Podcasts about rightscale

Evelyn Osman, Principal Platform Engineer at AutoScout24, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the dire need for developers to agree on a standardized tool set in order to scale their projects and innovate quickly. Corey and Evelyn pick apart the new products being launched in cloud computing and discover a large disconnect between what the industry needs and what is actually being created. Evelyn shares her thoughts on why viewing platforms as products themselves forces developers to get into the minds of their users and produces a better end result.About EvelynEvelyn is a recovering improviser currently role playing as a Lead Platform Engineer at Autoscout24 in Munich, Germany. While she says she specializes in AWS architecture and integration after spending 11 years with it, in truth she spends her days convincing engineers that a product mindset will make them hate their product managers less.Links Referenced:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyn-osman/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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is Evelyn Osman, engineering manager at AutoScout24. Evelyn, thank you for joining me.Evelyn: Thank you very much, Corey. It's actually really fun to be on here.Corey: I have to say one of the big reasons that I was enthused to talk to you is that you have been using AWS—to be direct—longer than I have, and that puts you in a somewhat rarefied position where AWS's customer base has absolutely exploded over the past 15 years that it's been around, but at the beginning, it was a very different type of thing. Nowadays, it seems like we've lost some of that magic from the beginning. Where do you land on that whole topic?Evelyn: That's actually a really good point because I always like to say, you know, when I come into a room, you know, I really started doing introductions like, “Oh, you know, hey,” I'm like, you know, “I'm this director, I've done this XYZ,” and I always say, like, “I'm Evelyn, engineering manager, or architect, or however,” and then I say, you know, “I've been working with AWS, you know, 11, 12 years,” or now I can't quite remember.Corey: Time becomes a flat circle. The pandemic didn't help.Evelyn: [laugh] Yeah, I just, like, a look at that the year, and I'm like, “Jesus. It's been that long.” Yeah. And usually, like you know, you get some odd looks like, “Oh, my God, you must be a sage.” And for me, I'm… you see how different services kind of, like, have just been reinventions of another one, or they just take a managed service and make another managed service around it. So, I feel that there's a lot of where it's just, you know, wrapping up a pretty bow, and calling it something different, it feels like.Corey: That's what I've been low-key asking people for a while now over the past year, namely, “What is the most foundational, interesting thing that AWS has done lately, that winds up solving for this problem of whatever it is you do as a company? What is it that has foundationally made things better that AWS has put out in the last service? What was it?” And the answers I get are all depressingly far in the past, I have to say. What's yours?Evelyn: Honestly, I think the biggest game-changer I remember experiencing was at an analyst summit in Stockholm when they announced Lambda.Corey: That was announced before I even got into this space, as an example of how far back things were. And you're right. That was transformative. That was awesome.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. Because before, you know, we were always, like, trying to figure, okay, how do we, like, launch an instance, run some short code, and then clean it up. AWS is going to charge for an hour, so we need to figure out, you know, how to pack everything into one instance, run for one hour. And then they announced Lambda, and suddenly, like, holy shit, this is actually a game changer. We can actually write small functions that do specific things.And, you know, you go from, like, microservices, like, to like, tiny, serverless functions. So, that was huge. And then DynamoDB along with that, really kind of like, transformed the entire space for us in many ways. So, back when I was at TIBCO, there was a few innovations around that, even, like, one startup inside TIBCO that quite literally, their entire product was just Lambda functions. And one of their problems was, they wanted to sell in the Marketplace, and they couldn't figure out how to sell Lambda on the marketplace.Corey: It's kind of wild when we see just how far it's come, but also how much they've announced that doesn't change that much, to be direct. For me, one of the big changes that I remember that really made things better for customers—thought it took a couple of years—was EFS. And even that's a little bit embarrassing because all that is, “All right, we finally found a way to stuff a NetApp into us-east-1,” so now NFS, just like you used to use it in the 90s and the naughts, can be done responsibly in the cloud. And that, on some level, wasn't a feature launch so much as it was a concession to the ways that companies had built things and weren't likely to change.Evelyn: Honestly, I found the EFS launch to be a bit embarrassing because, like, you know, when you look closer at it, you realize, like, the performance isn't actually that great.Corey: Oh, it was horrible when it launched. It would just slam to a halt because you got the IOPS scaled with how much data you stored on it. The documentation explicitly said to use dd to start loading a bunch of data onto it to increase the performance. It's like, “Look, just sandbag the thing so it does what you'd want.” And all that stuff got fixed, but at the time it looked like it was clown shoes.Evelyn: Yeah, and that reminds me of, like, EBS's, like, gp2 when we're, like you know, we're talking, like, okay, provision IOPS with gp2. We just kept saying, like, just give yourself really big volume for performance. And it feel like they just kind of kept that with EFS. And it took years for them to really iterate off of that. Yeah, so, like, EFS was a huge thing, and I see us, we're still using it now today, and like, we're trying to integrate, especially for, like, data center migrations, but yeah, you always see that a lot of these were first more for, like, you know, data centers to the cloud, you know. So, first I had, like, EC2 classic. That's where I started. And I always like to tell a story that in my team, we're talking about using AWS, I was the only person fiercely against it because we did basically large data processing—sorry, I forget the right words—data analytics. There we go [laugh].Corey: I remember that, too. When it first came out, it was, “This sounds dangerous and scary, and it's going to be a flash in the pan because who would ever trust their core compute infrastructure to some random third-party company, especially a bookstore?” And yeah, I think I got that one very wrong.Evelyn: Yeah, exactly. I was just like, no way. You know, I see all these articles talking about, like, terrible disk performance, and here I am, where it's like, it's my bread and butter. I'm specialized in it, you know? I write code in my sleep and such.[Yeah, the interesting thing is, I was like, first, it was like, I can 00:06:03] launch services, you know, to kind of replicate when you get in a data center to make it feature comparable, and then it was taking all this complex services and wrapping it up in a pretty bow for—as a managed service. Like, EKS, I think, was the biggest one, if we're looking at managed services. Technically Elasticsearch, but I feel like that was the redheaded stepchild for quite some time.Corey: Yeah, there was—Elasticsearch was a weird one, and still is. It's not a pleasant service to run in any meaningful sense. Like, what people actually want as the next enhancement that would excite everyone is, I want a serverless version of this thing where I can just point it at a bunch of data, I hit an API that I don't have to manage, and get Elasticsearch results back from. They finally launched a serverless offering that's anything but. You have to still provision compute units for it, so apparently, the word serverless just means managed service over at AWS-land now. And it just, it ties into the increasing sense of disappointment I've had with almost all of their recent launches versus what I felt they could have been.Evelyn: Yeah, the interesting thing about Elasticsearch is, a couple of years ago, they came out with OpenSearch, a competing Elasticsearch after [unintelligible 00:07:08] kind of gave us the finger and change the licensing. I mean, OpenSearch actually become a really great offering if you run it yourself, but if you use their managed service, it can kind—you lose all the benefits, in a way.Corey: I'm curious, as well, to get your take on what I've been seeing that I think could only be described as an internal shift, where it's almost as if there's been a decree passed down that every service has to run its own P&L or whatnot, and as a result, everything that gets put out seems to be monetized in weird ways, even when I'd argue it shouldn't be. The classic example I like to use for this is AWS Config, where it charges you per evaluation, and that happens whenever a cloud resource changes. What that means is that by using the cloud dynamically—the way that they supposedly want us to do—we wind up paying a fee for that as a result. And it's not like anyone is using that service in isolation; it is definitionally being used as people are using other cloud resources, so why does it cost money? And the answer is because literally everything they put out costs money.Evelyn: Yep, pretty simple. Oftentimes, there's, like, R&D that goes into it, but the charges seem a bit… odd. Like from an S3 lens, was, I mean, that's, like, you know, if you're talking about services, that was actually a really nice one, very nice holistic overview, you know, like, I could drill into a data lake and, like, look into things. But if you actually want to get anything useful, you have to pay for it.Corey: Yeah. Everything seems to, for one reason or another, be stuck in this place where, “Well, if you want to use it, it's going to cost.” And what that means is that it gets harder and harder to do anything that even remotely resembles being able to wind up figuring out where's the spend going, or what's it going to cost me as time goes on? Because it's not just what are the resources I'm spinning up going to cost, what are the second, third, and fourth-order effects of that? And the honest answer is, well, nobody knows. You're going to have to basically run an experiment and find out.Evelyn: Yeah. No, true. So, what I… at AutoScout, we actually ended up doing is—because we're trying to figure out how to tackle these costs—is they—we built an in-house cost allocation solution so we could track all of that. Now, AWS has actually improved Cost Explorer quite a bit, and even, I think, Billing Conductor was one that came out [unintelligible 00:09:21], kind of like, do a custom tiered and account pricing model where you can kind of do the same thing. But even that also, there is a cost with it.I think that was trying to compete with other, you know, vendors doing similar solutions. But it still isn't something where we see that either there's, like, arbitrarily low pricing there, or the costs itself doesn't really quite make sense. Like, AWS [unintelligible 00:09:45], as you mentioned, it's a terrific service. You know, we try to use it for compliance enforcement and other things, catching bad behavior, but then as soon as people see the price tag, we just run away from it. So, a lot of the security services themselves, actually, the costs, kind of like, goes—skyrockets tremendously when you start trying to use it across a large organization. And oftentimes, the organization isn't actually that large.Corey: Yeah, it gets to this point where, especially in small environments, you have to spend more energy and money chasing down what the cost is than you're actually spending on the thing. There were blog posts early on that, “Oh, here's how you analyze your bill with Redshift,” and that was a minimum 750 bucks a month. It's, well, I'm guessing that that's not really for my $50 a month account.Evelyn: Yeah. No, precisely. I remember seeing that, like, entire ETL process is just, you know, analyze your invoice. Cost [unintelligible 00:10:33], you know, is fantastic, but at the end of the day, like, what you're actually looking at [laugh], is infinitesimally small compared to all the data in that report. Like, I think oftentimes, it's simply, you know, like, I just want to look at my resources and allocate them in a multidimensional way. Which actually isn't really that multidimensional, when you think about it [laugh].Corey: Increasingly, Cost Explorer has gotten better. It's not a new service, but every iteration seems to improve it to a point now where I'm talking to folks, and they're having a hard time justifying most of the tools in the cost optimization space, just because, okay, they want a percentage of my spend on AWS to basically be a slightly better version of a thing that's already improving and works for free. That doesn't necessarily make sense. And I feel like that's what you get trapped into when