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2 episodes with stackery
2 episodes with stackery
2 episodes with stackery
Extreme Rewards via Extreme Stacking: Stack portal rewards, category bonuses, and much more to take your shopping to the next level. 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:42 Giant Mailbag 00:02:36 -- Backpack tip 00:03:09 -- Nordic Choice 00:06:00 -- AutoSlash for the win 00:06:52 -- Schwab debit card rocks 00:08:12 -- Open Hotel Alert to the rescue 00:08:57 -- Turkish Airlines: valuable mess 00:10:22 Card Talk: Amex Blue Business Plus 00:16:42 Award Talk: Book Etihad w/ Flying Blue miles 00:22:29 Award Talk: BREAKING NEWS from Hyatt 00:22:57 -- Hyatt's revamped Milestone Rewards 00:37:17 -- New ways to earn Hyatt elite nights 00:40:04 -- Mr & Mrs Smith integration w/ Hyatt 00:50:38 Award Talk: Get the room you really want Nick's way 00:54:47 Main Event: The Art of Extreme Stackery Extreme Rewards via Extreme Stacking See blog post: https://frequentmiler.com/extreme-sta... 01:33:05 Question of the Week: When going for the Companion Pass, should I open the personal or business Southwest card first? Music credit: Annie Yoder
About Farrah CampbellAfter 10 years of working in healthcare management, a serendipitous 20-minute car ride with Kara Swisher inspired Farrah to make the jump into technology. She has worked at multiple startups in many different capacities, eventually working her way to being the Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Containers & Serverless.Farrah previously worked as Ecosystems Director, at Stackery where she managed the relationship with AWS including Stackery as an Advanced Technology Partner, achieving the AWS DevOps Competency, a launch partner for Lambda Layers and is an AWS Serverless Hero. Farrah has cultivated the serverless community as an organizer of Portland Serverless Days, the Portland Serverless Meetup, along with numerous serverless workshops and the Portland tech community events from Techfest to bringing multiple luminaries to Portland. Twitter: @FarrahC32 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farrahcampbell/ AWS Community Builders: https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/community-builders/
This week we sit down with Brad Waldron, founder of Kali Protectives to take a deep dive into helmet tech and the new Grit gravel helmet. Kali Protectives Web / Instagram Support the Podcast The Ridership Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: Kali Protectives Craig Dalton: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to The Gravel Ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton this week on the podcast. We've got Brad Waldron from Kali. Protectives talking to us about helmets. [00:00:15]Before we jump in just to reminder, The Gravel Ride podcast is sponsored by listeners like you and a select group of sponsors from the industry and outside the industry. We appreciate any contributions to the show's www.buymeacoffee.com/thegravelride. And when we do bring a sponsor on board, please make sure to check out their products because without their support, we couldn't continue doing what we're doing. [00:00:40] [00:00:40]With that said let's dive right into my interview with Kali. Protectives. Brad. Welcome to the show. [00:00:46] Brad Waldron: [00:00:46] Thanks for having me [00:00:47] Craig Dalton: [00:00:47] I'm super stoked to talk helmets. It's interesting. It's one of those categories that. I haven't covered on the podcast thus far. So I figured going to an expert and talking about it will give the listener a lot of value about helmet technology for gravel, riding [00:01:02]Brad Waldron: [00:01:02] looking forward to it. [00:01:04] Craig Dalton: [00:01:04] Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about your background and how Kali was started? [00:01:09]Brad Waldron: [00:01:09] Sure. I was super lucky in a previous life career. I worked for an aerospace company working on military aircraft. So I was a carbon fiber R and D engineer. Mostly on the process side, not on the material side. [00:01:22]I was fortunate enough to work on the B2 bomber F eighteens joint strike fighter, and then a few airplanes that had never made it, but just stuff you've made it and broke it to see what we could do. And this will give you the idea of my age, but I was at Northrop Grumman in between the first Gulf war and the second Gulf war. [00:01:41] And they didn't want to put a lot of money in production at that time, but they want to put a lot of money into R and D. So I was just in the perfect place at the perfect time where you could almost do anything you wanted. If it made sense. I, one time my boss walked in and said, DARPA's going to be here next week. [00:01:57] Think of something. Go back to my desk and I, without five different projects and the next week sit down in front of these generals and you. Present these ideas in here I'm, in my late twenties, early thirties, somewhere in there. And they're like rubber stamping, all of them and oh shit. [00:02:12] Now I got, I do, so I got to build a $12 million milling machine and then just things like that. So that's where my real just try it. Mentality came from, when you hear are, you can't do that. And get into some of the things that people told me we couldn't do at Kali. It's let's just try, and that's been like theme sentence. [00:02:30] So I worked that and through some changes in life, I went to work or another aerospace company and didn't love it, so I was down in the Southern California area, working there. And then I moved back up to Northern California where I was born and raised. And I was in R and D at this satellite company and it just wasn't everything I wanted. [00:02:49] And lo and behold, there's this ad for the big red S in the paper. And so I put on my suit and went to my interview. Nobody's wearing a suit, got called back for a second interview and go, what do I wear when I knew I wore the suit? Yeah. So I guess it worked, they offered me a job as the Pumps and locks, designer, something like that. [00:03:09]And I was so happy to take my 25% pay cut to be in the bike industry. And there was, and then on my first day they said, Hey, you know that job, we offered you the helmet guy quit. And would you rather that job on the helmets over locks? Hell yeah. But the ironic thing was they, at that time, specialized was still assembling the helmets at, on a site and. [00:03:32] We tested our helmets and they said, there's the test lab. There's 10,000 helmets sitting over there that can't be shipped. So you say they're tested and Don, w oh, and by the way that the helmet technician quit at the same time. And so I walked into this test lab with this equipment I never seen in my life and go, okay, what did we do here? [00:03:50] And fortunately somebody who's become a good friend and who I trust in testing. Dr. Terry Smith came and trained me how to run the equipment. The best thing I did was I tested all the helmets at specialized for the next year. I didn't hire another technician. So getting that lab experience and seeing how these helmets broke personally, not just people come and say, Hey, look at this, here's your, reading reports and stuff it's was a great launching point for [00:04:17] me. [00:04:18] Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine just having your hands on that many. Tests to see how these helmets are performing just was like training by fire. [00:04:27]I tell people frequently that I'm a mediocre engineer. I'm really a better technician. I just somehow wiggled my way to get my degree, but mostly I just love being in the shop. [00:04:36] If you saw my office next to me as a drill press on the other side of the bandsaw, just being out there with my hands is the way [00:04:44] Craig Dalton: [00:04:44] I work. And did you have a background at cycling when you were in the aerospace industry? [00:04:48] Brad Waldron: [00:04:48] I had started cycling with some friends and just, around the LA area. [00:04:52] And if, I lived in first and Palmdale. When I first moved into Palmdale, I walked into a bike shop and this long hair blonde guy walks up and says, can I help you? And I said I'm new to the area. Can tell me where some trails are. And he's I'll pick you up Saturday morning at nine, it turned out it was insane. [00:05:10] Wayne crows Dale. So my first ride was insane, Wayne, and he there's a long story on board with it all, but he basically rode a wheelie up the fire road next to me, up and up. And, but we had a, the time rode with Wayne A. Little bit and then, got into riding there. And then the transfer down further. [00:05:29] Into the depths of LA, where you have to drive an hour just to get to the dirt. lot of people around me were riding and that's where I really got started riding was during that. [00:05:39] Craig Dalton: [00:05:39] Yeah. Right on. And you brought that to specialize and obviously specialized has a big riding culture down there in Morgan hill. [00:05:45] Brad Waldron: [00:05:45] Yep. Yeah. We're actually about 500 meters from them. Our building is they actually have to pass us to get to their building. And so we painted big ass Cali letters all over the building. Just to annoy him. [00:05:58]Craig Dalton: [00:05:58] So then at some point you decided I'm going to jump off and do this on my own. What, was there a particular market opportunity that you saw? [00:06:05] Something that you felt wasn't being done at the bigger companies? [00:06:08] Brad Waldron: [00:06:08] No, not yet. That's not really where it happened. At the time when I was in special ed, so I had moved on from helmets and eventually became the head of engineering that specialized for everything for bikes. Mostly. What I concentrated on was the carbon fiber projects. [00:06:22]The the, I worked on the tarmac and Robi mostly on the layups and things like that. Other guys who had much better frame experience than I did you know, the geometry? So I would go the factories and work with the carbon layups and things like that. And we would make it and break it. I still have, I have tarmac frame, number two, doesn't look, anything like what went to production. [00:06:43]It had a split top tube who knew that was UCI illegal, but so my re people see it all the time. It doesn't say special. I didn't say anything on it. So it's got carbon, top tube and chains and seats tubes, and and then the underbody is aluminum. So the idea was it was going to be nice, crisp, feel of the aluminum, but where your body touches, you're going to have that forgiving carbon fiber Conceptually feel. [00:07:09] And so I still have that bike when people see me out on it I'm not a big roadie. I don't ride a lot on the road, but they're like, what the hell is that? Because it's totally unrecognizable, but it's pretty cool. So I actually left specialized primarily because they were going through some transitions at the time they had wanted to transfer a lot of the engineering to Taiwan. [00:07:32] And I wasn't interested in that job. I had my first kid, I didn't want to travel, did not want to travel at all. And so I actually resigned from the position. It was a great experience. It took me nine months to leave. Because I didn't have another job. I hired my replacement. I finished those two bikes and then just started consulting a little bit. [00:07:52] So I consulted. A little bit with true beta worked on their first carbon bars. With Jared Smith, they're headed for engineering their first carbon cranks, things like that. And it bounced around a little bit. Then somebody came to me and said, we need a carbon fiber factory in China to feed these other factories. [00:08:12] And I just quit specialized cause I didn't want to travel. And they came to me and said, Hey, can you help us start the Stackery? And I'm like, how many times a year will I have to come? Then they were four times. I'm like four, okay. Talking to a non traveler. Now I said, I can come for four times a year. I spent no less than 150 days a year for the next seven years. [00:08:33]I just couldn't let it go, try to get the thing up and running and working the way. And we made things like skid plates and pipe bards. KTM was one of our biggest customers. But one of our customers was a helping it factory. So they came to us to make a motorcycle helmet shell, and they, we looked at this thing and we made the shell, we sent it over. [00:08:52]And they knew I also had some testing background. They were showing me these test results. And I was seeing some things that I didn't like. Basically I was seeing a double spike in G-Force and what that meant to me, it was inside your school or your brains just slapping around. Cause you're seeing a double impact. [00:09:10]That was happening because as the impact hits the outer shell was so stiff that if you forced a spike up, then as the shell breaks down, they start to fall. Then you hit the foam and they spike up again. I'm like okay, what's doing, that is the gap between your foam and my shell. [00:09:27]Let's get this thing tighter. Arrive, for example, really prides themselves on the fact that they designed their foam and shell to fit so well. Not everybody spends that much time on it. Then I had this really, according to them, stupid idea. He said, why aren't you in molding these like the bike helmet? [00:09:43] And they're like, that's impossible. It's a processing problem. You'll never make it work. And that's where that let's just try it thing came in. So we went in and we tried it. It took a couple of years to finally get it to work, but we started in molding motorcycle helmet. So now you're eliminating that gap between the farm and shop. [00:10:03] Then on top of it, you start to learn, oh, I don't need that much shell. I can thin the shell down because I've got the phone, backing it up. And by the way, I don't even have to have as high of DPS density. I can lower that too. So now I'm finding out that when I have the impact, instead of having that double spike and G-forces, I've got this nice smooth curve that spreads the load much more efficiently, then I got less shell. [00:10:29] I got lighter foam. I got a much lighter helmet. And I always liked to tell people I never start a project with a weight goal. I think that's not a good way to start a project that, that compromises safety in my opinion. But that process was helping us make a much lighter helmet, which in the end is simple physics force equals mass times acceleration, reduce the mass. [00:10:51] You're going to reduce the force. So we started, Perfecting this process showing these results around, tried to sell the patent. I did not. I was not looking to start my own company. That being a CEO, being in sales and marketing, not my favorite thing. We had a few people who were really close to buying it and then backed off. [00:11:11] And then somebody who somebody came along a golden investor, essentially. Came along and said, you got to do this and I'll back you. And so I've got one silent investor in his company has been nothing but amazing. Always allowing me to make safety decisions first over simply. What are your sales today? [00:11:30]Craig Dalton: [00:11:30] You mentioned that's amazing. You mentioned that you started with that motorcycle helmets technology did Cali launch where the motorcycle [00:11:39]Brad Waldron: [00:11:39] we did and nobody cared. Literally we, we went to the Interbike of Moda, which was Indianapolis. There was in Indianapolis motor sports show and we got our booth and I'm standing there my first day. [00:11:52] And you could hear the yarn from the industry. Nobody cared, had the cutouts, you could see. So the second day I'm like, I spent all of my money to get here. I stood in the aisle and made people pick up the helmet. Cause it was significantly lighter. Then what people were used to, and, know, you get the response, like that's it's okay. [00:12:09] But I guess just put it in your hands and if you don't want to talk to me, move on and then you put it in their hands and go, what is this? And then through that, the rest of the next few days, I only had one guy actually put it in my hand and walk on. Everybody else said, all right, what's going on? [00:12:22] And then we would explain what was happening with the in molding process and why we could do what we could do and, and show the results of the [00:12:30] Craig Dalton: [00:12:30] testing. Was it always in the back of your head to move into the cycling market? [00:12:35]Brad Waldron: [00:12:35] I was more of a cyclist than I was Moto. When I started doing good, if I get involved with something, I want to get into the sport. [00:12:41] So when we started making skid plates and pipe guards, I went and bought motorcycles, started riding dirt bikes. Now I ride a Ducati and in a fixer and and but cycling was definitely more my heart. But it, so it wasn't that I was necessarily looking to do that, but we had found a way to build full shell helmets that I believe in, I drank my own Kool-Aid that when you put that on your head using that technology, you were putting on a safer product on your head. [00:13:11] So the next thing of course was to do a full face download on it. So we did that and immediately the bike industry was. More welcoming. Yeah. The motor industry is great, but it's complex. It's the distributors have all had their own helmet brands. So in our industry, we've got the different distributors BTI, K Chaz QBP, all these different guys. [00:13:34] They don't have their own brands. When you start talking about Modo, they all have their own Hammad brands. If you think. The answer for example, is open owned by a company called Rocky. There's just the complexity of getting past the house brands where, when you were finding people were interested in our conversations. [00:13:51]We'd go to Interbike and people wanted to talk to us. They wanted to hear about what we had and yeah, and that's where we really started taking it off is when we were having these one-on-one conversations, it wasn't through any advertising. We did it. Wasn't through. The talk, it was meeting people and just showing them what we did and answering questions. [00:14:10]And that philosophy is still super important to us today. You call Kelly today. You better get somebody on the phone, somebody better to answer the phone. Cause that's our, we want to talk to people and respond. And that's an important part of who we are. So [00:14:24] Craig Dalton: [00:14:24] is it safe to say that the sort of signals the bike industry was giving you around the full face helmet suggested, Hey. [00:14:30] We need to lean into this and create a range of helmets for cyclists. [00:14:34]Brad Waldron: [00:14:34] Yeah. It came into, when you started talking to shops and what their needs are it's one thing to walk in with one helmet, it, when you're going up against, but let's be honest, you're going up against track, specialized, giant Cannondale, Scott, these guys all have, all their products behind them. [00:14:52]And they all have helmets and there's incentives to bring in those helmets. You get a discount if you bring that in. Then the only, other, not the only, but the other big boys would in are, bell Jiro who do have a complete range, that doesn't leave a lot of room for a lot of other people. [00:15:04] So expanding your range and it's something that makes sense for a shop carry. I still love bike shops. I still love walking in and smell the rubber. And still today Over 90% of our sales are still two independent bike dealers. Our, the amount that sold online is small. And that's a whole nother, probably podcast to talk about how that continues. [00:15:29] But our main focus is still to, to maintain those relationships with those independent bike shops. [00:15:35] Craig Dalton: [00:15:35] Interesting. So when you develop that range and I guess we can slip into the. More road and gravel helmets that you guys have been releasing over the few years. What features were you leaning into at that point? [00:15:46]You talked about how originally the differentiator turned out to be the weight and the technology around protecting the head and maybe a different way than had been done. Where did that go to for the road slash gravel helmets? [00:15:59] Brad Waldron: [00:15:59] Sure. Really what's what continues to drive us as technology. [00:16:02] We're always looking for stuff that can help us make. The next step. And we started with a technology from a guy from Australia called conehead, where you got the geometric shapes inside these helmets and they crushed the, but to get more specific to answering your question, some of the difficulties, when you start talking about road, helmets is ventilation is so important, right? [00:16:24] So getting big vents, getting air flow through. When you do that, you have to really crank up the density of the foam to get the enough to stop the impact according to the standards. When you do that let me put it another way to start with this. I believe all helmets are too hard. [00:16:41] We're hurting people by the foam densities. We need to get the foam densities down. It's based on how the interpretation of the standards are, which are built to take the worst of the worst crashes. We're not doing enough to deal with them. Where the majority of crashes are, which are according to a study at the Imperial college of London. [00:16:59]80% of all bicycle accidents are below 160. G's, yet all I got to do to pass a test and sell you a helmet is go to the test lab and make sure it doesn't go over 300 GS. Now 300 GS is close to death. Alrighty. How do we address both of those big hits? But also the majority of those hits. [00:17:21] And so that's where, that's where a lot of my time gets focused on. It's not specifically for a genre of helmet per se, but how do we lower the density of the foam? How do we put stuff next to your head? That's softer. How do we start reducing impact at zero G's? So now I jumped back to the question of how do we deal with the gravel helmets? [00:17:45]Again, now I'm battling. I got to put a lot of foam in a small space, which means I got to Jack up the densities. What's cool. Even though a lot of people don't know about Kali, we're known within the industry and the other helmet companies know each other. But getting a reputation is it somebody who wants to try technology? [00:18:03] We get people coming to us all the time saying, Hey, you want to try this? And my answer is always the same. If it works right, you bet. I'm going to try it. W we were approached initially by Don Morgan, that physicist from Australia with the corn head later, we were approached with a from a chemical company out of Italy that had this carbon nano to acrylic based material that they were trying to pitch as a multi impact material. [00:18:27]It didn't work as multi impact, but it works. So now I can bind the code ed and EPS. And I'm finding I'm able to lower the density in the helmet that we're probably going to talk about, which is the grit. And so much that I was shocked at the first round of testing that I was expecting the typical results where I got to put it way too hard, the higher density, if I'm in a place that I don't really want to put it, but by putting the right materials in the right combinations I'm getting better results then than I expected. [00:19:03]Craig Dalton: [00:19:03] And so did that sort of Eureka moment happened early in the process and allow you then to pursue different elements of the design? [00:19:11]Brad Waldron: [00:19:11] It wish she was at easy. We actually took, originally took that structure that I talked about and put it in an Aero helmet. And the other way I can go with this stuff is I can. [00:19:24] If you look at our Tada helmet, it's an Aero helmet. I think I've sold a hundred of them, so I don't think you've seen it. Probably. I think we have it on the Danish road team. So unless you've been there Copenhagen lately, I'm not sure you've seen this helmet, but if you actually look at it and you look at cross-section of it, it's one of the finished how much you've ever seen. [00:19:43]Which was interesting. For me as an engineer, that I could actually get this thing to work and pass the test. But because passing the test is not my goal. My goal is saving lives. Maybe cheeky about that, but it really is what we give a shit about. We want people to get on their bikes and ride more. [00:20:04]I want to get on my bike and ride more. I've been helicoptered off the hill before we want that to happen, but when I went back to more. Realistic thicknesses and I could drive those foam densities down. Now I'm getting the results I want and not only on linear impacts, but rotational impacts and I'll skip back. [00:20:24] We're doing a lot of testing and outside labs. So we took some of our helmets. We put in MIPS in it. We put in what we call Rian, which is our low density layer. That's Material developed by a professor out of London. We put in like five different anti-rotation systems and we tested them against each other. [00:20:42] And they all do an interesting job. A little better here, a little better there. Sometimes this system works, sometimes this is the work better. What consistently worked better was we threw in a. Helmet with extremely low density in it. It's actually a homophobic. We sell in Europe, but can't sell here because the density is too low and that helmet consistently performed way better in rotational forces. [00:21:06] So all these systems that we put in help, but what really matters is put softer shit next to your head. Let's get these things to be more crushing and more the pillow's a little bit overrated, but just get that stuff that will crush next to your head. So when I'm talking about using the nano material in the Coneheads structures, I'm basically talking about a way in a much smaller area to get the foam density down where it's really making a difference for you during that crash. [00:21:37] Craig Dalton: [00:21:37] Is that right? A way to articulate upon impact how a Cali helmet performs versus kind of maybe a major brand helmet in terms of how it crushes how the materials work? [00:21:48] Brad Waldron: [00:21:48] Sure. I don't know how to say it. It's that I can say, I'll go continue to go back to that foam density thing. Most people don't put as much energy as we do in trying to find how to get to that lower density. [00:22:01] So basically if the density is too hard, that thing you're going to smack and it's going to crack cracking is fine and a big hit on the helmet cause that's releasing energy. But what I really want is I want it to crush. And I wanted to crush equally. And then by having those, like those geometric shapes in that center, it's actually, if you look at it, it looks like an Oreo because the nanomaterials white, you've got the black DPS around it. [00:22:25] And as that outer side crushes, then you hit another material that's meant to crush and send the energy laterally away from your head in those geometric structures. Rather than a smack and a crack, you're just seeing a progressive crack with multiple different materials there to help dissipate that energy. [00:22:44] Craig Dalton: [00:22:44] Yeah. That resonates with me. And it's, it's hard to visualize in a conversation at times for the listener potentially. But if you think about that, just the, I think the pillow analogy works for me where it's just progressively becoming more and more supportive as my head is unfortunately impacting the ground or dirt, wherever I'm riding. [00:23:01]Brad Waldron: [00:23:01] And, a lot of your impacts are small. And so you don't even get into the part, but it has to really, get harder and harder to stop that big hit. And that's my kind of, my complaint with the way that our testing is that, we're only testing for those big hits. [00:23:16]When we have, a lot of hits, we're actually hurting people by doing it the way we're doing it. So w we just got to look at it from all aspects, rather than just. Th there's one test that we do in the test lab. Yeah. [00:23:27] Craig Dalton: [00:23:27] I managed to ring my own bell, this pandemic on a gravel ride. So I've it's resonating with me that having a look, it wasn't a super devastating crash, but I had one of those impacts that I definitely rung my bell. [00:23:41] Definitely like maybe it was not concussed, but needed to be escorted home by a friend. [00:23:47] Brad Waldron: [00:23:47] Some level of brain trauma happened there. It might've been like, but something happened. Yeah. It happens at a surprisingly low amount of G-forces and that's why I keep talking about, we need to start managing those impacts from all levels, not just from the highest levels. [00:24:06] Craig Dalton: [00:24:06] Yeah. And you said that you said before, like the testing is just very. With the tests, one thing, and it's easy to design around that one thing without really thinking about the athlete and the impacts. [00:24:17] Brad Waldron: [00:24:17] Yeah. Our tests are based on tests that were done in, in, in 1973 where we dropped cadavers on their heads and measured for skull fracture. [00:24:27] Cause we didn't know enough to measure the brain trauma. And at that time we terminate that it took 300, G's a helmet. It head took 300 GS to crack the school. So that became. Where that 300 GS came from it's cracking your skull, and that was fine at the time, but we've moved on. We have better technology and people are trying, people are trying to make changes. [00:24:46]People ask me about MIPS and I always say, I respect them. What Dr. Haller did was taught us about rotational forces. And we've learned a lot about those rotational forces. I happened to have a different philosophy on how to manage those. Then what MIPS does, because I want to start with something softer next year, head, they use a slip plane thing that is between your head and the EPS that needs. [00:25:12] Yeah, I was going to [00:25:12] Craig Dalton: [00:25:12] say, I think a number of listeners might be familiar with MIPS as a technology because it has been pretty heavily marketed and it's that little plastic frame inside the helmet that is designed to move. Yeah. [00:25:23] Brad Waldron: [00:25:23] Yep. Yes. And in my test it works. It's a technology that, that works. [00:25:28]Again, I, it, I think there's another way to attack it and we do by using something that crushes more immediately and then it gets off the rotation, but I'll even go beyond that. Forget my systems, my low density layers versus MIPS versus somebody else's. What I found in my tests at the university of Strasburg and that dynamic research and other labs that we use our own labs is the lower you can make the foam, the lower density. [00:25:56] You can make the foam the better it performs in rotation as well. So that salt. What's off your shit next to your head [00:26:05] Craig Dalton: [00:26:05] keeps coming back to that, Brad, doesn't it [00:26:07] Brad Waldron: [00:26:07] really what it comes down to, it's not as simple is that right? Otherwise we just put something, we go use those old ProTech helmets that just, had the soft stuff in it. [00:26:14]Those bottom out and they do bottom out at a low number you're in trouble. So we have to, we're trying to manage, all the impacts and that's, what's hard. I had somebody at MIPS. Tell me once. Those are two different helmets and I'm like, You guys invented the anti-rotation thing. [00:26:29] We're smarter than that. We can do this, just different philosophies. Yeah. So [00:26:33] Craig Dalton: [00:26:33] all this culminated recently in the grit helmet, coming to market, is there anything you want to mention about that helmet that we haven't covered? [00:26:40]Brad Waldron: [00:26:40] Yeah. The grit was it, there's pressure that pressure. [00:26:45] There's a lot of requests from our distributors, especially in Europe that. So look at the road side of things. I'm I'm a dirt guy through and through. And we the grit got the name. We actually started, the name was called the nickname was the dirty road. And we saw that as something that was much more Cali. [00:27:04] Then if we said, oh, we're going to go try and put a helmet on it on a tour de France rider. We got a couple of helmets that are in that category that they the UNO and the grit, the UNO is like a hundred dollar helmet. It's nice. It was actually designed by Hildegard Mueller. [00:27:20] Hilgard was the head of design for JIRA for, he was a Gero for 20 years. I don't know how long he was head of design, but. And then, and he freelances now and he helped us with that design. Because as you know is primarily amount biker. And when the lights, gravity a lot our line had led, leaned that way for a long time. [00:27:38] And then the grit was designed by Alan O Kimora who I've worked with quite a bit. And he's former bell specialized worked on several specialized road helmets. But we really worked on these thinking more towards the gravel market than the road market, because it fit us and who we are more than you're saying, like I said, we're going to, we're going to go sponsor. [00:28:03] I was like saying sky because they're dead and they're not