Podcasts about Terraform

On Day Two Cloud we've had a lot of conversations about using infrastructure as code. We've looked at solutions like Ansible, Terraform, the AWS CDK, and Pulumi. Which begs the question, which IaC solution should you learn? A Domain Specific Language (DSL)? A General Purpose Programming Language (GPPL)? Something else? We discuss. The post Day Two Cloud 153: IaC With GPPL Or DSL? IDK appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On Day Two Cloud we've had a lot of conversations about using infrastructure as code. We've looked at solutions like Ansible, Terraform, the AWS CDK, and Pulumi. Which begs the question, which IaC solution should you learn? A Domain Specific Language (DSL)? A General Purpose Programming Language (GPPL)? Something else? We discuss. The post Day Two Cloud 153: IaC With GPPL Or DSL? IDK appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On Day Two Cloud we've had a lot of conversations about using infrastructure as code. We've looked at solutions like Ansible, Terraform, the AWS CDK, and Pulumi. Which begs the question, which IaC solution should you learn? A Domain Specific Language (DSL)? A General Purpose Programming Language (GPPL)? Something else? We discuss. The post Day Two Cloud 153: IaC With GPPL Or DSL? IDK appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Matt and Nic return for a fiery episode of deals and news. In this episode:  Is miner selling backed up by the on-chain data?  Is Massachusetts open to pro-crypto legislation?  FTX provides credit support to embattled crypto lenders  Why private market transactions do not constitute bailouts in the pejorative sense Was 3 Arrows just a case of too much leverage and bad trades, or was it fraud?  Does the 3AC situation stray into criminal territory?  There were significant harms stemming from the 3AC scheme Kyle's infamous On The Brink appearance and his special request  Did GBTC bring down 3AC?  Are we entering the PvP era of crypto twitter?  The story behind 3AC's yacht  Solend requisitions user funds  Wartime versus peacetime governance in DeFi South Korea puts a travel ban on Terraform labs employees DYDX is leaving Ethereum and moving to their own chain  The relationship between lender balance sheets and GBTC  Is there a case to be made for winding down GBTC? How to think about the GBTC trade today How the 3AC GBTC trade is like LTCM  How to think about the "macro"  Is the 'crypto hedge fund that also does VC' obsolete?  Sponsor notes: Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter

Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/[00:00:00] Intro[00:01:29] Mercedes-Benz runs on 900 Kubernetes clustershttps://www.infoworld.com/article/3664052/why-mercedes-benz-runs-on-900-kubernetes-clusters.html[00:03:02] Terraform Cloud Adds Drift Detectionhttps://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-cloud-adds-drift-detection-for-infrastructure-management[00:06:03] HCP Waypoint Private Beta Programhttps://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-the-hcp-waypoint-private-beta-program[00:10:41] Using tfedit for terraform-provider-aws v4 upgradehttps://github.com/minamijoyo/tfedit#awsv4upgrade[00:13:09] Internet Crashed on June 21, 2022 (aka Cloudflare outage)https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-june-21-2022/[00:14:17] Terraform Registry Outage[00:14:50] Random announcements[00:23:14] Why go to tf cloud if you're already using S3 as your state backend[00:31:50] Anyone here have any IP Address Management solutions they would recommend? [00:37:22] GitOps developer experience[00:50:49] Does anyone know tools that generate auto documentation (graphs) for terraform and/or Azure?[00:58:19] Outro #officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show

Bret is joined by Ravi Lachhman, Field CTO at Shipa, to discuss the basics of Shipa application and policy management, and show off the developer experience that Shipa brings to apps running on IaC and GitOps tools like ArgoCD,  Crossplane, Terraform, Kubernetes, and more.Shipa is focused on the layer above the infrastructure where application developers can avoid other Kubernetes manifest tools like Helm or Kustomize, and create a cleaner contract between what their application needs are and how the infrastructure provides them.If you've done Kubernetes YAML long enough, you know that it can get quite complex and verbose, and it requires both infrastructure and developer roles or knowledge to fully configure it. So you kind of got to know both worlds. But Shipa wants to fit in the middle somewhere, not replacing the infrastructure tools like Terraform or Crossplane, but rather working on top of them, providing an easier way to describe your apps from a dev's point of view and how they work on top of your infrastructure. It focuses on the application requirements, not necessarily how those requirements are implemented. Streamed live on YouTube on April 14, 2022.Unedited live recording of this show on YouTube (Ep #166). Includes demos.★Topics★Shipa website Shipa exampleDevOps Days Atlanta★Ravi Lachhman★Ravi on Twitter★Join my Community★Best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes coursesChat with us on our Discord Server Vital DevOpsHomepage bretfisher.com★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

With terraform we can use variables for example an integer which is defined as a number or a string or a list of strings and then we can reference these variables further down in the code in order to reuse them you can also output variables to the screen and we could also ask the customer to input interactively variable values into the console In this session - init plan apply destroy - state file - variables - terraform pattern consistent - resource keyword - resource identifier "aws_vpc" - our name "mypc" - in curly braces the parametesrs like cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16" - `terraform init` - i's like mvn install - Download the plugins to use aws - We can run this command after created main.tf - pull down modules - `terraform plan` - will show what's its going to do - checks state - Get developer style diff before commit - What already created which diff - don't want to loose this state file - `terraform apply` - showing the diff - click `yes` to continue - resources created in aws! - `terraform destroy` - to delete all reources - confirm - `state file` `terraform.tfstate` - we can see locally all that we created with terraform! - this file will have ALL resources created by terraform - visibility! - we want this file to get missing - json format - .bak - track changes we made - used for diff # Variables - define variables - folder `variables` - `default` is like the value - we have `type` and then `default` for default value - `main.tf` create file in that folder ```json variable "vpcname" { type = string (or number boolean list(string) with values ["val1", "val2"] to access 1 [0]) default = "myvpc" } variable "mymap" { type = map default = { key1 = "value1" key2 = "value2" } } variable "mytuple" { type tuple([string, number, string]) default = ["mystr1", 45, "mystr2"] } variable "myobject" { type = object({name = string, port = number}) default { name = "myval1" default = "232" } } ``` - cidr_range would get used multiple times so just put it in var - use variables - `var.myvarname` can also be done with string interpolation - `var.mylist[0]` - `var.mymap["Key1"]` - interactive input variables ```json variable "inputname" { type = string description = "please enter value for input name" } ``` next use this - `var.inputname` as usuall - `terraform plan` will now ask to input the input vars values # Outputs ```json output "myoutput" { value = aws_vpc.myvpc.id } ``` so nw we can print the dynamic id we get when we run terraform. run `terraform plan` will not print the id as it's created only after the apply is run and resources actually run.

Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/#officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show

Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey are working on their math skills today with guests Emma Haruka Iwao and Sara Ford. What kind of computing power does it take to break the world record for pi computations? Emma and Sara are here to tell us. Emma tells us how she started with pi and how she and Sara came to work together to break the record. In 2019, Emma was on the show with her previous world record, and with the advancements in technology and Google products since, she knew she could do even more this year. Her 100 trillion digit goal wasn't enough to scare people away, and Sara, along with other partners, joined Emma on the pi computation journey. Together, Sara and Emma talk about the hardware required, building the algorithm, how it's run, and where the data is stored. Running on a personal computer was cheaper and easier than a super computer, and Emma explains why. Performing these immense calculations can also help illustrate just how far computers have come. The storage required for this project was immense, and Emma tells us how they worked around some of the storage limitations. We hear more about Ycruncher and how it was used to help with calculations. Our guests talk about how things might change for computing and specifically for pi computations in the next few years, and Sara tells us about the storage journey from the perspective of a mathematician, and gives us some interesting facts about the algorithms involved, and we learn how world records are verified. Emma Haruka Iwao Emma is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform, focusing on application developers' experience and high performance computing. She has been a C++ developer for 15 years and worked on embedded systems and the Chromium Project. Emma is passionate about learning and explaining the most fundamental technologies such as operating systems, distributed systems, and internet protocols. Besides software engineering, she likes games, traveling, and eating delicious food. Sara Ford Sara Ford is a Developer Advocate on Google Cloud focusing on Serverless. She received a Masters degree in Human Factors (UX) because she wants to make dev tools more usable. Her lifelong dream is to be a 97-year old weightlifter so she can be featured on the local news. Cool things of the week New Cloud Podcasts Website site Even more pi in the sky: Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast pi.delivery 100 Trillion Digits site pi.delivery Github site A History of Pi book Distributing historically linear calculations of Pi with serverless video Ycruncher site Compute Engine site Cloud Functions site SRE site Terraform site What's something cool you're working on? Carter and Brian are working on a new season of VM End to End Hosts Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey

Terraform main operations such as init plan apply and destroy and the state file telephone is a infrastructure as code tool a command line to help us create infrastructure with standard adjacent files and then run telephone apply in order to actually create this infrastructure either in AWS cloud or Google cloud or azure cloud or any other cloud provider even locally and it has many plugins. In this session init plan apply destroy state file variables terraform pattern consistentresource keyword resource identifier "aws_vpc" our name "mypc" in curly braces the parametesrs like cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16" terraform initi's like mvn install Download the plugins to use aws We can run this command after created main.tf pull down modules terraform planwill show what's its going to do checks stateGet developer style diff before commit What already created which diff don't want to loose this state file terraform applyshowing the diff click yes to continue resources created in aws! terraform destroyto delete all reources confirm state file terraform.tfstatewe can see locally all that we created with terraform! this file will have ALL resources created by terraform visibility! we want this file to get missing json format .bak track changes we made used for diff Terraform main operations and components are: - [1] init [2] plan [3] apply [4] destroy - State files - variables - terraform pattern consistent - resource keyword - resource identifier "aws_vpc" - our name "mypc" - in curly braces the parametesrs like cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16" - `terraform init` - i's like mvn install - Download the plugins to use aws - We can run this command after created main.tf - pull down modules - `terraform plan` - will show what's its going to do - checks state - Get developer style diff before commit - What already created which diff - don't want to loose this state file - `terraform apply` - showing the diff - click `yes` to continue - resources created in aws! - `terraform destroy` - to delete all reources - confirm - `state file` `terraform.tfstate` - we can see locally all that we created with terraform! - this file will have ALL resources created by terraform - visibility! - we want this file to get missing - json format - .bak - track changes we made - used for diff

