these competing products. I'm waiting for the container team to fully recreate AWS on top of containers. They're not far away.Corey: They're already in the process of recreating AWS on top of Lightsail. It's more or less the, “Oh, we're making this the simpler version.” Which is great. You know who likes simplicity? Freaking everyone.So, it's the vision of a cloud, we could have had but didn't. “Oh, you want a virtual machine. Spin up a Lightsail instance; you're going to get a fixed amount of compute, disk, RAM, and CPU that you can adjust, and it's going to cost you a flat fee per month until you exceed some fairly high limits.” Why can't everything be like that, on some level? Because in many cases, I don't care about wanting to know exactly to the penny shave things off.I want to spin up a fleet of 20 virtual machines, and if they cost me 20 bucks a pop each a month, I can forecast that, I can budget for that, I can do a lot and I don't actually care in any business context about the money there, but dialing it in and having the variable charges and the rest, and, “Oh, you went through a managed NAT gateway. That's going to double your bandwidth price and it's going to be expensive. Surprise, you should have looked more closely at it,” is sort of the lesson of the original AWS services. At some level, they've deviated away from anything resembling simplicity and increasingly we're seeing a world where in order to do something effectively with cloud, you have to spend 12 weeks going to cloud school first.Ant: Oh, yeah. Completely. See, that's one of the major barriers with serverless. You can't use serverless for any of the major cloud providers until you understand that cloud provider. So yeah, do your 12 weeks of cloud school. And there's more than enough providers.Corey: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Before you spin up a function that runs code, you have to understand the identity and security model, and how the network works, and a bunch of other ancillary nonsense that isn't directly tied to business value.Ant: And all these fun things. How are you're going to test this, and how are you're going to do all that?Corey: How do you write the entry point? Where is it going to enter? What is it expecting? What objects are getting passed in, if any? What format is it going to take?I've spent days, previously, trying to figure out the exact invocation for working with a JSON object in Python, what that's going to show up as, and how specifically to refer to it. And once you've done that a couple of times, great, fine, it's easy. Copy and paste it from the last time you did it. But figuring it out from first principles, particularly in a time when there isn't a lot of good public demonstrations of this—especially early days—it's hard to do.Ant: Yeah. And they just love complexity. Have you looked at the second edition—so the third version of the AWS SDK for JavaScript?Corey: I don't touch JavaScript with my hands most days, just because I'm bad at it and I don't understand the asynchronous model and computers are really not my thing most.Ant: So, unfortunately for my sins, I do use JavaScript a lot. So, version two of the SDK is effectively the single most popular Cloud SDK of any language, anything out there; 20 million downloads a week. It's crazy. It's huge—version two. And JavaScript's a very fast-evolving language, though.Basically, it's a bit like the English language in that it adopts things from other languages through osmosis, and co-opts various other features of other languages. So, JavaScript has—if there's a feature you love in your language, it's going to end up in JavaScript at some point. So, it becomes a very broad Swiss Army knife that can do almost anything. And there's always better ways to do things. So, the problem is, the version two was written in old JavaScript from years twenty fifteen years five years six kind of level.So, from 2015, 2016, I—you know, 2020, 2021, JavaScript has changed. So, they said, “Oh, we're going to rewrite this.” Which good; you should do. But they absolutely broke all compatibility with version two. So, there is no path from version two to version three without rewriting what you've got.So, if you want to take anything you've written—not even serverless—anything in JavaScript you've written and you want to upgrade it to get some of the new features of JavaScript in the SDK, you have to rewrite your code to do that. And some instances, if you're using hexagonal architecture and you're doing all the right things, that's a really small thing to do. But most people aren't doing that.Corey: But let's face it, a lot of things grow organically.Ant: Yeah.Corey: And again, I can sit here and tell you how to build things appropriately and then I look at my own environment and… yeah, pay no attention to that burning dumpster fire behind the camera. And it's awful. You want to make sure that you're doing things the right way but it's hard to do and taking on additional toil because the provider decides the time to focus on this is a problem.Ant: But it's completely not a user-centric way of thinking. You know, they've got all their 14—is it 16 principles now? Did they add two principles, didn't they?Corey: They added two to get up to 16; one less than the numbers of ways to run containers in AWS.Ant: Yeah. They could barely contain themselves. [laugh]. It's just not customer-centric. They've moved themselves away from that customer-centric view of the world because the reality is, they are centered on the goals of the team, the goals of the GM, and the goals of that particular product.That famous drawing of all the different organizational charts, they got the Facebook chart, and the Google Chart, and the Amazon chart has all these little circles, everyone pointing guns at each other. And the more Amazon grows, the more you feel like that's reality. And it's hurting users, it's massively hurting users. And we feel the pain every day, absolutely every day, which is not great. And it's going to hurt Amazon in the long run, but short-term, they're not going to see that pain quarterly, they're not going to see that pain, probably within 12 months.But they will see the pain long run. And if they want to fix it, they probably should have started fixing it two years ago. But it's going to take years to fix because that's a massive cultural shift to say, “Okay, how do we get back to being more customer-focused? How do we stop that organizational targets and goals from getting in the way of delivering value to the customer?”Corey: It's a good question. The hard part is getting customers to understand enough of what you put out there to be able to disambiguate what you've built, and what parts to trust, what parts not the trust, what parts are going to be hard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The concern that I've got across the board here is, how do you learn? How do you get started with this? And the way that I came into this was I started off, in the early days of AWS, there were a dozen services, and okay, I could sort of stumble my way through it.And the UI was rough, but it got better with time. So, the answer for a lot of folks these days is training, which makes sense. In the beginning, we learned through things like podcasts. Like there was a company called Jupiter Broadcasting which did a bunch of Linux-oriented podcasts and learned how this stuff works. And then they were acquired by Linux Academy which really focused on training.And then A Cloud Guru acquired Linux Academy. And then Pluralsight acquired A Cloud Guru and is now in the process of itself being acquired by Vista Equity Partners. There's always a bigger fish eating something somewhere. It feels like a tremendous, tremendous consolidation in the training market. Given that you were one of the founders of A Cloud Guru, where do you stand on that?Ant: So, in terms of that actual transaction, I don't know the details because I'm a long time out of A Cloud Guru, but I've stayed within the whole training sphere, and so effectively, the bigger fish scenario, it's making the market smaller in terms of providers are there. You really don't have many providers doing cloud-specific training anymore. On one level you don't, but then another level, you've got lots of independent folks doing tons of stuff. So, you've got this explosion at the bottom end. If you go to Udemy—which is where A Cloud Guru started, on Udemy—you will see tons of folks offering courses at ten bucks a pop.And then