Screaming in the Cloud

Latest Episodes:

Being Present in the Moment Through Balcony-Hopping with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Foundational Data Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her technique for spending time intentionally and prioritizing work-life balance called balcony-hopping. Mai-Lan explains how she created the concept of balcony-hopping and how it has helped her to be a better leader, mother, wife, and boxer. Corey and Mai-Lan discuss how in today’s age, attention is a form of currency and why it’s so important to be intentional with how and where you spend your attention. Mai-Lan also offers practical insights to anyone seeking to feel more productive, present, and balanced.

About Mai-Lan

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec is Vice President, Foundational Data Services (FDS) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leads a number of high-scale AWS cloud services that provide storage and streaming of petabytes or exabytes of data and essential building blocks for modern application architecture like queuing and notifications, monitoring, alarming, logging and reliability validation. Mai-Lan’s teams include some of AWS’ first and largest-scale services like Amazon S3 and Simple Queue Service (SQS) to more recent and fast-growing services like managed open source streaming (Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka).

Prior to joining Amazon, Mai-Lan spent almost 15 years in engineering and product leadership roles at technology companies including Microsoft and early stage startups. She began her technology career after serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Mopti region of Africa as a Forestry volunteer after earning her degree from University of California, San Diego.

At Amazon, Mai-Lan is an advisor to Asians@Amazon, creator and sponsor of internal leadership development programs for Amazon employees, and is passionate about AWS initiatives and cloud services that maximize human potential everywhere.

Mai-Lan has three children and lives in Seattle with her family. When she is not working on Amazon cloud services and spending time with her husband and kids, Mai-Lan trains primarily in boxing with additional practice in the martial art Savate.

Links Referenced:

LinkedIn post “Live Your Best Life Through Balcony Hopping”: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/live-your-best-life-through-balcony-hopping-mai-lan-tomsen-bukovec/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mailan/

The Complexity and Value of Scaling Reliability with Kannan Solaiappan Feb 16, 2023

Show notes

Kannan Solaiappan, Head of Reliability and Data Engineering at Circles Life, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss building a team in a start-up environment and the complexities of balancing reliability and security with scale. Kannan describes the challenges of building a semi-platform multiple instances model and how products like Severalnines have helped identify and optimize potential problems before they affect customers. Kannan and Corey also discuss the impact that major outages had on the world at large when it came to fault-tolerance on entry points, and Kannan explains how guardrails can improve reliability without creating the same resistance from engineers that governance can.

About Kannan

With over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Kannan Solaiappan is a highly motivated and passionate leader with a track record of driving results. With a background in software development, operations, architecture, security, and Agile transformation, Kannan has served as a Head of DevOps/Reliability/Data Engineering & Architecture, managing budgets of over 10 million dollars. Kannan has successfully led teams of up to 80 members and has a strong background in building and maintaining world-class organizational structures and cultures.

Currently, Kannan is leading a team of SRE, DevOps, and Data Engineering professionals at Circles Life, Asia’s first fully digital telco, where Kannan is working towards building the world’s best Telco SAAS platform with a focus on CiCD, observability, reliability, resilience, and security.

Kannan has a diverse set of skills including IT Service Management, team management, IT strategy, vendor management, site reliability engineering, Architecture and leadership.

Links Referenced:

Severalnines: https://severalnines.com/
Circles.Life: https://circles.life
Circles.Life Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/circleslifesg/
Circles.Life Twitter: https://twitter.com/circleslifesg
Circles.Life Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CirclesLifeSG/

Building Community in Open Source with Floor Drees Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

Episode Summary

Floor Drees, Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her journey into the world of open source and the opportunities she sees to improve developer relations. Floor and Corey dive into the pitfalls and opportunities of being a frequent speaker at events, and Floor shares some best practices to help be prepared for those opportunities. Floor also shares why she feels events should include hybrid remote attendance options, and the benefits of hosting local events to breathe life into new relationships within the developer community. Floor and Corey also discuss the complexities of maintaining an open-source project and what goes into keeping an open-source community healthy and thriving.

About Floor

Floor is a Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven, a company that manages your favorite open source data tools for you without exploiting the projects and their maintainers. Previously Floor worked in DevRel at Grafana Labs and Microsoft. She is a Devopsdays Core member, and organizes the Devopsdays Amsterdam and Eindhoven chapters. She is a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, and organizes a bunch of meetups, including-but-not-limited-to contributing.today, DevRel Salon Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam Ruby Meetup. Floor is also an art school graduate, who stumbled into tech face-first.

Links Referenced:

The Ever-Growing Ecosystem of Postgres with Álvaro Hernandez Feb 09, 2023

Show notes

Álvaro Hernandez, Founder of OnGres, joins Corey on Screaming in the cloud to discuss his hobby project Dyna53, the balkanization of AWS services, and all things Postgres. Álvaro and Corey discuss what it means to be an AWS Community Hero these days, and Álvaro shares some of his experiences as being one of the first Heroes to provide feedback on AWS services. Álvaro also shares his thoughts on why people shouldn’t underestimate the importance of selecting the right database, why he feels Postgres and Kubernetes work so well together, and the ever-growing ecosystem of Postgres.

About Álvaro

Álvaro is a passionate database and software developer. Founder of OnGres ("ON postGRES"), he has been dedicated to Postgres and R&D in databases for more than two decades.

Álvaro is at heart an open source advocate and developer. He has created software like StackGres, a Platform for running Postgres on Kubernetes or ToroDB (MongoDB on top of Postgres). As a well-known member of the PostgreSQL Community, Álvaro founded the non-profit Fundación PostgreSQL and the Spanish PostgreSQL User Group. He has contributed, among others, the SCRAM authentication library to the Postgres JDBC driver.

You can find him frequently speaking at PostgreSQL, database, cloud (becoming an AWS Data Hero in 2019), and Java conferences. In the last 10 years, Álvaro has completed more than 120 tech talks (https://aht.es).

Links Referenced:

OnGres: https://ongres.com/
Dyna53: https://dyna53.io/
Personal Website: https://aht.es
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ahachete
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahachete/

The 4D Approach to Cloud Sustainability with Catharine Strauss Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

About Catherine

Catharine brings more than fifteen years of experience building global networks and large scale data center infrastructure to the challenge of scaling quickly and safely. She loves building engaged and curious teams, providing insightful forecasting tools, and thinking about how to build to scale in a sustainable way to preserve a humane quality of life on this swiftly tilting planet.

When not trying to predict the future as a capacity planner, she’s often knitting extremely complicated sweaters and coming up with ridiculous puns.

The Evolution of DevRel with Jeremy Meiss Feb 02, 2023

Show notes

About Jeremy

Jeremy is the Director of DevRel & Community at CircleCI, formerly at Solace, Auth0, and XDA. He is active in the DevRel Community, and is a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.

Links Referenced:

CircleCI: https://circleci.com/
DevOps Party Games: https://devopspartygames.com/
Twitter: Iamjerdog
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymeiss/

The Art of Effective Incident Response with Emily Ruppe Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

About Emily

Emily Ruppe is a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io whose greatest accomplishment was once being referred to as “the Bob Ross of incident reviews.” Previously Emily has written hundreds of status posts, incident timelines and analyses at SendGrid, and was a founding member of the Incident Command team at Twilio. She’s written on human centered incident management and facilitating incident reviews. Emily believes the most important thing in both life and incidents is having enough snacks.

Links Referenced:

Jeli.io: https://jeli.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/themortalemily
Howie Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie/welcome

Saving the World through Cloud Sustainability with Aerin Booth Jan 26, 2023

Show notes

About Aerin

Aerin is a Cloud Sustainability Advocate and neurodiverse founder in tech on a mission to help developers understand the real impact that cloud computing has on the world and reduce their carbon emissions in the cloud. Did you know that internet and cloud computing contribute over 4% of annual carbon emissions? Twice that of the airline industry!

Aerin also hosts "Public Cloud for Public Good," a podcast targeted towards developers and senior leaders in tech. Every episode, they also donate £500 to charities and highlight organisations that are working towards a better future. Listen and learn how you can contribute towards making the world a better place through the use of public cloud services.

Links Referenced:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aerincloud
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aerinb/
Public Cloud for Public Good: https://publicgood.cloud/
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com

Solving for Cloud Security at Scale with Chris Farris Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

About Chris

Chris Farris has been in the IT field since 1994 primarily focused on Linux, networking, and security. For the last 8 years, he has focused on public-cloud and public-cloud security. He has built and evolved multiple cloud security programs for major media companies, focusing on enabling the broader security team’s objectives of secure design, incident response and vulnerability management. He has developed cloud security standards and baselines to provide risk-based guidance to development and operations teams. As a practitioner, he’s architected and implemented multiple serverless and traditional cloud applications focused on deployment, security, operations, and financial modeling.

Chris now does cloud security research for Turbot and evangelizes for the open source tool Steampipe. He is one if the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference (https://fwdcloudsec.org) and has given multiple presentations at AWS conferences and BSides events.

When not building things with AWS’s building blocks, he enjoys building Legos with his kid and figuring out what interesting part of the globe to travel to next. He opines on security and technology on Twitter and his website https://www.chrisfarris.com

Links Referenced:

Turbot: https://turbot.com/
fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/
Steampipe: https://steampipe.io/
Steampipe block: https://steampipe.io/blog

Becoming a Rural Remote Worker with Chris Vermilion Jan 19, 2023

Show notes

About Chris

Chris is a mostly-backend mostly-engineer at Remix Labs, working on visual app development. He has been in software startups for ten years, but his first and unrequited love was particle physics. Before joining Remix Labs, he wrote numerical simulation and analysis tools for the Large Hadron Collider, then co-founded Roobiq, a clean and powerful mobile client for Salesforce back when the official ones were neither.

Links Referenced:

Remix Labs: https://remixlabs.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrisvermilion

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