Podcasts about MongoDB

This podcast episode you're listening to right now was delivered to you, in part, by MongoDB and Python powering our web apps and production processes. But if you're using pymongo, the native driver from MongoDB to talk to the server, you're doing it wrong. Basing your app on a foundation of exchanging raw dictionaries is a castle of sand. BTW, see the joke at the end of the show about this. You should be using an ODM. This time we're talking about Beanie which is one of the exciting, new MongoDB Object Document Mappers which is based on Pydantic and is async-native. Join me as I discuss this project with its creator: Roman Right. Links from the show Roman on Twitter: @roman_the_right Beanie ODM: github.com Tutorial: roman-right.github.io Beanie Relations, Cache, Actions and more!

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.

I'm always on the look out for a good Python UI framework. This episode focuses on Dear PyGui. Dear PyGui: A fast and powerful Graphical User Interface Toolkit for Python with minimal dependencies, created by Jonathan Hoffstadt and Preston Cothren. They are here to tell us all about it. Links from the show Jonathan Hoffstadt: @jhoffs1 Preston Cothren: @toulaboy3 Dear PyGUI source: github.com Video tutorials: dearpygui.readthedocs.io Getting started tutorial: dearpygui.readthedocs.io OpenFOAM: openfoam.org Vulkan: vulkan.org Michael's Python Shorts video series The playlist: talkpython.fm/python-shorts Michael's YouTube Channel: youtube.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Sentry Error Monitoring, Code TALKPYTHON TopTal AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

About MilesAs Chief Technology Officer at SADA, Miles Ward leads SADA's cloud strategy and solutions capabilities. His remit includes delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization; reinforcing our engineering culture; and engaging with customers on their most complex and ambitious plans around Google Cloud.Previously, Miles served as Director and Global Lead for Solutions at Google Cloud. He founded the Google Cloud's Solutions Architecture practice, launched hundreds of solutions, built Style-Detection and Hummus AI APIs, built CloudHero, designed the pricing and TCO calculators, and helped thousands of customers like Twitter who migrated the world's largest Hadoop cluster to public cloud and Audi USA who re-platformed to k8s before it was out of alpha, and helped Banco Itau design the intercloud architecture for the bank of the future.Before Google, Miles helped build the AWS Solutions Architecture team. He wrote the first AWS Well-Architected framework, proposed Trusted Advisor and the Snowmobile, invented GameDay, worked as a core part of the Obama for America 2012 “tech” team, helped NASA stream the Curiosity Mars Rover landing, and rebooted Skype in a pinch.Earning his Bachelor of Science in Rhetoric and Media Studies from Willamette University, Miles is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur who also plays a mean electric sousaphone.Links: SADA.com: https://sada.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/milesward Email: miles@sada.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.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 today, once again by my friend and yours, Miles Ward, who's the CTO at SADA. However, he is, as I think of him, the closest thing the Google Cloud world has to Corey Quinn. Now, let's be clear, not the music and dancing part that is Forrest Brazeal, but Forrest works at Google Cloud, whereas Miles is a reasonably salty third-party. Miles, thank you for coming back and letting me subject you to that introduction.Miles: Corey, I appreciate that introduction. I am happy to provide substantial salt. It is easy, as I play brass instruments that produce my spit in high volumes. It's the most disgusting part of any possible introduction. For the folks in the audience, I am surrounded by a collection of giant sousaphones, tubas, trombones, baritones, marching baritones, trumpets, and pocket trumpets.So, Forrest threw down the gauntlet and was like, I can play a keyboard, and sing, and look cute at the same time. And so I decided to fail at all three. We put out a new song just a bit ago that's, like, us thanking all of our customers and partners, covering Kool & the Gang “Celebration,” and I neither look good, [laugh] play piano, or smiling, or [capturing 00:01:46] any of the notes; I just play the bass part, it's all I got to do.Corey: So, one thing that I didn't get to talk a lot about because it's not quite in my universe, for one, and for another, it is during the pre re:Invent—pre:Invent, my nonsense thing—run up, which is Google Cloud Next.Miles: Yes.Corey: And my gag a few years ago is that I'm not saying that Google is more interested in what they're building and what they're shipping, but even their conference is called Next. Buh dum, hiss.Miles: [laugh].Corey: So, I didn't really get to spend a lot of attention on the Google Cloud releases that came out this year, but given that SADA is in fact the, I believe, largest Google Cloud partner on the internet, and thus the world—Miles: [unintelligible 00:02:27] new year, three years in a row back, baby.Corey: Fantastic. I assume someone's watch got stuck or something. But good work. So, you have that bias in the way that I have a bias, which is your business is focused around Google Cloud the way that mine is focused on AWS, but neither of us is particularly beholden to that given company. I mean, you do have the not getting fired as partner, but that's a bit of a heavy lift; I don't think I can mouth off well enough to get you there.So, we have a position of relative independence. So, you were tracking Google Next, the same way that I track re:Invent. Well, not quite the same way I track re:Invent; there are some significant differences. What happened at Cloud Next 2021, that the worst of us should be paying attention to?Miles: Sure. I presented 10% of the material at the first re:Invent. There are 55 sessions; I did six. And so I have been at Cloud events for a really long time and really excited about Google's willingness to dive into demos in a way that I think they have been a little shy about. Kelsey Hightower is the kind of notable deep exception to that. Historically, he's been ready to dive into the, kind of, heavy hands-on piece but—Corey: Wait, those were demos? [Thought 00:03:39] was just playing Tetris on stage for the love of it.Miles: [laugh]. No. And he really codes all that stuff up, him and the whole team.Corey: Oh, absol—I'm sorry. If I ever grow up, I wish to be Kelsey Hightower.Miles: [laugh]. You and me both. So, he had kind of led the charge. We did a couple of fun little demos while I was there, but they've really gotten a lot further into that, and I think are doing a better job of packaging the benefits to not just developers, but also operators and data scientists and the broader roles in the cloud ecosystem from the new features that are being launched. And I think, different than the in-person events where there's 10, 20,000, 40,000 people in the audience paying attention, I think they have to work double-hard to capture attention and get engineers to tune in to what's being launched.But if you squint and look close, there are some, I think, very interesting trends that sit in the back of some of the very first launches in what I think are going to be whole veins of launches from Google over the course of the next several years that we are working really hard to track along with and make sure we're extracting maximum value from for our customers.Corey: So, what was it that they announced that is worth paying attention to? Now, through the cacophony of noise, one announcement that [I want to note 00:04:49] was tied to Next was the announcement that GME group, I believe, is going to be putting their futures exchange core trading systems on Google Cloud. At which point that to me—and I know people are going to yell at me, and I don't even slightly care—that is the last nail in the coffin of the idea that well, Google is going to turn this off in a couple years. Sorry, no. That is not a thing that's going to happen. Worst case, they might just stop investing it as aggressively as they are now, but even that would be just a clown-shoes move that I have a hard time envisioning.Miles: Yeah, you're talking now over a dozen, over ten year, over a billion-dollar commitments. So, you've got to just really, really hate your stock price if you're going to decide to vaporize that much shareholder value, right? I mean, we think that, in Google, stock price is a material fraction of the recognition of the growth trajectory for cloud, which is now basically just third place behind YouTube. And I think you can do the curve math, it's not like it's going to take long.Corey: Right. That requires effectively ejecting Thomas Kurian as the head of Google Cloud and replacing him with the former SVP of Bad Decisions at Yahoo.Miles: [laugh]. Sure. Google has no shyness about continuing to rotate leadership. I was there through three heads of Google Cloud, so I don't expect that Thomas will be the last although I think he may well go down in history as having been the best. The level of rotation to the focuses that I think are most critical, getting enterprise customers happy, successful, committed, building macroscale systems, in systems that are critical to the core of the business on GCP has grown at an incredible rate under his stewardship. So, I think he's doing a great job.Corey: He gets a lot of criticism—often from Googlers—when I wind up getting the real talk from them, which is, “Can you tell me what you really think?” Their answer is, “No,” I'm like, “Okay, next question. Can I go out and buy you eight beers and then”— and it's like, “Yeah.” And the answer that I get pretty commonly is that he's brought too much Oracle into Google. And okay, that sounds like a bad thing because, you know, Oracle, but let's be clear here, but what are you talking about specifically? And what they say distills down to engineers are no longer the end-all be-all of everything that Google Cloud. Engineers don't get to make sales decisions, or marketing decisions, or in some cases, product decisions. And that is not how Google has historically been run, and they don't like the change. I get it, but engineering is not the only hard thing in the world and it's not the only business area that builds value, let's be clear on this. So, I think that the things that they don't like are in fact, what Google absolutely needs.Miles: I think, one, the man is exceptionally intimidating and intentionally just hyper, hyper attentive to his business. So, one of my best employees, Brad [Svee 00:07:44], he worked together with me to lay out what was the book of our whole department, my team of 86 people there. What are we about? What do we do? And like I wanted this as like a memoriam to teach new hires as got brought in. So, this is, like, 38 pages of detail about our process, our hiring method, our promotional approach, all of it. I showed that to my new boss who had come in at the time, and he thought some of the pictures looked good. When we showed it to TK, he read every paragraph. I watched him highlight the paragraphs as he went through, and he read it twice as fast as I can read the thing. I think he does that to everybody's documents, everywhere. So, there's a level of just manual rigor that he's brought to the practice that was certainly not there before that. So, that alone, it can be intimidating for folks, but I think people that are high performance find that very attractive.Corey: Well, from my perspective, he is clearly head and shoulders above Adam Selipsky, and Scott Guthrie—the respective heads of AWS and Azure—for one key reason: He is the only one of those three people who follows me on Twitter. And—Miles: [laugh].Corey: —honestly, that is how I evaluate vendors.Miles: That's the thing. That's the only measure, yep. I've worked on for a long time with Selipsky, and I think that it will be interesting to see whether Adam's approach to capital allocation—where he really, I think, thinks of himself as the manager of thousands of startups, as opposed to a manager of a global business—whether that's a more efficient process for creating value for customers, then, where I think TK is absolutely trying to build a much more unified, much more singular platform. And a bunch of the launches really speak to that, right? So, one of the product announcements that I think is critical is this idea of the global distributed cloud, Google Distributed Cloud.We started with Kubernetes. And then you layer on to that, okay, we'll take care of Kubernetes for you; we call that Anthos. We'll build a bunch of structural controls and features into Anthos to make it so that you can really deal with stuff in a global way. Okay, what does that look like further? How do we get out into edge environments? Out into diverse hardware? How do we partner up with everybody to make sure that, kind of like comparing Apple's approach to Google's approach, you have an Android ecosystem of Kubernetes providers instead of just one place you can buy an outpost. That's generally the idea of GDC. I think that's a spot where you're going to watch Google actually leverage the muscle that it already built in understanding open-source dynamics and understanding collaboration between companies as opposed to feeling like it's got to be built here. We've got to sell it here. It's got to have our brand on it.Corey: I think that there's a stupendous and extreme story that is still unfolding over at Google Cloud. Now, re:Invent this year, they wound up talking all about how what they were rolling out was a focus on improving primitives. And they're right. I love their managed database service that they launched because it didn't exist.Miles: Yeah Werner's slide, “It's primitives, not frameworks.” I was like, I think customers want solutions, not frameworks or primitives. [laugh]. What's your plan?Corey: Yeah. However, I take a different perspective on all of this, which is that is a terrific spin on the big headline launches all missed the re:Invent timeline, and… oops, so now we're just going to talk about these other things instead. And that's great, but then they start talking about industrial IOT, and mainframe migrations, and the idea of private 5G, and running fleets of robots. And it's—Miles: Yeah, that's a cool product.Corey: Which one? I'm sorry, they're all very different things.Miles: Private 5G.Corey: Yeah, if someone someday will explain to me how it differs from Wavelength, but that's neither here nor there. You're right, they're all interesting, but none of them are actually doing the thing that I do, which is build websites, [unintelligible 00:11:31] looking for web services, it kind of says it in the name. And it feels like it's very much broadening into everything, and it's very difficult for me to identify—and if I have trouble that I guarantee you customers do—of, which services are for me and which are very much not? In some cases, the only answer to that is to check the pricing. I thought Kendra, their corporate information search thing was for me, then it's 7500 bucks a month to get started with that thing, and that is, “I can hire an internal corporate librarian to just go and hunt through our Google Drive.” Great.Miles: Yeah.Corey: So, there are—or our Dropbox, or our Slack. We have, like, five different information repositories, and this is how corporate nonsense starts, let me assure you.Miles: Yes. We call that luxury SaaS, you must enjoy your dozens of overlapping bills for, you know, what Workspace gives you as a single flat rate.Corey: Well, we have [unintelligible 00:12:22] a lot of this stuff, too. Google Drive is great, but we use Dropbox for holding anything that touches our customer's billing information, just because I—to be clear, I do not distrust Google, but it also seems a little weird to put the confidential billing information for one of their competitors on there to thing if a customer were to ask about it. So, it's the, like, I don't believe anyone's doing anything nefarious, but let's go ahead and just make sure, in this case.Miles: Go further man. Vimeo runs on GCP. You think YouTube doesn't want to look at Vimeo stats? Like they run everything on GCP, so they have to have arrived at a position of trust somehow. Oh, I know how it's called encryption. You've heard of encryption before? It's the best.Corey: Oh, yes. I love these rumors that crop up every now and again that Amazon is going to start scanning all of its customer content, somehow. It's first, do you have any idea how many compute resources that would take and to if they can actually do that and access something you're storing in there, against their attestations to the contrary, then that's your story because one of them just makes them look bad, the other one utterly destroys their entire business.Miles: Yeah.Corey: I think that that's the one that gets the better clicks. So no, they're not doing that.Miles: No, they're not doing that. Another product launch that I thought was super interesting that describes, let's call it second place—the third place will be the one where we get off into the technical deep end—but there's a whole set of coordinated work they're calling Cortex. So, let's imagine you go to a customer, they say, “I want to understand what's happening with my business.” You go, “Great.” So, you use SAP, right? So, you're a big corporate shop, and that's your infrastructure of choice. There are a bunch of different options at that layer.When you set up SAP, one of the advantages that something like that has is they have, kind of, pre-built configurations for roughly your business, but whatever behaviors SAP doesn't do, right, say, data warehousing, advanced analytics, regression and projection and stuff like that, maybe that's somewhat outside of the core wheelhouse for SAP, you would expect like, oh okay, I'll bolt on BigQuery. I'll build that stuff over there. We'll stream the data between the two. Yeah, I'm off to the races, but the BigQuery side of the house doesn't have this like bitching menu that says, “You're a retailer, and so you probably want to see these 75 KPIs, and you probably want to chew up your SKUs in exactly this way. And here's some presets that make it so that this is operable out of the box.”So, they are doing the three way combination: Consultancies plus ISVs plus Google products, and doing all the pre-work configuration to go out to a customer and go I know what you probably just want. Why don't I just give you the whole thing so that it does the stuff that you want? That I think—if that's the very first one, this little triangle between SAP, and Big Query, and a bunch of consultancies like mine, you have to imagine they go a lot further with that a lot faster, right? I mean, what does that look like when they do it with Epic, when they go do it with Go just generally, when they go do it with Apache? I've heard of that software, right? Like, there's no reason not to bundle up what the obvious choices are for a bunch of these combinations.Corey: The idea of moving up the stack and offering full on solutions, that's what customers actually want. “Well, here's a bunch of things you can do to wind up wiring together to build a solution,” is, “Cool. Then I'm going to go hire a company who's already done that is going to sell it to me at a significant markup because I just don't care.” I pay way more to WP Engine than I would to just run WordPress myself on top of AWS or Google Cloud. In fact, it is on Google Cloud, but okay.Miles: You and me both, man. WP Engine is the best. I—Corey: It's great because—Miles: You're welcome. I designed a bunch of the hosting on the back of that.Corey: Oh, yeah. But it's also the—I—well, it costs a little bit more that way. Yeah, but guess what's not—guess what's more expensive than that bill, is my time spent doing the care and feeding of this stuff. I like giving money to experts and making it their problem.Miles: Yeah. I heard it said best, Lego is an incredible business. I love their product, and you can build almost any toy with it. And they have not displaced all other plastic toy makers.Corey: Right.Miles: Some kids just want to buy a little car. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah, you can build anything you want out of Lego bricks, which are great, which absolutely explains why they are a reference AWS customer.Miles: Yeah, they're great. But they didn't beat all other toy companies worldwide, and eliminate the rest of that market because they had the better primitive, right? These other solutions are just as valuable, just as interesting, tend to have much bigger markets. Lego is not the largest toy manufacturer in the world. They are not in the top five of toy manufacturers in the world, right?Like, so chasing that thread, and getting all the way down into the spots where I think many of the cloud providers on their own, internally, had been very uncomfortable. Like, you got to go all the way to building this stuff that they need for that division, inside of that company, in that geo, in that industry? That's maybe, like, a little too far afield. I think Google has a natural advantage in its more partner-oriented approach to create these combinations that lower the cost to them and to customers to getting out of that solution quick.Corey: So, getting into the weeds of Google Next, I suppose, rather than a whole bunch of things that don't seem to apply to anyone except the four or five companies that really could use it, what things did Google release that make the lives of people building, you know, web apps better?Miles: This is the one. So, I'm at Amazon, hanging out as a part of the team that built up the infrastructure for the Obama campaign in 2012, and there are a bunch of Googlers there, and we are fighting with databases. We are fighting so hard, in fact, with RDS that I think we are the only ones that [Raju 00:17:51] has ever allowed to SSH into our RDS instances to screw with them.Corey: Until now, with the advent of RDS Custom, meaning that you can actually get in as root; where that hell that lands between RDS and EC2 is ridiculous. I just know that RDS can now run containers.Miles: Yeah. I know how many things we did in there that were good for us, and how many things we did in there that were bad for us. And I have to imagine, this is not a feature that they really ought to let everybody have, myself included. But I will say that what all of the Googlers that I talk to, you know, at the first blush, were I'm the evil Amazon guy in to, sort of, distract them and make them build a system that, you know, was very reliable and ended up winning an election was that they had a better database, and they had Spanner, and they didn't understand why this whole thing wasn't sitting on Spanner. So, we looked, and I read the white paper, and then I got all drooly, and I was like, yes, that is a much better database than everybody else's database, and I don't understand why everybody else isn't on it. Oh, there's that one reason, but you've heard of it: No other software works with it, anywhere in the world, right? It's utterly proprietary to Google. Yes, they were kind—Corey: Oh, you want to migrate it off somewhere else, or a fraction of it? Great. Step one, redo your data architecture.Miles: Yeah, take all of my software everywhere, rewrite every bit of it. And, oh all those commercial applications? Yeah, forget all those, you got, too. Right? It was very much where Google was eight years ago. So, for me, it was immensely meaningful to see the launch at Next where they described what they are building—and have now built; we have alpha access to it—a Postgres layer for Spanner.Corey: Is that effectively you have to treat it as Postgres at all times, or is it multimodal access?Miles: You can get in and tickle it like Spanner, if you want to tickle it like Spanner. And in reality, Spanner is ANSI SQL compliant; you're still writing SQL, you just don't have to talk to it like a REST endpoint, or a GRPC endpoint, or something; you can, you know, have like a—Corey: So, similar to Azure's Cosmos DB, on some level, except for the part where you can apparently look at other customers' data in that thing?Miles: [laugh]. Exactly. Yeah, you will not have a sweeping discovery of incredible security violations in the structure Spanner, in that it is the control system that Google uses to place every ad, and so it does not suck. You can't put a trillion-dollar business on top of a database and not have it be safe. That's kind of a thing.Corey: The thing that I find is the most interesting area of tech right now is there's been this rise of distributed databases. Yugabyte—or You-ji-byte—Pla-netScale—or PlanetScale, depending on how you pronounce these things.Miles: [laugh]. Yeah, why, why is G such an adversarial consonant? I don't understand why we've all gotten to this place.Corey: Oh, yeah. But at the same time, it's—so you take a look at all these—and they all are speaking Postgres; it is pretty clear that ‘Postgres-squeal' is the thing that is taking over the world as far as databases go. If I were building something from scratch that used—Miles: For folks in the back, that's PostgreSQL, for the rest of us, it's okay, it's going to be, all right.Corey: Same difference. But yeah, it's the thing that is eating the world. Although recently, I've got to say, MongoDB is absolutely stepping up in a bunch of really interesting ways.Miles: I mean, I think the 4.0 release, I'm the guy who wrote the MongoDB on AWS Best Practices white paper, and I would grab a lot of customer's and—Corey: They have to change it since then of, step one: Do not use DocumentDB; if you want to use Mongo, use Mongo.Miles: Yeah, that's right. No, there were a lot of customers I was on the phone with where Mongo had summarily vaporized their data, and I think they have made huge strides in structural reliability over the course of—you know, especially this 4.0 launch, but the last couple of years, for sure.Corey: And with all the people they've been hiring from AWS, it's one of those, “Well, we'll look at this now who's losing important things from production?”Miles: [laugh]. Right? So, maybe there's only actually five humans who know how to do operations, and we just sort of keep moving around these different companies.Corey: That's sort of my assumption on these things. But Postgres, for those who are not looking to depart from the relational model, is eating the world. And—Miles: There's this, like, basic emotional thing. My buddy Martin, who set up MySQL, and took it public, and then promptly got it gobbled up by the Oracle people, like, there was a bet there that said, hey, there's going to be a real open database, and then squish, like, the man came and got it. And so like, if you're going to be an independent, open-source software developer, I think you're probably not pushing your pull requests to our friends at Oracle, that seems weird. So instead, I think Postgres has gobbled up the best minds on that stuff.And it works. It's reliable, it's consistent, and it's functional in all these different, sort of, reapplications and subdivisions, right? I mean, you have to sort of squint real hard, but down there in the guts of Redshift, that's Postgres, right? Like, there's Postgres behind all sorts of stuff. So, as an interface layer, I'm not as interested about how it manages to be successful at bossing around hardware and getting people the zeros and ones that they ask for back in a timely manner.I'm interested in it as a compatibility standard, right? If I have software that says, “I need to have Postgres under here and then it all will work,” that creates this layer of interop that a bunch of other products can use. So, folks like PlanetScale, and Yugabyte can say, “No, no, no, it's cool. We talk Postgres; that'll make it so your application works right. You can bring a SQL alchemy and plug it into this, or whatever your interface layer looks like.”That's the spot where, if I can trade what is a fairly limited global distribution, global transactional management on literally ridiculously unlimited scalability and zero operations, I can handle the hard parts of running a database over to somebody else, but I get my layer, and my software talks to it, I think that's a huge step.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at Cloud Academy. Something special just for you folks. If you missed their offer on Black Friday or Cyber Monday or whatever day of the week doing sales it is—good news! They've opened up their Black Friday promotion for a very limited time. Same deal, $100 off a yearly plan, $249 a year for the highest quality cloud and tech skills content. Nobody else can get this because they have a assured me this not going to last for much longer. Go to CloudAcademy.com, hit the "start free trial" button on the homepage, and use the Promo code cloud at checkout. That's c-l-o-u-d, like loud, what I am, with a “C” in front of it. It's a free trial, so you'll get 7 days to try it out to make sure it's really a good fit for you, nothing to lose except your ignorance about cloud. My thanks again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I think that there's a strong movement toward building out on something like this. If it works, just because—well, I'm not multiregion today, but I can easily see a world in which I'd want to be. So, great. How do you approach the decision between—once this comes out of alpha; let's be clear. Let's turn this into something that actually ships, and no, Google that does not mean slapping a beta label on it for five years is the answer here; you actually have to stand behind this thing—but once it goes GA—Miles: GA is a good thing.Corey: Yeah. How do you decide between using that, or PlanetScale? Or Yugabyte?Miles: Or Cockroach or or SingleStore, right? I mean, there's a zillion of them that sit in this market. I think the core of the decision making for me is in every team you're looking at what skills do you bring to bear and what problem that you're off to go solve for customers? Do the nuances of these products make it easier to solve? So, I think there are some products that the nature of what you're building isn't all that dependent on one part of the application talking to another one, or an event happening someplace else mattering to an event over here. But some applications, that's, like, utterly critical, like, totally, totally necessary.So, we worked with a bunch of like Forex exchange trading desks that literally turn off 12 hours out of the day because they can only keep it consistent in one geographical location right near the main exchanges in New York. So, that's a place where I go, “Would you like to trade all day?” And they go, “Yes, but I can't because databases.” So, “Awesome. Let's call the folks on the Spanner side. They can solve that problem.”I go, “Would you like to trade all day and rewrite all your software?” And they go, “No.” And I go, “Oh, okay. What about trade all day, but not rewrite all your software?” There we go. Now, we've got a solution to that kind of problem.So like, we built this crazy game, like, totally other end of the ecosystem with the Dragon Ball Z people, hysterical; your like—you literally play like Rock, Paper, Scissors with your phone, and if you get a rock, I throw a fireball, and you get a paper, then I throw a punch, and we figure out who wins. But they can play these games like Europe versus Japan, thousands of people on each side, real-time, and it works.Corey: So, let's be clear, I have lobbied a consistent criticism at Google for a while now, which is the Google Cloud global control plane. So, you wind up with things like global service outages from time to time, you wind up with this thing is now broken for everyone everywhere. And that, for a lot of these use cases, is a problem. And I said that AWS's approach to regional isolation is the right way to do it. And I do stand by that assessment, except for the part where it turns out there's a lot of control plane stuff that winds up single tracking through us-east-1, as we learned in the great us-east-1 outage of 2021.Miles: Yeah, when I see customers move from data center to AWS, what they expect is a higher count of outages that lasts less time. That's the trade off, right? There's going to be more weird spurious stuff, and maybe—maybe—if they're lucky, that outage will be over there at some other region they're not using. I see almost exactly the same promise happening to folks that come from AWS—and in particular from Azure—over onto GCP, which is, there will be probably a higher frequency of outages at a per product level, right? So, like sometimes, like, some weird product takes a screw sideways, where there is structural interdependence between quite a few products—we actually published a whole internal structural map of like, you know, it turns out that Cloud SQL runs on top of GCE not on GKE, so you can expect if GKE goes sideways, Cloud SQL is probably not going to go sideways; the two aren't dependent on each other.Corey: You take the status page and Amazon FreeRTOS in a region is having an outage today or something like that. You're like, “Oh, no. That's terrible. First, let me go look up what the hell that is.” And I'm not using it? Absolutely not. Great. As hyperscalers, well, hyperscale, they're always things that are broken in different ways, in different locations, and if you had a truly accurate status page, it would all be red all the time, or varying shades of red, which is not helpful. So, I understand the challenge there, but very often, it's a partition that is you are not exposed to, or the way that you've architected things, ideally, means it doesn't really matter. And that is a good thing. So, raw outage counts don't solve that. I also maintain that if I were to run in a single region of AWS or even a single AZ, in all likelihood, I will have a significantly better uptime across the board than I would if I ran it myself. Because—Miles: Oh, for sure.Corey: —it is—Miles: For sure they're way better at ops than you are. Me, right?Corey: Of course.Miles: Right? Like, ridiculous.Corey: And they got that way, by learning. Like, I think in 2022, it is unlikely that there's going to be an outage in an AWS availability zone by someone tripping over a power cable, whereas I have actually done that. So, there's a—to be clear in a data center, not an AWS facility; that would not have flown. So, there is the better idea of of going in that direction. But the things like Route 53 is control plane single-tracking through the us-east-1, if you can't make DNS changes in an outage scenario, you may as well not have a DR plan, for most use cases.Miles: To be really clear, it was a part of the internal documentation on the AWS side that we would share with customers to be absolutely explicit with them. It's not just that there are mistakes and accidents which we try to limit to AZs, but no, go further, that we may intentionally cause outages to AZs if that's what allows us to keep broader service health higher, right? They are not just a blast radius because you, oops, pulled the pin on the grenade; they can actually intentionally step on the off button. And that's different than the way Google operates. They think of each of the AZs, and each of the regions, and the global system as an always-on, all the time environment, and they do not have systems where one gets, sort of, sacrificed for the benefit of the rest, right, or they will intentionally plan to take a system offline.There is no planned downtime in the SLA, where the SLAs from my friends at Amazon and Azure are explicit to, if they choose to, they decide to take it offline, they can. Now, that's—I don't know, I kind of want the contract that has the other thing where you don't get that.Corey: I don't know what the right answer is for a lot of these things. I think multi-cloud is dumb. I think that the idea of having this workload that you're going to seamlessly deploy to two providers in case of an outage, well guess what? The orchestration between those two providers is going to cause you more outages than you would take just sticking on one. And in most cases, unless you are able to have complete duplication of not just functionality but capacity between those two, congratulations, you've now just doubled your number of single points of failure, you made the problem actively worse and more expensive. Good job.Miles: I wrote an article about this, and I think it's important to differentiate between dumb and terrifyingly shockingly expensive, right? So, I have a bunch of customers who I would characterize as rich, as like, shockingly rich, as producing businesses that have 80-plus percent gross margins. And for them, the costs associated with this stuff are utterly rational, and they take on that work, and they are seeing benefits, or they wouldn't be doing it.Corey: Of course.Miles: So, I think their trajectory in technology—you know, this is a quote from a Google engineer—it's just like, “Oh, you want to see what the future looks like? Hang out with rich people.” I went into houses when I was a little kid that had whole-home automation. I couldn't afford them; my mom was cleaning house there, but now my house, I can use my phone to turn on the lights. Like—Corey: You know, unless us-east-1 is having a problem.Miles: Hey, and then no Roomba for you, right? Like utterly offline. So—Corey: Roomba has now failed to room.Miles: Conveniently, my lights are Philips Hue, and that's on Google, so that baby works. But it is definitely a spot where the barrier of entry and the level of complexity required is going down over time. And it is definitely a horrible choice for 99% of the companies that are out there right now. But next year, it'll be 98. And the year after that, it'll probably be 97. [laugh].And if I go inside of Amazon's data centers, there's not one manufacturer of hard drives, there's a bunch. So, that got so easy that now, of course you use more than one; you got to do—that's just like, sort of, a natural thing, right? These technologies, it'll move over time. We just aren't there yet for the vast, vast majority of workloads.Corey: I hope that in the future, this stuff becomes easier, but data transfer fees are going to continue to be a concern—Miles: Just—[makes explosion noise]—Corey: Oh, man—Miles: —like, right in the face.Corey: —especially with the Cambrian explosion of data because the data science folks have successfully convinced the entire industry that there's value in those mode balancer logs in 2012. Okay, great. We're never deleting anything again, but now you've got to replicate all of that stuff because no one has a decent handle on lifecycle management and won't for the foreseeable future. Great, to multiple providers so that you can work on these things? Like, that is incredibly expensive.Miles: Yeah. Cool tech, from this announcement at Next that I think is very applicable, and recognized the level of like, utter technical mastery—and security mastery to our earlier conversation—that something like this requires, the product is called BigQuery Omni, what Omni allows you to do is go into the Google Cloud Console, go to BigQuery, say I want to do analysis on this data that's in S3, or in Azure Blob Storage, Google will spin up an account on your behalf on Amazon and Azure, and run the compute there for you, bring the result back. So, just transfer the answers, not the raw data that you just scanned, and no work on your part, no management, no crapola. So, there's like—that's multi-cloud. If I've got—I can do a join between a bunch of rows that are in real BigQuery over on GCP side and rows that are over there in S3. The cross-eyedness of getting something like that to work is mind blowing.Corey: To give this a little more context, just because it gets difficult to reason about these things, I can either have data that is in a private subnet in AWS that traverses their horribly priced Managed NAT Gateways, and then goes out to the internet and sent there once, for the same cost as I could take that same data and store it in S3 in their standard tier for just shy of six full months. That's a little imbalanced, if we're being direct here. And then when you add in things like intelligent tiering and archive access classes, that becomes something that… there's no contest there. It's, if we're talking about things that are now approaching exabyte scale, that's one of those, “Yeah, do you want us to pay by a credit card?”—get serious. You can't at that scale anyway—“Invoice billing, or do we just, like, drive a dump truck full of gold bricks and drop them off in Seattle?”Miles: Sure. Same trajectory, on the multi-cloud thing. So, like a partner of ours, PacketFabric, you know, if you're a big, big company, you go out and you call Amazon and you buy 100 gigabit interconnect on—I think they call theirs Direct Connect, and then you hook that up to the Google one that's called Dedicated Interconnect. And voila, the price goes from twelve cents a gig down to two cents a gig; everybody's much happier. But Jesus, you pay the upfront for that, you got to set the thing up, it takes days to get deployed, and now you're culpable for the whole pipe if you don't use it up. Like, there are charges that are static over the course of the month.So, PacketFabric just buys one of those and lets you rent a slice of it you need. And I think they've got an incredible product. We're working with them on a whole bunch of different projects. But I also expect—like, there's no reason the cloud providers shouldn't be working hard to vend that kind of solution over time. If a hundred gigabit is where it is now, what does it look like when I get to ten gigabit? When I get to one gigabit? When I get to half gigabit? You know, utility price that for us so that we get to rational pricing.I think there's a bunch of baked-in business and cost logic that is a part of the pricing system, where egress is the source of all of the funding at Amazon for internal networking, right? I don't pay anything for the switches that connect to this machine to that machine, in region. It's not like those things are cheap or free; they have to be there. But the funding for that comes from egress. So, I think you're going to end up seeing a different model where you'll maybe have different approaches to egress pricing, but you'll be paying like an in-system networking fee.And I think folks will be surprised at how big that fee likely is because of the cost of the level of networking infrastructure that the providers deploy, right? I mean, like, I don't know, if you've gone and tried to buy a 40 port, 40 gig switch anytime recently. It's not like they're those little, you know, blue Netgear ones for 90 bucks.Corey: Exactly. It becomes this, [sigh] I don't know, I keep thinking that's not the right answer, but part of it also is like, well, you know, for things that I really need local and don't want to worry about if the internet's melting today, I kind of just want to get, like, some kind of Raspberry Pi shoved under my desk for some reason.Miles: Yeah. I think there is a lot where as more and more businesses bet bigger and bigger slices of the farm on this kind of thing, I think it's Jassy's line that you're, you know, the fat in the margin in your business is my opportunity. Like, there's a whole ecosystem of partners and competitors that are hunting all of those opportunities. I think that pressure can only be good for customers.Corey: Miles, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about you, what you're up to, your bad opinions, your ridiculous company, et cetera—Miles: [laugh].Corey: —where can they find you?Miles: Well, it's really easy to spell: SADA.com, S-A-D-A dot com. I'm Miles Ward, it's @milesward on Twitter; you don't have to do too hard of a math. It's miles@sada.com, if you want to send me an email. It's real straightforward. So, eager to reach out, happy to help. We've got a bunch of engineers that like helping people move from Amazon to GCP. So, let us know.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, put links to this in the [show notes 00:37:17] because that's how we roll.Miles: Yay.Corey: Thanks so much for being so generous with your time, and I look forward to seeing what comes out next year from these various cloud companies.Miles: Oh, I know some of them already, and they're good. Oh, they're super good.Corey: This is why I don't do predictions because like, the stuff that I know about, like, for example, I was I was aware of the Graviton 3 was coming—Miles: Sure.Corey: —and it turns out that if your—guess what's going to come up and you don't name Graviton 3, it's like, “Are you simple? Did you not see that one coming?” It's like—or if I don't know it's coming and I make that guess—which is not the hardest thing in the world—someone would think I knew and leaked. There's no benefit to doing predictions.Miles: No. It's very tough, very happy to do predictions in private, for customers. [laugh].Corey: Absolutely. Thanks again for your time. I appreciate it.Miles: Cheers.Corey: Myles Ward, CTO at SADA. 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 and be very angry in your opinion when you write that obnoxious comment, but then it's going to get lost because it's using MySQL instead of Postgres.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The team at Instagram dropped a performance bomb on the Python world when they open-sourced Cider, their performance oriented fork of CPython. It contains a number of performance optimizations, including bytecode inline caching, eager evaluation of coroutines, a method-at-a-time JIT, and an experimental bytecode compiler that uses type annotations to emit type-specialized bytecode that performs better in the JIT. While it's not a general purpose runtime we can all pick up and use, it contains many powerful features and optimizations that may make their way back to mainline Python. We welcome Dino Viehland to dive into Cinder. Links from the show Dino on Twitter: @DinoViehland Cinder Python Runtime: github.com/facebookincubator Dino's PyCon talk: youtube.com IronPython: ironpython.net Sam Gross's NoGil work: github.com/colesbury/nogil Pyjion: trypyjion.com uWSGI: uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io Configuring uWSGI at Bloomberg: techatbloomberg.com Locust perf testing: locust.io Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Sentry Error Monitoring, Code TALKPYTHON TopTal AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

This week we discuss why cloud numbers don't add up, Oracle buys Cerner and the demise of BlackBerry. Plus, Matt gives advice for keeping up with Web3. Rundown Cloud numbers don't add up (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3645135/cloud-numbers-dont-add-up.html) A Look Back at Q3 '21 Public Cloud Software Earnings (https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/a-look-back-at-q3-21-public-cloud) Oracle to buy medical records company Cerner in its biggest acquisition ever (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/oracle-to-buy-medical-records-company-cerner.html) Apple hits $3 trillion market cap, becoming first company to hit the mark (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-hits-3-trillion-market-cap-184825195.html) If you're clinging to an old BlackBerry, it will officially stop working on Jan. 4 (https://www.npr.org/2022/01/03/1069938727/blackberry-phones-will-stop-working-january-4) Relevant to your Interests AWS Amazon Cloud Unit Draws Antitrust Scrutiny From Khan's FTC (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/amazon-cloud-unit-draws-fresh-antitrust-scrutiny-from-khan-s-ftc) You have asked for this, it is basically your fault! (https://twitter.com/loujaybee/status/1473946267713777668) MongoDB Poaches Top Amazon Executives to Compete With AWS (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-21/mongodb-poaches-top-amazon-executives-to-compete-with-aws) AWS DynamoDB architect who recently left for MongoDB (https://twitter.com/houlihan_rick/status/1472969503575265283) Enterprise Strategy Blog 2021: Year-End Roundup (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/enterprise-strategy-blog-2021-year-end-roundup/) Amazon announces broad cloud and AI collaboration with auto giant Stellantis (https://u5080173.ct.sendgrid.net/ss/c/mU8jup-SNFzYvtbX4uPzDyL1IAz5Ln7YgpEcFyupWXkYVfffvkmVk3BhLDlVzDFIeRw_P95DEa2HqI_BexBNjAKvt6FfRZthQGF2WSCjJiYFiPMVhizyP2yS5z_xaIxS9XEABf95iIZIf6WpIvoRag/3ih/XiBZVWqJTIeD_85_O-P01Q/h92/VZ-TuO40kMGZGcvR-G4w0vWL0MmFfxA7Qn8k94v91FM) M&A and VC Google confirms it acquired cybersecurity specialist Siemplify, reportedly for $500M, to become part of Google Cloud's Chronicle (https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/04/google-confirms-it-acquired-cybersecurity-specialist-siemplify-reportedly-for-500m-to-become-part-of-google-clouds-chronicle/) Google confirms it acquired cybersecurity specialist Siemplify, reportedly for $500M, to become part of Google Cloud's Chronicle (https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/04/google-confirms-it-acquired-cybersecurity-specialist-siemplify-reportedly-for-500m-to-become-part-of-google-clouds-chronicle/) PitchBook: seed and early stage startups in the US raised $93B in 2021 through December 15, up from $52B in 2020 and $30B in 2016 (http://www.techmeme.com/220103/p8#a220103p8) Spotify acquires podcast tech company Whooshkaa which turns radio broadcasts into on-demand audio (https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/16/spotify-acquires-podcast-tech-company-whooshkaa-which-turns-radio-broadcasts-into-on-demand-audio/) Cal.com, Inc. raises $7.4m Seed (https://cal.com/blog/seed) Redpoint Ventures is Launching a Media Operation—And Embracing TikTok (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/redpoint-ventures-is-launching-a-media-operation-and-embracing-tiktok) Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreesen are still working (https://twitter.com/bhorowitz/status/1469063034765250562?s=21) Crypto Money in the Metaverse (https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/money-in-the-metaverse) The Block Unicorn Index (https://twitter.com/michaelbatnick/status/1472256861252501509?s=21) RadioShack goes Crypto (https://www.radioshack.com) Pay Google will pay top execs $1 million each after declining to boost workers' pay (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/4/22867419/google-execs-million-salaries-raise-sec) Apple Pays Its Engineers $180,000 Bonuses to Stop Them From Joining Meta (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-28/apple-pays-unusual-180-000-bonuses-to-retain-engineering-talent) Apple Apple is rebuilding Apple Music as a full native app with macOS 12.2 beta (https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/16/apple-is-rebuilding-apple-music-as-a-full-native-app-with-macos-12-2-beta/) Apple is reportedly going to make more of its own chips (https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/16/22839850/apple-office-develop-chips-in-house-broadcom-skyworks) Alexa Amazon's Alexa Stalled With Users as Interest Faded, Documents Show (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/amazon-s-voice-controlled-smart-speaker-alexa-can-t-hold-customer-interest-docs) Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to put penny in plug socket (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59810383) Security LastPass users warned their master passwords are compromised (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lastpass-users-warned-their-master-passwords-are-compromised) Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp users targeted in phishing scheme (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/facebook-messenger-instagram-and-whatsapp-users-targeted-in-phishing-scheme/) Misc TikTok is accused of violating GPL with new live streaming software (https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/tiktok-obs-gpl-violation) Retailers To Lose $828 Million Of Sales Over Christmas Due To Inaccessible Websites (https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2021/12/19/retailers-to-lose-828-million-of-sales-over-christmas-due-to-inaccessible-websites/) What's next for Cloud Foundry (https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/27/whats-next-for-cloud-foundry/) A big video game company enters the metaverse (https://thehustle.co/01062022-square-enix) IBM has restarted attempts to sell its unprofitable Watson Health division (https://twitter.com/Techmeme/status/1479085532902612994?s=20) Minecraft as a k8s admin tool (https://eric-jadi.medium.com/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-cf16f890de42) Web3 (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-8d859ef6-7a97-4527-8575-d43affa97158.html?chunk=0&utm_term=emshare) For (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-8d859ef6-7a97-4527-8575-d43affa97158.html?chunk=0&utm_term=emshare) and (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-8d859ef6-7a97-4527-8575-d43affa97158.html?chunk=0&utm_term=emshare) Against (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-8d859ef6-7a97-4527-8575-d43affa97158.html?chunk=0&utm_term=emshare) Jack Dorsey says VCs really own Web3 (and Web3 boosters are pretty mad about it) (https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/21/22848162/jack-dorsey-web3-criticism-a16z-ownership-venture-capital-twitter) Nonsense U Refill Toner | Laser printer cartridge refills you do yourself (https://www.urefilltoner.co.uk/index.html) Pedant-friendly millipede discovered: First with 1,000+ legs (https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/16/newly_discovered_millipede_earns_its/) Largest ever giant millipede fossil found on UK beach (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/dec/21/largest-ever-giant-millipede-fossil-found-on-uk-beach) A DAO wants to make Blockbuster a decentralized film streaming service (https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/128564/a-dao-wants-to-buy-blockbuster-and-turn-it-into-a-decentralized-film-streaming-service?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) Marvel Cinematic Universe is taking over the box office (https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1477657032798846979) Researchers make world's thinnest Christmas tree (https://phys.org/news/2021-12-world-thinnest-christmas-tree.html) Dieser Tortilla ist köstlich! Kein Öl, kein Backofen! Einfaches und leckeres Frühstück # 110 (https://youtu.be/t5C-6yrevHo) Crypto CEO Brian Armstrong Buys Los Angeles Home for $133 Million (https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-ceo-brian-armstrong-buys-los-angeles-home-for-133-million-11641249787) Taco Bell launches taco-a-day subscription program nationwide to drive visits (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/taco-bell-launches-taco-a-day-subscription-program-nationwide-to-drive-visits.html) North Koreans enjoy burritos after paper bizarrely claims Kim Jong-il invented them (https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/north-korea-burritos-kim-jong-il-vda90265d) ****## Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) Conferences THAT Conference comes to Texas (https://that.us/events/tx/2022/), POSTPONED UNTIL MAY Discount Codes: Everything Ticket ($75 off): SDTFriends75 3 Day Camper Ticket ($50 off): SDTFriends50 Virtual Ticket ($75 off): SDTFriendsON75 THAT Conference Wisconsin Call for Speakers is open (https://that.us/activities/create/cfp/?event=w1ZQFzsSZzRuItVCNVmC), July 25, 2022 DevOpsDays Chicago 2022: Call for Speakers/Papers (https://sessionize.com/devopsdays-chicago-2022/), May 10 & 11th, 2022 CFP closes on Jan 31, 2022, DevOps Days Birmingham AL, 2022 Call for Speakers (https://www.papercall.io/devopsdays-2022-birmingham-al), April 18 & 19th, 2022 CFP closes on Jan 31, 2022, Listner Feedback Polishing Cloth Unboxing (https://www.instagram.com/p/CYXiR-uOu9e/) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: Station Eleven on HBO (https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYZWoOQ6F9cLDCAEAAABP) Book originally recommend on episode 137 (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/137) Matt: (https://k8slens.dev)State of the World 2022 (https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/516/State-of-the-World-2022-page01.html) Photo Credits CoverArt (https://unsplash.com/photos/_mp8b9l0nC0) Banner Picture (https://unsplash.com/photos/zbpgmGe27p8)