there's what I'm doing now on homeschool.dev; there's serverless-focused training on there. But that's really focused on a really small niche. So, there's this explosion at the bottom end of lots of small people doing lots of things, and then you've got this consolidation at the top end, all the big providers buying each other, which leaves a massive gap in the middle.And on top of that, you've got AWS themselves, and all the other cloud providers, offering a lot of their own free training, whether it's on their own platforms—there's aws.training now, and Microsoft have similar as well—I think it's learn.microsoft.com is theirs. And you've got all these different providers doing their own training, so there's lots out there.There's actually probably more training for lower costs than ever before. The problem is, it's like the complexity of too many services, it's the 17 container problem. Which training do you use because the actual cost of the training is your time? It's not the cost of the course. Your time is always going to be more expensive.Corey: Yeah, the course is never going to be anywhere comparable to the time you spend on it. And I've never understood, frankly, why these large companies charge money for training on their own platform and also charge money for certifications because I don't care what you're going to pay for those things, once you know a platform well enough to hit a certification, you're going to use the thing you know, in most cases; it's a great bottom-up adoption story.Ant: Yeah, completely. That was actually one of Amazon's first early problems with their trainings, why A Cloud Guru even exists, and Linux Academy, and Cloud Academy all actually came into being is because Amazon hired a bunch of folks from VMware to set up their training program. And VMware's training, back in the day, was a profit center. So, you'd have a one-and-a-half thousand, two thousand dollar training course you'd go on for three to five days, and then you'd have a couple hundred dollars to do the certification. It was a profit center because VMware didn't really have that much competition. Zen and Microsoft's Hyper V were so late to the market, they basically own the market at the time. So—Corey: Oh, yeah. They still do in some corners.Ant: Yeah. They're still massively doing in this place as they still exist. And so they Amazon hired a bunch of ex-VMware folk, and they said, “We're just going to do what we did at VMware and do it at Amazon,” not realizing Amazon didn't own the market at the time, was still growing, and they tried to make it a profit center, which basically left a huge gap for folks who just did something at a reasonable price, which was basically everyone else. [laugh].This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: The challenge I found with a few of these courses as well, is that they teach you the certification, and the certifications are, in some ways, crap when it comes to things you actually need to know to intelligently use a platform. So, many of them distill down not to the things you need to know, but to the things that are easy to test in a multiple-choice format. So, it devolves inherently into trivia such as, “Which is the right syntax for this thing?” Or, “Which one of these CloudFormations stanzas or functions isn't real?” Things like that where it's, no one in the real world needs to know any of those things.I don't know anyone these days—sensible—who can write CloudFormation from scratch without pulling up some reference somewhere because most people don't have that stuff in their head. And if you do, I'd suggest forgetting it so you can use that space to remember something that's more valuable. It doesn't make sense for how people interact with these things. But I do see the value as well in large companies trying to upskill thousands and thousands of people. You have 5000 people that are trying to come up to speed because you're migrating into cloud. How do you judge people's progress? Well, certifications are an easy answer.Ant: Yeah, massively. Probably the most successful blog post ever written—I don't think it's up anymore, but it was when I was at A Cloud Gurus—like, what's the value of a certification? And ultimately, it came down to, it's a way for companies that are hiring to filter people easily. That's it. That's really it. It's if you've got to hire ten people and you get 1000 CVs or resumes for those ten roles, first thing you do is you filter by who's certified for that role. And then you go through anything else. Does the certification mean you can actually do the job? Not really. There are hundreds of people who are not cer—thousands, millions of people who are not certified to do jobs that they do. But when you're getting hired and there's lots of people applying for the same role, it's literally the first thing they will filter on. And it's—so you want to get certified, it's hard to get through that filter. That's what the certification does, it's how you get through that first filter of whatever the talent tracking system they're using is. That's it. And how to get into the dev lounge at re:Invent.Corey: Oh yeah, that's my reason for getting a certification, originally. And again, for folks who learn effectively that way, I have no problem with people getting certifications. If you're trying to advance in your career, especially early stage, and you need a piece of paper that says you know what you're talking about, a certification is a decent approach. In time, with seniority, that gets replaced by a piece of paper, it's called your resume or your CV, but that is a longer-term more senior-focused approach. I don't begrudge people getting certifications and I don't think that they're foolish for doing it.But in time, it feels like the market for training is simultaneously contracting into only a few players left, and also, I'm curious as to whether or not the large companies out there are increasing their spend with the training providers or not. On the community side, the direct-to-consumer approach, that is exploding, but at the same time, you're then also dealing—forgive me, listeners—with the general public and there is nothing worse than a customer, from a customer service perspective, who was only paying a little money to you. I used to work in a web hosting company that $3,000 a month customers were great to work with. The $2999 a month customers were hell on earth who expected that they were entitled to 80 hours a month of systems engineering time. And you see something similar in the training space. It's always the small individual customers who are spending personal money instead of corporate money that are more difficult to serve. You've been in the space for a while. What do you see around that?Ant: Yeah, I definitely see that. So, the smaller customers, there's a correlation between the amount of money you spend and the amount of hand-holding that someone needs. The more money someone spends, the less hand-holding they need, generally. But the other side of it, what training businesses—particularly for subscription-based business—it's the same model as most gyms. You pay for it and you never use it.And it's not just subscription; like, Udemy is a perfect example of that, you know, people who have hundreds of Udemy courses they've never done, but they spend ten bucks on each. So, there's a lot of that at the lower end, which is why people offer courses at that level. So, there's people who actually do the course who are going to give you a lot of a headache, but then you're going to have a bunch of folk who never do the course and you're just taking their money. Which is also not great, either, but those folks don't feel bad because I only spent 10, 20 bucks on it. It's like, oh, it's their fault for not doing it, and you've made the money.So, that's kind of how a lot of the training works. So, the other problem with training as well is you get the quality is so variable at the bottom end. It's so, so variable. You really struggle to find—there's a lot of people just copying, like, you see instances where folks upload videos to Udemy that are literally they've downloaded someone's, video resized it, cut out a logo or something like that, and re-uploaded it and it's taken a few weeks for them to get caught. But they made money in the meantime.That's how blatant it does get to some level, but there are levels where people will copy someone else's content and just basically make it their own slides, own words, that kind of thing; that