The Cloudcast

Tim Banks (@elchefe, Principal Cloud Economist @duckbillgroup) talks about how public cloud providers are offering committed spend programs, and ways to best use their programs to manage cloud spending.

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• New Relic (homepage)
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SHOW NOTES:

• Duckbill Group (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve got a very interesting background of hands-on technical and being on the business side of things. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you focus on at Duckbill Group.

Topic 2 - Let’s start by talking about this trend of long-term cloud contracts. Why are we seeing more and more announced, and who does it seem to benefit more (cloud provider or customer)?

Topic 2a - How do companies typically size these deals? Is it some percentage of current spend forecasted forward, or some aspirational goal, or something else?

Topic 3 - When a company signs up for one of these long-term committed spend contracts, what are the mechanics of the contract? Is it just “all-you-can-eat” technology, or do they tend to include additional capabilities/services, etc?

Topic 4 - What have you found to be the behavior of companies that sign these contracts? Does it lead to more projects getting created, or more experimentation, or any other unintended consequences?

Topic 5 - At what point do companies start re-evaluating the contracts? What happens if they find themselves way below expected spending expectations?

Topic 6 - Have you seen any new behaviors from the cloud providers once they sign a contract, whereas one group (or service) is pushing hard to capture a bigger portion of the contract?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet

Elliot Shmukler (@eshmu, Co-Founder/CEO @anomalo_hq) and Jeremy Stanley (@jeremystan, Co-Founder/CTO) talk about how data integrity and changes can impact both technology and business decisions.

SHOW: 598

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• Polyscale.ai - PolyScale solves global database latency and performance with intelligent serverless caching and compute at the edge.
• Check out PolyScale’s global edge data platform at www.polyscale.ai and sign up for a free account today.
• strongDM - Secure infrastructure access for the modern stack.
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• CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering Teams

SHOW NOTES:

• Anomalo (homepage)
• Anomalo raises 33M Series A (TechCrunch)
• Anomalo watches your data for weirdness (Forbes)
• Anomalo brings data quality platform to Snowflake (TechTarget)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start with brief introductions and backgrounds. Elliot & Jeremy please introduce yourselves.
Topic 2 - As mentioned you both met and worked together at Instacart. Let’s introduce the concept of data quality and integrity to those who may not be familiar. What patterns and problems did you see. Any possible horror stories you can share?
Topic 3 - Up until now, I’ve seen big data often more about finding the needle in the haystack. It’s in there somewhere, you just have to find it. But, what if it is the wrong needle?
Topic 4 - Are we also talking about data drift over time as the amount of data grows? As data is added to the pool, we may come to different conclusions. How do we know if the new conclusions are based on good data or bad data?
Topic 5 - You recently announced a partnership with Snowflake. This makes sense, why build another data lake and that of course may be a barrier of entry to some, correct? Are we reaching a point with big data and data lakes that we can have one single source of truth? I know we are in early days but how do most customers approach big data today and how do they keep the data sets up to date.
FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet

Computers break. Software has bugs. Cloud services fail. And yet we don’t deal with failures very well. Why don’t we have better Plan B’s, for both personal and business uses of cloud?

SHOW: 576

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• JumpCloud (homepage)
• At the intersection of devices, identities, and access, JumpCloud’s cloud directory platform unifies the IT resources in any company’s infrastructure – anywhere work happens. Fully evaluate JumpCloud for free today
• Datadog Security Solution: Modern Monitoring and Security - Datadog Application Monitoring:
• Modern Application Performance Monitoring. Get started monitoring service dependencies to eliminate latency and errors and enhance your users experience with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.

SHOW NOTES:

• AWS US-East-1 Outage (Dec.10, 2021) - Post Mortem (AWS Blog)
• AWS US-West outage (Dec.5, 2021)
• AWS is Too Big to Fail (The Information - Corey Quinn)
• YouTubeTV loses ESPN and other Disney channels (Dec.18, 2021)
• The Tech Industry after a Year of Burnout (The New Stack)

WHY DO WE EXPECT SO MUCH FROM COMPUTERS?

While we have automated testing, test coverage, SLAs, redundancy best practices, etc - We still really don’t know when computers and software will break. So why do we get so frustrated when it happens, instead of having backup plans?

SHOULD WE LOOK AT TECHNOLOGY FAILURES AS THE WORLD TRYING TO TELLING US SOMETHING?

1. Cloud service failures happen, and tend to last less than a full work day. Most are only a couple hours.
2. We tend to believe that we’re very dependent on technology and cloud services, until they go away. And then we figure out that we can all adapt.
3. We could all use some time reading a book, getting outside to do some exercise (go for a walk), or spending some time away from computers or being online.
4. We could all use a break in our extended hours work days.

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet

As the “Great Resignation” rolls along, many people are facing the prospect of a new role or a new company. What are some tips to be successful in the near-term in this new role?

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• Podcorn - The leading podcast influence marketplace
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• Mergify - the ultimate automation tool that makes your engineering team save time.
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• Datadog Kubernetes Solution: Maximum Visibility into Container Environments
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SHOW NOTES:

• Great Resignation (“The Big Quit”) - Wikipedia
• Who is Driving the Great Resignation? (HBR)
• The Great Resignation? More like the Great Renegotiation (NPR)

20-25% OF PEOPLE IN TECHNOLOGY HAVE CHANGED JOBS IN THE LAST 18 MONTHS

Lots of people are taking new jobs, and right now the industry is paying a premium for talent. So how can you stand out in your new role or company? How can you make an immediate difference?

HOW CAN YOU STAND OUT IN YOUR NEW ROLE OR NEW COMPANY

1. Keep in mind that most managers don’t expect you to make big contributions for 3-6 months (sometimes longer) as they realize there is always a learning curve.
2. But everyone is watching what you do to make a judgment of “are they a good fit?”.
3. Find out what’s important to your boss. Understand the things that they are measured on.
4. Identify an area that is either broken or needs improvement. And try to fix it.
5. Read as much as you can (read the docs!), and try to be valuable in your group and somewhere else in the company.

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet

Shadow IT and start-ups were the original users of public cloud, over a decade ago. But as public cloud has become a multi-billion dollar business, let’s explore how the role of Shadow IT has evolved.

SHOW: 591

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Datadog Kubernetes Solution: Maximum Visibility into Container Environments
• Start monitoring the health and performance of your container environment with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.
• Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all your infrastructure
• Get started with Teleport
• CloudZero - Cloud Cost Intelligence for Engineering Teams

SHOW NOTES:

• Shadow IT
• Why Software is Eating the World (WSJ, 2011)
• “Does IT Matter” (Nicholas Carr, 2014)
• Bi-Modal IT (Gartner, 2015)

DOES SHADOW IT STILL EXIST IF PUBLIC CLOUD IS MAINSTREAM?

Shadow IT began as a way to be more productive in the office (server under the desk, WiFi in a conference room, etc.) and then it went to the cloud (SaaS, the IaaS/PaaS). But how did it evolve and what situations has it created now?

WHAT DOES THE NEW DISTRIBUTED IT LOOK LIKE NOW?

1. Everybody has the ability to get access to (almost) any technology, via open-source or public cloud, or freemium services.
2. Everybody has the ability to learn something new (YouTube, ACloudGuru, Developer Evangelists, etc.
3. IT organizations have less influence over company-wide architectures and strategies.
4. IT still is often tasked with maintaining applications/security/compliance, even after another group deployed it.
5. IT leaders are asked to lead digital transformation projects, and typically aren’t staying in the same place for more than 2-3 years. How much of that time is spent coordinating, communicating, re-organizing around DevOps, DevSecOps, FinOps, AIOps, etc..
6. There are hybrid applications, but they aren’t hybrid in the sense of consistently being deployed everywhere to manage vendor lock-in.
7. There are many multi-cloud companies because IT no longer has a boundary. And the economics of cloud means that most applications won’t move once deployed (easier to turn off than to move).
8. There are many, many pains-of-glass.

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet