The Cloudcast #206 - Experience Building Large-Scale Clouds

Description: Aaron and Brian talk to Jeff Dickey (@jeffdickey; Chief Innovation Officer @Redapt) and John Griffith (@jdg_8, Software Engineer @SolidFire) about the evolution of Redapt, best practices for building large-scale clouds, comparing OpenStack to Docker communities and how the ecosystem is changing from Vendor to SP to VAR.

Links from the show:

• Redapt Homepage
• Jeff Dickey's Bio
• NextCast Podcasts
• Thanks for the Docker folks for having us! - DockerCon 2015 on YouTube

Topic 1 - Tell us about yourself and some background on Redapt.

Topic 1a - You both have OpenStack background. Why are you here at DockerCon?

Topic 2 - Aaron knows Redapt from his day job, but you really got on our radar the past few weeks with a bunch of announcements recently (eg CoreOS Fest + Tectonic). How did Redapt get involved with delivering solutions around these new Cloud Native frameworks?

Topic 3 - What you do is really a next-step in how companies are able to build or consume these new Cloud Native frameworks. How does Redapt go about pulling these systems together?

Topic 4 - We talked yesterday about your team. How do you keep the talent levels up to date on your team?

Topic 5 - Redapt is well-known in the cloud circles. What best practices can you take from your learnings and apply them to all these Enterprise and Mid-Market companies that want to do all the cool stuff we hear about here at DockerCon?

The Cloudcast #205 - AWS CloudMgmt-as-a-Service

The Cloudcast #204 - NGINX for Docker and Microservices

The Cloudcast #203 - Docker Networking

Free Ticket to OSCON - Tell us Your Open Source Journey

One of the coolest things about partnering with O'Reilly Media is that we get to give things to The Cloudcast community - including FREE passes to their excellent events.

For Velocity, we were able to give a free pass to Jordan Stone (@Cheddz) from Notion. He won our contest to tell us about his coolest project, and his Wireless Home Monitoring solution looks pretty cool to us.

For OSCON, we're giving away another free pass. This time, all you need to do is tell us about your journey to using open source software. Here's an example. Either send us a link via Twitter (to your blog or GitHub account), or drop us an email to show@thecloudcast.net. We'll pick the winner in the next week.

Interested in more great stuff from O'Reilly OSCON? 

• Want to register for OSCON now? Use promo code 20CLOUD for 20% off
• Check out the OSCON Schedule
• Free eBook from O'Reilly Media for Cloudcast Listeners!
• Check out an excerpt from the upcoming Docker Cookbook

The Cloudcast #202 - DockerCon - Project 6 from Datawise.io

The Cloudcast #201 - DockerCon - Secure Hybrid Cloud OS with Apcera

The Cloudcast #199 - Docker Security

The Cloudcast #198 - Architecting Cloud Foundry

The Cloudcast #197 - Tectonic Shifts at CoreOS

The Cloudcast #196 - Inside Cloud Foundry Operations

The Cloudcast #195 - Farming Cloud Apps with Rancher

The Cloudcast #194 - DevOps Down to the Rack Level

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.