2021 was an interesting year for investors. Overall, the S&P 500 composite index increased 26.89% during the year. But digging in deeper, those top-line return numbers are perhaps a bit deceiving. More than 20% of the S&P 50's market-cap weighted index is consolidated in its five largest constituents. Those would be Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), and Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA), in that respective order. Several of those stocks had an incredible year, which caused the overall performance of the overall index to similarly look incredible. But if you take out just a few of those high-flying names -- such as Alphabet's 65% gain or Tesla's 50% gain -- the total return suddenly becomes significantly less impressive. As such, the recent volatility of the broader market leaves investors in a conundrum. With the looming threats of rising interest rates or inflation, should we continue to flock to the relative safety of the market's largest companies? Or conversely, is the recent market selloff actually presenting an opportunity to buy into several smaller companies at a relative bargain? To help us answer those questions, we've brought in two of our favorite investors. Ryan Henderson and Brett Schafer together host the investing podcast Chit Chat Money and are also the general partners of Arch Capital. We thought the recent volatility presented an excellent opportunity to hear their perspectives on the status quo of the stock market. In this exclusive interview, Ryan and Brett spoke with 7investing CEO Simon Erickson and 7investing lead advisor Steve Symington about a variety of topics. They first discussed how investors should think about volatility and the process they follow for their investing methodology. They also describe three of Arch Capital's largest holdings -- Sprout's Farmers Market, Spotify, and Nelnet -- and provide a thorough recap of why they like each of these positions. And to have a little fun in the outro, Ryan, Brett, Simon, and Steve each share one stock that was on their Christmas List for 2021. Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Boston Omaha, Callaway, Costco, Latch, MongoDB, Nelnet, Rocket Lab, Spotify, Sprout's Farmers Market, and Walmart. 7investing's advisors or its guests may have positions in the companies mentioned. Welcome to 7investing. We are here to empower you to invest in your future! We publish our 7 best ideas in the stock market to our subscribers for just $49 per month or $399 per year. Start your journey toward's financial independence: https://www.7investing.com/subscribe Stop by our website to level-up your investing education: https://www.7investing.com Follow us: ► https://www.facebook.com/7investing ► https://twitter.com/7investing ► https://instagram.com/7investing --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/7investing/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/7investing/support

EDITORIAL NOTE: Your Cloud Pod hosts are on vacation until early January!! Enjoy our 2021 wrapup and look ahead to 2022 and we'll be back in your Podcast feed mid January!  Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are minus Peter in this episode as they review the year in cloud computing. A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This week's highlights

Special edition! All along 2021 Matt Yonkovit, The Head of Open Source Strategy, sat down with special guests to talk about the open-source community, databases features, trends, and more. In this episode, we have selected some short talks from previous podcasts. More talks are coming for 2022. Thank you for following us!

Marlon Nichols, a VC with Mac Venture Capital is on the main stage helping us understand startup funding rounds, and their impacts on the cap table, a spreadsheet or table that shows the equity capitalization for a company. Cap tables include all the equity in a company, like common and preferred shares, and more. Marlon is THE person to give this talk, he's a seed-stage venture capitalist that invests in visionary founders building the future that the world wants to see. Some of his current and previous portfolio companies include Blavity (which owns AfroTech), Gimlet Media, LISNR, Mayvenn, MongoDB, PlayVS, and more. This talk was presented at AfroTech 2017, held in San Francisco, CA. Follow Will Lucas on Instagram at @willlucas Learn more about other Black tech disruptors and innovators at AfroTech.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Aaron (@aarondelp) and Brian (@bgracely) discuss the biggest trends from 2021, and make bold cloud computing predictions in 2022.SHOW: 577CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teamsSign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner accountMegaport - Network as a Service PlatformTry Megaport - Cloud Connectivity SimplifiedSHOW NOTES:PODCAST BUSINESS:Crossed out 11yr anniversary We crossed 500 shows (March '21)Most listens in history, up about 20% from last yearWe launched Cloudcast Basics (4 seasons)We launched the Sunday Perspectives showsWe got named #1 Cloud podcastWe got named top 20 security podcastsListeners in 130 countries | 4200 CitiesIPOs from our guests - $2.678BVC Funding for our guest - $2.516BTRENDS and MAJOR STORIES from 2021:COVID pandemic continued, although some parts of many businesses opened up as vaccines became available. Working from Home seems to be a very real, long-term possibility for many in Tech. 25% of workers changed jobs (via LinkedIn)AWS - $60B, Azure - $68B, GCP - $15BAWS has new leadership. re:Invent felt very different.ARM is making a big push in the cloud (and Mac M1)This idea of “supercloud” or “overlay cloud services” is gaining traction - companies like Red Hat, Snowflake, MongoDB, Confluent, CockroachDB, etc. are growing quickly as SaaS services, even when the cloud has a native service.Cloudflare is making a move to chip away at AWS' profits (egress networking)Digital Ocean is making a bigger push around SMB cloud and developersVMware become independent again (from Dell)Cloud providers still haven't acquired legacy software companies to get into the on-premises data centers. They keep adjusting their offerings (Outposts, Arc, Anthos)Kubernetes keeps growing, but the hype has slowed down and moved to other areas adjacent to Kubernetes (Service Mesh, eBPF, etc.)Software-Supply-Chains and DevSecOps “shift left security” are now heavily funded industry segments. The metaverse, Web3, Crypto, NFTs are all starting to get a lots of hype (and confusion)2022 PREDICTIONS: Our 2020 Predictions from last yearOur 2021 Predictions from last yearAARON's PREDICTIONSZero Trust Models (again…) - Also security has been/will be the hardest part of cloud and hot job market will continueMicrosoft will become top public cloud worldwide, AWS will fall to #2Google will settle into 3rd, 4th, even 5th spot… BRIAN's PREDICTIONS Alphabet/Google decides if they still believe they can get to #2 by 2023We'll start seeing the first generation of ex-AWS people starting new companiesFEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet

Do you enjoy the "final 2 questions" I always ask at the end of the show? I think it's a great way to track the currents of the Python community. This episode focuses in on one of those questions: "What notable PyPI package have you come across recently? Not necessarily the most popular one but something that delighted you and people should know about?" Our guest, Antonio Andrade put together a GitHub repository cataloging guests' response to this question over the past couple of years. So I invited him to come share the packages covered there. We touch on over 40 packages during this episode so I'm sure you'll learn a few new gems to incorporate into your workflow. Links from the show Antonio on Twitter: @AntonioAndrade Notable PyPI Package Repo: github.com/xandrade/talkpython.fm-notable-packages Antonio's recommended packages from this episode: Sumy: Extract summary from HTML pages or plain texts: github.com gTTS (Google Text-to-Speech): github.com Packages discussed during the episode 1. FastAPI - A-W-E-S-O-M-E web framework for building APIs: fastapi.tiangolo.com 2. Pythonic - Graphical automation tool: github.com 3. umap-learn - Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection: readthedocs.io 4. Tortoise ORM - Easy async ORM for python, built with relations in mind: tortoise.github.io 5. Beanie - Asynchronous Python ODM for MongoDB: github.com 6. Hathi - SQL host scanner and dictionary attack tool: github.com 7. Plotext - Plots data directly on terminal: github.com 8. Dynaconf - Configuration Management for Python: dynaconf.com 9. Objexplore - Interactive Python Object Explorer: github.com 10. AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK): docs.aws.amazon.com 11. Luigi - Workflow mgmt + task scheduling + dependency resolution: github.com 12. Seaborn - Statistical Data Visualization: pydata.org 13. CuPy - NumPy & SciPy for GPU: cupy.dev 14. Stevedore - Manage dynamic plugins for Python applications: docs.openstack.org 15. Pydantic - Data validation and settings management: github.com 16. pipx - Install and Run Python Applications in Isolated Environments: pypa.github.io 17. openpyxl - A Python library to read/write Excel 2010 xlsx/xlsm files: readthedocs.io 18. HttpPy - More comfortable requests with python: github.com 19. rich - Render rich text, tables, progress bars, syntax highlighting, markdown and more to the terminal: readthedocs.io 20. PyO3 - Using Python from Rust: pyo3.rs 21. fastai - Making neural nets uncool again: fast.ai 22. Numba - Accelerate Python Functions by compiling Python code using LLVM: numba.pydata.org 23. NetworkML - Device Functional Role ID via Machine Learning and Network Traffic Analysis: github.com 24. Flask-SQLAlchemy - Adds SQLAlchemy support to your Flask application: palletsprojects.com 25. AutoInvent - Libraries for generating GraphQL API and UI from data: autoinvent.dev 26. trio - A friendly Python library for async concurrency and I/O: readthedocs.io 27. Flake8-docstrings - Extension for flake8 which uses pydocstyle to check docstrings: github.com 28. Hotwire-django - Integrate Hotwire in your Django app: github.com 29. Starlette - The little ASGI library that shines: github.com 30. tenacity - Retry code until it succeeds: readthedocs.io 31. pySerial - Python Serial Port Extension: github.com 32. Click - Composable command line interface toolkit: palletsprojects.com 33. Pytest - Simple powerful testing with Python: docs.pytest.org 34. testcontainers-python - Test almost anything that can run in a Docker container: github.com 35. cibuildwheel - Build Python wheels on CI with minimal configuration: readthedocs.io 36. async-rediscache - An easy to use asynchronous Redis cache: github.com 37. seinfeld - Query a Seinfeld quote database: github.com 38. notebook - A web-based notebook environment for interactive computing: readthedocs.io 39. dagster - A data orchestrator for machine learning, analytics, and ETL: dagster.io 40. bleach - An easy safelist-based HTML-sanitizing tool: github.com 41. flynt - string formatting converter: github.com   Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Coiled TopTal AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

About RobertR2 advocates for Liquibase customers and provides technical architecture leadership. Prior to co-founding Datical (now Liquibase), Robert was a Director at the Austin Technology Incubator. Robert co-founded Phurnace Software in 2005. He invented and created the flagship product, Phurnace Deliver, which provides middleware infrastructure management to multiple Fortune 500 companies.Links: Liquibase: https://www.liquibase.com Liquibase Community: https://www.liquibase.org Liquibase AWS Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=7e70900d-dcb2-4ef6-adab-f64590f4a967 Github: https://github.com/liquibase Twitter: https://twitter.com/liquibase 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: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com. Corey: You know how Git works right?Announcer: Sorta, kinda, not really. Please ask someone else.Corey: That's all of us. Git is how we build things, and Netlify is one of the best ways I've found to build those things quickly for the web. Netlify's Git-based workflows mean you don't have to play slap-and-tickle with integrating arcane nonsense and web hooks, which are themselves about as well understood as Git. Give them a try and see what folks ranging from my fake Twitter for Pets startup, to global Fortune 2000 companies are raving about. If you end up talking to them—because you don't have to; they get why self-service is important—but if you do, be sure to tell them that I sent you and watch all of the blood drain from their faces instantly. You can find them in the AWS marketplace or at www.netlify.com. N-E-T-L-I-F-Y dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This is a promoted episode. What does that mean in practice? Well, it means the company who provides the guest has paid to turn this into a discussion that's much more aligned with the company than it is the individual.Sometimes it works, Sometimes it doesn't, but the key part of that story is I get paid. Why am I bringing this up? Because today's guest is someone I met in person at Monktoberfest, which is the RedMonk conference in Portland, Maine, one of the only reasons to go to Maine, speaking as someone who grew up there. And I spoke there, I met my guest today, and eventually it turned into this, proving that I am the envy of developer advocates everywhere because now I can directly tie me attending one conference to making a fixed sum of money, and right now they're all screaming and tearing off their headphones and closing this episode. But for those of you who are sticking around, thank you. My guest today is the CTO and co-founder of Liquibase. Please welcome Robert Reeves. Robert, thank you for joining me, and suffering the slings and arrows I'm about to hurled directly into your arse, as a warning shot.Robert: [laugh]. Man. Thanks for having me. Corey, I've been looking forward to this for a while. I love hanging out with you.Corey: One of the things I love about the Monktoberfest conference, and frankly, anything that RedMonk gets up to is, forget what's on stage, which is uniformly excellent; forget the people at RedMonk who are wonderful and I aspire to do more work with them in different ways; they're great, but the people that they attract are invariably interesting, they are invariably incredibly diverse in terms of not just demographics, but interests and proclivities. It's just a wonderful group of people, and every time I get the opportunity to spend time with those folks I do, and I've never once regretted it because I get to meet people like you. Snark and cynicism about sponsoring this nonsense aside—for which I do thank you—you've been a fascinating person to talk to you because you're better at a lot of the database-facing things than I am, so I shortcut to instead of forming my own opinions, I just skate off of yours in some cases. You're going to get letters now.Robert: Well, look, it's an occupational hazard, right? Releasing software, it's hard so you have to learn these platforms, and part of it includes the database. But I tell you, you're spot on about Monktoberfest. I left that conference so motivated. Really opened my eyes, certainly injecting empathy into what I do on a day-to-day basis, but it spurred me to action.And there's a lot of programs that we've started at Liquibase that the germination for that seed came from Monktoberfest. And certainly, you know, we were bummed out that it's been canceled two years in a row, but we can't wait to get back and sponsor it. No end of love and affection for that team. They're also really smart and right about a hundred percent of the time.Corey: That's the most amazing part is that they have opinions that generally tend to mirror my own—which, you know—Robert: [laugh].Corey: —confirmation bias is awesome, but they almost never get it wrong. And that is one of the impressive things is when I do it, I'm shooting from the hip and I already have an apology half-written and ready to go, whereas when dealing with them, they do research on this and they don't have the ‘I'm a loud, abrasive shitpostter on Twitter' defense to fall back on to defend opinions. And if they do, I've never seen them do it. They're right, and the fact that I am as aligned with them as I am, you'd think that one of us was cribbing from the other. I assure you that's not the case.But every time Steve O'Grady or Rachel Stephens, or Kelly—I forget her last name; my apologies is all Twitter, but she studied medieval history, I remember that—or James Governor writes something, I'm uniformly looking at this and I feel a sense of dismay, been, “Dammit. I should have written this. It's so well written and it makes such a salient point.” I really envy their ability to be so consistently on point.Robert: Well, they're the only analysts we pay money to. So, we vote with our dollars with that one. [laugh].Corey: Yeah. I'm only an analyst when people have analyst budget. Other than that, I'm whatever the hell you describe me. So, let's talk about that thing you're here to show. You know, that little side project thing you found and are the CTO of.I wasn't super familiar with what Liquibase does until I looked into it and then had this—I got to say, it really pissed me off because I'm looking at it, and it's how did I not know that this existed back when the exact problems that you solve are the things I was careening headlong into? I was actively annoyed. You're also an open-source project, which means that you're effectively making all of your money by giving things away and hoping for gratitude to come back on you in the fullness of time, right?Robert: Well, yeah. There's two things there. They're open-source component, but also, where was this when I was struggling with this problem? So, for the folks that don't know, what Liquibase does is automate database schema change. So, if you need to update a database—I don't care what it is—as part of your application deployment, we can help.Instead of writing a ticket or manually executing a SQL script, or generating a bunch of docs in a NoSQL database, you can have Liquibase help you out with that. And so I was at a conference years ago, at the booth, doing my booth thing, and a managing director of a very large bank came to me, like, “Hey, what do you do?” And saw what we did and got angry, started yelling at me. “Where were you three years ago when I was struggling with this problem?” Like, spitting mad. [laugh]. And I was like, “Dude, we just started”—this was a while ago—it was like, “We just started the company two years ago. We got here as soon as we could.”But I struggled with this problem when I was a release manager. And so I've been doing this for years and years and years—I don't even want to talk about how long—getting bits from dev to test to production, and the database was always, always, always the bottleneck, whether it was things didn't run the same in test as they did, eventually in production, environments weren't in sync. It's just really hard. And we've automated so much stuff, we've automated application deployment, lowercase a compiled bits; we're building things with containers, so everything's in that container. It's not a J2EE app anymore—yay—but we haven't done a damn thing for the database.And what this means is that we have a whole part of our industry, all of our database professionals, that are frankly struggling. I always say we don't sell software Liquibase. We sell piano recitals, date nights, happy hours, all the stuff you want to do but you can't because you're stuck dealing with the database. And that's what we do at Liquibase.Corey: Well, you're talking about database people. That's not how I even do it. I would never call myself that, for very good reason because you know, Route 53 remains the only database I use. But the problem I always had was that, “Great. I'm doing a deployment. Oh, I'm going to put out some changes to some web servers. Okay, what's my rollback?” “Well, we have this other commit we can use.” “Oh, we're going to be making a database schema change. What's your rollback strategy,” “Oh, I've updated my resume and made sure that any personal files I had on my work laptop been backed up somewhere else when I immediately leave the company when we can't roll back.” Because there's not really going to be a company anymore at that point.It's one of those everyone sort of holds their breath and winces when it comes to anything that resembles a schema change—or an ALTER TABLE as we used to call it—because that is the mistakes will show territory and you can hope and plan for things in pre-prod environments, but it's always scary. It's always terrifying because production is not like other things. That's why I always call my staging environment ‘theory' because things work in theory but not in production. So, it's how do you avoid the mess of winding up just creating disasters when you're dealing with the reality of your production environments? So, let's back up here. How do you do it? Because it sounds like something people would love to sell me but doesn't exist.Robert: [laugh]. Well, it's real simple. We have a file, we call it the change log. And this is a ledger. So, databases need to be evolved. You can't drop everything and recreate it from scratch, so you have to apply changes sequentially.And so what Liquibase will do is it connects to the database, and it says, “Hey, what version are you?” It looks at the change log, and we'll see, ehh, “There's ten change sets”—that's what components of a change log, we call them change sets—“There's ten change sets in there and the database is telling me that only five had been executed.” “Oh, great. Well, I'll execute these other five.” Or it asks the database, “Hey, how many have been executed?” And it says, “Ten.”And we've got a couple of meta tables that we have in the database, real simple, ANSI SQL compliant, that store the changes that happen to the database. So, if it's a net new database, say you're running a Docker container with the database in it on your local machine, it's empty, you would run Liquibase, and it says, “Oh, hey. It's got that, you know, new database smell. I can run everything.”And so the interesting thing happens when you start pointing it at an environment that you haven't updated in a while. So, dev and test typically are going to have a lot of releases. And so there's going to be little tiny incremental changes, but when it's time to go to production, Liquibase will catch it up. And so we speak SQL to the database, if it's a NoSQL database, we'll speak their API and make the changes requested. And that's it. It's very simple in how it works.The real complex stuff is when we go a couple of inches deeper, when we start doing things like, well, reverse engineering of your database. How can I get a change log of an existing database? Because nobody starts out using Liquibase for a project. You always do it later.Corey: No, no. It's one of those things where when you're doing a project to see if it works, it's one of those, “Great, I'll run a database in some local Docker container or something just to prove that it works.” And, “Todo: fix this later.” And yeah, that todo becomes load-bearing.Robert: [laugh]. That's scary. And so, you know, we can help, like, reverse engineering an entire database schema, no problem. We also have things called quality checks. So sure, you can test your Liquibase change against an empty database and it will tell you if it's syntactically correct—you'll get an error if you need to fix something—but it doesn't enforce things like corporate standards. “Tables start with T underscore.” “Do not create a foreign key unless those columns have an ID already applied.” And that's what our quality checks does. We used to call it rules, but nobody likes rules, so we call it quality checks now.Corey: How do you avoid the trap of enumerating all the bad things you've seen happen because at some point, it feels like that's what leads to process ossification at large companies where, “Oh, we had this bad thing happen once, like, a disk filled up, so now we have a check that makes sure that all the disks are at least 20, empty.” Et cetera. Great. But you keep stacking those you have thousands and thousands and thousands of those, and even a one-line code change then has to pass through so many different tests to validate that this isn't going to cause the failure mode that happened that one time in a unicorn circumstance. How do you avoid the bloat and the creep of stuff like that?Robert: Well, let's look at what we've learned from automated testing. We certainly want more and more tests. Look, DevOp's algorithm is, “All right, we had a problem here.” [laugh]. Or SRE algorithm, I should say. “We had a problem here. What happened? What are we going to change in the future to make sure this doesn't happen?” Typically, that involves a new standard.Now, ossification occurs when a person has to enforce that standard. And what we should do is seek to have automation, have the machine do it for us. Have the humans come up and identify the problem, find a creative way to look for the issue, and then let the machine enforce it. Ossification happens in large organizations when it's people that are responsible, not the machine. The machines are great at running these things over and over again, and they're never hung over, day after Super Bowl Sunday, their kid doesn't get sick, they don't get sick. But we want humans to look at the things that we need that creative energy, that brain power on. And then the rote drudgery, hand that off to the machine.Corey: Drudgery seems like sort of a job description for a lot of us who spend time doing operation stuff.Robert: [laugh].Corey: It's drudgery and it's boring, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. On some level, you're more or less taking some of the adrenaline high of this job away from people. And you know, when it comes to databases, I'm kind of okay with that as it turns out.Robert: Yeah. Oh, yeah, we want no surprises in database-land. And that is why over the past several decades—can I say several decades since 1979?Corey: Oh, you can s—it's many decades, I'm sorry to burst your bubble on that.Robert: [laugh]. Thank you, Corey. Thank you.Corey: Five, if we're being honest. Go ahead.Robert: So, it has evolved over these many decades where change is the enemy of stability. And so we don't want change, and we want to lock these things down. And our database professionals have become changed from sentinels of data into traffic cops and TSA. And as we all know, some things slip through those. Sometimes we speed, sometimes things get snuck through TSA.And so what we need to do is create a system where it's not the people that are in charge of that; that we can set these policies and have our database professionals do more valuable things, instead of that adrenaline rush of, “Oh, my God,” how about we get the rush of solving a problem and saving the company millions of dollars? How about that rush? How about the rush of taking our old, busted on-prem databases and figure out a way to scale these up in the cloud, and also provide quick dev and test environments for our developer and test friends? These are exciting things. These are more fun, I would argue.Corey: You have a list of reference customers on your website that are awesome. In fact, we share a reference customer in the form of Ticketmaster. And I don't think that they will get too upset if I mention that based upon my work with them, at no point was I left with the impression that they played fast and loose with databases. This was something that they take very seriously because for any company that, you know, sells tickets to things you kind of need an authoritative record of who's bought what, or suddenly you don't really have a ticket-selling business anymore. You also reference customers in the form of UPS, which is important; banks in a variety of different places.Yeah, this is stuff that matters. And you support—from the looks of it—every database people can name except for Route 53. You've got RDS, you've got Redshift, you've got Postgres-squeal, you've got Oracle, Snowflake, Google's Cloud Spanner—lest people think that it winds up being just something from a legacy perspective—Cassandra, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, CockroachDB. I could go on because you have multiple pages of these things, SAP HANA—whatever the hell that's supposed to be—Yugabyte, and so on, and so forth. And it's like, some of these, like, ‘now you're just making up animals' territory.Robert: Well, that goes back to open-source, you know, you were talking about that earlier. There is no way in hell we could have brought out support for all these database platforms without us being open-source. That is where the community aligns their goals and works to a common end. So, I'll give you an example. So, case in point, recently, let me see Yugabyte, CockroachDB, AWS Redshift, and Google Cloud Spanner.So, these are four folks that reached out to us and said, either A) “Hey, we want Liquibase to support our database,” or B) “We want you to improve the support that's already there.” And so we have what we call—which is a super creative name—the Liquibase test harness, which is just genius because it's an automated way of running a whole suite of tests against an arbitrary database. And that helped us partner with these database vendors very quickly and to identify gaps. And so there's certain things that AWS Redshift—certain objects—that AWS Redshift doesn't support, for all the right reasons. Because it's data warehouse.Okay, great. And so we didn't have to run those tests. But there were other tests that we had to run, so we create a new test for them. They actually wrote some of those tests. Our friends at Yugabyte, CockroachDB, Cloud Spanner, they wrote these extensions and they came to us and partnered with us.The only way this works is with open-source, by being open, by being transparent, and aligning what we want out of life. And so what our friends—our database friends—wanted was they wanted more tooling for their platform. We wanted to support their platform. So, by teaming up, we help the most important person, [laugh] the most important person, and that's the customer. That's it. It was not about, “Oh, money,” and all this other stuff. It was, “This makes our customers' lives easier. So, let's do it. Oop, no brainer.”Corey: There's something to be said for making people's lives easier. I do want to talk about that open-source versus commercial divide. If I Google Liquibase—which, you know, I don't know how typing addresses in browsers works anymore because search engines are so fast—I just type in Liquibase. And the first thing it spits me out to is liquibase.org, which is the Community open-source version. And there's a link there to the Pro paid version and whatnot. And I was just scrolling idly through the comparison chart to see, “Oh, so ‘Community' is just code for shitty and you're holding back advanced features.” But it really doesn't look that way. What's the deal here?Robert: Oh, no. So, Liquibase open-source project started in 2006 and Liquibase the company, the commercial entity, started after that, 2012; 2014, first deal. And so, for—Nathan Voxland started this, and Nathan was struggling. He was working at a company, and he had to have his application—of course—you know, early 2000s, J2EE—support SQL Server and Oracle and he was struggling with it. And so he open-sourced it and added more and more databases.Certainly, as open-source databases grew, obviously he added those: MySQL, Postgres. But we're never going to undo that stuff. There's rollback for free in Liquibase, we're not going to be [laugh] we're not going to be jerks and either A) pull features out or, B) even worse, make Stephen O'Grady's life awful by changing the license [laugh] so he has to write about it. He loves writing about open-source license changes. We're Apache 2.0 and so you can do whatever you want with it.And we believe that the things that make sense for a paying customer, which is database-specific objects, that makes sense. But Liquibase Community, the open-source stuff, that is built so you can go to any database. So, if you have a change log that runs against Oracle, it should be able to run against SQL Server, or MySQL, or Postgres, as long as you don't use platform-specific data types and those sorts of things. And so that's what Community is about. Community is about being able to support any database with the same change log. Pro is about helping you get to that next level of DevOps Nirvana, of reaching those four metrics that Dr. Forsgren tells us are really important.Corey: Oh, yes. You can argue with Nicole Forsgren, but then you're wrong. So, why would you ever do that?Robert: Yeah. Yeah. [laugh]. It's just—it's a sucker's bet. Don't do it. There's a reason why she's got a PhD in CS.Corey: She has been a recurring guest on this show, and I only wish she would come back more often. You and I are fun to talk to, don't get me wrong. We want unbridled intellect that is couched in just a scintillating wit, and someone is great to talk to. Sorry, we're both outclassed.Robert: Yeah, you get entertained with us; you learn with her.Corey: Exactly. And you're still entertained while doing it is the best part.Robert: [laugh]. That's the difference between Community and Pro. Look, at the end of the day, if you're an individual developer just trying to solve a problem and get done and away from the computer and go spend time with your friends and family, yeah, go use Liquibase Community. If it's something that you think can improve the rest of the organization by teaming up and taking advantage of the collaboration features? Yes, sure, let us know. We're happy to help.Corey: Now, if people wanted to become an attorney, but law school was too expensive, out of reach, too much time, et cetera, but they did have a Twitter account, very often, they'll find that they can scratch that itch by arguing online about open-source licenses. So, I want to be very clear—because those people are odious when they email me—that you are licensed under the Apache License. That is a bonafide OSI approved open-source license. It is not everyone except big cloud companies, or service providers, which basically are people dancing around—they mean Amazon. So, let's be clear. One, are you worried about Amazon launching a competitive service with a dumb name? And/or have you really been validated as a product if AWS hasn't attempted and failed to launch a competitor?Robert: [laugh]. Well, I mean, we do have a very large corporation that has embedded Liquibase into one of their flagship products, and that is Oracle. They have embedded Liquibase in SQLcl. We're tickled pink because that means that, one, yes, it does validate Liquibase is the right way to do it, but it also means more people are getting help. Now, for Oracle users, if you're just an Oracle shop, great, have fun. We think it's a great solution. But there's not a lot of those.And so we believe that if you have Liquibase, whether it's open-source or the Pro version, then you're going to be able to support all the databases, and I think that's more important than being tied to a single cloud. Also—this is just my opinion and take it for what it's worth—but if Amazon wanted to do this, well, they're not the only game in town. So, somebody else is going to want to do it, too. And, you know, I would argue even with Amazon's backing that Liquibase is a little stronger brand than anything they would come out with.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: So, I want to call out though, that on some level, they have already competed with you because one of database that you do not support is DynamoDB. Let's ignore the Route 53 stuff because, okay. But the reason behind that, having worked with it myself, is that, “Oh, how do you do a schema change in DynamoDB?” The answer is that you don't because it doesn't do schemas for one—it is schemaless, which is kind of the point of it—as well as oh, you want to change the primary, or the partition, or the sort key index? Great. You need a new table because those things are immutable.So, they've solved this Gordian Knot just like Alexander the Great did by cutting through it. Like, “Oh, how do you wind up doing this?” “You don't do this. The end.” And that is certainly an approach, but there are scenarios where those were first, NoSQL is not a acceptable answer for some workloads.I know Rick [Horahan 00:26:16] is going to yell at me for that as soon as he hears me, but okay. But there are some for which a relational database is kind of a thing, and you need that. So, Dynamo isn't fit for everything. But there are other workloads where, okay, I'm going to just switch over. I'm going to basically dump all the data and add it to a new table. I can't necessarily afford to do that with anything less than maybe, you know, 20 milliseconds of downtime between table one and table two. And they're obnoxious and difficult ways to do it, but for everything else, you do kind of need to make ALTER TABLE changes from time to time as you go through the build and release process.Robert: Yeah. Well, we certainly have plans for DynamoDB support. We are working our way through all the NoSQLs. Started with Mongo, and—Corey: Well, back that out a second then for me because there's something I'm clearly not grasping because it's my understanding, DynamoDB is schemaless. You can put whatever you want into various arbitrary fields. How would Liquibase work with something like that?Robert: Well, that's something I struggled with. I had the same question. Like, “Dude, really, we're a schema change tool. Why would we work with a schemaless database?” And so what happened was a soon-to-be friend of ours in Europe had reached out to me and said, “I built an extension for MongoDB in Liquibase. Can we open-source this, and can y'all take care of the care and feeding of this?” And I said, “Absolutely. What does it do?” [laugh].And so I looked at it and it turns out that it focuses on collections and generating data for test. So, you're right about schemaless because these are just documents and we're not going to go through every single document and change the structure, we're just going to have the application create a new doc and the new format. Maybe there's a conversion log logic built into the app, who knows. But it's the database professionals that have to apply these collections—you know, indices; that's what they call them in Mongo-land: collections. And so being able to apply these across all environments—dev, test, production—and have consistency, that's important.Now, what was really interesting is that this came from MasterCard. So, this engineer had a consulting business and worked for MasterCard. And they had a problem, and they said, “Hey, can you fix this with Liquibase?” And he said, “Sure, no problem.” And he built it.So, that's why if you go to the MongoDB—the liquibase-mongodb repository in our Liquibase org, you'll see that MasterCard has the copyright on all that code. Still Apache 2.0. But for me, that was the validation we needed to start expanding to other things: Dynamo, Couch. And same—Corey: Oh, yeah. For a lot of contributors, there's a contributor license process you can go through, assign copyright. For everything else, there's MasterCard.Robert: Yeah. Well, we don't do that. Look, you know, we certainly have a code of conduct with our community, but we don't have a signing copyright and that kind of stuff. Because that's baked into Apache 2.0. So, why would I want to take somebody's ability to get credit and magical internet points and increase the rep by taking that away? That's just rude.Corey: The problem I keep smacking myself into is just looking at how the entire database space across the board goes, it feels like it's built on lock-in, it's built on it is super finicky to work with, and it generally feels like, okay, great. You take something like Postgres-squeal or whatever it is you want to run your database on, yeah, you could theoretically move it a bunch of other places, but moving databases is really hard. Back when I was at my last, “Real job,” quote-unquote, years ago, we were late to the game; we migrated the entire site from EC2 Classic into a VPC, and the biggest pain in the ass with all of that was the RDS instance. Because we had to quiesce the database so it would stop taking writes; we would then do snapshot it, shut it down, and then restore a new database from that RDS snapshot.How long does it take, at least in those days? That is left as an experiment for the reader. So, we booked a four hour maintenance window under the fear that would not be enough. It completed in 45 minutes. So okay, there's that. Sparked the thing up and everything else was tested and good to go. And yay. Okay.It took a tremendous amount of planning, a tremendous amount of work, and that wasn't moving it very far. It is the only time I've done a late-night deploy, where not a single thing went wrong. Until I was on the way home and the Uber driver sideswiped a city vehicle. So, there we go—Robert: [laugh].Corey: —that's the one. But everything else was flawless on this because we planned these things out. But imagine moving to a different provider. Oh, forget it. Or imagine moving to a different database engine? That's good. Tell another one.Robert: Well, those are the problems that we want our database professionals to solve. We do not want them to be like janitors at an elementary school, cleaning up developer throw-up with sawdust. The issue that you're describing, that's a one time event. This is something that doesn't happen very often. You need hands on the keyboard, you want people there to look for problems.If you can take these database releases away from those folks and automate them safely—you can have safety and speed—then that frees up their time to do these other herculean tasks, these other feats of strength that they're far better at. There is no silver bullet panacea for database issues. All we're trying to do is take about 70% of DBAs time and free it up to do the fun stuff that you described. There are people that really enjoy that, and we want to free up their time so they can do that. Moving to another platform, going from the data center to the cloud, these sorts of things, this is what we want a human on; we don't want them updating a column three times in a row because dev couldn't get it right. Let's just give them the keys and make sure they stay in their lane.Corey: There's something glorious about being able to do that. I wish that there were more commonly appreciated ways of addressing those pains, rather than, “Oh, we're going to sell you something big and enterprise-y and it's going to add a bunch of process and not work out super well for you.” You integrate with existing CI/CD systems reasonably well, as best I can tell because the nice thing about CI/CD—and by nice I mean awful—is that there is no consensus. Every pipeline you see, in a release engineering process inherently becomes this beautiful bespoke unicorn.Robert: Mm-hm. Yeah. And we have to. We have to integrate with whatever CI/CD they have in place. And we do not want customers to just run Liquibase by itself. We want them to integrate it with whatever is driving that application deployment.We're Switzerland when it comes to databases, and CI/CD. And I certainly have my favorite of those, and it's primarily based on who bought me drinks at the last conference, but we cannot go into somebody's house and start rearranging the furniture. That's just rude. If they're deploying the app a certain way, what we tell that customer is, “Hey, we're just going to have that CI/CD tool call Liquibase to update the database. This should be an atomic unit of deployment.” And it should be hidden from the person that pushes that shiny button or the automation that does it.Corey: I wish that one day that you could automate all of the button pushing, but the thing that always annoyed me in release engineering was the, “Oh, and here's where we stop to have a human press the button.” And I get it. That stuff's scary for some folks, but at the same time, this is the nature of reality. So, you're not going to be able to technology your way around people. At least not successfully and not for very long.Robert: It's about trust. You have to earn that database professional's trust because if something goes wrong, blaming Liquibase doesn't go very far. In that company, they're going to want a person [laugh] who has a badge to—with a throat to choke. And so I've seen this pattern over and over again.And this happened at our first customer. Major, major, big, big, big bank, and this was on the consumer side. They were doing their first production push, and they wanted us ready. Not on the call, but ready if there was an issue they needed to escalate and get us to help them out. And so my VP of Engineering and me, we took it. Great. Got VP of engineering and CTO. Right on.And so Kevin and I, we stayed home, stayed sober [laugh], you know—a lot of places to party in Austin; we fought that temptation—and so we stayed and I'm texting with Kevin, back and forth. “Did you get a call?” “No, I didn't get a call.” It was Friday night. Saturday rolls around. Sunday. “Did you get a—what's going on?” [laugh].Monday, we're like, “Hey. Everything, okay? Did you push to the next weekend?” They're like, “Oh, no. We did. It went great. We forgot to tell you.” [laugh]. But here's what happened. The DBAs push the Liquibase ‘make it go' button, and then they said, “Uh-Oh.” And we're like, “What do you mean, uh-oh?” They said, “Well, something went wrong.” “Well, what went wrong?” “Well, it was too fast.” [laugh]. Something—no way. And so they went through the whole thing—Corey: That was my downtime when I supposed to be compiling.Robert: Yeah. So, they went through the whole thing to verify every single change set. Okay, so that was weekend one. And then they go to weekend two, they do it the same thing. All right, all right. Building trust.By week four, they called a meeting with the release team. And they said, “Hey, process change. We're no longer going to be on these calls. You are going to push the Liquibase button. Now, if you want to integrate it with your CI/CD, go right ahead, but that's not my problem.” Dev—or, the release team is tier one; dev is tier two; we—DBAs—are tier three support, but we'll call you because we'll know something went wrong. And to this day, it's all automated.And so you have to earn trust to get people to give that up. Once they have trust and you really—it's based on empathy. You have to understand how terrible [laugh] they are sometimes treated, and to actively take care of them, realize the problems they're struggling with, and when you earn that trust, then and only then will they allow automation. But it's hard, but it's something you got to do.Corey: You mentioned something a minute ago that I want to focus on a little bit more closely, specifically that you're in Austin. Seems like that's a popular choice lately. You've got companies that are relocating their headquarters there, presumably for tax purposes. Oracle's there, Tesla's there. Great. I mean, from my perspective, terrific because it gets a number of notably annoying CEOs out of my backyard. But what's going on? Why is Austin on this meteoric rise and how'd it get there?Robert: Well, a lot of folks—overnight success, 40 years in the making, I guess. But what a lot of people don't realize is that, one, we had a pretty vibrant tech hub prior to all this. It all started with MCC, Microcomputer Consortium, which in the '80s, we were afraid of the Japanese taking over and so we decided to get a bunch of companies together, and Admiral Bobby Inman who was director planted it in Austin. And that's where it started. You certainly have other folks that have a huge impact, obviously, Michael Dell, Austin Ventures, a whole host of folks that have really leaned in on tech in Austin, but it actually started before that.So, there was a time where Willie Nelson was in Nashville and was just fed up with RCA Records. They would not release his albums because he wanted to change his sound. And so he had some nice friends at Atlantic Records that said, “Willie, we got this. Go to New York, use our studio, cut an album, we'll fix it up.” And so he cut an album called Shotgun Willie, famous for having “Whiskey River” which is what he uses to open and close every show.But that album sucked as far as sales. It's a good album, I like it. But it didn't sell except for one place in America: in Austin, Texas. It sold more copies in Austin than anywhere else. And so Willie was like, “I need to go check this out.”And so he shows up in Austin and sees a bunch of rednecks and hippies hanging out together, really geeking out on music. It was a great vibe. And then he calls, you know, Kris, and Waylon, and Merle, and say, “Come on down.” And so what happened here was a bunch of people really wanted to geek out on this new type of country music, outlaw country. And it started a pattern where people just geek out on stuff they really like.So, same thing with Austin film. You got Robert Rodriguez, you got Richard Linklater, and Slackers, his first movie, that's why I moved to Austin. And I got a job at Les Amis—a coffee shop that's closed—because it had three scenes in that. There was a whole scene of people that just really wanted to make different types of films. And we see that with software, we see that with film, we see it with fashion.And it just seems that Austin is the place where if you're really into something, you're going to find somebody here that really wants to get into it with you, whether it's board gaming, D&D, noise punk, whatever. And that's really comforting. I think it's the community that's just welcoming. And I just hope that we can continue that creativity, that sense of community, and that we don't have large corporations that are coming in and just taking from the system. I hope they inject more.I think Oracle's done a really good job; their new headquarters is gorgeous, they've done some really good things with the city, doing a land swap, I think it was forty acres for nine acres. They coughed up forty for nine. And it was nine acres the city wasn't even using. Great. So, I think they're being good citizens. I think Tesla's been pretty cool with building that factory where it is. I hope more come. I hope they catch what is ever in the water and the breakfast tacos in Austin.Corey: [laugh]. I certainly look forward to this pandemic ending; I can come over and find out for myself. I'm looking forward to it. I always enjoyed my time there, I just wish I got to spend more of it.Robert: How many folks from Duckbill Group are in Austin now?Corey: One at the moment. Tim Banks. And the challenge, of course, is that if you look across the board, there really aren't that many places that have more than one employee. For example, our operations person, Megan, is here in San Francisco and so is Jesse DeRose, our manager of cloud economics. But my business partner is in Portland; we have people scattered all over the country.It's kind of fun having a fully-distributed company. We started this way, back when that was easy. And because all right, travel is easy; we'll just go and visit whenever we need to. But there's no central office, which I think is sort of the dangerous part of full remote because then you have this idea of second-class citizens hanging out in one part of the country and then they go out to lunch together and that's where the real decisions get made. And then you get caught up to speed. It definitely fosters a writing culture.Robert: Yeah. When we went to remote work, our lease was up. We just didn't renew. And now we have expanded hiring outside of Austin, we have folks in the Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, more and more coming. We even have folks that are moving out of Austin to places like Minnesota and Virginia, moving back home where their family is located.And that is wonderful. But we are getting together as a company in January. We're also going to, instead of having an office, we're calling it a ‘Liquibase Lounge.' So, there's a number of retail places that didn't survive, and so we're going to take one of those spots and just make a little hangout place so that people can come in. And we also want to open it up for the community as well.But it's very important—and we learned this from our friends at GitLab and their culture. We really studied how they do it, how they've been successful, and it is an awareness of those lunch meetings where the decisions are made. And it is saying, “Nope, this is great we've had this conversation. We need to have this conversation again. Let's bring other people in.” And that's how we're doing at Liquibase, and so far it seems to work.Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing what happens, once this whole pandemic ends, and how things continue to thrive. We're long past due for a startup center that isn't San Francisco. The whole thing is based on the idea of disruption. “Oh, we're disruptive.” “Yes, we're so disruptive, we've taken a job that can be done from literally anywhere with internet access and created a land crunch in eight square miles, located in an earthquake zone.” Genius, simply genius.Robert: It's a shame that we had to have such a tragedy to happen to fix that.Corey: Isn't that the truth?Robert: It really is. But the toothpaste is out of the tube. You ain't putting that back in. But my bet on the next Tech Hub: Kansas City. That town is cool, it has one hundred percent Google Fiber all throughout, great university. Kauffman Fellows, I believe, is based there, so VC folks are trained there. I believe so; I hope I'm not wrong with that. I know Kauffman Foundation is there. But look, there's something happening in that town. And so if you're a buy low, sell high kind of person, come check us out in Austin. I'm not trying to dissuade anybody from moving to Austin; I'm not one of those people. But if the housing prices [laugh] you don't like them, check out Kansas City, and get that two-gig fiber for peanuts. Well, $75 worth of peanuts.Corey: Robert, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me so extensively about Liquibase, about how awesome RedMonk is, about Austin and so many other topics. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Robert: Well, I think the best place to find us right now is in AWS Marketplace. So—Corey: Now, hand on a second. When you say the best place for anything being the AWS Marketplace, I'm naturally a little suspicious. Tell me more.Robert: [laugh]. Well, best is, you know, it's—[laugh].Corey: It is a place that is there and people can find you through it. All right, then.Robert: I have a list. I have a list. But the first one I'm going to mention is AWS Marketplace. And so that's a really easy way, especially if you're taking advantage of the EDP, Enterprise Discount Program. That's helpful. Burn down those dollars, get a discount, et cetera, et cetera. Now, of course, you can go to liquibase.com, download a trial. Or you can find us on Github, github.com/liquibase. Of course, talking smack to us on Twitter is always appreciated.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:46:37]. Robert Reeves, CTO and co-founder of Liquibase. 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 along with an angry comment complaining about how Liquibase doesn't support your database engine of choice, which will quickly be rendered obsolete by the open-source community.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.

