The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

TCP Talks: The Service Not the Software: Anthony Lye on Evolution and Revolution Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Anthony Lye, Executive Vice President and General Manager of NetApp’s Public Cloud Services Business Unit. An industry veteran for over 25 years, Anthony has been at the forefront of cloud innovation for over half this time.

Anthony shares his insight on the importance of embracing disruption in the tech industry. He discusses how NetApp seized the right opportunities, got lucky, and came to dominate the Cloud space — even while younger app developers may have no idea what it was.

“They don’t comprehend — nor should they — the complexities of infrastructure,” Anthony explains. “And I really love the fact that we’ve been able to democratize ONTAP, because it’s cool, but you’ve got to be really smart to get the best out of it. And so we just decided we would be the smart ones.”

What’s really behind innovation in tech? “The context is where you are. And people like to think that the world operates through evolution. And sometimes it’s revolution –- sometimes, you have to do something radically different.”

Anthony also discusses cloud computing trends, the importance of customer focus, what NetApp does differently, and the multi-cloud.

Featured Guest

Name: Anthony Lye

What he does: Anthony is Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Public Cloud Services business for NetApp

Key quote: “You’ve got to put the customer in the middle of your business. And you’ve got to go where they want you to go. If you don’t, your hold may last a while, but it won’t last. And I still can’t believe that what we did we got away with, and we’ve gotten so much time to build so aggressively. It’s great.”

Where to find him: LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

There are two halves of the cloud space: the IT half and the app half. IT people see huge opportunities in extending data centers. App people want to and can build and run their own stacks, and Anthony took advantage of this. “They don’t have to wait for the IT people,” Anthony says. “And I wanted to build something for them — I didn’t want to just hang out on the IT side. I went and asked a whole bunch of application people: what do you need?”
NetApp spies huge business growth potential on the horizon with recurring revenues. “Recurring revenues are the best kinds of revenues you can get,” Anthony clarifies. But people don’t always consider this. “Because they’re different, they sort of ignore them — they don’t like them. And before they know it, they’re years behind and caught. And passed as if they’re standing still.”
The customer is and always should be focused on as front and center of any business. For NetApp, the software and implementation are the same, but the unique integrations are what makes the service stand out. With SaaS, it’s now the second “S” — the service — that matters most. “The rule of SaaS is the other Henry Ford thing: you can have it in any color you want, as long as it’s black,” Anthony says. “We’re going to run it for you as a service, and you’re going to love it”, NetApp tells customers, increasing developer productivity and providing a much higher release cadence.

Resources

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

ARM: the most widely used family of instruction set architectures with over 200 billion ARM chips produced.
CloudCheckr: an end-to-end cloud management platform with cost, security, resource and service functionality.

161: The Cloud Pod Observes Its Databases With Google Cloud SQL Insights Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week and with half the team gone fishin’, Justin and Peter hash it out short and sweet. Plus Google Cloud SQL Insights, Atlassian suffers an outage, and AWS finally offers accessible Lambda Function URLs.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Atlassian suffers an outage, sparking fears of data loss.
AWS offers some very welcome accessibility for Lambda Functions.
Google announces Cloud SQL Insights for MySQL.

Top Quotes

“When Lambda first came out, before I even used it, this is how I thought it would work … then it didn’t. So it’s cool that it’s now available. I’m surprised it wasn’t the default — the starting point — before getting more complex, like API gateways.”
“It’s almost required: These tools are so important when it’s a managed service and you can’t get under the covers yourself. So it’s cool, for sure. Especially when you get into how these things work with your cloud and how they interact with each other, it becomes even more important.”

General News: Atlassian Made a DevOops

While only 0.25% of their customer base was affected, Atlassian’s outage is not a good look. The company continues to be haunted by it, with data loss fears.
Sungard is doomed. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing confines them to history’s unmarked grave of discarded cloud victims.

AWS: Lambda Finally Does What It Was Always Meant To

Accessible Lambda Function URLs are now yours — something that would’ve been nice when it first came out.
Security Hub launches five controls and one new integration partner, in a move that seems to open the door to start using it for all sorts of non-security checks.
Amazon ECS now allows you to run commands in a Windows container running on AWS Fargate. Peter doesn’t want to do this at all, but maybe someone does.
Something you always thought would have been there but didn’t know actually existed: Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Agent job replication.
Ooooooh: PrivateLink, Transit Gateway and Client VPN services all get a data transfer price reduction — a good first step!
In case you’re looking (Peter’s not), there are two new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances.

