The Cloudcast

Forrest Brazeal (@forrestbrazeal, Head of Content @GoogleCloud) talks about the realities of multi-cloud (intended and accidental), how to adapt skills to new cloud environments, and best vs. worst practices.
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SHOW NOTES:

• The Cloud Resume Challenge Book
• The Read Aloud Cloud
• Cloud Irregular (Forrest’s blog)
• The Best Jobs in Cloud
• Advice for transferring IT skills to Cloud skills (Twitter thread)
• Are you multicloud engineer yet? (Google Cloud)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. We first learned about your skills at A Cloud Guru, but you work on a bunch of really interesting projects. Tell us a little bit about your background, and what you now focus on at Google Cloud.
Topic 2 - For a while you were very AWS-centric in your focus. What were your thoughts on multi-cloud a few years ago, and how has that evolved over the last few years?
Topic 3 - Hashicorp’s recent State of Cloud Strategy Survey found 76% of employers are already using multiple clouds in some fashion, with more than 50% flagging lack of skills among their employees as a top challenge to survival in the cloud. What do these survey results tell you about actual company usage of clouds?
Topic 4 - You spend a lot of time talking to people about cloud jobs and transitioning to cloud skills. In the context of multi-cloud, who do you find should be focusing on multi-cloud? Is it more infrastructure-centric or application-centric or something else?
Topic 5 - Technical people obviously can’t be experts in everything (all clouds). Do you have any suggestions for companies that have to manage applications across multiple clouds? Best practices, worst practices, etc.
Topic 6 - We have to ask about the songs. How did it begin, what’s the process, and do your co-workers respond to them? FEEDBACK?

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

AWS had an outage in a region and many people responded. What did we learn about outages, responses, and dealing with cloud services going forward?

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SHOW NOTES:

• AWS US-East-1 Outage (Dec.10, 2021) - Post Mortem (AWS Blog)
• Your Response to AWS Going Down Shouldn’t Be Multicloud (Tech Republic)
• Larry Ellison brags about Oracle Cloud after AWS outage

CLOUD OUTAGES ARE A PART OF USING A SHARED SERVICE

This week another major cloud service had an outage. They happen frequently enough, for some period of time (usually measured in hours), that we really notice them and then move on. Their impact is felt across many sites and dependent services,

SOME THOUGHTS ON RESPONSES TO CLOUD OUTAGES

1. 5 levels of grief - denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
2. The cloud providers (typically) don’t snipe at either other - they’ve all been there.
3. The post-mortems are becoming more consistent - any highly anticipated
4. We continue to learn about differences in cloud architectures, and where failures points (and failure actions) occur.
5. We still don’t understand the internal cloud architectural dependencies of each cloud.
6. How many companies actually follow multi-region best practices? How much does multi-region cost?
7. Multi-cloud is often a knee-jerk reaction, but it’s never that simple - cost, complexity, skills

FEEDBACK?

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

Aaron (@aarondelp) and Brian (@bgracely) discuss the biggest trends from 2021, and make bold cloud computing predictions in 2022.
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SHOW NOTES:
PODCAST BUSINESS:

• Crossed out 11yr anniversary
• We crossed 500 shows (March ’21)
• Most listens in history, up about 20% from last year
• We launched Cloudcast Basics (4 seasons)
• We launched the Sunday Perspectives shows
• We got named #1 Cloud podcast
• We got named top 20 security podcasts
• Listeners in 130 countries | 4200 Cities
• IPOs from our guests - $2.678B
• VC Funding for our guest - $2.516B

TRENDS and MAJOR STORIES from 2021:

• COVID pandemic continued, although some parts of many businesses opened up as vaccines became available.
• Working from Home seems to be a very real, long-term possibility for many in Tech. 25% of workers changed jobs (via LinkedIn)
• AWS - $60B, Azure - $68B, GCP - $15B
• AWS has new leadership. re:Invent felt very different.
• ARM is making a big push in the cloud (and Mac M1)
• This idea of “supercloud” or “overlay cloud services” is gaining traction - companies like Red Hat, Snowflake, MongoDB, Confluent, CockroachDB, etc. are growing quickly as SaaS services, even when the cloud has a native service.
• Cloudflare is making a move to chip away at AWS’ profits (egress networking)
• Digital Ocean is making a bigger push around SMB cloud and developers
• VMware become independent again (from Dell)
• Cloud providers still haven’t acquired legacy software companies to get into the on-premises data centers. They keep adjusting their offerings (Outposts, Arc, Anthos)
• Kubernetes keeps growing, but the hype has slowed down and moved to other areas adjacent to Kubernetes (Service Mesh, eBPF, etc.)
• Software-Supply-Chains and DevSecOps “shift left security” are now heavily funded industry segments.
• The metaverse, Web3, Crypto, NFTs are all starting to get a lots of hype (and confusion)

2022 PREDICTIONS:

• Our 2020 Predictions from last year
• Our 2021 Predictions from last year

AARON’s PREDICTIONS

• Zero Trust Models (again...) - Also security has been/will be the hardest part of cloud and hot job market will continue
• Microsoft will become top public cloud worldwide, AWS will fall to #2
• Google will settle into 3rd, 4th, even 5th spot...

BRIAN’s PREDICTIONS

• Alphabet/Google decides if they still believe they can get to #2 by 2023
• We’ll start seeing the first generation of ex-AWS people starting new companies

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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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

This past week, Amazon announced a new RTO policy that required 5 days a week in the office. What types of impacts could this have on tech workers and the tech industry?

SHOW: 858

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #858 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

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• Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.
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SHOW NOTES:

• Amazon announces new Manager/Employee Ratio and RTO policy for 2025

IT’S BEEN 4.5 YEARS SINCE PEOPLE WERE IN THE OFFICE - FULL TIME

• People have adapted their life to working from home
• People have adapted their families to working from home
• Daily commutes seem like a poor use of resources

IT’S BEEN 4.5 YEARS SINCE PEOPLE WERE IN THE OFFICE - FULL TIME

• Being around co-workers does tend to increase collaboration and idea sharing
• RTO is more difficult on certain employee (especially care-giving women)
• RTO is an effective way to reduce headcount without defined “layoffs”
• RTO may feel more impactful to mobility-able tech workers

FEEDBACK?

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