Podcasts about Media Temple

Get stoked, jQuery 1.2 is here! Join Scott and Wes as they discuss jQuery Mobile, slicing PSD files, CSS rounded corners, CoffeeScript features, WordPress 2.3, and the rise of Skeuomorphism, shaping the landscape of web development this year. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:16 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 02:17 jQuery 1.2 released! 07:38 jQuery Mobile. 09:34 Skeuomorphism. 10:25 How do you slice up your .PSDs? Slicy By MacRabbit 12:34 Cufon, new font method. 14:06 CSS rounded corners. CSS3Please 15:17 Coda Tip. 16:48 Top 5 CoffeeScript Features. 18:44 Conference Talks to Spotlight. BatmanJS, your new favorite JavaScript superhero 20:35 WordPress 2.3! 21:15 PHP 5.2.0 PHP 5.2.0 Release Announcement 21:53 Sponsored by Media Temple. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott:X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Amazon AWS adoption with cybersecurity first principle strategies. In this second session reviewing cloud platforms through the lens of first principle thinking, Rick Howard reviews Amazon Web Services (AWS). He discusses how AWS supports, or doesn't support, strategies of resilience, zero trust, intrusion kill chains, and risk assessments. Cybersecurity professional development and continued education. You will learn about: AWS networking and API techniques, DevSecOps in a cloud environment, AWS services and security tools, AWS strategies that support cybersecurity first principles. CyberWire is the world's most trusted news source for cybersecurity information and situational awareness. Join the conversation with Rick Howard on LinkedIn and Twitter, and follow CyberWire on social media and join our community of security professionals: LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram Additional first principles resources for your cybersecurity program. For more Amazon AWS and cybersecurity first principles resources, check the topic essay. Selected Reading: S1E6: 11 MAY: Cybersecurity First Principles S1E7: 18 MAY: Cybersecurity first principles: zero trust S1E8: 26 MAY: Cybersecurity first principles: intrusion kill chains. S1E9: 01 JUN: Cybersecurity first principles - resilience S1E11: 15 JUN: Cybersecurity first principles - risk S2E7: 31 AUG: Identity Management: a first principle idea. S2E8: 07 SEP: Identity Management: around the Hash Table. S4E3: 25 JAN: Microsoft Azure through a first principle lens S4E4: 01 FEB: Microsoft Azure security (Hashtable Interviews) “5 Best Practices for Resiliency Planning Using AWS | Amazon Web Services,” Amazon Web Services, 7 October 2020. “6 Best Practices for Increasing Security in AWS in a Zero Trust World.” by Louis Columbus, Forbes, 4 January 2019.  “About: History,” Cloud Security Alliance. “A Brief History of AWS,” by Alec Rojasm, Media Temple, 31 August 2017. “Amrandazz/Attack-Guardduty-Navigator.” by amrandazz, GitHub, 2021. “AWS Networking and Security 101,” by Net Joints, YouTube Video, 2020. “AWS Networking Fundamentals,” by Amazon Web Services, YouTube Video, 2019. “AWS Training and Certification,” by Aws.training, 2021. “Exposed Azure Bucket Leaked Passports, IDs of Volleyball Reporters,” by Ax Sharma, BleepingComputer, February 2021. “How to Connect Your On-Premises Active Directory to AWS Using AD Connector | Amazon Web Services,” by Amazon Web Services, 6 July 2015.  “How to Think about Zero Trust Architectures on AWS | Amazon Web Services.” by Amazon Web Services, 20 January 2020.  “Leaky AWS S3 Buckets Are so Common, They're Being Found by the Thousands Now – with Lots of Buried Secrets,” by Shaun Nichols, Shaun, Theregister.com, 3 August 2020.  “Network Address Translation (NAT) - GeeksforGeeks,” by GeeksforGeeks, 7 May 2018.  “Zero Trust Architectures: An AWS Perspective | Amazon Web Services,” by Amazon Web Services, 3 November 2020. 

Microsoft Azure adoption with cybersecurity first principle strategies. The cloud revolution is here. How well can we implement our first principle strategies within each environment? Do we need to embrace other security platforms to get it done? In this session, Rick discusses Microsoft Azure through the lens of first principle thinking. He reviews how Azure supports, or doesn't support, strategies of resilience, zero trust, intrusion kill chains, and risk assessments. Cybersecurity professional development and continued education. You will learn about: Microsoft Azure services and security tools, infrastructure as code, Azure strategies that support cybersecurity first principles CyberWire is the world's most trusted news source for cybersecurity information and situational awareness. Join the conversation with Rick Howard on LinkedIn and Twitter, and follow CyberWire on social media and join our community of security professionals: LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram Additional first principles resources for your cybersecurity program. For more Microsoft Azure and cybersecurity first principles resources, check the topic essay. Selected Reading: S1E1: 6 APR: Your Security Stack is Moving: SASE is Coming. S1E9: 01 JUN: Cybersecurity first principles - resilience S2E7: 31 AUG: Identity Management: a first principle idea. S2E8: 07 SEP: Identity Management: around the Hash Table. S3E3: 02 NOV: Securing containers and serverless functions. S3E4: 09 NOV: Securing containers and serverless functions: around the Hash Table. S3E5: 16 NOV: SOAR: a first principle idea. S3E6: 23 NOV: SOAR: around the Hash Table. “About: History,” Cloud Security Alliance. “A Brief History of AWS,” by Alec Rojasm, Media Temple, 31 August 2017. “A Look Back At Ten Years Of Microsoft Azure,” by Janakiram, Forbes, 3 February 2020. “An Annotated History of Google's Cloud Platform,” by Reto Meier, Medium, 10 February 2017. “Azure AD Overview,” John Savill, YouTube, 2020. “Azure Virtual Network FAQ,” KumudD, Microsoft.com, 26 June 2020.  “Azure Virtual Network Overview,” by John Savill, YouTube, 4 February 2020. “Matrices: Cloud Matrix,” by Mitre ATT&CK. “Microsoft Azure: Security.” by Microsoft. “Thinking about Resiliency in Azure,” John Savill, YouTube Video, June 2019. “Zero Trust Deployment Center,” Gary Centric, Microsoft.com, 30 September 2020.

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.