You know that feeling when one of your developer friends or colleague tells you about some amazing tool, library, or shell environment that you never heard of that you just have to run out and try right away? This episode is jam-packed full of those moments. We welcome back Jay Miller to discuss tools and tips for developer productivity. The title says 10 tips, but we actually veer into many more along the way. I think you'll really enjoy this useful and light-hearted episode. Links from the show Jay on Twitter: @kjaymiller More Oh my ZSH plugins: github.com exa: the.exa.website bat: github.com ripgrep/amber: github.com Neovim: neovim.io RUMPS macOS Framework: github.com Black: github.com pypi-changes package: readthedocs.io asdf-python: github.com WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool: wave.webaim.org Google PageSpeed: pagespeed.web.dev XKCD Commit messages: xkcd.com secure package: github.com OWASP Top 10: owasp.org ngrok: ngrok.com starship: starship.rs Homebrew: brew.sh Chocolatey: chocolatey.org pip-tools: github.com Let's Encrypt: letsencrypt.org Sourcetree Git App: sourcetreeapp.com Oh my ZSH: ohmyz.sh nerd fonts: nerdfonts.com Oh my Posh: ohmyposh.dev Windows Terminal: microsoft.com McFly shell history: github.com Fig IO enhanced shell: fig.io Conduit podcast: relay.fm htmx course at Talk Python: talkpython.fm/htmx Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Coiled CockroachDB AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

