AWS Insiders: Recent Episodes
CloudFix
The most innovative businesses in the world run on AWS — but with over 250 different products and services, keeping up with AWS can be tricky. This podcast helps technology leaders stay ahead of Amazon's constant pace of change and innovation. AWS Insiders brings you interviews with Amazon's top product managers — detailing the top secrets and strategies to save time, reduce cost, and improve performance. Hosted by AWS superfan and ESW Capital CTO Rahul Subramaniam.
Over the last 16 years, CloudFix has analyzed over a billion dollars of AWS spending. Having looked at so many different AWS bills, we’ve learned a lot of lessons about how to get the most out of each dollar, from storage, to networking, to compute – and in today’s episode, Rahul is sharing these lessons. He’ll even analyze Hilary Doyle’s AWS bill from her start up, Wealthie Works Daily, to see how she can get the most out of her AWS spend.
Formula 1 races have always been intense, with drivers reaching speeds over 200 mph on the track. But fans wanted to see closer racing and more overtaking – so F1 Lead Cloud Architect Ryan Kirk had a challenge ahead of him in designing a new F1 car. Hear how he and the F1 cloud team used the supercomputing power of AWS to overcome massive aerodynamic forces to speed up the design process and the race itself.
Right from the start, Netflix understood the potential of the cloud and embraced AWS. But this wasn’t just one company using another’s services. There was a deep collaboration between Netflix and AWS that literally helped shape AWS and its services. We’ll hear the detailed, behind the scenes story of how Netflix helped make AWS from Adrian Cockcroft, tech adviser, former Netflix cloud architect and former AWS VP of Sustainability Architecture.
Amazon invented a holiday that’s now one of the biggest international shopping days in the world: Prime Day. What powers it and how do they use AWS? We take you behind the scenes with AWS’s own Vice President and Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr to talk millions of requests per second, billions of products sold, and demands on AWS that keep getting bigger each year.
AI is much more than ChatGPT — and this week, we're diving into all things AWS and Artificial Intelligence. Join us as we go behind the scenes (and beyond the hype) with an exclusive interview with Ankur Mehrotra, general manager at AWS Machine Learning. We’ll also speak with analyst Benedict Evans about the bigger picture around AI and the future of business.
CloudFix has deciphered hundreds of thousands of AWS bills, and can sniff out problems, suggest solutions and improve cost optimization. Join gamemaster Hilary as Rahul and AWS enthusiast (and CloudFixer) Stephen Barr explain some of those "FinOps smells" by playing a game we're calling "The Price is Wrong."
David Heinemeier Hansson is no stranger to controversy. But recently, the co-owner and CTO of 37 Signals, the software company behind Basecamp, announced his companies are divesting themselves of cloud technology. We find out why as well as what companies committed to staying on the cloud can learn from his story.
Today, Moderna is a household name — but few people know the leading pharmaceutic and biotech company was born in the cloud. Join Rahul, Hilary, and Moderna's Carlos Peralta (Director of Data Engineering and Cloud Architecture) to hear how Moderna's lifesaving innovations depend on AWS and the cloud.
IaC has been around for over a decade but has only recently become common practice, thanks to the growth and adoption of the cloud itself. With this growth, developers looked for tools to tame their sprawling infrastructure and returned to what they were most comfortable with: code. But code comes with its own problems, including an ever-growing variety of languages that span different paradigms and different levels of abstraction. When it comes to IaC, people just aren't talking about all the pitfalls and the best practices like they do with code.
In this episode, a conversation with the CTO for the CIO at IBM and published author, Kyle Brown.
Staffing your cloud team with the right resources is probably one of the most critical steps right now, and also possibly one of the hardest. Rahul and Hilary speak with folks at both ends of the spectrum -- Jared Reimer of Cascadeo and David Brassor from Accenture -- for solutions to finding, retaining and leveling up cloud talent.
AWS Insiders is back with season 2, launching April 17. Rahul and Hilary return to your ears with big names, top companies, and leading ideas from every aspect of the AWS world. They’ll dig deep into the stories and technology that matter to you most as an AWS customer. And they’ll be questioning assumptions, challenging ideas and of course, voicing strong opinions!
In this episode, do old school compliance rules from the data center have any business in the new school cloud? Is compliance in the cloud really like some version of Die Hard or Mission Impossible? Making it hard for Tom Cruise, hanging by a thread, to steal your data? Rahul invites Steven Woodward, CEO of Cloud Perspectives, to debate the growing friction between physical and non-physical security and compliance rules.
In this episode, we are moving stacks. That’s right, bouncing, leaving the data center behind for a new life in the cloud. The only problem? You have to choose between two approaches. Do you wanna lift and shift (sounds very Schwarzenegger)? Or do you wanna go fully cloud native (sounds very… Marianne Williamson)? Rahul and David Mee, Principal Consultant, Carbonite, debate the merits of building a skyscraper on top of a log cabin.
