Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Bill Staples is the Chief Product Officer at New Relic who’s responsible for driving the company’s platform strategy and leading its product management, engineering, and design functions. Bill has more than 20 years of experience in technology, coming to New Relic after a three-year stint as Adobe’s Vice President of Experience Cloud and a 17-year stint at a little company called Microsoft, where he ended up as a Corporate Vice President of the Azure Application Platform. Join Corey and Bill as they discuss the New Relic One platform that’s designed to make it easier for companies to adopt observability; what the difference between monitoring and observability is; New Relic’s free tier, which Bill says is 10x more generous than any other vendor; why Bill believes New Relic lives its values more than the other company’s he’s worked at; Corey’s complicated relationship with usage-based pricing models; why Bill thinks observability should be part of the basic engineering process; and more.

Rodrigo Flores has more than 35 years of experience in the tech industry. For the last seven years, he’s served as the managing director of the Accenture Cloud Platform. In this role, he leads a team of 400 people that delivers services to 3,000 clients and oversees $400 million of cloud spend. Previously, he worked as the chief technology officer at Cisco, with a focus on intelligent automation solutions. He’s also the founder of newScale, which was acquired by Cisco. Join Corey and Rodrigo as they discuss what it’s like to deliver cloud services to Fortune 2000 and government customers, why the word “legacy” isn’t always a bad thing, how the skills shortage is one of the biggest prohibitors to cloud adoption, what it’s like to deal with billion-line cloud bills, why we live in a multi-cloud world even though it might not be the best option, how Accenture has expertise in every cloud because they have to, how leveraging the public cloud means you get to enjoy its benefits but also have to manage the associated problems, and more.

Blake Stoddard is a senior site reliability engineer at Basecamp who’s tasked with running and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications running on-premises, in AWS ECS, and in Kubernetes. Previously, he served as the chief executive officer at Coursix, Inc., a company that built software solutions for schools. In 2018, Blake earned a bachelor’s in business management with a concentration in IT from North Carolina State University. Join Corey and Blake as they discuss the recent saga of Basecamp taking on Apple, Basecamp’s email platform HEY and Blake’s role in its development, tracking pixels and why they’re a terrible thing, how HEY solves the tracking pixel problem, how everything Basecamp designs is intended to last until the end of the internet, what Basecamp’s hybrid cloud environment looks like, why organizations shouldn’t simply move to the cloud to transfer CAPEX to OPEX, how Basecamp uses Kubernetes, and more.

Sachin Agarwal is the worldwide product management lead at IBM Aspera. He’s also an organizer at Empower Platform and the founder and CEO of Braid, a project management solution built inside Gmail, Google Calendar, and Slack. Previously, Sachin worked as a principal product manager at LaunchDarkly, vice president of product and operations at Nylas, and director of financials product management and strategy at Oracle, among other positions. Join Corey and Sachin as they discuss what it’s like to work at Aspera, the startup inside the larger IBM behemoth; the lessons learned from the recent IBM Cloud outage; why Sachin tends to leave companies every two years; what the Red Hat acquisition means for IBM and why Sachin believes IBM has done a great job of letting Red Hat be Red Hat; how IBM prides itself on client service and strives to take care of customers on an individual basis; how “legacy” is code for “it makes money;” and more.

Simon Elisha is the Head of Technology and Transformation for the Australia and New Zealand public sector at AWS. He’s also the host of the AWS Podcast and an advisor for Bugwolf, the curated marketplace for bug bounty hunters. Previously, Simon served as the CTO and director of field engineering for Australia and New Zealand at Pivotal, Inc., a principal solution architect at AWS, and a data center enterprise architect for Cisco, among other positions. Join Corey and Simon as they discuss why it’s different to sell services to the public sector versus the private sector, why Simon decided to launch the AWS Podcast, what the most rewarding thing about hosting the podcast is, how increasing concurrent EC2 instances can actually help lower total spend, how tagging is a critical tool in getting a handle on your AWS bill, how the cloud has lowered the barrier of entry to tech considerably, career advice from Simon for those starting out, how the word “resilient” doesn’t have the same definition as it used to, and more.

For the last eight years, Jaana Dogan has been building developer products at Google. Currently, she is a staff engineer and technical advisor working on Spanner, a relational database that’s globally scalable. Previously, Jaana worked as a software architect at Tart, a software engineer at Tikle, and a software engineer at Microsoft. She also founded Rootapi, a company that built rich editing tools for internet publishing companies. Join Corey and Jaana as they talk about Spanner and all things database, why Jaana believes that five nines is extreme for most businesses, the CAP theorem and what it actually means, the difference between Google’s internal Spanner product and the Cloud Spanner product you can buy with someone else’s credit card, how Google designs all of its major releases with scalability in mind, the role Jaana played in the Go community, what Jaana loves about working at Google, Jaana’s career advice, and more.

