Insightful conversations. Less snark.

This week Corey is joined by Eric Dynowski, Managing Partner and Chief Solutions Officer at Deft. Eric began in engineering, then moved over to consulting and helping customers through the trails of AWS. Eric goes into what “technological needs” that Deft provides to its customers. The transition from cloud to data center or vice versa is at the forefront of this conversation! Eric goes into the deeper details on the origins of Deft and what they offer, navigating Corey’s bias of using multicloud, and becoming “trusted advisors” when it comes to AWS. Eric offers his perspective on the importance of building a solid reputation with partners and customers alike, and building on conversations. Tune in for the details!

Francessca Vasquez is the Vice President of Technology at Amazon Web Services, a job she started in March 2021 after a four-year stint as head of solutions architecture and customer solutions management at AWS. Prior to these positions, Francessca worked as a group vice president at Oracle, led the Americas enterprise architects and solution specialists at Salesforce, and was a partner for CSC’s global consulting and public sector division, among other positions. She also worked for the Department of Defense for two years. Join Corey and Francessca as they talk about empowering customers with tools that enable them to build cultures of innovation, how AWS is focused on meeting customers where they are, how different organizations have different starting points for moving to the cloud, how AWS helped Nationwide migrate to the cloud, how the pandemic has made digital a permanent fixture for all organizations, how some workers have taken a break during the pandemic, what AWS is doing to make technology more accessible, how many AWS employees start as customers, and more.

Angie Jones, Senior Director/Developer Relations at Applitools, joins Corey this week to have a good laugh as they discuss testing. Angie talks Corey through his own testing frustrations and makes the case for the importance of it within organizations. Angie takes the helm at teaching testing, and her work pays off! Angie discusses the whims of testing along with her contagious laughter. Angie talks about the “test automation pyramid” and breaks down its various layers. Angie and Corey also pontificate on the mythology of testing elves, and Angie’s accomplishment of becoming the first black woman to become Java Champion. Angie shares her passion of teaching coding and the places she does so in order to make tech more attractive for women and minorities. Tune in for the rest!

This week Duckbill Group’s very own Director of “Snarketing”, Natalie Williams, joins Corey for a conversation on what exacly marketing is—versus Corey’s so called “ridiculous nonsense.” Natalie’s recent hire at the DBG goes to show that marketing is much more than shitposting and witticisms, thankfully she is now on the team to show us how. Natalie offers her perspectives on how to make marketing feel more authentic to an audience and how to push the narrative around marketing into a more human space. She discusses coming on board with DBG and how working with them has helped her to foster the above. Natalie gives insightful advice on how you don’t need to obsess over tracking people across the internet to market your product to them, tune in for the “must know!”

As an industry we stand on the precipice of change! There is a lot going on in the cloud these days and Forrest Brazeal, Head of Content at Google Cloud, joins Corey again to talk about what's coming with his new career change! At the beginning of his transition to Google, Forrest goes into detail on what he is most excited to bring to the story telling of another cloud provider and how he is working to give back to the cloud community. Forrest discusses his time at A Cloud Guru and how it helped him in his new transition, his time as an AWS Severless Hero, and the technical excellence he brings to his vast ranging and prolific content. Forrest is also a successful author of a newsletter and multiple books, to include a children's book about the cloud! Needless to say, Forrest is an incredibly varied personality in the cloud community, tune in for a chance to get to know him better!

How has Ant Stanely, Co-Founder of Senzo, not been on Screaming in the Cloud before? Time to remedy that. Ant sits down with Corey to do so. He offers up his history which has lead to his time as “Serverless Hero” to landing on the line that “severless sucks.” Lend us your ears to see how that transition happened! Ant goes into detail on JeffConf (not the of the Bezos nomen), and working with severs and what to put where and why. Ant and Corey talk over the plague of AWS services where Ant offers his perspective how to trim the fat and keep things simple to make long terms objectives more attainable. They discuss the importance of training, the role of certifications for better and worse, and more. Tune in for his take!

This week Craig McLuckie, VP-Modern Applications Platform Business Unit at VMware, sits down with Corey to discuss his beginning with Google Compute Engine in the early days of the cloud, and his time at the forefront of Kubernetes and Docker. He discusses VMWare, and what exactly modern applications hope to achieve there, and what the next steps look like. Craig has always been at the forefront of innovation, especially in regard to the cloud. His storied history speaks to this and it stands at the center of Craig’s contributions to the field. Craig and Corey’s conversation covers a wide range that embodies Craig’s own trajectory, tune in for the whole story!

This week Corey is joined by Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of a company called Cribl. Clint breaks down what exactly Cribl is and the innovations they are bringing to security and observability. Cribl also has a lot to offer when it comes to optimizing and saving money--to the point of dropping vowels! Clint gives us a lot on Cribl’s offerings, tune in to see what they are! From security and observability, to making esoteric security products more accessible for an entire organization Clint offers a lot of insight. He and Corey discuss getting everybody on board with security, how Cribl LogStream navigates this space, the rising waters of “observability lakes”, and more! Tune in for the rest!

This week Corey is joined by Rich Burroughs, a Senior Developer Advocate at Loft Labs. Rich stays busy with improving workloads for folks using Kubernetes. Rich is a great resource for all things Kubernetes, he even hosts his own podcast (link in the description below) where he interviews people in the community. Rich tells us what's going on at Loft Labs and how they’re helping the folks who keep “banging their shins” on Kubernetes. Rich and Corey discuss learning to work well with ADHD, which he has launched into the Twitter-verse for the sake of advocacy. Rich offers his perspective on how to do so, and to do it well. Rich talks about working at large companies, versus small and the various responsibility of working with the latter. Tune in this week for Rich’s take!

Will Gregorian, Head of Security and Technical Operations at Rhino, sits down with Corey—despite the fact they’ve crossed paths in the past! Will’s background working for startups has informed his current work in security. By spending his time in smaller companies its helped Will to craft his perspectives in a valuable way, check in for how! Will and Corey talk about their own history, Will’s capacity to bring security to the early stages of start up, and how to find the failures to avoid in the future. Will ponders on the militarism in the language around security and how to revolutionize the conversation going forward, and what lessons can be learned from working security for healthcare. At the forefront is where Will tries so stay and he gives us the reasons why.

This week Corey is joined by Cliff Moon, an Agile Consultant, who has a history steeped in engineering that lead him to consultancy work—to include working on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Now as an Agile Consultant, Cliff’s discusses what his work brings to the table and how he handles Scrum within organizations. Cliff gives us the details on Agile, the Agile Manifesto, and its resulting “Agilist,” if you will. Cliff talks about how to do Agile the right way, working with the entirety of engineering departments, and the why ship-ability of products is a constant trial. Cliff also talks about the potential negative impacts of the engineer path as it stands, and how it might be changed. Tune in for the positive changes that can be made and the rest!

This week Corey is joined by John Allspaw, Founder/Principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John was foundational in the DevOps movement, but he’s continued to bring much more to the table. He’s written multiple books, and seems to always be at the forefront. Which is why he is now at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John tells us what exactly Adaptive Capacity Labs does and how it works and how he convinced some heros to get behind it. John brings a much needed insight into how to get multiple people in an organization on the same level when it comes to dealing with incidents. Engineers and non. John points out the issues surrounding public vs. private write ups and the roadblocks they may prop up. Adaptive Capacity Labs is working towards bringing those roadblocks down, tune in for how!