About SahirSahir is responsible for product strategy across the MongoDB portfolio. He joined MongoDB in 2016 as SVP, Cloud Products & GTM to lead MongoDB's cloud products and go-to-market strategy ahead of the launch of Atlas and helped grow the cloud business from zero to over $150 million annually. Sahir joined MongoDB from Sumo Logic, an SaaS machine-data analytics company, where he managed platform, pricing, packaging and technology partnerships. Before Sumo Logic, Sahir was the Director of Cloud Management Strategy & Evangelism at VMware, where he launched VMware's first organically developed SaaS management product and helped grow the management tools business to over $1B in revenue. Earlier in his career, Sahir held a variety of technical and sales-focused roles at DynamicOps, BMC Software, and BladeLogic.Links:MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: 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 nonsense.  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 Corey Quinn. For the first in-person recording in ages we have a promoted guest joining us from MongoDB. Sahir Azam is the chief product officer. Thank you so much for joining me.Sahir: Thank you for having me, Corey. It's really exciting to be able to talk and actually meet in person.Corey: I know it feels a little scandalous these days, when we're in a position of meeting people in person, like you're almost like you're doing something wrong somehow. So, MongoDB has been a staple of the internet for a long time. It's oh good; another database to keep track of. What do you do these days? What is MongoDB in this ecosystem?Sahir: That's a great question. I think we're fortunate that MongoDB has been very popular for a very long time. We're seeing, you know, massive adoption grow across the globe and the massive developer community is sort of adopting the technology. What I would bring across is today MongoDB is really one of the leading cloud database companies in the world. The majority of the company's business comes from our cloud service; we partner very heavily with AWS and other cloud providers on making sure we have global availability of that. That's our flagship product.And we've invested really heavily in the last I would say, five or six years, and really extending the capabilities of the product to not just be the, sort of, database for modern web scale applications, but also to be able to handle mission-critical use cases across every vertical, you know, enterprises to startups, and doing so in a way that really empowers a general purpose strategy for any app they want to build.Corey: You're talking about general purpose which, I guess, leads to the obvious question that AWS has been pushing for a while, the idea of purpose-built databases, which makes sense from a certain point of view, and then they, of course, take that way beyond the bounds of normalcy. I don't know what the job is for someone whose role is to disambiguate between the 20 different databases that they offer by, who knows, probably the end of this year. And I don't know what that looks like. What's your take on that whole idea of a different database for every problem slash every customer slash every employee slash API request.Sahir: What we see is customers clearly moved to the cloud because they want to be able to move faster, innovate faster, be more competitive in whatever market or business or organization they're in. And certainly, I think the days of a single vendor database to rule all use cases are gone. We're not [laugh] by any means supportive of that. However, the idea that you would have 15 different databases that need to be rationalized, integrated, scripted together, frankly, may be interesting for technical teams who want to cobble together, you know, a bespoke architecture. But when we look at it from, sort of a skills, repeatability, cost, simplicity, perspective of architecture, we're seeing these, sort of like, almost like Rube Goldbergian sort of architectures.And in a large organization that wants to adopt the cloud en mass, the idea of every development team coming up with their own architecture and spending all of that time and duplication and integration of work is a distraction from ultimately their core mission, which is driving more capability and differentiation in the application for their end customer. So, to be blunt, we actually think the idea of having 15 different databases, ‘the right tool for the job' is the wrong approach. We think that there's certain key technologies that most organizations will use for 70, 80% of use cases, and then use the niche technologies for where they really need specialized solutions for particular needs.Corey: So, if you're starting off with a general-purpose database then, what is the divergence point at which point—like in my case, eventually I have to admit that using TXT records in Route 53 as a database starts to fall down for certain use cases. Not many, mind you, but one or two here and there. At what point when you're sticking with a general-purpose database does migrating to something else—what's the tipping point there?Sahir: Yeah, I think what we see is if you have a general-purpose database that hits the majority of your needs, oftentimes, especially with a microservices kind of modern architecture, it's not necessarily replacing your general-purpose database with a completely different solution, it may be augmenting it. So, you may have a particular need for, I don't know deep graph capabilities, for example, for a particular traversal use case. Maybe you augment that with a specialized solution for that. But the idea is that there's a certain set of velocity you can enable an organization by building skill set and consolidation around a technology provider that gives much more repeatability, security, less data duplication, and ultimately focuses your organization in teams on innovation as opposed to plumbing and that's where the 15 different databases been cobbled together may be interesting, but it's not really focusing on innovation, it's focusing more on the technology problems that you solved.Corey: So, we're recording this on site in Las Vegas, as re:Invent, thankfully and finally, draws to a close. How was your conference?Sahir: It's been fantastic. And to be clear, we are huge fans and partners of AWS. This is one of our most exciting conferences we sponsor. We go big, [laugh] we throw a party, we have a huge presence, we have hundreds of customer meetings. So, although I'm a little ragged, as you can probably tell from my voice from many meetings and conversations and drinks with friends, it's actually been a really great week.Corey: It is one of those things where having taken a year off, you forget so much of it, where it's, “Oh, I can definitely walk between those two hotels,” and then you sort of curse the name of God as you wind up going down that path. It was a relief, honestly, to not see, for example, another managed database service being launched that I can recall in that flurry of announcements, did you catch any?Sahir: I didn't catch any new particular database services that at least caught my eye. Granted, I've been in meetings most of the time, however, we're really excited about a lot of the infrastructure innovation. You know, I just happened to have a meeting with the compute teams on the Amazon side and what they're doing with, you know, Wavelength, and Local Zones, and new hardware, and chips with Graviton, it's all stuff we're really excited about. So, it is always interesting to see the innovation coming out of AWS.Corey: You mentioned that you are a partner with AWS, and I get it, but AWS is also one of those companies whose product strategy is ‘yes.' And they a couple years ago launched their DocumentDB, in parentheses with MongoDB compatibility, which they say, “Oh, customers were demanding this,” but no, no, they weren't. I've been talking to customers; what they wanted was actual MongoDB. The couple of folks I'm talking to who are using it are using it for one reason and one reason only, and that is replication traffic between AZs on native AWS services is free; everyone else must pay. So, there's some sub-offering in many respects that is largely MongoDB compatible to a point. Okay, but… how do you wind up, I guess, addressing the idea of continuing to partner with a company that is also heavily advantaging its own first party services, even when those are not the thing that best serves customers.Sahir: Yeah, I've been in technology for a while, and you know, the idea of working with major platform players in the context of being, in our case, a customer, a partner, and a competitor is something we're more than comfortable with, you know, and any organization at our scale and size is navigating those same dynamics. And I think on the outside, it's very easy to pay way more attention to the competitive dynamics of oh, you run in AWS but you compete with them, but the reality is, honestly, there's a lot more collaboration, both on the engineering side but also in the field. Like, we go jointly work with customers, getting them onto our platform, way more often than I think the world sees. And that's a really positive relationship. And we value that and we're investing heavily on our side to make sure you know, we're good partners in that sense.The nuances of DocumentDB versus the real MongoDB, the reality of the situation is yes, if you want the minimal MongoDB experience for, you know, a narrow percentage of our functionality, you can get that from that technology, but that's not really what customers want. Customers choose MongoDB for the breadth of capabilities that we have, and in particular, in the last few years, it's not just the NoSQL query capability of Mongo, we've integrated rich aggregation capabilities for analytics, transactional guarantees, a globally distributed architecture that scales horizontally and across regions much further than anything a relational architecture can accomplish. And we've integrated other domains of data, so things like full text, search, analytics, mobile synchronization are all baked into our Atlas platform. So, to be honest, when customers compare the two on the merits of the technology, we're more than happy to be competitors with AWS.Corey: No, I think that everyone competes with AWS, including its own product teams amongst each other because, you know, that's how you, I guess, innovate more rapidly. What do I know? I don't run a hyperscale platform. Thankfully.If I go and pull up your website, it's mongodb.com. It is natural for me to assume that you make a database, but then I start reading; after the big text and the logo, it says that you are an application data platform. Tell me more about that.Sahir: Yeah, and this has been a relatively new area of focus for us over the last couple of years. You know, I think many people know MongoDB as a non-relational modern database. Clearly, that's our core product. I think in general, we have a lot of capabilities in the database that many customers are unaware of in terms of transactional guarantees and schema management and others, so that's kind of all within the core database. But over the last few years, we've both built and acquired technology, things like Realm, that allows for mobile synchronization; event-driven architectures; APIs to be created on your data Easily; Atlas data lake, which allows for data transformation and analytics to be done using the same API as the core Mongo database; as I mentioned a couple minutes ago, things like search, where we actually allow customers to remove the need for a separate search engine for their application and make it really seamless operationally, and from the developer experience standpoint.And you know, there's no real term in the industry for that, so we kind of describe ourselves as an application data platform because really, what we're trying to do is simplify the data architecture for applications, so you don't need ten different niche database technologies to be able to build a powerful, modern, scalable application; you can build it in a unified way with an amazing developer experience that allows your teams to focus on differentiation and competitiveness as opposed to plumbing together the data infrastructure.Corey: So, when I hear platform, I think about a number of different things that may or may not be accurate, but the first thing that I think is, “Oh. There's code running on this then, as sort of part of an ecosystem.” Effectively is their code running on the data platform that you built today that wasn't written by people at MongoDB?Sahir: Yes, but it's typically the customer's code as part of their application. So, you know, I'll give you a couple of simple examples. We provide SDKs to be able to build web and mobile applications. We handle the synchronization of data from the client and front end of an application back to the back end seamlessly through our Realm platform. So, we're certainly, in that case, operating some of the business logic, or extending beyond sort of just the back end data.Similarly, a lot of what we focus on is modern event-driven architectures with MongoDB. So, to make it easier to create reactive applications, trigger off of changes in your data, we built functions and triggers natively in the platform. Now, we're not trying to be a full-on application hosting platform; that's not our business, our business is a data platform, but we really invest in making sure that platform is open, accessible, provides APIs, and functional capabilities make it very easy to integrate into any application our customers want to build.Corey: It seems like a lot of different companies now are trying to, for lack of a better term, get some of the love that Snowflake has been getting for, “Oh, their data cloud is great.” But when you take a step back and talk to people about, “So, what do you think about Mongo?” The invariable response you're going to get every time is, “Oh, you mean the database?” Like, “No, no. The character from the Princess Bride. Yes, the database.” How do you view that?Sahir: Yeah, it's easy to look at all the data landscape through a simple lens, but the reality is, there's many sub markets within the database and data market overall. And for MongoDB we're, frankly, an operational data company. And we're not focused on data warehousing, although you can use MongoDB for various analytical capabilities. We're focused on helping organizations build amazing software, and leveraging data as an enabler for great customer experiences, for digital transformation initiatives, for solving healthcare problems, or [unintelligible 00:12:51] problems in the government, or whatever it might be. We're not really focused on selling customers'—or platforms of data from—not the customers' data, but other—allowing people to monetize their data. We're focused on their applications and developers building those experiences.Corey: Yeah. So, you're if you were selling customers' data, you just rebrand as FacebookDB and be done with it, or MetaDB now—Sahir: MetaDB?Corey: Yeah. As far as the general Zeitgeist around Mongo goes, back when I was first hearing about it, in I don't know, I want to say the first half of the 2010s, the running gag was, “Oh, Mongo. It's Snapchat for databases,” with the gag being that it lost production data was unsafe for a bunch of things. To be clear, based upon my Route 53 comments, I am not a database expert by any stretch of the imagination. Now, the most common thing in my experience that loses production data is me being allowed near it. But what was the story? What gave rise to that narrative?Sahir: Yeah, I think that—thank you for bringing that up. I mean, to be clear, you know, if a database doesn't keep your data safe, consistent, and guaranteed, the rest of the functionality doesn't matter, and we take that extremely seriously at MongoDB. Now, you know, MongoDB, has been around a long time, and for better or worse—I think there's, frankly, good things and bad things about this—the database exploded in popularity extremely fast, partially because it was so easy to use for developers and it was also very different than the traditional relational database models. And so I think in many ways, customer's expectation of where the technology was compared to where we were from a maturity standpoint, combined with running an operating it the same way as a traditional system, which was, frankly, wrong for a distributed database caused, unfortunately, some situations where customers stubbed their toes and, you know, we weren't able to get to them and help them as easily as we could. Thankfully, you know, none of those issues fundamentally are, like, foundational problems. You know, we've matured the product for many, many years, you know, we work with 30,000-plus customers worldwide on mission-critical applications. I just want to make sure that everyone understands that, like, we take any issue that has to do with data loss or data corruption, as sort of the foundational [P zero 00:14:56] problem we always have to solve.Corey: I tend to form a lot of my opinions based upon very little on what, you know, sorry to say it, execs say and a lot more about what I see. There was a whole buzz going around on Twitter that HSBC was moving a whole bunch of its databases over to Mongo. And everyone was saying, “Oh, they're going to lose all their data.” But I've done work with a fair number of financial services companies, and of all the people I talk to, they're pretty far on one end of that spectrum of, “How cool are we with losing data?” So, voting with a testimonial and a wallet like that—because let's be clear, getting financial services companies to reference anything for anyone anywhere is like pulling teeth—that says a lot more than any, I guess, PR talking points could.Sahir: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, we're very fortunate to have a very broad customer base, everything from the world's largest gaming companies to the world's largest established banks, the world's most fastest growing fintechs, to health care organizations distributing vaccines with technologies built on Mongo. Like, you name it, there's a use case in any vertical, as mission critical as you can think, built on our technology. So, customers absolutely don't take our word for granted. [laugh]. They go, you know, get comfortable with a new database technology over a span of years, but we've really hit sort of mainstream adoption for the majority of organizations. You mentioned financial services, but it's really any vertical globally, you know, we can count on our customer list.Corey: How do you, I guess, for lack of a better term, monetize what it is you do when you're one of the open-source—and yes, if you're an open-source zealot who wants to complain about licensing, it's imperative that you do not email me—but you are available for free—for certain definitions of free; I know, I know—that I can get started with a two o'clock in the morning and start running it myself in my environment. What is the tipping point that causes people to say, “Well, that was a good run. Now, I'm going to pay you folks to run it for me.”Sahir: Yeah, so there's two different sides to that, first and foremost, the majority of our engineering investment for our business goes in our core database, and our core database is free. And the way we actually, you know, survive and make money as a business, so we can keep innovating, you know, on top of the billion dollars of investment we've put in our technology over the years is, for customers who are self-managing in their own data center, we provide a set of management tools, enterprise security integrations, and others that are commercially licensed to be able to manage MongoDB for mission-critical applications in production, that's a product called Enterprise Advanced. It's typically used for large enterprise accounts in their own data centers. The flagship product for the company these days, the fastest growing part of the business is a product we call Atlas—or platform we call Atlas. That's a cloud data service.So, you know, you can go onto our website, sign up with our free tier, swipe a credit card, all consumption-based, available in every AWS region, as well as Azure and GCP, has the ability to run databases across AWS, Azure, and GCP, which is quite unique to us. And that, like any cloud data technology, is then used in conjunction with a bunch of other application components in the cloud, and customers pay us for the consumption of that database and how much they use.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I want to zero in a little bit on something you just said, where you can have data shared between all three of the primary hyperscalers. That sounds like a story that people like to tell a lot, but you would know far better than I: how common is that use case?Sahir: It's definitely one from a strategic standpoint, especially in large enterprises, that's really important. Now, to your point, the actual usage of cross-cloud databases is still very early, but the fact that customers know that we can go, in three minutes, spin up a database cluster that allows them to either migrate, or span data across multiple regions from multiple providers for high availability, or extend their data to another cloud for analytics purposes or whatnot, is something that it almost is like science fiction to them, but it's crucial as a capability I know they will need in the future.Now, to our surprise, we've seen more real production adoption of it probably sooner than we would have expected, and there's kind of three key use cases that come into play. One—you know, for example, I was with a challenger bank from Latin America yesterday; they need high availability in Latin America. In the countries they're in, no single infrastructure cloud provider has multiple regions. They need to span across multiple regions. They mix and match cloud providers, in their case AWS being their primary, and they have a secondary cloud provider, in their case GCP, for high availability.But it's also regulatorily-driven because the banking SEC regulations in that country state that they need to be able to show portability because they don't want concentration risk of their banking sector to be on a single cloud provider or single cloud provider's region. So, we see that in multiple countries happening right now. That's one use case.The other tends to be geographic reach. So, we work with a very large international gaming company, majority of their use cases happen to be run out of the US. They happen to have a spike of customers using their game [unintelligible 00:19:58] gamers using it in Taiwan; their cloud provider of choice didn't have a region in Taiwan, but they were able to seamlessly extend a replica into a different cloud to serve low-latency performance in that country. That's the second.And then the third, which is a little bit more emerging is kind of the analytic-style use case where you may have your operational data running in a particular cloud provider, but you want to leverage the best of every cloud provider's, newest, fanciest services on top of your data. So, isn't it great if you can just hit a couple clicks, we'll extend your data and keep it in sync in near real time, and allow you to plumb into some new service from another cloud provider.Corey: In an ideal world with all things being equal, this is a wonderful vision. There's been a lot of noise made—a fair bit of it by me, let's be fair—around the data egress pricing for—it's easy to beat up on AWS because they are the largest cloud provider and it's not particularly close, but they all do it. Does that serve as a brake on that particular pattern?Sahir: Thankfully, for a database like ours and various mechanisms we use, it's not a barrier to entry. It's certainly a cost component to enabling this capability, for sure. We absolutely would love to see the industry be more open and use less of egress fees as a way to wall people into a particular cloud providers. We certainly have that belief, and would push that notion and continually do in the industry. But it hasn't been a barrier to adoption because it's not the major cost component of operating a multi-cloud database.Corey: Well, [then you start 00:21:27] doing this whole circular replication thing, at which point, wow. It just goes round and round and round and lives on the network all the time. I'm told that's what a storage area network is because I'm about as good at storage as I am at databases. As you look at Atlas, since you are in all of the major hyperscalers, is the experience different in any way, depending upon which provider you're running in?Sahir: By and large, it's pretty consistent. However, what we are not doing is building to the lowest common denominator. If there's a service integration that our customers on AWS want, and that service doesn't integrate, it doesn't exist on another cloud provider, or vice versa, we're not going to stop ourselves from building a great customer experience and integration point. And the same thing goes for infrastructure; if there's some infrastructure innovation that delivers price, performance, great value for our customers and it's only on a single cloud, we're not going to stop ourselves from delivering that value to customers. So, there's a line there, you know, we want to provide a great experience, portability across the cloud providers, consistency where it makes sense, but we are not going to water down our experience on a particular cloud provider if customers are asking for some native capabilities.Corey: It always feels like a strange challenge historically to wind up—at least in large, regulated environments—getting a new vendor in. Originally an end run around this was using the AWS Marketplace or whatever marketplace you were using at any given cloud provider. Then procurement caught on and in some cases banned in the Marketplace outright and now, the Marketplace is sort of reformed, in some ways, to being a tool for procurement to use. Have you seen significant uptake of your offering through the various cloud marketplaces?Sahir: We do work with all the cloud marketplaces. In fact, we just made an announcement with AWS that we're going to be implementing the pay-as-you-go marketplace model for self-service as well on AWS. So, it is definitely a driver for our business. It tends to be used most heavily when we're selling with the, you know, sales teams from the cloud providers, and customers want to benefit from a single bill, benefit from, you know, drawing down on their large commitments that they might have with any given cloud providers. So, it drives really good alignment between the customer, us as a third-party on AWS or Azure GCP, and the infrastructure cloud provider. And so we're all aligned on a motion. So, in that sense, it's definitely been helpful, but it's largely been a procurement and fulfillment sort of value proposition to drive that alignment, I'd say, by and large today.Corey: I don't know if you're able to answer this without revealing anything confidential, so please feel free not to, but as you look across the total landscape—since I would say that you have a fairly reasonable snapshot of the industry as a whole—am I right when I say that AWS is the behemoth in the space, or is it a closer horse race than most people would believe, based upon your perspective?Sahir: I think in general, for sure AWS is the market share leader. It would be crazy to say anything otherwise. They innovated this model, you know, the amount of innovation happening at AWS is incredible, you know, and we're benefiting from it as a customer as well. However, we do believe it's a multi-cloud future. I mean, look at the growth of Azure. You know, we're seeing Google show up in large enterprises across the globe as well.And even beyond the three American clouds, you know, we work heavily with Alibaba and Tencent in mainland China, which is a completely different market than Western world. So, I do think the trend over time will be a more heterogeneous, more multi-cloud world—which I'm biased; that does favor MongoDB, but that's the trend we're seeing—but that doesn't mean that AWS won't continue to still be a leader and a very strong player in that market.Corey: I want to talk a little bit about Jepsen. And for those who are unaware, jepsen.io is run by Kyle Kingsbury. Kyle is wonderful, and he's also nuts. If you followed him back when he was on Twitter, you've also certainly seen them.But beyond that, he is the de facto resource I go to when it comes to consistency testing and stress testing of databases. I'm a little annoyed he hasn't taken on Route 53 yet, but hope does spring eternal. He's evaluated Mongo a number of times, and his conclusions, as always are mixed sometimes, shall we say, incendiary, but they always seem relatively fair. What is your experience been, working with him? And do you share my opinion of him as being a neutral and fair arbiter of these things?Sahir: I do. I think he's got real expertise and credibility in beating up distributed database systems and finding the edges of where they don't live up to what we all hope they do, right? Whether it's us or anyone else, just to be clear. And so anytime Kyle finds some flaw in MongoDB, we take it seriously, we add it to our test suite, [laugh] we remediate, and I think we have a pretty good history of that. And in fact, we've actually worked with Kyle to welcome him beating up our database on multiple occasions, too, so it's not an adversarial relationship at all.Corey: I have to ask, since you are a more modern generation of database, then many from the previous century, but there's always been a significant, shall we say… concern, when I wind up looking at it [it again in 00:26:33] any given database, and I look in the terms and conditions and, like, “Oh, it's a great database. We're by far the best. Whatever you do, do not publish benchmarks.” What's going on with that?Sahir: I think benchmarks can be spun in any direction you want, by any vendor. And it's not just database technology. I've been in IT for a while, and you know, that applies to any technology. So, we absolutely do not shy away from our performance or benchmark or comparisons to any technology. We just think that, you know, vendors benchmarking technologies for their—are doing so largely to only make their own technologies look good versus competition.Corey: I tend to be somewhat skeptical of the various benchmark stuff. I remember repeatedly oh, I'll wind up running whatever it is—I think it's Geek Speed—on my various devices to see oh, how snappy and performant is it going to be? But then I'm sitting there opening Microsoft Word and watching the beach ball spin, and spin, and spin, and it turns out, don't care about benchmarks in a real-world use case in many scenarios.Sahir: Yeah, it's kind of a good analogy, right? I mean, performance of an application, sure, the database at the heart of it is a crucial component, but there's many more aspects of it that have to do with the overall real world performance than just some raw benchmark results for any database, right? It's the way you model your data, the way the rest of the architecture of the application interacts and hangs together with the database, many, many layers of complexity. So, I don't always think those benchmarks are indicative of how real world performance will look, but at the same time, I'm very confident in MongoDB's performance comparatively to our peers, so it's not something we're afraid of.Corey: As you take a look at where you've been and where you are now, what's next? Where are you going? Because I have a hard time believing that, “Yep, we're deciding it's feature complete and we're just going to sell this until the end of time exactly as is, we're laying off our entire engineering team and we're going to be doing support from our yacht, parked comfortably in international waters.” That's a slightly different company. What's the plan?Sahir: So, [laugh] you're—we are not parking anything, anytime soon. We are continuing to invest heavily in the innovation of the technology, and really, it's two reasons: you know, one, we're seeing an acceleration of adoption of MongoDB, either with any customers that have used us for a long time, but for more important and more use cases, but also just broader adoption globally as more and more developers learn to code, they're choosing Mongo as the place to start, increasingly. And so that's really exciting for us, and we need to keep up with those customer demands and that roadmap of asks that they have.And at the same time, customer requirements are increasing as more and more organizations are software-first organizations, the requirements of what they demand from us continually increase, which requires continual innovation in our architecture and our functionality to keep up with those and stay ahead of those customer requirements. So, what you'll see from us is, one, making sure we can build the best modern database we can. That's the core of what we do; everything we do now especially is cloud first, so working closely with our cloud partners on that. And even though we're very fortunate to be a high-performance, high-growth company with a very pervasive open technology, we're still in a giant market that has a lot of legacy technologies powering old applications. So, [laugh] you know, we have a long, long runway to become a long-standing major player in this market.And then we're going to continue this vision of an application data platform, which is really just about simplifying the capabilities and data architecture for organizations and developers so they can focus on building their application and less on the plumbing.Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they go?Sahir: Clearly, you can go to mongodb.com. You can also reach out to us on our community sites: our own or on any of the public sites that you would typically find developers hanging out. We always have folks from our teams or our champions program of advocates worldwide helping out our customers and users. And I just want to thank you, Corey, for having me. I've followed you online for a while; it's great to finally be able to meet in person.Corey: Uh-oh. It's disturbing having realized some of the things I've said on Twitter and realizing I'm now within range to get punched in the face. But, you know, we take what we can get. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Sahir: My pleasure.Corey: Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB. 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 telling me that is not the reason that AWS is building many new databases. Tell me which one you're building and why it solves a problem other than getting you the promotion you probably don't deserve.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The Dow, S&P and Nasdaq all closed down and Jim Cramer is likening this market to fantasy football - hear what he is drafting, starting and benching. Then, Founding Partner of MoffettNathanson Craig Moffett breaks down the firm's deal with SVB Financial. After, CEO of MongoDB Dev Ittycheria joins Cramer to give more details on the company's latest quarter and where the company is headed. Plus, last week Starbucks employees in Buffalo made history by voting to become the first unionized Starbucks location in the U.S. - Cramer is talking to one of the baristas that led the union effort now getting national attention. Finally, Cramer said he expects the Fed to announce rate hikes to combat inflation – hear where he thinks it will make the biggest impact.