Jon Myer is a partner solutions architect for cloud management tools at AWS. Prior to joining AWS, Jon worked as a senior cloud solutions architect at NetEnrich AWS, an AWS consultant for DevOps and Solutions at MetroStar Systems, and an AWS course author at Linux Academy. A self-described evangelist for all things AWS, Jon holds a host of AWS certifications and blogs at TheAWSBlogger.com. Join Corey and Jon as they discuss what a partner solutions architect for cloud management tools does at AWS, the company’s top partners for cloud management, what it’s like to be part of the AWS team, what it’s like to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it compares to working from home during “normal times,” how working from home will become the new normal in the near future, why you can’t measure work-from-home productivity effectively during COVID-19, two new features Jon just realized Chime has and what he hopes to see added to the video meeting tool in the near future, why Jon launched his own AWS-focused blog, what AWS’ response to his blog has been, and more.

Tim Bray—the founder of OpenText, one of Canada’s biggest software companies—is a self-professed general-purpose Internet software geek with more than 35 years of experience in the world of technology. In April 2020, he resigned from his job as a senior principal engineer/distinguished engineer at AWS, where he worked in the Serverless group. Other positions he’s held over the years include developer advocate at Google and director of web technology at Sun Microsystems. Join Corey and Tim as they discuss the genesis of XML and JSON along with their shortcomings, what it was like being a distinguished engineer at AWS and resigning due to ethical concerns, why Tim believes capitalism doesn’t work when companies get too big, the Streisand effect and what happens when you fire whistleblowers, how AWS was the best place Tim worked in his career but why he had to leave anyway, what Tim likes about Kubernetes, the technology trends that interest Tim the most, what the future looks like, Tim’s interest in public sector procurement, and more.

Katie Bullard is the president of A Cloud Guru, a cloud education platform. She’s also a board member at Conservice, ChildCareCRM, and Journyx, Inc. Katie previously served as president and chief growth officer at ZoomInfo (formerly DiscoverOrg), VP of marketing, product and corporate development at Mitratech, director of marketing at Accruent, and chief of staff and leader of corporate strategy at Dun & Bradstreet, among other positions. Join Corey and Katie as they discuss Katie’s tenure at A Cloud Guru, how three months feels like both three weeks and three years at the same time, how everyone has a different learning style and what A Cloud Guru is doing to accommodate all of them, how not knowing something makes us vulnerable whether or not we want to admit, what it was like for Katie to accept a new position only to find out six days later A Cloud Guru was acquiring Linux Academy, how A Cloud Guru has both B2B and B2C products, what it’s like to run a company founded by other people, and more.

Liz Fong-Jones is the Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, a company that helps developers visualize, understand, and debug software. Prior to joining Honeycomb, Liz worked at Google for over 11 years, wearing many different hats over that period, including Staff Developer Advocate, Staff Site Reliability Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineering Manager. Join Corey and Liz as they discuss why people either love or hate Honeycomb, how Honeycomb has been pretty awesome to Corey over the years, why Liz left Google after an 11-year run, what Liz’s opinions on AWS and GCP are, how nobody really has a good understanding of AWS’ offering, why Liz doesn’t think anyone has to worry about GCP being deprecated, what boards and VCs tend to do once they hear the word “union,” how there isn’t an ethical leader among cloud providers, and more.

Forrest Brazeal is Cloud Bard who doubles as a senior manager at A Cloud Guru, an e-learning company that helps people learn about the cloud. Previously, he worked as a senior cloud architect at Trek10, Inc. and team lead for cloud architecture and services at Infor. One of the original AWS Serverless Heroes, Forrest holds a master’s in computer science at Georgia Tech, where he earned a 4.0 GPA. Join Corey and Forrest as they discuss what it’s like to be a cloud bard, why you should try to pull fun things into your job so you can get paid to do what you love, what it’s like to design and scale cloud training initiatives, how not everyone knows what the cloud is, the role empathy plays in cloud education, how Forrest wrote a book about the cloud in verse, how Forrest believes there will be hundreds of millions of developers by the end of the decade, what Forrest thinks is an effective way to teach people the cloud, and more.

Melanie Cebula is a staff software engineer at Airbnb who’s focused on cloud infrastructure. She’s a 2016 graduate of UC Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in computer science. Prior to joining Airbnb full-time, she interned there on the payments team. She’s also worked as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley (CS 164 - Programming Languages and Compilers and CS 61B - Data Structures) and has interned at Facebook, too. Melanie has many opinions, which are her own, and which do not reflect the opinions or views of her employer. Join Corey and Melanie as they discuss the differences between junior, senior, staff, and principal engineers, what a staff engineer’s job looks like at Airbnb, why cloud cost efficiency is a hard-but-great problem to work on, why some engineers are hesitant to turn anything off, how much of optimizing cloud spend involves picking off low-hanging fruit, why it’s more fun to talk to technologists about cloud problems than vendors, how Airbnb uses Kubernetes and what that means for AWS spend analysis, and more.