About SamA 25-year veteran of the Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes, Sam Ramji led Kubernetes and DevOps product management for Google Cloud, founded the Cloud Foundry foundation, has helped build two multi-billion dollar markets (API Management at Apigee and Enterprise Service Bus at BEA Systems) and redefined Microsoft's open source and Linux strategy from “extinguish” to “embrace”.He is nerdy about open source, platform economics, middleware, and cloud computing with emphasis on developer experience and enterprise software. He is an advisor to multiple companies including Dell Technologies, Accenture, Observable, Fletch, Orbit, OSS Capital, and the Linux Foundation.Sam received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, the home of transdisciplinary innovation, in 1994 and is still excited about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.Links: DataStax: https://www.datastax.com Sam Ramji Twitter: https://twitter.com/sramji Open||Source||Data: https://www.datastax.com/resources/podcast/open-source-data Screaming in the Cloud Episode 243 with Craig McLuckie: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/innovating-in-the-cloud-with-craig-mcluckie/ Screaming in the Cloud Episode 261 with Jason Warner: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at 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. Set up a meeting with a Redis expert during re:Invent, and you'll not only learn how you can become a Redis hero, but also have a chance to win some fun and exciting prizes. 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: Are you building cloud applications with a distributed team? Check out Teleport, an open source identity-aware access proxy for cloud resources. Teleport provides secure access to anything running somewhere behind NAT: SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, internal web apps and databases. Teleport gives engineers superpowers! Get access to everything via single sign-on with multi-factor. List and see all SSH servers, kubernetes clusters or databases available to you. Get instant access to them all using tools you already have. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility and ensuring compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open source and a pleasure to use.Download Teleport at https://goteleport.com. That's goteleport.com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and recurring effort that this show goes to is to showcase people in their best light. Today's guest has done an awful lot: he led Kubernetes and DevOps Product Management for Google Cloud; he founded the Cloud Foundry Foundation; he set open-source strategy for Microsoft in the naughts; he advises companies including Dell, Accenture, the Linux Foundation; and tying all of that together, it's hard to present a lot of that in a great light because given my own proclivities, that sounds an awful lot like a personal attack. Sam Ramji is the Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. Sam, thank you for joining me, and it's weird when your resume starts to read like, “Oh, I hate all of these things.”Sam: [laugh]. It's weird, but it's true. And it's the only life I could have lived apparently because here I am. Corey, it's a thrill to meet you. I've been an admirer of your public speaking, and public tweeting, and your writing for a long time.Corey: Well, thank you. The hard part is getting over the voice saying don't do it because it turns out that there's no real other side of public shutting up, which is something that I was never good at anyway, so I figured I'd lean into it. And again, I mean, that the sense of where you have been historically in terms of your career not, “Look what you've done,” which is a subtext that I could be accused of throwing in sometimes.Sam: I used to hear that a lot from my parents, actually.Corey: Oh, yeah. That was my name growing up. But you've done a lot of things, and you've transitioned from notable company making significant impact on the industry, to the next one, to the next one. And you've been in high-flying roles, doing lots of really interesting stuff. What's the common thread between all those things?Sam: I'm an intensely curious person, and the thing that I'm most curious about is distributed cognition. And that might not be obvious from what you see is kind of the… Lego blocks of my career, but I studied cognitive science in college when that was not really something that was super well known. So, I graduated from UC San Diego in '94 doing neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and psychology. And because I just couldn't stop thinking about thinking; I was just fascinated with how it worked.So, then I wanted to build software systems that would help people learn. And then I wanted to build distributed software systems. And then I wanted to learn how to work with people who were thinking about building the distributed software systems. So, you end up kind of going up this curve of, like, complexity about how do we think? How do we think alone? How do we learn to think? How do we think together?And that's the directed path through my software engineering career, into management, into middleware at BEA, into open-source at Microsoft because that's an amazing demonstration of distributed cognition, how, you know, at the time in 2007, I think, Sourceforge had 100,000 open-source projects, which was, like, mind boggling. Some of them even worked together, but all of them represented these groups of people, flung around the world, collaborating on something that was just fundamentally useful, that they were curious about. Kind of did the same thing into APIs because APIs are an even better way to reuse for some cases than having the source code—at Apigee. And kept growing up through that into, how are we building larger-scale thinking systems like Cloud Foundry, which took me into Google and Kubernetes, and then some applications of that in Autodesk and now DataStax. So, I love building companies. I love helping people build companies because I think business is distributed cognition. So, those businesses that build distributed systems, for me, are the most fascinating.Corey: You were basically handed a heck of a challenge as far as, “Well, help set open-source strategy,” back at Microsoft, in the days where that was a punchline. And credit where due, I have to look at Microsoft of today, and it's not a joke, you can have your arguments about them, but again in those days, a lot of us built our entire personality on hating Microsoft. Some folks never quite evolved beyond that, but it's a new ballgame and it's very clear that the Microsoft of yesteryear and the Microsoft of today are not completely congruent. What was it like at that point understanding that as you're working with open-source communities, you're doing that from a place of employment with a company that was widely reviled in the space.Sam: It was not lost on me. The irony, of course, was that—Corey: Well, thank God because otherwise the question where you would have been, “What do you mean they didn't like us?”Sam: [laugh].Corey: Which, on some levels, like, yeah, that's about the level of awareness I would have expected in that era, but contrary to popular opinion, execs at these companies are not generally oblivious.Sam: Yeah, well, if I'd been clever as a creative humorist, I would have given you that answer instead of my serious answer, but for some reason, my role in life is always to be the straight guy. I used to have Slashdot as my homepage, right? I love when I'd see some conspiracy theory about, you know, Bill Gates dressed up as the Borg, taking over the world. My first startup, actually in '97, was crushed by Microsoft. They copied our product, copied the marketing, and bundled it into Office, so I had lots of reasons to dislike Microsoft.But in 2004, I was recruited into their venture capital team, which I couldn't believe. It was really a place that they were like, “Hey, we could do better at helping startups succeed, so we're going to evangelize their success—if they're building with Microsoft technologies—to VCs, to enterprises, we'll help you get your first big enterprise deal.” I was like, “Man, if I had this a few years ago, I might not be working.” So, let's go try to pay it forward.I ended up in open-source by accident. I started going to these conferences on Software as a Service. This is back in 2005 when people were just starting to light up, like, Silicon Valley Forum with, you know, the CEO of Demandware would talk, right? We'd hear all these different ways of building a new business, and they all kept talking about their tech stack was Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I went to one eight-hour conference, and Microsoft technologies were mentioned for about 12 seconds in two separate chunks. So, six seconds, he was like, “Oh, and also we really like Microsoft SQL Server for our data layer.”Corey: Oh, Microsoft SQL Server was fantastic. And I know that's a weird thing for people to hear me say, just because I've been renowned recently for using Route 53 as the primary data store for everything that I can. But there was nothing quite like that as far as having multiple write nodes, being able to handle sharding effectively. It was expensive, and you would take a bath on the price come audit time, but people were not rolling it out unaware of those things. This was a trade off that they were making.Oracle has a similar story with databases. It's yeah, people love to talk smack about Oracle and its business practices for a variety of excellent reasons, at least in the database space that hasn't quite made it to cloud yet—knock on wood—but people weren't deploying it because they thought Oracle was warm and cuddly as a vendor; they did it because they can tolerate the rest of it because their stuff works.Sam: That's so well said, and people don't give them the credit that's due. Like, when they built hypergrowth in their business, like… they had a great product; it really worked. They made it expensive, and they made a lot of money on it, and I think that was why you saw MySQL so successful and why, if you were looking for a spec that worked, that you could talk through through an open driver like ODBC or JDBC or whatever, you could swap to Microsoft SQL Server. But I walked out of that and came back to the VC team and said, “Microsoft has a huge problem. This is a massive market wave that's coming. We're not doing anything in it. They use a little bit of SQL Server, but there's nothing else in your tech stack that they want, or like, or can afford because they don't know if their businesses are going to succeed or not. And they're going to go out of business trying to figure out how much licensing costs they would pay to you in order to consider using your software. They can't even start there. They have to start with open-source. So, if you're going to deal with SaaS, you're going to have to have open-source, and get it right.”So, I worked with some folks in the industry, wrote a ten-page paper, sent it up to Bill Gates for Think Week. Didn't hear much back. Bought a new strategy to the head of developer platform evangelism, Sanjay Parthasarathy who suggested that the idea of discounting software to zero for startups, with the hope that they would end up doing really well with it in the future as a Software as a Service company; it was dead on arrival. Dumb idea; bring it back; that actually became BizSpark, the most popular program in Microsoft partner history.And then about three months later, I got a call from this guy, Bill Hilf. And he said, “Hey, this is Bill Hilf. I do open-source at Microsoft. I work with Bill Gates. He sent me your paper. I really like it. Would you consider coming up and having conversation with me because I want you to think about running open-source technology strategy for the company.” And at this time I'm, like, 33 or 34. And I'm like, “Who me? You've got to be joking.” And he goes, “Oh, and also, you'll be responsible for doing quarterly deep technical briefings with Bill… Gates.” I was like, “You must be kidding.” And so of course I had to check it out. One thing led to another and all of a sudden, with not a lot of history in the open-source community but coming in it with a strategist's eye and with a technologist's eye, saying, “This is a problem we got to solve. How do we get after this pragmatically?” And the rest is history, as they say.Corey: I have to say that you are the Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax, and I pull up your website quickly here and a lot of what I tell earlier stage companies is effectively more or less what you have already done. You haven't named yourself after the open-source project that underlies the bones of what you have built so you're not going to wind up in the same glorious challenges that, for example, Elastic or MongoDB have in some ways. You have a pricing page that speaks both to the reality of, “It's two in the morning. I'm trying to get something up and running and I want you the hell out of my way. Just give me something that I can work with a reasonable free tier and don't make me talk to a salesperson.” But also, your enterprise tier is, “Click here to talk to a human being,” which is speaking enterprise slash procurement slash, oh, there will be contract negotiation on these things.It's being able to serve different ends of your market depending upon who it is that encounters you without being off-putting to any of those. And it's deceptively challenging for companies to pull off or get right. So clearly, you've learned lessons by doing this. That was the big problem with Microsoft for the longest time. It's, if I want to use some Microsoft stuff, once you were able to download things from the internet, it changed slightly, but even then it was one of those, “What exactly am I committing to here as far as signing up for this? And am I giving them audit rights into my environment? Is the BSA about to come out of nowhere and hit me with a surprise audit and find out that various folks throughout the company have installed this somewhere and now I owe more than the company's worth?” That was always the haunting fear that companies had back then.These days, I like the approach that companies are taking with the SaaS offering: you pay for usage. On some level, I'd prefer it slightly differently in a pay-per-seat model because at least then you can predict the pricing, but no one is getting surprise submarined with this type of thing on an audit basis, and then they owe damages and payment in arrears and someone has them over a barrel. It's just, “Oh. The bill this month was higher than we expected.” I like that model I think the industry does, too.Sam: I think that's super well said. As I used to joke at BEA Systems, nothing says ‘I love you' to a customer like an audit, right? That's kind of a one-time use strategy. If you're going to go audit licenses to get your revenue in place, you might be inducing some churn there. It's a huge fix for the structural problem in pricing that I think package software had, right?When we looked at Microsoft software versus open-source software, and particularly Windows versus Linux, you would have a structure where sales reps were really compensated to sell as much as possible upfront so they could get the best possible commission on what might be used perpetually. But then if you think about it, like, the boxes in a curve, right, if you do that calculus approximation of a smooth curve, a perpetual software license is a huge box and there's an enormous amount of waste in there. And customers figured out so as soon as you can go to a pay-per-use or pay-as-you-go, you start to smooth that curve, and now what you get is what you deserve, right, as opposed to getting filled with way more cost than you expect. So, I think this model is really super well understood now. Kind of the long run the high point of open-source meets, cloud, meets Software as a Service, you look at what companies like MongoDB, and Confluent, and Elastic, and Databricks are doing. And they've really established a very good path through the jungle of how to succeed as a software company. So, it's still difficult to implement, but there are really world-class guides right now.Corey: Moving beyond where Microsoft was back in the naughts, you were then hired as a VP over at Google. And in that era, the fact that you were hired as a VP at Google is fascinating. They preferred to grow those internally, generally from engineering. So, first question, when you were being hired as a VP in the product org, did they make you solve algorithms on a whiteboard to get there?Sam: [laugh]. They did not. I did have somewhat of an advantage [because they 00:13:36] could see me working pretty closely as the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I'd worked closely with Craig McLuckie who notably brought Kubernetes to the world along with Joe Beda, and with Eric Brewer, and a number of others.And he was my champion at Google. He was like, “Look, you know, we need him doing Kubernetes. Let's bring Sam in to do that.” So, that was helpful. I also wrote a [laugh] 2000-word strategy document, just to get some thoughts out of my head. And I said, “Hey, if you like this, great. If you don't throw it away.” So, the interviews were actually very much not solving problems in a whiteboard. There were super collaborative, really excellent conversations. It was slow—Corey: Let's be clear, Craig McLuckie's most notable achievement was being a guest on this podcast back in Episode 243. But I'll say that this is a close second.Sam: [laugh]. You're not wrong. And of course now with Heptio and their acquisition by VMware.Corey: Ehh, they're making money beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, that's all well and good, but an invite to this podcast, that's where it's at.Sam: Well, he should really come on again, he can double down and beat everybody. That can be his landmark achievement, a two-timer on Screaming in [the] Cloud.Corey: You were at Google; you were at Microsoft. These are the big titans of their era, in some respect—not to imply that there has beens; they're bigger than ever—but it's also a more crowded field in some ways. I guess completing the trifecta would be Amazon, but you've had the good judgment never to work there, directly of course. Now they're clearly in your market. You're at DataStax, which is among other things, built on Apache Cassandra, and they launched their own Cassandra service named Keyspaces because no one really knows why or how they name things.And of course, looking under the hood at the pricing model, it's pretty clear that it really is just DynamoDB wearing some Groucho Marx classes with a slight upcharge for API level compatibility. Great. So, I don't see it a lot in the real world and that's fine, but I'm curious as to your take on looking at all three of those companies at different eras. There was always the threat in the open-source world that they are going to come in and crush you. You said earlier that Microsoft crushed your first startup.Google is an interesting competitor in some respects; people don't really have that concern about them. And your job as a Chief Strategy Officer at Amazon is taken over by a Post-it Note that simply says ‘yes' on it because there's nothing they're not going to do, or try, and experiment with. So, from your perspective, if you look at the titans, who is it that you see as the largest competitive threat these days, if that's even a thing?Sam: If you think about Sun Tzu and the Art of War, right—a lot of strategy comes from what we've learned from military environments—fighting a symmetric war, right, using the same weapons and the same army against a symmetric opponent, but having 1/100th of the personnel and 1/100th of the money is not a good plan.Corey: “We're going to lose money, going to be outcompeted; we'll make it up in volume. Oh, by the way, we're also slower than they are.”Sam: [laugh]. So, you know, trying to come after AWS, or Microsoft, or Google as an independent software company, pound-for-pound, face-to-face, right, full-frontal assault is psychotic. What you have to do, I think, at this point is to understand that these are each companies that are much like we thought about Linux, and you know, Macintosh, and Windows as operating systems. They're now the operating systems of the planet. So, that creates some economies of scale, some efficiencies for them. And for us. Look at how cheap object storage is now, right? So, there's never been a better time in human history to create a database company because we can take the storage out of the database and hand it over to Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft to handle it with 13 nines of durability on a constantly falling cost basis.So, that's super interesting. So, you have to prosecute the structure of the world as it is, based on where the giants are and where they'll be in the future. Then you have to turn around and say, like, “What can they never sell?”So, Amazon can never sell something that is standalone, right? They're a parts factory and if you buy into the Amazon-first strategy of cloud computing—which we did at Autodesk when I was VP of cloud platform there—everything is a primitive that works inside Amazon, but they're not going to build things that don't work outside of the Amazon primitives. So, your company has to be built on the idea that there's a set of people who value something that is purpose-built for a particular use case that you can start to broaden out, it's really helpful if they would like it to be something that can help them escape a really valuable asset away from the center of gravity that is a cloud. And that's why data is super interesting. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Boy, I had such a great conversation with Oracle over the last 20 years beating me up on licensing. Let me go find a cloud vendor and dump all of my data in that so they can beat me up for the next 20 years.” Nobody says that.Corey: It's the idea of data portability that drives decision-making, which makes people, of course, feel better about not actually moving in anywhere. But the fact that they're not locked in strategically, in a way that requires a full software re-architecture and data model rewrite is compelling. I'm a big believer in convincing people to make decisions that look a lot like that.Sam: Right. And so that's the key, right? So, when I was at Autodesk, we went from our 100 million dollar, you know, committed spend with 19% discount on the big three services to, like—we started realize when we're going to burn through that, we were spending $60 million or so a year on 20% annual growth as the cloud part of the business grew. Thought, “Okay, let's renegotiate. Let's go and do a $250 million deal. I'm sure they'll give us a much better discount than 19%.” Short story is they came back and said, “You know, we're going to take you from an already generous 19% to an outstanding 22%.” We thought, “Wait a minute, we already talked to Intuit. They're getting a 40% discount on a $400 million spend.”So, you know, math is hard, but, like, 40% minus 22% is 18% times $250 million is a lot of money. So, we thought, “What is going on here?” And we realized we just had no credible threat of leaving, and Intuit did because they had built a cross-cloud capable architecture. And we had not. So, now stepping back into the kind of the world that we're living in 2021, if you're an independent software company, especially if you have the unreasonable advantage of being an open-source software company, you have got to be doing your customers good by giving them cross-cloud capability. It could be simply like the Amdahl coffee cup that Amdahl reps used to put as landmines for the IBM reps, later—I can tell you that story if you want—even if it's only a way to save money for your customer by using your software, when it gets up to tens and hundreds of million dollars, that's a really big deal.But they also know that data is super important, so the option value of being able to move if they have to, that they have to be able to pull that stick, instead of saying, “Nice doggy,” we have to be on their side, right? So, there's almost a detente that we have to create now, as cloud vendors, working in a world that's invented and operated by the giants.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: When we look across the, I guess, the ecosystem as it's currently unfolding, a recurring challenge that I have to the existing incumbent cloud providers is they're great at offering the bricks that you can use to build things, but if I'm starting a company today, I'm not going to look at building it myself out of, “Ooh, I'm going to take a bunch of EC2 instances, or Lambda functions, or popsicles and string and turn it into this thing.” I'm going to want to tie together things that are way higher level. In my own case, now I wind up paying for Retool, which is, effectively, yeah, it runs on some containers somewhere, presumably, I think in Azure, but don't quote me on that. And that's great. Could I build my own thing like that?Absolutely not. I would rather pay someone to tie it together. Same story. Instead of building my own CRM by running some open-source software on an EC2 instance, I wind up paying for Salesforce or Pipedrive or something in that space. And so on, and so forth.And a lot of these companies that I'm doing business with aren't themselves running on top of AWS. But for web hosting, for example; if I look at the reference architecture for a WordPress site, AWS's diagram looks like a punchline. It is incredibly overcomplicated. And I say this as someone who ran large WordPress installations at Media Temple many years ago. Now, I have the good sense to pay WP Engine. And on a monthly basis, I give them money and they make the website work.Sure, under the hood, it's running on top of GCP or AWS somewhere. But I don't have to think about it; I don't have to build this stuff together and think about the backups and the failover strategy and the rest. The website just works. And that is increasingly the direction that business is going; things commoditize over time. And AWS in particular has done a terrible job, in my experience, of differentiating what it is they're doing in the language that their customers speak.They're great at selling things to existing infrastructure engineers, but folks who are building something from scratch aren't usually in that cohort. It's a longer story with time and, “Well, we're great at being able to sell EC2 instances by the gallon.” Great. Are you capable of going to a small doctor's office somewhere in the American Midwest and offering them an end-to-end solution for managing patient data? Of course not. You can offer them a bunch of things they can tie together to something that will suffice if they all happen to be software engineers, but that's not the opportunity.So instead, other companies are building those solutions on top of AWS, capturing the margin. And if there's one thing guaranteed to keep Amazon execs awake at night, it's the idea of someone who isn't them making money somehow somewhere, so I know that's got to rankle them, but they do not speak that language. At all. Longer-term, I only see that as a more and more significant crutch. A long enough timeframe here, we're talking about them becoming the Centurylinks of the world, the tier one backbone provider that everyone uses, but no one really thinks about because they're not a household name.Sam: That is a really thoughtful perspective. I think the diseconomies of scale that you're pointing to start to creep in, right? Because when you have to sell compute units by the gallon, right, you can't care if it's a gallon of milk, [laugh] or a gallon of oil, or you know, a gallon of poison. You just have to keep moving it through. So, the shift that I think they're going to end up having to make pragmatically, and you start to see some signs of it, like, you know, they hired but could not retain Matt [Acey 00:23:48]. He did an amazing job of bringing them to some pragmatic realization that they need to partner with open-source, but more broadly, when I think about Microsoft in the 2000s as they were starting to learn their open-source lessons, we were also being able to pull on Microsoft's deep competency and partners. So, most people didn't do the math on this. I was part of the field governance council so I understood exactly how the Microsoft business worked to the level that I was capable. When they had $65 billion in revenue, they produced $24 billion in profit through an ecosystem that generated $450 billion in revenue. So, for every dollar Microsoft made, it was $8 to partners. It was a fundamentally platform-shaped business, and that was how they're able to get into doctors offices in the Midwest, and kind of fit the curve that you're describing of all of those longtail opportunities that require so much care and that are complex to prosecute. These solved for their diseconomies of scale by having 1.2 million partner companies. So, will Amazon figure that out and will they hire, right, enough people who've done this before from Microsoft to become world-class in partnering, that's kind of an exercise left to the [laugh] reader, right? Where will that go over time? But I don't see another better mathematical model for dealing with the diseconomies of scale you have when you're one of the very largest providers on the planet.Corey: The hardest problem as I look at this is, at some point, you hit a point of scale where smaller things look a lot less interesting. I get that all the time when people say, “Oh, you fix AWS bills, aren't you missing out by not targeting Google bills and Azure bills as well?” And it's, yeah. I'm not VC-backed. It turns out that if I limit the customer base that I can effectively service to only AWS customers, yeah turns out, I'm not going to starve anytime soon. Who knew? I don't need to conquer the world and that feels increasingly antiquated, at least going by the stories everyone loves to tell.Sam: Yeah, it's interesting to see how cloud makes strange bedfellows, right? We started seeing this in, like, 2014, 2015, weird partnerships that you're like, “There's no way this would happen.” But the cloud economics which go back to utilization, rather than what it used to be, which was software lock-in, just changed who people were willing to hang out with. And now you see companies like Databricks going, you know, we do an amazing amount of business, effectively competing with Amazon, selling Spark services on top of predominantly Amazon infrastructure, and everybody seems happy with it. So, there's some hint of a new sensibility of what the future of partnering will be. We used to call it coopetition a long time ago, which is kind of a terrible word, but at least it shows that there's some nuance in you can't compete with everybody because it's just too hard.Corey: I wish there were better ways of articulating these things because it seems from the all the outside world, you have companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Google who go and build out partner networks because they need that external accessibility into various customer profiles that they can't speak to super well themselves, but they're also coming out with things that wind up competing directly or indirectly, with all of those partners at the same time. And I don't get it. I wish that there were smarter ways to do it.Sam: It is hard to even talk about it, right? One of the things that I think we've learned from philosophy is if we don't have a word for it, we can't be intelligent about it. So, there's a missing semantics here for being able to describe the complexity of where are you partnering? Where are you competing? Where are you differentiating? In an ecosystem, which is moving and changing.I tend to look at the tools of game theory for this, which is to look at things as either, you know, nonzero-sum games or zero-sum games. And if it's a nonzero-sum game, which I think are the most interesting ones, can you make it a positive sum game? And who can you play positive-sum games with? An organization as big as Amazon, or as big as Microsoft, or even as big as Google isn't ever completely coherent with itself. So, thinking about this as an independent software company, it doesn't matter if part of one of these hyperscalers has a part of their business that competes with your entire business because your business probably drives utilization of a completely different resource in their company that you can partner within them against them, effectively. Right?For example, Cassandra is an amazingly powerful but demanding workload on Kubernetes. So, there's a lot of Cassandra on EKS. You grow a lot of workload, and EKS business does super well. Does that prevent us from working with Amazon because they have Dynamo or because they have Keyspaces? Absolutely not, right?So, this is when those companies get so big that they are almost their own forest, right, of complexity, you can kind of get in, hang out, do well, and pretty much never see the competitive product, unless you're explicitly looking for it, which I think is a huge danger for us as independent software companies. And I would say this to anybody doing strategy for an organization like this, which is, don't obsess over the tiny part of their business that competes with yours, and do not pay attention to any of the marketing that they put out that looks competitive with what you have. Because if you can't figure out how to make a better product and sell it better to your customers as a single purpose corporation, you have bigger problems.Corey: I want to change gears slightly to something that's probably a fair bit more insulting, but that's okay. We're going to roll with it. That seems to be the theme of this episode. You have been, in effect, a CIO a number of times at different companies. And if we take a look at the typical CIO tenure, industry-wide, it's not long; it approaches the territory from an executive perspective of, “Be sure not to buy green bananas. You might not be here by the time they ripen.” And I'm wondering what it is that drives that and how you make a mark in a relatively short time frame when you're providing inputs and deciding on strategy, and those decisions may not bear fruit for years.Sam: CIO used to—we used say it stood for ‘Career Is Over' because the tenure is so short. I think there's a couple of reasons why it's so short. And I think there's a way I believe you can have impact in a short amount of time. I think the reason that it's been short is because people aren't sure what they want the CIO role to be.Do they want it to be a glorified finance person who's got a lot of data processing experience, but now really has got, you know, maybe even an MBA in finance, but is not focusing on value creation? Do they want it to be somebody who's all-singing, all-dancing Chief Data Officer with a CTO background who did something amazing and solved a really hard problem? The definition of success is difficult. Often CIOs now also have security under them, which is literally a job I would never ever want to have. Do security for a public corporation? Good Lord, that's a way to lose most of your life. You're the only executive other than the CEO that the board wants to hear from. Every sing—Corey: You don't sleep; you wait, in those scenarios. And oh, yeah, people joke about ablative CSOs in those scenarios. Yeah, after SolarWinds, you try and get an ablative intern instead, but those don't work as well. It's a matter of waiting for an inevitability. One of the things I think is misunderstood about management broadly, is that you are delegating work, but not the responsibility. The responsibility rests with you.So, when companies have these statements blaming some third-party contractor, it's no, no, no. I'm dealing with you. You were the one that gave my data to some sketchy randos. It is your responsibility that data has now been compromised. And people don't want to hear that, but it's true.Sam: I think that's absolutely right. So, you have this high risk, medium reward, very fungible job definition, right? If you ask all of the CIO's peers what their job is, they'll probably all tell you something different that represents their wish list. The thing that I learned at Autodesk, I was only there for 15 months, but we established a fundamental transformation of the work of how cloud platform is done at the company that's still in place a couple years later.You have to realize that you're a change agent, right? You're actually being hired to bring in the bulk of all the different biases and experiences you have to solve a problem that is not working, right? So, when I got to Autodesk, they didn't even know what their uptime was. It took three months to teach the team how to measure the uptime. Turned out the uptime was 97.7% for the cloud, for the world's largest engineering software company.That is 200 hours a year of unplanned downtime, right? That is not good. So, a complete overhaul [laugh] was needed. Understanding that as a change agent, your half-life is 12 to 18 months, you have to measure success not on tenure, but on your ability to take good care of the patient, right? It's going to be a lot of pain, you're going to work super hard, you're going to have to build trust with everyone, and then people are still going to hate you at the end. That is something you just have to kind of take on.As a friend of mine, Jason Warner joined Redpoint Ventures recently, he said this when he was the CTO of GitHub: “No one is a villain in their own story.” So, you realize, going into a big organization, people are going to make you a villain, but you still have to do incredibly thoughtful, careful work, that's going to take care of them for a long time to come. And those are the kinds of CIOs that I can relate to very well.Corey: Jason is great. You're name-dropping all the guests we've had. My God, keep going. It's a hard thing to rationalize and wrap heads around. It's one of those areas where you will not be measured during your tenure in the role, in some respects. And, of course, that leads to the cynical perspective as well, where well, someone's not going to be here long and if they say, “Yeah, we're just going to keep being stewards of the change that's already underway,” well, that doesn't look great, so quick, time to do a cloud migration, or a cloud repatriation, or time to roll something else out. A bit of a different story.Sam: One of the biggest challenges is how do you get the hearts and the minds of the people who are in the organization when they are no fools, and their expectation is like, “Hey, this company's been around for decades, and we go through cloud leaders or CIOs, like Wendy's goes through hamburgers.” They could just cloud-wash, right, or change-wash all their language. They could use the new language to describe the old thing because all they have to do is get through the performance review and outwait you. So, there's always going to be a level of defection because it's hard to change; it's hard to think about new things.So, the most important thing is how do you get into people's hearts and minds and enable them to believe that the best thing they could do for their career is to come along with the change? And I think that was what we ended up getting right in the Autodesk cloud transformation. And that requires endless optimism, and there's no room for cynicism because the cynicism is going to creep in around the edges. So, what I found on the job is, you just have to get up every morning and believe everything is possible and transmit that belief to everybody.So, if it seems naive or ingenuous, I think that doesn't matter as long as you can move people's hearts in each conversation towards, like, “Oh, this person cares about me. They care about a good outcome from me. I should listen a little bit more and maybe make a 1% change in what I'm doing.” Because 1% compounded daily for a year, you can actually get something done in the lifetime of a CIO.Corey: And I think that's probably a great place to leave it. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about these things, how you view the world, where can they find you?Sam: You can find me on Twitter, I'm @sramji, S-R-A-M-J-I, and I have a podcast that I host called Open||Source||Datawhere I invite innovators, data nerds, computational networking nerds to hang out and explain to me, a software programmer, what is the big world of open-source data all about, what's happening with machine learning, and what would it be like if you could put data in a container, just like you could put code in a container, and how might the world change? So, that's Open||Source||Data podcast.Corey: And we'll of course include links to that in the [show notes 00:35:58]. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.Sam: Corey, it's been a privilege. Thank you so much for having me.Corey: Likewise. Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me exactly which item in Sam's background that I made fun of is the place that you work at.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.