Full Description / Show Notes Guillermo talks about how he came to work at OCI and what it was like helping to pioneer Oracle's cloud product (1:40) Corey and Guillermo discuss the challenges and realities of multi-cloud (6:00) Corey asks about OCI's dedicated region approach (8:27) Guillermo discusses the problem of awareness (12:40) Corey and Guillermo talk cloud providers and cloud migration (14:40) Guillermo shares about how OCI's cost and customer service is unique among cloud providers (16:56) Corey and Guillermo talk about IoT services and 5G (23:58) About Guillermo RuizGuillermo Ruiz gets into trouble more often than he would like. During his career Guillermo has seen many horror stories while building data centers worldwide. In 2007 he dreamed with space-based internet and direct routing between satellites, but he could only reach “the Cloud”. And there he is, helping customer build their business in someone else servers since 2011.Beware of his sense of humor...If you ever see him in a tech event, run, he will get you in problems.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/IaaSgeek, https://twitter.com/OracleStartup LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gruizesteban/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I've been meaning to get a number of folks on this show for a while and today is absolutely one of those episodes. I'm joined by Guillermo Ruiz who is the Director of OCI Developer Evangelism, slash the Director of Oracle for Startups. Guillermo, thank you for joining me, and is Oracle for Startups an oxymoron because it kind of feels like it in some weird way, in the fullness of time.Guillermo: [laugh]. Thanks, Corey. It's a pleasure being in your show.Corey: Well, thank you. I enjoy having you here. I've been trying to get you on for a while. I'm glad I finally wore you down.Guillermo: [laugh]. Thanks. As I said, well, startup, I think, is the future of the industry, so it's a fundamental piece of our building blocks for the next generation of services.Corey: I have to say that I know that you folks at Oracle Cloud have been a recurring sponsor of the show. Thank you for that, incidentally. This is not a promoted guest episode. I invited you on because I wanted to talk to you about these things, which means that I can say more or less whatever I damn well want. And my experience with Oracle Cloud has been one of constantly being surprised since I started using it a few years ago, long before I was even taking sponsorships for this show. It was, “Oh, Oracle has a cloud. This ought to be rich.”And I started kicking the tires on it and I came away consistently and repeatedly impressed by the technical qualities the platform has. The always-free tier has a model of cloud economics that great. I have a sizable VM running there and have for years and it's never charged me a dime. Your data egress fees aren't, you know, a 10th of what a lot of the other cloud providers are charging, also known as, you know, you're charging in the bounds of reality; good for that. And the platform continues to—although it is different from other cloud providers, in some respects, it continues to impress.Honestly, I keep saying one of the worst problems that has is the word Oracle at the front of it because Oracle has a 40-some-odd-year history of big enterprise systems, being stodgy, being difficult to work with, all the things you don't generally tend to think of in terms of cloud. It really is a head turn. How did that happen? And how did you get dragged into the mess?Guillermo: Well, this came, like, back in five, six years ago, when they started building this whole thing, they picked people that were used to build cloud services from different hyperscalers. They dropped them into a single box in Seattle. And it's like, “Guys, knowing what you know, how you would build the next generation cloud platform?” And the guys came up with OCI, which was a second generation. And when I got hired by Oracle, they showed me the first one, that classic.It was totally bullshit. It was like, “Guys, there's no key differentiator with what's there in the market.” I didn't even know Oracle had a cloud, and I've been in this space since late-2010. And I had to sign, like, a bunch of NDAs a lot of papers, and they show me what they were cooking in the oven, and oh my gosh, when I saw that SDN out of the box directly in the physical network, CPUs assign, it was [BLEEP] [unintelligible 00:03:45]. It was, like, bare metal. I saw that the future was there. And I think that they built the right solution, so I joined the company to help them leverage the cloud platform.Corey: The thing that continually surprises me is that, “Oh, we have a cloud.” It has a real, “Hello fellow kids,” energy. Yes, yeah, so does IBM; we've seen how that played out. But the more I use it, the more impressed I am. Early on in the serverless function days, you folks more or less acquired Iron.io, and you were streets ahead as far as a lot of the event-driven serverless function style of thing tended to go.And one of the challenges that I see in the story that's being told about Oracle Cloud is, the big enterprise customer wins. These are the typical global Fortune 2000s, who have been around for, you know—which is weird for those of us in San Francisco, but apparently, these companies have been around longer than 18 months and they've built for platforms that are not the latest model MacBook Pro running the current version of Chrome. What is that? What is that legacy piece of garbage? What does it do? It's like, “Oh, it does about $4 billion a quarter so maybe show some respect.”It's the idea of companies that are doing real-world things, and they absolutely have cloud power. Problems and needs that are being met by a variety of different companies. It's easy to look at that narrative and overlook the fact that you could come up with some ridiculous Twitter for Pets-style business idea and build it on top of Oracle Cloud and I would not, at this point, call that a poor decision. I'm not even sure how it got there, and I wish that story was being told a little bit better. Given that you are a developer evangelist focusing specifically on startups and run that org, how do you see it?Guillermo: Well, the thing here is, you mentioned, you know, about Oracle, many startup doesn't even know we have a cloud provider. So, many of the question comes is like, how we can help on your business. It's more on the experience, you know, what are the challenges, the gaps, and we go in and identify and try to use our cloud. And even though if I'm not able to fill that gap, that's why we have this partnership with Microsoft. It's the first time to cloud providers connect both clouds directly without no third party in between, router to router.It's like, let's leverage the best of these clouds together. I'm a truly believer of multi-cloud. Non-single cloud is perfect. We are evolving, we're getting better, we are adding services. I don't want to get to 500 services like other guys do. It's like, just have a set of things that really works and works really, really well.Corey: Until you have 40 distinct managed database services and 80 ways to run containers, are you're really a full cloud provider? I mean, there's always that question that, at some point, the database Java, the future is going to have to be disambiguating between all the different managed database services on a per workload basis, and that job sounds terrible. I can't let the multi-cloud advocacy pass unchallenged here because I'm often misunderstood on this, and if I don't say something, I will get emails, and nobody wants that. I think that the idea of building a workload with the idea that it can flow seamlessly between cloud providers is a ridiculous fantasy that basically no one achieves. The number of workloads that can do that are very small.That said, the idea of independent workloads living on different cloud providers as is the best fit for placement for those is not just a good idea, it is the—whether it's a good idea or not as irrelevant because that's the reality in which we all live now. That is the world we have to deal with.Guillermo: If you want distributed system, obviously you need to have multiple cloud providers in your strategy. How you federate things—if you go down to the Kubernetes side, how you federate multi-clusters and stuff, that's a challenge out there where people have. But you mentioned that having multiple apps and things, we have customers that they've been running Google Cloud, for example, and we build [unintelligible 00:07:40] that cloud service out there. And the thing is that when they run the network throughput and the performance test, they were like, “Damn, this is even better than what I have in my data center.” It's like, “Guys, because we are room by room.” It's here is Google, here it's Oracle; we land in the same data center, we can provide better connectivity that what you even have.So, that kind of perception is not well seen in some customers because they realize that they're two separate clouds, but the reality is that most of us have our infrastructure in the same providers.Corey: It's kind of interesting, just to look at the way that the industry is misunderstanding a lot of these things. When you folks came out with your cloud at customer initiatives—the one that jumps out to my mind is the dedicated region approach—a lot of people started making fun of that because, “What is this nonsense? You're saying that you can deploy a region of your cloud on site at the customer with all of the cloud services? That's ridiculous. You folks don't understand cloud.”My rejoinder to that is people saying that don't understand customers. You take a look at for example… AWS has their Outpost which is a rack or racks with a subset of services in them. And that, from their perspective, as best I can tell, solves the real problem that customers have, which is running virtual machines on-premises that do not somehow charge an hourly cost back to AWS—I digress—but it does bring a lot of those services closer to customers. You bring all of your services closer to customers and the fact that is a feasible thing is intensely appealing to a wide variety of customer types. Rather than waiting for you to build a region in a certain geographic area that conforms with some regulatory data requirement, “Well, cool, we can ship some racks. Does that work for you?” It really is a game-changer in a whole bunch of respects and I don't think that the industry is paying close enough attention to just how valuable that is.Guillermo: Indeed. I've been at least hearing since 2010 that next year is the boom; now everybody will move into the cloud. It has been 12 years and still 75% of customers doesn't have their critical workloads in the cloud. They have developer environments, some little production stuff, but the core business is still relying in the data center. If I come and say, “Hey, what if I build this behind your firewall?”And it's not just that you have the whole thing. I'm removing all your operational expenses. Now, you don't need to think about hardware refresh, upgrade staff, just focus on your business. I think when we came up with a dedicated region, it was awesome. It was one of the best thing I've seen their Outpost is a great solution, to be honest, but if you lose the one connectivity, the control plane is still in the cloud.In our site, you have the control plane inside your data center so you can still operate and manage your services, even if there is an outage on your one site. One of the common questions we find on that area is, like, “Damn, this is great, but we would like to have a smaller size of this dedicated region.” Well, stay tuned because maybe we come with smaller versions of our dedicated regions so you guys can go and deploy whatever you need there.Corey: It turns out that, in the fullness of time, I like this computer but I want it to be smaller is generally a need that gets met super well. One thing that I've looked into recently has been the evolution of companies, in the fullness of time—which this is what completely renders me a terrible analyst in any traditional sense; I think more than one or two quarters ahead, and I look at these things—the average tenure of a company in the S&P 500 index is 21 years or so. Which means that if we take a look at what's going on 20 years or so from now in the 2040s, roughly half—give or take—of the constituency of the S&P 500 may very well not have been founded yet. So, when someone goes out and founds a company tomorrow as an idea that they're kicking around, let's be clear, with a couple of very distinct exceptions, they're going to build it on Cloud. There's a lot of reasons to do that until you hit certain inflection points.So, this idea that, oh, we're going to rent a rack, and we're going to go build some nonsense, and yadda, yadda, yadda. It's just, it's a fantasy. So, the question that I see for a lot of companies is the longtail legacy where if I take that startup and found it tomorrow and drive it all the way toward being a multinational, at what point did they become a customer for whatever these companies are selling? A lot of the big E enterprise vendors don't have a story for that, which tells me long-term, they have problems. Looking increasingly at what Oracle Cloud is doing, I have to level with you, I viewed Oracle as being very much in that slow-eroding dinosaur perspective until I started using the platform in some depth. I am increasingly of the mind that there's a bright future. I'm just not sure that has sunk into the industry's level of awareness these days.Guillermo: Yeah, I can agree with you in that sense. Mainly, I think we need to work on that awareness side. Because for example, if I go back to the other products we have in the company, you know, like the database, what the database team has done—and I'm not a database guy—and it's like, “Guys, even being an infrastructure guy, customers doesn't care about infrastructure. They just want to run their service, that it doesn't fail, you don't have a disruption; let me evolve my business.” But even though they came with this converged database, I was really impressed that you can do everything in a single-engine rather than having multiple database implemented. Now, you can use the MongoDB APIs.It's like, this is the key of success. When you remove the learning curve and the frictions for people to use your services. I'm a [unintelligible 00:13:23] guy and I always say, “Guys, click, click, click. In three clicks, I should have my service up and running.” I think that the world is moving so fast and we have so much information today, that's just 24 hours a day that I have to grab the right information. I don't have time to go and start learning something from scratch and taking a course of six months because results needs to be done in the next few weeks.Corey: One thing that I think that really reinforces this is—so as I mentioned before, I have a free tier account with you folks, have for years, whenever I log into the thing, I'm presented with the default dashboard view, which recommends a bunch of quickstarts. And none of the quickstarts that you folks are recommending to me involve step one, migrate your legacy data center or mainframe into the cloud. It's all stuff like using analytics to predict things with AI services, it's about observability, it's about governance of deploy a landing zone as you build these things out. Here's how to do a low-code app using Apex—which is awesome, let's be clear here—and even then launching resources is all about things that you would tend to expect of launch database, create a stack, spin up some VMs, et cetera. And that's about as far as it goes toward a legacy way of thinking.It is very clear that there is a story here, but it seems that all the cloud providers these days are chasing the migration story. But I have to say that with a few notable exceptions, the way that those companies move to cloud, it always starts off by looking like an extension of their data center. Which is fine. In that phase, they are improving their data center environment at the expense of being particularly cloudy, but I don't think that is necessarily an adoption model that puts any of these platforms—Oracle Cloud included—in their best light.Guillermo: Yeah, well, people was laughing to us, when we released Layer 2 in the network in the cloud. They were like, “Guys, you're taking the legacy to the cloud. It's like, you're lifting the shit and putting the shit up there.” Is like, “Guys, there are customers that cannot refactor and do anything there. They need to still run Layer 2 there. Why not giving people options?”That's my question is, like, there's no right answers to the cloud. You just need to ensure that you have the right options for people that they can choose and build their strategy around that.Corey: This has been a global problem where so many of these services get built and launched from all of the vendors that it becomes very unclear as a customer, is this thing for me or not? And honestly, sometimes one of the best ways to figure that out is to all right, what does it cost because that, it turns out, is going to tell me an awful lot. When it comes to the price tag of millions of dollars a year, this is probably not for my tiny startup. Whereas when it comes to a, oh, it's in the always free tier or it winds up costing pennies per hour, okay, this is absolutely something I want to wind up exploring and seeing what happens. And it becomes a really polished experience across the board.I also will say this is your generation two cloud—Gen 2, not to be confused with Gentoo, the Linux distribution for people with way more time on their hands than they have sense—and what I find interesting about it is, unlike a lot of the—please don't take this the wrong way—late-comers to cloud compared to the last 15 years of experience of Amazon being out in front of everyone, you didn't just look at what other providers have done and implement the exact same models, the exact same approaches to things. You've clearly gone in your own direction and that's leading to some really interesting places.Guillermo: Yeah, I think that doing what others are doing, you just follow the chain, no? That will never position you as a top number one out there. Being number one so many years in the cloud space as other cloud providers, sometimes you lose the perception of how to treat and speak to customers you know? It's like, “I'm the number one. Who cares if this guy is coming with me or not?” I think that there's more on the empathy side on how we treat customers and how we try to work and solve.For example, in the startup team, we find a lot of people that hasn't have infrastructure teams. We put for free our architects that will give you your GitHub or your GitLab account and we'll build the Terraform modules and give that for you. It's like now you can reuse it, spin up, modify whatever you want. Trying to make life easier for people so they can adopt and leverage their business in the cloud side, you know?[midroll 00:14:45]Corey: There's so much that we folks get right. Honestly, one of the best things that recommends this is the always free tier does exactly what it says on the tin. Yeah, sure. I don't get to use every edge case service that you've built across the board, but I've also had this thing since 2019, and never had to pay a penny for any of it, whereas recently—as we're recording this, it was a week or two ago—that I saw someone wondering what happened to their AWS account because over the past week, suddenly they went from not using SageMaker to being charged $270,000 on SageMaker. And it's… yeah, that's not the kind of thing that is going to endear the platform to frickin' anyone.And I can't believe I'm saying this, but the thing says Oracle on the front of it and I'm recommending it because it doesn't wind up surprising you with a bill later. It feels like I've woken up in bizarro world. But it's great.Guillermo: Yep. I think that's one of the clever things we've done on that side. We've built a very robust platform, really cool services. But it's key on how people can start learning and testing the flavors of your cloud. But not only what you have in the fleet here, you have also the Ampere instances.We're moving into a more sustainable world, and I think that having, like, the ARM architectures in the cloud and providing that on the free space of people can just go and develop on top, I think that was one of the great things we've done in the last year-and-a-half, something like that. Definitely a full fan of a free tier.Corey: You also, working over in the Developer Evangelist slash advocacy side of the world—devrelopers, as I tend to call it much to the irritation of basically everyone who works in developer relations—one of the things that I think is a challenge for you is that when I wind up trying to do something ridiculous—I don't know maybe it's a URL shortener; maybe it is build a small app that does something that's fairly generic—with a lot of the other platforms. There's a universe of blog posts out there, “Here's how I did it on this platform,” and then it's more or less you go to GitHub—or gif-UB, and I have mispronounced that too—and click the button and I wind up getting a deploy, whereas in things that are rapidly emerging with the Oracle Cloud space, it feels like, on some level, I wind up getting to be a bit of a trailblazer and figure some of these things out myself. That is diminishing. I'm starting to see more and more content around this stuff. I have to assume that is at least partially due to your organization's work.Guillermo: Oh, yeah, but things have changed. For example, we used to have our GitHub repository just as a software release, and we push to have that as a content management, you know, it's like, I always say that give—let people steal the code. You just put the example that will come with other ideas, other extensions, plug-in connectors, but you need to have something where you can start. So, we created this DevRel Quickstart that now is managed by the new DevRel organization where we try to put those examples. So, you just can go and put it.I've been working with the community on building, like, a content aggregator of how people is using our technology. We used to have ocigeek.com, that was a website with more than 1000 blog and, like, 500 visits a day looking after what other people were doing, but unfortunately, we had to, because of… the amount of X reasons we have to pull it off.But we want to come with something like that. I think that information should be available. I don't want people to think when it comes to my cloud is like, “Oh, how you use this product?” It's like no, guys how I can build with Angular, React the content management system? You will do it in my cloud because that example I'm doing, but I want you to learn the basics and the context of running Python and doing other things there rather than go into oh, no, this is something specific to me. No, no, that will never work.Corey: That was the big problem I found with doing a lot of the serverless stuff in years past where my first Lambda application took me two weeks to build because I'm terrible at programming. And now it takes me ten minutes to build because I'm terrible at programming and don't know what tests are. But the problem I ran into for that first one was, what is the integration format? What is the event structure? How do I wind up accessing that?What is the thing that I'm integrating with expecting because, “Mmm, that's not it; try again,” is a terrible error message. And so, much of it felt like it was the undifferentiated gluing things together. The only way to make that stuff work is good documentation and numerous examples that come at the problem from a bunch of different ways. And increasingly, Oracle's documentation is great.Guillermo: Yeah, well, in my view, for example, you have the Three-Tier Oracle. We should have a catalog of 100 things that you can do in the free tier, even though when I propose some of the articles, I was even talking about VMware, and people was like, “[unintelligible 00:22:34], you cannot deploy VMware.” It's like, “Yeah, but I can connect my [crosstalk 00:22:39]—”Corey: Well, not with that attitude.Guillermo: Yeah. And I was like, “Yeah, but I can connect to the cloud and just use it as a backup place where I can put my image and my stuff. Now, you're connecting to things: VMware with free tier.” Stuff like that. There are multiple things that you can do.And just having three blocks is things that you can do in the free tier, then having developer architectures. Show me how you can deploy an architecture directly from the command line, how I can run my DevOps service without going to the console, just purely using SDKs and stuff like that. And give me the option of how people is working and expanding that content and things there. If you put those three blocks together, I think you're done on how people can adopt and leverage your cloud. It's like, I want to learn; I don't want to know the basics of I don't know, it's—I'm not a database guy, so I don't understand those things and I don't want to go into details.I just they just need a database to store my profiles and my stuff so I can pick that and do computer vision. How I can pick and say, “Hey, I'm speaking with Corey Quinn and I have a drone flying here, he recommends your face and give me your background from all the different profiles.” That's the kind of solutions I want to build. But I don't want to be an expert on those areas.Corey: Because with all the pictures of me with my mouth open, you wouldn't be able to under—it would make no sense of me until I make that pose. There's method to—Guillermo: [laugh].Corey: —my insane madness over here.Guillermo: [laugh] [unintelligible 00:23:58].Corey: Yeah. But yeah, there's a lot of value as you move up the stack on these things. There's also something to be said, as well, for a direction that you folks have been moving in recently, that I—let me be fair here—I think it's clown shoes because I tend to think in terms of software because I have more or less the hardware destruction bunny level of aura when it comes to being near expensive things. And I look around the world and I don't have a whole lot of problems that I can legally solve with an army of robots.But there are customers who very much do. And that's why we see sort of the twin linking of things like IoT services and 5G, which when I first started seeing cloud providers talking about this, I thought was Looney Tunes. And you folks are getting into it too, so, “Oh, great. The hype wound up affecting you too.” And the thing that changed my mind was not anything cloud providers have to say—because let's be clear, everyone has an agenda they're trying to push for—but who doesn't have an agenda is the customers talking about these things and the neat things that they're able to achieve with it, at which point I stopped making fun, I shut up and listen in the hopes that I might learn something. How have you seen that whole 5G slash IoT slash internet of Nonsense space evolving?Guillermo: That's the future. That's what we're going to see in the next five years. I run some innovation sessions with a lot of customers and one of the main components I speak about is this area. With 5G, the number of IoT devices will exponentially grow. That means that you're going to have more data points, more data volume out there.How can you provide the real value, how you can classify, index, and provide the right information in just 24 hours, that's what people is looking. Things needs to be instant. If you say to the kids today, they cannot watch a football match, 90 minutes. If you don't get the answer in ten, they move to the next thing. That's how this society is moving [unintelligible 00:25:50].Having all these solutions from a data perspective, and I think that Oracle has a great advantage in that space because we've been doing that for 43 years, right? It's like, how we do the abstraction? How I can pick all that information and provide added value? We build the robot as a service. I can configure it from my browser, any robot anywhere in the world.And I can do it in Python, Java. I can [unintelligible 00:26:14] applications. Two weeks ago, we were testing on connecting IoT devices and flashing the firmware. And it was working. And this is something that we didn't do it alone. We did it with a startup.The guys came and had a sandbox already there, is like, “let's enable this on [unintelligible 00:26:28]. Let's start working together.” Now, I can go to my customers and provide them a solution that is like, hey, let's connect Boston Dynamics, or [unintelligible 00:26:37] Robotics. Let's start doing those things and take the benefits of using Oracle's AI and ML services. Pick that, let's do computer vision, natural language processing.Now, you're connecting what I say, an end-to-end solution that provides real value for customers. Connected cars, we turn our car into a wallet. I can go and pay on the petrol station without leaving my car. If I'm taking the kids to takeaway, I can just pay these kind of things is like, “Whoa, this is really cool.” But what if I [laugh] get that information for your insurance company.Next year, Corey, you will pay double because you're a crazy driver. And we know how you drive in the car because we have all that information in place. That's how the things will roll out in the next five to ten years. And [unintelligible 00:27:24] healthcare. We build something for emergencies that if you have a car crash, they have the guys that go and attend can have your blood type and some information about your car, where to cut the chassis and stuff when you get prisoner inside.And I got people saying, “Oh gee, GDPR because we are in Europe.” It's like, “Guys, if I'm going to die, I don't care if they have my information.” That's the point where people really need to balance the whole thing, right? Obviously, we protect the information and the whole thing, but in those situations is like hey, there's so many things we can do. There are countless opportunities out there.Corey: The way that I square that circle personally has always been it's about informed consent, when if people are given a choice, then an awful lot of those objections that people have seemed to melt away. Provided, of course, that is an actual choice and it's not one of those, “Well, you can either choose to”—quote-unquote—“Choose to do this, or you can pay $9,000 a month extra.” Which is, that's not really a choice. But as long as there's a reasonable way to get informed consent, I think that people don't particularly mind, I think it's when they wind up feeling that they have been spied upon without their knowledge, that's when everything tends to blow up. It turns out, if you tell people in advance what you're going to do with their information, they're a lot less upset. And I don't mean burying it deep and the terms and conditions.Guillermo: And that's a good example. We run a demo with one of our customers showing them how dangerous the public information you have out there. You usually sign and click and give rights to everybody. We found in Stack Overflow, there was a user that you just have the username there, nothing else. And we build a platform with six terabytes of information grabbing from Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many other social media channels, and we show how we identify that this guy was living in Bangalore in India and was working for a specific company out there.So, people was like, “Damn, just having that name, you end up knowing that?” It's like there's so much information out there of value. And we've seen other companies doing that illegally in other places, you know, Cambridge Analytics and things like that. But that's the risk of giving your information for free out there.Corey: It's always a matter of trade-offs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and honestly, if there were it feels like we wouldn't have cloud providers; we would just have the turnkey solution that gives the same thing that everyone needs and calls it good. I dream of such a day, but it turns out that customers are different, people are different, and there's no escaping that.Guillermo: [laugh]. Well, you mentioned dreamer; I dream direct routing between satellites, and look where I am; I'm just in the cloud, one step lower. [laugh].Corey: You know, bit by bit, we're going to get there one way or another, for an altitude perspective. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the right place to find you?Guillermo: Well, I have the @IaaSgeek Twitter account, and you can find me on LinkedIn gruizesteban there. Just people wants to talk about anything there, I'm open to any kind of conversation. Just feel free to reach out. And it was a pleasure finally meeting you, in person. Not—well in person; through a camera, at least being in the show with you.Corey: Other than on the other side of a Twitter feed. No, I hear you.Guillermo: [laugh].Corey: We will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:30:43]. Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Guillermo: Thanks very much. So, you soon.Corey: Guillermo Ruiz, Director of OCI Developer Evangelism. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment, to which I will respond with a surprise $270,000 bill.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.

Telephone is a language declarative language for defining resources here we will describe their form in it and the command line how to install with regards to interjeed idea plugin and also the visual studio plugin

Bonjour à tous et bienvenue dans le ZDTech, le podcast quotidien de la rédaction de ZDNet. Je m'appelle Guillaume Serries, et aujourd'hui je vous explique comment Google vient d'établir le nouveau record du calcul du nombre Pi. 3,141592, et la suite... Combien de temps faut-il pour calculer 100 trillions de chiffres derrière la virgule du nombre Pi ? Demandez à Google. Emma Haruka Iwao, employée par Google Cloud, la filiale cloud computing de Google, a établi un nouveau record mondial pour le calcul du plus grand nombre de chiffres de Pi. Il s'agissait bien évidemment au delà du record de démontrer la puissance des systèmes de calcul en mode cloud de Google. Depuis 4000 ans, mathématiciens et scientifiques s'efforcent de calculer les chiffres de Pi. Une des plus anciennes approximations de Pi se trouve sur un papyrus égyptien. En moins 1800 avant notre ère, son auteur était parvenu à calculer deux décimales après la virgule, c'est à dire 3,15. Au 14ème siècle, l'astronome perse de Samarkand Jemshid al Kashi utilise la fameuse méthode d'Archimède pour calculer une valeur approchée à 14 décimales exactes. Et cela devrait durer éternellement puisque Pi est un nombre irrationnel, c'est à dire qu'il s'écrit avec un nombre infini de décimales sans suite logique. Mais à ce jour, nous connaissons désormais au moins les 100 premiers trillions de chiffres de Pi, et ce grâce à ce projet de Google. Google ne précise pas dans le détail la puissance de calcul nécessaire pour établir ce nouveau record. Mais le calcul a pris un peu moins de 158 jours. Au delà de la puissance informatique, Google vante avec cette expérience la fiabilité de ses produits. De fait, le programme a fonctionné pendant plus de cinq mois sans défaillance de nœud et a traité correctement chaque bit des 82 Petaoctet d'entrée et sortie de disque. Google a utilisé l'outil open-source Terraform pour tester différentes options d'infrastructure et choisir les paramètres optimaux. Et le code utilisé pour calculer les 100 000 milliards de chiffres est disponible sur GitHub. Si vous avez le temps, la séquence complète des chiffres calculés par Google est disponible en ligne. Ce nouveau record bat celui établi en 2021 par des scientifiques suisses, qui étaient parvenu à calculer la constante mathématique à 62,8 trillions de décimales. En 2019, l'antépénultième record était de 31,4 trillions de chiffres, et le calcul avait pris 121 jours. Donc le calcul de Google a pris deux fois moins de temps. Pour finir sachez que la 100 trillionième décimale de pi est 0. Merci Google.

ตามรายงานของ Singapore Business Review พบว่า30% ของสตาร์ทอัพในสิงคโปร์ล้มเหลวภายในสามปี แต่มีคำกล่าวที่ว่า “ธุรกิจไม่เคยล้มเหลว แต่เป็นเพราะผู้นำล้มเหลว” มาดูวิธีที่ผู้ก่อตั้งสตาร์ทอัพแย่ ๆ เหล่านี้ นำไปสู่การล่มสลายของธุรกิจของพวกเขาได้อย่างไร ในความเป็นจริง มีสตาร์ทอัพมากมายที่ประสบความสำเร็จ และแทนที่จะล้มเหลว พวกเขาเติบโตขึ้นจนกลายเป็นบริษัทข้ามชาติที่รู้จักกันทั่วทั้งภูมิภาค แม้ว่าความสำเร็จจะไม่ได้มาโดยง่าย ผู้นำควรระมัดระวังที่จะหลีกเลี่ยงความผิดพลาดที่ทำโดยผู้ก่อตั้งเหล่านี้: คนที่มีความโอหัง ความประมาท และความใจง่าย ========================= ร่วมสนับสนุน ด.ดล Blog และ Geek Forever Podcast เพื่อให้เรามีกำลังในการผลิต Content ดี ๆ ให้กับท่าน https://www.tharadhol.com/become-a-supporter/ ——————————————– ติดตาม ด.ดล Blog ผ่าน Line OA เพียงคลิก : https://lin.ee/aMEkyNA ——————————————– ไม่พลาดข่าวสารผ่านทาง Email จาก ด.ดล Blog : https://www.getrevue.co/profile/tharadhol ——————————————– Geek Forever Club พื้นที่ของการแลกเปลี่ยนข้อมูลข่าวสาร ความรู้ ด้านธุรกิจ เทคโนโลยีและวิทยาศาสตร์ ใหม่ ๆ ที่น่าสนใจ https://www.facebook.com/groups/geek.forever.club/ ========================= ช่องทางติดตาม ด.ดล Blog เพิ่มเติมได้ที่ Fanpage : www.facebook.com/tharadhol.blog Blockdit : www.blockdit.com/tharadhol.blog Twitter : www.twitter.com/tharadhol Instragram : instragram.com/tharadhol TikTok : tiktok.com/@geek.forever Youtube : www.youtube.com/c/mrtharadhol Linkedin : www.linkedin.com/in/tharadhol Website : www.tharadhol.com

The most valuable crypto stories for Thursday, June 9, 2022. "The Hash" team discusses billionaire investor Mike Novogratz's prediction on the fate of crypto hedge funds, and they chat about the ApeCoin community's vote on staying on Ethereum.This episode has been edited by Michele Musso. Our Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Neon Beach.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/[00:00:00] Intro[00:01:55] “I've locked myself out of my digital life” https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/06/ive-locked-myself-out-of-my-digital-life/[00:08:00] iOS adds PassKeys to eliminate Passwordshttps://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213305[00:11:34] Lots of nifty github actionshttps://github.com/devops-infra[00:12:22] Retool: The 2022 state of engineering timehttps://retool.com/reports/state-of-engineering-time-2022/[00:12:57] KubeView: (another) Kubernetes cluster visualiser and graphical explorerhttp://kubeview.benco.io/[00:15:00] Bitnami Chart Repo Postmortemhttps://github.com/bitnami/charts/issues/10539[00:20:07] “Platform teams are dead”  https://twitter.com/iamvlaaaaaaad/status/1534489530002071553?s=20&t=scqHB8AiDluRMh-65w5RLg[00:36:12] What kind of tools are available to get an overview of clusters and all the apps deployed in them as well as their versions?[00:42:26] what is the greatest latest to deploy apigateway lambda pairs? lambda aliases? lambda versions? multiple stages? done outside terraform? done on the pipeline?[00:50:45] “What are folks doing when they have a spacelift stack that assumes roles in multiple accounts?” [00:54:52] Outro #officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team talks tactics for infiltrating the new Google Cloud center in Ohio. Plus: AWS goes sci-fi with the new Graviton3 processors, the new GKE cost estimator calculates the value of your soul, and Microsoft builds the metaverse.  A big thanks to this week's sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights

Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/[00:00:00] Intro[00:01:23] Redis and Memcache are so 2009. Dragonfly is the new cool kid.https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly[00:02:24] AWS IA Publishes EKS Blueprintshttps://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-eks-blueprints[00:04:21] Terraform Registries are all the rage of 2022https://github.com/MatthewJohn/terrareghttps://github.com/shuaibiyy/awesome-terraform#private-module-registries[00:07:44] The State of DevOps survey by Google Cloud and the DORA research teamhttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/take-the-2022-state-of-devops-survey[00:09:03] In-depth Analysis of the Leaked Twitch Security Tools https://mazinahmed.net/blog/indepth-analysis-twitch-security-tools/[00:21:06] How do you organize repositories and configurations for Terraform code?[00:40:17] Has anyone tried Terramate? [00:47:57] How many of you are consuming products through the AWS Marketplace?[00:52:03] was wondering if anyone had some good criteria for why you would create an eventbus and not just use the default? [00:55:19] Anyone has a good tutorial on how to add people to eks clusters?[00:56:07] Add inline defaults to optional object attribute type constraintshttps://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/pull/31154[00:57:12] Outro #officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show

Today's Day Two Cloud sponsor Netris promises to deliver a cloud-like experience for running your physical network. Netris software lets you build a private cloud on premises, and integrates with Terraform and Kubernetes. Our guest is Alex Saroyan, Netris CEO and founder. The post Day Two Cloud 149: On-Prem Cloud Networking With Netris (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today's Day Two Cloud sponsor Netris promises to deliver a cloud-like experience for running your physical network. Netris software lets you build a private cloud on premises, and integrates with Terraform and Kubernetes. Our guest is Alex Saroyan, Netris CEO and founder. The post Day Two Cloud 149: On-Prem Cloud Networking With Netris (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today's Day Two Cloud sponsor Netris promises to deliver a cloud-like experience for running your physical network. Netris software lets you build a private cloud on premises, and integrates with Terraform and Kubernetes. Our guest is Alex Saroyan, Netris CEO and founder. The post Day Two Cloud 149: On-Prem Cloud Networking With Netris (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today we chat with Cisco's head of developer content, community, and events, Michael Chenetz. We discuss everything from KubeCon to kindness and Legos! Michael delves into some of the main themes he heard from creators at KubeCon, and we discuss methods for increasing adoption of new concepts in your organization. We have a conversation about attending live conferences, COVID protocol, and COVID shaming, and then we talk about how Legos can be used in talks to demonstrate concepts. We end the conversation with a discussion about combining passions to practice creativity. We discuss our time at KubeCon in Spain (5:51) Themes Michael heard at KubeCon talking with creators (7:46) Increasing adoption of new concepts (9:27) We talk conferences, COVID shaming, and blamelessness (12:21) Legos and reliability  (18:04) Michael talks about ways to exercise creativity (23:20) Links: KubeCon October 2022: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/ Nintendo Lego Set: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HVXMQ87?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_ED7NVBWPR8ANGT8WNGS5 Cloud Unfiltered podcast episode featuring Julie and Jason:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep125-chaos-engineering-with-julie-gunderson-and-jason/id1215105578?i=1000562393884 Links Referenced: Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/ Cloud Unfiltered Podcast with Julie and Jason: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep125-chaos-engineering-with-julie-gunderson-and-jason/id1215105578?i=1000562393884 Cloud Unfiltered Podcast: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cloud/podcasts.html Nintendo Lego: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HVXMQ87 TranscriptJulie: And for folks that are interested in, too, what day it is—because I think we're all still a little bit confused—it is Monday, May 24th that we are recording this episode.Jason: Uh, Julie's definitely confused on what day it is because it's actually Tuesday, [laugh] May 24th.Michael: Oh, my God. [laugh]. That's great. I love it.Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, learning from each other, and blamelessness. In this episode, we talk to Michael Chenetz, head of developer content, community, and events at Cisco, about all of the learnings from KubeCon, the importance of being kind to each other, and of course, how Lego translates into technology.Julie: Today, we are joined by Michael Chenetz. Michael, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?Michael: Yeah. [laugh]. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. And I'm really good at breaking things, so I guess that's why I'm asked to be here is because I'm superb at it. What I'm not so good at is, like, putting things back together.Like when I was a kid, I remember taking my dad's stereo apart; wasn't too happy about that. Wasn't very good at putting it back together. But you know, so that's just going back a little ways there. But yeah, so I work for the DevRel at Cisco and my whole responsibility is, you know, to get people to know that know a little bit about us in terms of, you know, all the developer-related topics.Julie: Well, and Jason and I had the awesome opportunity to hang out with you at KubeCon, where we got to join your Cloud Unfiltered podcast. So folks, definitely go check out that episode. We have a lot of fun. We'll put a link in the [show notes 00:02:03]. But yeah, let's talk a little bit about KubeCon. So, as of recording this episode, we all just recently traveled back from Spain, for KubeCon EU, which was… amazing. I really enjoyed being there. My first time in Spain. I got back, I can tell you, less than 24 hours ago. Michael, I think—when did you get back?Michael: So, I got back Saturday night, but my bags have not arrived yet. So, they're still traveling and they're enjoying Europe. And they should be back soon, I guess when they're when they feel like they're—you know, they should be back from vacation.Julie: [laugh].Michael: So. [laugh].Julie: Jason, how about you? When did you get home?Jason: I got home on Sunday night. So, I took the train from Valencia to Barcelona on Saturday evening, and then an early morning flight on Sunday and got home late Sunday night.Julie: And for folks that are interested in, too, what day it is—because I think we're all still a little bit confused—it is Monday, May 24th that we are recording this episode.Jason: Uh, Julie's definitely confused on what day it is because it's actually Tuesday, [laugh] May 24th.Michael: Oh, my God. [laugh]. That's great. I love it. By the way, yesterday was my birthday so I'm going to say—Julie: Happy birthday.Michael: —happy birthday to myself.Julie: Oh, my gosh, happy birthday. [laugh].Michael: Thank you [laugh].Julie: So… what is time anyway?Jason: Yeah.Michael: It's all good. It's all relative. Time is relative.Julie: Time is relative. And so, you know, tell us a little bit about—I'd love to know a little bit about why you want folks to know about, like, what is the message you try to get across?Jason: Oh, that's not the question I thought you were going to ask. I thought you were going to ask, “What's on your Amazon wishlist so people can send you birthday presents?”Julie: Yeah, let's back up. Let's do that. So, let's start with your Amazon wishlist. We know that there might be some Legos involved.Michael: Oh, my God, yeah. I mean, you just told me about a cool one, which was Optimus Prime and I just—I'm already on the website, my credit card is out and I'm ready to buy. So, you know, this is the problem with talking to you guys. [laugh]. It's definitely—you know, that's definitely on my list. So, anything that, anything music-related because obviously behind me is a lot of music equipment—I love music stuff—and anything tech. The combination of tech and music, and if you can combine Legos and that, too, man that would just match all the boxes. [laugh].Julie: Just to let you know, there's a Lego Con. Like, I did not know this until last night, actually. But it is a virtual conference.Michael: Really.Julie: Yeah. But one of the things I was looking at actually on Lego, when you look at their website, like, to request one of their speakers, to request one of their engineers as a speaker, they actually don't do that because they get so many requests for their folks to speak at conferences, they actually have a dedicated part of their website that talks about this. So, I thought that was interesting.Michael: Well listen, just because of that, if they want somebody that's in, you know, cloud computing, I'm not going to go talk for Lego. And I know they really want somebody from cloud computing talking to Lego, so, you know… it's, you know, quid pro quo there, so that's just the way it's going to work. [laugh].Julie: I want to be best friends with Lego people.Michael: [laugh]. I know, me too.Julie: I'm just going to make it a goal in life now to have one of their engineers speak at DevOpsDays Boise. It's like a challenge.Michael: It is. I accept it.Julie: [laugh]. With that, though, just on other Lego news, before we start talking about all the other things that folks may also want to hear about, there is another new Lego, which is the Van Gogh Starry Night that has been newly released by the time this episode comes out.Michael: With a free ear, right?Julie: I mean—[laugh].Michael: Is that what happens?Julie: —well played. Well, played. [laugh]. So, now you really got to spend a lot of time at KubeCon, you were just really recording podcast after podcast.Michael: Oh, my God. Yeah. So, I mean, it was great. I love—because I'm a techie, so I love tech and I love to find out origin stories of stuff. So, I love to, like, talk to these people and like, “Why did that come about? How did—” you know, “What happened in your life that made you want to do this? Who hurt you?” [laugh].And so, that's what I constantly try and figure out is, like, [laugh], “What is that?” So, it was really cool because I had, like, Jimmy Zelinskie who came from CoreOS, and he came from—you know, they create, you know, Quay and some of this other kinds of stuff. And you know, just to talk about, like, some of the operators and how they came about, and like… those were the original operators, so that was pretty cool. Varun from Tetrate was supposed to come on, and he created Istio, you know? So, there were so many of these things that I just geek out knowing about, you know?And then the other thing that was really high on our list, and it's really high from where I am, is API quality, API testing, API—so really, that's why I got in touch with you guys because I was like, “Wow, that fits in really good, you know? You guys are doing stuff that's around chaos, and you know, I think that's amazing.” So, all of this stuff is just so interesting to me. But man, it was just a whirlwind of every day just recording, and by the end that was just like, you know, “I'm so sorry, but I just, I can't talk anymore.” You know, and that was it. [laugh].Jason: I love that chatting with the creators. We had Zack Butcher on who is also from Tetrate and one of the early Istio—Michael: Yeah, yeah.Jason: Contributors. And I find it fascinating because I feel like when you chat with these folks, you start to understand the context of why things were built. And it—Michael: Yes.Jason: —it opens your brain up to, like, cool, there's a software—oh, now I know exactly why it's doing things that way, right? Like, it's just so, so eye-opening. I love it.Julie: With that, though, like, did you see any trends or any themes as you were talking to all these folks?Michael: Yeah, so a few real big trends. One is everybody wants to know about eBPF. That was the biggest thing at KubeCon, by far, was that, “We want to learn how to do this low-level kernel stuff that's really fast, that can give us all the information we need, and we don't have to use sidecars and things like that.” I mean it was—you know, that was the most excitement that I saw. OTel was another one for OpenTelemetry, which was a big one.The other thing was simplification. You know, a lot of people were looking to simplify the Kubernetes ecosystem because there's so much out there, and there's so many things that you have to learn about that it was super hard, you know, for somebody to come into it to say, “Where do I even start?” You know? So, that was a big theme was simplification.I'm trying to think. I think another one is APIs, for sure. You know, because there's this whole thing about API sprawl. And people don't know what their APIs are, people just, like—you know, I always say people can see—like, developers are lazy in a good way, and I consider myself one of them. So, what that means is that when we want to develop something, what we're going to do is we're just going to pull down the nearest API that does what we need, that has the best documentation, that has the best blog, that has the best everything.We don't know what their testing strategy is; we don't know what their security strategy is; we don't know if they use other libraries. And you have to figure that stuff out. And that's the thing that—you know, so everything around APIs is super important. And you really have to test that stuff out. Yes, people, you have to test it [laugh] and know more about it. So, those are those were the big themes, I think. [laugh].Julie: You know, I know that Kerim and I gave a talk on observability where we kind of talked more high-level about some of the overarching concepts, but folks were really excited about that. I think is was because we briefly touched on OpenTelemetry, which we should have gone into a little bit more depth, but there's only so much you can fit into a 30-minute talk, so hopefully we'll be able to talk about that more at a KubeCon in the future, we [crosstalk 00:09:54] to the selection committee.Michael: Hashtag topics?Julie: Uh-huh. [laugh]. You know, that said, though, it really did seem like a huge topic that people just wanted to learn more about. I know, too, at the Gremlin booth, a lot of folks were also interested in talking about, like, how do we just get our organization to adopt some of these concepts that we're hearing about here? And I think that was the thing that surprised me the most is I expected people to be coming up to the booth and deep-diving into very, very deep, technical-level questions, and really, a lot of it was how do we get our organization to do this? How can we increase adoption? So, that was a surprise for me.Michael: Yeah, you know what, and I would say two things to that. One is, when you talk about Chaos Engineering, I think people think it's like rocket science and people are really scared and they don't want to claim to be experts in it, so they're like, “Wow, this is, like, next-level stuff, and you know, we're really scared. You guys are the experts. I don't want to even attempt this.” And the other thing is that organizations are scared because they think that it's going to, like, create mass hysteria throughout their organization.And really, none of this is true in either way. In reality, it's a very, very scripted, very exacting stuff that you're testing, and you throw stuff out there and see what kind of response you get. So, you know, it's not this, like, you know—I think people just have—there needs to be more education around a lot of areas in cloud-native. But you know, that's one of the areas. So, I think it's really interesting there.Julie: I think so too. How about for you, Jason? Like, what was your surprise from the conference or something that maybe—Jason: Yeah, I mean, I think my surprise was mostly around just seeing people coming back, right? Because we're now I would say, six months into conferences being back as a thing, right? Like, we had re:Invent last year in Vegas; we had KubeCon last year in LA, and so, like, those are okay events. They weren't, like, back to normal. And this was, I feel like, one of the first conferences, that it really started to feel back to normal.Like, there was much better attendance, there was much more just buzz and hallway tracking and everything else that we're used to. Like, the whole reason that we go to conferences is getting together with people and hanging out and stuff, and this one has so far felt the most back-to-normal out of any event that I've been to over the past six months.Michael: Can I just talk about one thing that I think, you know, people have to get over is, you know, I see a lot online, I think it was—I forget who it was that was talking about it. But this whole idea of Covid shaming. I mean, we're going to this event, and it's like, yeah, everybody wants to get out, everybody wants to learn things, but don't shame people just because they got Covid, everybody's getting Covid, okay? That's just the point of life at this point. So, let's just, you know, let's just be nice to each other, be friendly to each other, you know? I just have to say that because I think it's a shame that people are getting shamed, you know, just for going to an event. [laugh].Julie: See, and I think that—that's an interesting—there's been a lot of conversation around this. And I don't think anybody should be Covid-shamed. Look, I think that we all took a calculated risk in coming—Michael: Absolutely.Julie: To this event. I personally gave out a lot of hugs. I hugged some of the folks that have mentioned that they have come up positive from Covid, so there's a calculated risk in going. I think there has been a little bit of pushback on maybe how some of the communication has come out around it. That said, as an organizer of a small conference with, like, 400 people, I think that these are very complicated matters. And what I really think is important is to listen to feedback from attendees and to take that.And then we're always looking to improve, right?Michael: Absolutely.Julie: If everything that we did was perfect right out of the gate, then we wouldn't have Chaos Engineering because there'd be nothing [crosstalk 00:13:45] be just perfectly reliable. And so, if we take away anything, let's take away—just like what you said, first of all, Covid, you should never shame somebody for having Covid. Like, that's not cool. It's not somebody's fault that they caught an illness.Michael: Yes.Julie: I mean unless they were licking doorknobs. And that's a whole different—Michael: Yes. [laugh]. That's a whole different thing, right there.Julie: Conversation. But when we talk about just like these questions around cultural adoption, we talk about blamelessness; we talk about learning from failure; we talked about finding ways to improve, and I think all of that can come into play. So, it'll be interesting to see how we learn and grow as we move forward. And like, thank you to re:Invent, thank you to KubeCon, thank you to DevOpsDays Boise. But these conferences that have started going back in-person, at great risk to organizers and the committee because people are going to be mad, one way or the other.Michael: Yeah. And you can see that people want to be back because it was huge, you know?Julie: Yeah.Michael: Maybe you guys, I'm going to put in a feature request for Gremlin to chaos engineer crowds. Can we do that so we can figure out, like, what's going to happen when we have these big events? Can we do that?Julie: I mean, that sounds fun. I think what's going to happen is there's going to be hugs, there's going to be people getting sick, but there's going to be people learning and growing.Michael: Yes.Julie: And ultimately, I just think that we have to remember that just, like, our systems aren't perfect, and neither are people. Like, the fact that we expect people to be perfect, and maybe we should just keep some mask mandates for a little bit longer when we're at conferences with 8000 people.Michael: Sure.Julie: I mean, that's—Michael: That makes sense.Jason: Yeah. I mean, it's all about risk management, right? This is, essentially what we do in SRE is there's always a risk of a massive outage, and so it's that balance of, right, do what you can, but ultimately, that's why we have SLOs and things is, you can never be a hundred percent, so like, where do we draw the line of here are the things that we're going to do to help manage this risk, but you can never shoot for a perfectly, entirely safe space, right? Because then we'd all be having conferences in padded rooms, and not touching each other, and things like that. There's a balance there.And I think we're all just trying to find that, so yeah, as you mentioned, that whole, like, DevOps blamelessness thing, you know, treat each other with the notion that we're all trying to get through this together and do what we think is best. Nobody's just like John Allspaw said, you know, “Nobody goes to work thinking that, like, their intent is to crash everything and destroy the company.” No one's going to KubeCon or any of these conferences thinking, “Yeah, I'm going to be a super-spreader.”Julie: [laugh].Michael: Yeah, that would be [crosstalk 00:16:22].Jason: Like, everyone's trying not to do it. They're doing their best. They're not actively, like, aggressively trying to get you sick or intentionally about it. But you know—so just be kind to one another.Michael: Yeah. And that's the key.Julie: It is.Michael: The key. Be kind to one another, you know? I mean, it's a great community. People are really nice, so, you know, let's keep that up. I think that's something special about the, you know, the community around KubeCon, specifically.Julie: As we can refine this and find ways, I would take all of the hugs over virtual conferences—Michael: Yes.Julie: Any day now. Because, as Jason mentioned, is even just with you, Michael, the time we got to spend with you, or the time I kept going up to Jfrog's booth and Baruch and I would have conversations as he made me a delicious coffee, these hallway tracks, these conversations, that's what no one figured out how to recreate during the virtual events—Michael: Absolutely.Julie: —and it's just not possible, right?Michael: Yeah. I mean, I think it would take a little bit of VR and then maybe some, like, suit that you wear in order to feel the hug. And, you know, so it would take a lot more in order to do that. I mean, I guess it's technologically possible. I don't know if the graphics are there yet, so it might be like a pixelated version, like, you know, like, NES-style, or something like that. But it could look pretty cool. [laugh]. So, we'll have to see, you know?Julie: Everybody listening to this episode, I hope you're getting as much of a kick out of it as we are recording it because I mean, there are so many different topics here. One of the things that Michael and I bonded about years ago, for our listeners that are—not years ago; months ago. Again, what is time?Michael: Yeah. What is time? It's all relative.Julie: It is. It was Lego, though, and so we've been talking about that. But Michael, you asked a great question when we were recording with you, which is, like—Michael: Wow.Julie: Can—just one. Only one great question.Michael: [laugh].Julie: [laugh]. Which was, how would you incorporate Lego into a talk? And, like, when we look at our systems breaking and all of that, I've really been thinking about that and how to make our systems more reliable. And here's one of the things I really wanted to clarify that answer. I kind of went… I went talking about my Lego that I build, like, my Optim—not my Optimus Primes, I don't have it, but my Voltron or my Nintendo Lego. And those are all box sets.Michael: Yep.Julie: But one of the things if you're not playing with a box set with instruction, if you're just playing with just the—or excuse me, architecting with just the Lego blocks because it's not playing because we're adults now, I think.Michael: Yes, now it's architecting. Yes.Julie: Yes, now that we're architecting, like, that's one of the things that I was really thinking about this, and I think that it would make something really fun to talk about is how you're building upon each layer and you're testing out these new connection pieces. And then that really goes into, like, when we get into Technics, into dependencies because if you forget that one little one-inch plastic piece that goes from the one to the other, then your whole Lego can fall apart. So anyway, I just thought that was really interesting, and I'd wondered if you or Jason even gave that any more thought, or if it was just fleeting for you.Michael: It was definitely fleeting for me, but I will give it some more thought, you know? But you know, when—as you're saying that though, I'm thinking these Lego pieces really need names because you're like that little two-inch Lego piece that kind of connects this and this, like, we got to give these all names so that people can know, that's x-54 that's—that you're putting between x-53 and x-52. I don't know but you need some kind of name for these parts now.Julie: There are Lego names. You just Google it. There are actual names for all of the parts but—Michael: Wow. [laugh].Julie: Like, Jason, what do you think? I know you've got [unintelligible 00:19:59].Jason: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because I am one of those, like, freeform folks, right? You know, my standard practice when I was growing up with Legos was you build the thing that you bought once and then you immediately, like, tear it apart, and you build whatever the hell you want.Michael: Absolutely.Jason: So, I think that that's kind of an interesting thing as we think about our systems and stuff, right? Like, part of it is, like, yeah, there's best practices and various companies will publish, like, you know, “Here's how to architect such-and-such system.” And it's interesting because that's just not reality, right? You're not going to go and take, like, the Amazon CloudFormation thing, and like, congrats, you're done. You know, you just implement that and your job's done; you just kick back for the rest of the week.It never works that way, right? You're taking these little bits of, like, cool, I might have, like, set that up once just to see what's happening but then you immediately, like, deconstruct it, and you take the knowledge of what you learned in those building blocks, and you, like, go and remix it to build the thing that you actually need to build.Michael: But yeah, I mean, that's exactly—so you know, Legos is what got me interested in that as a kid, but when you look at, you know, cloud services and things like that, there's so many different ways to combine things and so many different ways to, like—you know, you could use Terraform, you could use Crossplane, you could use, you know, any of the services in the cloud, you could use FaaS, you could use serverless, you could use, you know, all these different kinds of solutions and tie them together. So, there's so much choice, and what Lego teaches you is that, embrace the choice. Figure out and embrace the different pieces, embrace all the different things that you have and what the art of possibility is, and then start to build on that. So, I think it's a really good thing. And that's why there's so much correlation between, like, kind of, art and tech and things like that because that's the kind of mentality that you need in order to be really successful in tech.Jason: And I think the other thing that works really well with what you said is, as you're playing with Legos, you start to learn these hacks, right? Like, I don't have, like, a four-by-one brick, but I know that if I have three four-by-one flats, I can stack those three and it's the same height as a brick, right?Michael: Yep.Jason: And you can start combining things. And I love that engineering mentality of, like, I have this problem that I need to solve, I have a limited toolbox for whatever constraints, right, and understanding those constraints, and then cool, how can I remix what I've got in my toolbox to get this thing done?Michael: And that's a thing that I'm always doing. Like, when I used to do a lot of development, you know, it was always like, what is the right code? Or what is the library that's going to solve my problem? Or what is the API that's going to solve my problem, you know?And there's so many different ways to do it. I mean, so many people are afraid of, like, making the wrong choice, when really in programming, there is no wrong choice. It's all about how you want to do it and what makes sense to you, you know? There might be better options in formatting and in the way that you kind of, you know, format that code together and put them in different libraries and things like that, but making choices on, like, APIs and things like that, that's all up to the artist. I would say that's an artist. [laugh]. So, you know, I think it all stems though, when you go back from, you know, just being creative with things… so creativity is king.Jason: So Michael, how do you exercise your creativity, then? How do you keep up that creativity?Michael: Yeah, so there's multiple ways. And that's a great segment because one of the things that I really enjoy—so you know, I like development, but I'm also a people person. And I like product management, but I also like dealing with people. So really, to me, it's about how do I relate products, how do I relate solutions, how do I talk to people about solutions that people can understand? And that's a creative process.Like, what is the right media? What is the right demos? What is the right—you know, what do people need? And what do people need to, kind of, embrace things? And to me, that's a really creative medium to me, and I love it.So, I love that I can use my technical, I love that I can use my artistic, I love that I can use, you know, all these pieces all at once. And sometimes maybe I'll play guitar and just put it in the intro or something, I don't know. So, that kind of combines that together, too. So, we'll figure that piece out later. Maybe nobody wants to hear me play guitar, that's fine, too. [laugh].But I love to be able to use, you know, both sides of my brain to do these creative aspects. So, that's really what does it. And then sometimes I'll program again and I'll find the need, and I'll say, “Hey, look, you know, I realized there's a need for this,” just like a lot of those creators are. But I haven't created anything cool, but you know, maybe someday I will. I feel like it's just been in between all those different intersections that's really cool.Jason: I love the electric guitar stuff that you mentioned. So, for folks who are listening to this show, during our recording of the Cloud Unfiltered you were talking about bringing that art and technical together with electric guitars, and you've been building electric guitar pickups.Michael: Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, I love anything that can combine my music passion with tech, so I have a CNC machine back here that winds pickups and it does it automatically. So, I can say, “Hey, I need a 57 pickup, you know, whatever it is,” and it'll wind it to that exact spec.But that's not the only thing I do. I mean, I used to design control surfaces for artists that were a big band, and I really can't—a lot of them I can't mention because we're under NDA. But I designed a lot of these big, you know, control surfaces for a lot of the big electronic and rock bands that are out there. I taught people how to use Max for Live, which is an artist's, kind of, programming language that's graphical, so [NMax 00:25:33] and MSP and all that kind of stuff. So, I really, really like to combine that.Nowadays, you know, I'm talking about doing some kind of events that may be combined tech, with art. So, maybe doing things like Algorave, and you know, things that are live-coding music and an art. So, being able to combine all these things together, I love that. That's my ultimate passion.Jason: That is super cool.Julie: I think we have learned quite a bit on this episode of Break Things on Purpose, first of all, from the guy who said he hasn't created much—because you did say that, which I'm going to call you out on that because you just gave a long list of things that you created. And I think we need to remember that we're all creators in our own way, so it's very important to remember that. But I think that right now we've created a couple of options for talks in the future, whether or not it's with Lego, or guitar pickups.Michael: Yeah.Julie: Is that—Michael: Hey—Julie: Because I—Michael: Yeah, why not?Julie: —know you do kind of explain that a little bit to me as well when I was there. So, Michael, this has just been amazing having you. We're going to put a lot of links in the notes for everybody today. So, to Michael's podcast, to some Lego, and to anything else Michael wants to share with us as well. Oh, real quick, is there anything you want to leave our listeners with other than that? You know, are you looking to hire Cisco? Is there anything you wanted to share with us?Michael: Yeah, I mean, we're always looking for great people at Cisco, but the biggest thing I'd say is, just realize that we are doing stuff around cloud-native, we're not just network. And I think that's something to note there. But you know, I just love being on the show with you guys. I love doing anything with you guys. You guys are awesome, you know. So.Julie: You're great too, and I think we'll probably do more stuff, all of us together, in the future. And with that, I just want to thank everybody for joining us today.Michael: Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

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About CarlaCarla Stickler is a professional multi-hyphenate advocating for the inclusion of artists in STEM. Currently, she works as a software engineer at G2 in Chicago. She loves chatting with folks interested in shifting gears from the arts to programming and especially hopes to get more women into the field. Carla spent over 10 years performing in Broadway musicals, most notably, “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and “The Sound of Music.” She recently made headlines for stepping back into the role of Elphaba on Broadway for a limited time to help out during the covid surge after not having performed the role for 7 years. Carla is passionate about reframing the narrative of the “starving artist” and states, “When we choose to walk away from a full-time pursuit of the arts, it does not make us failed artists. The possibilities for what we can do and who we can be are unlimited.”Links Referenced: G2: https://www.g2.com/ Personal website: https://carlastickler.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sticklercarla/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, there seems to be a trope in our industry that the real engineers all follow what more or less looks like the exact same pattern, where it's you wind up playing around with computers as a small child and then you wind up going to any college you want—as long as it's Stanford—and getting a degree in anything under the sun—as long as it's computer science—and then all of your next jobs are based upon how well you can re-implement algorithms on the whiteboard. A lot of us didn't go through that path. We wound up finding our own ways to tech. My guest today has one of the more remarkable stories that I've come across. Carla Stickler is a software engineer at G2. Carla, thank you for agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows today. It's appreciated.Carla: Thanks so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, before you entered tech—I believe this is your first job as an engineer and as of the time we're recording this, it's been just shy of a year that you've done in the role. What were you doing before now?Carla: Oh, boy, Corey. What was I doing? I definitely was not doing software engineering. I was a Broadway actress. So, I spent about 15 years in New York doing musical theater, touring around the country and Asia in big Broadway shows. And that was pretty much all I did.I guess, I also was a teacher. I was a voice teacher and I taught voice lessons, and I had a studio and I taught it a couple of faculties in New York. But I was one hundred percent ride-or-die, like, all the way to the end musical theater or bust, from a very, very early age. So, it's been kind of a crazy time changing careers. [laugh].Corey: What inspired that? I mean, it doesn't seem like it's a common pattern of someone who had an established career as a Broadway actress to wake up one day and say, “You know what I don't like anymore. That's right being on stage, doing the thing that I spent 15 years doing. You know what I want to do instead? That's right, be mad at computers all the time and angry because some of the stuff is freaking maddening.” What was the catalyst that—Carla: Yeah, sounds crazy. [laugh].Corey: —inspired you to move?Carla: It sounds crazy. It was kind of a long time coming. I love performing; I do, and it's like, my heart and soul is with performing. Nothing else in my life really can kind of replace that feeling I get when I'm on stage. But the one thing they don't really talk about when you are growing up and dreaming of being a performer is how physically and emotionally taxing it is.I think there's, like, this narrative around, like, “Being an actor is really hard, and you should only do it if you can't see yourself doing anything else,” but they don't actually ever explain to you what hard means. You know, you expect that, oh, there's going to be a lot of other people doing it in, I'm going to be auditioning all the time, and I'm going to have a lot of competition, but you never quite grasp the physical and emotional toll that it takes on your body and your—you know, just ongoing in auditions and getting rejections all the time. And then when you're working in a show eight times a week and you're wearing four-inch heels on a stage that is on a giant angle, and you're wearing wigs that are, like, really, really massive, you don't really—no one ever tells you how hard that is on your body. So, for me, I just hit a point where I was performing nonstop and I was so tired. I was, like, living at my physical therapist's office, I was living at, like, my head therapist's office.I was just trying to, like, figure out why I was so miserable. And so, I actually left in 2015, performing full time. So, I went to get my Master's in Education at NYU thinking that teaching was my way out of performing full-time.Corey: It does seem that there's some congruities—there's some congruities there between your—instead of performing in front of a giant audience, you're performing in front of a bunch of students. And whether it's performing slash educating, well that comes down to almost stylistic differences. But I have a hard time imagining you just reading from your slides.Carla: Yeah, no, I loved it because it allowed me to create connections with my students, and I found I like to help inspire them on their journeys, and I really like to help influence them in a positive way. And so yeah, it came really natural to me. And my family—or I have a bunch of teachers in my family so, you know, teaching was kind of a thing I just assumed I would be good at, and I think I fell naturally into. But the thing that was really hard for me was while I was teaching, I was still… kind of—I had, like, one foot in performing. I was still, like, going in and out of the show that I've been working on, which I didn't mention.So, I was in Wicked for, like, ten years, that's kind of like my claim to fame. And I had been with that show for a really long time, and that was why—when I left to go teach, that was kind of my way out of that big show because it was hard for me to explain to people why it was leaving such a giant show. And teaching was just, like, a natural thing to go into. I felt like it was like a justifiable action, [laugh] you know, that I could explain to, like, my parents for why I was quitting Broadway.So, you know, I love teaching and—but I—and so I kept that one foot kind of in Broadway, and I was still going in and out of the show. It's like a vacation cover, filling in whenever they needed me, and I was still auditioning. But I was like, I was still so burned out, you know? Like, I still had those feelings of, like—and I wasn't booking work; I think my heart just wasn't really in it. Like, every time I'd go into audition, I would just feel awful about myself every time I left.And I was starting to really reject that feeling in my life because I was also starting to find there were other things in my life that made me really happy. Like, just having a life. Like, I had—for the first time in a very long time, I had friends that I could hang out with on the weekends because I wasn't working on the weekend. And I was able to, like, go to, you know, birthdays and weddings and I was having, like, this social life. And then every time I would go on an audition—Corey: And they did other things with their lives, and it wasn't—Carla: Yeah.Corey: All shop talk all the time—Carla: Right.Corey: Which speaking as someone who lives in San Francisco and worked in normal companies before starting this ridiculous one, it seems that your entire social circle can come out of your workplace. And congratulations, it's now all shop talk, all the time. And anyone you know or might be married to who's not deeply in tech just gets this long-suffering attitude on all of it. It's nice to be able to have varied conversations about different things.Carla: Yes. And so, I was like having all these, like—I was, like, having these life moments that felt really good, and then I would go to an audition and I would leave being, like, “Why do I do that to myself? Why do I need to feel like that?” Because I just feel awful every time I go. And so, then I was having trouble teaching my students because I was feeling really negative about it, and I was like, “I don't know how to encourage you to go into a business that's just going to, like, tear you down and make you feel awful about yourself all the time.”Corey: And then you got into tech?Carla: [laugh]. And then I was just, like, “Tech. That's great.” No, I—do you know what—Corey: Like, “I'm sad all the time and I feel like less than constantly. You know what I'm going to use to fix that? I'm going to learn JavaScript.” Oh, my God.Carla: Yeah. I'm going to just challenge myself and do the hardest thing I can think of because that's fun. But ki—I mean, sort of I [laugh] I, I was not ever—like, being an engineer was never, like, on my radar. My dad was an engineer for a long time, and he kind of always would be, like, “You're good at math. You should do engineering.”And I was like, “No, I'm an actor. [laugh]. I don't want to do that.” And so, I kind of always just, like, shooed it away. And when a friend of mine came to my birthday party in the summer of 2018, who had been a songwriter and I had done some readings of a musical of his, and he was like, “I'm an engineer now at Forbes. Isn't that great?”And I was like, “What? How does that happen? I need you to back up, explain to me what's going on.” And I just, like—but I went home and I could not stop thinking about it. I don't know if it was like my dad's voice in the back of my head, or there was like the stars aligned.My misery that I was feeling in my life, and, like, this new thing that just got thrown in my face was just such an exciting, interesting idea. I was like, “That sounds—I don't know what—I don't even know what that looks like or I don't even know what's involved in that, but I need to figure out how to do it.” And I went home when I first started teaching myself how to do it. And I would just sit on my couch and I would do, like, little coding challenges, and before I knew it, like, hours would have passed by, I forgot to eat, I forget to go to the bathroom. Like, I would just be, like, groove on the couch from where I was sitting for too long.And I was like, oh, I guess I really liked this. [laugh]. It's interesting, it's creative. Maybe I should do something with it.Corey: And then from there, did you decide at some point to pursue—like, a lot of paths into tech these days. There's a whole sea of boot camps, for example, that depending on how you look at them are either inspirational stories of how people can transform their lives, slash money-grabbing scams. And it really depends on the boot camp in particular, is that the path you took? Did you—Carla: Yes.Corey: Remain self-taught? How did you proceed from—there's a whole Couch-to-5k running program; what is about—I guess we'll call getting to tech—but what was your Couch-to-100k path?Carla: Yeah, I was just going to say, Couch-to-100k tech gig.Corey: Yeah.Carla: So, my friend to had gone to Flatiron School, which is a boot camp. I think they have a few locations around the country, and so I initially started looking at their program just because he had gone there, and it sounded great. And I was like, “Cool, great.” And they had a lot of free resources online. They have, like, this whole free, like, boot camp prep program that you can do that teaches Rails and JavaScript.And so, I started doing that online. And then I—at the time, they had, like, a part-time class. I like learning in person, which is funny because now I just work remote and I do everything on Google… it's like, Google and Stack Overflow. So—but I knew at the time—Corey: I have bad news about the people who are senior. It doesn't exactly change that much.Carla: Yeah, that's what I've heard, so I don't feel bad about telling people that I do it. [laugh].Corey: We're all Full Stack Overflow developers. It happens.Carla: Exactly. So yeah, I just. They had, like, a part-time front-end class that was, like, in person two nights a week for a couple months. And I was like, “Okay, that'll be a really good way to kind of get my feet wet with, like, a different kind of learning environment.”And I loved it. I fell in love with it. I loved being in a room of people trying to figure out how to do something hard. I liked talking about it with other people. I liked talking about it with my teachers.So, I was like, “Okay, I guess I'm going to invest in a boot camp.” And I did their, like, immersive, in-person boot camps. This was 2019 before everything shut down, so I was able to actually do it in person. And it was great. It was like, nine to six, five days a week, and it was really intense.Did I remember everything I learned when it was over? No. And did I have to, like, spend a lot of time relearning a lot of things just so I could have, like, a deeper understanding of it. Yes. But, like, I also knew that was part of it, you know? It's like, you throw a lot of information out you, hope some of it sticks, and then it's your job to make sure that you actually remember it and then know how to use it when you have to.Corey: One of the challenges that I've always found is that when I have a hobby that I'm into, similar to the way that you were doing this just for fun on your couch, and then it becomes your full-time focus, first as a boot camp and later as a job, that it has a tendency in some cases to turn a thing that you love into a thing that you view is this obligation or burden. Do you still love it? Is it still something that you find that's fun and challenging and exciting? Or is it more a means to an end for you? And there is no wrong answer there.Carla: Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both, right? Like, I found it was a creative thing I could do that I enjoy doing. Am I the most passionate software engineer that ever lived? No. Do I have aspirations to be, like, an architect one day? Absolutely not. I really, like, the small tickets that I do that are just, like, refactoring a button or, you know, like, I find that stuff creative and I think it's fun. Do I necessarily want to—Corey: You can see—Carla: —no.Corey: The results immediately as [crosstalk 00:15:15]—Carla: Yeah.Corey: More abstract stuff. It's like, “Well, when this 18 months migration finishes, and everything is 10% faster, oh, then I'll be vindicated.”Carla: Yeah. No.Corey: It's a little more attenuated from the immediate feedback.Carla: Yeah. I'm not that kind of developer, I'm learning. But I'm totally fine with that. I have no issue. Like, I am a very humble person about it. I don't have aspirations to be amazing.Don't ask me to do algorithm challenges. I'm terrible at them. I know that I'm terrible at them. But I also know that you can be a good developer and be terrible algorithm, like, challenges. So, I don't feel bad about it.Corey: The algorithm challenge is inherently biased for people who not only have a formal computer science education but have one relatively recently. I look back at some of the technical challenges I used to give candidates and take myself for jobs ten years ago, and I don't remember half of it because it's not my day-to-day anymore. It turns out that most of us don't have a job implementing quicksort. We just use the one built into the library and we move on with our lives to do something interesting and much more valuable, like, moving that button three pixels left, but because of CSS, that's now a two-week project.Carla: Yeah. Add a little border-radius, changes the su—you know. There are some database things I like. You know, I'm trying to get better at SQL. Rails is really nice because we use Active Record, and I don't really have to know SQL.But I find there are some things that you can do in Rails that are really cool, and I enjoyed working in their console. And that's exciting. You know when you write, like, a whole controller and then you make something but you can only see it in the console? That's cool. I think to me, that's fun. Being able to, like, generate things is fun. I don't have to always see them, like, on the page in a visual, pretty way, even though I tend to be more visual.Corey: This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word.Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen manage databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud.To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: One of the big fictions that we tend to have as an industry is when people sit down and say, “Oh, so why did you get into tech?” And everyone expects it to be this aspirational story of the challenge, and I've been interested in this stuff since I was a kid. And we're all supposed to just completely ignore the very present reality of well, looking at all of my different opportunities, this is the one that pays three times what the others do. Like, we're supposed to pretend that money doesn't matter and we're all following our passion. That is actively ridiculous from where I sit.Carla: Mm-hm.Corey: Do you find that effectively going from the Broadway actress side of the world to—where, let's be clear, in the world of entertaining and arts—to my understanding—90% of people in that space are not able to do that as their only gig without side projects to basically afford to eat, whereas in tech, the median developer makes an extremely comfortable living that significantly outpaces the average median income for a family of four in the United States. Do you find that it has changed your philosophy on life in any meaningful way?Carla: Oh, my God, yeah. I love talking about on all of my social platforms the idea that you can learn tech skills and you can—like, there are so many different jobs that exist for an engineer, right? There are full-time jobs. There are full-time job that are flexible and they're remote, and nobody cares what time you're working as long as you get the work done. And because of that and because of the nature of how performing and being an artist works, where you also have a lot of downtime in between jobs or even when you are working, that I feel like the two go very, very well together, and that it allows—if an artist can spend a little bit of time learning the skill, they now have the ability to feel stable in their lives, also be creative how they want to, and decide what the art looks like for them without struggling and freaking out all the time about where's my next meal going to come from, or can I pay my rent?And, like, I sometimes think back to when I was on tour—I was on tour for three years with Wicked—and I had so much free time, Corey. Like, if I had known that I could have spent some time when I was just like hanging out in my hotel room watching TV all day, like, learning how to code. I would have been—I would have done this years ago. If I had known it was even, I don't even know actually if it was an option back then in, like, the early-2010s. I feel like boot camps kind of started around then, but they were mostly in person.But if I was—today, if I was right now starting my career as an artist, I would absolutely learn how to code as a side hustle. Because why wait tables? [laugh]. Why make, like, minimum wage in a terrible job that you hate when you can I have a skillset that you can do from home now because everything is remote for the most part? Why not?It doesn't make sense to me that anybody would go back to those kind of awful side gigs, side hustle jobs. Because at the end of the day, side hustle jobs end up actually being the things that you spend more time doing, just because theater jobs and art jobs and music jobs are so, you know, far apart when you have them. That might as well pick something that's lucrative and makes you feel less stressed out, you know, in the interim, between gigs. I see it as kind of a way to give artists a little more freedom in what they can choose to do with their art. Which I think is… it's kind of magical, right?Like, it takes away that narrative of if you can't see yourself—if you can see yourself doing anything else, you should do it, right? That's what we tell kids when they go into the arts. If you can see yourself doing any other thing, you know, you have to struggle to be an artist; that is part of the gig. That's what you sign up for. And I just call bullshit on it, Corey. I don't know if I can swear on this, but I call bullshit on [crosstalk 00:21:06]—[laugh].Corey: Oh, you absolutely can.Carla: I just think it's so unfair to young people, to how they get to view themselves and their creativity, right? Like, you literally stunt them when you tell them that. You say, “You can only do this one thing.” That's like the opposite of creative, right? That's like telling somebody that they can only do one thing without imagining that they can do all these other things. The most interesting artists that I know do, like, 400 things, they are creative people and they can't stop, right? They're like multi-hyphenates [crosstalk 00:21:39].Corey: It feels like it's setting people up for failure, on some level, in a big way where when you're building your entire life toward this make-or-break thing and then you don't get it, it's, well, what happens then?Carla: Yeah.Corey: I've always liked the idea of failure as a step forward. And well, that thing didn't work out; let's see if we can roll into it and see what comes out next. It's similar to the idea of a lot of folks who are career-changing, where they were working somewhere else in a white-collar environment, well time to go back to square one for an entry-level world. Hell with that. Pivot; take a half step toward what you want to be doing in your next role, and then a year or so later, take the other half step, and now you're doing it full time without having to start back at square one.I think that there are very few things in this world that are that binary as far as you either succeed or you're done and your whole life was a waste. It is easy get stuck in this idea that if your childhood dream doesn't come true, well give up and prepare for a life of misery. I just don't accept that.Carla: Yeah, I—Corey: But maybe it's because I have no choice because getting fired is my stock-in-trade. So, it wasn't until I built a company where I can't get fired from it that I really started to feel a little bit secure in that. But it does definitely leave its marks and its damages. I spent 12 years waiting for the surprise meeting with my boss and someone I didn't recognize from HR where they don't offer you coffee—that's always the tell when they don't offer coffee—and to realize it while I'm back on the job market again; time to find something new. It left me feeling more mercenary that I probably should have, which wasn't great for the career.What about you? Do you think that—did it take, on some level, a sense of letting go of old dreams? Was it—and did it feel like a creeping awareness that this was, like—that you felt almost cornered into it? Or how did you approach it?Carla: Yeah, I think I was the same way. I think I especially when you were younger because of that narrative, right, we tell people that if they decide to go into the arts, they have to be one hundred percent committed to it, and if they aren't one hundred percent and then they don't succeed, it is their fault, right? Like, if you give it everything that you have, and then it doesn't work out, you have clearly done something wrong, therefore you are a failure. You failed at your dream because you gave it everything that you have, so you kind of set yourself up for failure because you don't allow yourself to, you know, be more of who you are in other ways.For me, I just spent so many I had so many moments in my life where I thought that the world was over, right? Like, when I was—right out of college, I went to school to study opera. And I was studying at Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, it was, like, the great, great conservatory, and halfway through my freshman year, I got diagnosed with a cyst on my vocal cords. So, basically what this meant was that I had to have surgery to have it removed, and the doctor told me that I probably would never sing opera. And I was devastated.Like, I was—this was the thing I wanted to do with my life; I had committed myself one hundred percent, and now all of a sudden this thing happened, and I panicked. I thought it was my fault—because there was nobody to help me understand that it wasn't—and I was like, “I have failed this thing. I have failed my dream. What am I going to do with my life?” And I said, “Okay I'll be an actor because acting is a noble thing.” And that's sort of like act—that's sort of like performing; it's performing in a different way, it's just not singing.And I was terrified to sing again because I had this narrative in my head that I was a failed singer if I co,uldn't be an opera singer. And so, it took me, like, years, three years before I finally started singing again I got a voice teacher, and he—I would cry through all of my lessons. He was like, “Carly, you really have a—should be singing. Like, this is something that you're good at.” And I was like, no because if I can't sing, like, the way I want to sing, why would I sing?And he really kind of pushed me and helped me, like, figure out what my voice could do in a new way. And it was really magical for me. It made me realize that this narrative that I've been telling myself of what I thought that I was supposed to be didn't have to be true. It didn't have to be the only one that existed; there could be other possibilities for what I could do and they could look different. But I closed myself off to that idea because I had basically been told no, you can't do this thing that you want to do.So, I didn't even consider the possibilities of the other things that I could do. And when I relearned how to sing, it just blew my mind because I was like, “Oh, my God, I didn't know this was possible. I didn't know in my body it was possible of this. I didn't know if I could do this.” And, like, overcoming that and making me realize that I could do other things, that there were other versions of what I wanted, kind of blew my mind a little bit.And so, when I would hit road bumps and I'd hit these walls, I was like, “Okay, well, maybe I just need to pivot. Maybe the direction I'm going in isn't quite the right one, but maybe if I just, like, open my eyes a little bit, there's another—there's something else over here that is interesting and will be creative and will take me in a different way, an unexpected way that I wasn't expecting.” And so, I've kind of from that point on sort of living my life like that, in this way that, well, this might be a roadblock, and many people might view this thing as a failure, but for me, it allowed me to open up all these other new things that I didn't even know I could do, right? Like, what I'm doing now is something I never would have imagined I'd be doing five years ago. And now I'm also in a place where not only am I doing something completely different as a software engineer, but I have this incredible opportunity to also start incorporating art back into my life in a way that I can own and I can do for myself instead of having to do for other people.Which is also something I never thought because I thought it was all or nothing. I thought if I was an artist, I was an artist; I'm a software engineer, I'm a software engineer. And so, now I have the ability to kind of live in this weird gray area of getting to make those decisions for myself, and recognize that those little failures were, you know—like, I like to call them, like, the lowercase failures instead of the uppercase failure, right? Like, I am not a failure because I experienced failure. Those little failures are kind of what led me to grow my strength and my resilience and my ability to recognize it more free—like, more quickly when I see it so that I can bounce back faster, right?Like, when I hit a wall, instead of living in that feeling of, like, “Ugh, God, this is the worst thing that ever happened,” I allow myself to move faster through it and recognize that there will be light on the other side. I will get there. And I know that it's going to be okay, and I can trust that because it's always been okay. I always figure it out. And so, that's something—taken me a long time to, like, realize, you know? To, like, really learn, you have to fail a lot to learn that you're going to be okay every time it happens. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, what's the phrase? “Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at it?”Carla: Yeah. You got to let yourself suck at it. When I used to teach voice, I would make my students make just, like, the ugliest sounds because I was like, if we can just get past the fact that no matter what, when you sing you're going to sound awful at some point. We're going to try something, you're going to crack, it's not going to come out right, and if we can't own that it's going to suck a little bit on the journey to being good, like, you're going to have a really hard time getting there because you're just going to beat yourself up every time it sucks. Like, it's going to suck a lot [laugh] before you get good. And that's just part of it. That's, like, it is just a part of the process, and you have to kind of own it.Corey: I think that as people we are rarely as one-dimensional as we imagine we are when. And for example, I like working with cloud services, let's not kid ourselves on this. But I have a deep and abiding love affair with the sound of my own voice, so I'm always going to find ways to work that into it. I have a hard time seeing a future career for you that does not in some way, shape or form, tie back to your performing background because even now, talking about singing, you lit up when talking about that in a way that no one does—or at least should—light up when they're talking about React. So, do you think that there's a place between the performing side of the world and the technical side of the world, or those phases of your life, that's going to provide interesting paths for you down the road?Carla: That is a good question, Corey. And I don't know if I have the answer. You know, I think one thing—if there's anything I learned from all the crazy things that happened to me, is that I just kind of have to be open. You know, I like to say yes to things. And also learning to say no, which has been really a big deal for me.Corey: Oh, yes.“, no,” is a complete sentence and people know that sometimes at their own peril.Carla: Yes, I have said no to some things lately, and it's felt very good. But I like to be open, you know? I like to feel like if I'm putting out good things into the world, good things will come back to me, and so I'm just trying to keep that open. You know, I'm trying to be the best engineer that I can be. And I'm trying to also, you know—if I can use my voice and my platform to help inspire other people to see that there are other ways of being an artist, there are, you know, there are other paths in this world to take.I hope that, you know, I can, other things will come up to me, there'll be opportunities. And I don't know what those look like, but I'm open. So, if anybody out there hears this and you want to collaborate, hit me up. [laugh].Corey: Careful what you offer. People don't know—people have a disturbing tendency of saying, “Well, all right, I have an idea.” That's where a lot of my ridiculous parody music videos came from. It's like, “So, what's the business case for doing?” It's like, “Mmm, I think it'll be funny.”It's like, “Well, how are you going to justify the expense?” “Oh, there's a line item and the company budget labeled ‘Spite.' That's how.” And it's this weird combination of things that lead to a path that on some level makes perfect sense, but at the time you're building this stuff out, it feels like you're directionless and doing all these weird things. Like, one of the, I guess, strange parts of looking back at a path you take in the course of your career is, in retrospect, it feels like every step for the next was obvious and made intuitive sense, but going through it it's, “I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm like the dog that caught the car, and they need to desperately figure out how to drive the thing before it hits the wall.”It's just a—I don't pretend to understand how the tapestry of careers tie together, but I do know that I'm very glad to see people in this space, who do not all have the same ridiculous story for how they got in here. That's the thing that I find continually obnoxious, this belief that there's only one way to do it, or you're somehow less than because you didn't grow up programming in the '90s. Great. There's a lot of people like that. And yes, it is okay to just view computers as a job that pays the bills; there is nothing inherently wrong with that.Carla: Yeah. And I mean, and I—Corey: I just wish people were told that early on.Carla: Yeah, why not? Right? Why didn't anybody tell us that? Like, you don't—the thing that I did not—it took me a long time to realize is that you do not have to be passionate about your job. And that's like, that's okay, right? All you have to do is enjoy it enough to do it, but it does not have to be, like—Corey: You have to like it, on some level [crosstalk 00:33:10]—Carla: Yeah, you just do have to like it. [laugh].Corey: —dreading the 40 hours a week, that's a miserable life on some level.Carla: Like, I sit in front of a computer now all day, and I enjoy it. Like, I enjoy what I'm doing. But again, like, I don't need to be the greatest software engineer that ever lived; I have other things that I like to do, and it allows me to also do those things. And that is what I love about it. It allows me that ability to just enjoy my weekends and have a stable career and have a stable life and have health insurance. And then when I want—Corey: Oh, the luxuries of modern life.Carla: [laugh]. Yeah, the luxuries of modern life. Health insurance, who knew? Yeah, you know, so it's great. And then when creative projects come up, I can choose to say yes or no to them, and that's really exciting for me.Corey: I have a sneaking suspicion—I'll just place my bet now—that the world of performing is not quite done with you yet.Carla: Probably not. I would be lying if I said it was. I—so before all this stuff, I don't know if your listeners know this, but in January, the thing that kind of happened to me that went a little viral where I went back to Broadway after not being on Broadway for a little while, and the news media and everybody picked up on it, and there were like these headlines of, “Software engineer plays Elphaba on Broadway after seven years.” It surprised me, but it also didn't surprise me, you know? Like, when I left, I left thinking I was done.And I think it was easy to leave when I left because of the pandemic, right? There was nothing going on when I—like, I started my journey before the pandemic, but I fully shifted into software engineering during the pandemic. So, I never had feelings of, like, “I'm missing out on performing,” because performing didn't exist. There was no Broadway for a while. And so, once it kind of started to come back last year in the fall, I was like, “Oh, maybe I miss it a little bit.”And maybe I accidentally manifested it, but, you know, when Wicked called and I flew back to New York for those shows, and I was like, “Oh, this is really wonderful.” Also, I'm really glad I don't have to do this eight times a week. I'm so excited to go home. And I was like, having a little taste of it made me realize, “Oh, I can do this if I want to do this. I also don't have to do this if I don't want to do this.” And that was pretty—it was very empowering. I was like, “That feels nice.”Corey: I really appreciate your taking so much time to talk about how you've gone through what at the time has got to have felt like a very strange set of career steps, but it's starting to form into something that appears to have an arc to it. If people want to learn more and follow along as you continue to figure out what you're going to do next, where's the best place to find you?Carla: Oh, good question, Corey. I do a website, carlastickler.com. Because I've had a lot of people—artists, in particular—reaching out and asking how I did this, I'm starting to build some resources, and so you can sign up for my mailing list.I also am pretty big on Instagram if we're going to choose social media. So, my Instagram is stiglercarla. And there's links to all that stuff on my website. But—Corey: And they will soon be in the [show notes 00:36:26] as well.Carla: Ah yes, add them to the show notes. [laugh]. Yeah, and I want to make sure that I… I want—a lot of people who've seen my story and felt very inspired by it. A lot of artists who have felt that they, too, were failures because they chose not to go into art and get a regular nine to five. And so, I'm trying to, like, kind of put a little bit more of that out there so that people see that they're not alone.And so, on my social media, I do post a lot of stories that people send to me, just telling me their story about how they made the transition and how they keep art in their life in different ways. And so, that's something that also really inspires me. So, I tried to put their voices up, too. So, if anybody is interested in feeling not alone, feeling like there are other people out there, all of us, quote-unquote, “Failed artists,” and there's a lot of us. And so, I'm just trying to create a little space for all of us.Corey: I look forward to seeing it continue to evolve.Carla: Thank you.Corey: Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Carla: Thanks, Corey.Corey: Carla Stickler, software engineer at G2 and also very much more. 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, and if it's on the YouTubes, smash the like and subscribe buttons, as the kids of today are saying, whereas if you've hated this podcast, same thing: Five-star review, smash the buttons, but also leave an angry comment telling me exactly what you didn't like about this, and I will reply with the time and date for your audition.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. 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Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/[00:00:00] Intro[00:01:15] Multi-Account Support for AWS Transit Gateway Network Managerhttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/05/multi-account-support-aws-transit-gateway-network-manager/[00:03:22] GitHub Actions: Re-run jobs with debug logginghttps://docs.github.com/en/actions/monitoring-and-troubleshooting-workflows/enabling-debug-logging[00:06:09] Pretty Drawings that Explain How Terraform Workshttps://medium.com/@mfundo/how-terraform-works-a-visual-intro-6328cddbe067[00:07:05] The Most Upvoted Terraform Issueshttps://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc[00:13:39] AWSLS with Terraform Resource Nameshttps://github.com/jckuester/awsls[00:14:10] Terraform Plan Visualizerhttps://github.com/im2nguyen/rover/blob/main/docs/rover-cropped-screenshot.png[00:20:51] EC2 C7g instances are now available[00:23:32] What if HashiCorp Decides go the way of MongoDB and Elastic with Licensing?[00:35:27] Is there an example of how to merge global and environment specific variables (probably more levels) so you can call your main stack module in a DRY way?[00:40:23] Pinning containers in CI configurations with Ratchet https://github.com/sethvargo/ratchet[00:55:00] Outro #officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show

About SimonFounder and CEO of SnapShooter a backup company Links Referenced: SnapShooter.com: https://SnapShooter.com MrSimonBennett: https://twitter.com/MrSimonBennett 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: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the things that I learned early on in my career as a grumpy Unix systems administrator is that there are two kinds of people out there: those who care about backups an awful lot, and people who haven't lost data yet. I lost a bunch of data once upon a time and then I too fell on the side of backups are super important. Here to talk with me about them a bit today is Simon Bennett, founder and CEO of SnapShooter.com. Simon, thanks for joining me.Simon: Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.Corey: It's fun to be able to talk to people who are doing business in the cloud space—in this sense too—that is not venture-backed, that is not, “Well, we have 600 people here that are building this thing out.” And similar to the way that I handle things at The Duckbill Group, you are effectively one of those legacy things known as a profitable business that self-funds. What made you decide to pursue that model as opposed to, well, whatever the polite version of bilking venture capitalists out of enormous piles of money for [unintelligible 00:01:32]?Simon: I think I always liked the idea of being self-sufficient and running a business, so I always wanted to start a physical business when I was younger, but when I got into software, I realized that that's a really easy way, no capital needed, to get started. And I tried for years and years to build products, all of which failed until finally SnapShooter actually gained a customer. [laugh].Corey: “Oh, wait, someone finally is paying money for this, I guess I'm onto something.”Simon: Yeah.Corey: And it's sort of progressed from there. How long have you been in business?Simon: We started in 2017, as… it was an internal project for a company I was working at who had problems with DigitalOcean backups, or they had problems with their servers getting compromised. So, I looked at DigitalOcean API and realized I could build something. And it took less than a week to build a product [with billing 00:02:20]. And I put that online and people started using it. So, that was how it worked.Every other product I tried before, I'd spent months and months developing it and never getting a customer. And the one time I spent less than [laugh] less than a week's worth of evenings, someone started paying. I mean, admittedly, the first person was only paying a couple of dollars a month, but it was something.Corey: There's a huge turning point where you just validate the ability and willingness for someone to transfer one dollar from their bank account to yours. It speaks to validation in a way that social media nonsense generally doesn't. It's the oh, someone is actually willing to pay because I'm adding value to what they do. That's no small thing.Simon: Yeah. There's definitely a big difference between people saying they're going to and they'd love it, and actually doing it. So.Corey: I first heard about you when Patrick McKenzie—or @patio11, as he goes by on Twitter—wound up doing a mini-thread on you about, “I've now used SnapShooter.com for real, and it was such a joy, including making a server migration easier than it would otherwise have been. Now, I have automatically monitored backups to my own S3 account for a bunch of things, which already had a fairly remote risk of failure.” And he keeps talking about the awesome aspects of it. And okay, when Patrick says, “This is neat,” that usually means it's time for me to at least click the link and see what's going on.And the thing that jumped out at me was a few things about what it is that you offer. You talk about making sure that people can sleep well at night, that it's about why backups are important, about—you obviously check the boxes and talk about how you do things and why you do them the way that you do, but it resonates around the idea of helping people sleep well at night. Because no one wants to think about backups. Because no one cares about backups; they just care an awful lot about restores, usually right after they should have cared about the backups.Simon: Yeah. This is actually a big problem with getting customers because I don't think it's on a lot of people's minds, getting backups set up until, as you said in the intro, something's gone wrong. [laugh]. And then they're happy to be a customer for life.Corey: I started clicking around and looking at your testimonials, for example, on your website. And the first one I saw was from the CEO of Transistor.fm. For those who aren't familiar with what they do, they are the company that hosts this podcast. I pay them as a vendor for all the back issues and whatnot.Whenever you download the show. It's routing through their stuff. So yeah, I kind of want them to have backups of these things because I really don't want to have all these conversations [laugh] again with everyone. That's an important thing. But Transistor's business is not making sure that the data is safe and secure; it's making podcasts available, making it easy to publish to them.And in your case, you're handling the backup portion of it so they can pay their money and they set it up effectively once—set it and forget it—and then they can go back to doing the thing that they do, and not having to fuss with it constantly. I think a lot of companies get it wrong, where they seem to think that people are going to make sustained, engaged efforts in whatever platform or tool or service they build. People have bigger fish to fry; they just want the thing to work and not take up brain sweat.Simon: Yeah. Customers hardly ever log in. I think it's probably a good sign when they don't have to log in. So, they get their report emails, and that's that. And they obviously come back when they got new stuff to set up, but from a support point of view is pretty, pretty easy, really, people don't—[laugh] constantly on there.Corey: From where I sit, the large cloud providers—and some of the small ones, too—they all have backup functionality built into the offering that they've got. And some are great, some are terrible. I assume—perhaps naively—that all of them do what it says on the tin and actually back up the data. If that were sufficient, you wouldn't have any customers. You clearly have customers. What is it that makes those things not work super well?Simon: Some of them are inflexible. So, some of the providers have built-in server backups that only happen weekly, and six days of no backups can be a big problem when you've made a mistake. So, we offer a lot of flexibility around how often you backup your data. And then another key part is that we let you store your data where you want. A lot of the providers have either vendor lock-in, or they only store it in themselves. So… we let you take your data from one side of the globe to the other if you want.Corey: As anyone who has listened to the show is aware, I'm not a huge advocate for multi-cloud for a variety of excellent reasons. And I mean that on a per-workload basis, not, “Oh, we're going to go with one company called Amazon,” and you use everything that they do, including their WorkMail product. Yeah, even Amazon doesn't use WorkMail; they use Exchange like a real company would. And great, pick the thing that works best for you, but backups have always been one of those areas.I know that AWS has great region separation—most of the time. I know that it is unheard of for there to be a catastrophic data loss story that transcends multiple regions, so the story from their side is very often, oh, just back it up to a different region. Problem solved. Ignoring the data transfer aspect of that from a pricing perspective, okay. But there's also a risk element here where everyone talks about the single point of failure with the AWS account that it's there, people don't talk about as much: it's your payment instrument; if they suspend your account, you're not getting into any region.There's also the story of if someone gets access to your account, how do you back that up? If you're going to be doing backups, from my perspective, that is the perfect use case, to put it on a different provider. Because if I'm backing up from, I don't know, Amazon to Google Cloud or vice versa, I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which both of those companies simultaneously have lost my data and I still care about computers. It is very hard for me to imagine that kind of failure mode, it's way out of scope for any disaster recovery or business continuity plan that I'm coming up with.Simon: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I haven't—[laugh] I don't have that in my disaster recovery plan, to be honest about going to a different cloud, as in, we'll solve that problem when it happens. But the data is, as you say, in two different places, or more. But yeah, the security one is a key one because, you know, there's quite a lot of surface area on your AWS account for compromising, but if you're using either—even a separate AWS account or a different provider purely for storage, that can be very tightly controlled.Corey: I also appreciate the idea that when you're backing stuff up between different providers, the idea of owning both sides of it—I know you offer a solution where you wind up hosting the data as well, and that has its value, don't get me wrong, but there are also times, particularly for regulated industries, where yeah, I kind of don't want my backup data just hanging out with someone else's account with whatever they choose to do with it. There's also the verification question, which again, I'm not accusing you of in any way, shape, or form of being nefarious, but it's also one of those when I have to report to a board of directors of like, “Are you sure that they're doing what they say they're doing?” It's a, “Well, he seemed trustworthy,” is not the greatest answer. And the boards ask questions like that all the time. Netflix has talked about this where they backup a rehydrate-the-business level of data to Google Cloud from AWS, not because they think Amazon is going to disappear off the face of the earth, but because it's easier to do that and explain it than having to say, “Well, it's extremely unlikely and here's why,” and not get torn to pieces by auditors, shareholders, et cetera. It's the path of least resistance, and there is some validity to it.Simon: Yeah, when you see those big companies who've been with ransomware attacks and they've had to either pay the ransom or they've literally got to build the business from scratch, like, the cost associated with that is almost business-ending. So, just one backup for their data, off-site [laugh] they could have saved themselves millions and millions of pounds. So.Corey: It's one of those things where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And we're still seeing that stuff continue to evolve and continue to exist out in the ecosystem. There's a whole host of things that I think about like, “Ooh, if I lost, that would be annoying but not disastrous.” When I was going through some contractual stuff when we were first setting up The Duckbill Group and talking to clients about this, they would periodically ask questions about, “Well, what's your DR policy for these things?” It's, “Well, we have a number of employees; no more than two are located in the same city anywhere, and we all work from laptops because it is the 21st century, so if someone's internet goes out, they'll go to a coffee shop. If everyone's internet goes out, do you really care about the AWS bill that month?”It's a very different use case and [unintelligible 00:11:02] with these things. Now, let's be clear, we are a consultancy that fixes AWS bills; we're not a hospital. There's a big difference in the use case and what is acceptable in different ways. But what I like is that you have really build something out that lets people choose their own adventure in how managed they want it to be, what the source is, what the target should be. And it gives people enough control but without having to worry about the finicky parts of aligning a bunch of scripts that wind up firing off in cron jobs.Simon: Yeah. I'd say a fair few people run into issues running scripts or, you know, they silently fail and then you realize you haven't actually been running backups for the last six months until you're trying to pull them, even if you were trying to—Corey: Bold of you to think that I would notice it that quickly.Simon: [laugh]. Yeah, right. True. Yeah, that's presuming you have a disaster recovery plan that you actually test. Lots of small businesses have never even heard of that as a thing. So, having as us, kind of, manage backups sort of enables us to very easily tell people that backups of, like—we couldn't take the backup. Like, you need to address this.Also, to your previous point about the control, you can decide completely where data flows between. So, when people ask us about what's GDPR policies around data and stuff, we can say, “Well, we don't actually handle your data in that sense. It goes directly from your source through almost a proxy that you control to your storage.” So.Corey: The best answer: GDPR is out of scope. Please come again. And [laugh] yeah, just pass that off to someone else.Simon: In a way, you've already approved those two: you've approved the person that you're managing servers with and you've already approved the people that are doing storage with. You kind of… you do need to approve us, but we're not handling the data. So, we're handling your data, like your actual customer; we're not handling your customer's customer's data.Corey: Oh, yeah. Now, it's a valuable thing. One of my famous personal backup issues was okay, “I'm going to back this up onto the shared drive,” and I sort of might have screwed up the backup script—in the better way, given the two possible directions this can go—but it was backing up all of its data and all the existing backup data, so you know, exponential growth of your backups. Now, my storage vendor was about to buy a boat and name it after me when I caught that. “Oh, yeah, let's go ahead and fix that.”But this stuff is finicky, it's annoying, and in most cases, it fails in silent ways that only show up as a giant bill in one form or another. And not having to think about that is valuable. I'm willing to spend a few hours setting up a backup strategy and the rest; I'm not willing to tend it on an ongoing basis, just because I have other things I care about and things I need to get done.Simon: Yeah. It's such a kind of simple and trivial thing that can quickly become a nightmare [laugh] when you've made a mistake. So, not doing it yourself is a good [laugh] solution.Corey: So, it wouldn't have been a @patio11 recommendation to look at what you do without having some insight into the rest of the nuts and bolts of the business and the rest. Your plans are interesting. You have a free tier of course, which is a single daily backup job and half a gig of storage—or bring your own to that it's unlimited storage—Simon: Yep. Yeah.Corey: Unlimited: the only limits are your budget. Yeah. Zombo.com got it slightly wrong. It's not your mind, it's your budget. And then it goes from Light to Startup to Business to Agency at the high end.A question I have for you is at the high end, what I've found has been sort of the SaaS approach. The top end is always been a ‘Contact Us' form where it's the enterprise scope of folks where they tend to have procurement departments looking at this, and they're going to have a whole bunch of custom contract stuff, but they're also not used to signing checks with fewer than two commas in them. So, it's the signaling and the messaging of, “Reach out and talk to us.” Have you experimented with that at all, yet? Is it something you haven't gotten to yet or do you not have interest in serving that particular market segment?Simon: I'd say we've been gearing the business from starting off very small with one solution to, you know, last—and two years ago, we added the ability to store data from one provider to a different provider. So, we're sort of stair-stepping our way up to enterprise. For example, at the end of last year, we went and got certificates for ISO 27001 and… one other one, I can't remember the name of them, and we're probably going to get SOC 2 at some point this year. And then yes, we will be pushing more towards enterprises. We add, like, APIs as well so people can set up backups on the fly, or so they can put it as part of their provisioning.That's hopefully where I'm seeing the business go, as in we'll become under-the-hood backup provider for, like, a managed hosting solution or something where their customers won't even realize it's us, but we're taking the backups away from—responsibility away from businesses.Corey: For those listeners who are fortunate enough to not have to have spent as long as I have in the woods of corporate governance, the correct answer to, “Well, how do we know that vendor is doing what they say that they're doing,” because the, “Well, he seemed like a nice guy,” is not going to carry water, well, here are the certifications that they have attested to. Here's copies under NDA, if their audit reports that call out what controls they claim to have and it validates that they are in fact doing what they say that they're doing. That is corporate-speak that attests that you're doing the right things. Now, you're going to, in most cases, find yourself spending all your time doing work for no real money if you start making those things available to every customer spending 50 cents a year with you. So generally, the, “Oh, we're going to go through the compliance, get you the reports,” is one of the higher, more expensive tiers where you must spend at least this much for us to start engaging down this rabbit hole of various nonsense.And I don't blame you in the least for not going down that path. One of these years, I'm going to wind up going through at least one of those certification approaches myself, but historically, we don't handle anything except your billing data, and here's how we do it has so far been sufficient for our contractual needs. But the world's evolving; sophistication of enterprise buyers is at varying places and at some point, it'll just be easier to go down that path.Simon: Yeah, to be honest, we haven't had many, many of those customers. Sometimes we have people who come in well over the plan limits, and that's where we do a custom plan for them, but we've not had too many requests for certification. But obviously, we have the certification now, so if anyone ever [laugh] did want to see it under NDA, we could add some commas to any price. [laugh].Corey: This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word.Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen manage databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud.To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: What I like as well is that you offer backups for a bunch of different things. You can do snapshots from, effectively, every provider. I'm sorry, I'm just going to call out because I love this: AWS and Amazon LightSail are called out as two distinct things. And Amazonians will say, “Oh, well, under the hood, they're really the same thing, et cetera.” Yeah, the user experience is wildly different, so yeah, calling those things out as separate things make sense.But it goes beyond that because it's not just, “Well, I took a disk image. There we go. Come again.” You also offer backup recipes for specific things where you could, for example, back things up to a local file and external storage where someone is. Great, you also backup WordPress and MongoDB and MySQL and a whole bunch of other things.A unified cloud controller, which is something I have in my house, and I keep thinking I should find a way to back that up. Yeah, this is great. It's not just about the big server thing; it's about having data living in managed services. It's about making sure that the application data is backed up in a reasonable, responsible way. I really liked that approach. Was that an evolution or is that something you wound up focusing on almost from the beginning?Simon: It was an evolution. So, we started with the snapshots, which got the business quite far to be honest and it was very simple. It was just DigitalOcean to start with, actually, for the first two years. Pretty easy to market in a way because it's just focused on one thing. Then the other solutions came in, like the other providers and, you know, once you add one, it was easy to add many.And then came database backups and file backups. And I just had those two solutions because that was what people were asking for. Like, they wanted to make sure their whole server snapshot, if you have a whole server snapshot, the point in time data for MySQL could be corrupt. Like, there could be stuff in RAM that a MySQL dump would have pulled out, for example. Like… there's a possibility that the database could be corrupt from a snapshot, so people were asking for a bit of, more, peace of mind with doing proper backups of MySQL.So, that's what we added. And it soon became apparent when more customers were asking for more solutions that we really needed to, like, step back and think about what we're actually offering. So, we rebuilt this whole, kind of like, database engine, then that allowed us to consume data from anywhere. So, we can easily add more backup types. So, the reason you can see all the ones you've listed there is because that's kind of what people have been asking for. And every time someone comes up with a new, [laugh], like, a new open-source project or database or whatever, we'll add support, even ones I've never heard of before. When people ask for some weird file—Corey: All it takes is just waiting for someone to reach out and say, hey, can you back this thing up, please?Simon: Yeah, exactly, some weird file-based database system that I've never ever heard of. Yeah, sure. Just give us [laugh] a test server to mess around with and we'll build, essentially, like, we use bash in the background for doing the backups; if you can stream the data from a command, we can then deal with the whole management process. So, that's the reason why. And then, I was seeing in, like, the Laravel space, for example, people were doing MySQL backups and they'd have a script, and then for whatever reason, someone rotated the passwords on the database and the backup script… was forgotten about.So, there it is, not working for months. So, we thought we could build a backup where you could just point it at where the Laravel project is. We can get all the config we need at the runtime because it's all there with the project anyway, and then thus, you never need to tell us the password for your database and that problem goes away. And it's the same with WordPress.Corey: I'm looking at this now just as you go through this, and I'm a big believer in disclaiming my biases, conflicts of interest, et cetera. And until this point, neither of us have traded a penny in either direction between us that I'm ever aware of—maybe you bought a t-shirt or something once upon a time—but great, I'm about to become a customer of this because I already have backup solutions for a lot of the things that you currently support, but again, when you're a grumpy admin who's lost data in the past, it's, “Huh, you know what I would really like? That's right, another backup.” And if that costs me a few hundred bucks a year for the peace of mind is money well spent because the failure mode is I get to rewrite a whole lot of blog posts and re-record all podcasts and pay for a whole bunch of custom development again. And it's just not something that I particularly want to have to deal with. There's something to be said for a holistic backup solution. I wish that more people thought about these things.Simon: Can you imagine having to pull all the blog posts off [unintelligible 00:22:19]? [laugh]—Corey: Oh, my got—Simon: —to try and rebuild it.Corey: That is called the crappiest summer internship someone has ever had.Simon: Yeah.Corey: And that is just painful. I can't quite fathom having to do that as a strategy. Every once in a while some big site will have a data loss incident or go out of business or something, and there's a frantic archiving endeavor that happens where people are trying to copy the content out of the Google Search Engine's cache before it expires at whatever timeline that is. And that looks like the worst possible situation for any sort of giant backup.Simon: At least that's one you can fix. I mean, if you were to lose all the payment information, then you've got to restitch all that together, or anything else. Like, that's a fixable solution, but a lot of these other ones, if you lose the data, yeah, there's no two ways around it, you're screwed. So.Corey: Yeah, it's a challenging thing. And it's also—the question also becomes one of, “Well, hang on. I know about backups on this because I have this data, but it's used to working in an AWS environment. What possible good would it do me sitting somewhere else?” It's, yeah, the point is, it's sitting somewhere else, at least in my experience. You can copy it back to that sort of environment.I'm not suggesting this is a way that you can run your AWS serverless environment on DigitalOcean, but it's a matter of if everything turns against you, you can rebuild from those backups. That's the approach that I've usually taken. Do you find that your customers understand that going in or is there an education process?Simon: I'd say people come for all sorts of reasons for why they want backup. So, having your data in two places for that is one of the reasons but, you know, I think there's a lot of reasons why people want peace of mind: for either developer mistakes or migration mistakes or hacking, all these things. So, I guess the big one we come up with a lot is people talking about databases and they don't need backups because they've got replication. And trying to explain that replication between two databases isn't the same as a backup. Like, you make a mistake you drop—[laugh] you run your delete query wrong on the first database, it's gone, replicated or not.Corey: Right, the odds of me fat-fingering an S3 bucket command are incredibly likelier than the odds of AWS losing an entire region's S3 data irretrievably. I make mistakes a lot more than they tend to architecturally, but let's also be clear, they're one of the best. My impression has always been the big three mostly do a decent job of this. The jury's still out, in my opinion, on other third-party clouds that are not, I guess, tier one. What's your take?Simon: I have to be careful. I've got quite good relationships with some of these. [laugh].Corey: Oh, of course. Of course. Of course.Simon: But yes, I would say most customers do end up using S3 as their storage option, and I think that is because it is, I think, the best. Like, is in terms of reliability and performance, some storage can be a little slow at times for pulling data in, which could or could not be a problem depending on what your use case is. But there are some trade-offs. Obviously, S3, if you're trying to get your data back out, is expensive. If you were to look at Backblaze, for example, as well, that's considerably cheaper than S3, especially, like, when you're talking in the petabyte-scale, there can be huge savings there. So… they all sort of bring their own thing to the table. Personally, I store the backups in S3 and in Backblaze, and in one other provider. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. Like—Simon: I like to have them spread.Corey: Like, every once in a while in the industry, there's something that happens that's sort of a watershed moment where it reminds everyone, “Oh, right. That's why we do backups.” I think the most recent one—and again, love to them; this stuff is never fun—was when that OVH data center burned down. And OVH is a somewhat more traditional hosting provider, in some respects. Like, their pricing is great, but they wind up giving you what amounts to here as a server in a rack. You get to build all this stuff yourself.And that backup story is one of those. Oh, okay. Well, I just got two of them and I'll copy backups to each other. Yeah, but they're in the same building and that building just burned down. Now, what? And a lot of people learned a very painful lesson. And oh, right, that's why we have to do that.Simon: Yeah. The other big lesson from that was that even if the people with data in a different region—like, they'd had cross-regional backups—because of the demand at the time for accessing backups, if you wanted to get your data quickly, you're in a queue because so many other people were in the same boat as you're trying to restore stored backups. So, being off-site with a different provider would have made that a little easier. [laugh].Corey: It's a herd of elephants problem. You test your DR strategy on a scheduled basis; great, you're the only person doing it—give or take—at that time, as opposed to a large provider has lost a region and everyone is hitting their backup service simultaneously. It generally isn't built for that type of scale and provisioning. One other question I have for you is when I make mistakes, for better or worse, they're usually relatively small-scale. I want to restore a certain file or I will want to, “Ooh, that one item I just dropped out of that database really should not have been dropped.” Do you currently offer things that go beyond the entire restore everything or nothing? Or right now are you still approaching this from the perspective of this is for the catastrophic case where you're in some pain already?Simon: Mostly the catastrophic stage. So, we have MySQL [bin logs 00:27:57] as an option. So, if you wanted to do, like, a point-in-time of store, which… may be more applicable to what you're saying, but generally, its whole, whole website recovery. For example, like, we have a WordPress backup that'll go through all the WordPress websites on the server and we'll back them up individually so you can restore just one. There are ways that we have helped customers in the past just pull one table, for example, from a backup.But yeah, we geared towards, kind of, the set and the forget. And people don't often restore backups, to be honest. They don't. But when they do, it's obviously [laugh] very crucial that they work, so I prefer to back up the whole thing and then help people, like, if you need to extract ten megabytes out of an entire gig backup, that's a bit wasteful, but at least, you know, you've got the data there. So.Corey: Yeah. I'm a big believer in having backups in a variety of different levels. Because I don't really want to do a whole server restore when I remove a file. And let's be clear, I still have that grumpy old Unix admin of before I start making changes to a file, yeah, my editor can undo things and remembers that persistently and all. But I have a disturbing number of files and directories whose names end in ‘.bac' with then, like, a date or something on it, just because it's—you know, like, “Oh, I have to fix something in Git. How do I do this?”Step one, I'm going to copy the entire directory so when I make a pig's breakfast out of this and I lose things that I care about, rather than having to play Git surgeon for two more days, I can just copy it back over and try again. Disk space is cheap for those things. But that's also not a holistic backup strategy because I have to remember to do it every time and the whole point of what you're building and the value you're adding, from my perspective, is people don't have to think about it.Simon: Yes. Yeah yeah yeah. Once it's there, it's there. It's running. It's as you say, it's not the most efficient thing if you wanted to restore one file—not to say you couldn't—but at least you didn't have to think about doing the backup first.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to talk to me about all this. If people want to learn more for themselves, where can they find you?Simon: So, SnapShooter.com is a great place, or on Twitter, if you want to follow me. I am @MrSimonBennett.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:11]. Thank you once again. I really appreciate it.Simon: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.Corey: Simon Bennett, founder and CEO of SnapShooter.com. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry insulting comment that, just like your backup strategy, you haven't put enough thought into.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.

Mike and Ken are BACK after a small hiatus and they jump into hot takes on multi-cloud. What does multi-cloud even mean? How does it differ from hybrid cloud, private cloud, or even just the status quo data center. The hosts discuss integration of products and projects into a multicloud deployment, security concerns associated with the approach, and how it differs from  the horrors and challenges in private cloud and hybrid cloud. The team talks resources, talent, hiring, and what challenges they've faced over time shifting organizations into cloud deploymentsAs the passion increases, hot takes on hot takes manifest and a discussion of cloud unicorns ensues. We hope you enjoy!

Chatting With Sherri welcomes award-winning author and Writers of the Future winner, Sean Patrick Hazlett!  What if there were a war after Armageddon? How would the survivors emerging from World War III's radioactive slag heaps fight in this conflict? Would they wage it with sticks and stones . . . and sorcery? Or would they use more refined weapons, elevating lawfare to an art and unleashing bureaucratic nightmares worse than death? Would they struggle against themselves or inter-dimensional invaders? What horrors from the desolate darkness might slither into the light? Wipe away the ashes of civilization and peer into a pit of atomic glass to witness the haunting visions of World War IV from today's greatest minds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Sean Patrick Hazlett is an US Army veteran, speculative fiction writer and editor, and finance executive in the San Francisco Bay area. He holds an AB in history and BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a master's degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. As a cavalry officer serving in the elite 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, he trained various Army and Marine Corps units for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sean is a 2017 winner of the Writers of the Future Contest. More than forty of his short stories have appeared in publications such as The Year's Best Military and Adventure SF, Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Terraform, Galaxy's Edge, Writers of the Future, Grimdark Magazine, Vastarien, and Abyss & Apex, among others.

Migrating monoliths to the cloud can be a scary, expensive and time consuming and time consuming activity. Many companies try to avoid it even if it could be beneficial for them, just because they think it would require too much work and be too risky. But there are interesting compromises and incremental approaches that can be used to simplify and de-risk this kind of migration. The idea is that you don't necessarily have to dramatically re-engineer your application to move it to the cloud (and start to take advantage of it). In this episode, based on an InfoQ article that we recently published, we discuss a fictional use case where a company with a monolithic application managed to move to the cloud with a minimum amount of change. The move to the cloud has brought more scalability and resilience for the company to move forward and expand. But it also brings new challenges and opportunities. We will discuss all of this in more detail and by the end of this episode you should have a checklist for migrating monoliths to the cloud with minimal effort. In this episode, we mentioned the following resources: - InfoQ article “A Recipe to Migrate and Scale Monoliths in the Cloud”: https://www.infoq.com/articles/cloud-migrate-scale/ - Our previous episode about other cloud migration strategies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDh4eQzbvyg - Our previous episode about the difference between CloudFormation and Terraform for infrastructure as code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLkOH2I0rX8 - Our previous episode about the pros and cons of CDK for infrastructure as code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjyNTNQdW2s This episode is also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/AWSBites You can listen to AWS Bites wherever you get your podcasts: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-bites/id1585489017 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Lh7PzqBFV6yt5WsTAmO5q - Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy82YTMzMTJhMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== - Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/aws-bites - RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/6a3312a0/podcast/rss Do you have any AWS questions you would like us to address? Leave a comment here or connect with us on Twitter: - https://twitter.com/eoins - https://twitter.com/loige #aws #monolith #migration

Live from Valencia, it’s KubeCon EU! Craig talks to conference co-chair and CERN computer scientist Ricardo Rocha about the event, and what it’s like to be in a room full of people again. Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know: web: kubernetespodcast.com mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com twitter: @kubernetespod Chatter of the week 9am Karaoke News of the week CNCF news from KubeCon EU: SlashData survey 800 members Boeing Coinbase Prometheus Certified Associate Google Cloud improves GitOps usability with Config Sync and Porch kpt Other Google news from KubeCon Tetragon from Isovalent Envoy Gateway Infra Ask HN with the creators Cloud Foundry launches Korifi SUSE NeuVector is open source CloudNativePG from EnterpriseDB All the other options Assured Open Source Software from Google Cloud Recent Guest news: Akuity announces $20m Series A (episode 172) Komodor raises $42 million Series B (episode 153) Deepfence launches Deepfence Cloud (episode 173) Lightning Round Armory announced public early access to their new Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service product Aserto announces its ”better together” approach to authorization by bringing together OPA, OCI, and Sigstore Bunnyshell Introduces support for multi-repository Terraform with full-stack drift management and GitOps Calyptia announces the General Availability of Calyptia for Fluent Bit, CAST AI introduces advanced Autoscaler for AKS Clastix launches Kamaji, a new open source tool for Managed Kubernetes Service CloudCasa by Catalogic expands to support Microosft AKS Codenotary combines Community Attestation Service with background vulnerability scanning CodeZero Launches Surf, a new developer tool for observability in pre-production Kubernetes environments CrateDB introduces Logical Replication D2iQ Partners with GitLab DataCore Bolt container-native storage software now GA; built on their acquisition of Mayadata Datadog launches Application Security Monitoring and support for OpenTelemetry Protocol in the Datadog Agent, Deepfactor partners with Synopsys to help developers resolve cloud native supply chain security risks env0 enables full-stack IaC deployment and management with native Kubernetes support Era Software introduces EraStreams Fairwinds Insights unifies DevSecOps with additional shift-left enhancements GitLab free tier adds pull-based Kubernetes deployments Google announced a new low-cost, high-usage pricing tier for Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus HCL Technologies launches Kubernetes migration platform Kasten by Veeam launches K10 v5.0 released Runecast adds CI/CD integration and image scanning Lacework introduces new Kubernetes Audit Logs monitoring Loft Labs announces a Cluster API provider for vcluster NetFoundry embeds zero trust into Prometheus New Relic introduces low-overhead Kubernetes monitoring and Pixie plug-in framework Pure Storage’s new Database as a Service platform is GA Replicated introduces community licensing and pre-flight checks SphereEx releases DB-Plus Suite Snapt announces security package to run Kubernetes in public cloud SPIRE now runs on Windows Sysdig launches new Advisor and Sysdig Open Source leverages Falco plugins SysEleven unveils MetaKube Operator Timescale announces OpenTelemetry Tracing support for Promscale Vultr Kubernetes Engine now Generally Available Zesty Disk for Kubernetes introduced Links from the interview Episode 62 Lukas Heinrich Clemens Lange CERN LHC Computing Grid Large Hadron Collider Kubeflow Data on Kubernetes Community CNCF Research User Group CNCF TOC Volcano moves to incubation KubeCon EU 2022 Episode 165, with Jasmine James Selection process report for KubeCon EU KubeCon China 2021 Research track Puppies at KubeCon NA 2019 Code, mountains and flying Kubernetes on an F/16 Ricardo Rocha on Twitter and on the web

About WesleyWesley Faulkner is a first-generation American, public speaker, and podcaster. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and a staunch supporter of racial justice, workplace equity, and neurodiversity. His professional experience spans technology from AMD, Atlassian, Dell, IBM, and MongoDB. Wesley currently works as a Developer Advocate, and in addition, co-hosts the developer relations focused podcast Community Pulse and serves on the board for SXSW.Links Referenced: Twitter: https://twitter.com/wesley83 Polywork: https://polywork.com/wesley83 Personal Website: https://www.wesleyfaulkner.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: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined again for a second time this year by Wesley Faulkner. Last time we spoke, he was a developer advocate. And since then, as so many have, he's changed companies. Wesley, thank you for joining me again. You're the Head of Community at SingleStore, now. Congrats on the promotion.Wesley: Thank you. It's been a very welcome change. I love developer advocates and developer advocacy. But I love people, too, so it's almost, I think, very analogous to the ebbs and flow that we all have gone through, through the pandemic, and leaning into my strong suits.Corey: It's a big deal having a ‘head of' in a role title, as opposed to Developer Advocate, Senior Developer Advocate. And it is a different role. It's easy to default into the world of thinking that it's a promotion. Management is in many ways orthogonal to what it takes to succeed in an actual role. And further, you're not the head of DevRel, or DevRelopers or whatever you want to call the term. You are instead the Head of Community. How tied is that to developer relations, developer advocacy, or other things that we are used to using as terms of art in this space?Wesley: If we're talking about other companies, I would say the Head of Community is something that's under the umbrella of developer relations, where it's just a peer to some of the other different elements or columns of developer relations. But in SingleStore specifically, I have to say that developer relations in terms of what you think about whole umbrella is very new to the company. And so, I consider myself the first person in the role of developer relations by being the Head of Community. So, a lot of the other parts are being bolted in, but under the focus of developer as a community. So, I'm liaisoning right now as helping with spearheading some of the design of the activities that the advocates do, as well as architecting the platform and the experiences of people coming in and experiencing SingleStore through the community's perspective.So, all that to say is, what I'm doing is extremely structured, and a lot of stuff that we're doing with the efficacy, I'm using some of my expertise to help guide that, but it's still something that's kind of like an offshoot and not well integrated at the moment.Corey: How has it changed the way that you view the function of someone who's advocating to developers, which is from my cynical perspective, “Oh, it's marketing, but we don't tell people it's marketing because they won't like it.” And yes, I know, I'll get emails about that. But how does it differ from doing that yourself versus being the head of the function of a company? Because leadership is a heck of a switch? I thought earlier in my career that oh, yeah, it's a natural evolution of being a mediocre engineer. Time to be a mediocre manager. And oh, no, no, I aspired to be a mediocre manager. It's a completely different skill set and I got things hilariously wrong. What's it like for you going through that shift?Wesley: First of all, it is kind of like advertising, and people may not think of it that way. Just to give an example, movie trailers is advertising. The free samples at the grocery store is advertising. But people love those because it gives an experience that they like in a package that they are accustomed to. And so, it's the same with developer relations; it's finding the thing that makes the experience worthwhile.On the community side, this is not new to me. I've done several different roles, maybe not in this combination. But when I was at MongoDB, I was a technical community manager, which is like a cog in the whole giant machine. But before that, in my other life, I managed social and community interactions for Walmart, and I had, at the slow period, around 65, but during the holidays, it would ramp up to 95 direct reports that I managed.It's almost—if you're a fan of The Princess Bride, it's different than fighting one person. Sometimes it's easier to fight, like, a squad or a gang of people. So, being Head of Community with such a young company is definitely a lot different than. In some ways, harder to deal with this type of community where we're just growing and emerging, rather than something more well-established.Corey: It probably gives you an interesting opportunity. Because back when I was doing engineering work as an SRE or whatever we call them in that era, it was, “Yeah, wow, my boss is terrible and has no idea what the hell they're doing.” So, then I found myself in the role, and it's, “Cool. Now, do all the things that you said you would do. Put up or shut up.”And it turns out that there's a lot you don't see that our strategic considerations. I completely avoided things like managing up or managing laterally or balancing trade-offs in different ways. Yeah, you're right. If you view the role of management as strictly being something that is between you and your direct reports, you can be an amazing manager from their perspective, but completely ineffective organizationally at accomplishing the goals that have been laid out for you.Wesley: Yeah. The good thing about being head of and the first head of is that you help establish those goals. And so, when you take a role with another company saying, “Hey, we have headcount for this,” and it's an established role, then you're kind of like streamlining into a process that's already underway. What's good about this role specifically, a ‘head of,' is that I help with not only designing what are the goals and the OKRs but deciding what the teams and what the team structure should look like. And so, I'm hiring for a specific position based on how it interacts with everything else.So, when I'm coming in, I don't say, “Well, what do you do?” Or, “How do you do it?” I said, “This is what needs to be done.” And that makes it so much easier just to say that if everything is working the way it should and to give marching orders based on the grand vision, instead of hitting the numbers this quarter or next quarter. Because what is core to my belief, and what's core, too, of how I approach things is at the heart of what I'm trying to do, which is really great, in terms of making something that didn't exist before.Corey: The challenge, too, is that everyone loves to say—and I love to see this at different ways—is the evolution and understanding of the DevRel folks who I work with and I have great relationships with realizing that you have to demonstrate business value. Because I struggle with this my entire career where I know intrinsically, that if I get on stage and tell a story about a thing that is germane to what my company does, that good things are going to happen. But it's very hard to do any form of attribution to it. In a different light, this podcast is a great example of this.We have sponsors. And people are listening. Ideally, they aren't fast-forwarding through sponsor messages; I do have interesting thoughts about the sponsors that I put into these ads. And that's great, but I also appreciate that people are driving while they're listening to this, and they are doing the dishes, they are mowing the lawn, and hopefully not turning up the volume too loudly so it damages their hearing. And the idea that they're going to suddenly stop any of those things and go punch in the link that I give is a little out to lunch there.Instead, it's partially brand awareness and it is occasionally the, “Wait. That resonates exactly with the problem that I have.” So, they get to work or they get back in front of a computer and the odds are terrific they're not going to punch in that URL of whatever I wound up giving; they're going to type in whatever phrases they remember and the company name into Google. Now—and doing attribution on something like that is very hard.It gets even more hard when we're talking about something that is higher up the stack that requires a bit more buy-in than individual developers. There's often a meeting or two about it. And then someone finally approaches the company to have a conversation. Now, does it work? Yes. There are companies that are sponsoring this stuff that spend a lot of time, effort, and money on that.I don't know how you do that sort of attribution; I don't pretend to know, but I know that it works. Because these people whose entire job is making sure that it does tell me it does. So, I smile, I nod, and that's great. But it's very hard to wind up building out a direct, “If you spend X dollars sponsoring this, you will see Y dollars in response.” But in the DevOps world, when your internal doing these things, well, okay because to the company, I look an awful lot like an expensive developer except I don't ever write production code.And then—at least in the before times—“So, what does your job do? Because looking at the achievements and accomplishments last quarter, it looks an awful lot like you traveled to exotic places on the company dime, give talks that are of only vague relevance to what we do, and then hang out at parties with your friends? Nice job, how can I get that?” But it's also first on the chopping block when okay, how do we trim expenses go? And I think it's a mistake to do that. I just don't think that story of the value of developer relations is articulated super-well. And I say that, but I don't know how to do a much better job of it myself.Wesley: Well, that's why corporate or executive buy-in is important because if they know from the get-go while you're there, it makes it a little bit easier to sell. But you do have to show that you are executing. So, there are always two parts to presenting a story, and that's one, the actual quantitative, like, I've done this many talks—so that output part—I've written this many blog posts, or I've stood up this many events that people can attend to. And then there's the results saying, people did read this post, people did show up to my event, people did listen to my talk that I gave. But you also need to give the subjective ones where people respond back and say, “I loved your talk,” or, “I heard you on Corey's podcast,” or, “I read your blog posts,” because even though you might not understand that it goes all the way down in a conversion funnel to a purchase, you can least use that stand-in to say there's probably, like, 20, 30 people behind this person to have that same sentiment, so you can see that your impact is reaching people and that it's having some sort of lasting effect.That said, you have to keep it up. You have to try to increase your output and increase your sphere of influence. Because when people go to solve their problem, they're going to look into their history and their own Rolodex of saying what was the last thing that I heard? What was the last thing that's relevant?There is a reason that Pepsi and Coke still do advertising. It's not because people don't know those brands, but being easily recalled, or a center of relevance based on how many touchpoints or how many times that you've seen them, either from being on American Idol and the logo facing the camera, or seeing a whole display when you go into the grocery store. Same with display advertising. All of this stuff works hand in hand so that you can be front-of-mind with the people and the decision-makers who will make that decision. And we went through this through the pandemic where… that same sentiment, it was like, “You just travel and now you can't travel, so we're just going to get rid of the whole department.”And then those same companies are hunting for those people to come back or to rebuild these departments that are now gone because maybe you don't see what we do, but when it's gone, you definitely notice a dip. And that trust is from the top-up. You have to do not just external advocacy, but you have to do internal advocacy about what impacts you're having so that at least the people who are making that decision can hopefully understand that you are working hard and the work is paying off.Corey: Since the last time that we spoke, you've given your first keynote, which—Wesley: Yes.Corey: Is always an interesting experience to go through. It was at a conference called THAT Conference. And I feel the need to specify that because otherwise, we're going to wind up with a ‘who's on first' situation. But THAT Conference is the name.Wesley: Specify THAT. Yes.Corey: Exactly. Better specify THAT. Yes. So, what was your keynote about? And for a bit of a behind-the-scenes look, what was that like for you?Wesley: Let me do the behind-the-scenes because it's going to lead up to actual the execution.Corey: Excellent.Wesley: So, I've been on several different podcasts. And one of the ones that I loved for years is one called This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte. Was a big fan of Leo Laporte back in the Screen Saver days back in TechTV days. Loved his opinion, follow his work. And I went to a South by Southwest… three, four years ago where I actually met him.And then from that conversation, he asked me to be on his show. And I've been on the show a handful of times, just talking about tech because I love tech. Tech is my passion, not just doing it, but just experiencing and just being on either side of creating or consuming. When I moved—I moved recently also since, I think, from the last time I was on your show—when I moved here to Wisconsin, the organizer of THAT Conference said that he's been following me for a while, since my first appearance on This Week in Tech, and loved my outlook and my take on things. And he approached me to do a keynote.Since I am now Wisconsin—THAT Conference is been in Wisconsin since inception and it's been going on for ten years—and he wanted me to just basically share my knowledge. Clean slate, have enough time to just say whatever I wanted. I said, “Yes, I can do that.” So, my experience on my end was like sheer excitement and then quickly sheer terror of not having a framework of what I was going to speak on or how I was going to deliver it. And knowing as a keynote, that it would be setting the tone for the whole conference.So, I decided to talk on the thing that I knew the most about, which was myself. Talked about my journey growing up and learning what my strengths, what my weaknesses are, how to navigate life, as well as the corporate jungle, and deciding where I wanted to go. Do I want to be the person that I feel like I need to be in order to be successful, which when we look at structures and examples and the things that we hold on a pedestal, we feel that we have to be perfect, or we have to be knowledgeable, and we have to do everything, well rounded in order to be accepted. Especially being a minority, there's a lot more caveats in terms of being socially acceptable to other people. And then the other path that I could have taken, that I chose to take, was to accept my things that are seen as false, but my own quirkiness, my own uniqueness and putting that front and center about, this is me, this is my person that over the years has formed into this version of myself.I'm going to make sure that is really transparent and so if I go anywhere, they know what they're getting, and they know what they're signing up for by bringing me on board. I have an opinion, I will share my opinion, I will bring my whole self, I won't just be the person that is technical or whimsical, or whatever you're looking for. You have to take the good with the bad, you have to take the I really understand technology, but I have ADHD and I might miss some deadlines. [laugh].Corey: This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word.Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen manage databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud.To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: I have a very similar philosophy, and how I approach these things where it's there is no single speaking engagement that I can fathom even being presented to me, let alone me accepting that is going to be worth me losing the reputation I have developed for authenticity. It's you will not get me to turn into a shill for whatever it is that I am speaking in front of this week. Conversely, whether it's a paid speaking engagement or not, I have a standing policy of not using a platform that is being given to me by a company or organization to make them look foolish. In other words, I will not make someone regret inviting me to speak at their events. Full stop.And I have spoken at events for AWS; I have spoken at events for Oracle, et cetera, et cetera, and there's no company out there that I'm not going to be able to get on stage and tell an entertaining and engaging story, but it requires me to dunk on them. And that's fine. Frankly, if there is a company like that where I could not say nice things about them—such as Facebook—I would simply decline to pursue the speaking opportunity. And that is the way that I view it. And very few companies are on that list, to be very honest with you.Now, there are exceptions to this, if you're having a big public keynote, I will do my traditional live-tweet the keynote and make fun of people because that is, A, expected and, B, it's live-streamed anywhere on the planet I want to be sitting at that point in time, and yeah, if you're saying things in public, you can basically expect that to be the way that I approach these things. But it's a nuanced take, and that is something that is not fully understood by an awful lot of folks who run events. I'll be the first to admit that aspects of who and what I am mean that some speaking engagements are not open to me. And I'm okay with that, on some level, I truly am. It's a different philosophy.But I do know that I am done apologizing for who I am and what I'm about. And at some point that required a tremendous amount of privilege and a not insignificant willingness to take a risk that it was going to work out all right. I can't imagine going back anymore. Now, that road is certainly not what I would recommend to everyone, particularly folks earlier in their career, particularly for folks who don't look just like I do and have a failure mode of a board seat and a book deal somewhere, but figuring out where you will and will not compromise is always an important thing to get straight for yourself before you're presented with a situation where you have to make those decisions, but now there's a whole bunch of incentive to decide in one way or another.Wesley: And that's a journey. You can't just skip sections, right? You didn't get to where you are unless you went through the previous experience that you went through. And it's true for everyone. If you see those success books or how-to books written by people who are extremely rich, and, like, how to become successful and, like, okay, well, that journey is your own. It doesn't make it totally, like, inaccessible to everyone else, but you got to realize that not everyone can walk that path. And—Corey: You were in the right place at the right time, an early employee at a company that did phenomenally well and that catapulted you into reach beyond the wildest dreams of avarice territory. Good for you, but fundamentally, when you give talks like that as a result, what it often presents as is, “I won the lottery, and here's how you can too.” It doesn't work that way. The road you walked was unique to you and that opportunity is closed, not open anyone else, so people have to find their own paths.Wesley: Yeah, and lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. But there are some things where you can understand some fundamentals. And depending on where you go, I think you do need to know yourself, you do need to know—like, be able to access yourself, but being able to share that, of course, you have to be at a point where you feel comfortable. And so, even if you're in a space where you don't feel that you can be your authentic self or be able to share all parts of you, you yourself should at least know yourself and then make that decision. I agree that it's a point of privilege to be able to say, “Take me how I am.”I'm lucky that I've gotten here, not everyone does, and just because you don't doesn't mean that you're a failure. It just means that the world hasn't caught up yet. People who are part of marginalized society, like, if you are, let's say trans, or if you are even gay, you take the same person, the same stance, the same yearning to be accepted, and then transport it to 50 years ago, you're not safe. You will not necessarily be accepted, or you may not even be successful. And if you have a lane where you can do that, all the power to you, but not everyone could be themselves, and you just need to make sure that at least you can know yourself, even if you don't share that with the world.Corey: It takes time to get there, and I think you're right that it's impossible to get there without walking through the various steps. It's one of the reasons I'm somewhat reluctant to talk overly publicly about my side project gig of paid speaking engagements, for instance, is that the way to get those is you start off by building a reputation as a speaker, and that takes an awful lot of time. And speaking at events where there's no budget even to pay you a speaking fee out of anyway. And part of what gets the keynote invitations to, “Hey, we want you to come and give a talk,” is the fact that people have seen you speak elsewhere and know what you're about and what to expect. Here's a keynote presented by someone who's never presented on stage before is a recipe for a terrifying experience, if not for the speaker or the audience, definitely [laugh] for the event organizers because what if they choke.?Easy example of this, even now hundreds of speaking engagements in, the adrenaline hit right before I go on stage means that sometimes my knees shake a bit before I walk out on stage. I make it a point to warn the people who are standing with me backstage, “Oh, this is a normal thing. Don't worry, it is absolutely expected. It happens every time. Don't sweat it.”And, like, “Thank you for letting us know. That is the sort of thing that's useful.” And then they see me shake, and they get a little skeptical. Like, I thought this guy was a professional. What's the story and I walk on stage and do my thing and I come back. Like, “That was incredible. I was worried at the beginning.” “I told you, we all have our rituals before going on stage. Mine is to shake like a leaf.”But the value there is that people know what to generally expect when I get on stage. It's going to have humor, there's going to be a point interwoven throughout what I tend to say, and in the case of paid speaking engagements, I always make sure I know where the boundaries are of things I can make fun of a big company for. Like, I can get on stage and make fun of service naming or I can make fun of their deprecation policy or something like that, but yeah, making fun of the way that they wind up handling worker relations is probably not going to be great and it could get the person who championed me fired or centered internally. So, that is off the table.Like, even on this podcast, for example, I sometimes get feedback from listeners of, “Well, you have someone from company X on and you didn't beat the crap out of them on this particular point.” It's yeah, you do understand that by having people on the show I'm making a tacit agreement not to attack them. I'm not a journalist. I don't pretend to be. But if I beat someone up with questions about their corporate policy, yeah, very rarely do I have someone who is in a position in those companies to change that policy, and they're certainly not authorized to speak on the record about those things.So, I can beat them up on it, they can say, “I can't answer that,” and we're not going to go anywhere. What is the value of that? It looks like it's not just gotcha journalism, but ineffective gotcha journalism. It doesn't work that way. And that's never been what this show is about.But there's that consistent effort behind the scenes of making sure that people will be entertained, will enjoy what they're seeing, but also are not going to deeply regret giving me a microphone, has always been the balancing act, at least for me. And I want to be clear, my style is humor. It is not for everyone. And my style of humor has a failure mode of being a jerk and making people feel bad, so don't think that my path is the only or even a recommended way for folks who want to get more into speaking to proceed.Wesley: You also mention, though, about, like, punching up versus punching down. And if you really tear down a company after you've been invited to speak, what you're doing is you're punching down at the person who booked you. They're not the CEO; they're not the owner of the company; they're the person who's in charge of running an event or booking speakers. And so, putting that person and throwing them under the bus is punching down because now you're threatening their livelihood, and it doesn't make any market difference in terms of changing the corporate's values or how they execute. So yeah, I totally agree with you in that one.And, like you were saying before, if there's a company you really thought was abhorrent, why speak there? Why give them or lend your reputation to this company if you absolutely feel that it's something you don't want to be associated with? You can just choose not to do that. For me, when I look at speaking, it is important for me to really think about why I'm speaking as well. So, not just the company who's hiring me, but the audience that I'll be serving.So, if I'm going to help with inspiring the next generation of developers, or helping along the thought of how to make the world a better place, or how people themselves can be better people so that we can just change the landscape and make it a lot friendlier, that is also its own… form of compensation and not just speaking for a speaker's fee. So, I do agree that you need to not just be super Negative Nancy, and try to fight all fights. You need to embrace some of the good things and try to make more of those experiences good for everyone, not just the people who are inviting you there, but the people who are attending. And when I started speaking, I was not a good speaker as well. I made a lot of mistakes, and still do, but I think speaking is easier than some people think and if someone truly wants to do it, they should go ahead and get started.What is the saying? If there's something is truly important, you'll be bad at it [laugh] and you'll be okay with it. I started speaking because of my role as a developer advocate. And if you just do a Google search for ‘CFPs,' you can start speaking, too. So, those who are not public speakers and want to get into it, just Google ‘CFP' and then start applying.And then you'll get better at your submissions, you'll get better at your slides, and then once you get accepted, then you'll get better at preparing, then you'll get better at actually speaking. There's a lot of steps between starting and stopping and it's okay to get started doing that route. The other thing I wanted to point out is I feel public speaking is the equivalent of lifting your own bodyweight. If you can do it, you're one of the small few of the population that is willing to do so or that can do it. If you start public speaking, that in itself is an accomplishment and an experience that is something that is somewhat enriching. And being bad at it doesn't take the passion away from you. If you just really want to do it, just keep doing it, even if you're a bad speaker.Corey: Yeah. The way to give a great talk because you have a bunch of terrible talks first.Wesley: Yeah. And it's okay to do that.Corey: And it's not the in entirety of community. It's not even a requirement to be involved with the community. If you're one of those people that absolutely dreads the prospect of speaking publicly, fine. I'm not suggesting that, oh, you need to get over that and get on stage. That doesn't help anyone. Don't do the things you dread doing because you know that it's not going to go well for you.That's the reason I don't touch actual databases. I mean, come on, let's be realistic. I will accidentally the data, and then we won't have a company anymore. So, I know what things I'm good at and things I'm not. I also don't do hostage negotiations, for obvious reasons.Wesley: And also, here's a little, like, secret tip. If you really want to do public speaking and you start doing public speaking and you're not so good at it from other peoples' perspective, but you still love doing it and you think you're getting better, doing public speaking is one of those things where you can say that you do it and no one will really question how good you are at it. [laugh]. If you're just in casual conversation, it's like, “Hey, I wrote a book.” People like, “Oh, wow. This person wrote the book on blah, blah, blah.”Corey: It's a self-published book that says the best way to run Kubernetes. It's a single page; it says, “Don't.” In 150-point type. “The end.” But I wrote a book.Wesley: Yeah.Corey: Yeah.Wesley: People won't probe too much and it'll help you with your development. So, go ahead and get started. Don't worry about doing that thing where, like, I have to be the best before I can present it. Call yourself a public speaker. Check, done.Corey: Always. We are the stories we tell, and nowhere is it more true than in the world of public speaking. I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak with me about this for a second time in a single year. Oh, my goodness. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Wesley: I'm on Twitter, @wesley83 on Twitter. And you can find me also on PolyWork. So, polywork.com/wesley83. Or just go to wesleyfaulkner.com which redirects you there. I list pretty much everything that I am working on and any upcoming speaking opportunities, hopefully when they release that feature, will also be on that Polywork page.Corey: Excellent. And of course, I started Polywork recently, and I'm at thoughtleader.cloud because of course I am, which is neither here nor there. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak about this side of the industry that we never really get to talk about much, at least not publicly and not very often.Wesley: Well, thank you for having me on the show. And I wanted to take some time to say thank you for the work that you're doing. Not just elevating voices like myself, but talking truth to power, like we mentioned before, but being yourself and being a great representation of how people should be treating others: being honest without being mean, being snarky without being rude. And other companies and other people who've given me a chance, and given me a platform, I wanted to say thank you to you too, and I wouldn't be here unless it was people like you acknowledging the work that I've been doing.Corey: All it takes is just recognizing what you're doing and acknowledging it. People often want to thank me for this stuff, but it's just, what, for keeping my eyes open? I don't know, I feel like it's just the job; it's not something that is above and beyond any expected normal behavior. The only challenge is I look around the industry and I realize just how wrong that impression is, apparently. But here we are. It's about finding people doing interesting work and letting them tell their story. That's all this podcast has ever tried to be.Wesley: Yeah. And you do it. And doing the work is part of the reward, and I really appreciate you just going through the effort. Even having your ears open is something that I'm glad that you're able to at least know who the people are and who are making noises—or making noise to raise their profile up and then in turn, sharing that with the world. And so, that's a great service that you're providing, not just for me, but for everyone.Corey: Well, thank you. And as always, thank you for your time. Wesley Faulkner, Head of Community at SingleStore. 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 rambling comment telling me exactly why DevRel does not need success metrics of any kind.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.

Cloud Posse holds public "Office Hours" every Wednesday at 11:30am PST to answer questions on all things related to DevOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, CICD. Basically, it's like an interactive "Lunch & Learn" session where we get together for about an hour and talk shop. These are totally free and just an opportunity to ask us (or our community of experts) any questions you may have. You can register here: https://cloudposse.com/office-hoursJoin the conversation: https://slack.cloudposse.com/Find out how we can help your company:https://cloudposse.com/quizhttps://cloudposse.com/accelerate/Learn more about Cloud Posse:https://cloudposse.comhttps://github.com/cloudpossehttps://sweetops.com/https://newsletter.cloudposse.comhttps://podcast.cloudposse.com/[00:00:00] Intro[00:01:13] Red Hat open sources StackRoxhttps://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/red-hat-open-sources-stackrox-the-kubernetes-security-platform-it-acquired-last-year/[00:01:52] Easily Manage Access to Kuberneteshttps://github.com/infrahq/infra[00:03:40] Heroku CI and Review App Secrets Compromised (Dejavu?)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417993[00:04:56] AWS Control Tower can now use customer provided core accountshttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/05/aws-control-tower-now-use-customer-provided-core-accounts/[00:07:41] AWS SSO delegated administration to a member accounthttps://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/getting-started-with-aws-sso-delegated-administration/[00:10:21] Yet Another Kubernetes Controller for Terraform (weaveworks, rancher, et al)https://www.appvia.io/blog/self-service-of-cloud-resourceshttps://github.com/weaveworks/tf-controllerhttps://github.com/rancher/terraform-controller[00:12:20] Terraform provider for Atlas Database Migrations https://atlasgo.io/blog/2022/05/04/announcing-terraform-providerx[00:15:56] What does cloudposse use for ingress controller?[00:24:41] I'm curious what kinds of patterns cloudposse has seen work for “On demand” environments, for microservices? [00:38:10] atmos.tools launched![00:39:33] Using Terraform to create a DB from scratch - how are we supposed to manage the DB passwords? [00:44:02] How would you set up IAM policies if starting from scratch? [00:46:42] Outro #officehours,#cloudposse,#sweetops,#devops,#sre,#terraform,#kubernetes,#awsSupport the show