a team anymore, but it's just, something like that and more to, to what we are. Yep. [00:28:11] Craig Dalton: [00:28:11] And you certainly have some great athletes riding the helmets on the gravel scene, former guest and friend of the pod. Amanda Nauman is a great friend of Cali's. [00:28:21] Brad Waldron: [00:28:21] She's just super chill and rides like a monster. You know what she did at the XL. Just shows that and, just a great attitude and somebody that's fun to just watch and see her progress. [00:28:33] Craig Dalton: [00:28:33] Yeah. Yeah. It was a great racing debut for the helmet. For sure. [00:28:37]Brad Waldron: [00:28:37] Appreciate that. [00:28:39] Yeah. [00:28:39] Craig Dalton: [00:28:39] Cool. Brett, I appreciate the overview. I hope the listener got a bit out of this in terms of the type of helmet tech that they should be looking at. I think I'm probably guilty of not looking at my helmet enough and saying, Hey, it's time for a new one time to replace it. So this is a good reminder, this conversation to to think about what's hanging in the garage. [00:28:58]Brad Waldron: [00:28:58] Yeah. Do you want to keep that thing for us, especially if you're using it a lot. And it's not saying that it's not always has to be a Cali there's other helmets, there's other people making helmets they're out there like me that. Give a shit that want people to do well. [00:29:11]We have our philosophy and like I said earlier, I drink my Kool-Aid. I think what we're doing is right on and on target. But yeah, make sure that you're, taking a look at what you're putting on your [00:29:19] Craig Dalton: [00:29:19] head. Sure. And I'll make sure that the listener knows how to find you. [00:29:23]Brad Waldron: [00:29:23] I appreciate that. [00:29:24]Craig Dalton: [00:29:24] So that's it for this week's edition of the gravel ride podcast. I hope you learned a lot more about helmets than you did prior to listening. I know I did. [00:29:33]It's an area. I probably should be thinking a little bit more about given the state of my current helmet. [00:29:38]Thank you for spending a little bit of your week with me this week. If you're interested in giving us any feedback or joining our community, please visit the ridership it's www.theridership.com. Until next time. Here's to finding some dirt under your wheels
About AviadAviad Mor is the Co-Founder & CTO at Lumigo. Lumigo’s SaaS platform helps companies monitor and troubleshoot serverless applications while providing actionable insights that prevent business disruptions. Aviad has over a decade of experience in technology leadership, heading the development of core products in Check Point from inception to wide adoption.Links:Lumigo: https://lumigo.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn’t translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that’s not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you’ve built anything from serverless, you know that if there’s one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it’s that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications.It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You’ve created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I periodically talk about how I bolt together a whole bunch of different serverless tools in horrifying ways to write my newsletter every week. At last count, I was up to something like four API Gateways, twenty-nine Lambda functions, and counting. How do I figure out if something’s broken in there? Well, honestly, I just keep clicking the button until it works, which is a depressingly honest story.Now, that doesn’t work for everyone. Today’s promoted episode is brought to us by Lumigo. And my guest today is Aviad Mor, their CTO, and co-founder. Aviad, thanks for taking the time to suffer my slings and arrows.Aviad: Thank you, Corey. I’m very glad to be here today.Corey: So, let’s begin at, I guess, the very easy, high-level question: what is Lumigo and is ‘loom-ago’ an accepted alternate pronunciation?Aviad: [laugh]. So, Lumigo is a monitoring and debugging platform for serverless environments. And yes, you can call it whatever you want as long as it’s Lu-mi-go. What we do is we integrate with the customer’s AWS account, we do a very quick connection to its Lambdas, and then we’re able to show him exactly what’s going on in his system: what’s going well, what’s going wrong, and how we can fix it.Corey: So, let’s make sure that we hit a few points here at the beginning. It is AWS specific at this time?Aviad: Yes, it is. We’re not officially exclusive with AWS, but right now we see the most interesting serverless environments in AWS, so it’s a pretty easy call. But we are keeping our eye open to, you know, Google, Microsoft, even Oracle.Corey: Oh, Oracle Cloud has some phenomenally interesting serverless stories that I don’t think the world is paying enough attention to yet. But one of these days, I’m hoping that that’s going to change just because they have so much savvy locked up in that platform.Aviad: Right. They do have serverless functions. Yeah, so.Corey: They acquired the iron.io folks a while back, and those people were way ahead of Lambda at the time.Aviad: Right, right. So, we’re waiting for the big breakout of serverless in Oracle, and then we’ll build the best monitoring solution for them.Corey: So, something else, I think, that you have successfully navigated as far as, I guess, the traps that various observability tooling falls into, you also talk on your site about monitoring AWS Lambda as the center around which everything winds up being captured. You also, of course, integrate with the things that tied directly into it, such as API Gateway—or ‘opi-gateway,’ as I’m sure they mispronounce it at AWS—but that’s sort of where you stop. You don’t also show all of the container workloads that folks are running, and, “Oh, hey. While we have access to your API, here’s a whole story about ECS, and RDS, and all the rest.” And eventually, it feels like everything, in the fullness of time, tries to become Datadog version two.And that always drove me nuts because I want something that’s going to talk to me specifically about what it is that I’m looking at in a serverless application context, not trying to be all things to all people at once. Is that a fair assessment of the product strategy you folks have pursued?Aviad: Right. So, we’re very focused on serverless. We think there’s a lot of interesting things that we can do there, and we’re actually seeing more and more use cases of serverless. And it is important to say that when we say serverless, it’s very clear what is serverless. So Lambda, of course, and API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, and so on.There’s a lot of services in data ecosystem, and seeing them all being tied together in a serverless cloud application, we’re able to do all of that to monitor it; not only monitor it at the high level, but also get into the details and show you things which are very specific because this is what we do all day, and sometimes all night. And then there are those boundaries of where do we go beyond serverless. So, there are some hybrid environments out there. And when I say ‘hybrid,’ the easy hybrid, which is you have two different applications which just happen to be on the same AWS account; one of them is completely serverless, and then the other one is EC2. So, that’s kind of hybrid.But the more interesting hybrid is those applications which start with an API Gateway in the Lambda, and then are directly connected to something else, which is maybe Fargate, ECS, EKS, and so on. So, we are very much focused on serverless, but we are getting also a lot of requests from our customers, “So, show us, also, the other parts.” We’re starting to look at that, but we’re not losing our focus. Our focus is still very much on the serverless while allowing you to tie together if you do have some other aspects in your environment to see them all together.Corey: So, you’ve done a number of things that I would consider best in class as you’ve gone through this. First and foremost, let’s begin with the easy stuff. It doesn’t appear that your dashboard, your tooling itself, is purely serverless itself. I can tell this because when I click around in your site, the site loads super quickly. It’s not waiting for cold starts or waiting for the latency inherent to the Lambda.It’s clear that you have not gone so far down the path of being, I guess, religiously correct around everything must be serverless all the times in favor of improving customer experience. That’s something that I’ve seen a number of different vendors fall into the trap of, of, “Why is the dashboard so slow to load?” “Ah, because everything is itself a Lambda function.” Is that accurate, or if you just found a way to improve Lambda [laugh] function performance in an ungodly way?Aviad: [laugh]. We are serverless—we call ourselves serverless first, but the customer is always—he’s really the first. So, if there’s a place where serverless is not the best solution, we’re going to use whatever is the best solution. But the truth is, we’re, I’d say, something like 99% serverless. And specifically, anything which is dashboard-facing customer-facing, that’s actually completely serverless.So, we did have to put in a lot of work, but also, I have to say that AWS went a very long way, like, in the last two years, allowing us to give much better latencies in different parts of the dashboard. So, all of that is serverless, and it goes together with the new features of Lambdas, and API Gateways, and a lot of small things we had to do in order to provide the best experience to the customer.Corey: The next thing that I think was interesting, as far as, I guess, capturing the way in which people use these things. One of the earliest problems I had, in the early days of these, I guess, new breed of serverless tools was getting everything instrumented correctly. It felt like it took in some cases more time to get the observability pieces working than it did to write the thing in the first place. So, you’re integrating out of the gate with a lot of the right things as best I can tell. Your website advertises that you integrate with the Serverless Framework, you integrate with a bunch of other [processes 00:07:52] as well. Chalice, which I haven’t seen used in anger too much, but okay; Terraform, which everyone’s using; Stackery, et cetera. Is AWS’s SAM on the list as well?Aviad: Yes, it actually is. And once we started seeing more and more users using SAM, we had to provide a way to allow them to easily do the integration. Because one of the things that we learned is, no, our users are developers and, just like you said, they don’t want to spend time on anything, which is not like doing the thing that they want to do. Especially in serverless, because the whole serverless premise is work on what you do best, and don’t spend time on everything else. So, we actually spend a lot of time ourselves in order to make the integrations as easy as possible, as quickly as possible, and that also means that working with a lot of different tools to fit all the different environments our users are using out there.Corey: It looks like you’re doing this through the application—judiciously—of a bunch of custom layers. In other words, whatever you wind up using winds up being built as an underpinning of the existing Lambda functions, so it’s super easy to wind up grabbing the necessary dependencies for anything that you folks support without having to go back and refactor existing applications. Is that directionally correct?Aviad: Right. That’s correct. We’re using layers in order to, on one hand, do this deep integration we do with the Lambda, allowing us to do different instrumentations, collecting the data that’s being passed into the Lambda, being passed out of the Lambda, on one hand. But on the other hand, so the developer doesn’t have to make any code changes, and he can do whatever changes he wants to do. Doesn’t have to think about Lumigo at any point, and serverless layer does everything for him automatically.Corey: How do you handle support of the Lambda@Edge functions, which seem an awful lot like regular Lambda functions, except they’re worse in nearly every single way, every time I’ve tried to use them? In fact, in my experience, the best practice has been to immediately rip out Lambda@Edge and replace it with something else. Recently, it was formally disclosed that they only ran in a subset of 13 regional cache locations, and they still took a full CloudFront distribution update cycle every time you did a deployment, which dramatically slowed everything down for deploying it; they were massively expensive to run at significant scale, and they would log to whatever region was closest so it was a constant game of whack a mole to figure out what was going on. But, you know, other than that, they were great. How do you approach those?Aviad: Lambda@Edge are not very easy to use, and they’re, like, let’s say they’re full of surprises [laugh] because not everything they do is exactly what you find in the documentation. But again, since our users are using them, we had to make sure that we give them proper support. And giving them the proper support—other than running and collecting the data—is things that you mentioned, like the fact that it will log to the specific region it’s running in, so you have to go and collect all this data from different places, and you don’t really know exactly where it’s going to run. So, the main thing here is just to make things easy. It’s a bit of a mess when you’re looking at it directly, and taking all the information, putting it in one place so you as a user can just go ahead and read it and you don’t care where it’s running and what it’s doing, that was the main challenge which we worked on and added to the product.Corey: So, across the board, it seems like you folks have been evolving in lockstep with the underlying platform itself. Have you had time to evaluate their new CloudFront Functions, I believe is what they’re calling it. Or is it CloudFront Workers? I can never quite keep it straight; between all the different providers, all the words start to sound alike. But the thing that only runs for a millisecond or two, only in JavaScript, only in the actual all the CloudFront edge locations, et cetera, et cetera. Rather than fixing Lambda@Edge, they decided to roll something completely different out, and I haven’t looked at anything approaching the observability story yet because I’m still too angry about it.Aviad: [laugh]. Right. So, there’s a lot of things coming out, and we’re also very close partners with AWS, so in many cases, we’re actually beta users of new services or new functionality in Lambda. And one of the hardest parts is—and then we cannot spend all our time checking everything new. So, this is one of the things which is still in the to-do list; we’re going to check it very close, in a very close time.I think it’s interesting to see how we can actually use it and is it as quickly as they say. What they say usually works; we’ll see if it works already today, or do we have to wait a little bit until it works exactly like they said. But no, that’s one of the things that are on my to-do list. I’m really looking forward to checking it out.Corey: So, it looks like once I set this up and it starts monitoring my account—or observing my account. I know I know, observability is just hipster monitoring, but no one agrees with me on that, so I’m going to keep rolling with it anyway just to irritate people—it looks like I can effectively more-or-less click a button, and suddenly, you will roll out an underlying Lambda layer to all of my existing Lambda functions. How does that get maintained whenever I wind up, for example, doing a new deployment with the serverless framework or something like it that isn’t aware of that underlying layer, so it—presumably—would revert that layer itself in the definition? Or am I misunderstanding how that works?Aviad: No, no. You’re actually getting it right. So, unless you, for example, are using a serverless plugin, so this is an integral part of your deployment, one of the things that we need to do is to automatically identify that a deployment is happening so we can automatically update the Lambda layer to be the right one, so you won’t miss anything. And this deep integration, which is happening without the user having to know anything about it, this is, I think, one of the most important parts because in serverless, as you know, you have so many components, and very easily you can reach, you know, hundreds of Lambdas, which are things that we’re seeing. So, if a user has to take care and maintain something across a hundred Lambdas or more, you can be sure that it won’t be maintained because he has, like, something much more important to do.So, behind the scenes, immediately as the deployment is happening, we can recognize that it’s happening, and then update the layer that’s required. And by the way, now the layers have a new part called extensions, which allow us and everybody else to do a lot more with those layers, basically allowing the code to run in parallel to the Lambda. So, this is a new thing that AWS has started to roll out, and we think will allow us to give even better experience to our users.Corey: Let’s have a look across the, I guess, the ecosystem of have different approaches to this stuff. One thing that has always annoyed me about a whole raft of observability and monitoring tools is they wind up charging me whatever it is they charge me; it’s generally fine—and I don’t really have a problem with that. You know, in advance going in what things are going to cost you. Incidentally, what is your pricing model?Aviad: So, our pricing model is according to the number of invocations you have. So, we have basically two models which we’re using right now, and each one can decide what he wants better. So, if you want to know in advance exactly how much you’re going to pay, you can go with the tiered model meaning, I want to pay for, let’s say, a million invocations each month, and then you’re sure that you’re paying exactly for what you have a budget for. And it’s always related to how much your AWS account is working, so similar to how much you’re paying for your Lambdas. And then there’s another way, which is dynamic pricing, which is very similar to serverless payment.So, it’s really according to the number of invocations you have; you don’t need to decide in advance, and at the end of each month, according to the number of invocations you have, you get the bill. And that way it’s not based on the invocation in general; it’s exactly according to the number of invocations.Corey: And let’s be clear, if I wind up exceeding the number of invocations under my plan, it just stops tracing and observing these things, it doesn’t break my app.Aviad: Yeah, right. [laugh].Corey: Always good to triple-check those things. It seems like that might hurt.Aviad: That’s very important. You’re totally correct. And, yeah, we never do anything bad to your Lambdas. That’s written on the top of our door: “Never hurt a Lambda.” And we make sure that nothing bad happens, we just stopped collecting data.And by the way, even as you pass your limit, we still collect the basic metrics so you can see what’s going on in your system. But you won’t be able to see the rich information, all the information that allowing you to do the debugging, or seeing the full traceability end-to-end of all the invocations and see how they’re connected to each other.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: So, the pricing makes perfect sense, and that is in line with what I would expect, but the thing that irritates me then is, “Great. I know what I’m going to be paying you folks on a monthly basis, and that’s fine.” And then I use the monitoring tool and it cost me over three times as much in AWS charges, both direct and indirect, where it’s, “Oh, now CloudWatch is going to suddenly be the largest component of my bill and data transfer for sending everything externally winds up spiking into the stratosphere.” What’s your experience been around that?Aviad: So, since we are collecting data and we are doing API calls, it will affect your AWS bill. But because we don’t want to irritate you, or anybody else, we are putting a lot of focus to see that we’re doing the absolute minimal possible effect on your system. So, for example, as we’re collecting data from your Lambda, we’re doing our best to add only milliseconds to the running time of your Lambda so you don’t end up paying a lot more for the runtime. Or for the API calls or data transfer, we have a lot of optimizations that we did, so the billing on your AWS account is really very, very small; it’s not something that you will notice. And sometimes when people do ask us, we go together with them into their account and show them exactly how their billing was affected by Lumigo so they’ll have assurance that nothing crazy is going on there.Corey: Which is I guess one of the fundamental problems of the underlying platform itself. I have a hard time blaming you for any of this stuff. This is the perpetual joyless story of getting to work with a variety of AWS services. It’s not something that I see that you folks have a good way around just on basis of how the underlying platform works.Aviad: Yeah. And then there are a lot of different prices for a lot of small things that you do, and you need to be able to collect it all in order to have the big picture of the effect. And yeah, we don’t have a silver bullet for it, but we can show exactly where we’re going, what we’re adding, to show how low it is.Corey: One of the things that I think is not well understood for folks who are not into the serverless ecosystem is just how these applications tend to look. In most organic environments, you’ll see a whole bunch of Lambda functions that are all tied together with basically spit and baling wire. They talk to each other, either directly on the back end—which is an anti-pattern in many respects, let’s not kid ourselves—or alternately, they’re approaching through a lens of, we’re going to now talk to each other through hardened REST APIs, which is generally preferred, but also a little finicky to get up and running. So, at some point, you have a request come in, and it winds up bouncing around through a whole bunch of different subsystems. Tracing, and a lot of the observability story around serverless is figuring out, all right, somewhere in that rat’s nest, it winds up failing.Where did it break? What was it that actually threw the exception? What was it that prevented something from working? Or alternately, adding latency: where is the bulk of the time serving that request being spent? And you would think that this is the sort of thing that AWS could handle itself.And they’ve tried with their X-Ray distributed tracing option, which more or less feels like a proof of concept demonstrating what not to do. And if you take a look from their application view, and all the rest, it is the best sales pitch I can possibly imagine for any of the serverless monitoring tools that I’ve seen because it is so badly articulated. You have to instrument all of your stuff by hand. There’s none of this, oh, I’ll look at it and figure out what it’s talking to and build an automated trace approach, the way that Lumigo does. And that’s always frustrated me because I shouldn’t have to turn every weird analysis into a murder mystery. Am I missing something obvious in how this could be done using native tools directly, or is it really as bad as I believe it is?Aviad: [laugh]. I won’t say it as bad as you’re saying it is. I think X-Ray is a great place to start with. So, if you have, like, just a few Lambdas; you’re starting to check out the serverless world, X-Ray can be good enough if you don’t want to start with a third-party tool right at the beginning. But then as it gets a little bit complex, it’s going to get hard, especially if you’re trying to do it yourself.That’s usually the wow part when people start using Lumigo when we show them a demo, is seeing how everything is tied together. So, once you see how everything is tied together: the whole system, which components are talking to each other, and how they’re affecting each other. And for example, if one of them goes down, does it mean that the whole system now is not working, or maybe, eh, wasn’t that important, and everything is working. I’ll fix it next week. But I think the most important part is actually what we call the transactions.So, as you said, there’s an API call at the very beginning with an API Gateway or AppSync, and then it can go through dozens of components. Some of them are not directly related, so it’s like, Lambda calling, putting something into a DynamoDB, which triggers a DynamoDB stream. And then another Lambda is being called, and so on, and so on. It’s crucial to be able to see how everything is connected, both very visually, so you can understand it. There’s only so much you can understand when looking at a list as a human being, right?You need to see it visually how everything is connected. But then after you understand how everything is connected in this specific transaction, if, for example, you have an issue in a specific invocation, you need to understand the story of that invocation. And maybe you’re looking at a Lambda which starts to throw an exception, and you didn’t change anything in its code today, yesterday, or the day before that, so take care of that exception, but the root cause is probably not in that Lambda, it’s probably upstream. So, you need to be able to understand exactly what was the chain of events, all the calls being made until that specific Lambda was called to see the data being passed, including the data that Lambda maybe passed to a third-party API—like Stripe or PayPal—and what it got in return. And only when you’re able to see all of that you’re able to solve an issue quickly, not a murder mystery like it might be. Time over time without having to think about how will I make sure that I make all the code changes in order to keep getting these transactions?Corey: So, taking a look at the somewhat crowded space—if I’m being perfectly honest with you—of the entirety of, let’s call it the serverless observability space—or ‘observerless,’ as I’m a big fan of calling it—what is it the differentiates Lumigo from a number of other offerings that people could wind up pulling out of the hat?Aviad: Right. So, that’s a great question. And every time somebody asks me, the first thing I can say is, the more I see people getting into this space, I think that that’s a great sign. Because that means there’s more serverless activity, there’s more companies doing serverless and it means that our serverless space is interesting. People see an opportunity there, and they want to try and solve the issues that we’re seeing there.And I think that there’s a few things: one of them is the serverless expertise. So, if you look at a lot of the big companies—like I’ll mention Datadog and New Relic—they’re doing a lot of great things, but in the end, in the serverless environment, there are very specific things which you need to know, have to do in order to be able to do that distributed tracing, the distributed tracing which allows you to correlate specific transactions together and then bring in those metrics which are relevant and bring in the logs which are relevant for a specific transaction. That’s a lot of hard work which we put in in order to be able to do the transactions with a distributed tracing in the best way possible, and then showing it to you in the simplest way possible. And today, I think that Lumigo does that in a very good way. And also, if we’re looking around at other players, which are not only the big ones, also players, which are doing more specifically serverless, I think that if we’re looking at companies which are very focused on serverless, and serverless is the thing that they do, you’ll still see that Lumigo is the one which is doing serverless the most, let’s call it.So, as serverless is expanding, we’re still not becoming generic—something that we mentioned before—and this allows us not only to do the best distributed tracing but also allow us to show you, out of the box, a lot of issues which might be hiding in your environment. So, it’s not only, “Okay, you have an exception here,” it’s also more specific things to serverless. Like for example, because it’s event-driven, so sometimes you’ll get duplicate events that Kinesis or SQL might send you over and over the same event. The fact that we can show you it automatically and put a spotlight on it can save you a lot of time in trying to understand why things are not working the way you think they should be working. And allowing us to scan your environment and show you misconfigurations which are specific to serverless, this is the kind of things that once you use Lumigo, you get automatically without having to do anything special and that can save you a lot of time.Corey: I think that’s a relatively astute position to take. I’m a big believer in getting the right tool for the right job. I don’t necessarily want the one single pane of glass to look at everything. I think that is something that is very often misunderstood. Yeah, I might be using three or four different clouds in different ways.I don’t need to see a roundup of all of them; I don’t necessarily care what the billing looks like on all of them; I don’t necessarily want to spend my time thinking about different aspects of these things juxtaposed to one another, and it’s a pain in the butt to have to sort through to find the thing I actually care about. So yeah, on some level, I definitely want there to be a specific tool. And let’s be clear, you have a terrific stack of things that you integrate with for alerting, for opening tickets, for remediation—or issues, as the case may be. Nomenclature is always a distraction. Don’t at me—but yeah, across the board, I see that you’re doing a lot of things right that if I were going to be entering the space, I would make a lot of those decisions very similarly. And then expect to hear it from the internet. You’ve been around for years now and are continuing to grow. What’s next for you, folks?Aviad: So, that’s a great question, which I asked myself every morning. I’ll actually take together the two things that you mentioned. One is how we’re focused on serverless, and the second is where do we want to grow from there? And when you do this great focus, you have to make sure that what you’re focusing on is big enough. So, as we’re growing, we’re very happy to see that the serverless is growing with us.We’re seeing more and more places using serverless. We see a lot more users, companies, developers going into serverless. And we see new types of users. So, it’s not only those bleeding-edge technologies that people want to use, and they are really trying to find out how they can use it. We’re seeing more and more places, for example, enterprises that had maybe one architect in the beginning that said, “Okay, I’m going to use serverless.”And now a year or two afterwards, they see that it’s working, and it saving them money. They’re able to build faster, and now it’s both spreading virally to other teams which are starting to use that, and also the initial project, which was started two years ago, is now growing and becoming bigger and more complex. And also, that team which was just starting with serverless two years ago now has maybe a second and third product. So, what we’re doing is we’re looking how we can give serverless better and better monitoring for the new services that are entering that field. And also, we’re very strong believers that developers today are doing much of that monitoring—or observability, you can choose whatever you want—and that means that it goes all the way into debugging.So, we think that doing those two together, bringing together the monitoring and debugging is a great opportunity for our users just to save them more time because it’s the same person who’s going to do both those things, and trying to keep being best of breed in serverless, and doing those two together, I think that’s going to be hard. And that’s exactly the challenge that we’re taking, and we want to see how we’re doing it to the best.Corey: And I think that that is probably the best way to approach it. If people want to learn more about what you’re up to, how you view these things, and ideally, kick the tires on Lumigo and see for themselves, where can they find you?Aviad: So, easiest thing you can do, just search for Lumigo in Google, you’ll get to lumigo.io. And from there, it’s very easy to try us out.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:31:24]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Aviad: Thank you, Corey. It was great fun and looking forward for the next time.Corey: Absolutely. Aviad Mor, co-founder and CTO at Lumigo. I’m Chief 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 hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a long rambling comment telling me how very wrong I am on the wonder that is Lambda@Edge.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
On this episode of The Built in Seattle Podcast, I talked with Kirby Winfield, Founding General Partner at Ascend (ascend.vc)For extras from this interview, subscribe to my weekly emailEpisode HighlightsHow his identity and ego got into an unhealthy state.How he hit reset on his mental and physical healthWhy founders should be able to ask for help and let their guard down.The power imbalance for founders pitching VCs.What matters after the pre-seed round.How a writing and marketing background has helped Kirby as an investor.The value of being willing to look stupid in public.How he picks companies and teams in the earliest stage.How the challenges & expectations when raising money change between rounds.Why you need vision and selling more widgets is never enough.Why it needs to be "cool" to angel invest in startups to support a hub.The time Kirby got confused with a drug trafficking conspiracy on Twitter.Guest BioKirby Winfield is a seasoned startup operator and investor, and is currently the Founding General Partner at Ascend.vc, a pre-seed stage venture fund investing in marketplace, e-commerce/DTC, and B2B software startups in the Pacific Northwest.Early in his career, Kirby was a founding team member and operating executive at back-to-back tech IPOs, with Go2Net (GNET) and Marchex (MCHX).He is also a two-time venture capital-backed CEO, with AdXpose (DFJ, Ignition) acquired by comScore (SCOR), and Dwellable (Maveron, VersionOne) acquired by HomeAway (AWAY).Kirby has invested in dozens of technology startups, and served as a Board Director of the real estate CRM platform Sharper Agent (sold to LEDR/Z), and the in-store customer experience platform Spectrio (sold to Bertram Capital).He currently serves as a Board Director at Bean Box, the premier Direct to Consumer gourmet coffee gift and subscription brand, and Keepe, the leading vetted, on-demand contractor network for property managers. Other notable investments include Wrench, Crowd Cow, Dolly, Stackery and Blume.Kirby has served as Board Chair at Special Olympics of Washington, where he helped bring the 2018 Special Olympics USA Games to Seattle. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Seattle Preparatory School, Board Member at the University of Washington's Haring Center Capital Campaign, and Board Advisor at the Friendship Circle of Washington. In his free time, Kirby coaches youth sports, and enjoys running, tennis, and traveling with his wife, son and daughter.Where to follow Kirbyhttps://twitter.com/kirbywinfieldhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/winfield/Where to follow Adam:https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamschoenfeld/https://twitter.com/schoenyFeedback? Suggestions on who to interview? Email me anytime - adamseattlepodcast@gmail.com
This episode is with Chase Douglas, the CTO of Stackery a serverless platform to design, develop and deliver modern applications. Chase leads the engineering team at Stackery and was made an AWS Serverless Hero for his efforts in Cloud Computing. Check out what makes him so optimistic about the future of serverless and why he likes the direction he sees it heading! If you like this episode and want to hear more, visit us at: talkingserverless.io --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/talking-serverless/message
Who would have thought the pandemic would drive biometrics, cybersecurity in schools comes up short and we talk about how serverless can solve our DevSecOps problems.Pandemic drives innovation in biometric digital door lock marketUsing Adversarial Machine Learning, Researchers Look to Foil Facial RecognitionHarvard, MIT sue Trump admin to block deportation of online-only studentsNew video codec halves streaming timeHong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdownGoogle Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, Other MarketsSchools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19Fight Phishing with IntentionTim Zonca, CEO of Stackery talks about how serverless can solve DevSecOps problems. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Tim Zonca Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Sponsors: expressvpn.com/enterprise itpro.tv/enterprise use code ENTERPRISE30 barracuda.com/enterprise
Who would have thought the pandemic would drive biometrics, cybersecurity in schools comes up short and we talk about how serverless can solve our DevSecOps problems.Pandemic drives innovation in biometric digital door lock marketUsing Adversarial Machine Learning, Researchers Look to Foil Facial RecognitionHarvard, MIT sue Trump admin to block deportation of online-only studentsNew video codec halves streaming timeHong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdownGoogle Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, Other MarketsSchools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19Fight Phishing with IntentionTim Zonca, CEO of Stackery talks about how serverless can solve DevSecOps problems. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Tim Zonca Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Sponsors: expressvpn.com/enterprise itpro.tv/enterprise use code ENTERPRISE30 barracuda.com/enterprise
Who would have thought the pandemic would drive biometrics, cybersecurity in schools comes up short and we talk about how serverless can solve our DevSecOps problems.Pandemic drives innovation in biometric digital door lock marketUsing Adversarial Machine Learning, Researchers Look to Foil Facial RecognitionHarvard, MIT sue Trump admin to block deportation of online-only studentsNew video codec halves streaming timeHong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdownGoogle Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, Other MarketsSchools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19Fight Phishing with IntentionTim Zonca, CEO of Stackery talks about how serverless can solve DevSecOps problems. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Tim Zonca Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Sponsors: expressvpn.com/enterprise itpro.tv/enterprise use code ENTERPRISE30 barracuda.com/enterprise
Who would have thought the pandemic would drive biometrics, cybersecurity in schools comes up short and we talk about how serverless can solve our DevSecOps problems.Pandemic drives innovation in biometric digital door lock marketUsing Adversarial Machine Learning, Researchers Look to Foil Facial RecognitionHarvard, MIT sue Trump admin to block deportation of online-only studentsNew video codec halves streaming timeHong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdownGoogle Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, Other MarketsSchools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19Fight Phishing with IntentionTim Zonca, CEO of Stackery talks about how serverless can solve DevSecOps problems. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Tim Zonca Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Sponsors: expressvpn.com/enterprise itpro.tv/enterprise use code ENTERPRISE30 barracuda.com/enterprise
Who would have thought the pandemic would drive biometrics, cybersecurity in schools comes up short and we talk about how serverless can solve our DevSecOps problems.Pandemic drives innovation in biometric digital door lock marketUsing Adversarial Machine Learning, Researchers Look to Foil Facial RecognitionHarvard, MIT sue Trump admin to block deportation of online-only studentsNew video codec halves streaming timeHong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdownGoogle Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, Other MarketsSchools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19Fight Phishing with IntentionTim Zonca, CEO of Stackery talks about how serverless can solve DevSecOps problems. Hosts: Louis Maresca, Brian Chee, and Curt Franklin Guest: Tim Zonca Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Sponsors: expressvpn.com/enterprise itpro.tv/enterprise use code ENTERPRISE30 barracuda.com/enterprise
Tim Zonca (@timzonca, CEO at @stackeryio) talks about the next evolution of the serverless developer experience, the maturity of customer adoption, how much customer appreciate not having to manage infrastructure, and how to manage the journey to serverless.SHOW: 456SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:Taos HomepageTaos - Gartner MQ - Cloud Professional ServicesStudio 3T - HomepageStudio 3T - 30 Day Free TrialDatadog Security Monitoring 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-shirtCLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwPodCTL Podcast is Back (Enterprise Kubernetes) - http://podctl.comSHOW NOTES:Stackery HomepageStackery Cloudlocal FeaturesTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve had a pretty diverse career in terms of elements of making developers successful. Tell about your background and how you became CEO at Stackery almost a year ago.Topic 2 - It’s hard to believe that AWS Lambda launched about 5.5 years ago. Obviously the serverless ecosystem has grown and expanded quite a bit since then. Where do you see serverless in terms of both maturity of the technologies, and maturity of customer adoption?Topic 3 - Lets talk about what the Stackery platform brings to the serverless ecosystem. Topic 4 - As you talk to prospective customers, how much different is it to discuss not have to be burdened by underlying resources vs. previous conversations you’ve had about applications? How long does it usually take them to grasp the magnitude of the changes in development?Topic 5 - How much of a “traditional” developer experience still exists with serverless (write code, write tests, pipelines, etc.) and what are some immediate things they will see that’s different?Topic 6 - Having been at Puppet you obviously saw many DevOps transformations. What are some of the steps on a typical Serverless transformation for companies?FEEDBACK?Email: show at thecloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet
Farrah Campbell is the Ecosystems Director at Stackery, a software company that builds tools that support and accelerate the development and delivery of serverless applications. She also serves as the speaker liaison and runs business development for TechfestNW, a conference that brings business leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs together to talk all things tech. Previously, Farrah worked in customer and people ops at Reflect Technologies and as director of operations at Chirpify. Join Corey and Farrah as they discuss career advice Farrah got from Kara Swisher, what an AWS Serverless Hero is and what it’s like to be one, what Corey’s done to earn the AWS Villain moniker, Farrah’s experience as a single mom raising two kids and the mindset that comes with it, what evangelizing for a new technology really means, how serverless is a mindset, an innovation strategy, and a paradigm shift, how to use Route 53 as a database, and more.
In episode #1 of the Talking Serverless podcast, we talk to Anna Spysz a software engineer at Stackery. Twitter --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/talking-serverless/message
Serverless developers have always faced a steep challenge when it comes to writing code on their laptops, and debugging said code on cloud services. It's sort of a chicken and egg thing. You can't deploy until you're ready, but you can't know if you're ready without testing. That requires access to your cloud services on your laptop, something that up until now has been difficult to replicate.
Anna Spysz offers a different perspective, coming from communications first and engineering second. In this episode, she describes the hybrid model employed at Stackery for developing cloud applications that can save time and frustration, plus she’s got a few tips for liberal arts majors looking to get into tech.
This week, we're talking with Toby Fee, community developer at serverless software provider Stackery, about how to apply the principles of the 12-factor application model to serverless apps. In the second half of the show, we spoke with Roman Swoszowski, vice president of cloud research and development at Grape Up, about this week's Cloud Foundry Summit, in Philadelphia. Fee has been writing a series of posts for us over the past few weeks that explores each of the principles in the 12-factor application through a serverless lens. She writes: No two serverless apps are identical, and the design decisions you make greatly affect how hard or easy you make your developers' lives. Serverless should be a choice that makes the dev experience easier not more difficult, following these guides can help.In the second half of the podcast, we discuss the Cloud Foundry Summit.
Do you understand how tabs work? How spaces work? Are you willing to defeat the JSON heretics? Most people understand the power of the serverless paradigm, but need help to put it into a useful form. That’s where Stackery comes in to treat YAML as an assembly language. After all, no one programs processors like they did in the '80s with raw assembly routines and no one programs with C. Everyone is using a higher-level scripted or other programming language. Today, we’re talking to Chase Douglas, co-founder and CTO of Stackery, which is serverless acceleration software where levels of abstraction empower you to move quickly. Stackery has an intricate binding model that gives you a visual representation - at a human logical level - of the infrastructure you defined in your application. Some of the highlights of the show include: Stackery builds infrastructures by using best practices with security applications What's a VPC? Way to put resources into a Cloud account that aren’t accessible outside of that network; anything in that network can talk to each other Lambda layers let developers create one Git layer that includes multiple functionality and put it in all functions for consistency and management Git is an open-source amalgam of different programming languages that has grown and changed over time, but it has its own build system Stackery created a PHP runtime functionality for Lambda; you don't want to run your own runtime - leave that up to a Cloud service provider for security reasons Should you refactor existing Lambda functions to leverage layers? No, rebuild everything already built before re-architecting everything to use serverless Many companies find serverless to be useful for their types of workloads; about 95% of workloads can effectively be engineered on a serverless foundation Trough of Disillusionment or Gartner Hype Cycle: Stackery wants to re-engage and help people who have had challenges with serverless Is DynamoDB considered serverless? Yes, because it’s got global replication Puritanical (being able to scale down to zero) and practical approaches to the definition of serverless Links: Stackery JSON AWS Lambda Aurora Serverless Data API Hype Cycle Secrets Manager YAML S3 GitHub GitLab AWS Codecommit Node.js WordPress re:Invent Ruby on Rails Kinesis Streams DynamoDB Docker Simon Wardley Datadog
On this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we're recapping the Serverless Days event we attended in Portland last week and discussing the 2.0 release of the Linkerd service mesh project. Joining us today is TNS managing editor Joab Jackson, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams. Williams and I attended Serverless Days in Portland this week where The New Stack was a media sponsor, as well as co-hosted the after party with our sponsor Stackery. In this episode, we discuss what we learned about serverless trends from that event, including the latest definition of serverless, what serverless means for DevOps, monitoring and security. Then later in the show, we discuss some of the top stories on the site this week, including Buoyant's release of Linkerd 2.0, the open source service mesh project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that was just completely rearchitected with a lighter, more nimble codebase.
Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Kishore Bhatia discusses with Nate Taggart about Serverless. Topics include: understanding the motivations for this computing model, deep dive learning about Serverless architecture, development frameworks and tools. Learn from Nate’s experience with Serverless paradigm developing Operations tools at Stackery and find out various approaches, challenges and best practices for architecting and building Serverless applications.
Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Kishore Bhatia discusses with Nate Taggart about Serverless. Topics include: understanding the motivations for this computing model, deep dive learning about Serverless architecture, development frameworks and tools. Learn from Nate’s experience with Serverless paradigm developing Operations tools at Stackery and find out various approaches, challenges and best practices for architecting and building Serverless applications. Related […]
Brian talks with Ryan Brown (@ryan_sb, Sr. Software Engineer @Ansible, Author of ServerlessCode) about the overall state of the Serverless community after the recent ServerlessConf 2017 NYC, the breadth of focus areas for developers and business, the ways to integrate serverless into existing applications, and areas for newbies to the space to get started. Show Links: ServerlessCode Managing Serverless Framework with Ansible Slides from Ryan's talk Ben Kehoe’s “DiffOps” [PODCAST] @PodCTL - Containers | Kubernetes - RSS Feed, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn and all your favorite podcast players [A CLOUD GURU] Get The Cloudcast Alexa Skill [A CLOUD GURU] DISCOUNT: Serverless for Beginners (only $15 instead of $29) [A CLOUD GURU] FREE: Alexa Development for Absolute Beginners [FREE] eBook from O'Reilly Show Notes: Topic 1 - You’ve been heavily involved in Serverless since the very days, working on things like the ServerlessCode site as a side project. How are you seeing the community evolve? The DevOps crowd was there Lots of “is it NoOps or Not?” discussions Nobody is actually NoOps. There’s a common understanding (underlined by people like Charity Majors) that someone in your org is always responsible for stuff working, or else you die. DiffOps is one term that encompasses the “you have responsibility, but one of your responsibilities is to farm out as much as is reasonable to your provider” Any viable open-source elements emerging? Lots of toy-ish “oh you can run FaaS on k8s” around, but when you get serious: Serverless Framework/Zappa/Sparta/Apex OpenWhisk Some VC funding, but nothing massive yet IOPipe raised at least one round Serverless has a spot in the HeavyBit, and some funding Stackery has about 2 million in funding The real “VC’s” in serverless tooling are the cloud mega-providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) and the biggest teams I know of are all subteams there How many customers vs. vendors at the event? Basically 2x the first ServerlessConf, up to 450/460 attendees Topic 2 - You gave a talk called “Harmonizing Serverless and Traditional Applications“. Outside of greenfield companies, that seems to be the common questions that companies are asking. What topics did you cover in your talk?
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