Hito histórico en el autoconsumo solar colectivo / Más privacidad en la web sin romperla / Kernel unificado en Android / Apple demanda a NSO / Lucha contra la basura espacial / Mumbler abre al público Patrocinador: Llega el Black Friday https://www.pccomponentes.com/black-friday?utm_source=voiceup&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=black-friday-2021-es, y en PcComponentes tienen un Pedazo Catálogo con miles de ofertas. Este Black Friday todas las ofertas en tecnología, electrónica y electrodomésticos, o quizás quieras darte un super capricho con este super-PC gaming https://www.pccomponentes.com/pccom-platinum-intel-core-i9-11900k-32gb-1tbssd-2tb-rtx3080ti?utm_source=voiceup&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=black-friday-2021-es. Hito histórico en el autoconsumo solar colectivo / Más privacidad en la web sin romperla / Kernel unificado en Android / Apple demanda a NSO / Lucha contra la basura espacial / Mumbler abre al público

Cam reads the greatest poem ever written. Part 4/4, Canti XXXII-XXXIV, Cocytus Canto XXXII - Circle 9, Rounds 1-2 Canto XXXIII - Circle 9, Round 3 Canto XXXIV - Circle 9, Round 4; Center This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK

Cam reads the greatest poem ever written. Part 3/4, Canti XVIII-XXXI, CIrcle 8, Malebolge Canto XVIII - Circle 8, Bolgia 1-2 Canto XIX - Circle 8, Bolgia 3 Canto XX - Circle 8, Bolgia 4 Canti XXI, XXII - Circle 8, Bolgia 5 Canto XXIII - Circle 8, Bolgia 6 Canti XXIV, XXV - Circle 8, Bolgia 7 Canti XXVI, XXVII - Circle 8, Bolgia 8 Canto XXVIII - Circle 8, Bolgia 9 Canti XXIX-XXXI - Circle 8, Bolgia 10 This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK

Cam reads the greatest poem ever written. Part 2/4, Canti XII-XVII, Circle 7 Canto XII - Circle 7, Ring 1 Canto XIII - Circle 7, Ring 2 Canti XIV-XVII - Circle 7, Ring 3 This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK

Cam reads the greatest poem ever written. Recorded Jan. 2020 on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. Part 1/4, Canti I-XI Canti I-II - Virgil & Descent Canto III - Gates & Vestibule Canto IV - Circle 1 Canto V - Circle 2 Canto VI - Circle 3 Canto VII - Circle 4 Canti VIII, IX - Circle 5 Canti X, XI - Circle 6 This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Marquita. Thanks for listening.

Thank you to Mailchimp, InVision, VOGSY and Media Temple for their support of our inaugural Digital Diversity Days, and their generous contributions to the Bureau Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) scholarship fund. With donations totaling $26,000, the DE&I scholarship will go live once more. These organizations have done so much to strengthen the Bureau community, so be sure to show them some love.Also, special thanks to Sparkbox who handled all of the planning and logistics for Digital Diversity Days. Our time together was thought-provoking and a wonderful opportunity to learn and connect.This week's episode was recorded previously and we've been holding it for a big announcement…Mailchimp now has a new website builder that will integrate seamlessly with your emails, landing pages, signup forms, social posts and ads. And there's even more coming out soon, so stay tuned.

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Robbie. Robbie is at vitaminwigc.bandcamp.com Thanks for listening.

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Matt. Matt is at therealmattbrown.com Thanks for listening.