you start going down the VC path in the cost optimization space. You've got to wind up having a revenue model and an offering that scales through software… and I thought, originally, I was going to be doing something like that. At this point, I'm unconvinced that anything like that is really tenable.Evelyn: Yeah. When you're a small organization you're trying to optimize, you might not have the expertise and the knowledge to do so, so when one of these small consultancies comes along, saying, “Hey, we're going to charge you a really small percentage of your invoice,” like, okay, great. That's, like, you know, like, a few $100 a month to make sure I'm fully optimized, and I'm saving, you know, far more than that. But as soon as your invoice turns into, you know, it's like $100,000, or $300,000 or more, that percentage becomes rather significant. And I've had vendors come to me and, like, talk to me and is like, “Hey, we can, you know, for a small percentage, you know, we're going to do this machine learning, you know, AI optimization for you. You know, you don't have to do anything. We guaranteed buybacks your RIs.” And as soon as you look at the price tag with it, we just have to walk away. Or oftentimes we look at it, and there are truly very simple ways to do it on your own, if you just kind of put some thought into it.Corey: While we want to talking a bit before this show, you taught me something new about GameLift, which I think is a different problem that AWS has been dealing with lately. I've never paid much attention to it because it is the—as I assume from what it says on the tin, oh, it's a service for just running a whole bunch of games at scale, and I'm not generally doing that. My favorite computer game remains to be Twitter at this point, but that's okay. What is GameLift, though, because you want to shining a different light on it, which makes me annoyed that Amazon Marketing has not pointed this out.Evelyn: Yeah, so I'll preface this by saying, like, I'm not an expert on GameLift. I haven't even spun it up myself because there's quite a bit of price. I learned this fall while chatting with an SA who works in the gaming space, and it kind of like, I went, like, “Back up a second.” If you think about, like, I'm, you know, like, World of Warcraft, all you have are thousands of game clients all over the world, playing the same game, you know, on the same server, in the same instance, and you need to make sure, you know, that when I'm running, and you're running, that we know that we're going to reach the same point the same time, or if there's one object in that room, that only one of us can get it. So, all these servers are doing is tracking state across thousands of clients.And GameLift, when you think about your dedicated game service, it really is just multi-region distributed state management. Like, at the basic, that's really what it is. Now, there's, you know, quite a bit more happening within GameLift, but that's what I was going to explain is, like, it's just state management. And there are far more use cases for it than just for video games.Corey: That's maddening to me because having a global session state store, for lack of a better term, is something that so many customers have built themselves repeatedly. They can build it on top of primitives like DynamoDB global tables, or alternately, you have a dedicated region where that thing has to live and everything far away takes forever to round-trip. If they've solved some of those things, why on earth would they bury it under a gaming-branded service? Like, offer that primitive to the rest of us because that's useful.Evelyn: No, absolutely. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if you peeled back the curtain with GameLift, you'll find a lot of—like, several other you know, AWS services that it's just built on top of. I kind of mentioned earlier is, like, what I see now with innovation, it's like we just see other services packaged together and releases a new product.Corey: Yeah, IoT had the same problem going on for years where there was a lot of really good stuff buried in there, like IOT events. People were talking about using that for things like browser extensions and whatnot, but you need to be explicitly told that that's a thing that exists and is handy, but otherwise you'd never know it was there because, “Well, I'm not building anything that's IoT-related. Why would I bother?” It feels like that was one direction that they tended to go in.And now they take existing services that are, mmm, kind of milquetoast, if I'm being honest, and then saying, “Oh, like, we have Comprehend that does, effectively detection of themes, keywords, and whatnot, from text. We're going to wind up re-releasing that as Comprehend Medical.” Same type of thing, but now focused on a particular vertical. Seems to me that instead of being a specific service for that vertical, just improve the baseline the service and offer HIPAA compliance if it didn't exist already, and you're mostly there. But what do I know? I'm not a product manager trying to get promoted.Evelyn: Yeah, that's true. Well, I was going to mention that maybe it's the HIPAA compliance, but actually, a lot of their services already have HIPAA compliance. And I've stared far too long at that compliance section on AWS's site to know this, but you know, a lot of them actually are HIPAA-compliant, they're PCI-compliant, and ISO-compliant, and you know, and everything. So, I'm actually pretty intrigued to know why they [wouldn't 00:16:04] take that advantage.Corey: I just checked. Amazon Comprehend is itself HIPAA-compliant and is qualified and certified to hold Personal Health Information—PHI—Private Health Information, whatever the acronym stands for. Now, what's the difference, then, between that and Medical? In fact, the HIPAA section says for Comprehend Medical, “For guidance, see the previous section on Amazon Comprehend.” So, there's no difference from a regulatory point of view.Evelyn: That's fascinating. I am intrigued because I do know that, like, within AWS, you know, they have different segments, you know? There's, like, Digital Native Business, there's Enterprise, there's Startup. So, I am curious how things look over the engineering side. I'm going to talk to somebody about this now [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's the—like, I almost wonder, on some level, it feels like, “Well, we wound to building this thing in the hopes that someone would use it for something. And well, if we just use different words, it checks a box in some analyst's chart somewhere.” I don't know. I mean, I hate to sound that negative about it, but it's… increasingly when I talk to customers who are active in these spaces around the industry vertical targeted stuff aimed at their industry, they're like, “Yeah, we took a look at it. It was adorable, but we're not using it that way. We're going to use either the baseline version or we're going to work with someone who actively gets our industry.” And I've heard that repeated about three or four different releases that they've put out across the board of what they've been doing. It feels like it is a misunderstanding between what the world needs and what they're able to or willing to build for us.Evelyn: Not sure. I wouldn't be surprised, if we go far enough, it could probably be that it's just a product manager saying, like, “We have to advertise directly to the industry.” And if you look at it, you know, in the backend, you know, it's an engineer, you know, kicking off a build and just changing the name from Comprehend to Comprehend Medical.Corey: And, on some level, too, they're moving a lot more slowly than they used to. There was a time where they were, in many cases, if not the first mover, the first one to do it well. Take Code Whisperer, their AI powered coding assistant. That would have been a transformative thing if GitHub Copilot hadn't beaten them every punch, come out with new features, and frankly, in head-to-head experiments that I've run, came out way better as a product than what Code Whisperer is. And while I'd like to say that this is great, but it's too little too late. And when I talk to engineers, they're very excited about what Copilot can do, and the only people I see who are even talking about Code Whisperer work at AWS.Evelyn: No, that's true. And so, I think what's happening—and this is my opinion—is that first you had AWS, like, launching a really innovative new services, you know, that kind of like, it's like, “Ah, it's a whole new way of running your workloads in the cloud.” Instead of you know, basically, hiring a whole team, I just click a button, you have your instance, you use it, sell software, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they went towards serverless, and then IoT, and then it started targeting large data lakes, and then eventually that kind of run backwards towards security, after the umpteenth S3 data leak.Corey: Oh, yeah. And especially now, like, so they had a hit in some corners with SageMaker, so now there are 40 services all starting with the word SageMaker. That's always pleasant.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. And what I kind of notice is… now they're actually having to run it even further back because they caught all the corporations that could pivot to the cloud, they caught all the startups who started in the cloud, and now they're going for the larger behemoths who have massive data centers, and they don't want to innovate. They just want to reduce this massive sysadmin team. And I always like to use the example of a Bare Metal. When that came out in 2019, everybody—we've all kind of scratched your head. I'm like, really [laugh]?Corey: Yeah, I could see where it makes some sense just for very specific workloads that involve things like specific capabilities of processors that don't work under emulation in some weird way, but it's also such a weird niche that I'm sure it's there for someone. My default assumption, just given the breadth of AWS's customer base, is that whenever I see something that they just announced, well, okay, it's clearly not for me; that doesn't mean it's not meeting the needs of someone who looks nothing like me. But increasingly as I start exploring the industry in these services have time to percolate in the popular imagination and I still don't see anything interesting coming out with it, it really makes you start to wonder.Evelyn: Yeah. But then, like, I think, like, roughly a year or something, right after Bare Metal came out, they announced Outposts. So, then it was like, another way to just stay within your data center and be in the cloud.Corey: Yeah. There's a bunch of different ways they have that, okay, here's ways you can run AWS services on-prem, but still pay us by the hour for the privilege of running things that you have living in your facility. And that doesn't seem like it's quite fair.Evelyn: That's exactly it. So, I feel like now it's sort of in diminishing returns and sort of doing more cloud-native work compared to, you know, these huge opportunities, which is everybody who still has a data center for various reasons, or they're cloud-native, and they grow so big, that they actually start running their own data centers.Corey: I want to call out as well before we wind up being accused of being oblivious, that we're recording this before re:Invent. So, it's entirely possible—I hope this happens—that they announce something or several some things that make this look ridiculous, and we're embarrassed to have had this conversation. And yeah, they're totally getting it now, and they have completely surprised us with stuff that's going to be transformative for almost every customer. I've been expecting and hoping for that for the last three or four re:Invents now, and I haven't gotten it.Evelyn: Yeah, that's right. And I think there's even a new service launches that actually are missing fairly obvious things in a way. Like, mine is the Managed Workflow for Amazon—it's Managed Airflow, sorry. So, we were using Data Pipeline for, you know, big ETL processing, so it was an in-house tool we kind of built at Autoscout, we do platform engineering.And it was deprecated, so we looked at a new—what to replace it with. And so, we looked at Airflow, and we decided this is the way to go, we want to use managed because we don't want to maintain our own infrastructure. And the problem we ran into is that it doesn't have support for shared VPCs. And we actually talked to our account team, and they were confused. Because they said, like, “Well, every new service should support it natively.” But it just didn't have it. And that's, kind of, what, I kind of found is, like, there's—it feels—sometimes it's—there's a—it's getting rushed out the door, and it'll actually have a new managed service or new service launched out, but they're also sort of cutting some corners just to actually make sure it's packaged up and ready to go.Corey: When I'm looking at this, and seeing how this stuff gets packaged, and how it's built out, I start to understand a pattern that I've been relatively down on across the board. I'm curious to get your take because you work at a fairly sizable company as an engineering manager, running teams of people who do this sort of thing. Where do you land on the idea of companies building internal platforms to wrap around the offerings that the cloud service providers that they use make available to them?Evelyn: So, my opinion is that you need to build out some form of standardized tool set in order to actually be able to innovate quickly. Now, this sounds counterintuitive because everyone is like, “Oh, you know, if I want to innovate, I should be able to do this experiment, and try out everything, and use what works, and just release it.” And that greatness [unintelligible 00:23:14] mentality, you know, it's like five talented engineers working to build something. But when you have, instead of five engineers, you have five teams of five engineers each, and every single team does something totally different. You know, one uses Scala, and other on TypeScript, another one, you know .NET, and then there could have been a [last 00:23:30] one, you know, comes in, you know, saying they're still using Ruby.And then next thing you know, you know, you have, like, incredibly diverse platforms for services. And if you want to do any sort of like hiring or cross-training, it becomes incredibly difficult. And actually, as the organization grows, you want to hire talent, and so you're going to have to hire, you know, a developer for this team, you going to have to hire, you know, Ruby developer for this one, a Scala guy here, a Node.js guy over there.And so, this is where we say, “Okay, let's agree. We're going to be a Scala shop. Great. All right, are we running serverless? Are we running containerized?” And you agree on those things. So, that's already, like, the formation of it. And oftentimes, you start with DevOps. You'll say, like, “I'm a DevOps team,” you know, or doing a DevOps culture, if you do it properly, but you always hit this scaling issue where you start growing, and then how do you maintain that common tool set? And that's where we start looking at, you know, having a platform… approach, but I'm going to say it's Platform-as-a-Product. That's the key.Corey: Yeah, that's a good way of framing it because originally, the entire world needed that. That's what RightScale was when EC2 first came out. It was a reimagining of the EC2 console that was actually usable. And in time, AWS improved that to the point where RightScale didn't really have a place anymore in a way that it had previously, and that became a business challenge for them. But you have, what is it now, 2, 300 services that AWS has put out, and out, and okay, great. Most companies are really only actively working with a handful of those. How do you make those available in a reasonable way to your teams, in ways that aren't distracting, dangerous, et cetera? I don't know the answer on that one.Evelyn: Yeah. No, that's true. So, full disclosure. At AutoScout, we do platform engineering. So, I'm part of, like, the platform engineering group, and we built a platform for our product teams. It's kind of like, you need to decide to [follow 00:25:24] those answers, you know? Like, are we going to be fully containerized? Okay, then, great, we're going to use Fargate. All right, how do we do it so that developers don't actually—don't need to think that they're running Fargate workloads?And that's, like, you know, where it's really important to have those standardized abstractions that developers actually enjoy using. And I'd even say that, before you start saying, “Ah, we're going to do platform,” you say, “We should probably think about developer experience.” Because you can do a developer experience without a platform. You can do that, you know, in a DevOps approach, you know? It's basically build tools that makes it easy for developers to write code. That's the first step for anything. It's just, like, you have people writing the code; make sure that they can do the things easily, and then look at how to operate it.Corey: That sure would be nice. There's a lack of focus on usability, especially when it comes to a number of developer tools that we see out there in the wild, in that, they're clearly built by people who understand the problem space super well, but they're designing these things to be used by people who just want to make the website work. They don't have the insight, the knowledge, the approach, any of it, nor should they necessarily be expected to.Evelyn: No, that's true. And what I see is, a lot of the times, it's a couple really talented engineers who are just getting shit done, and they get shit done however they can. So, it's basically like, if they're just trying to run the website, they're just going to write the code to get things out there and call it a day. And then somebody else comes along, has a heart attack when see what's been done, and they're kind of stuck with it because there is no guardrails or paved path or however you want to call it.Corey: I really hope—truly—that this is going to be something that we look back and laugh when this episode airs, that, “Oh, yeah, we just got it so wrong. Look at all the amazing stuff that came out of re:Invent.” Are you going to be there this year?Evelyn: I am going to be there this year.Corey: My condolences. I keep hoping people get to escape.Evelyn: This is actually my first one in, I think, five years. So, I mean, the last time I was there was when everybody's going crazy over pins. And I still have a bag of them [laugh].Corey: Yeah, that did seem like a hot-second collectable moment, didn't it?Evelyn: Yeah. And then at the—I think, what, the very last day, as everybody's heading to re:Play, you could just go into the registration area, and they just had, like, bags of them lying around to take. So, all the competing, you know, to get the requirements for a pin was kind of moot [laugh].Corey: Don't you hate it at some point where it's like, you feel like I'm going to finally get this crowning achievement, it's like or just show up at the buffet at the end and grab one of everything, and wow, that would have saved me a lot of pain and trouble.Evelyn: Yeah.Corey: Ugh, scavenger hunts are hard, as I'm about to learn to my own detriment.Evelyn: Yeah. No, true. Yeah. But I am really hoping that re:Invent proves me wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, and then all my colleagues can proceed to mock me for this ridiculous podcast that I made with you. But I am a fierce skeptic. Optimistic nihilist, but still a nihilist, so we'll see how re:Invent turns out.Corey: So, I am curious, given your experience at more large companies than I tend to be embedded with for any period of time, how have you found that these large organizations tend to pick up new technologies? What does the adoption process look like? And honestly, if you feel like throwing some shade, how do they tend to get it wrong?Evelyn: In most cases, I've seen it go… terrible. Like, it just blows up in their face. And I say that is because a lot of the time, an organization will say, “Hey, we're going to adopt this new way of organizing teams or developing products,” and they look at all the practices. They say, “Okay, great. Product management is going to bring it in, they're going to structure things, how we do the planning, here's some great charts and diagrams,” but they don't really look at the culture aspect.And that's always where I've seen things fall apart. I've been in a room where, you know, our VP was really excited about team topologies and say, “Hey, we're going to adopt it.” And then an engineering manager proceeded to say, “Okay, you're responsible for this team, you're responsible for that team, you're responsible for this team talking to, like, a team of, like, five engineers,” which doesn't really work at all. Or, like, I think the best example is DevOps, you know, where you say, “Ah, we're going to adopt DevOps, we're going to have a DevOps team, or have a DevOps engineer.”Corey: Step one: we're going to rebadge everyone with existing job titles to have the new fancy job titles that reflect it. It turns out that's not necessarily sufficient in and of itself.Evelyn: Not really. The Spotify model. People say, like, “Oh, we're going to do the Spotify model. We're going to do skills, tribes, you know, and everything. It's going to be awesome, it's going to be great, you know, and nice, cross-functional.”The reason I say it bails on us every single time is because somebody wants to be in control of the process, and if the process is meant to encourage collaboration and innovation, that person actually becomes a chokehold for it. And it could be somebody that says, like, “Ah, I need to be involved in every single team, and listen to know what's happening, just so I'm aware of it.” What ends up happening is that everybody differs to them. So, there is no collaboration, there is no innovation. DevOps, you say, like, “Hey, we're going to have a team to do everything, so your developers don't need to worry about it.” What ends up happening is you're still an ops team, you still have your silos.And that's always a challenge is you actually have to say, “Okay, what are the cultural values around this process?” You know, what is SRE? What is DevOps, you know? Is it seen as processes, is it a series of principles, platform, maybe, you know? We have to say, like—that's why I say, Platform-as-a-Product because you need to have that product mindset, that culture of product thinking, to really build a platform that works because it's all about the user journey.It's not about building a common set of tools. It's the user journey of how a person interacts with their code to get it into a production environment. And so, you need to understand how that person sits down at their desk, starts the laptop up, logs in, opens the IDE, what they're actually trying to get done. And once you understand that, then you know your requirements, and you build something to fill those things so that they are happy to use it, as opposed to saying, “This is our platform, and you're going to use it.” And they're probably going to say, “No.” And the next thing, you know, they're just doing their own thing on the side.Corey: Yeah, the rise of Shadow IT has never gone away. It's just, on some level, it's the natural expression, I think it's an immune reaction that companies tend to have when process gets in the way. Great, we have an outcome that we need to drive towards; we don't have a choice. Cloud empowered a lot of that and also has given tools to help rein it in, and as with everything, the arms race continues.Evelyn: Yeah. And so, what I'm going to continue now, kind of like, toot the platform horn. So, Gregor Hohpe, he's a [solutions architect 00:31:56]—I always f- up his name. I'm so sorry, Gregor. He has a great book, and even a talk, called The Magic of Platforms, that if somebody is actually curious about understanding of why platforms are nice, they should really watch that talk.If you see him at re:Invent, or a summit or somewhere giving a talk, go listen to that, and just pick his brain. Because that's—for me, I really kind of strongly agree with his approach because that's really how, like, you know, as he says, like, boost innovation is, you know, where you're actually building a platform that really works.Corey: Yeah, it's a hard problem, but it's also one of those things where you're trying to focus on—at least ideally—an outcome or a better situation than you currently find yourselves in. It's hard to turn down things that might very well get you there sooner, faster, but it's like trying to effectively cargo-cult the leadership principles from your last employer into your new one. It just doesn't work. I mean, you see more startups from Amazonians who try that, and it just goes horribly because without the cultural understanding and the supporting structures, it doesn't work.Evelyn: Exactly. So, I've worked with, like, organizations, like, 4000-plus people, I've worked for, like, small startups, consulted, and this is why I say, almost every single transformation, it fails the first time because somebody needs to be in control and track things and basically be really, really certain that people are doing it right. And as soon as it blows up in their face, that's when they realize they should actually take a step back. And so, even for building out a platform, you know, doing Platform-as-a-Product, I always reiterate that you have to really be willing to just invest upfront, and not get very much back. Because you have to figure out the whole user journey, and what you're actually building, before you actually build it.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Evelyn: So, I used to be on Twitter, but I've actually got off there after it kind of turned a bit toxic and crazy.Corey: Feels like that was years ago, but that's beside the point.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. So, I would even just say because this feels like a corporate show, but find me on LinkedIn of all places because I will be sharing whatever I find on there, you know? So, just look me up on my name, Evelyn Osman, and give me a follow, and I'll probably be screaming into the cloud like you are.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Evelyn: Thank you, Corey.Corey: Evelyn Osman, engineering manager at AutoScout24. 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 I will read it once I finish building an internal platform to normalize all of those platforms together into one.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.