happens a lot. At the low end, it's a bit all over the place, but you still have quality, as well, at the low end, where you have these cheapest smaller courses. And how do you find that quality, as well? That's the other side of it. And also people will just trade in their name.That's the other problem you see. Someone has a name for doing X whatever, and they'll go out and bring a course on whatever that is. Doesn't mean they're a good teacher; it means they're good at building a brand.Corey: Oh, teaching is very much its own skill set.Ant: Oh, yeah.Corey: I learned to speak publicly by being a corporate trainer for Puppet and it teaches you an awful lot. But I had the benefit, in that case, of a team of people who spent their entire careers building curricula, so it wasn't just me throwing together some slides; I would teach a well-structured curriculum that was built by someone who knew exactly what they're doing. And yeah, I needed to understand failure modes, and how to get things to work when they weren't working properly, and how to explain it in different ways for folks who learn in different ways—and that is the skill of teaching right there—but curriculum development is usually not the same thing. And when you're bootstrapping, learning—I'm going to build my own training course, you have to do all of those things, and more. And it lends itself to, in many cases, what can come across as relatively low-quality offerings.Ant: Yeah, completely. And it's hard. But one thing you will often see is sometimes you'll see a course that's really high production quality, but actually, the content isn't great because folks have focused on making it look good. That's another common, common problem I see. If you're going to do training out there, just get referrals, get references, find people who've done it.Don't believe the references you see on a website; there's a good chance they might be fake or exaggerated. Put something out on Twitter, put out something on Reddit, whatever communities—and Slack or Discord, whatever groups you're in, ask questions. And folks will recommend. In the world of Google where you could search for anything, [laugh], the only way to really find out if something is any good is to find out if someone else has done it first and get their opinion on it.Corey: That's really the right answer. And frankly, I think that is sort of the network effect that makes a lot of software work for folks. Because you don't want to wind up being the first person on your provider trying to do a certain thing. The right answer is making sure that you are basically 8,000th person to try and do this thing so you can just Google it and there's a bunch of results and you can borrow code on GitHub—which is how we call ‘thought leadership' because plagiarism just doesn't work the same way—and effectively realizing this has been solved before. If you find a brand new cloud that has no customers, you are trailblazing every time you do anything with the platform. And that's personally never where I wanted to spend my innovation points.Ant: We did that at Cloud Guru. I think when we were—in 2015 and we had problems with Lambda and you go to Stack Overflow, and there was no Lambda tag on Stack Overflow, no serverless tag on Stack Overflow, but you asked a question and Tim Wagner would probably be the one answering. And he was the former head of product on Lambda. But it was painful, and in general you don't want to do it. Like [sigh] whenever AWS comes out with a new product, I've done it a few times, I'll go, “I think I might want to use this thing.”AWS Proton is a really good example. It's like, “Hey, this looks awesome. It looks better than CodeBuild and CodePipeline,” the headlines or what I thought it would be. I basically went while the keynote was on, I logged in to our console, had a look at it, and realized it was awful. And then I started tweeting about it as well and then got a lot of feedback [laugh] on my tweets on that.And in general, my attitude from whatever the new shiny thing is if I'm going to try it, it needs to work perfectly and it needs to live up to its billing on day one. Otherwise, I'm not going to touch it. And in general with AWS products now, you announce something, I'm not going to look at it for a year.Corey: And it's to their benefit that you don't look at it for a year because the answer is going to be, ah, if you're going to see that it's terrible, that's going to form your opinion and you won't go back later when it's actually decent and reevaluate your opinion because no one ever does. We're all busy.Ant: Yeah, exactly.Corey: And there's nothing wrong with doing that, but it is obnoxious they're not doing themselves favors here.Ant: Yeah, completely. And I think that's actually a failure of marketing and communication more than anything else. I don't blame the product teams too much there. Don't bill something as a finished glossy product when it's not. Pitch it at where it is.Say, “Hey, we are building”—like, I don't think at the re:Invent stage they should announce anything that's not GA and anything that it does not live up to the billing, the hype they're going to give it to. And they're getting more and more guilty of that the last few re:Invents, of announcing products that do not live up to the hype that they promote it at and that are not GA. Literally, they should just have a straight-up rule, they can announce products, but don't put it on the keynote stage if it's not GA. That's it.Corey: The whole re:Invent release is a whole separate series of arguments.Ant: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah.Corey: There are very few substantial releases throughout the year and then they drop a whole bunch of them at re:Invent, and it doesn't matter what you're talking about, whose problem it solves, how great it is, it gets drowned out in the flood. The only thing more foolish that I see than that is companies that are not AWS releasing things during re:Invent that are not on the re:Invent keynote stage, which in turn means that no one pays attention. The only thing you should be releasing is news about your data breach.Ant: [laugh]. Yeah. That's exactly it.Corey: What do I want to bury? Whenever Adam Selipsky gets on stage and starts talking, great, then it's time to push the button on the, “We regret to inform you,k” dance.Ant: Yeah, exactly. Microsoft will announce yet another print spooler bug malware.Corey: Ugh, don't get me started on that. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to hear more about your thoughts and how you view these nonsenses, and of course to send angry emails because they are serverless fans, where can they find you?Ant: Twitter is probably the easiest place to find me, @iamstan—Corey: It is a place for outrage. Yes. Your Twitter user account is?Ant: [laugh], my Twitter user account's all over the place. It's probably about 20% serverless. So, yeah @iamstan. Tweet me; I will probably respond to you… unless you're rude, then I probably won't. If you're rude about something else, I probably will. But if you're rude about me, I won't.And I expect a few DMs from Amazon after this. I'm waiting for you, [unintelligible 00:32:02], as I always do. So yeah, that's probably the easiest place to get hold of me. I check my email once a month. And I'm actually not joking about that; I really do check my email once a month.Corey: Yeah, people really need me then they'll find me. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Ant: Yes, Corey. Thank you.Corey: Ant Stanley, AWS Serverless Hero, and oh so much more. 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 defending serverless's good name just as soon as you string together the 85 components necessary to submit that comment.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
About AmyWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. More recently, she built APIs for enterprise clients for a cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children. Links: The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/ @nerdypaws: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws 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: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by my colleague, Amy Arumbulo Negrette, who's a cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. Amy, thank you for taking the time to, basically, deal with my slings and arrows instead of the ones that clients throw your way.Amy: It's perfectly fine. It's not as if we are… not the kindest people within the Slack channels anyway. So, I am totally good. [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. So, you've been at The Duckbill Group, as of the time of this recording, which when you're releasing things in the future, it's always a question of how long will you have been here by then? No. We're playing it straight here from a perspective of, as of the time of this recording, you've been here six months, all of which, of course, have been during the global pandemic. So first, what's that been like?Amy: It has been very loud. And that's to say, I live in a house with five other people in it, so it's one thing for me to be a remote worker and just being at my desk, working quietly, but also having to manage noise that you can't really control, it's been an extra level of stress that I could possibly do without. It's fine. [laugh].Corey: One of the whole problems with the pandemic, from our perspective, has been that we've run this place as a full remote operation since it was started, and people come at this from a perspective of, “Well, this whole experience we've had with working remote is awful. It's terrible. No one likes it. I'm not productive.” Let's be very clear here. There's been a global pandemic; this is not like most years, and there are stressors and things that absolutely suck about this that don't normally impact the remote work story quite the way that they have.Amy: I totally agree. At least before, in one of my previous companies had an office in Chicago, so I would be there once a week, but effectively I was remote because that was an all meetings type of day. And the difference between that and now is that you had very explicit work hours; you had client hours; your work sometimes brought you out the house, if you had to go on travel, or on-site. This is just everything is done within the same ten feet of basically where you work, and you eat, and you sleep, if you have really unhealthy living habits like I do. And while I'm trying to get better at it, I'm also not the best at having time-based boundaries. I'm only good with physical boundaries. So, I have to turn off the work computer, to turn on the fun computer, which are physically next to each other, but I have to look in a different direction. And that is as close as I get.Corey: Yeah. It's the good screen versus the bad screen model of, “Oh, yeah, we're going to stop doing work now and just move our gaze slightly to one side and look at the fun screen and work on those things instead.” And at first, I was trying to be militant when we started the whole pandemic thing and working full remote of booting people of, “Hey, all right, it's quitting time. Go home and stop it.” The other side of that, though, is some people are, in some ways, using work to escape.So, we've modified our approach to get the work done. If you're working consistently more than 40 hours to get it done, let us know; that's a problem. But let people work when they want to work, how they want to work and be empathetic humans. And that carries surprisingly far. Now, the question, of course, becomes, does this scale to a company that has 50,000 employees? I don't know. That's never been a problem that anyone has asked me to solve. But it works for us at small scale.Amy: I find that the attitude working here has been really understanding as to, we know what our lives are like and we know what kind of work that we actually have to get done within a certain time period. And all of us make those. We don't feel the need to explain how we were able to get that work done or what time slots happen. You'll see me and Jesse—one of the other cloud economists—it's like we'll be hitting document at the same time at—for my time would be closer to later in the evening, but that's just because I spent most of the day either taking care of kids or handling house management sort of duties. So, having that flexibility on where my schedule goes without having to answer that question of, “Well, why were you working at that hour?” I feel gives me a lot more control and takes one less thing away that I have to worry about.Corey: One approach that we've always taken here has been that we treat people functionally like adults. And that's sort of an insulting way to frame it. Like, “What are you saying. That a lot of employers treat their staff like kids?” Well, basically, yes, is the short answer, where it's, “great, we're going to trust you with root in production, or a bunch of confidential customer data, but we're also not going to trust you to make a $50 purchase on the company credit card without a bunch of scrutiny because we don't trust that you're not embezzling.”The cross-incentives of different organizational structures are so twisted at that point that it's very hard to self-correct. I mean, our approach going into this was always never to go down that dark path, and so far, so good. Will it bite us someday if we continue to grow to that 50,000 person company? Undoubtedly. But I have to believe it can be done.Amy: I would also think the pressure of managing 50,000 people would break every single person in this company. Just thinking about it gives me panic.Corey: Oh, yeah. When every person becomes effectively, what, 500 people, that's divisional stuff. I don't think that anyone wants to stick around and see a small company go through those kinds of transformations because functionally, it becomes such a radically different place. For better or worse, that's not something we have to worry about, at least not anytime soon.Amy: We work really well with our fairly tight teams, I think. And it's I think it's one of the virtues of the type of work that we do. You don't need a team of 15 people looking at one document.Corey: No. And invariably, it seems like that tends to slow things down. Let's talk a little bit about something that makes you a bit of an outlier insofar as when you are only dealing with a small number of people everyone's inherently an outlier. You're the only cloud economist at The Duckbill Group with a background as a software engineer.Amy: Yeah. I did not realize that when I was joining. So, this deal with my infrastructure background is that I've only ever done enough infrastructure to support my applications. Like, Pete, I come from a startup background initially in my career, where you had to manage your application, you had to manage your own routes, you had to manage your own database connections, your own storage connections, and all of that, which, looking back on it and saying it out loud, sounds like a really bad idea now, but this was life before infrastructure as code and it was the quote-unquote, “Wild West” of San Francisco startups, where you can make a product out of basically anything. And the anything I went into was fantasy football of all things.So, I always made sure to have enough knowledge so that if I knew something broke, that I could blame it on networking, and then I would be able to show the paper trail to prove it. That was the extent of my knowledge. And then I started getting into the serverless space, where I started building things out of cloud services, instead of just spinning up more EC2 because I was young and impressionable. And that gave me a lot more understanding of what infrastructure engineering was like. But beyond that, I build APIs, I do business logic; that's really where my comfort levels are.Corey: For the rest of us, we seem to come from a background of grumpy Unix sysadmin types where we were running infrastructures, but as far as the code that was tied into it, eh, that was always the stuff we would kind of hand-wave over or we'd go diving into it as little as possible. And that does shape how you go through your career. For example, most companies are not going to wind up needing someone in that role until they've raised at least a Series B round, whereas in many cases, “Oh, you're an engineer. Great, why don't you start the company yourself?” From a software engineering perspective. It's a different philosophy in many respects, and one that I think is a little bit on the strange side if that makes sense.Amy: It is. It's extremely strange how completely dependent the two are on each other, yet the mindset to get into either and of that level of engineering is completely different. My husband and my father are both on the infrastructure side, and they've tried to explain networking to me my entire life, and I just—the minute the word subnet comes up, my brain is gone. It's like I'm replaying Star Trek episodes in my head because I can no longer handle this [laugh] conversation.Corey: That's how a lot of us feel about various code constructs at some point. For better or worse, we've made our peace with it, and let's be very direct here for a minute, we've learned to talk our way around customer questions that go too deep into the software engineering space, by and large. What's it like on the other side of that, where there's an expectation that you have a lot more in-depth infrastructure experience than perhaps you do? Or isn't there at that expectation?Amy: There is, I think a lot of that is just because of the type of industry this is. Cloud consulting is always infrastructure first because that is what the cloud is selling; they are selling managed infrastructures. They are giving you data center alternatives, but they're not giving you are full-blown apps. And whenever they do—let's say Lightsail—it's an expensive thing that you, somewhere in your mind go, “I could build that cheaper. Why am I paying for this service?”So, when I am on the phone with clients and they have a situation that is obviously going to be a software solution, where their infrastructure is growing, but it's because their software has a specific requirement, either for logging, or for surge, that they're using either Elasticsearch, or Kubernetes, or CloudWatch Metrics for, and it's turning into an expensive solution, it gives me an inside, “Well, this is the kind of engineering effort that's going to need to happen in order for you to write all of these problems and to reduce these costs. And these aren't as simple as hitting an option within AWS console to bring all of that down.” It's always going to be seen as more of an effort, but you also get a bit of empathy from the engineers you're talking to because you now are explaining to them that you understand what they built. You understand why they built it a specific way, and you're just trying to give them a path out.Corey: You mentioned the now antiquated idea of going on-site and talking to clients. I mean, before pandemic, Mike and I would head out to a lot of our clients for the final wrap-up meeting, or even in some cases kickoffs, because it made sense for us to do it and get everyone in the same room and on the same page. And over the past year, we've found ways to solve for these problems in ways that I don't necessarily know are going to go away once the pandemic is over. Is it more effective for us to travel somewhere and sit down in the same room with people, who in many cases have to travel in for wherever they live themselves? I don't know. There is going to be a higher bandwidth story there, of course, and the communication is going to be marginally more effective, but is it going to be so effective that it's worth more or less throwing a wrench into everyone's schedule for that meeting? That leaves me somewhat unconvinced.Amy: One of the strange things is that previously, I would go on-site to clients and fly out to where they are because as many startups as there are within Chicago, and the [unintelligible 00:13:10], and within Illinois, I'm always being sent to New York, or Atlanta, or Denver, for some reason because they're far and there're planes there. But we always end up having to talk to some amount of people that don't even work in that time zone, or maybe even then in this country, so we're talking to resources in Asia, resources in Europe, which meant we were flying people in to be on somebody else's phone. And I'm glad to not do that. I'm glad to not have to hang out in an airport, there is a burrito place in O'Hare that I truly enjoy, but that is the one thing I miss about traveling. I almost have my punch card done and it stopped right before then, but I'm kind of okay with that.Corey: I was chasing the brass ring of airline status and all the rest for a long time. I can't wait to finally go and hit the next tier and the rest, and where, well, the pandemic through all of that into a jumble and I take a step back and look at it and, you know, I don't miss it as much. What I do miss is that the opportunity, in my case, to get away from everyone that I spend all of my time with now, just for a day or two, and clear my head and recenter myself. But there are probably ways to do that that doesn't keep me on the road for 140,000 miles a year.Amy: I think, or at least I hope, that this will give us a chance to as an industry just reevaluate how we treat travel. A lot of clients treated it as essentially a status level that came with your engagement where we need you on-site so we can show off we have consultants coming in on-site so frequently to give us personal reports, even though we are all in a room on a conference call with other people. So hopefully, even if they're not forcing that every other week—sometimes weekly, depending on what your engagement is—type of cadence on travel, then maybe it'll just increase the quality of life for some of us. It would be nice. It would be super nice. I honestly don't see them forcing that anytime soon, but once everyone gets vaccinated, and there's a successful pediatric vaccine that comes out, it's like, I don't see them, just letting us stay at home and continue doing our job the way we have been for the past year, going on two years.Corey: So, dialing back into the mists of the distant past, it's always a question of where do cloud economists—or clouds economist, depending upon how we choose to mis-pluralize things—come from. And everyone here is a different story and there's not a whole lot of common points between those stories. You, for example, spent some time doing work with NASA. What was that about?Amy: There's a lot of misconceptions about working for NASA like you need to be a doctor. [laugh]. And trust me, you don't. I knew a lot of people who work there that they basically got their degree, and then they just did code work forever and they are lifers there. And it's such an interesting place to be because, on one hand, you have that mission of space and exploration and trying to do better by the world, but also, it's still a federal agency and there's still a lot of problems with federal agencies in that how you get paid is essentially at the beginning of the year, that's when all the budgets are done.So, you can't do the startup thing where you go, I'm going to try a bunch of things, and if one doesn't work, I'm going to pivot to something else because you're essentially answering taxpayers and they don't let you do that. No one wants their taxes going to someone who tried a thing and then found out they messed up. Which is unfortunate, but also a really hard reality of the way these work.Corey: I really love installing, upgrading, and fixing security agents in my cloud estate! Why do I say that? Because I sell things, because I sell things for a company that deploys an agent, there's no other reason. Because let's face it. Agents can be a real headache. Well, now Orca Security gives you a single tool that detects basically every risk in your cloud environment -- and that's as easy to install and maintain as a smartphone app. It is agentless, or my intro would've gotten me into trouble here, but it can still see deep into your AWS workloads, while guaranteeing 100% coverage. With Orca Security, there are no overlooked assets, no DevOps headaches, and believe me you will hear from those people if you cause them headaches. and no performance hits on live environments. Connect your first cloud account in minutes and see for yourself at orca.security. Thats “Orca” as in whale, “dot” security as in that things you company claims to care about but doesn't until right after it really should have. Corey: I must confess that I'm somewhat disappointed that you opened with, “You don't really need to be a rocket scientist to work at NASA,” just because, honestly, I was liking the mystique of, “Oh, yeah. You need to be a rocket scientist to understand AWS billing constructs.” But I suppose if I'm being honest, that might be a slight overreach.Amy: I knew a lot of people there who had multiple PhDs, and they could barely keep their computer on, so really, I'm finding that I respect very smart people, but it also does not imply your world intelligence anywhere else outside of that very specific field. One of the really weird things about having worked there—I worked at NASA Ames as part of their IT department—one of the things we did as outreach was, we did a booth over at SiliCon Valley Comic Con once, and it