Theme of the week Do VCs care for developer education? With more and more software-driven and developer-focused startups and companies popping up, it's only natural that we should look into what VCs think about developer education and also enablement. topics changed? To discuss this, we are by Nate Aune, founder and CEO of Appsembler and Shannon Bradshaw - Education Partner at Unusual Ventures. Here are the topics we discussed: Has the VCs' appetite for developer education topics changed? Do VCs care for developer education or enablement? Why is developer enablement important to VCs? How can one convince VCs of the value of developer education? What kind of metrics can you use to prove its value? What type of developer enablement strategy or focus can influence VC buy-in? How do you expect developer education or enablement to evolve in the future? And more! Listen to this episode to better understand what we mean by "developer education & enablement" and what VCs think of it. Let's talk data! Shannon and Nate chose to talk about https://www.devrelx.com/trends (Documentation, tutorials, tools and community engagement are the core of developer programs.) Shannon Bradshaw is Education Partner at Unusual Ventures, responsible for overall content strategy at Unusual and education services for the Get Ahead Platform. Prior to joining Unusual Ventures, Shannon was an executive at MongoDB, Inc. from their time as a startup through IPO and beyond. At MongoDB, he led the MongoDB University and Documentation teams with an education strategy that continues to drive widespread adoption of MongoDB software and services. Nate Aune plays a strong community role in the development of Open Source Software. As a social entrepreneur, he values openness, transparency and sustainable development. Nate thrives on exploring ideas with smart creative people, and then executing on those ideas.

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

In this release of the Canadian Investor Podcast, we cover the following earnings releases and news: The markets finish a volatile week Square changing its corporate name to Block Labour shortages in Canada MongoDB earnings results BRP Q3 earnings results Canadian banks earnings Tickers of stocks discussed: MDB, SQ, BRP.TO, RY.TO, TD.TO, BMO.TO, CM.TO, BNS.TO   https://thecanadianinvestorpodcast.com/ Canadian Investor Podcast Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon's twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden's twitter: @BradoCapital Stratosphere

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.

Name: Marlon Nichols Current Title: Managing Partner, MaC Venture Capital   About Marlon: Marlon Nichols is a founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital (formerly known as Cross Culture Ventures), which finds the entrepreneurs who are building the future for the rest of America. He's a former Kauffman Fellow and Investment Director at Intel Capital, with an extensive background in technology, private equity, media, and entertainment. Marlon's unique eye for global trends and shifts in consumer behavior has helped him capture many high-potential investments, which include Gimlet Media, MongoDB, Thrive Market, Fair, LISNR, Mayvenn, Blavity, Pipe, Wonderschool, and other companies that reflect overlooked markets.   He serves on the board of directors for Ajua, Blavity, Finesse, Kauffman Fellows Program, LISNR, Ryff, Sote and Wonderschool. Marlon is the recipient of MVMT50's SXSW 2018 Innovator of the Year award, a 2018 nominee of the ADCOLOR in Tech award, Digital Diversity's Innovation & Inclusion Change Agent award, was named Pitchbook's 25 Black Founders and VCs to Watch in 2018 and 2019, was a TechWeek 100 winner and was named one of Silicon Republic's 26 VC professionals spearheading change. He's been featured on TechCrunch, Fortune, Blavity, and NBC, and is adjunct faculty in entrepreneurship and venture capital at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University.   DURING THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSSED: Understanding how venture capital works and the different types Which types of businesses should pursue venture capital funding When is the right time for a business to consider raising venture financing The role of a venture partner in a business What happens at the end of a companies life cycle What to expect after receiving funding and business expectations Tips for qualifying investors to make sure they are a right fit to invest in your business Are you a business owner looking to get more clients and exposure? Does your business provide professional services that would be beneficial for a business owner starting their business? If so, submit your business to be listed in our directory, The Connect!  You may submit your business at:  https://blacktobusiness.com/theconnect/   For complete show notes and resources mentioned for this episode go to: blacktobusiness.com/73   Thank you so much for listening! Please support us by simply rating and reviewing our podcast!

SQLAlchemy is the most widely used ORM (Object Relational Mapper) for Python developers. It's been around since February 2006. But we might be in for the most significant release since the first one: SQLAlchemy 2.0. This version adds async and await support, new context-manager friendly features everywhere, and even a unified query syntax. Mike Bayer is back to give us a glimpse of what's coming and why Python's database story is getting stronger. Links from the show SQLAlchemy: sqlalchemy.org Mike on Twitter: @zzzeek Migrating to SQLAlchemy 2.0: sqlalchemy.org awesome-sqlalchemy: github.com sqlalchemy-continuum versioning: readthedocs.io enum support: github.com alembic: sqlalchemy.org GeoAlchemy: geoalchemy.org sqltap profiling: github.com nplusone: github.com Unit of work: duckduckgo.com ORM + Dataclasses: sqlalchemy.org SQLModel: sqlmodel.tiangolo.com Cython example: cython.org Async SQLAlchemy example: sqlalchemy.org ORM Usages Stats (see ORM section): jetbrains.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors TopTal Talk Python Training AssemblyAI

MongoDB, Inc., Q3 2022 Earnings Call, Dec 06, 2021

Aus Angst vor OMIKRON wird Angst, die nächste Rally zu verpassen. FOMO ist back on Wall Street! Dass der Tech-Sektor die Rally anführt, ist ein besonders wichtiges Signal. Erste Berichte signalisieren, dass die COVID-Variante zwar besonders ansteckend ist, aber mit milderen Symptomen. Die gestrige Zinssenkung in China, gekoppelt mit gleichzeitig robusten Wirtschaftsdaten aus Deutschland, China, und Taiwan wirken sich ebenfalls stützend aus. Was die US-Notenbank betrifft, scheint das Risiko einer Drosselung am 15. Dezember nun eingepreist zu sein. Im Fokus steht neben Apple auch AutoZone und MongoDB. Abonniere den Podcast, um keine Folge zu verpassen! ____ Folge uns, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben: • Facebook: http://fal.cn/SQfacebook • Twitter: http://fal.cn/SQtwitter • LinkedIn: http://fal.cn/SQlinkedin • Instagram: http://fal.cn/SQInstagram

Aus Angst vor OMIKRON wird Angst, die nächste Rally zu verpassen. FOMO ist back on Wall Street! Dass der Tech-Sektor die Rally anführt, ist ein besonders wichtiges Signal. Erste Berichte signalisieren, dass die COVID-Variante zwar besonders ansteckend ist, aber mit milderen Symptomen. Die gestrige Zinssenkung in China, gekoppelt mit gleichzeitig robusten Wirtschaftsdaten aus Deutschland, China, und Taiwan wirken sich ebenfalls stützend aus. Was die US-Notenbank betrifft, scheint das Risiko einer Drosselung am 15. Dezember nun eingepreist zu sein. Im Fokus steht neben Apple auch AutoZone und MongoDB. Abonniere den Podcast, um keine Folge zu verpassen! LINKS https://www.instagram.com/kochwallstreet/ https://www.facebook.com/markus.koch.newyork https://www.youtube.com/user/kochntv https://www.markuskoch.de/

Steve and Frank are back with the latest cloud FinOps news for November! This episode covers the following topics:Achieve up to 30% better performance with Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) using new Graviton2 instancesSheet Change Performance Optimizations is now generally available for Amazon QuickSightAnnouncing general availability of Amazon EC2 G5 instancesAWS Batch introduces fair-share schedulingAmazon EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet now support automatic instance termination with Capacity RebalancingAmazon Athena adds cost details to query execution plansModernizing compliance: Introducing Risk and Compliance as CodeAnnouncing Spot Pods for GKE Autopilot—save on fault tolerant workloadsForrester: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Migrating Expensive Operating Systems and Traditional Software to Google CloudAutomatically clean up unneeded data with TTL for Cloud SpannerLive resize of Azure Disk Storage in public previewGeneral availability: Provisioned throughput increase for Azure Ultra Disk StorageTo find out more about cloud FinOps, click here to visit our website. 

There is a visibility problem within the tech industry as there is a large absence of female leaders and role models. The diversity gap among tech leadership roles is wider today than it was in 1984. A 2021 report found that 50% of women abandon tech careers by 35 and are leaving at a 45% higher rate than men. AWIT was founded to address this representation gap in tech leadership roles by giving underrepresented individuals the resources they need to exceed, including mentoring, skills-based training, and advocacy. Nancy Wang shares the story behind AWIT. In addition to being CEO and Founder of AWIT, Nancy pulls double duty. She is the GM of Data Protection Services at Amazon Web Services (AWS) — understanding first-hand what it means to climb to be a female leader within the tech industry. We discuss all of these reasons represent the need for mentorship and continuing education for women and underrepresented individuals to have the right support to accelerate their careers to the next level. I learn how AWIT has recently created the industry's first 1:1 executive mentorship program for MongoDB and teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to release two online certification programs for Coursera.    

Here's a question: What's the most common way to explore data? Would you say pandas and matplotlib? Maybe you went more general and said Jupyter notebooks. How about Excel, or Google Sheets, or Numbers, or some other spreadsheet app? Yeah, my bet is on Excel. And while it has many drawbacks, it makes exploring tabular data very accessible to many people, most of whom aren't even developers or data scientists. On this episode, we're talking about a tool called Mito. This is an add-in for Jupyter notebooks that injects an Excel-like interface into the notebook. You pass it data via a pandas dataframe (or some other source) and then you can explore it as if you're using Excel. The cool thing is though, just below that, it's writing the pandas code you'd need to do to actually accomplish that outcome in code. I think this will make pandas and Python data exploration way more accessible to many more people. So if you've been intimidated by pandas, or know someone who has, this could be what you've been looking for. Links from the show Mito: trymito.io Mito summary stats: trymito.io pandas-profiling package: github.com Lux API: pypi.org Hex notebooks: medium.com Deepnote: deepnote.com Papermill: papermill.readthedocs.io JupterLite: jupyter.org Jupyter Desktop App: github.com Jut: github.com Jupyter project: jupyter.org Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Shortcut Linode AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

An airhacks.fm conversation with Gunnar Morling (@gunnarmorling) about: debezium as analytics enablement, enriching events with quarkus, ksqlDB and PrestoDB and trino, cloud migrations with Debezium, embedded Debezium Engine, debezium server vs. Kafka Connect, Debezium Server with sink connectors, Apache Pulsar, Redis Streams are supporting Debezium Server, Debezium Server follows the microservice architecture, pluggable offset stores, JDBC offset store is Apache Iceberg connector, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB change streams, Cassandra, Vitess, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server scylladb is cassandra compatible and provides external debezium connector, debezium ui is written in React, incremental snapshots, netflix cdc system, DBLog: A Watermark Based Change-Data-Capture Framework, multi-threaded snapshots, internal data leakage and the Outbox pattern, debezium listens to the outbox pattern, OpenTracing integration and the outbox pattern, sending messages directly to transaction log with PostgreSQL, Quarkus outbox pattern extension, the transaction boundary topic Gunnar Morling on twitter: @gunnarmorling and debezium.io

The Cloud Pod: Oh the Places You'll Go at re:Invent 2021 — Episode 144 On The Cloud Pod this week, as a birthday present to Ryan, the team didn't discuss his advanced age, and focused instead on their AWS re:Invent predictions. Also, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team launches a product, and Microsoft announces a new VM series in Azure. A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights

At PyCon 2017, Jake Vanderplas gave a great keynote where he said, "Python is a mosaic." He described how Python is stronger and growing because it's being adopted and used by people with diverse technical backgrounds. In this episode, we're adding to that mosaic by diving into how Python is being used in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Our guest, Gui Talarico, has worked as an architect who help automate that world by bringing Python to solve problems others were just doing by point-and-click tooling. I think you'll enjoy this look into that world. We also touch on his project pyairtable near the end as well. Links from the show Pyninsula Python in Architecture Talk: youtube.com Using technology to scale building design processes at WeWork talk: youtube.com Revit software: autodesk.com Creating a command in pyRevit: notion.so IronPython: ironpython.net Python.NET: github.com revitpythonwrapper: readthedocs.io aec.works site: aec.works Speckle: speckle.systems Ladybug Tools: ladybug.tools Airtable: airtable.com PyAirtable: pyairtable.readthedocs.io PyAirtable ORM: pyairtable.readthedocs.io Revitron: github.com WeWork: wework.com Article: Using Airtable as a Content Backend: medium.com Python is a Mosaic Talk: youtube.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Shortcut Linode AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

Episode 130 : Du DevSecOps administrativement souverainPar Vincent Heuschling, Jérome Mainaud, Nicolas Steinmetz, et Alexander DejanovskiUn épisode de news enregistré le 15/10/2021.Shownotes complètes sur : https://trkit.io/s/BDHEP130

On The Cloud Pod this week, the pod squad is down to the OG three while Ryan is away. Also AWS announces serverless pipelines, GCP releases Spot Pods, and Azure introduces Chaos Studio.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights

To give patients the healthcare experience they expect, providers and payers must first free themselves from rigid data architectures, legacy hardware, and monolithic patient record and care applications. Hear how Humana is using FHIR to address these challenges and build the future of connected healthcare.

Do you do anything with Jupyter notebooks? If you do, there is a very good chance you're working with the pandas library. This is one of THE primary tools of anyone doing computational work or data exploration with Python. Yet, this library is massive and knowing the idiomatic way to use it can be hard to discover. That's why I've invited Bex Tuychiev to be our guest. He wrote an excellent article highlighting 25 idiomatic Pandas functions and properties we should all keep in our data toolkit. I'm sure there is something here for all of us to take away and use pandas that much better. Links from the show Bex Tuychiev: linkedin.com Bex's Medium profile: ibexorigin.medium.com Numpy 25 functions article: towardsdatascience.com missingno package: coderzcolumn.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Shortcut Linode AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

Welcome to Remotely Interesting brought to you by Netlify. To day we have the pleasure or meeting up with Evan Weaver, CTO of Fauna to hear about his Jamstack journey.People who were remotely interesting: Cassidy Williams Phil Hawksworth Tara Z. Manicsic And special guest: Evan Weaver, Fauna CTOWho is he?Co-founder, CTO (former CEO) of FaunaThe Jamstack Journey ~2017 Global transactional database tech based on Twitter experience serverless before there even was 'serverless' in 2016 people wanted servers not APIs ~2018 found early adopters building GraphQL interfaces for Fauna in the Jamstack pivot to developer-led db as a service & the rest is history Being OK with the Weird him & co-founder (Chief Architect) Matt Freels ex-Twitter anarchist hippies Twitter: home of the weird off the shelf solutions like Cassandra & MongoDB wouldn't work for what they needed considering the journey of other small teams and how to help them "fundamentally motivated by anger and rage" fave quote of the show & why Fauna came around to help Moore's Law pun Where to Focus First there are only so many large companies w specialized dbs for the rest of us they wanted to make off-the-shelf dbs that would grow with company LAMP era analogy & steak dinners & web 1.0 data replication and inability to modernize 100s of millions of dollars a year on Oracle CHCHCHCHChanges from the developer out provisioning microservices and GraphQL the permission chain of architectural change "you don't know what the future is going to be you just know you need to iterate" Phil Wants to Talk to About Trust the bigger the company the harder it is for them to trust third parties https://fauna.com/trust is the foundation stable & secure making distributed strictly serializable Calvin algorithm giving people more information & transparency region groups Delegating Databases & Legacy Struggle knowing just enough to be dangerous some Phil puns no one migrates their database you can port if you want to...but maybe don't decoupled architectures besides the Jamstack mixing and matching TidBits & ThoughtThings™️What is something old that you have that getting rid of isn't easy? sad rags more Pheels about Phil philtting and philing shirts not getting rid of old things...on purpose computer treasures, we want that data ummmmbilical cords & Beautician and the Beast Get started w Fauna for free! & join the slack community :)As always, we hope you find it remotely interesting.

Adam Kurkiewicz is the CEO and co-founder of Biomage, an open-source bioinformatics software company whose mission is to improve human health through science and technology. Biomage makes it easier for researchers to understand their own data without having to hire a bioinformatician, which often comes with problems around collaboration, communication, and price.After completing his Bachelors in Computer Science and Mathematics, Adam joined Skyscanner. And though he loved the company culture, he did not agree with the mission and instead wanted to address people's health problems, so he decided to pursue a PhD in bioinformatics. However, he decided to not continue with his PhD, and along with his friends Iva and Marcell, they founded Biomage. After overcoming hurdles in the hiring process, Adam and his co-founders have now successfully and proudly expanded their team to 15 people.In terms of their software, while a typical biology experiment will produce one data point, with Biomage's single-cell RNA-seq technology, a single experiment results in 200 million data points. Naturally, that would require powerful software capable of processing all that data. So, in simple terms, Biomage's software does both the processing as well as the analytics of data. Inspired by MongoDB and Elasticsearch, Adam likens Biomage to being the MongoDB of bioinformatics. Here's proof that Biomage works. Dr. Angela Bradshaw's research on the heart bypass in the University of Glasgow uncovered the mechanism occurring after receiving a bypass that leads to its failure. Through this research, they're able to prevent this from happening in the future, and this discovery would not have been possible without Biomage. Aside from the University of Glasgow, another one of Biomage's partners is Harvard Medical School, and they hope to partner with more and more universities and institutions. Adam shares his advice for founders on how to raise funding, and he highly encourages joining accelerator programs. In 10 years' time, Adam envisions Biomage contributing to major advancements in precision medicine, because ultimately, their goal is to help as many scientists as possible for the betterment of everyone.Adam's key lessons and quotes from this episode were:“In traditional businesses, the term human resources or even just the approach to the employees is as sort of just a commodity resource, but we really do not think about our employees that way. They are the company, and that's it.” (20:40)We envision becoming a multi-product, open-source bioinformatics company that really helps, that really allows any bioinformatician, any biologist who has bioinformatics needs to get their job done in a better way than right now.” (25:14)“That's the beauty of the fundraising process; it only has to work once. You can have 100 conversations with investors. It only has to work once. You only need it to work once.” (30:06)“I believe that precision medicine will happen, and has been waiting to happen, and will happen sooner or later, and I believe Biomage is just going to be a big part of that story.” (35:04)In this episode, we also talked about:Adam's education and then how his career began at Skyscanner  (1:28)From being a PhD student to Biomage founder (3:51)Biology then and now (7:39)How and why Biomage is a big help in research  (12:17)The biggest challenge for Adam and his team (16:48)Developing Biomage and one of their main partnerships (22:14)Biomage and its role in drug development (26:29)How to get investors (29:57)Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/impacthustlers)

MongoDB.local London https://events.mongodb.com/dotlocallondon AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/ Recommendations Dominic People. Just people. In three dimensions and real life. Mike The Tim Ferriss Show - Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?i=1000540043607 Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Is Python slow? We touched on that question with Guido and Mark last episode. This time we welcome back friend of the show, Anthony Shaw. Here's there to share the massive amount of work he's been doing to answer that question and speed things up where they answer is yes. He's just released version 1.0 of the Pyjion project. Pyjion is a drop-in JIT compiler for Python 3.10. Pyjion uses the power of the .NET 6 cross-platform JIT compiler to optimize Python code on the fly, with NO changes to your source code required. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, x64 and ARM64. Links from the show Anthony on Twitter: @anthonypjshaw Pyjion: github.com Restarting Pyjion Presentation: youtube.com Hathi: SQL host scanner and dictionary attack tool: github.com Try Pyjion online: trypyjion.com Pyjion optimizations: readthedocs.io Pyjion docs: readthedocs.io .NET: dotnet.microsoft.com PEP 523: python.org Pydantic validation decorator: helpmanual.io Tortoise ORM: github.com pypy: pypy.org Numba: numba.pydata.org NGen AOT Compiler: microsoft.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Shortcut Linode AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

