The Cloudcast #264 - The Evolution of Digital Ocean

The Cloudcast #259 - Multi-Instance vs. Multi-Tenancy in SaaS

The Cloudcast #257 - Surviving in a Software-Eating World

The Cloudcast #256 - Can Open Source Companies Make Money?

The Cloudcast #251 - IT Tricks that SaaS services Forget

The Cloudcast #221 - Self-Improvement as a Service

The Cloudcast #209 - The Evolution of Private Cloud as a Service

The Cloudcast #184 - Streaming Analytics for Distributed Applications

Projects of the Week - None this week

• SignalFx Website - https://signalfx.com/
• SignalFx REST API - https://support.signalfx.com/hc/en-us/articles/201270489
• TheNewStack covers SignalFx launch - http://thenewstack.io/signalfx-a-saas-to-monitor-apps-at-any-scale/
• Ben’s Blog - http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_past_and_future_of_systems_management

Topic 1 - Came out of Stealth recently (3/12), Give a quick overview of the company and the problem you are trying to solve… Given what SignalFx offers, it’s important to understand the people behind it. Let’s start with the background of the team - lots of large, webscale, distributed system background. [how much is “productizing lessons learned”?; how much is “the will be different in 5yrs”?]

Topic 2 - What does streaming analytics mean? Why do companies care about getting analytics faster? Why build an analytics engine to solve a monitoring problem?

Topic 3 - You mention (intro video) that you’re a company that builds services for distributed systems, which are run by product teams, not IT. You were previously at VMware. Can you talk about the different mindset those product teams have vs. IT teams, especially how SignalFx takes their ideas and feedback?

Topic 4 - Walk us through how your customers interact with your service? Where do metrics come from (app, message queue, etc)? How do you secure that API interaction? How are metrics different from logs or events?

Topic 5 - In the same vein as the shift from IT to the Product Groups, your co-founder mentions that Developers are closer to production than ever. What does that mean to the evolution of tools and overall psyche of application developers?

Topic 6 - You mention that SignalFx “double purposes as a Application Intelligence solution”. We’ve been watching lots of interesting SaaS applications  emerge that tend to have a more singular purpose (Logging, PerfMon, AppIntelligence, etc.). Are you hearing from customers that some consolidation of functions is needed?

The Cloudcast #183 - Container-Centric Application Deployments

Topic 1 - It’s unusual for us to have guests from different companies, but your stories have commonality. But let’s talk about both of your backgrounds (and company backgrounds) first.

Topic 2 - When I was watching this video of Khash (Cloud 66) at this Hacker News meetup in London, it looked to me like a concept I call “unstructured PaaS”, which is sort of a DIY PaaS, with the best-of technologies.

Topic 3 - We’re curious to learn more about ContainerNet, that is the backbone for the container networking of Cloud66 (using Weave technology) and how it really works.

Topic 4 - Both of you are at the forefront of this transition of container-centric application deployments. Where do you see the maturity in the market and what are the next big opportunities?

Topic 5 - You both seem to believe in the model of modularity for these new architectures. Beyond “giving customers choice”, what are the big focus areas in building elements of these modular architectures?

Topic 6 - What are some of the tangible business advantages that you’ve heard from customers when it comes to choice and modularity in this container-centric application model?

New ByteSized DevOps Podcasts - Logging, Monitoring and Application State

A few weeks ago we introduced the ByteSized DevOps Podcast series. Initial feedback from the community was very strong, so we've decided to do some more. We plan to release a few every week or two. Let us know what topics you'd like to see covered.

Monitoring and Logging


Stateful vs. Stateless Apps

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

The Cloudcast #167 - Bringing Advanced Analytics to DevOps

The Cloudcast #162 - Building and Managing Scalable SaaS Services

• Loggly - http://www.loggly.com
• Six Critical SaaS Mistakes to Avoid - http://www.slideshare.net/loggly/loggly-6saa-sengineeringmistakesv2aa#2
• AWS Centralized Log Management - https://www.loggly.com/blog/aws-cloudwatch-log-management/

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?

The Cloudcast #158 - Private Cloud Management as a Service

The Cloudcast #156 - Making Complex Apps Look Simple

• Molehill - http://www.themolehill.com/
• Buzzsprout - https://www.buzzsprout.com/
• Tickspot - http://www.tickspot.com/

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?

The Cloudcast #153 - Building Better APIs for Business Success

The Cloudcast #132 - Cloud Apps need Borderless Security

The Cloudcast #131 - Distributed Chaos, Security's New Normal

The Mobilecast #19 - Beer, Twinkies and Box - The Mobile CIO

The Cloudcast – #123 – Monitoring the Clouds from the Cloud