Kenneth Rose, CTO at OpsLevel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how OpsLevel is helping developer teams to scale effectively. Kenneth reveals what a developer portal is, how he thinks about the functionality of a developer portal, and the problems a developer portal solves for large developer teams. Corey and Kenneth discuss how to drive adoption of a developer portal, and Kenneth explains why it's so necessary to have executive buy-in throughout that process. Kenneth also discusses how using their own portal internally along with seeking out customer feedback has allowed OpsLevel to make impactful innovations. About KenKenneth (Ken) Rose is the CTO and Co-Founder of OpsLevel. Ken has spent over 15 years scaling engineering teams as an early engineer at PagerDuty and Shopify. Having in-the-trenches experience has allowed Ken a unique perspective on how some of the best teams are built and scaled and lends this viewpoint to building products for OpsLevel, a service ownership platform built to turn chaos into consistency for engineering leaders.Links Referenced: OpsLevel: https://www.opslevel.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opslevel/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, about, oh I don't know, two years ago and change, I wound up writing a blog post titled, “Developer Portals are An Anti Pattern,” and I haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about them since. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at OpsLevel, and they have sent their CTO and co-founder Ken Rose, presumably in an attempt to change my perspective on these things. Let's find out. Ken, thank you for agreeing to, well, run the gauntlet, for lack of a better term.Ken: Hey, Corey. Thanks again for having me. And I've heard, you know, heard and listened to your show a bunch, and really excited to be here today.Corey: Let's begin with defining our terms. I'm curious to know what a developer portal is. ‘What would you say a developer portal means to you?' Like it's a college entrance essay.Ken: Right? Definitely. You know, so really, a developer portal is this consolidated place for developers to come to, especially in large organizations to be able to get their jobs done more easily, right? A large challenge that developers have in large organizations, there's just a lot to do and a lot to take care of. So, a developer portal is a place for developers to be able to better own, manage, and run the services, they're responsible for that run in production, and they can do that through access, easy access to self-service tooling.Corey: I guess, on some level, this turns into one of those alignment charts of, like, what is a database and, like, how prescriptive you want to be. It's like, well is a senior engineer a database because you can query them and they have information? Would you consider, for example, Kubernetes be a developer platform, and/or would the AWS console?Ken: Yeah, that's actually an interesting question, right? So, I think there's actually two—we're going to get really niggly here—there's developer platform and developer portal, right? And the word portal for me is something that sits above a developer platform. I don't know if you remember, like, the late-90s, early-2000s, like, portals were all the rage.Like, Yahoo and AltaVistas were like search portals, they were trying to, at the time, consolidate all this information on a much smaller internet to make it easy to access. A developer portal is sort of the same thing, but custom-built for developers and trying to consolidate a lot of the tooling that exists. Now, in terms of the AWS console? Yeah, maybe. Like, it has a suite of tools and suite of offerings. It doesn't do a lot on the well, how do I quickly find out what's running in production and who is responsible for it? I don't know, unless AWS shipped, like, their, you know, three-hundredth new offering in the last week that I haven't, you know, kept on top of.But you know, there's definitely some spectrum in terms of what goes into a developer portal. For me, there's kind of three main things you need. You do need some kind of a catalog, like, what's out there who owns it; you need some kind of a way to measure, like, how good are those services, like, how well built are they; and then you need some access to self-service tooling. And that last part is where, like, the Kubernetes or AWS could be, you know, sort of a dev portal as well.Corey: My experience with developer portals—there was a time when I loved it. RightScale was what I used—at some depth—back in I want to say 2010, 2011 because the EC2 console was clearly not built or designed by anyone who had not built EC2 themselves with their bare hands and sweat of their brow. And in time, the EC2 console got better where it wasn't written in hieroglyphics, as best we could tell, and it became ‘click button to launch instance.' And RightScale really didn't have a second act and they wound up getting acquired by our friends over at Flexera years later. And I haven't seen their developer portal in at least eight years as a direct result of this.So, the problem, at least when I was viewing it purely in the context of AWS services, it feels like you are competing against AWS iterating forward on developer experience, which they iterate slowly, sometimes, and unevenly across their breadth of services, but it does feel like at some level by building an internal portal, you are, first, trying to out-innovate AWS, in some ways, and two, you are inherently making the trade-off of not using recent features and enhancements that have not themselves been incorporated into the portal. That's where the, I guess the start, the genesis of my opposition to the developer portal approach comes from. Is that philosophy valid these days? Not as much. Because I can see an argument for it shifting.Ken: Yeah, I think it's slightly different. I think of a developer portal as again, it's something that sort of sits on top of AWS or Google Cloud or whatever cloud provider use, right? You give an example for example with RightScale and EC2. So, provisioning instances is one part of the activity you have to do as a developer. Now, in most modern organizations, you have, like, your product developers that ship features. They don't actually care about provisioning instance themselves. There are another group called the platform engineers or platform group that are responsible for building automation and tooling to help spin up instances and create CI/CD pipelines and get everything you need set up.And they might use AWS under the covers to do that, but the automation built on top and making that accessible to developers, that's really what a developer portal can provide. In addition, it also provides links to operational tooling that you need, technical documentation, it's everything you need as a developer to do your job, in one place. And though AWs bills itself is that, I think of them as more, they have a lot of platform offerings, right, they have a lot of infra-offerings, but they still haven't been able to, I think, customize that, unless you're an organization that builds—that has kind of gone in-all on AWS and doesn't build any of your own tooling, that's where a developer portal helps. It really helps by consolidating all that information in one place, by making that information discoverable for every developer so they have less… less cognitive load, right? We've asked developers to kind of do too much that we don't… we've asked to shift left and well, how do we make that information more accessible?Regarding the point of, you know, AWS adds new features or new capabilities all the time and, like, well you have this dev portal, that's sort of your interface for how to get things done. Like, how will you use those? Dev portal doesn't stop you from doing that, right? So, my mental model is, if I'm a developer, and I want to spin up a new service, I can just press a button inside of my dev portal in my company and do that. And I have a service that is built according to the latest standards, it has a CI/CD pipeline, it already has a—you know, it's registered in PagerDuty, it's registered in Datadog, it has all the various bits.And then there's something else that I want to do that isn't really on the golden path because maybe this is some new service or some experiment, nothing stops us from doing that. Like, you still can use all those tools from AWS, you know, kind of raw. And if those prove to be valuable for the rest of the organization, great. They can make their way into the dev portal; they can actually become a source of leverage. But if they're not, then they can also just sit there on the vine. Like, not everything that eight of us ever produces will be used by every company.Corey: Many years ago, I got a Cisco pair of certifications because recession was hitting and I needed to be better at networking. And taking those certifications, in those days before Cisco became the sad corporate dragon with no friends we all know today, they were highly germane and relevant. But I distinctly remember, even now, 15 years later, that there was this entire philosophy of pretend that the entire world is Cisco only, which in networking is absolutely never true. It feels like a lot of the AWS designs and patterns tend to assume, oh yeah, you're going to use AWS services for everything. I have never yet found that to be true, other than when I'm just trying to be obstinate.And hell is interoperability between a bunch of different things. Yes, I may want to spin up an EC2 instance and an AWS load balancer and some S3 storage or whatnot, but I'm also going to want to monitor it with PagerDuty, I'm going to want to have a CDN that isn't CloudFront because most CDN these days don't hate you in quite the same economic ways and are simpler to work with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's definitely a story wherein I've found that there's an—the interoperability of tying these things together is helpful. How do you avoid falling down the trap of oh, everyone should be multi-cloud, single pane of glass at cetera, et cetera? In practice that always seems to turn to custard.Ken: Yeah, I think multi-cloud and single pane of glass are actually two different things. So multi-cloud, like, I agree with you to some sense. Like, pick a cloud and go with it, like, unless you have really good business reasons to go for multi-cloud. And sometimes you do, like, years ago, I worked at PagerDuty, they were multi-cloud for a reliability reason, that hey, if one cloud provider goes down, you don't want [crosstalk 00:08:40]—Corey: They were an example I used all the time for that story—Ken: Right.Corey: —specifically the thing woke you up was homed in a bunch of different places, whereas the marketing site, the onboarding flow, the periphery stuff around it was not because it didn't need to be.Ken: Exactly.Corey: Like, the core business need of wake you up was very much multi-cloud because once upon a time, it wasn't and it went down with the rest of us-east-1 and people weren't woken up to be told their site was on fire.Ken: A hundred percent. And on the kind of like application side where, even then, pick a cloud and go with it, unless there's a really compelling business reason for your business to go multi-cloud. Maybe there's something credits or compliance or availability, right? There might be reasons, but you have to be articulate about whether they're right for you.Now, single pane of glass, I think that's different, right? I do think that's something that, ultimately, is a net boon for developers. In any large organization, there is a myriad of internal tools that have been built. And it's like, well, how do I provision a new topic in the Kafka cluster? How do I actually get access to the AWS console? How do I spin up a new service, right? How do I kind of do these things?And if I'm a developer, I just want to ship features. Like, that's what I'm incented to do, that's what I'm optimizing for. And all this other stuff I have to do as part of my job, but I don't want to have to become, like, a Kubernetes guru to be able to do it, right? So, what a developer portal is trying to do is be that single pane of glass, bringing all these common set of tools and responsibilities that you have as a developer in one place. They're easy to search for, they're easy to find, they're easy to query, they're easy to use.Corey: I should probably have asked this earlier on, but let's disambiguate for a little bit here. Because when I'm setting up to use a new service or product and kick the tires on it, no two explorations really look the same. Whereas at most responsible mature companies that are building products that are—services that are going to production use, they've standardized around a number of different approaches. What does your target customer look like? Is there a certain point of scale, a certain level of complexity, a certain maturity of process?Ken: Absolutely. So, a tool like OpsLevel or a developer portal really only makes sense when you hit some critical mass in terms of the number of services you have running in production, or the number of developers that you have. So, when you hit 20, 30, 50 developers or 20, 30, 50 services, an important part of a developer portal is this catalog of what's out there. Once you kind of hit the Dunbar number of services, like, when you have more than you keep in your head, that's when you start to need tooling like this. If you look at our customer base, they're all you know, kind of medium to large-sized companies. If you're a startup with, like, ten people, OpsLevel is probably not right for you. We use all playable internally at OpsLevel, and you know, like, we're still a small company. It's like, we make it work for us because we know how to get the most out of it, but like, it's not the perfect fit because it's not really meant for, you know, smaller companies.Corey: Oh, I hear you. I think I'm probably… I have a better AWS bill analytic system running internally here at The Duckbill Group than some banks do. So, I hear you on that front.Ken: I believe it.Corey: But also implies to me that there's no OpsLevel prospect or customer deployment that has ever been greenfield. It's always you're building existing things, there's already infrastructure in place, vendors have been selected across the board. You aren't—don't to want to starting a company day one, they're going to all right, time to spin up our AWS account and we're also going to wind up signing up for OpsLevel, from the sound of it.Ken: Correct—Corey: Accurate? Inaccurate?Ken: I think that's actually accurate. Like, a lot of the problems, we