My guest today is Roelof Botha, a partner at one of the world's oldest and most successful venture firms, Sequoia Capital. A few days ago before I sat down with Roelof, he announced Sequoia's boldest innovation since the firm was founded by Don Valentine in the early 1970s. Going forward, the firm will break from the traditional VC mould of fund cycles and instead restructure around a single, open-ended, permanent structure named The Sequoia Fund.   In our conversation, we first discuss the details of this change from all different angles and then dive into Roelof's career. We talk about what's changed over the past twenty years, his days at PayPal, what legendary investors he's worked with have had in common, and what he's learned from being involved in businesses like Square, YouTube, and Unity.   Please enjoy this great conversation with Roelof Botha.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   ------   This episode is brought to you by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. If you've been scrambling to keep up with the deluge of IPOs and SPACs these days, Canalyst has models on Robinhood, Marqeta, Grab, and everything in between. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalyst.com/patrick.   ------   At WatchBox, the world's finest watches are at your fingertips with an ever-expanding collection of luxury timepieces, all certified authentic and collector quality. WatchBox's global team of expert client advisors is ready to help you find the watch you've always wanted. Step into the collector's circle at thewatchbox.com/patrick   ------   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:53] - [First question] - What led Sequoia to change their structure [00:05:53] - Parallels between their approach and the problem Square set out to solve [00:07:36] - The mechanics of the new fund and how it'll affect their clients [00:10:42] - How much discretion LPs will have when choosing to participate in sub-funds [00:13:11] - What the future looks like and how public securities could be a dominant force [00:15:02] - Benefits and value-unlocks that the new fund offers that weren't available before [00:16:55] - Comparing their structure to the current crossover funds we see emerging [00:18:21] - What alignment looks like in this new structure for LPs [00:22:02] - Cost of capital, interest rates, and their impacts on rates of return [00:25:39] - Changes in the industry and founders that he's noticed [00:28:56] - What matters to him when meeting with young companies for the first time [00:31:47] - The importance placed on value creation over value capture in the early days [00:33:09] - Things that would dissuade him from partnering with a company [00:34:18] - What the growth and leadership at Square has taught him over the years [00:35:44] - Things he's most excited about for payments looking forward [00:37:34] - How often a company lowering friction with technology appeals to him  [00:38:38] - Thoughts on Unity and its role in the growing trend of the metaverse [00:40:28] - Why the open and decentralized nature of the future is so beneficial [00:42:05] - Lessons learned about content and internet from working with YouTube [00:44:08] - The landscape of developers today and MongoDB's role in it  [00:45:24] - Commonalities between companies who have a successful second act [00:48:16] - Good board members support founders during their pivotal moments [00:49:26] - Learning to identify and hunt for crucible moments [00:50:50] - Curiosity is the key ingredient of a great investor [00:52:05] - What makes for a fantastic investment memo [00:53:20] - The most memorable investment memo he's ever read [00:54:07] - Honing his leadership as his role has changed at Sequoia these past years [00:55:51] - Thoughts on Sequoia's brand and the scope of his ambition [00:58:05] - What he's most curious about in the world today [00:58:46] - What technology wants most from people today [01:01:13] - The difference between an accountant and an actuary's mindset and when each one is appropriate to inhabit [01:02:38] - Differences between talent and genius  [01:04:12] - Closing principals about business building he finds important to consider [01:06:17] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

There has a been a bunch of renewed interested in making Python faster. While for some of us, Python is already plenty fast. For others, such as those in data science, scientific computing, and even the large tech companies, making Python even a little faster would be a big deal. This episode is the first of several that dive into some of the active efforts to increase the speed of Python while maintaining compatibility with existing code and packages. Who better to help kick this off than Guido van Rossum and Mark Shannon? They both join us to share their project to make Python faster. I'm sure you'll love hearing what they are up to. Links from the show Guido van Rossum: @gvanrossum Mark Shannon: linkedin.com Faster Python Plan: github.com/faster-cpython The “Shannon Plan”: github.com/markshannon Sam Gross's nogil work: docs.google.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Shortcut Linode AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Jonathan Heiliger, co-founder and partner at Vertex Ventures: an early-stage venture capital firm backing innovative technology entrepreneurs.  Earlier in his career, at just 19, Jonathan co-founded web hosting provider GlobalCenter and served as CTO. He went on to hold engineering roles at Walmart and Danger, Inc., the latter of which was acquired by Microsoft. He was also Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations at Facebook (now Meta), and a general partner at North Bridge Ventures. The latter firm's portfolio included Quora, Periscope, and Lytro (which has been acquired by Google.) At Vertex Ventures, Jonathan has helped cutting-edge companies like LaunchDarkly and OpsLevel revolutionize the tech space with continuous delivery and IT service management solutions. Jonathan shares his insights into the shifting market of IT services and explains why decentralizing infrastructure management can help digitally native companies operate at a faster pace. According to Jonathan, the question of IT service infrastructure isn't being adequately addressed. Without properly defining service ownership, businesses looking to scale run the risk of siloing critical knowledge, and losing track of services networks.  Jonathan also discusses his own experiences running infrastructure at Facebook (oops, Meta), the merits of both centralized and decentralized IT services management, and how he and his partners at Vertex Ventures approach new investments.   Featured Guest

I'm Jesse Pujji and today we're breaking down MongoDB. The MongoDB story traces back to 2007 when the founding team was running DoubleClick, a large adtech business now owned by Google. They could not find an existing database software with the agility and scalability that the internet requires. Today, MongoDB has over 25,000 customers across 100 countries.    To help break down Mongo, I'm joined by Ro Nagpal, an investor at Holocene Advisors. Listeners will recognize Ro from our breakdown of Twilio earlier this year. During our conversation, we get a 101 on database software, talk through Mongo's creative approach to R&D, learn about how database product advantages compound, and look at what protects Mongo from larger players like Microsoft and Amazon. Please enjoy this business breakdown of MongoDB.    For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. With Tegus, you can learn everything you'd want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 20,000 calls on Coinbase, Hinge Health, Farfetch, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. If you're ready to go deeper on any company and you appreciate the value of primary research, head to tegus.co/breakdowns for a free trial.   -----   This episode is brought to you by the MIT Investment Management Company, known as MITIMCo. As the endowment office of MIT, MITIMCo searches for investment firms that are focused on achieving exceptional long-term investment returns. MITIMCo's goal is to create long-term relationships. They will partner with firms as early as Day 1 and do not ask for general partner economics in return. Visit www.mitimco.org to learn more about their unconventional emerging manager approach, including examples of managers they have backed.   -----   Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @JoinColossus | @patrick_oshag | @jspujji | @zbfuss   Show Notes [00:03:51] - [First question] - What MongoDB is, what they do, and their scale today [00:05:03] - The functions of a database and why they're important [00:07:37] - The unmet market need that led to founding MongoDB and the history of the space leading up to today [00:11:13] - What big data means and how it applies to MongoDB [00:12:42] - Things that would lead customers of Oracle to leave them for MongoDB [00:13:42] - The technology stack behind a company like weather.com [00:14:52] - Types of companies and services that couldn't exist without MongoDB [00:16:40] - State of the database marketplace today and where they fit into it [00:17:51] - How big the new market of big data is and current competitors [00:19:22] - What makes MongoDB so distinct and why they're winning [00:21:34] - The most important metrics and numbers for the business [00:23:28] - Gross margins and why they spend so much on sales and marketing [00:24:55] - How investors can justify a company spending so much on marketing [00:26:19] - The P&L and unit economics of the business [00:26:47] - How a customer grows after they've been acquired [00:27:21] - Clever ways that MongoDB spends and uses their resources [00:29:26] - Different types of open source models and how they use it to their advantage [00:31:22] - One thing MongoDB does exceptionally well and something they could improve [00:34:19] - What MongoDB has managed to get so right compared to their competitors [00:36:04] - Their unique go-to-market strategy and why it worked [00:37:15] - The things that would have to go right for MongoDB to compound over a decade [00:39:00] - Market factors that may impact their future growth and potential M&A opportunities [00:40:27] - Biggest risks that may affect MongoDB's growth trajectory over the next few years [00:41:01] - What allows them to exist in a world dominated by Google and Microsoft [00:42:34] - Lessons for builders and investors when studying MongoDB's story [00:44:17] - Why changing their CEO was necessary and helped the company recover and thrive

Elena Verna is a master when it comes to all things starting and scaling growth organizations. Previously, Elena spent over 7 years as SVP Growth @ SurveyMonkey where she ran product, growth marketing, and data teams. Post SurveyMonkey, Elena worked with the rocket ship that is Miro both as Interim CMO and as an advisor. Elena has also advised some of the best growth orgs with advisor roles at HP, MongoDB, Netlify, Maze, and many more awesome companies. In Today's Episode with Elena Verna You Will Learn: 1.) How Elena made her way into the world of tech and growth from a Craiglist job listing? What was her big break in the world of growth with her first Head of Growth role? 2.) How does Elena define "growth" and "Head of Growth"? When should startups not have a growth team? What are the 3 main levers to the growth model today? How does Elena advise between hiring a CMO vs Head of Growth? Where do many founders make mistakes with this decision in mind? 3.) Who are the wrong people to hire for your growth team? What characteristics and traits do these people have that make them bad for growth? What questions does Elena ask in interviews to determine if they have these traits? How does Elena advise founders structure the process of hiring their "Head of Growth"? Should it be internal promotion or external hire? 4.) Where do most founders go wrong in the onboarding phase of their growth team? What do you have to have in place before the growth team starts? What are the biggest red flags for founders when reviewing their growth teams in the first 3 months? Why does Elena not like post-mortems? What is the optimal relationship between CEO and Head of Growth? 5.) How can growth teams work most effectively with both product and engineering teams? How do they need to communicate to ensure a healthy relationship? Where do growth teams most often make mistakes here? What have been some of Elena's lessons on how growth can experiment without angering engineering teams?

We talk to Harry Wolff, writer, YouTuber, and Director of Engineering at MongoDB, about Rust content, clickbait, creating a YouTube channel, why engineering managers fail, and so much more. Links https://twitter.com/hswolff (https://twitter.com/hswolff) https://www.youtube.com/hswolff (https://www.youtube.com/hswolff) https://github.com/hswolff (https://github.com/hswolff) https://www.hswolff.com (https://www.hswolff.com) https://www.mongodb.com (https://www.mongodb.com) https://www.mongodb.com/careers (https://www.mongodb.com/careers) Contact us https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us) @PodRocketpod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod) What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today (https://logrocket.com/signup?pdr). Special Guest: Harry Wolff.

Recording date: 10/01/2021John Papa @John_PapaWard Bell @WardBellDan Wahlin @DanWahlinCraig Shoemaker @craigshoemakerNatalia Venditto @anfibiacreativaBrought to you byAG GridIonicResources:MongoDBCloud databaseACID Database PrinciplesRelational databaseDocument-Model databaseSQL (Structured Query Language)Referential integrity in databasesData localizationPostgreSQLThe Price of PeaceHemingway appHemingway's “Shortest story” contestTimejumps01:43 Guest introduction03:36 How do you think about databases in 2021?09:27 Sponsor: Ag Grid10:30 How do you break out various databases and when to use them?17:41 Databases in the cloud20:26 Stories of successful database decisions25:03 Sponsor: Ionic25:48 What kinds of issues did you have?28:51 Do we evolve past data schemas?36:01 What about relational integrity?38:33 When should I choose to go with MongoDB?41:16 Final thoughtsPodcast editing on this episode done by Chris Enns of Lemon Productions.

It's another Potluck! In this episode, Scott and Wes answer your questions about privacy policies, coding for kids, MongaDB hosting, cloud backups, system design, #NoMoreFoo, and much more! Prismic - Sponsor Prismic is a Headless CMS that makes it easy to build website pages as a set of components. Break pages into sections of components using React, Vue, or whatever you like. Make corresponding Slices in Prismic. Start building pages dynamically in minutes. Get started at prismic.io/syntax. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Cloudinary - Sponsor Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary's APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations. Show Notes 04:49 - Ben Lamers: Heyo Scott and Wes! I am building a web app currently with my brother, and I was wondering when we get to launch it how do you go about correctly writing/adding Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. I'm assuming this may be quite different depending on the platform so maybe general resources or tips for this. Thanks! 06:45 - Fumbles O'Brian: Do you have any recommendations for teaching young children how to code? I have a 5-year-old niece in kindergarten who is absolutely fascinated watching me work, and I'd like to start teaching her basic concepts when she's able to read/write better. For example, she loves watching me make UI changes in React, it blows her mind that changing letters on one screen changes what a website looks like. 11:01 - Kenny: Gentlemen! Love this show and the content you put out. It keeps me occupied during my 5 and 6 mile runs. Thank you both for working so hard to keep it active, I know it takes a lot of work. I'm curious what you think about hosting your own MongoDB server? I'm relatively new to Mongo but want to start working with it for smaller projects. I've used MySQL for a decade, hosted online with shared hosting. Worked well for my relational db needs. Should I host my own Mongo when I'm ready for production, or pay the reasonable costs for something like Linode or maybe even Atlas? I have experience in Linux (enough to get by) and have my own virtualization cluster that I can spin up a server in seconds, along with an enterprise level firewall for managing traffic to and from. I actually just spun up a docker server this week and have a Mongo container running on it, though it's not accessible outside my network. This is purely for my development environments. Despite the firewall, my concern is security. Is it worth paying for a trusted solution like Linode, or should I put a little time in locking down my own Mongo container for my own use? Thank you both! Keep up the great work. 14:42 - Mike: Not a question but more of a rant… It's 2021, almost 2022, can we all stop using ‘foo' and ‘bar' and ‘baz' when teaching a programming concept? I applaud both of you because I don't recall seeing any of your content ever using such atrocious terms, however, I'm sad to see other prominent educators in the web development community use these terms from time to time. I feel like there are so many better examples that we could use to explain a concept and the use of ‘foo' is just confusing to beginners. That's all, just wanted to get that off my chest. Thanks for a wonderful podcast! #nomorefoo 18:53 - Amir: Hey Wes and Scott, thank you for your awesome podcast. What are the best cities in Canada and USA to get (more quantity, highest-paying) developer jobs? 23:44 - LW: Hi guys, I am finally starting to get into GraphQL and I don't get it. Specifically I am working to convert an existing REST API to GraphQL. This seems really tough and there is not much guidance out there on how to do it. The main part I am unsure of is how to write resolvers. If I use the existing query then GraphQL just seems like an over-engineered filter method. If I write an individual resolver for each column in the table - that's gonna be 100s of resolvers and super annoying to write. Have either of you ever moved something from REST to GraphQL? And, if so, how did you handle this? 27:57 - Dan: How does someone learn and actually practice using these system design topics like load balancing, caching, and database sharding. I have never had the need to use some of these things in my day-to-day work, but recently been interviewing and in the system design portion of the interview I feel a little lost. I've read about these topics and watched videos but haven't really seen how to implement these things. Any good resource recommendations? 31:57 - Matt: How do you know if you can trust an NPM package, from an unknown developer, that does not have many GitHub stars and has relatively few downloads? (The repo that made me ask this question is https://github.com/Wondermarin/react-color-palette). NPM audit automatically runs when you install a package, do any of you ever use additional security checks? 38:32 - Yosef: Hi I'm a beginner front-end developer and I heard you saying that being able to copy prototypes is a valuable skill, so I found some Figma free template and I copied them, the question is can I put them in my portfolio or deploy them? 40:00 - Nick: Hey dudes! I picked up a freelance project to make a brochure-style website and found myself having trouble to decide on what tools to pick for this site. I wanted to ask you and get your take, what tools/tech would you use to build a brochure site? By this, I mean the site should have mainly company information that is ideally editable by the stakeholders and has a contact form. Thanks! 44:22 - Casey: Hi Scooter and Wild Wes! Why do I feel so dirty when I'm forced to use negative values in CSS? 45:45 - Gnommer: Do you use some cloud sync service to backup your directory with projects? I mean OneDrive, Dropbox etc. I tried to use it alongside with Git, and it just messed my files so badly. On the other side I feel very uncomfortable without any backup apart from Github. BTW, according to last Potluck: polish ‘ł/Ł' is pronounced like ‘w' in ‘what a sick podcast you have'. Best from Poland ;) Links https://www.ryzerobotics.com/tello https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas https://snyk.io/ https://deno.land/ https://kit.svelte.dev/ https://astro.build/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/ https://www.dropbox.com/ https://www.backblaze.com/ https://www.synology.com/ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250 ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: The Way Down Wes: Wooster Shortcut Shameless Plugs Scott: Modern GraphQL with Prisma - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax' for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

How do you build and maintain a complex suite of Python packages? Of course, you want to put them on PyPI. The best format there is as a wheel. This means that when developers use your code, it comes straight down and requires no local tooling to install and use. But if you have compiled dependencies, such as C or FORTRAN, then you have a big challenge. How do you automatically compile and test against Linux, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, and so on? That's the problem cibuildwheel is solving. On this episode, you'll meet Henry Schreiner. He is developing tools for the next era of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is an admin of Scikit-HEP. Of course, cibuildwheel is central to this process. Links from the show Henry on Twitter: @HenrySchreiner3 Henry's website: iscinumpy.gitlab.io Large Hadron Collider (LHC): home.cern cibuildwheel: github.com plumbum package: plumbum.readthedocs.io boost-histogram: github.com vector: github.com hepunits: github.com awkward arrays: github.com Numba: numba.pydata.org uproot4: github.com scikit-hep developer: scikit-hep.org pypa: pypa.io CLI11: github.com pybind11: github.com cling: root.cern Pint: pint.readthedocs.io Python Wheels site: pythonwheels.com Build package: pypa-build.readthedocs.io Mac Mini Colo: macminicolo.net scikit-build: github.com plotext: pypi.org Code Combat: codecombat.com clang format wheel: github.com cibuildwheel examples: cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io Cling in LLVM: root.cern New htmx course: talkpython.fm/htmx Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Talk Python Training AssemblyAI

Have you heard of Kedro? It's a Python framework for creating reproducible, maintainable and modular data science code. We all know that reproducibility and related topics are important ones in the data science space. The freedom to pop open a notebook and just start exploring is much of the magic. Yet, that free-form style can lead to difficulties in versioning, reproducibility, collaboration, and moving to production. Solving these problems is the goal of Kedro. And we have 3 great guests from the Kedro community here to give us the rundown: Yetunde Dada, Waylon Walker, and Ivan Danov. Links from the show Waylong on Twitter: @_WaylonWalker Yetunda on Twitter: @yetudada Ivan on Twitter: @ivandanov Kedro: kedro.readthedocs.io Kedro on GitHub: github.com Join the Kedro Discord: discord.gg Articles about Kedro by Waylan: waylonwalker.com Kedro spaceflights tutorial: kedro.readthedocs.io “Hello World” on Kedro: kedro.readthedocs.io Kedro Viz: quantumblacklabs.github.io Spaceflights Tutorial video: youtube.com Dynaconf package: dynaconf.com fsspec: Filesystem interfaces for Python: filesystem-spec.readthedocs.io Neovim: neovim.io Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Tabnine Talk Python Training AssemblyAI

Have you heard of the package Rich? This library allows you to create very, well, rich terminal-based UIs in Python. When you think of what you can typically build with basic print statements, that may seem quite limited. But with Rich, imagine justified tables, progress bars, rendering of markdown, and way more. This is one of the fastest growing projects in the Python space these days. And the creator, Will McGugan is here to give is the whole history and even a peak at the future of Rich and a follow on library called Textual. Links from the show Will on Twitter: @willmcgugan Rich: github.com Textual: github.com Pyfilesystem: pyfilesystem.org A Look At – and Inside – Textual Video: youtube.com ObjExplore: reposhub.com ghtop: ghtop.fast.ai Watch YouTube live stream edition: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm ---------- Stay in touch with us ---------- Subscribe on YouTube (for live streams): youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Shortcut Talk Python Training AssemblyAI