Podcasts about teletraan

Teletraan 1 finds himself. Find Paul and John on Twitter or email the show. Full episode archive

Andy this time round grabs the Sugarbear, Paul, to talk about 1991 Heart of Darkness. Its a crossover one-shot with Ghost Rider, The Punisher and Wolverine fighting against Black Heart and its Andy's first proper introduction to Ghost Rider. Is it a positive experience or not?

Guest of this episode Adam Gruff shares with Andy the run of Spawn The Dark Ages, since Andy hasn't read a lot of Spawn this was the chosen to be a proper introduction into the very 90's feel of the Tod Mcfarlane icon. Join the two as they talk about it, is it all good or all bad?

Mikey bring on General Tekno to discuss the ups and down of the fan loved comic series MTMTE and Lost Light written by James Roberts.

Sometimes a character speaks to you on a level more emotional than intellectual. Mikey is joined by All Things Transformers' TFG1Mike who speaks of his deep love of Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime and how he uses that to make excuses for the IDW version.

Mikey keeps pushing on with a retrospective look at the IDW Transformer series and this time he talks with Jalaguy about that time Hasbro made IDW stop all their stories and smoosh all of them together into a aligned continuity.

Its been a while but comic talk has returned, but there will be no reviews this time. Mikey brings Vangelus on to talk about IDW 2, well the transformers side of it. Vangelus is for it and of course Mikey is against it, the battle commence!

Mikey and Andy are back to talk comics after a break and the lads decide to cover 4 issues of IDW Shattered Glass, why four? because they already covered the first issue. They both enjoyed the first issue so will the other four be that good or will the ball be dropped?