solve other problems that come as you start to scale both your product and your engineering team. And it's the problems of complexity.Corey: What do those painful problems look like? In other words, what is someone sitting at home right now listening to this, or driving to work debating whether want to ram a bridge abutment or go into the office depending on their mental state today, what painful problem did they have that OpsLevel is designed to fix?Ken: Yeah, for sure. So, let's help people self-select. So, here's my mental model for any [unintelligible 00:12:25]. There are product developers, platform developers, and engineering leaders. Product developers, if you're asking questions like, “I just got paged for the service. I don't know what this does.” Or, “It's upstream from here. Where do I find the technical documentation?” Or, “I think I have to do something with the payment service. Where do I find the API for that?”You know, when you get to that scale, a developer portal can help you. If you're a platform engineer and you have questions like, “Okay, we got to migrate. We're migrating, I don't know, from Datadog to Honeycomb, right? We got to get these fifty or a hundred or thousands of services and all these different owners to, like, switch to some new tool.” Or, “Hey, we've done all this work to ship the golden path. Like, how to actually measure the adoption of all this work that we're doing and if it's actually valuable?” Right?Like, we want everybody to be on a certain set of CI tooling or a certain minimum version of some library or framework. How do we do that? How do we measure that? OpsLevel is for you, right? We have a whole bunch of stuff around maturity.And if you're engineering leader, ultimately, questions you care about, like, “How fast are my developers working? I have this massive team, we've made this massive investment in hiring all these humans to write software and bring value for our customers. How can we be more efficient as a business in terms of that value delivery?” And that's where OpsLevel can help as well.Corey: Guardrails, whether they be economic, regulatory, or otherwise, have to make it easier than doing things incorrectly because one of the miracle aspects of cloud also turns into a bit of a problem, which is shadow IT is only ever a corporate credit card away. Make it too difficult to comply with corporate policies and people won't. And they're good actors; they're trying to get work done. They're not trying to make people's lives harder, but they don't want to spend six weeks provisioning an EC2 cluster. So, there's always that weird trade-off.Now, it feels—and please correct me if I'm wrong—once someone has rolled out OpsLevel at their organization, where it really shines is spinning up a new service where okay, great, you're going to spin up the automatic observability portion of it, you're going to spin up the underlying infrastructure in certain ways that comply with our policies, it's going to build the CI/CD pipelines around it, you're going to wind up having the various cost instrumentation rolled out to it. But for services that are already excellent within the environment, is there an OpsLevel story for them?Ken: Oh, absolutely. So, I look at it as, like, the first problem OpsLevel helps solve is the catalog and what's out there and who owns it. So, not even getting developers to spin up new services that are kind of on the golden path, but just understanding the taxonomy of what are the services we have? How do those services compose into higher-level things like systems or domains? What's the whole set of infrastructure we have?Like, I have 50 AWS accounts, maybe a handful of GCP ones, also, some Azure. I have all this infrastructure that, like, how do I start to get a handle on, like, what's out there in prod and who's responsible for it. And that helps you get in front of compliance risks, security risks. That's really the starting point for OpsLevel building that catalog. And we have a bunch of integrations that kind of slurp all this data to automatically assemble that catalog, or YAML as well if that's your thing. But that's the starting point is building that catalog and figuring out this assignment of, like, okay, this service and this human, or this—sorry—team, like, they're paired together.Corey: A number of offerings in this space, which honestly, my exposure to it is bounded simultaneously to things that are ten years old and no one uses anymore, or a bunch of things I found on GitHub. And the challenge that both of those products tend to have is that they assume certain things to be true about a given environment: that they're using Terraform to manage everything, or they're always going to be using CloudFormation, or everyone there knows Python or something else like that. What are the prerequisites to get started with OpsLevel?Ken: Yeah, so we worked pretty hard to build just a ton of integrations. I would say integrations is are just continuing thing we have going on in the background. Like, when we started, like, we only supported a GitHub. Now, we support all the gits, you know, like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, like, we're building [unintelligible 00:16:19]. There's just a whole, like, long tail of integrations.The same with APM tooling. The same with vulnerability management tooling, right? And the reason we do that is because there's just this huge vendor footprint, and people, you know, want OpsLevel to work for them. Now, the other thing we try to do is we also build APIs. So, anything we have as, like, a core integration, we also have kind of like an underlying API for, so that there's, no matter what you have an escape hatch. If like, you're using some tool that we don't support or you have some homegrown thing, there's always a way to try to be able to integrate that into OpsLevel.Corey: When people think about developer portals, the most common one that pops to mind is Backstage, which Spotify wound up building, internally, championing, open-sourcing, and I believe, on some level, turned into a product because if there's one thing people want, it's to have their podcast music company become a SaaS vendor, which is weird to me. But the criticisms that I've seen about and across the board have rung relatively true, including from people internal at Spotify who have used the thing, which is, well first is underestimating the amount of effort that is necessary to maintain Backstage itself, that the build versus buy discussion is always harder to bu—engineers love to build, but they shouldn't be building things outside of their core competency half the time, and the other is driving adoption within the org where you can have the most amazing developer portal in the known universe, but if people don't use it, it may as well not exist and doing the carrot and stick approach often doesn't work. I think you have a pretty good answer that I need not even ask you to elaborate on, “Well, how do we avoid having to maintain this ourselves,” since you have a company that does this, but how do you find companies are driving adoption successfully once they have deployed OpsLevel?Ken: Yeah, that's a great question. So, absolutely. Like, I think the biggest thing you need first, is kind of cultural buy-in and that this is a tool that we want to invest in, right? I think one of the reasons Spotify was successful with Backstage and I think it was System Z before that was that they had this kind of flywheel of, like, they saw that their developers were getting, you know better faster, working happier, by using this type of tooling, by reducing the cognitive load. The way that we approach it is sort of similar, right?We want to make sure that there is executive buy-in that, like, everybody agrees this is, like, a problem that's worth solving. The first step we do is trying to build out that catalog again and helping assign ownership. And that helps people understand, like, hey, these are the services I'm responsible for. Oh, look, and now here's this other context that I didn't have before. And then helping organizations, you know, what—it depends on the problem we're trying to solve, but whether it's rolling out self-serve automation to help developers, like, reduce what was before a ton of cognitive load or if it's helping platform teams define what good looks like so they can start to level up the overall health of what's running in production, we kind of work on different problems, but it's picking one problem and then you know, kind of working with the customers and driving it forward.Corey: On some level, I think that this is going to be looked down upon inherently just by automatic reflex of folks with infrastructure engineering backgrounds. It's taken me some time to learn to overcome my own negative reaction to it. Because it's, I'm here to build things and I want to build things out in such a way that it's portable and reusable without having to be tied to a particular vendor and move on. And it took me a long time to realize that what that instinct was whispering in my ear was in fact, no, you should be your own cloud provider. If that's really what I want to do, I probably should just brush up on you know, computer science trivia from 20 years ago and then go see if I can pass Google's SRE interview.I'm not here to build the things that just provision infrastructure from scratch every company I wind up landing at. It feels like there's more important, impactful work that I can do. And let's be clear, people are never going to follow guardrails themselves when they have to do a bunch of manual steps. It has to be something that is done for them. And I don't know how you necessarily get there without having some form of blueprint or something like that, provided for them with something that is self-service because otherwise, it's not going to work.Ken: I a hundred percent agree, by the way, Corey. Like, the take that, like, automation is the only way to drive a lot of this forward is true, right? If for every single thing you're trying—like, we have a concept called a rubric and it's basically how you measure the service health. And you can—it's very customizable, you have different dimensions. But if, for any check that's on your rubric, it requires manual effort from all your developers, that is going to be harder than something you can just automate away.So, vulnerability management is a great example. If you tell developers, “Hey, you have to go upgrade this library,” okay, some percentage [unintelligible 00:20:47], if you give developers, “Here's a pull request that's already been done and has a test passing and now you just need to merge it,” you're going to have a much better adoption rate with that. Similarly with, like, applying templates being able to [up-level 00:20:57], you know, kind of apply the latest version of a template to an existing service, those types of capabilities, anything where you can automate what the fixes are, absolutely you're going to get better adoption.Corey: As you take a look at your existing reference customers—which is something I always look for on vendor websites because, like, oh, we have many customers who will absolutely not admit to being customers, it's like, that sounds like something that's easy to say—you have actual names tied to these things. Not just companies, but also individuals. If you were to sit down and ask your existing customer base, “So, why did you wind up implementing OpsLevel and what has the value that's delivered to you been since that implementation?” What do they say?Ken: Definitely. I actually had to check our website because we, you know, land new customers and put new logos on it. I was like, “Oh, I wonder what the current set is out right now?”Corey: I have the exact same challenge. Like oh, we have some mutual customers. And it's okay. I don't know if I can mention them by name because I haven't checked our own list of testimonials [unintelligible 00:21:51] lately because say the wrong thing and that's how you wind up being sued and not having a company anymore.Ken: Yeah. So, I don't—I definitely, you know, want to stay [on side 00:22:00] on that part, but in terms of, like, kind of sample reference customer, a lot of the folks that we initially worked with are the platform teams, right? They're the teams that care about what's out there, and they need to know who's responsible for it because they're trying to drive some kind of cross-cutting change across the entire, you know, production footprint. And so, the first thing that generally people will say is—and I love this quote. This came—I won't name them, but like, it's in one of our case studies.It was like, “I had, like, 50 different attempts at making a spreadsheet and they're all, like, in the graveyard, like, to be able to capture what's out there and who's responsible for it.” And just OpsLevel helping automate that has been one of the biggest values that they've gotten. The second point, then is now be able to drive maturity and be able to measure how well those services are being built. And again, it's sort of this interesting thing where we start with the platform teams. And then sometime later security teams find out about OpsLevel, and they're like, “Oh, this is a tool I can use to, like, get developers to do stuff? Like, I've been trying to get developers to do stuff for the longest time.”And they—I file Jira tickets and they just sit there and nothing gets done. But when it becomes part of this, like, overall health score that you're trying to increase a part of the across the board, yeah, it's just a way to kind of drive action.Corey: I think that there's a dichotomy of companies that emerge. And I tend to see the world through a lens of AWS bills, so let's go down that path. I feel like there are some companies presumably like OpsLevel, whereas if I—assuming you're running on top of AWS—if I were to pull your AWS bill, I would see upwards of 80% of your spend is going to be on this application called OpsLevel, the service that you provide to people. As opposed to the other side of the world, which is large enterprises, where they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but the largest application they have is a million-and-a-half a year in spend because just, they have thousands of these things scattered everywhere. That latter case is where I tend to see more platform teams, where I start to see a lot of managing a whole bunch of relatively small workloads. And developer platforms really seem to be where a lot of solutions lead, whereas 80% of our workload is one application, we don't feel the need for that as much. Is that accurate? Am I misunderstanding some aspect of it?Ken: No, a hundred percent you'd hit the nail on the head. Like, okay, think about the typical, like, microservices adoption journey. Like, you started with, you know, some small company—like us—you started with a monolith. Ah, maybe you built out a second app—Corey: Then you read on Hacker News and realize, “Oh, if we want to hire people, we've got to be doing what all the cool kids are up to.”Ken: Right. We got a microservice all the thing—but that's actually you know, microservices should come later, right, as a response to you needing scale your org and scale your—Corey: As someone who started building some application with microservices, I could not agree more.Ken: A hundred percent. So, it's as you're starting to take steps to having just more moving parts in your production infrastructure, right? If you have one moving part, unless it's like a really large moving part that you can internally break down, like, kind of this majestic monolith where you do have kind of like individual domains that are owned by different teams, but really the problem we're trying to solve, it's more about, like, who owns what. Now, if that's a single atomic unit, great, but can you decompose that? But if you just have, like, one small application, kind of like the whole team is owning everything, again, a developer portal is probably not the right tool for you. It really is a tool that you need as you start to scale your engineer work and as you start to scale the number of moving parts in your production infrastructure.Corey: I tended to use to think of that in terms of boring companies versus innovative ones and I don't think that's accurate. I think it is the question of maturity and where companies lead to. On some level, of OpsLevel starts growing and becomes larger and larger in different ways and starts doing acquisitions and launching into other areas, at some point, you don't have just one product offering, you have a multitude of them. At which point having something like that is going to be critical. But I have to ask, given that you are sort of not exactly your target customer profile, what are the sharp edges been on using it for your use case?Ken: Yeah. So, we actually have an internal Slack channel, we call OpsLevel on OpsLevel. And finding those sharp edges actually has been really useful for us. You know, all the good stuff, dogfooding and it makes your own product better. Okay, so we have our main app, we also do have a bunch of smaller things and it's like, oh yeah, you know, we have, like, I don't know, various Hackaday things that go on, it's important we kind of wind those down for, you know, compliance, we have our marketing site, we have, like, our Terraform.Like, so there's, like, stuff. It's not, like, hundreds or thousands of things, but there's more than just the main app. The second though, is it's really on the maturity piece that we really try to get a lot of value out of our own product, right? Helping—we have our own platform team. They're also trying to drive certain initiatives with our product developers.There is that usual tension of our, like, our own product developers are like, “I want to ship features.” What's this security thing I have to go take care of right now? But OpsLevel itself, like, helps reflect that. We had an operational review today and it was like, “Oh, this one service is actually now”—we have platinum as a level. It's in gold instead of platinum. It's like, “Why?” “Oh, there's this thing that came up. We got to go fix that.” “Great. Let's go actually go fix that so we're back into platinum.”Corey: Do you find that there's often a choice you have to make internally, where you could make the product more effective for your specific use case, but that also diverges from where your typical customer needs or wants the product to go?Ken: No, I think a lot of the things we find for our use case are, like, they're more small paper cuts, right? They're just as we're using it, it's like, “Hey, like, as I'm using this, I want to see the report for this particular check. Why do I have to click six times to get?” You know, like, “Wouldn't it be great if we had a button?” Right?And so, it's those type of, like, small innovations that kind of come up. And those ultimately lead to, you know, a better product for our customers. We also work really closely with our customers and developers are not shy about telling you what they don't like about your product. And I say this with love, like, a lot of our customers give us phenomenal feedback just on how our product can be better and we try to internalize that and you know, roll that feedback into the product.Corey: You have a number of integrations of different SaaS providers, infrastructure providers, et cetera, that you wind up working with. I imagine that given your scale and scope and whatnot, those offerings are dictated by what customers say, “Hey, we're using this thing. Are you going to support that or are you not going to maintain our business?” Which is a great way to wind up financing a lot of product development and figuring out what matters to people. My question for you is, if you look across the totality of your user base, what are the most popularly used integrations, if you can say?Ken: Yeah, for sure. I think right now—I could actually dive in to pull the numbers—GitHub and GitLab—or… I think GitHub, like, has slightly more adoption across our customer base. At least with our customers, almost nobody uses Bitbucket. I mean, we have, like, a small number, but, like, it's… I think, single-digit percentage. A lot of people use PagerDuty, which you know, hey, I'm an ex-PagerDuty person [crosstalk 00:28:24] and I'm glad to see that.Corey: I have a free tier PagerDuty account that will automatically page me for my home automation stuff. Specifically, if you know, the fire alarm goes off. Like, yeah, okay, there are certain things I want to be woken up for, but it's a very short list.Ken: Yeah, it's funny, the running default message when we use a test PagerDuty was, “The server is on fire.” [unintelligible 00:28:44] be like, “The house is on fire.” Like you know, go get that taken care of. There's one other tool so that's used a lot. Datadog actually is used a ton by just across our entire customer base, despite its… we're also Data—we're a Datadog partner, we're a Datadog customer, you know? It's not cheap, but it's a good product for, you know, monitoring and logs and there are [crosstalk 00:29:01]—Corey: No other than cloud infrastructure providers, I get the number one most common source of inquiries is Datadog optimization. It has now risen to a board-level concern in many cases because observability is expensive. That's a sign of success, on some level. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, like, Date-a-dog? Oh, my God, that's disgusting. It's like Tinder for Pets. Which it turns out is not at all what they do.Ken: Nice.Corey: Yeah.[audio break 00:29:23]—optimizing their Slack integrations, their GitHub integration, et cetera. Or are they starting with the spinning up the servers piece of it?Ken: A lot of the time—and again, that first problem they're trying to solve is just get me a handle on everything we have running in production. You know, if you have multiple AWS accounts, multiple Kubernetes clusters, dozens or even hundreds of teams, God help you if you're going to try to, like, build a list manually to consolidate all that information. That's really the first part is, like, integrate Kubernetes, integrate your CI/CD pipelines, integrate Git, integrate your Cloud account, like, will integrate with everything and will try to build that map of, like, here's everything that's out there, and start to try to assign it to, like, and here's people that we think might be responsible in terms of owning the software. That's generally the starting point.Corey: Which makes an awesome amount of sense. I think going at it from the infrastructure first perspective is where I've seen most developer platforms founder. And to be fair, the job is easier now than it was years ago because it used to be that you were being out-innovated by AWS constantly. Innovation has slow down there. And you know that because of how much they say the pace of innovation has only sped up.And whenever AWS says something in a marketing context, they're insecure about it. I've learned this through the fullness of time observing that company. And these days, most customers do not use the majority of features available for any given service. They have solidified to a point where you can responsibly build on top of these things. Now, it seems that the problem is all the ‘yes, and' stuff that gets built on top of it.Ken: Yeah. Do you have an example, actually, like, one of the kinds of, like, ‘yes, and' tools that you're thinking about?Corey: Oh, absolutely. We have a bunch of AWS environment stuff so we should configure CloudWatch to look at all these things from an observability perspective. No, you should not. You should set up Datadog. And the first time someone does that by hand, they enable all have the observability and the rest and suddenly get charged approximately the GDP of Guam.And okay, maybe we shouldn't do that because then you have the downstream impact of that on your CloudWatch bill. So okay, how do we optimize this for the observability piece directly tied to that? How do we make sure that we get woken up when the site is down or preferably before that, but not every time basically, a EBS volume starts to get a little bit toasty? You have to start dialing this stuff in. And once you've found a lot of those aspects, being able to templatize that and roll that out on an ongoing basis and having the integrations all work together feels like it's the right problem to be solving.Ken: Yeah, absolutely. And the group that I think is responsible for that kind of—because it's a set of problems you described—is really, like, platform teams. Sometimes service owners for like, how should we get paged, but really, what you're describing are these kind of cross-cutting engineering concerns that platform teams are uniquely poised to help solve in an [unintelligible 00:32:03] organization, right? I was thinking what you said earlier. Like, nobody just wants to rebuild the same info over and over, but it's sort of like, it's not just building an [unintelligible 00:32:09]; it's kind of like solving this, like, how do we ship? Can we actually run stuff in prod? And not just run it but get observability and ensure that we're woken up for it and, like, what's that total end-to-end look like from, like, developers writing code to running software in production that's serving traffic? And solving all the problems [unintelligible 00:32:24], that's what I think of was platform engineering.Corey: So, my last question before we wind up wrapping this episode comes down to, I am very adept at two different programming languages, and those are brute force and enthusiasm. What implementation language is most of what you find yourself working with? And why is it in invariably going to be YAML?Ken: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think there's, in terms of implementing OpsLevel and implementing a service catalog, we support YAML. Like, you know, there's this very common workflow, you just drop a YAML spec, basically, in your repo, if you're a service owner. And that, we can support that. I don't think that's a great take, though.Like, we have other integrations. Again, if the problem you're trying to solve is I want to build a catalog of everything that's out there, asking each of your developers hey, can you please all write YAML files that, like, describe the services you own and drop them into this repo? You've inverted this, like, database that essentially you're trying to build, like, what's out there and stored it in Git, potentially across several hundreds or thousands of repos. You put a lot of toil now on individual product developers to go write and maintain these files. And if you ever had to, like, make a blanket update to these files, there's no atomic way to kind of do that, right?So, I look at YAML as, like, I get it, you know? Like, we use the YAML for all the things in DevOps, so why not their service catalog as well, but I think it's toil. Like, there are easier ways to build a catalog. By, kind of, just integrate. Like, hook up AWS, hook up GitHub, hook up Kubernetes, hook up your CI/CD pipeline, hook up all these different sources that have information about what's running in prod, and let the software, let the tool, automatically infer what's actually running as opposed to requiring humans to manually enter data.Corey: I find that there are remarkably few technical holy wars that I cannot unify both sides on by nominating something far worse. Like, the VI versus Emacs stuff, the tabs versus spaces, and of course, the JSON versus YAML folks. My JSON versus YAML answer is XML: God's language. I find that as soon as you suggest that, people care a hell of a lot less about the differences between JSON and YAML because their job is to now kill the apostate, which is me.Ken: Right. Yeah. I remember XML, like, oh, man, 2002. SOAP. I remember SOAP as a protocol. That was a thing.Corey: Some of the earliest S3 API calls were done in SOAP, and I think they finally just used it to wash their mouths out when all was said and done.Ken: Nice. Yeah.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to do your level best to attempt to convert me, and I would argue in many respects, you have succeeded. I'm thinking about this differently than I did half an hour ago. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Ken: Absolutely. So, you can always check out our website, opslevel.com. We're also fairly active on LinkedIn. If Twitter hasn't imploded by the time this episode becomes launched, then they can also check us out at twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ. We're always posting, just different content on, like, how to be successful with service maturity, DevOps, developer productivity, so that you know, ultimately, that you can ship out to customers faster.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:23]. Thank you so much for taking the time, not just to speak with me, but also for sponsoring this episode. It is appreciated.Ken: Cheers.Corey: Ken Rose, CTO and co-founder at OpsLevel. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this has been a promoted guest episode of 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 which, upon further reflection, you could have posted to all of the podcast platforms if only you had the right developer platform to pull it off.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.