was great. We had a vintage display of old electronics, like CRT monitors, and full keyboards, and all of this nonsense, and kids would go, “These are so old. Why would anyone use this? It's so boring.” [laugh].And the entire IT department showed up to volunteer. We're like, “No, you don't understand why it's interesting. It's great.” It was so, so hard to watch young people just [laugh] not be interested in what the past of digital devices were. Very sad. And on the other hand, we did get a lot of interest, but it was also having to have that conversation in real life can be a little disheartening.Corey: It really is.Amy: But it was fun because it was one of the few things that you don't really get to see NASA at a comic book convention, so that was actually a really cool thing to do. Also, we got free tickets, so that was great.Corey: So, what was your background before you got to the point of, “You know what I want to do? Work for a consultancy, whose entire mascot is a platypus, and from there, go ahead and fix AWS bills,” which sounds like, to folks who aren't steeped in it, the worst thing ever? What series of, I guess, decisions led you here?Amy: I know you don't remember this, but we actually met at Serverlessconf, and you opened your talk with, “I am a cloud economist, a title I completely made up.” Your talk was right before mine, so that's why you didn't remember I was there because I was actually on the backstage getting prepared for my talk.Corey: That's right. I would have been breathing into a paper bag right before or right after my talk, trying not to pass out. People say, “Oh, you won't be nervous once you give enough talks.” I'm still waiting.Amy: It never happens. I did finally stop having blackouts, so that's an improvement. It gets better, but it never goes away. And when you told me that, and I saw the listing, I'm like, “I don't know what this job is. There's an easy way to find out what the job is, and that's to apply.”And that is when I started going through the process of applying, and then you hired me some months afterwards. And the thing that I found out about looking through AWS billing is that I found out I have a very specific skill set, in trying to find a discount while looking through receipts. This is a thing I thought only applied to my personal life because I don't really like paying retail prices for anything, so I'm always looking for a way to squeeze out another 20, 30% out of something because 10% is really just taking taxes off of stuff. And the fact that I was able to apply that very specific skill set to an actual technical job is so much fun for me because I like being able to tell stories out of what people spend, just because it is—as we say around here—it's the sum of all of your engineering decisions. Because everything you do, there's a price tag on it. And knowing how you got there, and that you can optimize the architecture by looking through the bill is super fascinating to me.Corey: So, now that it's been six months, is the job what you expected it to be? Is it something radically different? Is it something else?Amy: The tone of our engagements have actually changed within the past six months, partially because of the way AWS has made some organizational changes internally as far as we can tell. But really, it's also what types of companies are finding out that they need a service like this. Before, when I was interviewing, and when I started, I was talking to Pete and Jesse about the types of engagements you do. It was for larger companies; they're looking for some amount of savings, and then we run some tooling and then we get back to them. And now it's turning into… some are relatively small companies, companies that wouldn't get use out of an EDP, for example, because they're spending so low.But also other companies, they don't even really want this saving specifically, they want validation on what the process is like, they want validation on their unit economics and what the cost allocation strategies are. So, it's fascinating what people actually want now that they understand that that option is out there.Corey: One thing that you mentioned a minute ago, was the idea of going and giving talks—in the before times, at Serverlessconf and things like that—how do you find that that has changed for you over the past year? And how are you viewing a slow, but effectively guaranteed in the long enough timeframe, return to normalcy?Amy: So, when everything went virtual, it was a really hard transition for a lot of communities. I'm part of AWS Chicago, I'm an organizer at a meetup group called Write/Speak/Code where our whole deal was to give women and people of underrepresented genders the opportunity to learn how to do open-source, how do you learn how to do technical speaking, we helped them with their CFPs, and all of that required a physical community in order for us to be able to give each other that type of support. Well, we can't do that anymore. The last big event we did was specifically around getting everyone set up into the organization. So, we do one big one every year where we tell you how to do slides, we tell you how to do everything, and then the rest of the year smaller meetups where we do feedback and prompts and other types of support events.Now, that we can't do that, we found that a lot of the people who ran these events, they're extroverts and they're social to begin with, so they got burnt out very quickly, which meant we not only had to find new ways of supporting them but also reaching out to members and making sure everyone could still do the types of thing we promised we'd help them to do. The other issue is that with things going virtual, there used to be clear lines on the types of events you could apply to, which were events that I could reach, that my company would pay for, what have you. But now everything's virtual, I accidentally applied to a meetup that I spoke at that was based in Australia, which meant I was talking at 10 o'clock at night, just because I explained to them the mix-up and essentially begged to get an earlier slot. And it's interesting because it presents both a wide array of opportunities, but it also means that there's now so much noise, and so much burnout and fatigue from these one direction types of conferences, which are long Zoom meetings, which is basically everyone's workday now, which is just full day's worth of Zoom meetings. And it's hard to get people interested.And really, what these events did best was give people who generally don't have that type of visibility—like me—who, I am a female engineer, and I am a person of color, so my opportunities aren't always going to be as well as they could be, but this visibility also gave me a boost. So, when we lost out on physical events, my organization personally lost out on a lot of things that we could do for those people, which is unfortunate, but it's also what was happening, really, everywhere. Now, we're gearing more towards how to do less Zoom meeting type of events, and we're now using a tool called gather.town, which lets everyone go into a space, you can walk around, you can drop in and out of conversations like you would in a hallway, and it has this cute little eight-bit kind of avatar feel to it so it looks kind of like a game, but it's also—if you go around a large group of people, it pulls up everyone's picture and then you're suddenly speaking to each other over voice without having to physically join in or wait for a breakout room or wait to be let into a different room. So, it's been difficult to try to find ways of managing it, but it's also been very interesting seeing the tools that had come out of this.Now, once we start going back to physical events and on-site events, personally, I have a lot of anxiety about that just because my allergies and everything makes it hard for me to do travel in the first place, but also, I'm not really sure how everyone's going to react being in the same space anymore, or how full they're going to be. So, to me, it does cause me a little bit of anxiety and I'm going to wait a little until things are more settled and are a little more stable than they are right now. That said, I believe AWS Midwest is doing something physical at the end of this year. But I'm not entirely positive about that.Corey: One of the things I want to avoid is going back to an old style of re:Invent, where it's only open to folks who are able to spend $2,000 on a ticket, travel to Las Vegas, and get the time off and afford the hotel