
Tools for the Business Engineer
12/15/21 • 36 min
1 Listener
Gil Hoffer (@gilhoffer, Co-Founder / CTO @salto_io) talks about the challenges of managing and integrating SaaS applications, the blurring line between business and technical engineer, and software supply-chain for SaaS integrations.
SHOW: 575
CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw
CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"
SHOW SPONSORS:
- Megaport - Network as a Service Platform
- Try Megaport - Cloud Connectivity Simplified
- CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teams
- Sign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account
SHOW NOTES:
- Salto (homepage)
- Companies today have, on average, 800 SaaS applications
- Salto (OSS code) - manage business applications by code
Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You have a broad background in engineering and entrepreneurship. Let’s talk about your background and what led you to create Salto.
Topic 2 - There is a big trend happening, where companies are using more and more technology outside of the “central IT” groups. This includes quite a bit of SaaS usage. But it also requires more than just vanilla SaaS. Let’s talk about this concept of a “business engineer”.
Topic 3 - How often do SaaS applications need customizations? How often does a business application require integrations across multiple SaaS services?
Topic 4 - Walk us through a day in the life of a business engineer, and what’s involved in some of the integrations? How much is being able to code, and how much
Topic 5 - Integrations can be complicated, not only to build, but also to maintain. How does Salto simplify the creation and life cycle of these integrations?
Topic 6 - Salto is available as OSS, software and SaaS. What seems to be the best usage model for certain use-cases or types of businesses?
FEEDBACK?
- Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
- Twitter: @thecloudcastnet
Gil Hoffer (@gilhoffer, Co-Founder / CTO @salto_io) talks about the challenges of managing and integrating SaaS applications, the blurring line between business and technical engineer, and software supply-chain for SaaS integrations.
SHOW: 575
CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw
CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"
SHOW SPONSORS:
- Megaport - Network as a Service Platform
- Try Megaport - Cloud Connectivity Simplified
- CBT Nuggets: Expert IT Training for individuals and teams
- Sign up for a CBT Nuggets Free Learner account
SHOW NOTES:
- Salto (homepage)
- Companies today have, on average, 800 SaaS applications
- Salto (OSS code) - manage business applications by code
Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You have a broad background in engineering and entrepreneurship. Let’s talk about your background and what led you to create Salto.
Topic 2 - There is a big trend happening, where companies are using more and more technology outside of the “central IT” groups. This includes quite a bit of SaaS usage. But it also requires more than just vanilla SaaS. Let’s talk about this concept of a “business engineer”.
Topic 3 - How often do SaaS applications need customizations? How often does a business application require integrations across multiple SaaS services?
Topic 4 - Walk us through a day in the life of a business engineer, and what’s involved in some of the integrations? How much is being able to code, and how much
Topic 5 - Integrations can be complicated, not only to build, but also to maintain. How does Salto simplify the creation and life cycle of these integrations?
Topic 6 - Salto is available as OSS, software and SaaS. What seems to be the best usage model for certain use-cases or types of businesses?
FEEDBACK?
- Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
- Twitter: @thecloudcastnet
Previous Episode

Thoughts on Cloud Outages
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?
SHOW: 574
CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw
CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"
SHOW SPONSORS:
- Datadog Security Solution: Modern Monitoring and Security
- Start investigating security threats before it affects your customers with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.
- 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
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
- 5 levels of grief - denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
- The cloud providers (typically) don’t snipe at either other - they’ve all been there.
- The post-mortems are becoming more consistent - any highly anticipated
- We continue to learn about differences in cloud architectures, and where failures points (and failure actions) occur.
- We still don’t understand the internal cloud architectural dependencies of each cloud.
- How many companies actually follow multi-region best practices? How much does multi-region cost?
- 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
Next Episode

Dealing with Technology Failure
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
CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw
CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"
SHOW SPONSORS:
- 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?
- Cloud service failures happen, and tend to last less than a full work day. Most are only a couple hours.
- 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.
- 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.
- We could all use a break in our extended hours work days.
FEEDBACK?
- Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
- Twitter: @thecloudcastnet
If you like this episode you’ll love
Episode Comments
Generate a badge
Get a badge for your website that links back to this episode
<a href="https://goodpods.com/podcasts/the-cloudcast-190008/tools-for-the-business-engineer-18044304"> <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/badges/generic-badge-1.svg" alt="listen to tools for the business engineer on goodpods" style="width: 225px" /> </a>
Copy