WordPress Hosting 網站寄存公司比較 (Bluehost, Siteground, Mediatemple, Wpengine, Kinsta) 今天講關於wordpress上的hosting。 如果你用wordpress.org，就是自己下載的版本，就需要有自己的hosting plan。 他們的網站上也有建議幾家公司，例如有bluehost, dreamhost, siteground。 我本身有用過bluehost, siteground, mediatemple, wpengine, kinsta。 因為我自己用過的經驗，稍後會做一個片面而簡單的測試，和我自己的一些心得，可是不可能逐一給大家看，因為有些已經不再用。 首先是bluehost，我用Chrome browser，上面有個計時器，可以看到載入網站需要的時間，現在我只載入他們自己的網站，平均需時5秒，以前用的時候覺得他們的支援不太好，其他朋友的意見也差不多； dreamhost我沒有用過，同樣的載入他們的網站，平均需時3秒，算不錯； siteground我現在正在用，覺得便宜才用的，而且比較簡單，有一個Cpanel，速度要求不要太高，載入你的網站大約需時4到5秒，載入他們自己的網站平均需時3秒； godaddy也有很多朋友用過，可以登記domain，他們也提供 Wordpress hosting，載入他們的網站大約要4秒。 這個網站十分有名，不過有名在很多用家不滿意他們的速度。 另外轉換計劃的時候步驟很麻煩，需要整個網站拉下來再重新上載，嚇怕好多用家。 我也不知道這是一般的做法，還是正好我朋友遇到； 我很久以前用得較多的Mediatemple，他們不只做 wordpress，還做很多其他的hosting。 載入他們的網站大約需時6秒。 幾年前被godaddy收購做 hosting，godaddy到處收購主要是為了鞏固自己的網上王國； wpengine現在相當出名，以Premium hosting來算，應該最多wordpress用家使用。 現在他們的伺服器在雲端和Amazon，他們中間的software layer幫你做很多工作，每天的備份、有CDN/SSL，專為wordpress做的caching，和優化環境，我們當時放了一百個網站也用得很滿意。 直到一個時候我們需要用woocommerce，發現caching方面出了問題，不過這是1年前的事，不知道現在是否改善了； 最後是我現在常用的kinsta，我也放了100個網站，他們主要用Google雲端，伺服器地點可以選擇香港或者東南亞，載入他們自己的網站需要2-3秒，相當快。 他們提供的服務跟wpengine相似，用Google雲端、有每日備份、CDN/ SSL，有infrastructure特別有利於wordpress的速度，有專為wordpress網站的cache。 wpengine的woocommerce在cache方面出了一些問題，kinsta的cache功能很好沒有問題，在網店方面表現良好，所以我們現在將200個網站都放在kinsta。 Premium的價錢並不便宜，但是涵蓋的服務相當多，所以是有利有弊，看你需要的是什麼。 我幫客人管理的網站大部份放在這裏，自己做測試的就在siteground。 本視頻說的就是這些，剛才上面的示範，純粹是看載入他們的網站時間，並沒有真正放wordpress網站測試，因為也試不了那麼多，說的也是憑以前的經驗。 主要就是測試在siteground，認真的業務放在kinsta。 如果對於這個視頻或課程有任何疑問，請歡迎留言。 覺得這條視頻有給你提供一點價值的話，請 Like 一下及分享給你的朋友。 另外，我還有很多教學視頻，以下有我的網站及Facebook專頁，多多指教。 Website: https://www.hdcourse.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ivansopage YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ivanso Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanso/ Podcast: https://www.anchor.fm/hdcourse Amazon: http://amazon.com/author/ivanso Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/ivanso/ Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/user/ivanso Eventbrite: https://ivanso.eventbrite.com Slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/ivancyso

The short film I made with Chase can be seen here. This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Liz McNeil. Thanks for listening.

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Spencer. Thanks for listening.

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Erlin. Thanks for listening.

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Spencer. Thanks for listening.

This show is at podcast.cameronadair.com, Patreon, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by signing up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. Tip: Leave a message: bit.ly/CASPEAK Thanks to Jordan. Thanks for listening.

This show is now listener supported through Patreon at bit.ly/CAPodPtrn and by leaving a rating or review and subscribing on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Support for this show is also provided by using these links to sign up for a subscription to Audible, a web hosting service at Media Temple, or by shopping on Amazon. You can leave a tip here: Leave a message for the show here: bit.ly/CASPEAK More information can be found at podcast.cameronadair.com. Lee Shaner is a musician and podcast host. In this episode Cameron talks to Lee about music, Los Angeles, and podcast drama. Thanks to Lee. Thanks for listening.  

Today we have Neal St. Clair on the show who's the founder of East of Western. We dive deep into software, running an agency, and he asks the hosts some questions as well.

Longtime investigative journalist Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News analyzes the Buzzfeed News bombshell report that Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie to cover up a planned Trump Tower in Moscow. Robert Mueller is disputing the report and Isikoff offers his own critique of the story and what we know to be true thus far.  Popular economist and adviser to Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign Stephanie Kelton talks about Modern Monetary Theory, the lies told by Republicans and Democrats about deficits, and whether young workers will ever get Social Security benefits.  Los Angeles public school teachers appear to have won some major victories as a result of their historic strike. We speak to Noriko Nakada, an 8th grade English teacher at Emerson Middle School in LA, and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe, who covered the strike for The Nation.

I’m an innovation guy.    It may not say so on my business card, but that’s what I do.    I encourage people, whether inside HP or in my meetings with customers around the world, to accept that they and their product are going to have to change.    No matter how popular and successful your work is, things change.    The economy shifts; your customers’ needs evolve; technologies become redundant.    We’ve talked about this in earlier chapters, but looking forward, preparing for the inevitable evolutions in your business and your product are crucial if you’re going to succeed.       Amazon has been brilliant at refining What they do and How they do it to reflect the changing criteria of Who they’re doing it for.    This kind of flexibility is to be expected in the formative and pliable early years of a business or industry.    What’s impressive is that Amazon has retained that spirit even as they’ve solidified into the cornerstone of the digital marketplace.       The first phase of the Amazon era addressed readers’ criteria and hassles in the mid-’90s.    They made it easy to buy any book, no matter how niche or obscure, thereby undercutting Borders and Barnes & Noble to offer a cheaper product and saving you a trip to the mall in the process.    Mission accomplished.    This very simple What—cheaper books, huge selection, delivered to your door—worked.    Since then, they’ve diversified the products offered to the point where they are essentially an online department store.    They’ve experimented with everything from a search engine—A9 (built on the Google platform, but not a hit)—to allowing small booksellers a chance to list their books on the site.    Their Amazon Mechanical Turk service allows individuals to make money by offering their services in tiny increments of time.    Have five minutes free? Make a little money transcribing a two-minute podcast.       Whether any of these Whats are really a good idea is up for debate.    Amazon’s detractors argue that they are diluting their core message and product.    I’d counter that they are taking risks and exploring new uses for their existing infrastructure.    Much of Amazon’s explorations in creating new value are based around a tweak of this Killer Question, which goes something like “Is there unused space in my existing infrastructure that could be filled?”   Amazon has vastly more server capacity than they generally need in order to address requirements at peak times such as the Christmas holiday season or Black Friday.    As a result, they have taken their cue from companies like Rackspace and Media Temple and have begun renting their servers to provide infrastructure for third-party websites.    Their leap from selling books and other retail goods to getting into the computing infrastructure business has been unexpected.    But it has worked well.    Amazon S3 is very successful, and lots of start-ups use it.    As long as you have a credit card number, you can have servers and storage.    Amazon can easily allocate you more space on the servers as your business grows and needs more capacity.      The lesson here is to avoid being pigeonholed into one set of services.    Take a look at any underused resources you have available.    Is there a way that you could offer these to your customers as an auxiliary service to your main business?  Finding ways to offer underused resources as a service and see income where there would otherwise be none is brilliant.    These explorations might not yield big payoffs, but the point is that you need to be constantly looking at new ways to stay ahead of the trends that are shaping your industry.       [Sparking Points]  Are there year-round or seasonally based un- or underused assets or capabilities in your company (real estate, capacity, distribution, etc.)?  What customers, partners, or suppliers could benefit from having access to those assets?  What business model would you need in order to promote, sell, or support a set of products or services around these unused assets? 

This week, @Scarfinger & @lasberry discuss duck boats, tires, setting kids’ limits and more on episode 132 of Facetious! Let’s get it! 2:00 – Duck Boat deaths MO 5:00 – Grown men riding roller coasters 14:00 – Media Temple sacrilege 18:00 – Buying tires 21:00 – Throw some Ds 22:00 – Netflix Documentary series on

This week, @Scarfinger & @lasberry discuss amazon price day, music, games and more on episode 131 of Facetious! Let’s get it! 3:00 – Braums story 6:00 – Media Temple sacrilege 12:00 – Prime Day 13:00 – New PC Build 21:00 – Reconnecting with cats Consumption Scar:   27:00 – The Flash 29:00 – Lost in

Life Updates Adam: not much… WordPress Essentials Course going well! Kyle: Bachelor Party! Easter/Family trip  & working with Pippin in Kansas. WordPress News. WordPress 4.7.4. Wearing/Drinking Kyle – Media Temple shirt / water Adam- WCLAX 2016 shirt / water Questions How do you think we can get more people in the WP community to contribute?…

Whatcha wearing/drinking Kyle: special edition WordCamp Chicago 2016 Hoodie. Media Temple shirt. Adam: WC Ann Arbor 2014 Pullover & WooCommerce Ninja shirt. What we are working on. Kyle: New plugins in development. Adam: Delivered 2 client sites – 1 on spec! Questions: What shifts have you seen in the community and the conversations surrounding WordPress…

Mike Wells is a mastering engineer.  He opened Mike Wells Mastering fifteen years ago in a room at Hyde Street Studios in the San Francisco Tenderloin, where Cameron also worked later on.  He now runs Mike Wells Mastering out of North Hollywood. His credits include Green Day, Prince, Tommy Guerrero, Google, Apple, and many others.  He served on the board for the Recording Academy, and also as President of the LA chapter of AES.  Mike and Cameron talked about audio, music, and survival. Thanks to Mike.  You can find him at mikewellsmastering.com, and on Facebook. This show is available on iTunes and at cameronadair.com/podcast. This episode is brought to you by Audible, Amazon, and Media Temple.

Matt Kelley is a legendary SF Bay Area audio engineer.   His credits are crazy:  Digital Underground, 2-Pac, Souls of Mischief, Dead Kennedys, Hieroglyphics, and many more... Matt is the sound of a huge part of San Francisco musical and cultural history. Cameron and Matt have known each other for many years working in SF.  For this episode, they met up at Matt's studio, The Crows Nest, in Russian Hill in SF. Thank you to Matt Kelley Audio.  Matts website is mattkelleyaudio.com. This show is available on iTunes, cameronadair.com/podcast, and other awesome places through your computer. This episode is brought to you by Audible, Amazon, and is hosted in part by Media Temple.  Thank you for listening.

Brian Wakefield plays in the bands Melted Toys, Emotional, Healing Potporri, and runs the cassette label Death Records which has an annual festival, Deathstock, in Sonoma county every June. Cameron met up with Brian at Death Records HQ in SF, where they talked about music, movies, growing up in San Jose, cassettes, and other awesome things. Thanks to Brian and to Death Records.  Their website is longlivedeathrecords.com. This show is available on iTunes and at cameronadair.com/podcast. This episode is brought to you by Audible, Media Temple, and Amazon.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is becoming irrelevant, or invisible in my culture and in my society today.” Speaking on the global theme of “shock” in this CreativeMornings/Austin event from October 2015, Aralyn Hughes, a pioneer for women’s rights and self-proclaimed “Queen of Weird,” takes us on a colorful, poignant, and shocking journey through her incredible life. Whether it was teaching students about sex in a time when such topics were taboo, being among the first women in the US to obtain a legal abortion, or driving around Austin in her banana-topped art car, Aralyn Hughes makes a habit out of disrupting social norms. And the world is better for it. This episode was made possible by our friends at MailChimp and Media Temple.

Spencer Keeton Cunningham is a visual artist.  He travels around the world painting outdoor murals and selling work in galleries.  He smuggled skateboards into Cuba, and travels to paint in Alaska, Mexico, China, Japan, British Columbia, Canada, and all over the US.  We met up in the top floor tower of the Westerfeld house off of Alamo Square in SF.  Its a place with a lot of history, including past residents, Anton LaVey, Kenneth Anger, and from where there have been many UFO sightings.We chatted past sunset, not bothering to turn on any lights. We talked about dreams, traveling, music, technology, films, nature, and culture.Thanks to Spencer.  You can see his most recent show at The Luggage Store gallery in San Francisco and online on his tumblr and facebook.This show is at cameronadair.com/podcast.  You can subscribe, rate and review on iTunes, and Stitcher, and join Cameron next time. This episode is brought to you by Audible, Media Temple, and Amazon.

From 14 hour shifts as a Busboy in SOHO to selling his company Mad Mimi for $45,000,000 to Godaddy, this interview with Gary Levitt is one of the most inspirational I have ever heard. Hear his story and ignite your passion! From working on the music for The Oprah Winfrey Show to his love for Jazz and how he taught himself HTML from a book, this interview will keep you on the edge of your seat and waiting for more! Learn about his belief in remote working, always going to the top and his being anti-establishment and why that matters. You will learn something from this episode and be inspired. Name: Gary Levitt Website: http://madmimi.com (www.MadMimi.com) New Co: https://pinecone.com/ (Pinecone.com) LinkedIn: https://il.linkedin.com/in/garylevitt (Gary Levitt on LinkedIn) Twitter: https://twitter.com/garyjoe (@garyjoe) https://frumentrepreneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Gary.png () People, Companies and Books Mentioned in this Episode http://madmimi.com (MadMimi) http://godaddy.com (GoDaddy.com) http://fourhourworkweek.com/ (Tim Ferris & the 4 Hour Work Week) (Gary Did not read it) https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_smash_fear_learn_anything?language=en (But he did watch this Ted Talk with Tim) http://amzn.to/1PyM9rs (Getting Real By Jason Fried from 37 Signals) Oprah Winfrey http://www.sonicbids.com/ (Sonic Bids) http://amzn.to/1JYeucc (Head First HTML & CSS By: Elisabeth Robson) http://mediatemple.net/ (Media Temple) http://rubyonrails.org (Ruby on Rails) http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/ (David Heinemeier Hansson) http://jpattonassociates.com/ (Jeff Patton) http://amzn.to/1zU4ei5 (User Story Mapping by: Jeff Patton (Gary calls this on of the greatest books ever written)) Jet Blue http://mashable.com/2008/07/07/mad-mimi-email-marketing/ (Original Mad Mimi Launch Article on Mashable) http://ajaxian.com/archives/mad-mimi-wysiwyg-email-marketing (Original Mad Mimi Launch Article on Ajaxian) Starbucks https://www.linkedin.com/in/redsquirrel (Dave Hoover) https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobielangel (Tobie Langel) http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp (Constant Contact) http://mailchimp.com (MailChimp) Bob Parsons http://www.kkr.com/ (KKR) http://www.silverlake.com/ (SilverLake) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/02/us-godaddy-idUSTRE76066E20110702 (GoDaddy is Acquired for $2.25 Billion) https://dribbble.com/ (Dribbble.com) http://pinecone.com (Pinecone) Bibi Netanyahu Naftali Bennett   ——— https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-frum-entrepreneur/id975678776 (Are you enjoying this podcast? Please take 30 seconds and rate it on iTunes! Every 5 Stars helps us get more noticed!) To learn more about me, please check out http://nachum.co (Nachum.co) Thank you for listening!!                              

This week on the Boagworld Web Show we talk to Brett Harned about the value of digital project management. This week's show is sponsored by Opera, Media Temple and end of the season tears. For a transcript of this week's show containing all the links mentioned visit: https://boagworld.com/season/11/episode/1115/

This week on the Boagworld Web Show we talk to Mark Boulton about the do's and dont's of web typography. This week's show is sponsored by Opera, Media Temple and the yorkie chocolate bar I am currently eating. For access to the links mentioned in this show and a complete transcript please check out: https://boagworld.com/season/11/episode/1114/

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andy Abramson is the founder of Comunicano, Inc., a 20+ person asymmetrical communications consultancy, geared to providing clients with Senior Advising, Marketing Communications, Corporate Communications and Marketer-In-Residence services to start-ups, companies in transition and established brands with regard to influencer relations, marketing, advertising, public relations, social media, promotion, events and reputation management in the technology, consumer products and business to business markets. In the last 10 years 27 of his agency's clients have exited, with three IPOs. Some of the acquiring companies include Google, eBay, Yahoo, Nokia, Cisco, IBM, Citrix Online, Computer Associates, Symantec and Logitech.For 14 years Andy was Ken Rutkowski's co-host on KenRadio's World Technology Roundup and remains an active blogger with both VoIPWatch and Working Anywhere, two blogs that focus on emerging communications and the virtual workplace.Russell P. Reeder is President and COO of (mt) Media Temple, a premium provider of cloud services that powers 1.7 million websites for 130,000 customers in 100 countries worldwide. He's responsible for (mt) Media Temple's brand and overall vision, strategy, and execution. (mt) was recently acquired by GoDaddy and is now a GoDaddy company.A 20-year veteran of the IT field, Reeder continues to be on the leading edge, from entrepreneurial ventures to Fortune 500 powerhouses like Oracle to his first programming job at Mobil Oil. He's managed global high-growth businesses that have sold for billions of dollars and consistently drives performance and innovation at scale. Kronfli Bros. strives to manufacture and distribute unique, high quality food products to both the retail and wholesale markets. We partner with creative chefs and restaurants from around the world to offer our customers a tasteful window into culinary excellence. Regard of sustainability, passion, and a high level of customer service defines the goal of Kronfli Bros.

This week Jason breaks free of the hell of MediaTemple, Brian gets furnished, Jason gets caffeinated with a dirty apparatus, Brian talks cool ways to get badass signed books, Jason discovers the app of his dreams, as well as nightmares. And belfies! Show notes at http://grumpyoldgeeks.com/54

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools re-imagines the Whole Earth Catalog, of which he was an editor and publisher, for the Internet era: crowdsourced, crowdmade, crowdmanaged. He's been on the Internet for as long as there's been an Internet for all us to get on. He was part of the founding team of Wired magazine, and the author of many inspiring books and essays about technological change and self-empowerment, including "1,000 True Fans." We talk about collaboration, old and new technology, and making books. We had a full transcript of this interview made, which also has sources linked in for further reading. Sponsored by: The Fog Horn: A new short fiction magazine for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Four stories a month, 12 issues a year from exciting Hollywood writers and new voices. Free 7-day trial. lynda.com: Over 2,000 high-quality and engaging video courses taught by industry experts — with new courses added daily. Listeners get a free 7-day trial with full access to all content by visiting lynda.com/tnd and signing up. Media Temple: Web hosting for artists, designers, and Web developers since 1998. Media Temple hosts beautiful websites and great ideas. Use code "tnd" to get 25% off your first month.

Maxwell Salzberg of BackerKit knows what it's like to have a lot of people giving him money who want something in return: he and three colleagues credited the Diaspora project, one of Kickstarter's early blockbusters. He co-founded BackerKit with Rosanna Yau to help people with the problem of managing crowdfunding backers' responses and expectations. This episode is sponsored by Media Temple: Web hosting for artists, designers, and Web developers since 1998. Media Temple hosts beautiful websites and great ideas. Sign up with coupon code "tnd" to get 25% off your first month of hosting. We're also sponsored by Born SQL, who can help small- and medium-sized businesses who use Microsoft SQL Server without a dedicated database administrator. New Disruptors' listeners can get a Cdn$750 discount on Born SQL's analysis report, which examines your instances and provides extensive, implementable recommendations about making improvements.

Dan Shapiro created the game Robot Turtles out of scissors, clip art, and a printer to offer asymmetric play: kids and adults can play together and both can enjoy the experience. He brought it to Kickstarter to sell a few hundred copies, and wound selling over 25,000. In his workshop, Dan explains how the game developed, the Kickstarter proceeded, and how he's fulfilling it. This episode is sponsored by Media Temple, where New Disruptors listeners receive 25% off their first month of hosting with the coupon code "tnd". And by Audible.com, where you can get a free audiobook and a 30-day free trial by visiting http://audiblepodcast.com/disruptors.

Guest host Jason Snell talks to regular host Glenn Fleishman about Glenn's recent Kickstarter campaign to fund a book of non-fiction articles from The Magazine. Jason, host of The Incomparable and an editorial director at a major magazine firm, quizzes Glenn about failure, success, fulfillment (product and otherwise), and the reason we solicit funds from our fans, friends, family, and strangers. This episode is sponsored by Media Temple: Web hosting for artists, designers, and Web developers since 1998. World-class support available 24x7 through phone and chat—and even Twitter. Media Temple hosts beautiful websites and great ideas. Sign up with coupon code "tnd" to get 25% off your first month of hosting. We're also sponsored this time by Smile Software's TextExpander! TextExpander avoids the tedium of retyping common text, shortening URLs, and much more. Get a copy today and let the computer do the hard work!

Take a picture and put it under glass, but not quite the way you think. The folks at Fracture have a built a business that connects several different technologies into one new way to make large-format photos printed on glass suitable for hanging. Today I talk to Abhi Lokesh, one of Fracture's founders, about the journey from a small village in Africa to a whizz-bang printing and distribution company. This episode is sponsored by Media Temple: Web hosting for artists, designers, and Web developers since 1998. World-class support available 24x7 through phone and chat—and even Twitter. Media Temple hosts beautiful websites and great ideas. Sign up with coupon code "tnd" to get 25% off your first month of hosting.

Double Union is a new community workshop in San Francisco designed for women, and intended to provide a comfortable, welcoming environment to make things. In this podcast, I visit the pre-renovation space with Amelia Greenhall, one of the people who helped create the non-profit organization. She explains why Double Union is necessary, and the path that led to it and others like it. This episode is sponsored by Media Temple, where a Grid plan gives you 100 Web sites, 100 GB of storage, and a terabyte of data transfer each month. Sign up with coupon code "tnd" to get 25% off your first month of hosting.

In this episode we discuss the aquisition of CoreMatix by Perficient, Workday partnership with Salesforce.com, GoDaddy acquisition of Media Temple, and a few thoughts on Salesforce Files and Identity services.Perficient acquires CoreMatrixSalesforce and Workday Partnership Workday Big Data Analytics Salesforce Q2 Numbers GoDaddy acquires Media Temple - Chris Coyier’s thoughts on the acquisition Salesforce Identity Chatterbox is now Salesforce Files  Download MP3 (36.5 MB, 00:50:42)

Dan is back! We catch up on latest happenings, talk about upcoming changes to the show, and answer listener questions like:* Can I donate time for a tax write-off?* I'm doing design work for a client that is asking for multiple revisions and it's costing me a fortune and making me lose enthusiasm for the project. How should I handle this?* How do I know which clients are right for me?* You're hired to do three design concepts for a client, and paid 50% up front. You do the three designs, but the client doesn't like any of them. What do you do?* How do you "bake in" the cost of things (supplies, hardware, conferences) that aren't related to your project?* How do you guys handle a scope document? Do you itemize things?* Where do you guys go for online learning/tutorials?* What processes do you use to find opportunities to add value to client's projects?* How should I handle health insurance?* How do I know when to grow my freelance business into an agency?* How do you feel about offering discounts for first time clients?* How do you handle raising your rates for old clients?* GoDaddy just bought Media Temple, what does this mean for web hosting?This week's show is sponsored by:* FreeAgent* Harvest

On this episode of WPwatercooler we celebrate about our first birthday and discuss the year in review. Live stream starts at 11am PST MondaysThe one year anniversary of WP WatercoolerFavorite Episodes:* Episode 28 – April Fools Day show – Drupal Watercooler* WordCamp Live shows* Orange County* Phoenix, Day two* Miami, Recap* Show and tellFavorite Guests:* Siobhan McKeown* Andrew Norcross* Carrie Dills* Jeff Zinn* Sarah Wefeld* Morton Rand-Hendriksen* Natalie MacLeesStats as of the September 16:* 54 Guests on the show* 2,982,983 episode viewsOther WP podcasts:* DradCast* Matt Report* This Week in WordPressMentions:* github* jetpack* Media Temple* #blamelema[LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep52-happy-1st-birthday-wordpress-year-in-review-wpwatercooler-sept-16-2013″ show_gravatar=”true”] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to the Software Process and Measurement Cast 188! The Software Process and Measurement Cast 188 features my interview with Siraj Sirajuddin.  We discussed agile, organizational change, listening, philosophy and a ton more! Siraj has provided excellent change management coaching and leadership to large and medium sized organizations like Extended Stay America, Ft. Huachuca AZ, DKB Household Brands, Railinc, Media Temple, EDF, Springfield TN Middle School, Ultimate Software, LabCorp, Elemica, Inc., ShoreTel, Winn Dixie Stores, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, NIH, CMS and Compaq Computers.  He has 20 years of experience with people and process improvement consulting and coaching. He has deep and varied domain (Social Media, SAAS, IT, Software, Healthcare, Retail, Transport, Education, Finance) and functional knowledge and process improvement experience using Lean, Kanban, Agile, CMMI, Six Sigma, PMBOK, SOX, BASEL and HIPAA. He is also an expert / student of Systems Thinking / Learning Organizations, People Dynamics, Transactional Analysis, MBTI, FIRO(B), Element B, Leadership & Motivation and Team Building.  He invented several unique techniques (Influence Maps, Supplication, Exit & Re-entry, Language of Elegance, The Interview, Clean Slate, Cereal Box, Intensive Collaboration & Discovery) that are now used for managing strategic plans and scaling operations / projects at various client locations.  Siraj completed his MBA in 1992 from BIM and he continues to learn every second!  He loves poetry, travel, music, books and being with people. Most of all he loves his two daughters!  He brings tremendous energy and passion to every engagement Contact Information:  Web:  http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=370174&locale=en_US&trk=tyahTwitter: http://twitter.com/siraju  Shameless Ad for my book!  Have you bought your copy? Contact information for the Software Process and Measurement CastEmail:  spamcastinfo@gmail.comVoicemail:  +1-206-888-6111Website: www.spamcast.netTwitter: www.twitter.com/tcagleyFacebook:  http://bit.ly/16fBWV Next The Software Process and Measurement Cast 189 will feature Part Two of "Who Owns Estimating In An Agile Project."  THe essay dives more deeply into the role of the PMO and the prorject team in Agile Estimation. I hope we will all still be friends when I am done.

Dealing with domains and hosting and all the server setup stuff isn’t usually the most comfortable stuff for web designers. In this screencast I walk though my regular process and share many little tips of how I like to handle it. I use a real live domain name that I recently purchased on Go Daddy, point it to my Media Temple hosting and then switch the email handling to Google Apps. Links from Video: Go Daddy Whois MediaTemple Google Apps… Read article “#46: Domains, DNS, Hosting and Google Apps”

Driving while podcasting - sounds illegal but it seems like the only way I'm going to get a new episode online. I've been busy working on a new project and shared my experience with deploying my latest Ruby on Rails application on Media Temple's grid infrastructure. Here's the blog posts that I mentioned in the cast with tips and tricks for deploying on mt with svn and capistrano. http://blog.vixiom.com/2007/02/18/mt-ror-a-z-the-complete-guide-to-getting-rails-running-on-media-temple/ http://www.capify.org/upgrade/gotchas http://blog.postpostmodern.com/2006/11/29/a-recipe-for-capistrano-rails-deployment-on-media-temples-grid-server/ http://myles.eftos.id.au/blog/2006/10/27/setting-up-a-rails-app-on-a-media-temple-grid-server/

Science and Art Project, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Societie de Chimie Industrielle Fellowship. Ms. Jo Ann Caplin has had a distinguished career in television. As a producer for ABC News and CBS News she won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards for her work. Her areas of research are science education, and the relationships between science and art. She has lectured on 'Science and Art' all over the U.S. and in England. In the summer of 2006, she was invited to lecture at the Oxford Round Table.

Science and Art Project, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Societie de Chimie Industrielle Fellowship. Ms. Jo Ann Caplin has had a distinguished career in television. As a producer for ABC News and CBS News she won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards for her work. Her areas of research are science education, and the relationships between science and art. She has lectured on 'Science and Art' all over the U.S. and in England. In the summer of 2006, she was invited to lecture at the Oxford Round Table.

AudioSurgeon - Episode 003 - Part B - featuring Bugz in the Attic CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO AUDIOSURGEON IN iTUNES! Part 2 of our two part Podcast extravaganza, with almost and hour and three quarters of chat, interviews and music. This half features the second part of our super hero chat and an interview with remixers turned funksters, Bugz in the Attic. And of course there is a ton of cool music from Bonobo and more.Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment. Episode 003 Show Notes: SPONSORS (mt) Media TempleIndustry-leading web hosting and software application services company. We wouldn't be here without 'em! ** FULL SHOW NOTES COMING SOON ** MUSICFingathing - Superhero MusicAlbum: Superhero MusicRelease Date: Out NowLabel: Grand CentralOfficial SiteBonobo - Nightlife (featuring Bajka) Single Released 14th AugustAlbum: Days to Come Release Date: 2nd OctoberLabel: Ninja TuneOfficial SiteBugz in the Attic - Inna RowAlbum: Back in the DoghouseRelease Date: Out NowLabel: Nurture RecordsOfficial SitePixelsurgeon Album ReviewCaptain - Build a LifeAlbum: This is Hazelville Release Date: 14th AugustRecord Label: EMIOfficial SiteG-Ampere - Destroyer's StepAlbum: Fresh Cuts from Japan Vol 1Official SiteNneka - The Uncomfortable Truth Single released 21st AugustAlbum: Victim of Truth Release Date: 18th SeptemberLabel: Yo MamasOfficial SiteMusic used with kind permission. Thanks to Chris Drury, Laura Seach, Alex Marcou, Camilla Pearce, Lucius Yeo, Iain Cooke, Kate Fitzpatrick, Ben Parker, Stephen Phillips, Simon Hotchkiss, Justin Pritchard, Stuart Freeman and David Cirone for their help.