stay and the rest. One thing I loved about the 2020 version of that was that everyone was coming from a baseline of its full remote. There was no VIP ticket option that got you a better experience than anyone else had. And I do worry, on some level, that as soon as they can, they're going to go running back to a story like that. I hope not.Amy: I hope not, too, because one of the great things about virtual re:Invent was everyone saw the same things at the same time. And you didn't have to give up one panel because you're too busy being in line for another panel. And I've never liked that type of convention activity where you know you're actively giving something up just because the line for the thing you want to get to is so super long. That said, they could have done better a bit on the website. The website was really hard to navigate and confusing and the schedule was weird.If they get that kind of usability fixed and a little more reasonable so that things are surprisingly searchable and easier to navigate, and they have more social type of events instead of AWS is going to—it's going to announce another service that they're calling a product, even though it's just… it's a service enhancement, and that's all it is. I would like for all of that to kind of be streamlined so it's not just more announcements. I can read announcements. I don't need to watch two hours' worth of announcements.Corey: I really hope that at some point, some of the AWS service teams learn that, “Hey. We could announce services anytime of the year,” rather than in a three-week sprint that leaves no one able to pay attention because there's just too much.Amy: And it's hard because it's hard when you have to hold a release because re:Invent's coming up. Or you have to be part of their Developer Relations Group where you have to do all of your training and all of your docs right beforehand, just so that it's prepared for this launch that people may not hear about because it gets drowned out in all the other noise.Corey: And that's sometimes part of the entire problem.Amy: Yeah.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. As always, it's a pleasure. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Amy: They can hire me for engagement here. [laugh] but also—Corey: Good answer.Amy: —I do technical talks. I don't have anything lined up right now, just because it's spring in my brain took a break, like everyone else did. I'm on Twitter as @nerdypaws because that was a handle I had since college and have not changed.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, leave a link to that in the [show notes 00:31:10], as we always do. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It's always a pleasure, and it's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always a good time talking to you, Corey.Corey: Amy Arumbulo Negrette, cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me why you do in fact need to be a rocket surgeon in order to properly work on AWS bills.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.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Andrew More, Director, BlueStone Venture PartnersP.O. Box 17044Tucson, AZ 85731520-405-925email: andrew.more@bluestonevp.comSOCIAL MEDIA: LinkedIn |Born and raised in Tucson, Andrew is a native Tucsonanand is what is known as a “boomerang”. Andrew moved away in 2008 when he graduated from the U of A, but found his way back to Tucson in 2018 when he turned down a job offer from Amazon to join their Seattle headquarters. Instead, Andrew decided to move back to Tucson and help launch BlueStone Venture Partners with BlueStone co-founders Mara Aspinall and Tom Nickoloff.After moving away, Andrew received his Master's degree from USC in 2009 and soon after began his career with Ernst &Young's M&A Transaction Support team in San Francisco. In2012 he joined a Palo Alto-based private equity firm where he invested growth capital into a variety of private companies across a diverse set of industries.BlueStone Venture Partners is a Tucson-based venture capital fund capitalizing on the strength and innovation found in entrepreneurial companies in the Southwest.BlueStone invests in early-stage life science and healthcare startups based in the “NATO” states (New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma).Fueling GrowthBlueStone's Story Turquoise, the elusive native blue stone of the Southwest, has enjoyed a special significance across different cultures throughout history. Prized for its distinctive blue color, turquoise is thought to attract success and money. Its power is also fabled to bring protection, courage, and friendship.Just as turquoise derives its colors from the minerals in the ground where it forms, BlueStone Venture Partners'strength stems from partnering with businesses that reside in our shared innovation ecosystem.Who We AreBlueStone Venture Partners is a best-in-class life sciences venture capital fund capitalizing on the strength, creativity, and innovation found in entrepreneurial companies in the southwestern UnitedStates.Our firm is rooted in the Southwest and our experience has shown that there are investment gems likewise hidden in the desert Southwest. There is a dearth of venture capital support in the region despite strong universities, unique research centers, and significant infrastructure. We believe that our management skills, existing deal pipelines and relationships with industry-leading advisors and co-investors will enable us to choose companies wisely and in so doing create value for investors.Target Verticals Investment CriteriaBlueStone invests in early-stage companies that operate within the life Sciences. The Fund primarily focuses on companies that reside within five key verticals including Medical Devices, AdvancedMaterials, Healthcare IT, Diagnostics, and biopharma Platforms.We seek companies that have developed transformative platforms or disruptive technologies, are protected by strong intellectual property and will have a meaningful impact on healthcare. Our preference is for companies residing in the NATO States (New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma), however, as a return-driven fund, we will make investments regardless of geography if they fit our “Southwest-like” metrics.BlueStone provides growth capital and strategic support to our portfolio companies in addition to privileged access to strategic partners including investors, customers, and other partners residing within the supply chain.Jim Cantrell, Executive Vice PresidentR2 SpaceEmail:jim@r2space.comwww.jimcantrell.comSOCIAL MEDIA: LinkedIn |Jim is the founder of several entrepreneurial start-ups, including vector, StratSpace and Vintage Exotics Competition Engineering.He was on the founding team of Moon Express and SpaceX and has worked closely with Iceye, Skybox Imaging, PlanetIQ, PlanetLabs, and Rocket Lab.He has worked on 45 satellite missions including iridium Next, the Pluto mission, Osiris-Rex, and Lightsail. Jim also served as CEO of IDair, a bio-metrics company.He holds Board and Advisory positions at The Planetary Society, ATLAS Space, Morf3D, York Space Systems, Infinite Composites, Iceye and the Sports Car Club of America and is an active angel investor.
Today on Space Radio:Sailing on light for fun and profit,What if we shoot lasers at lightsails?,Does life increase the entropy of the universe?,How quickly do planetary rings form?,Can wee detect exoplanets with long orbital periods?,Tips on human interaction,and more!Join the show recording every Thursday at 4pm ET by leaving a voicemail at www.SpaceRadioShow.com.Support the show on Patreon.Follow on Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube.Big thanks to my top Patreon supporters this month: Matthew K, Helge B, Justin Z, Justin G, Kevin O, Duncan M, Corey D, Barbara K, Neuterdude, Chris C, Robert M, Nate H, Andrew F, Chris L, Jon, Elizabeth W, Cameron L, Nalia, Tim R, Joe R, Neil P, Gabriella G, Tom S, Bryan D, Irene P, Dustin R, Matt C, Iothian53, Steve P, Debra S, Ken L, Alberto M, Ron W, Chris L, Mark R, Alan B, Stephen J, David P, John F, Maureen R, Frank T, Craig B, Jesse A, Steven L, Ulfert B, Dave L, Stace J, S Stark, Richard K, Vladimir Z, Carol S, Stephen M, Grace M, Jeremy K, Russell W, David B, Tamara F, Robert B, Fr Bruce W, Catherine R, Nicolai B, Sean M, Nate H, Edward K, Ped, Teresa L, and Chuck C!Produced by Greg Moebius at WCBE Radio Columbus.Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, and the one and only Agent to the Stars.
Whaddya Know: Beryllium; News Items: Telescope Protests, LightSail 2, Free Speech vs Professional Licensing, Autism Genetic, Bird Conspiracy; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction
Where you can travel in space depends on how much propellant you've got on board your rocket and how efficiently you can use it. But there's a source of free propellant right here in the Solar System - the Sun - which is streaming out photons in all directions. You just need to catch them. And right now, the Planetary Society's new LightSail 2 spacecraft is testing out just how well it'll work. Light Sail 2 Photos: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/lightsail-2-team-continues-tweaks-tests.html Episode on Breakthrough Starshot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FWcEtXgK2g&list=PLbJ42wpShvml6Eg22WjWAR-6QUufHFh2v&index=146 Episode on Project Dragonfly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=598UtgxFd1E&list=PLbJ42wpShvml6Eg22WjWAR-6QUufHFh2v&index=23 Audio Podcast version: ITunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/universe-today-guide-to-space-audio/id794058155?mt=2 RSS: https://www.universetoday.com/audio What Fraser's Watching Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbJ42wpShvmkjd428BcHcCEVWOjv7cJ1G Weekly email newsletter: https://www.universetoday.com/newsletter Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday More stories at: http://www.universetoday.com/ Twitch: https://twitch.tv/fcain Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universetoday Instagram - http://instagram.com/universetoday Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com Karla Thompson - @karlaii / https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEItkORQYd4Wf0TpgYI_1fw Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com References: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-maximum-speed-a-chemical-rocket-can-achieve http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/lightsail-2-has-launched.html http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/lightsail-2-team-continues-tweaks-tests.html https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2014-4435 https://www.nasa.gov/content/nea-scout https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2018/pdf/1406.pdf http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2017/20170925-solar-sail-dsg.htmlSupport Universe Today Podcast
Among the many spacecraft and satellites ascending to space on Monday's Falcon Heavy launch, the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 may be the most interesting. If all goes well, a week from launch it will be moving through space — slowly, but surely — on nothing more than the force exerted on it by sunlight.
Casey Dreier is the Chief Advocate & Senior Space Policy Adviser at The Planetary Society, the world's largest independent space outreach organization. In this interview we discuss season 2 of National Geographic's Mars TV series, as well as The Planetary Society's Lightsail 2 project and the United States Space Force. As Chief Advocate & Senior... The post 64. The Planetary Society's CASEY DREIER discusses National Geographic's MARS Season 2, LightSail 2 & the U.S. Space Force appeared first on 15 Minutes With Chuck - podcast.
This season (season 4) will cover the groups of services Amazon provides in their AWS offerings. Each episode will focus on a particular group and review the included services from a high level. We have created posts over the last year to go a little deeper into each service. However, this season will give you some great ideas on where to start and what they currently offer. The Virtual Machine We start our season with a focus on the "compute" family of services. These cover a few different ways to handle your cloud-based applications. The first we look at is the traditional virtual machine. This service starts with the elastic compute cloud (EC2). We use this service as part of our Launch Your Internet Business class and embrace the free tier to keep your startup costs down. The pricing around EC2 can be a little confusing, so Amazon has added LightSail as a more natural way to manage your VM. Flexibility The power of a cloud solution and a VM is the ability to be flexible in how many resources it uses. Amazon has provided Elastic Beanstalk to automate the grow and shrink needs of a VM. It is not a trivial service to understand. However, it is very powerful and well worth the time spent mastering that service. You may find this too much for your needs if you stick a single server and a small number of users. On the other hand, it is nice to know your site can handle a flood of interest. Containers Developers have progressed from VMs to containers as the latest hot platform. Amazon is right there with us and added compute services to run containers on top of EC2 instances. They have Fargate as an over-arching management service that will help you spin up a container instance without worrying about the underlying VM details. This is all we want from a container including a lack of need for a system specialist that crafts the adequately sized VM. The "compute" services are the core of so many of the AWS offerings that this is a perfect place to get started. Go ahead and take advantage of the free tier to spin up your VM and play around with it for the next year (until the free period expires). This is as effective a "try before you buy" deal as I have found.
AWS cuts in half the price of most of its Lightsail virtual private servers AWS Lightsail, which launched in 2016, is Amazon's answer to the rise of Digital Ocean, OVH and other affordable virtual private server (VPS) players. Lightsail started as a pretty basic service, but over the course of the last two years, AWS added features like block storage, Windows support and additional regions.
Deploy the solar sails and take to the stars! Bill Nye the Science Guy and comic co-host Iliza Schlesinger answer fan-submitted questions about LightSail 1 and 2, space exploration, artificial intelligence, Breakthrough StarShot, and more.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/solar-sailing-with-bill-nye/Photo Credit: Credit: Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society, via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
How do you propel a spacecraft without fuel? Hear about LightSail, the Planetary Society's solar sailing spacecraft set to launch in 2018.
On this episode of Talking Space, we look at the duration records set by the recently-returned Expedition 43 crew, and a close look at why they were up there for so long (hint: the 2011 Soyuz age of reliability statement and a failed Progress launch come into play). Next we take a look at the mostly successful LDSD test and how a balloon can help us on Mars. Then it's onto a look at two recent satellite launches and their importance, LightSail and DSCOVR. We also discuss the Boeing CST-100 contract awarded by NASA and what that means for SpaceX, and we also look at SpaceX's pad abort test. Then it's on to everybody's favorite topic: the NASA budget, and what's being cut or funded this year. We finish off as always with our spinoff of the week, and this time it's Robonaut2 and what it's doing for robotics back on Earth with a company called Universal Robotics. Show recorded: 5/21/2015 Host This Week: Sawyer Rosenstein. Panel Members: Gene Mikulka, Mark Ratterman, Kathryn Robison and Kassy Tamanini aka Craft Lass Listen now!
The New Horizons spacecraft is one month away from Pluto, but it's already giving us some fuzzy photos. And new findings from the Hubble telescope give some insights into the complex orbits and interactions of Pluto's moons. In the last month around 120,000 Saiga antelopes have died in Kazakhstan, and nobody knows why. Breaking news while we recorded this show - the Philae lander has awoken on Comet 67P after a seven month sleep. The first stage of The Planetary Society's LightSail project has been successfully completed. The small craft unfurled its large solar sail, which uses sunlight for propulsion.
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