The Cloudcast #193 - Andy Weir Author of The Martian

The Cloudcast #192 - Pets, Cattle & Chickens

The Cloudcast #191 - Cloud Foundry + Netflix OSS

The Cloudcast #190 - Live from Cloud Foundry Summit

The Cloudcast #189 - Containers + Data Persistence

Win a Free Pass to O'Reilly Velocity Conference

The Cloudcast is excited to announce a new partnership of O'Reilly Media! To kick things off The Cloudcast and O'Reilly have one free pass to O'Reilly Velocity to give away! We're also allowing our listeners access to free O'Reilly eBooks. Other great offers coming soon.

Velocity Contest details:

• Velocity website: http://velocityconf.com/devops-web-performance-2015/
• Velocity Dates: 5/27-5/29 in Santa Clara, CA 
• Contest runs April 25th - May 2nd
• What cool project are you working on? Send us details to show@thecloudcast.net or @thecloudcastnet 
• Winner announced on May 3rd 
• Want to register for Velocity now? Use promo code 20CLOUD for 20% off! 
• Velocity Schedule: https://en.oreilly.com/devops­web­performance­2015/public/register?cmp=mp­webops­confreg­reg­vlca15_cloudcast_201504ct

NOTE: Contest only includes the pass to Velocity Conference. It does not provide any coverage for Travel or Expenses - you're on your own for that.

We look forward to hearing about what you have going on!

-Aaron & Brian

The Cloudcast #188 - The ContainerPocalyse Ahead

The Cloudcast #187 - API Performance Monitoring

Topic 1 - Briefly about your background on the company and team (John was at Twillio and IFTTT).

Topic 2 - How is API testing different than application testing? How is API Monitoring different from simple uptime monitoring? Who is a typical customer of Runscope, what types of challenges and tests are they solving for?

Topic 3 - Walk us thru how the testing works (you mention "no code needed") through the lifecycle of an application. What are some common problems across different platforms (browsers, OS) or different regions of the world?

Topic 4 - API versioning is a major headache. Anything you do to help simplify or manage that for customers? Don’t you still code as a CEO? Do you feel this pain?

Topic 5 - Runscope has a lot of community based projects (link in show notes). How did this come about and what advantages have you seen through the development of an API community?

Topic 6 - With so many APIs these days what's the best way to get started with API testing?

The Cloudcast #186 - Understanding the Cloud Foundry Foundation

Topic 1 - It’s been nearly two months on the new job. How are things going so far and where haven’t you been speaking - we seen pictures of you everywhere.

Topic 2 - What is Cloud Foundry these days? Sometimes I hear it called “modern middleware”, other times it’s a “platform for modern apps”, or times it’s “advanced container management”.

Topic 3 - Digging into the tech a little bit, Cloud Foundry used to be the platform and then there was BOSH, which was the CF deployment tool. Now there are a bunch of other subset projects, such as Lattice. How does the Foundation manage architectural discussions so this doesn’t turn into OpenStack?

Topic 4 - You’ve been around both open source communities and commercial ecosystems for a while. They’re difference, but similar in ways. Why do you think we’re seeing more projects go towards the Foundation model?

Topic 5 - What are the marketplace goals of the Cloud Foundry Foundation? Where are your boundaries to spread the word vs. moderating messages?

Topic 6 - You’ve built developer communities and ecosystems before. Is there a killer-app “type” or domain that you’re specifically focused on growing or you think will grow faster than others?

The Cloudcast #185 - Masters, Minions and Pods - Kubernetes 101

• Kismatic Website - http://kismatic.io/
• Kismatic on GitHub - https://github.com/kismatic
• Kubernetes on GitHub - https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes
• Intro to Kubernetes (tutorial) - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-kubernetes
• Kubernetes homepage (Google) - http://kubernetes.io/

Topic 1 - Let’s talk a little bit about your background and why we asked you to come discuss Kubernetes tonight.

Topic 2 - We’re all familiar with Docker at this point, and generally familiar with the underlying container technologies. So where does Kubernetes fit in? (who runs it? what’s the input to the scheduler? what does it use to track resources at the host level? does it assume all machines are the same?)

Topic 2a - What makes Kubernetes easy to use and hard to use?

Topic 2b - Does it use/assume all the native container management tools, or does Kubernetes do some of that tool?

Topic 3 - Let’s walk through the basic concepts and suggested best practices around things like #apps/container, tagging and pods.

Topic 4 - Since Kubernetes came from Google, every just assumes it deals with scale well. But how does the scaling of that control plane work? Is it a single data-center view, multi-data center or smaller segments within a data-center?

Topic 5 - What Google-specific assumptions are built into Kubernetes that might not be broadly applicable to other companies?

Topic 6 - What are some of the common applications that companies use to get started with Kubernetes?

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?

The Cloudcast #182 - Moving DevOps Forward with CI/CD

The Cloudcast #181 - Investigating the ELK Stack

The Cloudcast #180 - Understanding CoreOS Distributed Architecture

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 #179 - Managing Containers w/o a Tupperware Party

Krispy Kreme Challenge 2015

Once again, the best community in technology has come together for an outstanding cause. We want to thank all of our sponsors / donors for helping to raise $4125 for the NC Children's Hospital.

This is the 3rd year in a row that our community has been recognized as the largest donor. We've now raised nearly $15,000 to help children and their families struggling with life threatening diseases.

• 2013 - $4310
• 2014 - $5701
• 2015 - $4125

Aaron and Brian finished the dozen donuts and the five miles is 59m:30s, which is the first time they have completed the challenge in under 1hr! With age comes greater eating skills and superior athletic ability...apparently.

 

Introducing "ByteSized" DevOps Podcasts

Today we tried something a little different. As we've shifted the focus of the podcast to have more focus on SaaS, DevOps, Public Cloud and other topics, we've added number of new listeners (up 40% YoY). For many of them, these are new areas of technology. So we thought we'd add something new...

We're calling them "The Cloudcast - ByteSized", and they will be a series of ~ 10min podcasts that just cover the basics of a given topic or technology.

NOTE: We're still going to do (mostly) weekly shows in the normal formal as well. We'll just mix these in from time to time.

Here's the first batch. They should all be consumable independently, but we're also trying to loosely link them together.

You're the best audience in technology, so your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The Cloudcast #178 - DevOps Defined Networking with Socketplane

The Cloudcast #177 - Operationalized OpenStack and NFV

The Cloudcast #176 - Dev,Ops & VC Perspective on Modern Apps

The Cloudcast #175 - Machine Data & DevOps

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!!

The Cloudcast #173 - Hashicorp Atlas - Framework for Cloud Automation

The Cloudcast #172 - The State of Containers

The Cloudcast #171 - Evolving API Economy & Hackathons

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?

The Cloudcast #169 - DevOps Incident Management with BigPanda

Big Panda - http://bigpanda.io/

• Golden Age of Developers = Nightmare for Ops: http://blog.bigpanda.io/golden-age-of-developers-nightmare-for-ops

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

Shippable - http://www.shippable.com/

• Shippable + Ansible + Docker + Loggly: http://www.hiddentao.com/archives/2014/06/03/shippable-ansible-docker-loggly-for-awesome-deployments/
• Interview with Avi: http://startupbeat.com/2013/12/24/shippable-qa-id3634/

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?

The Cloudcast #167 - Bringing Advanced Analytics to DevOps

The Cloudcast #166 - Creating a Docker Cloud with Clocker

The Cloudcast #165 - DevOps Automation as a Service

StackStorm - http://stackstorm.com/

• http://stackstorm.com/2014/10/07/dont-call-comeback-part-1/

• http://stackstorm.com/2014/10/08/dont-call-comeback-part-2-2/

• OpenSource & DevOps Movement into Infrastructure.next. Presentation given in an OpenStack vs. VMware context but great non technology analogies and lessons to learn: http://www.slideshare.net/StackStorm/scale-12x-openstack-vs-vmware-a-system?qid=33438ad7-a263-4164-9ceb-9b6021dd2af5&v=default

• Monitoring, Remediation, Automation (even mention ChatOps): http://www.slideshare.net/StackStorm/stackstorm-devops-automation-webinar?qid=33438ad7-a263-4164-9ceb-9b6021dd2af5&v=default&b=&from_search=1

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?

The Cloudcast #164 - Full-Stack Real-Time Monitoring from the Cloud

The Cloudcast #163 - Evolution of CoreOS

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 #161 - Transitioning from CTO to VC

The Cloudcast #160 - The State of The Cloudcast - MidYear 2014

The Cloudcast #159 - Panamax - Docker Simplified

The Cloudcast #158 - Private Cloud Management as a Service

The Cloudcast #157 - Automating Data Center Scale Infrastructure

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 #155 - Large Scale Distributed Infrastructure with Mesos

The Cloudcast #154 - AppStore APIs and Data to Help Build Better Apps