Insightful conversations. Less snark.

For the most part “Screaming in the Cloud” is figurative, but Tyler Slove, Senior Manager or Enterprise Cloud & DevOps at United Airlines, it is sometimes literal. For an industry that is effectively a logistics system, the airline industry is now increasingly a tech company. That is the new world into which the industry is heading, and it creates an interesting dynamic. Tyler hashes out what it is like to work in an industry where delays are not inconsequential. As the airline industry shifts from mainframes to the cloud, Tyler discusses the challenges they face there. Tyler talks about the systemic change within the airline industry to essentially become tech companies. Tyler discusses United Airlines migration to AWS, working within larger entities, and more!

A little over a year ago Randall Hunt, VP of Cloud Strategy and Solutions at Caylent, came on the podcast when he was working at Facebook, and boy was it an eventful day! Now Randall and Corey sit down to a conversation on a comparatively much calmer day than the last go around. Randall discusses his transition to Caylent, and how they stood out from the AWS partner crowd. Randall breaks down exactly what Caylent is, down to the etymological origins. Randall expounds on the kind of environment that Caylent is striving for. He offers up some perspectives on balancing management with his engineer brain, his love of their sci-fi vibes, and more!

This is a bit unusual for this episode! Our friends at Redis have asked us to interview Jason Frazier, who does not, nor has ever, worked at Redis. Rather, Jason is the Software Engineering Manager at Ekata, who is striving to be a global leader in online identity verification. Because, as it turns out, we live in the age where anybody can put anything anywhere all over the web! Jason goes into details on Ekata, a Redis customer, and their efforts to reduce fraudulent activity online. He discusses their efforts to make things frictionless for the customer and the balance they need to strike. He also lays out why Ekata has chosen to use Redis in detail. Jason also notes the importance of striking a balance between the consumers willingness for privacy, versus convenience and patience.

Corey caught wind of EFS, or Elastic File System, at his first re:Invent back in 2017. First impressions were not great, but when Wayne Duso, VP of Storage, Edge and Data Governance Services at AWS, reached out with a genuine desire to hear Corey’s two cents—it left an impression. Wayne reflects on Corey’s feedback on EFS in the early days, and how for technologists, input is “one of the most valuable things we can get.” Wayne reflects on the lessons he has learned across the history of EFS, as well as the other earlier services of AWS. Those other services stand as examples and bastions for Wayne to learn from. Wayne's comprehensive view of AWS provides some excellent connective tissue across such a massive entity. Tune in for the conversation!

Ana Visneski, now founder of Merewif, a crisis communications firm, is back for another run with Corey! For this go around Ana, who as the “Chief Chaos Coordinator,” is keeping things interesting as she embarks on this latest venture. Ana has taken the plunge and now, with Duckbill locked in a first client, is on the rise! Ana levels her Coast Guard experience, alongside her previous professional experience, to develop crisis and risk management plans for her customers. From burnout to handling potentially spicy Twitter threads she is honing her work in crisis comms. But her expertise also extends to risk management and mitigation from the seemingly silly, to the serious. Check out her conversation for some well honed insights!

Toward the end of last year Redis Lab’s went through a shift, and became Redis—sans “Labs.” Yiftach Shoolman, Co-Founder & CTO at Redis, has joined the “Screaming” line up to discuss their rebranding. Namely, they wanted to bring the messaging of Redis under one umbrella. Yiftach talks about the rise of Redis from the early days of being primarily a cache to its current state. Yiftach discusses the issues around latency and how Redis is working to shave the milliseconds. He also hashes out some of the nuance of working with both cloud environments and with the cloud vendors. Redis is a partner with AWS, which Yiftach expounds on the services they are providing in the cloud.

It turns out that when it comes to incidents, you can do more than just blowing past them and onto the next one! Laura Maguire, lead of the research program at Jeli.io, is changing the “leave it in your tracks mentality” and focusing on the post-incident investigative work. Laura, who holds a PhD with a research focus Cognitive Systems Engineering, uses her doctoral work that focuses on DevOps teams responsible for critical digital services. Her work brings a suite of insights into how organizations can better function in the post-incident fallout. Laura discusses her history working in high risk, high consequence environments–notbaly extreme mountain sports! She translates those perspectives to help her work with software engineers. Laura translates the potentially life threatening risks of work in alpine and mountain sports into studying the societal risks of DevOps and incidents. She offers up some wisdom on how organizations can better handle incidents. She also discusses Jel.io’s post-incident guide, and their efforts to guide how post-incident investigations can, and should, be carried out.

TikTok sensation Serena (@shenetworks) is back again for another round of “Screaming!” Now she is drumming up her Discord presence and the Cisco cert study group that she and others are forming there. Again, Serena continues to keep things fresh as she discusses the many, best ways, for all of us to learn. Serena gives us some insight into her study group, and the various certifications that they so studiously work over. Serena and Corey rake over the usefulness of certain certifications and practices. Serena talks about her own learning style and her implementation of actual work and some of the obstacles with certs. For Serena, she puts importance of actually learning, and not just regurgitating rote memory.

Conversations about what the cloud is might be an infinitely convoluted one, but some are taking the conversation down paths less traveled. That is certainly the case for AB Periasamy, CEO and Co-Founder of MinIO, an open source provider of high performance, object storage software. AB and Corey talk about the shift from legacy to the cloud and the advent of S3, and how in that transition AB saw an opportunity. That was when he started to build a brand around the new demands for storage. AB saw that building a software storage company early on that was compatible with S3 would “sweep the market” and now they’re sitting on a billion dollar company. Corey and AB take a deeply technical dive, check it out!

Where does the next generation of cloud engineer come from? The current generation walked a path that may not even exist anymore. So, when Natalie Davis, a Software Engineer at Netlify, decided to jump over to tech from another industry, she stood as a stellar example of how to do so! Especially for this next generation. Natalie talks about her bootcamp experiences, and her maneuver from retail into tech. Natalie talks about the ways that tech is addressing the problems at hand in tech. She discusses the various adversities that tech needs to confront when it comes to those problems. Natalie compares the relatively benign nature of tech compared to her background in retail, but importantly so she offers up areas where tech can improve!

“Nobody cares about backups” might ring true in certain circles, and Corey has uttered that line a few times, but there are some who do. Nancy Wang, GM of AWS Backup and AWS Cryo at AWS, does care. A lot. And naturally she had to come on the show and tell Corey about it! Nancy and Corey bat around some back up reasoning. Nancy kindly goes into the nuances of her own work, of which her title actually indicates what she does, and the importance that she sees in back ups. Nancy’s work doesn’t end there—she is also the founder and CEO of Advancing Women in Tech. A 501c non-profit, “Advancing Women” is an education platform designed to help women move into higher positions in their organizations. Check out the conversation for more!

Often on “Screaming” we get folks whose careers in tech don’t follow the typical path. This is certainly the case for Rachel Kelly, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Fastly, who has pulled a kind of “Benjamin Buttoning” move, and has done a career repatriation. Rachel has gone from managing just the SaaS web app to managing vast groups of servers and data centers worldwide. Rachel talks about her repatriation and gives the why, what, where, and how of her current position. Rachel wanted to tap into some of the more arcane aspects of how the internet works, and at Fastly she gets to be a part of that group. Rachel and Corey bat some AWS considerations across the net and have an enlightening conversation about the multitudes of AWS. From AWS offerings, to nuances of hiring, to some practices that need to be left in the rear view—Rachel and Corey cover the spread!