160: The Cloud Pod Goes Fishing on Google BigLake Apr 06, 2022

Show notes

Google Biglake takes the feature of the week with the ability to federate data from multiple data lakes. On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the most expensive way to run a VM (Oracle wins). Plus some exciting developments, an AWS OpenSearch 1.2 update with several new features, and Azure’s having a party, so bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP).

This week’s highlights

The Cloud Pod goes fishing on Google BigLake with a new tackle box and a whole lot of data.
AWS opens up the market with its OpenSearch 1.2 update boasting several new features and which could attract more customers.
Azure implements a fancy new bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) policy.

Top Quotes

“Are they saving BigOcean for the next layer of unification above when we need to aggregate multiple BigLakes?”
“It is good to be able to do it, and I still pity the poor companies who need to migrate IP addresses and anchor their IPs to a provider in order to get their DVR functionality. So this now makes that possible, however bad a pattern that is in the cloud.”

General News: Decisions, Decisions

VentureBeat discusses how to choose the right AWS region for your business, but they seem to be missing a few considerations (sovereignty, anyone?). Also, picking a region isn’t a great idea for a business (like an e-commerce site) that needs to be multiregional to survive if things go sideways.

AWS: Opening up the Search Nice and Wide

Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 — maybe AWS bribed the Kubernetes governance board because they were tired of trying to keep up with Kubernetes’ quarterly patch releases.
Good news for console users who no longer have to click through five separate pages of configurations, with the new and improved Amazon EC2 console launch experience.
Cue applause track: AWS Organizations now provides central AWS account closure. We’ve been waiting for this for years.
Amazon EC2 now performs automatic recovery of instances by default — a no-brainer, really.
Killing the need for all those expensive backup software solutions, AWS Backup now allows you to restore virtual disks from protected copies of your VMware virtual machines. You can use it for decades.
Could there be a more expensive way to run a VM than VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts? Yes, as it happens: Oracle. But this is a not-so-distant second place.
Not ideal, but there should be a workaround, as

159: The Cloud Pod Suspends Its (GCP) Hosts Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is in the doghouse and he’s been suspended (with full pay). Plus, we’re comfortably numb with AWS Cloud NGFW, GCP suspends hosts for big savings, and Azure is once again shutting the Front Door on us.

This week’s highlights

AWS Cloud NGFW cost calculations leaves us comfortably numb.
GCP boasts big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded hosts.
Azure is once again shutting the Front Door with a new, modern cloud service.

Top Quotes

“I’m ready to make my [AWS] re:Invent next year’s first prediction, which will be an AmazonBasics version of that for 1/10th of the cost.”
“I’m very curious to actually see the comparison … in cost because, assuming performance is relatively similar, cost is what this always comes down to.”

AWS: Pay Less, More Often!

Helping you bleed cash by the hour instead of writing one big annual check, AWS presents the new Cloud NGFW. Ouch.
Knock yourself out with up to 10 GB ephemeral storage supported with AWS Lambda. It’s cheap (at $0.0000000309 for every GB-second), but they’re not giving it to you — they’re selling it to you.
We’re slightly concerned about the general availability of AWS Proton support for Terraform Open Source and its effects on potential future innovation.
Amazon hops on Google’s gamification bandwagon with Amazon GameSparks now in preview.

GCP: GCP Equalizes With a Quiet Week

Nice job, Google: a feature with an edge over other cloud providers that offers big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs. Awesome!

Azure: It All Comes Down to Costs

Azure shutting the front door on us once again with the now generally available modern cloud CDN service, Azure Front Door. This probably gives them a competitive advantage over AWS for at least a week or two.
In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft announces its intent to establish an India datacenter region in Hyderabad. As that’s where most of their employees are, how was there not one there already?
It’s like UPnP for cloud, so do not use lightly: Azure Load Balancer now allows you to manage port forwarding for a backend pool. We seriously recommend discussing this with your security team in advance.

TCP Lightning Round

Peter finally levels up, making the scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

158: The Cloud Pod Discloses All of Its Okta Breaches Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a brave new world for Ryan, who learns all kinds of things. Plus the Okta breach leads to customer outrage over not telling them for months, AWS announces its new Billing Conductor, and Google expands Contact Center AI for a reimagined customer experience.

This week’s highlights

Okta is in big trouble with furious customers after it fails to disclose a security breach… for months.
AWS announces the brand new and very welcome AWS Billing Conductor to much fanfare and great rejoicing.
Google expands end-to-end with Contact Center AI for a touted “reimagining” of the customer experience.

Top Quotes

“The breach is bad enough, but then the handling of the communications of it is really what seals the deal and where you really do all the damage. It’s one thing if someone attacks you and gets in through something unintended … that’s not going to shake my confidence in using a company. But someone who’s hiding it, someone who’s clearly dancing around it, makes me think that they’re not well organized.”
“Google is notoriously bad for customer support … and it’s very difficult to be a satisfied customer of Google when you have to deal with their support channels. So anything they can do for anybody to make the customer experience less frustrating is good. Let’s hope that this doesn’t just turn into another agent, please situation where all you want to do is break out of the system and just speak to a real person who can apply some logic.”

General News: Okta Breach Shenanigans

Change your credentials immediately. Customers are raging at Okta, which manages 100 million logins but failed to disclose a security breach for months. Just who is running things over there?

AWS: Money Money Money

Donald Trump’s golf courses are going to be very unhappy to learn that AWS is investing $2.3 billion in UK data centers over the next two years, taking advantage of the Moray West Wind Farm off the coast of Scotland — creating 1000 jobs and injecting £500,000 into the Scottish economy.
Billing and accounting departments across the land rejoice as AWS announces its very welcome and much improved AWS Billing Conductor.
Sharing is caring: AWS Lambda console now supports the option to share test events between developers.

GCP: ReAImagining Customer Experiences

“Agent, please.” Let’s hope Google’s Contact Center AI expa

157: The Cloud Pod Goes on a Quest…. An AWS Cloud Quest Mar 17, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Peter’s concept of fun. Plus digital adventures with AWS Cloud Quest game, much-wanted Google price increases, and a labyrinthine run-through of the details of Azure Health Data Services.

This week’s highlights

AWS gamifies cloud training with the release of Cloud Quest, along with two new initiatives in a bid to build foundational cloud skills for younger people.
Google announces price changes while framing it as “choice”: Some services will decrease in price while others will increase.
Microsoft launches Azure Health Data Services, the details of which turn out to be super fun trying to get your head around.

Top Quotes

“If you’ve ever wanted the job of living in a 3D world where a construction worker runs up to you and tells you that the server running in this weather app is failing and helping them figure this out, this game is for you. And you can earn gems and build and it feels very much like Roblox…. I give it an A for effort and an F for execution.”
“One of the arguments that people have made against the cloud forever is that once you’re locked in, they’re gonna jack the rates up, and then you’re screwed because you’re stuck there. It’s that exact thing. This is now giving credence to those naysayers who traditionally will say that’s not really true. … Now we have an exact use-case: Google did it. So what’s to stop Azure and AWS from doing it?”

AWS: Slay the Dragon and Rescue the Cloud

New bigger and badder EC2 X2idn and X2iedn Instances for you to throw your money away on are now here — supporting memory-intensive workloads with higher network bandwidth.
If you’re excited about Pi Day, Jeff Barr helps celebrate with a bragging blog post on the number of objects Amazon S3 now boasts (with some fun galaxial anecdotes to boot).
A feature we can finally appreciate: Amazon ECS Update Service API now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags.
And moving onto an AWS feature we don’t care about, Amazon ECS now supports on-premises workload orchestration on Windows OS.
More Windows support arrives, this time for containerd runtime on EKS starting with Kubernetes 1.21. We don’t know about you, but we’re starting to get releases mixed up here.
Don’t get fooled by the marketing folks: There’s still work for the dev team to do with the general availability of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags.
We’re not sure who wants to use this, but Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

156: The Cloud Pod Takes Back Everything It Said About Windows vs Linux Security Mar 09, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team reminisces about dealing with awful database technologies, which Ryan luckily managed to avoid. Plus all things cybersecurity as Linux gets hit with a huge security emergency, Google acquires Mandiant for $5.4 billion, and Orca Security catches a major Azure cross-tenant vulnerability.

This week’s highlights

Linux is on the backfoot as it’s hit by the most severe vulnerability in years.
Google has acquired the cybersecurity giant Mandiant for a cool $5.4 billion.
Orca Security catches a huge Azure cross-tenant vulnerability.

Top Quotes

”But is Mandiant now going to be suddenly finding the vulnerabilities and publishing the vulnerabilities that they’re finding in Azure and AWS, and happen to maybe not mention the ones externally that are happening in GCP? They’re no longer an independent third party.”
“Even with these things happening, you’re still safer running in the cloud. Even though there are outages, you’re still more highly available in the cloud. I hate to see these things in the news.”

General News: Linux Is Feeling the Pain

Knative is now officially a CNCF incubating project — any competitors in the market?
As Linux is bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years, we take back everything we said about Windows vs Linux security.

AWS: Solving Very Cloudy Problems

Faster failover is the name of the game with AWS this week: its RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment option comes with improved write performance. Jonathan is also very, very excited about their JDBC driver for MySQL.
AWS customers can now request their CyberGRX report for due diligence on third-party suppliers. But who watches the watchmen?
Ryan’s always suffered from slow performance, but now he can now get specific about how his bad code is affecting it, thanks to Amazon DevOps Guru’s extended support for Lambda with CodeGuru Profiler integration.

GCP: Getting Out the Wallet

Google pays $5.4 billion in hush money to Mandiant in a move that’s sure to massively boost their credibility in the cybersecurity arms race. Mandiant’s biggest customer? GCP itself.
You can now leverage OpenTelemetry to democratize Cloud Spanner observability — which of course they want everyone using.

Azure: Take Shelter From the

155: The Cloud Pod Shows Green in the New AWS Status Page Mar 02, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team heads down a Cisco business model rabbithole. Plus cloud status pages struggle with reality, AWS is tracking carbon footprints, and Microsoft sees serious security business growth with Defender.

This week’s highlights

Cloud status pages aren’t reflecting reported issues, in what appears to be a cover-up by error-shy cloud providers.
AWS introduces a new carbon footprint dashboard to help customers track their sustainability for cleaner, greener living.
Following on the heels of AWS and Azure, Microsoft Defender now provides security on Google Cloud, and is also available for Azure Cosmos DB.

Top Quotes

“Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it’s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can’t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There’re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something’s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don’t think they’re trying to mislead anybody.”

“They’re so strong in other areas, I think it’s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you’re really good at and just keep doing it better.”

General News: Move Along, Everything’s Fine Here

It seems like cloud providers are on a customer gaslighting mission, with cloud status pages not reflecting reported issues.

AWS: Continuing Its Tradition of Silly Names

In a badly timed announcement, AWS shows off its new unified Health Dashboard. It does make sense to keep it in one place, though.
Amazon S3 showcases important, super valuable new additional checksum algorithms. If it’s computationally expensive, push it back onto the client.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools has two new hibernation and scale-in features — a great solution for penny-pinchers who invested in Windows.
The new AWS CloudSaga tool allows for security event simulation and testing. A great first step in what should prove to be cheaper than bringing in a whole team to do it.
How many IPv6 workloads are you running? Now you can connect them to IPv4 Services.
Six months too late for Jonathan, AWS’ new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool allows customers to track sustainability, helping to reach those clean and green goals.

154: The Cloud Pod Is QUIC and Rusty This Week Feb 23, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, order in the court! Plus tackling those notorious latency issues with AWS Local Zones, things get quick and rusty with AWS s2n-quic, and GCP flexes with Dataplex data mesh.

This week’s highlights

AWS takes on network latency issues — its customers’ #1 complaint — with AWS Local Zones.
AWS is getting quick and rusty this week with s2n-quic, its new open-source protocol for Rust implementation.
GCP announces Dataplex in Google Cloud is now generally available, enabling the creation of the data mesh view.

Top Quotes

“We must be hitting some huge brick walls in web performance that are really hurting certain application workloads that require low latency, because if you look at both these announcements back-to-back, they’re really trying to improve performance.”
“This is definitely a hard problem for companies to solve. Data is not going to be uniform, and you’re going to have many different sources of it, and you want it to all play nice together so it’s usable across a larger view than it used to be. I like these types of solutions, where they’re applying governance and a way of doing things that’s not just everyone reinventing these wheels — which is what we’ve been doing up until now.”

General News: Order in the Court! Judge Ryan Presides

Best Buy selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider, but Peter and Ryan argue that it may not be all that exclusive.
VentureBeat reveals that Optimizely is partnering with Google Cloud. Justin thinks the reason the company chose GCP over AWS comes down to wanting to feel special.

AWS: Goodbye Network Latency?

With AWS’ announcement of the global expansion of AWS Local Zones, will its customers’ number one complaint (network latency) be finally addressed? No doubt a good move forward.
AWS is also getting quick and rusty this week with the introduction of s2n-quic, the new open-source QUIC protocol for Rust implementation. For encryption nerds, this is it.
The general availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is sure to be a great enablement — not to mention a massive cost saving for those using the age-old solution of full data replication between buckets.
Amazon comes to the rescue with auto-adjusting budgets — something to add to budgets, not a tool to replace them. Super valuable nonetheless!

GCP: The Great Dataplex Data Mesh Flex

You can now build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex — very f

153: The Cloud Pod Gets the (CloudFormation) Stage Hook Feb 17, 2022

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s got his detective hat on. Plus Akamai steps up to CloudFare with Linode acquisition, AWS’ CloudFormation Hooks lift us up, and EPYC instances are now available.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Akamai notes CloudFare’s aggressive pivot to edge computing and acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m.
AWS announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, which should prove very useful.
Amazon provides EPYC-powered instances, with up to 15% improvement in price-performance.

Top Quotes

“When AWS announces general availability of an instance, I have never been unable to launch that instance to test it. … I can’t say the same thing for workloads on GCP.”
“If you ever take a laptop that has no security patches on it and you put it on a network … it’ll be hacked within minutes. It’s crazy how bad it is, actually. This is what we always talk about: it’s when you get hacked, not if you get hacked. Because if you have vulnerabilities, there’s always a chance. It’s just a matter of time before someone figures it out.”

General News: Akamai Steps Up Its Game

Capitalizing on existing relationships, F5 unveils its new cloud platform with a huge advantage in security — but it might be a tough sell.
Akamai acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. Clearly Akamai saw what CloudFare was doing and thought I gotta get me some of that.

AWS: Getting Its CloudFormation Hooks In

AWS announces the general availability of its CloudFormation Hooks. Very nice.
We wish we’d had Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer’s new security features back in December — now it’s February and no one cares about Log4j anymore.
A nice freebie comes in the form of improved performance for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).
Epic new EC2 c6a instances are powered by EPYC processors, providing up to 15% price performance improvements next to c5a instances. And there was much rejoicing.
Protect your login page against credential stuffing attacks with AWS WAF Fraud Control.
We don’t completely hate the new Billing console home page experience. Actually, it’s pretty good.
Ryan thinks AWS’

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Featured Guest

Key Takeaways

Resources

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

This week’s highlights

General News: Atlassian Made a DevOops

AWS: Lambda Finally Does What It Was Always Meant To

This week’s highlights

General News: Decisions, Decisions

AWS: Opening up the Search Nice and Wide

This week’s highlights

AWS: Pay Less, More Often!

GCP: GCP Equalizes With a Quiet Week

Azure: It All Comes Down to Costs

Other Headlines Mentioned:

This week’s highlights

General News: Okta Breach Shenanigans

AWS: Money Money Money

GCP: ReAImagining Customer Experiences

This week’s highlights

AWS: Slay the Dragon and Rescue the Cloud

This week’s highlights

General News: Linux Is Feeling the Pain

AWS: Solving Very Cloudy Problems

GCP: Getting Out the Wallet

Azure: Take Shelter From the

This week’s highlights

General News: Move Along, Everything’s Fine Here

AWS: Continuing Its Tradition of Silly Names

This week’s highlights

General News: Order in the Court! Judge Ryan Presides

AWS: Goodbye Network Latency?

GCP: The Great Dataplex Data Mesh Flex

This week’s highlights

General News: Akamai Steps Up Its Game

AWS: Getting Its CloudFormation Hooks In

Related Podcasts

1

2

3

4

5

6