About Micheal BenedictMicheal Benedict leads Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. He and his team focus on developer experience, building tools and platforms for over a thousand engineers to effectively code, build, deploy and operate workloads on the cloud. Mr. Benedict has also built Infrastructure and Cloud Governance programs at Pinterest and previously, at Twitter -- focussed on managing cloud vendor relationships, infrastructure budget management, cloud migration, capacity forecasting and planning and cloud cost attribution (chargeback). Links: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michealb/ 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: You know how git works right?Announcer: Sorta, kinda, not really Please ask someone else!Corey: Thats all of us. Git is how we build things, and Netlify is one of the best way I've found to build those things quickly for the web. Netlify's git based workflows mean you don't have to play slap and tickle with integrating arcane non-sense and web hooks, which are themselves about as well understood as git. Give them a try and see what folks ranging from my fake Twitter for pets startup, to global fortune 2000 companies are raving about. If you end up talking to them, because you don't have to, they get why self service is important—but if you do, be sure to tell them that I sent you and watch all of the blood drain from their faces instantly. You can find them in the AWS marketplace or at www.netlify.com. N-E-T-L-I-F-Y.comCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Sometimes when I have conversations with guests here, we run long. Really long. And then we wind up deciding it was such a good conversation, and there's still so much more to say that we schedule a follow-up, and that's what happened today. Please welcome back Micheal Benedict, who is, as of the last time we spoke and presumably still now, the head of engineering productivity at Pinterest. Micheal, how are you?Micheal: I'm doing great, and thanks for that introduction, Corey. Thankfully, yes, I am still the head of engineering productivity; I'm really glad to speak more about it today.Corey: The last time that we spoke, we went up one side and down the other of large-scale environments running on AWS and billing aspects thereof, et cetera, et cetera. I want to stay away from that this time and instead focus on the rest of engineering productivity, which is always an interesting and possibly loaded term. So, what is productivity engineering? It sounds almost like it's an internal dev tools team, or is it something more?Micheal: Well, thanks for asking because I get this question asked a lot of times. So, for one, our primary job is to enable every developer, at least at our company, to do their best work. And we want to do this by providing them a fast, safe, and a reliable path to take any idea into production without ever worrying about the infrastructure. As you clearly know, learning anything about how AWS works—or any public cloud provider works—is a ton of investment, and we do want our product engineers, our mobile engineers, and all the other folks to be focused on delivering amazing experiences to our Pinners. So, we could be doing some of the hard work in providing those abstractions for them in such way, and taking away the pain of managing infrastructure.Corey: The challenge, of course, that I've seen is that a lot of companies take the approach of, “Ah. We're going to make AWS available to all of our engineers in it's raw, unfiltered form.” And that lasts until the first bill shows up. And then it's, “Okay. We're going to start building some guardrails around that.” Which makes a lot of sense. There then tends to be a move towards internal platforms that effectively wrap cloud services.And for a while now, I've been generally down on the concept and publicly so in the general sense. That said, what I say that applies as a best practice or something that most people should consider does tend to fall apart when we talk about specific use cases. You folks are an extremely large environment; how do you view it? First off, do you do internal platforms like that? And secondly, would you recommend that other companies do the same thing?Micheal: I think that's such a great question because every company evolves with its own pace of development. And I wouldn't say Pinterest by itself had a developer productivity or an engineering productivity organization from the get-go. I think this happens when you start realizing that your core engineers who are working on product are now spending a certain fraction of time—which starts ballooning pretty fast—in managing the underlying systems and the infrastructure. And at that point in time, it's probably a good question to ask, how can I reduce the friction in those people's lives such that they could be focused more on the product. And, kind of, centralize or provide some sort of common abstractions through a central team which can take away all that pain.So, that is generally a good guiding principle to think about when your engineers are spending at least 30% of their time on operating the systems rather than building capabilities, that's probably a good time to revisit and see whether a central team would make sense to take away some of that. And just simple examples, right? This includes upgrading OS on your EC2 machines, or just trying to make sure you're patching all the right versions on your next big Kubernetes cluster you're running for serving x number of users. The moment you start seeing that, you want to start thinking about, if there is a central team who could take away that pain, what are the things they could be investing on to help up-level every other engineer within your organization. And I think that's one of the best ways to be thinking about it.And it was also a guiding principle for us within Pinterest to view what investments we could make in these central teams which can up-level each and every different type of engineer in the company as well. And just an example on that could be your mobile engineer would have very different expectations from your backend engineer who was working on certain aspects of code in your product. And it is truly important to understand where you want to centralize capabilities, which both these types of engineers could use, or you want to divest and have unique capabilities where it's going to make them productive. There's no one-size-fits-all solution for this, but I'm happy to talk about what we have at Pinterest, which has been reasonably working well. But I do think there's a lot more improvements we could be doing.Corey: Yeah, but let's also be clear that, as you've mentioned, you are heavily biased towards EC2 instances for a lot of what you do. If we look at the AWS console and we see hundreds of different services now, and it's easy to sit here and say, “Oh, internal platforms are terrible because all of those services are going to be enhanced in various ways and you're never going to be able to keep up with feature parity.” Yeah, but if you can wrap something like EC2 in an internal platform wrapper, that begins to be a different story because sure, someone's going to go and try something new with a different AWS service, they're going to need direct access. But the EC2 product across the board generally does not evolve in leaps and bounds with transformative changes overnight. Let's also not forget that at a company with the scale that Pinterest operates at, “Hey, AWS just dusted off a new feature and docs are still rolling out, and it's not in CloudFormation yet, but we're going to roll it out to production,” probably seems like the wrong direction to go in, I would assume.Micheal: And yes, I think that brings one of the key guardrails, I think, which these groups provide. So, when we start thinking about what teams, centralized teams like engineering productivity, developer tools, developer platforms actually do is they help with a couple of things. The top three are: they can help pave a path for the most common use cases. Like to your point, provisioning EC2 does take a set of steps, all the time. If you're going to have a thousand people doing that every time they're building a new service or trying to expand capacity playing with their launch templates, those are things you can start streamlining and making it simple by some wrapper because you want to address those 80% use cases which are usually common, and you can have a wrapper or could just automate that. And that's one of the key things: can you provide a paved path for those use cases?The second thing is, can you do that by having the right guardrails in place? How often have you heard the story that, “I just clicked a button and that now spun up, like, a thousand-plus instances.” And now you have to juggle between trying to stop them or do something about it.Corey: Back in 2013, you folks were still focusing on this fair bit. I remember because Jeremy Carroll, who I believe was your first SRE there once upon a time, wound up doing a whole series of talks around how Pinterest approached doing an AMI Factory. And back in those days, the challenges were, “Okay. We have the baseline AMI, and that's great, but we also want to do deployments of things and we don't really want to do a new deploy of an entire fleet of EC2 instances for a single line of config change, so how do we wind up weighing off of when you bake a new AMI versus when you just change something that has—in what is deployed to them?” And it was really a complicated problem back then.I'm not convinced it's not still a complicated problem, but the answers are a lot more cohesive. And making sure that every team—when you're talking about a company as large as Pinterest with that many teams—is doing things in the same way, seems like it's critically important otherwise you wind up with a whole bunch of unique-looking instances that each have to be managed by hand as opposed to something that can be reasoned around collectively.Micheal: Yep. And that last part you mentioned is extremely crucial as well because like I said, our audience or our customers are just not the engineers; we do work with our product managers and business partners as well because at times, we have to tie or change our architecture based on certain cost optimizations which would make sense, like you just articulated. We don't want to have all the instance types. It does not add much value to a developer unless they're explicitly seeking a high-memory instance or a [GP-based instance in a 00:10:25] certain way. So, we can then work with our business partners to make sure that we're committing to only a certain type of instances, and how we can abstract our tools to only give you that. For example, our deployment system, Teletraan which is an open-source system, actually condenses down all these instance types to a couple of categories like high-compute, high-memory—and you've probably seen that in many of the new cloud providers as well—so people don't have to learn or know the underlying instance type.When we moved from c3 to c5, it was just called as a high-compute system, so the next time someone provisioned a new service or deployed it using our system, they would just select high-compute as the de facto instance type and we would just automatically provision a C5 for them. So, that just reduces the extra complexity or the cognitive overhead individuals would have to go through in learning each instance type, what is the base AMI that comes on it, what are the different configurations that need to go in terms of setting up your AZ-scaling properties. We give them a good reasonable set of defaults to get started with, and then they can then work on optimizing or making changes to it.Corey: Ignoring entirely your mispronunciation of AMI, which is, of course, three syllables—and that is a petty hill upon which I will die—it occurs to me the more I work with AWS in various ways, the easier it gets. And I used to think in some respects, it was because the platform was so—it was improving so dramatically around me. But no, in many cases, it's because the first time you write some CloudFormation by hand, it's a nightmare and you keep smacking into weird issues. But the second or third time, it's super easy because you just copy the thing you've already built and change the relevant bits around. And that was the learning curve that I went through playing around with a lot of these things.When you start looking at this from a large-scale environment where it's not just about upskilling the people that you have to understand how these things integrate in AWS land, but also the consistent onboarding of engineers at a fairly progressive clip is, great, you effectively have to start doing trainings on all these things, and there's a lot of knobs and dials that can blow up and hurt people. At some point, building the guardrails or building the environment in which you are getting all the stuff abstracted away from where the application engineers have to think about this at all, it eventually reaches a tipping point where it starts to feel like it's no longer optional if you want to continue growing as a company because you don't have the luxury of spending six months of onboarding before you let someone touch the thing they were hired to build.Micheal: And you will see that many companies very often have very similar programming practices like you just described. Even I learned that the same way: you have a base template, you just copy-paste it and start from there on. And no one goes through the bootstrapping process manually anymore; you want to—I think we call it cargo-culting, but in general, just get something to bootstrap and start from there. But one of the things we learned in sort of the hard way is that can also lead to, kind of, you pushing, you know, not great practices because people don't know what is a blessed version of a good template or what actually would make sense. So, some of those things, we have been working on.And this is where centralized teams like engineering productivity are really helpful is we provide you with the blessed or the canonical way to do certain things. Case in point example is a CI/CD pipeline or delivery of software services. We have invested enough in experimenting on what works with some of the more nuanced use cases at Pinterest, in helping generate, sort of, a canonical version which would cover 80% of the use cases. Someone could just go and try to build a service and they could just use the same canonical pipeline without learning much or making changes to it. This also reduces that cargo-culting nature which I called, rather than copying it from unknown sources and trying to like—again, it may cause havoc to our systems, so we can avoid a lot of that because of these practices.Corey: So, let's step a little bit beyond AWS—I know I hate doing it, too—but I'm going to assume that your remit is broader than, oh, AWS whisperer-slash-Wrangler. So, tell me a little bit more about what it is that your day-to-day looks like if there is anything that could be said not to focus purely around AWS whispering.Micheal: So, one of the challenges—and I want to talk about this a bit more—is our environments have become extremely complex over time. And it's the nature of, like, rising entropy. Like, we've just noticed that there's two things: we have a diverse set of customer base, and these include everyone trying to do different workloads or work service types. What that essentially translates into is that we realized that our solution may not fit all of them. For example, what works for a machine-learning engineer in terms of iterating on building a model and delivering a model is not the same as someone working on a long-running service and trying to deploy that. The same would apply for someone trying to operate a Kafka system.And that has made, I think, definitely our job a bit challenging in trying to assess where do you actually draw the line on the abstraction? What is the right layer of abstraction across your local development experience, across when you move over to staging your code in a PR model and getting feedback and subsequently actually releasing it to production? Because this changes dramatically based on what is the workload type you're working on. And we feel like that has been one of the biggest challenges where I know I spent my day-to-day and my team does too, in trying to help provide some of the right solutions for these individuals. There's—very often we'll also get asked from individuals trying to do a very nuanced thing.Of late, we have been talking about thinking about how you operate functions, like provide Functions as a Service within the company? It just put us in a difficult spot at times because we have to ask the hard question, “Is this required?” I know the industry is doing it; it's definitely there. I personally believe, yes, it could be a future, but is that absolutely important? Is that going to benefit Pinterest in any formal way if we invest on some core abstractions?And those are difficult conversations to have because we have exciting engineers coming in trying to do amazing things; it puts us in a hard spot, as well, as to sometimes saying graciously, no. I know many companies deal with it when they have these centralized teams, but I think it's part of that job. Like when you say it's day-to-day, I would say I'm probably saying no a couple of times in that day.Corey: Let's pretend for the sake of argument that I am, tomorrow morning, starting another company—Twitter for Pets—and over the next ten years, it grows to be larger than Pinterest in terms of infrastructure, probably not revenue because it turns out pets are not the lucrative source of ad revenue that I was hoping it would be but, you know, directionally the same thing. It seems to me that building out this sort of function with this sort of approach to things is dramatically early as far as optimizations go when it's just me puttering around on something. I'm always cognizant of the wrong people taking the wrong message when we're talking about things that happen like this at scale. When does having an engineering productivity group begin to make sense?Micheal: I mentioned this earlier; like, yeah, there is definitely not a right answer, but we can start small. For example, this group actually started more as a delivery team. You know, when we started, we realized that we had different ways of deploying services or software at Pinterest, so we first gathered together to figure out, okay, what are the different ways and can we start simplifying that part? And that's where it started expanding. Okay, we are doing button-based deployments right now we have thousand-plus microservices, and we are seeing more incidents than we wanted to because anything where there's a human involved means there's a potential gap for error. I myself was involved in a SEV 0 incident, and I will be honest; we ended up deploying a Hello World application in one of our production fleet. Not the thing I wanted to be associated with my name, but, you know—Corey: And you were suddenly saying hello to the world, in fact—Micheal: [laugh].Corey: —and oops-a-doozy.Micheal: Yeah. So—and that really prompted us to rethink how we need to enable guardrails to do safe production rollouts. And that's how those conversations start ballooning out.Corey: And the healthy correct way. We've all broken production in various ways, and it's—you correctly are identifying, I believe, the direction you're heading in where this is a process problem and a tooling problem; it is not that you are secretly crap and should never have been allowed near anything in production. I mean, that's my excuse for me, but in your case, this is a common thing where it's, if someone can unintentionally cause issues like that, there needs to be better processes and procedures as the organization matures.Micheal: Yep. And that's kind of like always the route or the starting point for these discussions. And it starts growing from there on because, okay, you've helped improve the deploy process but now we're seeing insane amount of slowness, say on the build processes, or even post-deploy, there's, like, issues on how we monitor and look into data.And that I think forces these conversations, okay, where do we have these bespoke tools available? What are people doing today? And you have to ask those hard questions, like what can we actually remove from here? The goal is not to introduce yet another new system. Many a times, to be honest bash just gets the job done. [laugh].Personally, I'm okay with that as long as it's consistent and people, you know, are able to contribute to it and you have good practices in validating it, if it works, we should go for it rather than introducing yet another YAML [laugh] and some of that other aspects of doing that work. And that's what we encourage as well. That's how I think a lot of this starts connecting together in terms of, okay, now this is becoming a productivity group; they're focused on certain challenges where investing probably one person here may up-level a few other engineers who don't have to do that on a day-to-day basis. And I think that's one of the key items for, especially, folks who are running mid-sized companies to realize and start investing in these type of teams to really up-level, sort of, the rest of the engineering.Corey: You've been doing this for a fair while. If you were to go back and start over again on day one—which is always a terrifying question, on some level—what would you have done differently about building out this function as Pinterest continued to scale out?Micheal: Well, first, I must acknowledge that this was just not me, and there's, like, ton of people involved in helping make this happen.Corey: No, that's fair. We'll blame them for the missteps; that is—Micheal: [laugh].Corey: —just fine with me. I kid. I kid.Micheal: I think, definitely the nuances. If I look back, all the decisions that were made then at that point in time, there was a decision made to move to Phabricator, which was back then a great open-source code management system where with the current information at that point in time. And I'm not—I think it's very hard to always look back and say, “Oh, we could have chosen x at one point in time.” And I think in reality, that's how engineering organizations always evolve, that you have to make do with the information you have right now to make a decision that works for you over a couple of years.And I'll give you a small example of this. There was a time when Pinterest was actually on GitHub Enterprise—this was like circa 2013, I would say—and it really served as well for, like, five-plus years. Only then at certain point, we realized that it's hard to hire PHP engineers to support a tool like that, and we had to rethink what is the ROI and the investments we've made here? Can we ever map up or match back to one of the offerings in the industry today? And that's when you make decisions that, okay, at this point in time, it's clear that business continuity talks, you know, and it's hard to operate a system, which is, at this moment not supported, and then you make a call about making a shift or moving.And I think that's the key item. I don't think there's anything dramatically I would have changed since the start. Perhaps definitely investing a bit more individuals into the group and going from there. But that said, I'm really, sort of, at least proud of the fact that usually these teams are extremely lean and small, and they always have an outsized impact, especially when they're working with other engineers, other [opinionated 00:22:13] engineers for what it's worth.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Most folks show up intending to do good today, and you make the best decision at the time with the context and constraints that you have, but my question I think is less around, “Well, what were the biggest mistakes you made?” But more to do with the idea of, based upon what you've learned and as you have shown—as you've shined light on these dark areas, as you have been exploring it, has anything jumped out at you that is, “Oh, yeah. Now, that I know—if I had known then what I know now, I would definitely have made this other decision.” Ideally, something that applies a little more globally than specific within Pinterest, just because the whole idea, aspirationally, is that people might learn something from our conversation. At least I will, if nothing else.Micheal: No, I think that's a great question. And I think the three things that jump to me, top of mind. I think technology is means to an end unless it gives you a competitive edge. And it's really hard to figure out at what point in time what technology and why we adopted it, it's going to make the biggest difference. Humans always tend to have a bias towards aligning towards where we want to go. So, that's the first one in my mind.The second one is, and we spoke about this last time, embrace your cloud provider as much as possible. You'd want to avoid taking on operational burden which is not going to add value to the business. If there is something you see your operating which can be offloaded—because your provider can, trust me, do a way better job than you or your team of few can ever do—embrace that as soon as possible. It's better that way because then it frees up your time to focus on the most important thing, which I've realized over time is—I really think teams like ours are actually—we're probably the most value as a glue to all the different experiences a software engineer would go through as part of their SDLC lifecycle.If we can simplify someone's life by giving them a clear view as to where their commit or the work is in this grand scheme of rolling out and giving them the right amount of data to take action when something goes wrong, trust me, they will love you for what you're doing because you're saving them ton of time. Many times, we don't realize that when we publish 11 different ways for you to go and check to just get your basic validation of work done. We tend to so much focus on the technological aspect of what the tool does, rather than the experience of it, and I've realized, if you can bridge the experience, especially for teams like ours, people really don't even need to know whether you're running Kubernetes or any of those solutions behind the scenes. And I think that's one of the biggest takeaways I have.Corey: I want to double down on something you said about the fact that you are not going to be able to run these services as effectively as your provider can. And relatively recently—in fact, since the first time we spoke—AWS has released a investment report in Virginia. And from 2011 through 2020, they have invested in building AWS data centers there, $35 billion. I promise almost no company that employs people listening to this that are not themselves a cloud provider is going to make that kind of investment in running these things themselves.Now, do cloud providers have sharp edges? Yes, absolutely. That is what my entire career is about, unfortunately. But you're not going to do a better job of running things more sustainably, more reliably, et cetera, et cetera. But there are other problems with this—and that's what I want to start exploring here—where in the olden days, when I ran things in data centers and they went down a lot more as a result, sometimes when there were outages, I would have the CEO of the company just standing there nervous worrying over my shoulder as I frantically typed to fix things.Spoiler: my typing accuracy did not improve by having someone looming over me. Now, when there's an outage that your cloud provider takes, in many cases the thing that you are doing to fix it is reloading the status page and waiting for an update because it is completely out of your hands. Is that something that you've had to encounter? Because you can push buttons and turn dials when things are broken and you control it, but in an AWS—or other cloud provider—outage, all you can really do is wait unless you have a DR plan that is large-scale and effective enough that you won't feel foolish or have wasted a huge amount of time and energy migrating off and then—because then it gets repaired in ten minutes. How do you approach that, from your perspective? I guess, the expectation management piece?Micheal: It's definitely I know something which keeps a lot of folks within infrastructure up at night because, like you just said, at times we can feel extremely powerless when we obviously don't have direct control—or visibility at times, as well—on what's happening. One of the things we have realized over time as part of running on our cloud provider for over a decade now, it forces us to rethink a bit on our priority workflows, what we want our Pinners to always have access to, what they need to see, what is not important or critical. Because it puts into perspective, even for the infrastructure teams, is to what is the most important thing we should always have it available and running, what is okay to be in a degraded state, until what time, right? So, it actually forces us to define SLOs and availability criteria within the team where we can broadcast that to the larger audience including the executives. So, none of this comes as a surprise at that point.I mean, it's not the answer, probably, you're looking for because is there's nothing we can do except set expectations clearly on what we can do and how when you think about the business when these things do happen. So, I know people may have I have a different view on this; I'm definitely curious to hear as well, but I know at Pinterest at least we have converged on our priority workflows. When something goes out, how do we jump in to provide a degraded experience? We have very clear run books to do that, and especially when it's a SEV 0, we do have clear processes in place on how often we need to update our entire company on where things are. And especially this is where your partnership with the cloud provider is going to be a big, big boon because you really want to know or have visibility, at the minimum some predictability on when things can get resolved, and how you want to work with them on some creative solutions. This is outside the DR strategy, obviously; you should still be focused on a DR strategy, but these are just simple things we've learned over time on how to just make it predictable for individuals within the company, so not everyone is freaking out.Corey: Yeah, from my perspective, I think the big things that I found that have worked, in my experience—mostly by getting them wrong the first time—is explain that someone else running the infrastructure when they take an outage; there's not much we can do. And no, it's not the sort of thing where picking up the phone and screaming at someone is going to help us, is the sort of thing that is best to communicate to executive stakeholders when things are running well, not in the middle of that incident.Then when things break, it's one of those, “Great, you're an exec. You know what your job is? Literally anything other than standing in the middle of the engineering floor, making everyone freak out even more. We'll have a discussion later about what the contributing factors were when you demand that we fire someone because of an outage. Then we're going to have a long and hard talk about what kind of culture you're trying to build here again?” But there are no perfect answers here.It's easy to sit here in the silver light of day with things working correctly and say, “Oh, yeah. This is how outages should be handled.” But then when it goes down, we're all basically an inch away at best from running around with our hair on fire, screaming, “Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, now.” And I am empathetic to that. There's a reason but I fix AWS bills for a living, and one of those big reasons is that it's a strictly business-hours problem and I don't have to run production infrastructure that faces anything that people care about, which is kind of amazing and freeing for someone who spent too many years on call.Micheal: Absolutely. And one of the things is that this is not only with the cloud provider, I think in today's nature of how our businesses are set up, there's probably tons of other APIs you are using or you're working with you may not be aware of. And we ended up finding that the hard way as well. There were a certain set of APIs or services we were using in the critical path which we were not aware of. When these outages happen, that's when you find that out.So, you're not only beholden to your provider at that point in time; you have to have those SLO expectations set with your other SaaS providers as well, other folks you're working with. Because I don't think that's going to change; it's probably only going to get complicated with all the different types of tools you're using. And then that's a trade-off you need to really think about. An example here is just like—you know, like I said, we moved in the past from GitHub to Phabricator—I didn't close the loop on that because we're moving back to GitHub right now [laugh] and that's one of the key projects I'm working with. Yeah, it's circle of life.But the thing is, we did a very strong evaluation here because we felt like, “Okay, there's a probability that GitHub can go down and that means people will be not productive for that couple of hours. What do we do then?” And we had to put a plan together to how we can mitigate that part and really build that confidence with the engineering teams, internally. And it's not the best solution out there; the other solution was just run our own, but how is that going to make any other difference because we do have libraries being pulled out of GitHub and so many other aspects of our systems which are unknowingly dependent on it anyways. So, you have to still mitigate those issues at some point in your entire SDLC process.So, that was just one example I shared, but it's not always on the cloud provider; I think there are just many aspects of—at least today how businesses are run, you're dependent; you have critical dependencies, probably, on some SaaS provider you haven't really vetted or evaluated. You will find out when they go down.Corey: So, I don't think I've told this story before, but before I started this place, I was doing a fair bit of consulting work for other companies. And I was doing a project at Pinterest years ago. And this was one of the best things I've ever experienced at a company site, let alone a client site, where I was there early in the morning, eight o'clock or so, so you know, engineers love to show up at the crack of 11:30. But so I was working a little early; it was great. And suddenly my SSH session that I was using to remote into something or other hung.And it's tap up, tap enter a couple of times, tap it a couple more. It was hung hard. “What's the—” and then someone gently taps me on the shoulder. So, I take the headphones off. It was someone from corporate IT was coming around saying, “Hey, there's a slight problem with our corporate firewall that we're fixing. Here's a MiFi device just for you that you can tether to get back online and get worked on until the firewall gets back.”And it was incredible, just the level of just being on top of things, and the focus on keeping the people who were building things and doing expensive engineering work that was awesome—and also me—productive during that time frame was just something I hadn't really seen before. It really made me think about the value of where do you remove bottlenecks from people getting their jobs done? It was—it remains one of the most impressive things I've seen.Micheal: That is great. And as you were telling me that I did look up our [laugh] internal system to see whether a user called Corey Quinn existed, and I should confirm this with you. I do see entries over here, a couple of commits, but this was 2015. Was that the time you were around, or is this before that even?Corey: That would have been around then, yes. I didn't start this place until late 2016.Micheal: I do see your commits, like, from 2015, and I—Corey: And they're probably terrible, I have no doubt. There's a reason I don't read code for a living anymore.Micheal: Okay, I do see a lot of GIFs—and I hope it's pronounced as GIF—okay, this is cool. We should definitely have a chat about this separately, Corey?Corey: Oh, yeah. “Would you explain this code?” “Absolutely not. I wrote it. Of course, I have no idea what it does. That's the rule. That's the way code always works.”Micheal: Oh, you are an honorary Pinterest engineer at this point, and you have—yes—contributed to our API service and a couple of Puppet profiles I see over here.Corey: Oh, yes—Micheal: [Amazing 00:36:11]. [laugh].Corey: You don't wind up thinking that's a risk factor that should be disclosed. I kid. I kid. It's, I made a joke about this when VMware acquired SaltStack and I did some analytics and found that 60 some odd lines of code I had written, way back when that were still in the current version of what was being shipped. And they thought, “Wait, is this actually a risk?”And no, I am making a joke. The joke is, is my code is bad. Fortunately, there are smart people around me who review these things. This is why code review is so important. But there was a lot to admire when I was there doing various things at Pinterest. It was a fun environment to work in, the level of professionalism was phenomenal, and I was just a big fan of a lot of the automation stuff.Phabricator was great. I love working with it, and, “Great, I'm going to use this to the next place I go.” And I did and then it was—I looked at what it took to get it up and running, and oh, yeah, I can see why GitHub is so popular these days. But it was neat. It was interesting seeing that type of environment up close.Micheal: That is great to hear. You know, this is what I enjoy, like, hearing some of these war stories. I am surprised; you seem to have committed way more than I've ever done in my [laugh] duration here at Pinterest. I do managing for a living, but then again—Corey, the good news is your code is still running on production. And we—Corey: Oh dear.Micheal: —haven't—[laugh]. We haven't removed or made any changes to it, so that's pretty amazing. And thank you for all your contributions.Corey: Oh, please, you don't have to thank me. I was paid, it was fine. That's the value of—Micheal: [laugh].Corey: —[work 00:37:38] for hire. It's kind of amazing. And the best part about consultants is, is when we're done with a project, we get the hell out everyone's happy about it.More happy when it's me that's leaving because of obvious personality-related reasons. But it was just an interesting company from start to finish. I remember one other time, I wound up opening a ticket about having a slight challenge with a flickering on my then Apple-branded display that everyone was using before they discontinued those. And I expected there to be, “Oh, okay. You're a consultant. Great. How did we not put you in the closet with a printer next to that thing, breathing the toner?” Like most consulting clients tend to do, and sure enough, three minutes later, I'm getting that tap on the shoulder again; they have a whole replacement monitor. “Can you go grab a cup of coffee? We'll run the cable for it. It'll just be about five minutes.” I started to feel actively bad about requesting things because I did a lot of consulting work for a lot of different companies, and not to be unkind, but treating consultants and contractors super well is not something that a lot of companies optimize for. I can't necessarily blame them for that. It just really stood out.Micheal: Yep, I do hope we are keeping up with that right now because I know our team definitely has a lot of consultants working with us as well. And it's always amazing to see; we do want to treat them as FTs. It doesn't even matter at that point because we're all individuals and we're trying to work towards common goals. Like you just said, I think I personally have learned a few items as well from some of these folks. Which is again, I think speaks to how we want to work and create a culture of, like, we're all engineers; we want to be solving problems together, and as you were doing it, we want to do it in such a way that it's still fun, and we're not having the restrictions of titles or roles and other pieces. But I think I digressed. It was really fun to see your commits though, I do want to track this at some point before we move completely over to GitHub, at least keep this as a record, for what it's worth.Corey: Yeah basically look at this graffiti in the codebase of, “A shit-poster was here,” and here I am. And that tends to be, on some level, the mark we live on the universe. What's always terrifying is looking at things I did 15 years ago in my first Linux admin job. Can I still ping the thing that I built there? Yes, I can. And how is that even possible? That should not have outlived me; honestly, it should never have seen the light of day in production, but here we are. And you never know how long that temporary kluge you put together is going to last.Micheal: You know, one of the things I was recalling, I was talking to someone in my team about this topic as well. We always talk about 10x engineers. I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but the fact that you just mentioned you built something; it still pings. And there's a bunch of things, in my mind, when you are writing code or you're working on some projects, the fact that it can outlast you and live on, I think that's a big, big contribution. And secondly, if your code can actually help up-level, like, ten other people, I think you've really made the mark of 10x engineer at that point.Corey: Yeah, the idea of the superhuman engineer is always been a strange and dangerous one. If for nothing else, from where I sit, excellence is inherently situational. Like we just talked about someone at Pinterest: is potentially going to be able to have that kind of impact specifically because—to my worldview—that there's enough process and things around there that empower them to succeed. Then if you were to take that engineer and drop them into a five-person startup where none of those things exist, they might very well flounder. It's why I'm always a little suspicious of this is a startup founded by engineers from Google or Facebook, or wherever it is.It's, yeah, and what aspects of that culture do you think are one-to-one matches with the small scrappy startup in the garage? Right, I predicting some challenges here. Excellence is always situational. An amazing employee at one company can get fired at a second one for lack of performance, and that does not mean that there's anything wrong with them and it does not mean that they are a fraud. It means that what they needed to be successful was present in one of those shops, but not the other.Micheal: This is so true. And I really appreciate you bringing this up because whenever we discuss any form of performance management, that is a—in my view personally—I think that's an incorrect term to be using. It is really at that point in time, either you have outlived the environment you are in, or the environment is going in a different direction where I think your current skill set probably could be best used in the environment where it's going to work. And I know it's very fuzzy at that point, but like you said, yes, excellence really means you don't want to tie it to the number of commits you have pushed out, or any specific aspect of your deliverables or how you work.Corey: There are no easy answers to any of these things, and it's always situational. It's why I think people are sometimes surprised when I will make comments about the general case of how things should be, then I talk to a specific environment where they do the exact opposite, and I don't yell at them for it. It's there—in a general sense, I have some guidance, but they are usually reasons things are the way they are, and I'm interested in hearing them out. Everything's situational, the worst consultant in the world is the one that shows up, has no idea what's going on, and then asked, “What moron set this up?” Invariably, two said, quote-unquote, “Moron.” And the engagement doesn't go super well from there. It's, “Okay, why is this the way that it is? What constraints shaped it? What was the context behind the problem you were trying to solve?” And, “Well, why didn't you use this AWS service?” “Because it didn't exist for another three years when we were building that thing,” is a—Micheal: Yes.Corey: —common answer.Micheal: Yes, you should definitely appreciate that of all the decisions that have been made in past. People tend to always forget why they were made. You're absolutely right; what worked back then will probably not work now, or vice versa, and it's always situational. So, I think I can go on about this for hours, but I think you hit that to the point, Corey.Corey: Yeah, I do my best. I want to thank you for taking another block of time out of your day to wind up talking with me about various aspects of what it takes to effectively achieve better levels of engineering productivity at large companies, with many teams, working on shared codebases. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Micheal: I'm definitely on Twitter. So, please note that I'm spelled M-I-C-H-E-A-L on Twitter. So, you can definitely read on to my tweets there. But otherwise, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn, too.Corey: Fantastic and we will, of course, include a link to that in the [show notes 00:44:02]. Thanks once again for your time. I appreciate it.Micheal: Thanks a lot, Corey.Corey: Micheal Benedict, head of engineering productivity at Pinterest. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment telling me that you work at Pinterest, have looked at the codebase, and would very much like a refund and an apology.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About Micheal Micheal Benedict leads Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. He and his team focus on developer experience, building tools and platforms for over a thousand engineers to effectively code, build, deploy and operate workloads on the cloud. Mr. Benedict has also built Infrastructure and Cloud Governance programs at Pinterest and previously, at Twitter -- focussed on managing cloud vendor relationships, infrastructure budget management, cloud migration, capacity forecasting and planning and cloud cost attribution (chargeback). Links: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com Teletraan: https://github.com/pinterest/teletraan Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal Pinterestcareers.com: https://pinterestcareers.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You know how git works right?Announcer: Sorta, kinda, not really. Please ask someone else!Corey: Thats all of us. Git is how we build things, and Netlify is one of the best way I've found to build those things quickly for the web. Netlify's git based workflows mean you don't have to play slap and tickle with integrating arcane non-sense and web hooks, which are themselves about as well understood as git. Give them a try and see what folks ranging from my fake Twitter for pets startup, to global fortune 2000 companies are raving about. If you end up talking to them, because you don't have to, they get why self service is important—but if you do, be sure to tell them that I sent you and watch all of the blood drain from their faces instantly. You can find them in the AWS marketplace or at www.netlify.com. N-E-T-L-I-F-Y.comCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I like to talk to people who work at very large companies that are not in fact themselves a cloud provider. I know it sounds ridiculous. How can you possibly be a big company and not make money by selling managed NAT gateways to an unsuspecting public? But I'm told it can be done here to answer that question. And hopefully at least one other is Pinterest. It's head of engineering productivity, Micheal Benedict. Micheal, thank you for taking the time to join me today.Micheal: Hi, Corey, thank you for inviting me today. I'm really excited to talk to you.Corey: So, exciting times at Pinterest in a bunch of different ways. It was recently reported—which of course, went right to the top of my inbox as 500,000 people on Twitter all said, “Hey, this sounds like a ‘Corey would be interested in it' thing.” It was announced that you folks had signed a $3.2 billion commitment with AWS stretching until 2028. Now, if this is like any other large-scale AWS contract commitment deal that has been made public, you were probably immediately inundated with a whole bunch of people who are very good at arithmetic and not very good at business context saying, “$3.2 billion? You could build massive data centers for that. Why would anyone do this?” And it's tiresome, and that's the world in which we live. But I'm guessing you heard at least a little bit of that from the peanut gallery.Micheal: I did, and I always find it interesting when direct comparisons are made with the total amount that's been committed. And like you said, there's so many nuances that go into how to perceive that amount, and put it in context of, obviously, what Pinterest does. So, I at least want to take this opportunity to share with everyone that Pinterest has been on the cloud since day one. When Ben initially started the company, that product was launched—it was a simple Django app—it was launched on AWS from day one, and since then, it has grown to support 450-plus million MAUs over the course of the decade.And our infrastructure has grown pretty complex. We started with a bunch of EC2 machines and persisting data in S3, and since then we have explored an array of different products, in fact, sometimes working very closely with AWS, as well and helping them put together a product roadmap for some of the items they're working on as well. So, we have an amazing partnership with them, and part of the commitment and how we want to see these numbers is how does it unlock value for Pinterest as a business over time in terms of making us much more agile, without thinking about the nuances of the infrastructure itself. And that's, I think, one of the best ways to really put this into context, that it's not a single number we pay at the end [laugh] of the month, but rather, we are on track to spending a certain amount over a period of time, so this just keeps accruing or adding to that number. And we basically come out with an amazing partnership in AWS, where we have that commitment and we're able to leverage their products and full suite of items without any hiccups.Corey: The most interesting part of what you said is the word partner. And I think that's the piece that gets lost an awful lot when we talk about large-scale cloud negotiations. It's not like buying a car, where you can basically beat the crap out of the salesperson, you can act as if $400 price difference on a car is the difference between storm out of the dealership and sign the contract. Great, you don't really have to deal with that person ever again.In the context of a cloud provider, they run your production infrastructure, and if they have a bad day, I promise you're going to have a bad day, too. You want to handle those negotiations in a way that is respectful of that because they are your partner, whether you want them to be or not. Now, I'm not suggesting that any cloud provider is going to hold an awkward negotiation against the customer, but at the same time, there are going to be scenarios in which you're going to want to have strong relationships, where you're going to need to cash in political capital to some extent, and personally, I've never seen stupendous value in trying to beat the crap out of a company in order to get another tenth of a percent discount on a service you barely use, just because someone decided that well, we didn't do well in the last negotiation so we're going to get them back this time.That's great. What are you actually planning to do as a company? Where are you going? And the fact that you just alluded to, that you're not just a pile of S3 and EC2 instances speaks, in many ways, to that. By moving into the differentiated service world, suddenly you're able to do things that don't look quite as much like building a better database and start looking a lot more like servicing your users more effectively and well.Micheal: And I think, like you said, I feel like there's like a general skepticism in viewing that the cloud providers are usually out there to rip you apart. But in reality, that's not true. To your point, as part of the partnership, especially with AWS and Pinterest, we've got an amazing relationship going on, and behind the scenes, there's a dedicated team at Pinterest, called the Infrastructure Governance Team, a cross-functional team with folks from finance, legal, engineering, product, all sitting together and working with our AWS partners—even the AWS account managers at the times are part of that—to help us make both Pinterest successful, and in turn, AWS gets that amazing customer to work with in helping build some of their newer products as well. And that's one of the most important things we have learned over time is that there's two parts to it; when you want to help improve your business agility, you want to focus not just on the bottom line numbers as they are. It's okay to pay a premium because it offsets the people capital you would have to invest in getting there.And that's a very tricky way to look at math, but that's what these teams do; they sit down and work through those specifics. And for what it's worth, in our conversations, the AWS teams always come back with giving us very insightful data on how we're using their systems to help us better think about how we should be pricing or looking things ahead. And I'm not the expert on this; like I said, there's a dedicated team sitting behind this and looking through and working through these deals, but that's one of the important takeaways I hope the users—or the listeners of this podcast then take away that you want to treat your cloud provider as your partner as much as possible. They're not always there to screw you. That's not their goal. And I apologize for using that term. It is important that you set that expectations that it's in their best interest to actually make you successful because that's how they make money as well.Corey: It's a long-term play. I mean, they could gouge you this quarter, and then you're trying to evacuate as fast as possible. Well, they had a great quarter, but what's their long-term prospect? There are two competing philosophies in the world of business; you can either make a lot of money quickly, or you can make a little bit of money and build it over time in a sustained way. And it's clear the cloud providers are playing the long game on this because they basically have to.Micheal: I mean, it's inevitable at this point. I mean, look at Pinterest. It is one of those success stories. Starting as a Django app on a bunch of EC2 machines to wherever we are right now with having a three-plus billion dollar commitment over a span of couple of years, and we do spend a pretty significant chunk of that on a yearly basis. So, in this case, I'm sure it was a great successful partnership.And I'm hoping some of the newer companies who are building the cloud from the get-go are thinking about it from that perspective. And one of the things I do want to call out, Corey, is that we did initially start with using the primitive services in AWS, but it became clear over time—and I'm sure you heard of the term multi-cloud and many of that—you know, when companies start evaluating how to make the most out of the deals they're negotiating or signing, it is important to acknowledge that the cost of any of those evaluations or even thinking about migrations never tends to get factored in. And we always tend to treat that as being extremely simple or not, but those are engineering resources you want to be spending more building on the product rather than these crazy costly migrations. So, it's in your best interest probably to start using the most from your cloud provider, and also look for opportunities to use other cloud providers—if they provide more value in certain product offerings—rather than thinking about a complete lift-and-shift, and I'm going to make DR as being the primary case on why I want to be moving to multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. There's a question, too, of the numbers on paper look radically different than the reality of this. You mentioned, Pinterest has been on AWS since the beginning, which means that even if an edict had been passed at the beginning, that, “Thou shalt never build on anything except EC2 and S3. The end. Full stop.”And let's say you went down that rabbit hole of, “Oh, we don't trust their load balancers. We're going to build our own at home. We have load balancers at home. We'll use those.” It's terrible, but even had you done that and restricted yourselves just to those baseline building blocks, and then decide to do a cloud migration, you're still looking back at over a decade of experience where the app has been built unconsciously reflecting the various failure modes that AWS has, the way that it responds to API calls, the latency in how long it takes to request something versus it being available, et cetera, et cetera.So, even moving that baseline thing to another cloud provider is not a trivial undertaking by any stretch of the imagination. But that said—because the topic does always come up, and I don't shy away from it; I think it's something people should go into with an open mind—how has the multi-cloud conversation progressed at Pinterest? Because there's always a multi-cloud conversation.Micheal: We have always approached it with some form of… openness. It's not like we don't want to be open to the ideas, but you really want to be thinking hard on the business case and the business value something provides on why you want to be doing x. In this case, when we think about multi-cloud—and again, Pinterest did start with EC2 and S3, and we did keep it that way for a long time. We built a lot of primitives around it, used it—for example, my team actually runs our bread and butter deployment system on EC2. We help facilitate deployments across a 100,000-plus machines today.And like you said, we have built that system keeping in mind how AWS works, and understanding the nuances of region and AZ failovers and all of that, and help facilitate deployments across 1000-plus microservices in the company. So, thinking about leveraging, say, a Google Cloud instance and how that works, in theory, we can always make a case for engineering to build our deployment system and expand there, but there's really no value. And one of the biggest cases, usually, when multi-cloud comes in is usually either negotiation for price or actually a DR strategy. Like, what if AWS goes down in and us-east-1? Well, let's be honest, they're powering half the internet [laugh] from that one single—Corey: Right.Micheal: Yeah. So, if you think your business is okay running when AWS goes down and half the internet is not going to be working, how do you want to be thinking about that? So, DR is probably not the best reason for you to be even exploring multi-cloud. Rather, you should be thinking about what the cloud providers are offering as a very nuanced offering which your current cloud provider is not offering, and really think about just using those specific items.Corey: So, I agree that multi-cloud for DR purposes is generally not necessarily the best approach with the idea of being able to failover seamlessly, but I like the idea for backups. I mean, Pinterest is a publicly-traded company, which means that among other things, you have to file risk disclosures and be responsive to auditors in a variety of different ways. There are some regulations to start applying to you. And the idea of, well, AWS builds things out in a super effective way, region separation, et cetera, whenever I talk to Amazonians, they are always surprised that anyone wouldn't accept that, “Oh, if you want backups use a different region. Problem solved.”Right, but it is often easier for me to have a rehydrate the business level of backup that would take weeks to redeploy living on another cloud provider than it is for me to explain to all of those auditors and regulators and financial analysts, et cetera why I didn't go ahead and do that path. So, there's always some story for okay, what if AWS decides that they hate us and want to kick us off the platform? Well, that's why legal is involved in those high-level discussions around things like risk, and indemnity, and termination for convenience and for cause clauses, et cetera, et cetera. The idea of making an all-in commitment to a cloud provider goes well beyond things that engineering thinks about. And it's easy for those of us with engineering backgrounds to be incredibly dismissive of that of, “Oh, indemnity? Like, when does AWS ever lose data?” “Yeah, but let's say one day they do. What is your story going to be when asked some very uncomfortable questions by people who wanted you to pay attention to this during the negotiation process?” It's about dotting the i's and crossing the t's, especially with that many commas in the contractual commitments.Micheal: No, it is true. And we did evaluate that as an option, but one of the interesting things about compliance, and especially auditing as well, we generally work with the best in class consultants to help us work through the controls and how we audit, how we look at these controls, how to make sure there's enough accountability going through. The interesting part was in this case, as well, we were able to work with AWS in crafting a lot of those controls and setting up the right expectations as and when we were putting proposals together as well. Now, again, I'm not an expert on this and I know we have a dedicated team from our technical program management organization focused on this, but early on we realized that, to your point, the cost of any form of backups and then being able to audit what's going in, look at all those pipelines, how quickly we can get the data in and out it was proving pretty costly for us. So, we were able to work out some of that within the constructs of what we have with our cloud provider today, and still meet our compliance goals.Corey: That's, on some level, the higher point, too, where everything is everything comes down to context; everything comes down to what the business demands, what the business requires, what the business will accept. And I'm not suggesting that in any case, they're wrong. I'm known for beating the ‘Multi-cloud is a bad default decision' drum, and then people get surprised when they'll have one-on-one conversations, and they say, “Well, we're multi-cloud. Do you think we're foolish?” “No. You're probably doing the right thing, just because you have context that is specific to your business that I, speaking in a general sense, certainly don't have.”People don't generally wake up in the morning and decide they're going to do a terrible job or no job at all at work today, unless they're Facebook's VP of Integrity. So, it's not the sort of thing that lends itself to casual tweet size, pithy analysis very often. There's a strong dive into what is the level of risk a business can accept? And my general belief is that most companies are doing this stuff right. The universal constant in all of my consulting clients that I have spoken to about the in-depth management piece of things is, they've always asked the same question of, “So, this is what we've done, but can you introduce us to the people who are doing it really right, who have absolutely nailed this and gotten it all down?” “It's, yeah, absolutely no one believes that that is them, even the folks who are, from my perspective, pretty close to having achieved it.”But I want to talk a bit more about what you do beyond just the headline-grabbing large dollar figure commitment to a cloud provider story. What does engineering productivity mean at Pinterest? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Micheal: I want to just quickly touch upon that last point about multi-cloud, and like you said, every company works within the context of what they are given and the constraints of their business. It's probably a good time to give a plug to my previous employer, Twitter, who are doing multi-cloud in a reasonably effective way. They are on the data centers, they do have presence on Google Cloud, and AWS, and I know probably things have changed since a couple of years now, but they have embraced that environment pretty effectively to cater to their acquisitions who were on the public cloud, help obviously, with their initial set of investments in the data center, and still continue to scale that out, and explore, in this case, Google Cloud for a variety of other use cases, which sounds like it's been extremely beneficial as well.So, to your point, there is probably no right way to do this. There's always that context, and what you're working with comes into play as part of making these decisions. And it's important to take a lot of these with a grain of salt because you can never understand the decisions, why they were made the way they were made. And for what it's worth, it sort of works out in the end. [laugh]. I've rarely heard a story where it's never worked out, and people are just upset with the deals they've signed. So, hopefully, that helps close that whole conversation about multi-cloud.Corey: I hope so. It's one of those areas where everyone has an opinion and a lot of them do not necessarily apply universally, but it's always fun to take—in that case, great, I'll take the lesser trod path of everyone's saying multi-cloud is great, invariably because they're trying to sell you something. Yeah, I have nothing particularly to sell, folks. My argument has always been, in the absence of a compelling reason not to, pick a provider and go all in. I don't care which provider you pick—which people are sometimes surprised to hear.It's like, “Well, what if they pick a cloud provider that you don't do consulting work for?” Yeah, it turns out, I don't actually need to win every AWS customer over to have a successful working business. Do what makes sense for you, folks. From my perspective, I want this industry to be better. I don't want to sit here and just drum up business for myself and make self-serving comments to empower that. Which apparently is a rare tactic.Micheal: No, that's totally true, Corey. One of the things you do is help people with their bills, so this has come up so many times, and I realize we're sort of going off track a bit from that engineering productivity discussion—Corey: Oh, which is fine. That's this entire show's theme, if it has one.Micheal: [laugh]. So, I want to briefly just talk about the whole billing and how cost management works because I know you spend a lot of time on that and you help a lot of these companies be effective in how they manage their bills. These questions have come up multiple times, even at Pinterest. We actually in the past, when I was leading the infrastructure governance organization, we were working with other companies of our similar size to better understand how they are looking into getting visibility into their cost, setting sort of the right controls and expectations within the engineering organization to plan, and capacity plan, and effectively meet those plans in a certain criteria, and then obviously, if there is any risk to that, actively manage risk. That was like the biggest thing those teams used to do.And we used to talk a lot trade notes, and get a better sense of how a lot of these companies are trying to do—for example, Netflix, or Lyft, or Stripe. I recall Netflix, content was their biggest spender, so cloud spending was like way down in the list of things for them. [laugh]. But regardless, they had an active team looking at this on a day-to-day basis. So, one of the things we learned early on at Pinterest is that start investing in those visibility tools early on.No one can parse the cloud bills. Let's be honest. You're probably the only person who can reverse… [laugh] engineer an architecture diagram from a cloud bill, and I think that's like—definitely you should take a patent for that or something. But in reality, no one has the time to do that. You want to make sure your business leaders, from your finance teams to engineering teams to head of the executives all have a better understanding of how to parse it.So, investing engineering resources, take that data, how do you munch it down to the cost, the utilization across the different vectors of offerings, and have a very insightful discussion. Like, what are certain action items we want to be taking? It's very easy to see, “Oh, we overspent EC2,” and we want to go from there. But in reality, that's not just that thing; you will start finding out that EC2 is being used by your Hadoop infrastructure, which runs hundreds of thousands of jobs. Okay, now who's actually responsible for that cost? You might find that one job which is accruing, sort of, a lot of instance hours over a period of time and a shared multi-tenant environment, how do you attribute that cost to that particular cost center?Corey: And then someone left the company a while back, and that job just kept running in perpetuity. No one's checked the output for four years, I guess it can't be that necessarily important. And digging into it requires context. It turns out, there's no SaaS tool to do this, which is unfortunate for those of us who set out originally to build such a thing. But we discovered pretty early on the context on this stuff is incredibly important.I love the thing you're talking about here, where you're discussing with your peer companies about these things because the advice that I would give to companies with the level of spend that you folks do is worlds apart from what I would advise someone who's building something new and spending maybe 500 bucks a month on their cloud bill. Those folks do not need to hire a dedicated team of people to solve for these problems. At your scale, yeah, you probably should have had some people in [laugh] here looking at this for a while now. And at some point, the guidance changes based upon scale. And if there's one thing that we discover from the horrible pages of Hacker News, it's that people love applying bits of wisdom that they hear in wildly inappropriate situations.How do you think about these things at that scale? Because, a simple example: right now I spend about 1000 bucks a month at The Duckbill Group, on our AWS bill. I know. We have one, too. Imagine that. And if I wind up just committing admin credentials to GitHub, for example, and someone compromises that and start spinning things up to mine all the Bitcoin, yeah, I'm going to notice that by the impact it has on the bill, which will be noticeable from orbit.At the level of spend that you folks are at, at company would be hard-pressed to spin up enough Bitcoin miners to materially move the billing needle on a month-to-month basis, just because of the sheer scope and scale. At small bill volumes, yeah, it's pretty easy to discover the thing that spiking your bill to three times normal. It's usually a managed NAT gateway. At your scale, tripling the bill begins to look suspiciously like the GDP of a small country, so what actually happened here? Invariably, at that scale, with that level of massive multiplier, it's usually the simplest solution, an error somewhere in the AWS billing system. Yes, they exist. Imagine that.Micheal: They do exist, and we've encountered that.Corey: Kind of heartstopping, isn't it?Micheal: [laugh]. I don't know if you remember when we had the big Spectre and the Meltdown, right, and those were interesting scenarios for us because we had identified a lot of those issues early on, given the scale we operate, and we were able to, sort of, obviously it did have an impact on the builds and everything, but that's it; that's why you have these dedicated teams to fix that. But I think one of the points you made, these are large bills and you're never going to have a 3x jump the next day. We're not going to be seeing that. And if that happens, you know, God save us. [laugh].But to your point, one of the things we do still want to be doing is look at trends, literally on a week-over-week basis because even a one percentage move is a pretty significant amount, if you think about it, which could be funding some other aspects of the business, which we would prefer to be investing on. So, we do want to have enough rigor and controls in place in our technical stack to identify and alert when something is off track. And it becomes challenging when you start using those higher-order services from your public cloud provider because there's no clear insights on how do you, kind of, parse that information. One of the biggest challenges we had at Pinterest was tying ownership to all these things.No, using tags is not going to cut it. It was so difficult for us to get to a point where we could put some sense of ownership in all the things and the resources people are using, and then subsequently have the right conversation with our ads infrastructure teams, or our product teams to help drive the cost improvements we want to be seeing. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's not a challenge already, even for the smaller companies who have bills in the tunes of tens and thousands, right?Corey: It is. It's predicting the spend and trying to categorize it appropriately; that's the root of all AWS bill panic on the corporate level. It's not that the bill is 20% higher, so we're going to go broke. Most companies spend far more on payroll than they do on infrastructure—as you mentioned with Netflix, content is a significantly larger [laugh] expense than any of those things; real estate, it's usually right up there too—but instead it's, when you're trying to do business forecasting of, okay, if we're going to have an additional 1000 monthly active users, what will the cost for us be to service those users and, okay, if we're seeing a sudden 20% variance, if that's the new normal, then well, that does change our cost projections for a number of years, what happens? When you're public, there starts to become the question of okay, do we have to restate earnings or what's the deal here?And of course, all this sidesteps past the unfortunate reality that, for many companies, the AWS bill is not a function of how many customers you have; it's how many engineers you hired. And that is always the way it winds up playing out for some reason. “It's why did we see a 10% increase in the bill? Yeah, we hired another data science team. Oops.” It's always seems to be the data science folks; I know I'd beat up on those folks a fair bit, and my apologies. And one day, if they analyze enough of the data, they might figure out why.Micheal: So, this is where I want to give a shout out to our data science team, especially some of the engineers working in the Infrastructure Governance Team putting these charts together, helping us derive insights. So, definitely props to them.I think there's a great segue into the point you made. As you add more engineers, what is the impact on the bottom line? And this is one of the things actually as part of engineering productivity, we think about as well on a long-term basis. Pinterest does have over 1000-plus engineers today, and to large degree, many of them actually have their own EC2 instances today. And I wouldn't say it's a significant amount of cost, but it is a large enough number, were shutting down a c5.9xl can actually fund a bunch of conference tickets or something else.And then you can imagine that sort of the scale you start working with at one point. The nuance here is though, you want to make sure there's enough flexibility for these engineers to do their local development in a sustainable way, but when moving to, say production, we really want to tighten the flexibility a bit so they don't end up doing what you just said, spin up a bunch of machines talking to the API directly which no one will be aware of.I want to share a small anecdote because when back in the day, this was probably four years ago, when we were doing some analysis on our bills, we realized that there was a huge jump every—I believe Wednesday—in our EC2 instances by almost a factor of, like, 500 to 600 instances. And we're like, “Why is this happening? What is going on?” And we found out there was an obscure job written by someone who had left the company, calling an EC2 API to spin up a search cluster of 500 machines on-demand, as part of pulling that ETL data together, and then shutting that cluster down. Which at times didn't work as expected because, you know, obviously, your Hadoop jobs are very predictable, right?So, those are the things we were dealing with back in the day, and you want to make sure—since then—this is where engineering productivity as team starts coming in that our job is to enable every engineer to be doing their best work across code building and deploying the services. And we have done this.Corey: Right. You and I can sit here and have an in-depth conversation about the intricacies of AWS billing in a bunch of different ways because in different ways we both specialize in it, in many respects. But let's say that Pinterest theoretically was foolish enough to hire me before I got into this space as an engineer, for terrifying reasons. And great. I start day one as a typical software developer if such a thing could be said to exist. How do you effectively build guardrails in so that I don't inadvertently wind up spinning up all the EC2 instances available to me within an account, which it turns out are more than one might expect sometimes, but still leave me free to do my job without effectively spending a nine-month safari figuring out how AWS bills work?Micheal: And this is why teams like ours exist, to help provide those tools to help you get started. So today, we actually don't let anyone directly use AWS APIs, or even use the UI for that matter. And I think you'll soon realize, the moment you hit, like, probably 30 or 40 people in your organization, you definitely want to lock it down. You don't want that access to be given to anyone or everyone. And then subsequently start building some higher-order tools or abstraction so people can start using that to control effectively.In this case, if you're a new engineer, Corey, which it seems like you were, at some point—Corey: I still write code like I am, don't worry.Micheal: [laugh]. So yes, you would get access to our internal tool to actually help spin up what we call is a dev app, where you get a chance to, obviously, choose the instance size, not the instance type itself, and we have actually constrained the instance types we have approved within Pinterest as well. We don't give you the entire list you get a chance to choose and deploy to. We actually have constraint to based on the workload types, what are the instance types we want to support because in the future, if we ever want to move from c3 to c5—and I've been there, trust me—it is not an easy thing to do, so you want to make sure that you're not letting people just use random instances, and constrain that by building some of these tools. As a new engineer, you would go in, you'd use the tool, and actually have a dev app provisioned for you with our Pinterest image to get you started.And then subsequently, we'll obviously shut it down if we see you not being using it over a certain amount of time, but those are sort of the guardrails we've put in over there so you never get a chance to directly ever use the EC2 APIs, or any of those AWS APIs to do certain things. The similar thing applies for S3 or any of the higher-order tools which AWS will provide, too.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. 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Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: How does that interplay with AWS launches yet another way to run containers, for example, and that becomes a valuable potential avenue to get some business value for a developer, but the platform you built doesn't necessarily embrace that capability? Or they release a feature to an existing tool that you use that could potentially be a just feature capability story, much more so than a cost savings one. How do you keep track of all of that and empower people to use those things so they're not effectively trying to reimplement DynamoDB on top of EC2?Micheal: That's been a challenge, actually, in the past for us because we've always been very flexible where engineers have had an opportunity to write their own solutions many a times rather than leveraging the AWS services, and of late, that's one of the reasons why we have an infrastructure organization—an extremely lean organization for what it's worth—but then still able to achieve outsized outputs. Where we evaluate a lot of these use cases, as they come in and open up different aspects of what we want to provide say directly from AWS, or build certain abstractions on top of it. Every time we talk about containers, obviously, we always associate that with something like Kubernetes and offerings from there on; we realized that our engineers directly never ask for those capabilities. They don't come in and say, “I need a new container orchestration system. Give that to me, and I'm going to be extremely productive.”What people actually realize is that if you can provide them effective tools and that can help them get their job done, they would be happy with it. For example, like I said, our deployment system, which is actually an open-source system called Teletraan. That is the bread and butter at Pinterest at which my team runs. We operate 100,000-plus machines. We have actually looked into container orchestration where we do have a dedicated Kubernetes team looking at it and helping certain use cases moved there, but we realized that the cost of entire migrations need to be evaluated against certain use cases which can benefit from being on Kubernetes from day one. You don't want to force anyone to move there, but give them the right incentives to move there. Case in point, let's upgrade your OS. Because if you're managing machines, obviously everyone loves to upgrade their OSes.Corey: Well, it's one of the things I love savings plans versus RIs; you talk about the c3 to c5 migration and everyone has a story about one of those, but the most foolish or frustrating reason that I ever saw not to do the upgrade was what we bought a bunch of Reserved Instances on the C3s and those have a year-and-a-half left to run. And it's foolish not on the part of customers—it's economically sound—but on the part of AWS where great, you're now forcing me to take a contractual commitment to something that serves me less effectively, rather than getting out of the way and letting me do my job. That's why it's so important to me at least, that savings plans cover Fargate and Lambda, I wish they covered SageMaker instead of SageMaker having its own thing because once again, you're now architecturally constrained based upon some ridiculous economic model that they have imposed on us. But that's a separate rant for another time.Micheal: No, we actually went through that process because we do have a healthy balance of how we do Reserved Instances and how we look at on-demand. We've never been big users have spot in the past because just the spot market itself, we realized that putting that pressure on our customers to figure out how to manage that is way more. When I say customers, in this case, engineers within the organization.Corey: Oh, yes. “I want to post some pictures on Pinterest, so now I have to understand the spot market. What?” Yeah.Micheal: [laugh]. So, in this case, when we even we're moving from C3 to C5—and this is where the partnership really plays out effectively, right, because it's also in the best interest of AWS to deprecate their aging hardware to support some of these new ones where they could also be making good enough premium margins for what it's worth and give the benefit back to the user. So, in this case, we were able to work out an extremely flexible way of moving to a C5 as soon as possible, get help from them, actually, in helping us do that, too, allocating capacity and working with them on capacity management. I believe at one point, we were actually one of the largest companies with a C3 footprint and it took quite a while for us to move to C5. But rest assured, once we moved, the savings was just immense. We were able to offset any of those RI and we were able to work behind the scenes to get that out. But obviously, not a lot of that is considered in a small-scale company just because of, like you said, those constraints which have been placed in a contractual obligation.Corey: Well, this is an area in which I will give the same guidance to companies of your scale as well as small-scale companies. And by small-scale, I mean, people on the free tier account, give or take, so I do mean the smallest of the small. Whenever you wind up in a scenario where you find yourself architecturally constrained by an economic barrier like this, reach out to your account manager. I promise you have one. Every account, even the tiny free tier accounts, have an account manager.I have an account manager, who I have to say has probably one of the most surreal jobs that AWS, just based upon the conversations I throw past him. But it's reaching out to your provider rather than trying to solve a lot of this stuff yourself by constraining how you're building things internally is always the right first move because the worst case is you don't get anywhere in those conversations. Okay, but at least you explored that, as opposed to what often happens is, “Oh, yeah. I have a switch over here I can flip and solve your entire problem. Does that help anything?”Micheal: Yeah.Corey: You feel foolish finding that out only after nine months of dedicated work, it turns out.Micheal: Which makes me wonder, Corey. I mean, do you see a lot of that happening where folks don't tend to reach out to their account managers, or rather treat them as partners in this case, right? Because it sounds like there is this unhealthy tension, I would say, as to what is the best help you could be getting from your account managers in this case.Corey: Constantly. And the challenge comes from a few things, in my experience. The first is that the quality of account managers and the technical account managers—the folks who are embedded many cases with your engineering teams in different ways—does vary. AWS is scaling wildly and bursting at the seams, and people are hard to scale.So, some are fantastic, some are decidedly less so, and most folks fall somewhere in the middle of that bell curve. And it doesn't take too many poor experiences for the default to be, “Oh, those people are useless. They never do anything we want, so why bother asking them?” And that leads to an unhealthy dynamic where a lot of companies will wind up treating their AWS account manager types as a ticket triage system, or the last resort of places that they'll turn when they should be involved in earlier conversations.I mean, take Pinterest as an example of this. I'm not sure how many technical account managers you have assigned to your account, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the ratio of technical account managers to engineers working on the environment is incredibly lopsided. It's got to be a high ratio just because of the nature of how these things work. So, there are a lot of people who are actively working on things that would almost certainly benefit from a more holistic conversation with your AWS account team, but it doesn't occur to them to do it just because of either perceived biases around levels of competence, or poor experiences in the past, or simply not knowing the capabilities that are there. If I could tell one story around the AWS account management story, it would be talk to folks sooner about these things.And to be clear, Pinterest has this less than other folks, but AWS does themselves no favors by having a product strategy of, “Yes,” because very often in service of those conversations with a number of companies, there is the very real concern of are they doing research so that they can launch a service that competes with us? Amazon as a whole launching a social network is admittedly one of the most hilarious ideas I [laugh] can come up with and I hope they take a whack at it just to watch them learn all these lessons themselves, but that is again, neither here nor there.Micheal: That story is very interesting, and I think you mentioned one thing; it's just that lack of trust, or even knowing what the account managers can actually do for you. There seems to be just a lack of education on that. And we also found it the hard way, right? I wouldn't say that Pinterest figured this out on day one. We evolved sort of a relationship over time. Yes, our time… engagements are, sort of, lopsided, but we were able to negotiate that as part of deals as we learned a bit more on what we can and we cannot do, and how these individuals are beneficial for Pinterest as well. And—Corey: Well, here's a question for you, without naming names—and this might illustrate part of the challenge customers have—how long has your account manager—not the technical account managers, but your account manager—been assigned to your account?Micheal: I've been at Pinterest for five years and I've been working with the same person. And he's amazing.Corey: Which is incredibly atypical. At a lot of smaller companies, it feels like, “Oh, I'm your account manager being introduced to you.” And, “Are you the third one this year? Great.” What happens is that if the account manager excels, very often they get promoted and work with a smaller number of accounts at larger spend, and whereas if they don't find that AWS is a great place for them for a variety of reasons, they go somewhere else and need to be backfilled.So, at the smaller account, it's, “Great. I've had more account managers in a year than you've had in five.” And that is often the experience when you start seeing significant levels of rotation, especially on the customer engineering side where you wind up with you have this big kickoff, and everyone's aware of all the capabilities and you look at it three years later, and not a single person who was in that kickoff is still involved with the account on either side, and it's just sort of been evolving evolutionarily from there. One thing that we've done in some of our larger accounts as part of our negotiation process is when we see that the bridges have been so thoroughly burned, we will effectively request a full account team cycle, just because it's time to get new faces in where the customer, in many cases unreasonably, is not going to say, “Yeah but a year-and-a-half ago you did this terrible thing and we're still salty about it.” Fine, whatever. I get it. People relationships are hard. Let's go ahead and swap some folks out so that there are new faces with new perspectives because that helps.Micheal: Well, first off, if you had so many switches in account manager, I think that's something speaks about [laugh] how you've been working, too. I'm just kidding. There are a bu—Corey: Entirely possible. In seriousness, yes. But if you talk to—like, this is not just me because in my case, yeah, I feel like my account manager is whoever drew the short straw that week because frankly, yeah, that does seem like a great punishment to wind up passing out to someone who is underperforming. But for a lot of folks who are in the mid-tier, like, spending $50 to $100,000 a month, this is a very common story.Micheal: Yeah. Actually, we've heard a bit about this, too. And like you said, I think maintaining context is the most thing. You really want your account manager to vouch for you, really be your champion in those meetings because AWS, like you said is so large, getting those exec time, and reviews, and there's so many things that happen, your account manager is the champion for you, or right there. And it's important and in fact in your best interest to have a great relationship with them as well, not treat them as, oh yet another vendor.And I think that's where things start to get a bit messy because when you start treating them as yet another vendor, there is no incentive for them to do the best for you, too. You know, people relationships are hard. But that said though, I think given the amount of customers like these cloud companies are accruing, I wouldn't be surprised; every account manager seems to be extremely burdened. Even in our case, although I've been having a chance to work with this one person for a long time, we've actually expanded. We have now multiple account managers helping us out as we've started scaling to use certain aspects of AWS which we've never explored before.We were a bit constrained and reserved about what service we want to use because there have been instances where we have tried using something and we have hit the wall pretty immediately. API rate limits, or it's not ready for primetime, and we're like, “Oh, my God. Now, what do we do?” So, we have a bit more cautious. But that said, over time, having an account manager who understands how you work, what scale you have, they're able to advocate with the internal engineering teams within the cloud provider to make the best of supporting you as a customer and tell that success story all the way out.So yeah, I can totally understand how this may be hard, especially for those small companies. For what it's worth, I think the best way to really think about it is not treat them as your vendor, but really go out on a limb there. Even though you signed a deal with them, you want to make sure that you have the continuing relationship with them to have—represent your voice better within the company. Which is probably hard. [laugh].Corey: That's always the hard part. Honestly, if this were the sort of thing that were easy to automate, or you could wind up building out something that winds up helping companies figure out how to solve these things programmatically, talk about interesting business problems that are only going to get larger in the fullness of time. This is not going away, even if AWS stopped signing up new customers entirely right now, they would still have years of growth ahead of them just from organic growth. And take a company with the scale of Pinterest and just think of how many years it would take to do a full-on exodus, even if it became priority number one. It's not realistic in many cases, which is why I've never been a big fan of multi-cloud as an approach for negotiation. Yeah, AWS has more data on those points than any of us do; they're not worried about it. It just makes you sound like an unsophisticated negotiator. Pick your poison and lean in.Micheal: That is the truth you just mentioned, and I probably want to give a call out to our head of infrastructure, [Coburn 00:42:13]. He's also my boss, and he had brought this perspective as well. As part of any negotiation discussions, like you just said, AWS has way more data points on this than what we think we can do in terms of talking about, “Oh, we are exploring this other cloud provider.” And it's—they would be like, “Yeah. Do tell me more [laugh] how that's going.”And it's probably in the best interest to never use that as a negotiation tactic because they clearly know the investments that's going to build on what you've done, so you might as well be talking more—again, this is where that relationship really plays together because you want both of them to be successful. And it's in their best interest to still keep you happy because the good thing about at least companies of our size is that we're probably, like, one phone call away from some of their executive team, where we could always talk about what didn't work for us. And I know not everyone has that opportunity, but I'm really hoping and I know at least with some of the interactions we've had with the AWS teams, they're actively working and building that relationship more and more, giving access to those customer advisory boards, and all of them to have those direct calls with the executives. I don't know whether you've seen that in your experience in helping some of these companies?Corey: Have a different approach to it. It turns out when you're super loud and public and noisy about AWS and spend too much time in Seattle, you start to spend time with those people on a social basis. Because, again, I'm obnoxious and annoying to a lot of AWS folks, but I'm also having an obnoxious habit of being right in most of the things I'm pointing out. And that becomes harder and harder to ignore. I mean, part of the value that I found in being able to do this as a consultant is that I begin to compare and contrast different customer environments on a consistent ongoing basis.I mean, the reason that negotiation works well from my perspective is that AWS does a bunch of these every week, and customers do these every few years with AWS. And well, we do an awful lot of them, too, and it's okay, we've seen different ways things can get structured and it doesn't take too long and too many engagements before you start to see the points of commonality in how these things flow together. So, when we wind up seeing things that a customer is planning on architecturally and looking to do in the future, and, “Well, wait a minute. Have you talked to the folks negotiating the contract about this? Because that does potentially have bearing and it provides better data than what AWS is gathering just through looking at overall spend trends. So yeah, bring that up. That is absolutely going to impact the type of offer you get.”It just comes down to understanding the motivators that drive folks and it comes down to, I think understanding the incentives. I will say that across the board, I have never yet seen a deal from AWS come through where it was, “Okay, at this point you're just trying to hoodwink the customer and get them to sign on something that doesn't help them.” I've seen mistakes that can definitely lead to that impression, and I've seen areas where they're doing data is incomplete and they're making assumptions that are not borne out in reality. But it's not one of those bad faith type—Micheal: Yeah.Corey: —of negotiations. If it were, I would be framing a lot of this very differently. It sounds weird to say, “Yeah, your vendor is not trying to screw you over in this sense,” because look at the entire IT industry. How often has that been true about almost any other vendor in the fullness of time? This is something a bit different, and I still think we're trying to grapple with the repercussions of that, from a negotiation standpoint and from a long-term business continuity standpoint, when your faith is linked—in a shared fate context—with your vendor.Micheal: It's in their best interest as well because they're trying to build a diversified portfolio. Like, if they help 100 companies, even if one of them becomes the next Pinterest, that's great, right? And that continued relationship is what they're aiming for. So, assuming any bad faith over there probably is not going to be the best outcome, like you said. And two, it's not a zero-sum game.I always get a sense that when you're doing these negotiations, it's an all-or-nothing deal. It's not. You have to think they're also running a business and it's important that you as your business, how okay are you with some of those premiums? You cannot get a discount on everything, you cannot get the deal or the numbers you probably want almost everything. And to your point, architecturally, if you're moving in a certain direction where you think in the next three years, this is what your usage is going to be or it will come down to that, obviously, you should be investing more and negotiating that out front rather than managed NAT [laugh] gateways, I guess. So, I think that's also an important mindset to take in as part of any of these negotiations. Which I'm assuming—I don't know how you folks have been working in the past, but at least that's one of the key items we have taken in as part of any of these discussions.Corey: I would agree wholeheartedly. I think that it just comes down to understanding where you're going, what's important, and again in some cases knowing around what things AWS will never bend contractually. I've seen companies spend six weeks or more trying to get to negotiate custom SLAs around services. Let me save everyone a bunch of time and money; they will not grant them to you.Micheal: Yeah.Corey: I promise. So, stop asking for them; you're not going to get them. There are other things they will negotiate on that they're going to be highly case-dependent. I'm hesitant to mention any of them just because, “Well, wait a minute, we did that once. Why are you talking about that in public?” I don't want to hear it and confidentiality matters. But yeah, not everything is negotiable, but most things are, so figuring out what levers and knobs and dials you have is important.Micheal: We also found it that way. AWS does cater to their—they are a platform and they are pretty clear in how much engagement—even if we are one of their top customers, there's been many times where I know their product managers have heavily pushed back on some of the requests we have put in. And that makes me wonder, they probably have the same engagement even with the smallest of customers, there's always an implicit assumption that the big fish is trying to get the most out of your public cloud providers. To your point, I don't think that's true. We're rarely able to negotiate anything exclusive in terms of their product offerings just for us, if that makes sense.Case in point, tell us your capacity [laugh] for x instances or type of instances, so we as a company would know how to plan out our scale-ups or scale-downs. That's not going to happen exclusively for you. But those kind of things are just, like, examples we have had a chance to work with their product managers and see if, can we get some flexibility on that? For what it's worth, though, they are willing to find a middle ground with you to make sure that you get your answers and, obviously, you're being successful in your plans to use certain technologies they offer or [unintelligible 00:48:31] how you use their services.Corey: So, I know we've gone significantly over time and we are definitely going to do another episode talking about a lot of the other things that you're involved in because I'm going to assume that your full-time job is not worrying about the AWS bill. In fact, you do a fair number of things beyond that; I just get stuck on that one, given that it is but I eat, sleep, breathe, and dream about.Micheal: Absolutely. I would love to talk more, especially about how we're enabling our engineers to be extremely productive in this new world, and how we want to cater to this whole cloud-native environment which is being created, and make sure people are doing their best work. But regardless, Corey, I mean, this has been an amazing, insightful chat, even for me. And I really appreciate you having me on the show.Corey: No, thank you for joining me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, and how you think about things, where can they find you? Because I'm also going to go out on a limb and assume you're also probably hiring, given that everyone seems to be these days.Micheal: Well, that is true. And I wasn't planning to make a hiring pitch but I'm glad that you leaned into that one. Yes, we are hiring and you can find me on Twitter at twitter dot com slash M-I-C-H-E-A-L. I am spelled a bit differently, so make sure you can hit me up, and my DMs are open. And obviously, we have all our open roles listed on pinterestcareers.com as well.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:49:45]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Micheal: Thank you, Corey. It was really been great on your show.Corey: And I'm sure we'll do it again in the near future. Micheal Benedict, Head of Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a long rambling comment about exactly how many data centers Pinterest could build instead.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 months show Mikey drags Andy off to a mythical journey of swords and sorcery and Grimlock, with the 1st and the 2nd issue of King Grimlock. Will the lads find this to be a fun adventure or will the 2 genres of magic and sci-fi not mix well?

With the arrival of the Shattered Glass line to the toy world comes a long a tie in comic to help fill out the world and oddly enough they started this new world off with a Blurr Spotlight, but remember he's evil! So how is the writing, art, you know the usual stuff Mikey and Andy talk about when it comes to comics.

For this month Mikey leads Andy down to the jungle.....but wait, what's that? ITS BEAST WARS!!!!!! IDW to be specific, the lads talked about issue 1 months ago so how are the rest of the issues from the first story arc?

Episode 281 of the Seibertron.com Twincast / Podcast is almost all about the just released Transformers War for Cybertron: Kingdom show, available now streaming on Netflix. The cast goes through the six episode series episode by episode, covering the story, characters, and how everything fits in to the wider trilogy. The introduction of the Beast Wars characters provides ample room for discussion as the talk looks at how these characters like Optimus Primal, Cheetor, Dinobot, Blackarachnia and others are handled, including the good and not so good parts of the voice performances. The episodes covering the show's climactic moments are in the spotlight next with opinions offered on Starscream's story as well as how Unicron is fit in to the proceedings. The ending of Kingdom, how it handles some characters from earlier chapters such as Siege and its overall pacing come up to round out the cartoon discussion. The episode concludes with a shorter than usual "Bragging Rights" segment where the cast members share their recent Transformers toy acquisitions.

How many years has it been since Mikey and Andy talked about the Taskmaster mini series Unthinkable? A long time it seems, so after so many years will the lads still enjoy this comic as much as they did when they read it originally?

Mikey and Andy continue on into Immortal Hulk with Vol. 3, yes this time its more then like 3 issues this time so thats a plus, who will Hulk and crew get out of SUPER HELL!!!!

Ok people this ones a little late out, but Mikey and Andy cover only 3 issues of Immortal hulk, why only 3? ummm because we messed up last time and covered too many, volume 2 contains the Hulk vs the Avengers and these 3 issues so....whoops. Next time the lads will do all of volume 3, promise.

The Seibertron.com Twincast / Podcast's 275th episode begins with a discussion on NFTs, what they are, what they have to do with Transformers, how they're created, why that has to deal with cryptocurrency, and who's concerned about its impacts. From there the talk goes on to opine on the just revealed Shattered Glass Megatron figure before the show moves into listener questions for the remainder of the episode. Speculation on the next round of official product reveals and what will be in them kick off the question and answer session, and this is followed by some thoughts about reissues in other older product lines such as Transformers: Armada and Cybertron in light of the recently revealed Beast Wars reissue lineup. Questions about favorites in Cyberverse lead to characters and lore coming front and center before we bring it back to toys with character deco paradigms and the color schemes that are just plain ugly. A final listener question has the cast analyzing which older Classics or Generations toys still have a place among the toys from the most recent years depicting the same characters. A quick round of the recurring Bragging Rights segment then closes out another episode.

Mikey and Andy finish talking about Marvel's Annihilation Book 3, was it any good in the end? Did Mikey like it? DID YOOOOOOU????

This is a  extra for the month since the Beast Wars issue 1 comic came out Mikey decided to strike the iron was hot and get Andy on to talk about this new mini series, the proper show will still be on for this month as well. So how did it come off? was it a good start or what? join the Moonbase boi's and find out.

Mikey and Andy get back into the comics for this year with Marvel's Annihilation book 2 which contains Silver Surfer, Ronan and Super Skrull to set to stage before the even kicks into gear. 

To go forward, we have to go back and this time around, we're going back to 1988...These aren't the usual suspects that you are used to. These kids are the new royalty of Edgar Allen Poe Middle School, here in Garrett, MD., and today they are joining the ranks of the few that can see the truth beyond the veil. The adults have no idea what is going on, and the Autobot's Human Allies in Teletraan 2 are too busy dealing with a pending apocalypse, so it falls to these four heroes to risk life and limb in the fight to save Garrett.Watch LIVE on Twitch at 8pm ET Mon, Tues, and Thurs:http://www.twitch.tv/unMadeGaming== CAST ==Game Master - https://twitter.com/GrimJack21502Heather Jones - https://twitter.com/Drathdir Derrick Lewis - https://twitter.com/necrot1cScarlett Blake - https://twitter.com/LightningSpaz09Jesse "JD" Davis - https://twitter.com/baconfive0Editing by @gnomedicMusic / Instrumental by Aries Beats @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1At_G-08HQAtari Twilight is an unMadeGaming production. If you would like to learn more about the world of Atari Twilight, and get some behind the scenes looks, please join on Patreon at Patreon.com/unMadeGaming. Thank you for joining us on this 80's throwback, and we’ll see you next time on Atari Twilight.

For this month in comics Andy introduces young Mikey to cosmic Marvel with Book 1 of 3, Annihilation from 2005, so you know post Marvel movies. Will they have good or bad things to say about it looking back a it now and how well does it do introduction new comers to the Cosmic characters and setting. Anyway ENJOY!

To go forward, we have to go back and this time around, we're going back to 1988...These aren't the usual suspects that you are used to. These kids are the new royalty of Edgar Allen Poe Middle School, here in Garrett, MD., and today they are joining the ranks of the few that can see the truth beyond the veil. The adults have no idea what is going on, and the Autobot's Human Allies in Teletraan 2 are too busy dealing with a pending apocalypse, so it falls to these four heroes to risk life and limb in the fight to save Garrett.Watch LIVE on Twitch at 8pm ET Mon, Tues, and Thurs:http://www.twitch.tv/unMadeGaming== CAST ==Game Master - https://twitter.com/GrimJack21502Heather Jones - https://twitter.com/Drathdir Derrick Lewis - https://twitter.com/necrot1cScarlett Blake - https://twitter.com/LightningSpaz09Jesse "JD" Davis - https://twitter.com/baconfive0Editing by @gnomedicMusic / Instrumental by Aries Beats @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1At_G-08HQAtari Twilight is an unMadeGaming production. If you would like to learn more about the world of Atari Twilight, and get some behind the scenes looks, please join on Patreon at Patreon.com/unMadeGaming. Thank you for joining us on this 80's throwback, and we’ll see you next time on Atari Twilight.

So things are changing up for a bit on From the Files, Mikey and Andy will be taking a break from the mainline of TF comics and letting a few build up to hopefully have more to say about them in the future. So the main show this week will look at issues 2#-7# of vol.1 of Immortal Hulk, where issue 1#? well that was a Patreon show so.......why cover it again.

Gundam and the unicorn trilogy, what could go wrong?

bay films, banter, All the things you could ever want out of a Transformers podcast!

This month the Mikey and the Andy talk about Transformers issue 21# and both Transformer Galaxies issue 7# and 8# will they be good or will they be poo? join the lads and find out.

Our Autobots roll out as we visit The Transformers Wiki this week on the pod. Random pages include Tutor Bot, Sub-Atlantica, and Nemo. Matt: mastodon.cloud/@mattherron Louisa: mastodon.xyz/@Louisa Jeff: mastodon.social/@jeffjk Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Twitter @hackthenetpod or e-mail us at SeeingReddit@gmail.com! Tell your friends if you enjoy the show! Our theme song is […]

Sliding in before the finish line of the month comics sneak out for Mikey and Andy to finally chat about, so Transformers issue #20 is out and has the pacing finally picked up for the series?

Well......there isnt much in the way of comic from last month, although there is something later this month, so this show should tidy us over till something comes out. Mikey an Andy take a look at the manga Mazinger Vs Transformers. 

We have 3 podcast comics to go through this month Transformers issue 18# and 19# and Transformers Galaxies issue 6#, hope you peeps enjoy listen to Andy and Mikey flap on about them.

Invisibility spray! Teletraan characterization! Breaking jets over your knee like a twig! There's a lot to take in this week. Megatron does some techno-nonsense to the recharging chamber and almost every single Autobot turns into a top class jerk for a little bit there. Are they better at being evil than the Decepticons? Ehhhh, I won't say no. Joe and Kristen have some questions about solving the entire world's energy problems and... oh man, wait. It's a female scientist! Dang, look at her run in that skirt and those heels! Also it's kind of a Jazz episode? Sort of. Follow Joe (@awktapus) and Kristen (@marinakazam) on Twitter! Email us at cwtapod@gmail.com with questions/comments! CWTA artwork by Madeline (@ignoretherobot) on Twitter. Check out Kristen's side project, ASMr/relationships, here!: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/asmr-relationships/id1474592637

On the show for this month IDW comics brings us the Transformers main line comic series issue 16# and 17#, finishing off the Constructicons story in Transformers Galaxies issue 4# and starting the Cliffjumper story in issue 5#

as always TF news toy pick ups, we review g1 EP8 Dinobots SOS and more Banana hammicks?

more reviews pick ups and TF news

review of the g1 episode Fire in the Sky trash talk and so much TF news

It's 2020 and this is the first episode of Teletraan 2 where Mikey and Andy can start digging into the Transformer comics for the year. We are kicking off with a surprisingly good assortment this month with issue 15# of the main series and issue 3# of TF Galaxies, but is this description you're reading now right now a LIE or are this a both decent issue? Find out with the boi's.

Cyberverse deluxes talk. TF news is pretty light this week.

TF News g1 ep4 reveiw and so much more!

Earth Rise wave 2 news! More then meets the eye part 3 review and BANANA HAMMOCKS!

Small amount of news this week but what is our top 5 seige figs for the year? What are our fav. Transformers memories? Tune in and find out

We return to another month and another batch of Transformer comics, on the menu for this episode Mikey and Andy chat about issue 13# of the main Transformers comic, issue 2# of Transformers Galaxies

This month for TF comics Mikey and Andy cover IDW Transformers issues 11# and 12# as well as the new series kicking off Transformers Galaxies issue 1#.

Mikey and Andy nip in at the end of the month to talk about some comics, so whats on the board today you ask? Transformers issues 9# and 10# as the tension on Cybertron builds does the pace?

Another month has come and dropped off comics into the digital laps of Mikey and Andy, so on the show the lads talk about issues 7# and 8# of the current Transformers ongoing series. Will the pace come to a screeching halt or will the story start rolling as it seems to have done last month?

This time out, we have feedback! Plus, we watch 2 more episode of The Transformers! In "City of Steel," the Decepticons turn New York City into New Cybertron. In "Attack of the Autobots," Megatron sabotages Teletraan-1 so that the Autobots are turned into Decepticons.Feedback for this show can be sent to: charliesgeekcast@gmail.comYou can subscribe to Charlie’s Geekcast through iTunes, Google Play, the RSS Feed, Stitcher, TuneIn Radio, Spotify, or you can also download the episode directly here. You can also visit the show's Facebook group page. For complete show notes, including more images, please be sure to visit the blog.

This time out, we have feedback! Plus, we watch 2 more episode of The Transformers! In "City of Steel," the Decepticons turn New York City into New Cybertron. In "Attack of the Autobots," Megatron sabotages Teletraan-1 so that the Autobots are turned into Decepticons.

This time out, we have feedback! Plus, we watch 2 more episode of The Transformers! In "City of Steel," the Decepticons turn New York City into New Cybertron. In "Attack of the Autobots," Megatron sabotages Teletraan-1 so that the Autobots are turned into Decepticons.Feedback for this show can be sent to: charliesgeekcast@gmail.comYou can subscribe to Charlie’s Geekcast through iTunes, Google Play, the RSS Feed, Stitcher, TuneIn Radio, Spotify, or you can also download the episode directly here. You can also visit the show's Facebook group page. For complete show notes, including more images, please be sure to visit the blog.

Welcome children to another month of Transformers comics, Andy and Mikey are hitting you with issues 5# and 6#, has the story started rolling and what will the guys think of the new artist on issue 6?

Another month and another 2 issues of the 2019 Transformers series, does the story deepen and grab young Andy and Mikey? Well the lads let you know when they talk about issues 3# and 4#!

IDW begins its reboot of the Transformers comic universe and Mikey and Andy chat about the first 2 issues of this new beginning and new world, is it an exciting new time and a good place to jump in or is it the worst thing ever?

Sorry guys for this one coming out late but here it is, Mikey and Andy in this episode cover issues 2# and 3# of Gobots.....its...different, issues 2# and 3# of Star Trek vs Transformers.

The Autobots are helpless to stop Trypticon as it destroys Teletraan 1 and their only hope is that Metroplex is able to save them in time. Also, John spills his beer! (Apologies for the low quality of John's audio on this episode) Find Paul and John on Twitter.

So with the end of the main Transformers story for IDW what will Mikey and Andy talk about it until the reboot/relaunch happens? Well the side Transformer comics like Star Trek vs Transformers #1 and we look at the first issue of Gobots. 

So here we are, we come to the end of things, or at least the end of the IDW comic continuity for Transformers as we currently know it before it gets rebooted in 2019 (apparently. So Mikey and Andy talk about the last issues of Optimus Prime and Lost light, both of which are 25#, hey handy that. So how does it all pan out, will it blow the pants off Andy, will it leave Mikey as a quivering wreck? Join us for this show and find out.

In this episode, we geek out on a special surprise. Joining us this week is TokuChris! He's joining us this week for our main topic, an announcement of sorts. TokuChris, Chris Long, and I will be joining forces on an all-new Podcast named Teletraan Fun! As the name suggests, this show will be Transformers focused. While we're currently going to discuss the news, our mission is to watch, commentate, and review EVERY EPISODE of Transformers. From G1 to Beast Wars to Cyberverse to whatever comes after. For this episode of Geek Each Week, we discuss the show and go over our history with the franchise. Look for Teletraan Fun coming to a...listening service near you! --- Next Week's Topic: Back to the Future! --- You can catch us on Twitter (@GeekEachWeek), Facebook (@GeekEachWeek), or drop us a line at geekeachweekcast@gmail.com! --- You can download the enhanced M4A of the show with album art and chapter titles at this mirror link here. Alternatively, you can download a standard MP3 of the show here.

Finally Mikey and Andy get to talk about comics this month. With delays for IDW this was the best the boi's could do and so on this episode the lads talk about Lost Light issues 23# and 24#, Optimus Prime issues 23# and 24#. So yes, this will be a long episode so strap in for ALL OF THE COMICS............ALLLLLLL OF THEM.

This month isnt as mad as last month, with only the standard comics to talk about so Mikey and Andy sit down and chat about Lost Light issue 22#, Optimus Prime 22#.

8 comics this month guys.......8!!!!! my god there is a mighty girthy amount to cover so Mikey and Andy do what they do and spitball about all of them. So we have Lost Light issues 19#-21#, Optimus Prime 20#-21# and we kick off the end of the universe with Unicron issues 0#-2#. We hope you enjoy the show and if you like you can tell us what you think of them as well.

In this months comic line up Mikey and Andy talk about Lost Light issue 18#, Optimus Prime issue 19# and Requiem of the Wreckers, the culmination of Nick Roches work on Springer's story through the IDW comics.

Oh my 4 comics to cover this month on the show, Optimus issues 17# and 18#, Lost Light issues 16# and 17# a.  Lots to cover all exciting issues for this month so we hope you enjoy the show.

This month Mikey and Andy chat about issue 15# of Lost light which might be the last of the scavengers stories, issue 16# of Optimus Prime with Onyx Prime on Cybertron what does this mean for the Transformers and the Optimus Prime Annual, Thundercracker writes a movie....ok.

COMICS!!!!! Mikey and Andy talk about the last batch of comics for the month on this episode of From the Files of Teletraan 2 with issue 13# and 14# for the lost light, release schedules were the reason for the 2 in one this month. We also have Optimus Prime issue 15# and for the guys on Patreon we have issue 2# of Transformers vs Visionaries.What do the boys like? What do they hate? have a listen and find out. Enjoy the show :)

On the show this month Mikey and Andy are joined by the one and only Chris also know as Vangelus from WTF@TFW and the youtubes. They get to talk about Lost Light issue 12#. Optimus Prime issue 14# and Till All Are One comes back for its final hurrah with an Annual.

Comic talk just before Christmas rolls around this year, so Andy and Mikey get down to talk about Optimus Prime issue 13# and Lost Light issue 11#. How doe these comics stack up? well have a listen and see what the lads think. They also have a quick round up talk on Rom vs Transformers as well.

On this months episode of From the Files of Teletraan 2, Mikey and Andy talk about the IDW Transformer comic Lost Light issue 10#, Optimus Prime issue 12#.

On the show this month Mikey and Andy talk about Lost Light issue 9# and issue 11# of Optimus Prime for the Transformers comic releases. Problems with their release schedule forced us to push these back issues back to this month.

Since the IDW release schedule has been a bit......wonky recently its a perfect time for Andy and Amiee (ladywreck) to talk about what they thought about the TFNation exclusive comic, Trail and Error. Is this convention comic up to snuff? Have a listen to these 2 peeps gab about it and find out!

This month is late but so were the comic releases so what can a do? This time Andy and Mikey cover issues 10# of Optimus Prime, the last issue of Till All Are One issue 12# and issue 8# of Lost light.

No Mikey for this show to join Andy in comic talk so Amiee, Ladywreck comes in to do what sh does best and thats comics. On this show there's issue 7# of Lost light, issue 9 of Optimus Prime and issue 11# of Till All Are One. For the Patreons we talk about Rom vs Transformers issue 1# which was super good. So enjoy the IDW comic filled show everyone.

On this months episode Mikey and Andy talk about this months IDW comics and on this months Transformers list we have issue 10# of Till All Are One, , issues 7# and 8# of Optimus Prime and issue 6# of Lost Light. A good amount of comics to get through and talk about on this months episode so get listening and get enjoying.....that doesnt sound/read right...oh well.

Its comic times once again everyone and this time its Optimus Prime #6, Lost light 5# and Till All Are One 9#, so lets hear Mikey and Andy's thoughts on this months installment of Transformer comics.

Downloaded From The Files of Teletraan 2 this week Mikey and Andy talk about issues 5# of Optimus Prime, issue 4# of Lost Light and issue 8# of Till All Are One. All the issues were light are huge story discussion points this week and so it makes for a quick one. Hope you all enjoy it guys.

So it seems Andy forgot to upload last months episode to you......the people (bane voice) Whoops! So here it is, but don't fret next week you will still get the free version of Episode 8. This episode the lads cover Optimus Prime issue 4# and Lost Light issue 3#, so its late but get ready for them comics!

Comic time nerds!! We continue with Optimus Prime issue 2 and 3, finally now up to date with it, Lost Light issue 2 and Till All Are One issue 7.

So this is the first episode where the boys talk about individual comics rather then a completed story, so its a bit of a rocky start for Mikey and Andy as they find their feet. But this month they talk about Optimus Prime issue 1, Lost Light issue 1 and Till All Are One issues 5 and 6.

As a gift to you guys this will be the full episode, its basically what the Patreon Supports get. So in this episode Mikey, Andy and Chris (Vange1us from WTF@TFW) discuss their thoughts on the small run called Titans Return and then the big IDW crossover event Revolutions which brings in new teams to the IDW comic world like GI Joe, Mask and Rom the Space Knight as well as others. Did the lads enjoy these two events or now? Have a listen and find out.

In this months Files the lads take a look at Windblade and her comic series roles from her 1st series "Windblade Vol 1", "Windblade Vol 2" and finally "Till All Are One". Mikey leads the discussion as always with Andy being there dropping his thoughts on it and they are joined by Charles aka Big C from the TransMissions Podcast. We hope you all enjoy the show.

And so the Moonbase 2 boys get to try and cover  about 25 or so issues of season 2 of Transformers Robots In Disguise/Transformers......that comic series that was out along side MTMTE....the one with Galvatron, that one. So with a lot to cover some stuff will have been missed or edited out as is the nature of using a hosting site for a podcast but enjoy the show. 

The 1st episode of Moonbase 2's attempt at doing a comic discussion show and what better way to kick it off then by talking about Sins of the Wreckers, which is now available to buy in graphic novel form. So for the first show we thought who better to add to this 1st episode the Underbase's own Amiee, Ladywreck, she loves Nick.....so it just made sense. This is a trail run so all feedback is appreciated. if you wish to leave it on the Facebook page it would be appreciated.