AudioSurgeon - Episode 002 - featuring Plaid and Charli 2na CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO AUDIOSURGEON IN iTUNES! It's back - the version of Pixelsurgeon you can listen to while driving the car, potholing and making sweet, sweet love. We have a ton of fabulous stuff: Part 2 of our Jurassic 5 interview, an interview with Plaid and video maker Bob Jaroc, opinions coming out of the wazoo, and music from Mogwai, Plaid, Mojave 3, Bugz in the Attic and more!Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment. Episode 002 Show Notes: SPONSORS (mt) Media TempleIndustry-leading web hosting and software application services company. We wouldn't be here without 'em! INTERVIEWS: CHARLI 2NA FROM JURASSIC 5 Official SiteJurassic 5 MySpace PageInterscope INTERVIEW: PLAID AND BOB JAROC PlaidBob JarocWarp DISCUSSION: JET LI Fearless review on PixelsurgeonJet Li on IMDB Jet Li on Wikipedia OPINION: MYSPACE Team Surgeon: Pixelsurgeon's MySpace PageJason Arber MySpace PageSam Gilbey MySpace PageRichard May MySpace PageVitamin: The MySpace Problem ASK RINA: BEAR VS TIGER Bear Vs Tiger (Actually Bear vs Lion, but who's counting?) (NOTE FROM RINA: Bear Vs Liger link found by Alex Amelines. This footage contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing and offensive. Pixelsurgeon and AudioSurgeon are animal lovers and we hope that the maker of this documentary got a smack in the face.) Cat chases bear up a tree You can email your questions for Rina to askrina@pixelsurgeon.com, Skype a message to "audiosurgeon", or if you don't have Skype you can call 020 8133 9828 (+44 20 8133 9828 for calls outside the UK) and leave a message. MUSIC Bugz in the Attic - Move Aside Bugz in the Attic - Consequences Album: Back in the Dog HouseRelease Date: 24 July 2006Label: NurtureOfficial Site Mojave 3 - Breaking the IceAlbum: Puzzles Like You Release Date: Out NowLabel: 4ADPuzzles Like You review on PixelsurgeonOfficial SiteMojave 3 on 4AD New Flesh - Wherever We Go Album: Universally Dirty Release Date: 3 July 2006 (Album) 24 July 2006 (Single)Label: Ninja TuneNew Flesh on Ninja Tune Metronomy vs South Central - Trick or TreatzAlbum: Pip Paine (Pay Back the £5000 You Owe)Release Date: Out NowLabel: Holiphonic RecordsHoliphonic Coldcut - Walk a MileAlbum: Sound MirrorsRelease Date: Out Now (Album) 21 August 2006 (Single)Label: Ninja TuneColdcut interview on PixelsurgeonSound Mirrors review in PixelsurgeonColdcut.netColdcut's MySpace PageColdcut on Ninja Tune Mogwai - Travel is DangerousAlbum: Mr. BeastLabel: PIASRelease Date: Out NowOfficial SiteMogwai Podcast (Requires iTunes) Diesler - PathosAlbum: Keepie UppiesRelease Date: Out NowLabel: Tru Thoughts Diesler interview on PixelsurgeonOfficial SiteTru Thoughts Plaid - The Launching of Big FaceAlbum: Greedy BabyRelease Date: Out NowLabel: Warp Official SiteWarp All music used with kind permission. Thanks to Lucius Yeo, Melanie Gaugl, Laura Seach, Simon Yarde, Ryan Bird, Alex Marcou and Jo Kelly for their help.

AudioSurgeon - Episode 001 - featuring Jurassic 5 CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO AUDIOSURGEON IN iTUNES! It's here at last! The very first Pixelsurgeon Podcast! Games and Movie chat, cool music and an interview with Hip Hop legends Jurassic 5.Although we're hopefully going to do the podcasts on a weekly basis, they may be a bit random while we find our groove. Hope you like it and don't forget to share your opinions in the comments section! Episode 001 Show Notes: SPONSORS (mt) Media TempleIndustry-leading web hosting and software application services company. We wouldn't be here without 'em! GAMES Links coming soon! MUSIC The Delays: You and MeFrom the album You See ColoursRough TradeGomez: How We OperateFrom the album How We OperateIndependienteOutputmessage: SommeilFrom the album Nebulae (out 26th June)Melodic RecordsDaedelus: Lights OutFrom the album Denies the Days DemiseNinja TuneImogen Heap: The WalkFrom the album Speak for YourselfSony BMGAmmoncontact featuring Brother J and Cut Chemist: Drum RidersFrom the album With VoicesNinja Tune Quantic: Meet Me at the Pomegranate TreeFrom the album An Announcement to Answer (out 24th July)Tru ThoughtsNatalie Walker: No One Else (The Vector Warrior Remix)From the No One Else EPOriginal version of the track is from the album Urban Angel (release TBC)Dorado RecordsJURASSIC 5Official SiteJurassic 5 MySpace PageTracks played: Work It Out featuring Dave Matthews from the forthcoming album FeedbackI Am Somebody from Power In Numbers All music used with kind permission. Thanks go to Lucy Beer, Leanne Mison, Laura Norton, David Cooper, Emma Edmondson, Laura Seach, Alex Marcou and The Delays. MOVIESUnited 93 Down in the Valley The Omen Mission Impossible III The Da Vinci Code X-Men: The Last Stand

AudioSurgeon - Episode 003 - Part A - featuring Rowan Woods, director of Little Fish, starring Cate Blanchett CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO AUDIOSURGEON IN iTUNES! It's two weeks late and a dollar short, but feel the width. We had so much stuff for this podcast we had to break it into two parts. Part A features an interview with Rowan Woods, director of gritty Aussie flick Little Fish, featuring Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving. Alex Wiltshire tells us what he thinks of the Nintendo Wii's controller and we have part 1 of Super Hero movie discussion. And of course there is a ton of cool music from Punish the Atom and more.Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment. Episode 003 Show Notes: SPONSORS (mt) Media TempleIndustry-leading web hosting and software application services company. We wouldn't be here without 'em! ** FULL SHOW NOTES COMING SOON ** MUSICNneka - The Uncomfortable Truth Single released 21st AugustAlbum: Victim of Truth Release Date: 18th SeptemberLabel: Yo MamasOfficial SiteQuantic - An Announcement to AnswerAlbum: An Announcement to AnswerRelease Date: Out NowLabel: Tru-ThoughtsOfficial SitePunish the Atom - First Line in FrankensteinSingle Out NowAlbum: I Cry DemolitionRelease Date: 14th AugustLabel: 48CrashOfficial SiteAim (featuring Nico) - NorthwestSingle Out NowAlbum: Flight 602 Release Date: 18th SeptemberLabel: Atic RecordsOfficial SiteBell X1 - Rocky Took a Lover Single released August 14thAlbum: FlockRelease Date: Out NowLabel: IslandOfficial SiteBen Parker - Crooked LinesOfficial SiteFingathing - Superhero MusicAlbum: Superhero MusicRelease Date: Out NowLabel: Grand CentralOfficial SiteMusic used with kind permission. Thanks to Chris Drury, Laura Seach, Alex Marcou, Camilla Pearce, Lucius Yeo, Iain Cooke, Kate Fitzpatrick, Ben Parker, Stephen Phillips, Simon Hotchkiss, Justin Pritchard, Stuart Freeman and David Cirone for their help.

Nathalie Lussier is a digital strategist who believes that unique businesses deserve unique strategies to succeed online…and she loves coming up with ideas to match your ambition. An early-adopter of technology as a child, Nathalie was designing websites by the age of 12. Despite having job offers from prestigious Wall Street firms, Nathalie followed her passions and while growing her first business, being her quirky self, and wearing a witch's hat in her videos, she built a website that now boasts 750,000 yearly visitors and over 1 million page views. That's when her readers started asking her how she did it, which brings us to today's interview. Rubber-Meets-The-Road Tip * Nathalie is good at simplifying the complex. " Start where people are at." (Meet them where they are.) In her healthy eating site, she'd literally show people how to cut an avocado and how to know when it's ripe. It sounds rudimentary, but people are looking for help and are embarrassed to admit what they don't know so start small and work you way up in helping your prospects and clients. * Start with a good site and a follow-up system in place. Nathalie offers her 30-day list-building challenge for free. Most people are building big Facebook profiles or Twitter followers but no email lists. The problem with this strategy is if people weren't online when you made that Tweet or Post you've lost your chance to make an impact and a sale. Also, social media is quickly becoming a pay-to-play arena. If you are going to spend money online, make sure you start with a good web site and email follow-up sequence. (That's why I recommend HubSpot ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/ ).) * Nathalie recommends Wordpress and she has some great plugins she recommends that are free to use and can help you grow. * Wordpress SEO by Yoast ( https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ ) (SEO still matters) * Pop-Up Ally ( http://ambitionally.com/popupally/tutorials/ ) , which Nathalie and her husband created * “Empower your audience to share for you.” Have easily-shareable images. Click To Tweet ( http://clicktotweet.com/ ) from blog posts. * Google+ is important now. (It was then, but not in 2019!) * Start with great content. * Have strong calls to action. * If I don't ask people to share they don't. * Use BackupBuddy ( http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/ ) to backup your Wordpress website. * Use a more robust host for your site once you start making money and increasing traffic. Nathalie uses WP Engine. I use Media Temple ( http://www.mediatemple.net#a_aid=531b4ca789c0e ) for this site but I got started with HostGator ( http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=wes1479 ) (and still use them today for development of new sites before I launch them). * Don't get stuck in thinking about everything. Just get going and put one front in front of the other. Links Mentioned * Death To The Stock Photo ( http://deathtothestockphoto.com/ ) * WP MultiSite ( http://wpmultisite.com/ ) * Nathalie Lussier's Home Page ( http://nathalielussier.com/ ) * Off The Charts Business Podcast With Nathalie Lussier ( http://nathalielussier.com/podcast-2 ) * 30 Day List Building Challenge ( http://30daylistbuildingchallenge.com/ ) * Off The Charts Live ( http://offthechartslive.com ) * Nathalie Lussier Google+ ( https://plus.google.com/117381317686689316989 ) * Nathalie Lussier on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/nathalielussier ) Get all of the show notes for every episode of The Sales Podcast ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/podcasts/ ) with Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer® ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/ ). Use these resources to grow your sales: * Sell More This Month ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/30-day-sales-growth ) * Hire Better Salespeople ( https://talentgenius.simplybook.me/v2/ ) * Hire The Best Keynote Speaker ( https://www.wesschaeffer.com/ ) * Find Your Best CRM ( https://info.thesaleswhisperer.com/best-crm-quiz ) * Join the Free Facebook Group ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/theimplementors/ ) Check out earlier episodes of The Sales Podcast: * Episodes 1 to 10 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-one-to-ten ). * Episodes 11 to 20 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/the-sales-podcast-episodes-11-20 ). * Episodes 21 to 30 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-21-30 ). * Episodes 31 to 40 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-31-40 ). * Episodes 41 to 50 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-41-50 ). * Episodes 51 to 60 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-51-60 ). * Episodes 61 to 70 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-61-70 ). Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-sales-podcast/exclusive-content Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy