Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Cloudcast #174 - The 2014 Year in Review & 2015 Predictions

The Growth of The Cloudcast

Thank you to our incredible community of guests and listeners. The last 4 years have been so much fun, and we're looking forward to 2015!!




Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Cloudcast #170 - Reigniting of the Cloud Wars

Topic 1 - We’re now about 90 days from the 2015 Krispy Kreme Challenge, which means two things: (a) we need to start getting our fat asses in shape, and (b) we need to start campaigning with our community to help us do awesome stuff for the kids that benefit from the services of the
baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">NC Children’s Hospital. The last two years we’ve raised +$11,000 and won the donation contest both time - which is an incredible recognition of the power of this community (good people, supporting good causes). This year’s goal is $8000.
Topic 2 - This last week was Google Cloud Platform announcement day, and a bunch of interesting stuff - Carrier Interconnect & Direct Peering, Enterprise VPN, lower prices (in APAC), Google SDN everywhere, Kubernetes-as-a-Service, more Container stuff   


Topic 3 - You were at OpenStack Summit. What was the vibe there? Anything interesting? Didn’t seem like a lot of new announcements, just lots of panels. And of course the OpenStack Foundation took a swipe at AWS dominance - not sure why? Is OpenStack going to lose the modern-app-infrastructure game to Docker?


Topic 4 - Canonical quietly slipped out that they are developing a new container/virtualization technology called LXD (lex-dee).

Topic 5 - You’ll be out at AWS re:Invent, enjoying Vegas while I’m actually working, so what are you looking forward to out there this week? Any predictions on their announcements?

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The Cloudcast #169 - DevOps Incident Management with BigPanda


Big Panda - http://bigpanda.io/




Topic 1 - Announced A Round and came out of stealth yesterday. Give us a quick overview of Big Panda and the problem you are trying to solve


Topic 1.5 - The service - Is it an aggregator, a single interface or a different way to create a contextual view of apps? “Command and Control?”


Topic 2 - Is this a service for Ops teams, or do you see developers wanting access to validate what Ops might be telling them? (Mention the Blog Post Above)


Topic 3 - What Big Data do you have in the background to drive faster incident closure?


Topic 4 - You integrate with ticketing systems like Service Now, Jira, BMC Remedy. What's a typical incident workflow when integrating with those tools?


Topic 5 - How do you keep the incident tagging consistent from all the different sources? How do you avoid conflicts as environments get larger, or the downstream services (generating events) change over time?

Topic 6 - Early use cases? Anything surprising emerging from the data?

The Cloudcast #168 - Containerized Continuous Delivery




Topic 1 - You have an very interesting background to some of our listeners having been involved in XBox Live and Kinect platforms. What was that like? What CI/CD needs to you encounter?

Topic 2 - CI/CD with a “developer cloud” focus. Where does Jenkins fit into this picture? Is Jenkins more about vm’s and this is about containers? You mentioned in an interview that code and apps are in the cloud (github) but CI is in-house, that didn’t make sense to you.

Follow Up: As I see it, a developer can spin up a container on their laptop, then move this container to another environment test/det, AWS, production in house, etc. and you are potentially removing the gotchas of “It worked on my laptop”, correct?

Topic 3 - In addition, what other problems you are trying to solve with Containerized CI/CD? Faster time to value? Portability between environments? All of the above? I see you have integration with Docker Hub, Chef, Puppet, even Kubernetes

Topic 4 - We keep mentioning micro-service as an architecture on the show. Is this an example of the CI/CD ecosystem evolving to embrace containers and a micro-service architecture?

Topic 5 - You also did a podcast with friend of the show Lucas Carlson (http://www.centurylinklabs.com/the-future-of-continuous-integration-with-shippable-founder-avi-cavale/). We had him on to discuss Panamax. Do you integrate with Panamax?

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Cloudcast #165 - DevOps Automation as a Service






Topic 1 - Tonight is interesting because we are pulling in pieces from a bunch of previous podcasts and past guest topics. We have spoken about the many emerging trends and use cases in DevOps, but a big problem has been how do you put all the pieces together. You hear about Jenkins, Docker, OpenStack, PagerDuty, Loggly, AWS, etc. A lot of moving pieces that we have to integrate together and then actually operate efficiently.


Let’s start at the start, what is the concept of Automation as a Service and what problem are we trying to solve?


Topic 2 - Quote from Blog: "because developers are in charge that every single API must be a first class citizen. They determine whether your API is inadequate very quickly. If you treat your APIs badly by deprecating them suddenly and without warning, you are essentially slapping developers that use your APIs in the face." - Very true. There is a presentation your company did on OpenStack vs. VMware and the idea of closed vs. open with some great analogies to history and advancements in efficient. How does AaaS help developers?


Topic 3 - Third Wave in IT. You present a potential framework:
  1. Docker automating tracking of all dependencies for an environment while providing efficient and very fast to deploy containers; 
  2. Jenkins automating QA testing; 
  3. OpenStack and Docker orienting orchestration solutions 
  4. Monitoring 
  5. StackStorm and others are focusing on automation as a service - Remediation through automation?
Topic 4 - Is AaaS the “glue” between a bunch of existing projects and frameworks to create an automation workflow through change management, remote execution? Not trying to replace Docker, Salt, Ansible, Chef, OpenStack, Jenkins, New Relic? Aren’t all these integrations points a nightmare? Is this an on-prem product, cloud offering?

Topic 5 - You mention machine learning and artificial intelligence. This sounds a bit like what VMturbo tries to do at the hypervisor level. In discussion with them I know getting people flipping the bit that enables full automation makes some folks uncomfortable. They start to think of SkyNet in Terminator and the machines taking over the world. Thoughts?

Thursday, September 25, 2014

The Cloudcast #162 - Building and Managing Scalable SaaS Services




Topic 1 - Manoj, you and your team came highly recommended to us by the team at Evident.io (Tim Prendergast) and we learned about your service at AWS Summit in NYC. Tell us about your background and how it eventually led you to Loggly.


Topic 2 - You have an excellent talk/presentation on Critical SaaS Mistakes to Avoid. You mention that scalability needs to be priority #1. How much different is building applications/service in the cloud vs. building packaged software?


Topic 3 - We presume that Loggly was built from Day 1 was a web-scale SaaS application. Having built it, what might you do differently or major lessons learned? Realistically, is it possible for someone to SaaS-ify an existing application?


Topic 4 - Let’s talk about Loggly. Every company, every application has logs and they are a cluttered mess of potentially valuable information. People throw them at Loggly. What happens next?


Topic 5 - That has to be a really complex system on the backend to be able to ingest, parse, analyze, tag all the data - keep it isolated by customer - manage historical logs - then visualize it and give recommendations in real-times. Can you give us some sense of what goes on behind the scenes?


Topic 6 - Logging became somewhat more visible at AWS Summit when AWS announced centralized log management. How does your world change when AWS elevates a service that is in your domain?

Topic 7- What are the most common scenarios where companies decide they need help with log management?

Thursday, August 7, 2014

The Cloudcast #156 - Making Complex Apps Look Simple





Topic 1 - Tell us about your background starting Molehill and how a small company scales on the web?


Topic 2 - The Cloudcast has been a customer of Buzzsprout for over 4 years. We’ve always thought it was a very simple application (upload podcast, publish podcast), but thinking about all the elements involved (store podcast, serve podcast, analytics on usage, APIs to distribute feeds via iTunes, RSS, etc.), we’re curious about the complexity of the application.


Topic 3 - At what point did you find it necessary to leverage more advanced cloud services, above and beyond basic compute/storage - things like CDN, DB-as-a-Service, etc.


Topic 4 - You recently rolled out a whole new set of analytics for customers. Would this be considered “Big Data” and how do you integrate those new capabilities into the existing applications.

Topic 5 - Buzzsprout is available as both a web application and a personalized mobile app. How much different is it to develop for each platform? Any tips for developers on how to build cross-platforms apps?

Sunday, May 25, 2014

The Cloudcast at OpenStack Summit


We had the chance to record six shows at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta.
We also spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) on theCUBE, talking Cloud trends, DevOps and Openstack - http://bit.ly/1kCOzJz

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Talking Cloud, DevOps and OpenStack on TheCUBE at OpenStack Summit

This past week, we had the opportunity to sit down with Stu Miniman (@stu) from Wikibon on theCUBE at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta.

 


Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Cloudcast #128 - Does Open Source Redefine the Cloud Supply Chain


Topic 1 - Ask about branching out beyond reselling - hosting/Cloud; DevOps stuff like Colin does; mobile app development

Topic 2 - Who are the main buyers or influencers of technology these days?

Topic 3 - What technology or business trends do you see earlier than the vendors or media?

Topic 4 - How aggressive are the cloud providers pursuing the channel partners?

Topic 5 - What do you wish the vendors would change about interacting with channels?