An airhacks.fm conversation with Dave Johnson (@snoopdave) about: PDP-8 with a paper tape reader, airhacks.tv questions and answers, TRS-80, playing asteroids, asteroids, Defender and Battlezone were based on vector graphics, learning Pascal and C, Data General Eclipse MV/8000, Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS GIS), working for University of Kingston, working on jfactory for Rouge Wave, HAHT Software, The Soul of a New Machine, distributed Visual Basic application server, using xdoclet to generate EJB, using castor for persistence, Apache Roller started as sample application, Sun hires dave, working on Lotus Notes social, starting at wayin, Roller supports Pingback, Lotus is using roller, using Rightscale to deploy Java software to AWS, using Jenkins and CloudFormation, episode with Scott McNealy "#19 SUN, JavaSoft, Java, Oracle", Roller uses Apache Velocity, working on RSS parser Rome, switching from MongoDB to Apache Cassandra, UserGrid data store, Oracle acquires apiary , starting at CloudBees, episode with Kohsuke Kawaguchi "#143 How Hudson and Jenkins happened", starting at Apollo, several thousand blogs on roller Dave Johnson on twitter: @snoopdave

Show: 378Description: Aaron and Brian review the biggest news, trends and topics of 2018.Show Sponsor Links:Datadog Homepage - Modern Monitoring and AnalyticsTry Datadog yourself by starting a free, 14-day trial today. Listeners of this podcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirtCloudcast Housekeeping:Thank you to our sponsors, both A Cloud Guru and DataDog64% of Krispy Kreme Funding - http://bit.ly/Cloudcast-Donuts201951 Shows, Avg Listens (show): 18-20k (+19%), Avg Rank iTunes Technology: 63Over $50B in M&A and VC Funding for guests (all-time)Acquired: Red Hat, Rightscale, CoreOS, GitHub, Evident.io, Loggly, CloudHealth, VictorOps, BonsaiIPO: PivotalFunding: SWIM.AI, Stryth Leviathan, Atomist, Kasten, Lightstep, Rubrik, Hashicorp, A Cloud GuruShow Notes:Previous Year Cloudcast Predictions: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014,Top Tech Trends (expected) in 2019 (via CBInsights)Commercial Open Source Software Companies ($100B)Cloudability - State of the Cloud (2018)Big Trends:Gartner IaaS MQ is down to 6 companies (AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle)AWS growing +40% ($25B revenues) and Azure revenues ~ $28-30B (but not explicitly broken out) - AWS claimed at re:Invent to have 51% market-share.Big acquisitions around Open Source (Red Hat, GitHub, Hortonworks)A new push by Open Source companies (Redis, Confluent) to change their licensing model to help protect them from public cloud providers taking their software and not giving back - http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/Big funding and investments around HCI and Backup HCIKubernetes continues to dominate containers and cloud-native (see: @PodCTL podcast)New CEO at Google Cloud (Thomas Kurian)Blockchain seems to need a new PR agencyInterest rates are rising (2 more raises are projected in 2019), which changes all the VC modelsTech Stocks (2018):S and P 500: (-12.2%), DJIA: (-12%), NASDAQ: (-8%)AAPL: (-12%), AMZN: (+14%), CSCO: (+5%), FB: (-29%), GOOG: (-7.5%), IBM: (-30%)MSFT: (+11%), NFLX: (+25%), NTAP: (-1%), NTNX: (+1%), ORCL: (-11%), RHT: +43% (acquired by IBM)PVTL (0%), SAP: (-8.5%), SFDC: (+18%), VMW: (+13%)How are SaaS priced after 2018 correction? - https://tomtunguz.com/just-where-are-saas-companies-priced-after-the-2018-correction/

We discuss the recent Linux controversy resulting in Linus Torvalds taking some time off, review the latest release from Chef and try to figure out how and when you should hire consultants to help with your cloud projects. Relevant to your interests Amazon's 11 new products from its big event - Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis (https://staceyoniot.com/amazons-11-new-products-from-its-big-event/) After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside) Software provider Solarwinds files for IPO (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/software-provider-solarwinds-files-for-ipo-2018-09-21) Slack has made its biggest acquisition to date (https://qz.com/work/1392936/slack-has-made-its-biggest-acquisition-to-date/) In praise of SWARMing (https://dannorth.net/2018/01/26/in-praise-of-swarming/) Deliver Superior Business Outcomes. We Recap the Latest Release (https://content.pivotal.io/springone-platform-2018/pcf-2-3) Announcing Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure - Chef Blog (https://blog.chef.io/2018/09/25/announcing-chef-automate-managed-service-for-azure/) Microsoft Ignite 2018: Windows Virtual Desktop, Office 2019 and everything else just announced (https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ignite-2018-windows-virtual-desktop-and-more/) Flexera acquires RightScale to combine software asset, cloud management | ZDNet (https://www.zdnet.com/article/flexera-acquires-rightscale-to-combine-software-asset-cloud-management/#ftag=RSSbaffb68) Instana raises $30M for its application performance monitoring service (https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/instana-raises-30m-for-its-application-performance-monitoring-service/) Data.world raises $12M to help Fortune 500 companies close the great data divide (https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/25/data-world-raises-12m-to-help-fortune-500-companies-close-the-great-data-divide/) PKS 1.2 Adds AWS: More Multi-cloud for Your Kubernetes (https://content.pivotal.io/springone-platform-2018/pks-1-2) Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.3, Powered by Industrialized Open Source, Helps You (https://content.pivotal.io/springone-platform-2018/pcf-2-3) Revenge of the PMO | Silicon Valley Product Group (https://svpg.com/revenge-of-the-pmo/) Conferences, et. al. Oct 1st to 2nd - New Relic (aka “Not Datadog”) FutureStack London (https://newrelic.com/futurestack/london), Coté on a partner panel on Oct 1st, also, come see The Governor (https://twitter.com/monkchips) in action at FutureStack on the 2nd. Oct 2nd, London! Coté talking metrics at the NO NAME Pivotal Meetup (https://connect.pivotal.io/london-meetup-oct18.html). Oct 4th - ITQ Transform (https://itq.nl/transform/#transform_1), Utrecht - Coté talking. Oct 16th - DevOpsDays Paris (https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2018-paris/welcome/) - Coté at a table. Pivotal will have a raffle! Oct 17th - JDriven Managers summit (https://www.jdriven.com/events/) - near Amsterdam - Coté talking. Oct 10th to 11th - Cloud Expo Asia (https://www.cloudexpoasia.com/cloud-asia-2018) - Matt’s presenting! Oct 11th to 12th - DevOps Days Singapore (https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2018-singapore/) - Matt’s keynoting & igniting! Discount Code (https://ti.to/devopsdays-singapore/2018/discount/MRA_DEVOPS) Oct 31st - Coté speaking at New Relic’s FutureStack Amsterdam (https://web.cvent.com/event/23ce37e7-6077-42f5-8015-4a47a0cee30d/summary). Nov 3rd to Nov 12th - SpringOne Tour (https://springonetour.io/) - all over the earth! Coté will be MC’ing Beijing Nov 3rd, Seoul Nov 8th, Tokyo Nov 6th, and Singapore Nov 12th (https://springonetour.io/2018/singapore). Nov 14th to 16th - Devoxx Belgium (https://devoxx.be/), Antwerp. Coté’s presenting on enterprise architecture (https://dvbe18.confinabox.com/talk/ASN-9274/Rethinking_enterprise_architecture_for_DevOps,_agile,_&_cloud_native_organizations). Dec 12th and 13th - SpringTour Toronto (http://springonetour.io/2018/toronto), Coté. SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Subscribe to Software Defined Interviews Podcast (http://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/) - Cote on Tech Evangelism (http://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/75) CashedOut.coffee podcast (http://www.cashedout.coffee/). Buy some t-shirts (https://fsgprints.myshopify.com/collections/software-defined-talk)! All T-Shirts $5.50 T-SHIRTS GONE IN SEPTEMBER Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you a sticker. Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Recommendations Matt: Annihilation Movie, (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2798920/) Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Review (https://geeksguideshow.com/2018/02/27/ggg298-annihilation/) Sonic Youth’s Youth Against Fascism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWzIlCJAw-o) Brandon: That Moment, Episode (https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/that-moment-episode-9-focus-on-what-s-in-your-control) 9 (http://That Moment, Episode 9: “Focus on what’s in your control”) with the Cote ad read at 13:11 (https://overcast.fm/+JhBYkbZw4/13:10) Cloud Rankings from Liftrnews (https://liftrnews.com/)

Segment 1: Tracy Brown is the author of “How to Detect Lies, Fraud and Identity Theft”. She's is a Three Time US Collegiate Cycling Champion and former member of Team USA.Segment 2: Chris Fussell, a former Navy Seal, is a Partner at the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute, coauthor of General Stanley McChrystal's 2015 bestseller “Team of Teams”, and author of the new book, “ONE MISSION: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams”, now a Wall Street Journal-bestseller. Segment 3: Jonathan Siegel is the founder of RightCart, RightSignature, and RightScale. He is chairman and founder of Xenon Ventures.  Segment 4:Barry Moltz shares how to get your business unstuck.Segment 5: Max Bluvband is the co-founder and CEO of AppsVillage. He is a serial entrepreneur and has founded multiple technology and mobile-focused companies. Sponsored by Nextiva

Moving to the cloud can bring you a number of business benefits, but it may cost more than you had planned. According to the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud, users report an average of 30 percent wasted cloud spend, while RightScale measures actual waste between 30 and 45 percent. The culprit behind these wasted resources: poor planning. To avoid unexpected cloud spend, you need a defined cloud strategy before you migrate. In this episode, host Cherie Caswell Dost speaks with industry expert Dave Carlson, vice president, Forsythe Hosting Solutions about how gain control of your cloud costs. Listen to this episode to learn: How to develop a cloud strategy that sets you up for success. The hidden costs associated with cloud and how to gain control before you migrate. Why you should focus on managing costs instead of cutting them. Four ways to optimize your cloud spend now. The Truth about Cloud Costs: 5 Things You Should Know – Moving applications to the cloud offers you greater agility, but your bill may give you sticker shock. Here’s how to migrate applications to the cloud while keeping the true costs of cloud computing in check. Ignite a Business Transformation with Cloud – Find out how our cloud strategy guide can help you ignite a transformation at your organization. Forsythe Technology - For more than 40 years, Forsythe has helped companies succeed by working to optimize, modernize, and innovate enterprise IT. We develop solutions that make practical business sense from idea to implementation. We help champion innovation and deliver bottom-line results. We serve as the bridge, moving you from traditional to new IT. Whatever your business needs, we make it happen.

We discuss RightScale’s State of the Cloud report analyzing trends in the cloud. RightScale helps customers adopt cloud by helping them with a cloud management and optimization. This is the sixth year of the report so we can start to see trends over time now and there were a few interesting takeaways this year. In the report, RightScale asks two big questions for enterprises. First is about cloud strategy and what their intention is on cloud – to use private, public, or combinations of those. Second, they are asked about what they use today for private or public clouds. From a strategy point of view, people are still focused on multi-cloud with a special focus on hybrid cloud. In strategy, there was a shift away from private-only strategies. Fewer people were saying they plan to use only private cloud or multiple private clouds as their strategies. On adoption, there was a slight drop in people who are already using private cloud from 77% last year down to 72% this year. This may indicate companies who had tried to build their own private cloud with Openstack, and are now backing off from that strategy. The survey found that the average company leverages about four different cloud vendors. This a result of a combination of acquisitions of companies that use different cloud providers and a strategy to leverage different cloud providers. Rightscale asked people for a list of public and private clouds they are running applications on (focused on IaaS and PaaS, not SaaS) and whether they’re experimenting with particular public and private clouds. They found that among people that are using at least one public cloud, they’re running applications in 1.8 public clouds. They are typically experimenting with another 1.8 clouds. Even if they are not using one of the big cloud vendors, they are often at least experimenting with it. The ones that are adopting private cloud are reporting about 2.3 different private clouds.   For top challenges this year there was a three-way tie between security, spend and skills (access to skilled resources). Last year skills was highest and it has dropped a bit this year. The people in IT who are concerned about security has been declining each year. Among enterprises, in 2017 over 35% rated cloud security as a significant challenge, and six years ago that number was about 10% higher. We have now reached a tipping point where people realize that when done right, cloud can be as secure if not more secure than a traditional data center. As people adopt public cloud, the cost has been increasing and companies are starting to realize they are inefficient with their spend. On average companies believe they are wasting 30% of their cloud spend. RightScale has found that 30-45% or more is typically what companies are wasting on their cloud spend. The survey found that the more mature a cloud instance is, the more important spend becomes. This year Docker has moved into first place in the list of tools RightScale researches, and while all tools had an increase in usage, Chef and Puppet had a decrease in usage. The survey specifically focuses on configuration management tools and container tools. Docker usage moved from 13% in 2015 to 27% in 2016 to 35% this year, while Chef and Puppet each dropped about 4% this year. The other big increase seen this year was in Kubernetes, which doubled from 7% last year to 14% this year and seems to be in the lead for scheduling and orchestration tools. There is an early trend RightScale noticed that people are starting to use Docker to take advantage of the temporary instances from the cloud providers such as AWS Spot or Google Preemptibles. For people looking to use those, which can mean 70-90% savings on demand, they need the ability to be very portable when they lose their temporary instances, so using Docker along with a container as a service can be helpful in saving those costs. We look at predictions for next year’s State of the Cloud report. Private cloud will likely continue to be under pressure, though we may see a slight uptick with VMware on AWS. It is likely that Docker will continue to grow and that the cost of the cloud will continue to be an ongoing challenge for enterprises.

Brian talks with Kim Weins (@kimweins, VP of Marketing) and Tim MIller (@Miller_Tim, VP of Engineering) at @Rightscale about market adoption of DevOps and Containers, migrating applications to containers, and the challenges of a container-centric deployment to production. Show Links: Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos RightScale State of the Cloud: DevOps report Rightscale “Project Sherpa” blogs - moving apps to containers “Project Sherpa” webinar Show Notes: Want to register for VelocityConf right now? Use code PCCLOUD20 for 20% off registration Topic 1 - Give us a sense of the scope and scale of the Rightscale platform and how involved it is in companies and applications that are leveraging the fast growing public cloud. Topic 1a - What were the biggest takeaways that you observed in the data from the 2016 Cloud / DevOps report? Topic 2 - Why did Rightscale take on “Project Sherpa” in the first place? Topic 3 - What were the initial big hurdles, red flags or things that told you that maybe this wasn’t a good idea? How did you overcome those challenges? Topic 4 - What were some of the lessons you learned through the transition? Did you take a bimodal approach, or was this an “everybody” transition, or was there another people/culture/process approach? Topic 5 - On the dev-side, containers are getting much better understood. How did you manage the ops portion? Feedback? Email:show at thecloudcast dot net Twitter:@thecloudcastnet YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

Our guest on the podcast this week is Kim Weins, VP of Marketing at RightScale. We discuss RightScale’s recent State of the Cloud Report, taking a deep dive into DevOps and Docker adoption. Adoption is increasing across the board for configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, but Docker has seen the greatest growth since last year. Last year 13% of the teams surveyed were using Docker, while this year 27% are using it and 35% reported they plan to use it in the future. At this rate of growth, Docker could take the lead on widespread adoption as soon as next year. We also see a trend in large enterprises embracing DevOps, sometimes with more enthusiasm that SMBs. RightScale has taken their own steps to migrate to Docker to save costs and we see how they were successfully able to make the switch.

Allyson and Reuven are finally reunited this week for a new episode with a couple of great guests. First up, Michael Crandell (@michaelcrandell), the CEO of RightScale stops by to talk about cloud management in the cloud environment and bridging services (servers/network/storage) to run applications. He also weighs in on the PaaS vs. IaaS debate. Then Dave McCrory (@mccrory), the CTO of Basho, discusses distributed database technology and also the concept of Data Gravity – thinking about data as if it were a planet that builds mass and attracts additional Services and Applications. When data is large enough, it’s virtually impossible to move. Show timeline: • 0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week • 9:17 – Interview with Michael Crandell • 23:38 – Interview with Dave McCrory • 36:52 – Wrap up

Allyson and Reuven are finally reunited this week for a new episode with a couple of great guests. First up, Michael Crandell (@michaelcrandell), the CEO of RightScale stops by to talk about cloud management in the cloud environment and bridging services (servers/network/storage) to run applications. He also weighs in on the PaaS vs. IaaS debate. Then Dave McCrory (@mccrory), the CTO of Basho, discusses distributed database technology and also the concept of Data Gravity – thinking about data as if it were a planet that builds mass and attracts additional Services and Applications. When data is large enough, it’s virtually impossible to move.Show timeline:0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week9:17 – Interview with Michael Crandell23:38 – Interview with Dave McCrory36:52 – Wrap up

Allyson and Reuven are finally reunited this week for a new episode with a couple of great guests. First up, Michael Crandell (@michaelcrandell), the CEO of RightScale stops by to talk about cloud management in the cloud environment and bridging services (servers/network/storage) to run applications. He also weighs in on the PaaS vs. IaaS debate. Then Dave McCrory (@mccrory), the CTO of Basho, discusses distributed database technology and also the concept of Data Gravity – thinking about data as if it were a planet that builds mass and attracts additional Services and Applications. When data is large enough, it’s virtually impossible to move.Show timeline:0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week9:17 – Interview with Michael Crandell23:38 – Interview with Dave McCrory36:52 – Wrap up

Brian talks with Phil Cox (@sec_prof), Director of Security and Compliance at Rightscale, about managing secure and compliant environments in the public cloud, as well as how Rightscale is helping next-gen IT evolve to be more agile.