In this episode: conflict, controversy, subterfuge, secrecy. Most people we approached didn’t even want to speak on the record. What we want to know is: is AWS eating up the open source landscape? And, if so, is that a good or bad thing? Rahul, Hilary, and guest Matt Asay, Vice President, Partner Marketing, MongoDB, debate whether AWS is poaching or playing fair, when it comes to open source software from partners.
High availability is an expectation in business today — and Rahul shudders to think about what parents (and kids) would do if Disney Plus or Youtube went down for 15 minutes. Joking aside, it’s the cloud: so why all the focus on old, complex disaster recovery solutions?
In this episode, it’s High Availability vs. Disaster Recovery, and it’s Rahul vs. Eamonn O’Neill, a disaster recovery expert and Co-Founder and CTO of Lemongrass. This episode won’t be a disaster, but it is highly available on all podcast apps.
Rahul is getting pretty tired of people chirping about the unfulfilled promises of serverless, as articulated by Corey Quinn. So he invited Jeremy Daly, host of the Serverless Chats podcast to set the record straight: “Corey is wrong,” says Rahul. Serverless is not going anywhere. It’s a journey, not an end goal. Tune in to hear the vibrant debate around just how far we’ve come from manual server management — and how far we still have to go.
Rahul says code no longer matters because it has such a short half-life. He is obsessed with cloud APIs instead. Says they are fully managed, more efficient and cheaper and they can help you get from a million lines of code down to 10 thousand per app. So Rahul invited Alex Hudson, CTO for hire, on the show to debate “to code or not to code.” That is this episode’s question.
We had a lot of expectations for Dr. Werner Vogels’ re:Invent keynote and he delivered. Whether it was about advances in 3D design, data-informed simulation work, simplifying how to build and build fast, or just knowing how to tell a good story, Werner gave us a lot to chew. Dan Hopkins, VP of Engineering at Stackhawk, joins Hilary and Rahul to offer the engineers’ view on the Werner Matrix and wrap our coverage of this year’s conference. Let us know what you think at podcast@cloudfix.com.
Tuesday’s keynote from Swami Sivasubramanian - AWS VP of Data & Machine Learning, leaned much more into the “data” part than the “machine learning” part of his role. Data is a major theme at re:Invent this year. Rahul, Hilary and special guest Alex Kearns, AWS Consultant at Inawisdom (an AI/ML company), chat through why they think AWS is focused on data, and review their unfilled wish lists on further artificial intelligence and machine learning integration into the platform. Let us know what you think at podcast@cloudfix.com.
Great explorers through history defined the theme of Adam Selipsky's re:Invent Keynote this morning. But what caught Rahul and Hilary’s attention wasn’t what was being said, but what didn’t get explored on stage. Along with special guests J.R. Storment and Joe Daly from FinOps Foundation, they unpack Selipsky's announcements, and dive into what they wish they’d also heard. Let us know what you think at podcast@cloudfix.com.
The Cloudfix Team is on prem at AWS’s massive re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, and we’re bringing you along with us throughout the week. Rahul, Hilary and special guests meet up every morning to unpack the latest AWS news from the conference, and swap opinions and hot takes on where the cloud community grows from here. We start with Rahul’s best predictions for what we can expect will be unveiled this week, and connect with AMD’s Brad Smith. Got any questions about re:Invent? Find us at podcast@cloudfix.com.
In this episode, the timely topic of real estate. What kind of a home do you want for your data, your stack, your instances? Where should you house your architecture? In a nice bare metal colo rack bungalow? Or maybe something a little more “penthouse fabulous” — something up in the… public cloud? Rahul makes the case to stop hugging servers altogether and go all-in on AWS, and pushback ensues when Chase Cunningham talks security and compliance.
Guest: Chase Cunningham is the Chief Strategy Officer at Ericom Software, a web isolation and remote application access software company. He is a former Chief Cryptologic Technician with the NSA where he ran cyber security and worked closely with the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security.
Known in the industry as Dr. Zero Trust, Chase also hosts an eponymous podcast and has authored three books: gAbriel, Cyber Warfare -- Truth, Tactics and Strategies and Rip Tide: A Narrative on Cyber Security Failures at the National Level isolation.
Are microservices a macro disaster waiting to happen? Is the CNCF Landscape the Etsy of web development? Rahul has a serious thing against Kubernetes. Says it’s like playing tech whack-a-mole. So we went out and found a K8s superstar to defend the DIY open source platform’s honor. Senior Member of Technical Staff, VMware Tanzu and co-host ofThe Podlets Podcast, Carlisia Thompson joins to debate Rahul on dev culture, problem solving and vendor flexibility.
Rahul and Hilary get into one of the great battles in the cloud: commitment issues. When it comes to your choice of cloud vendor, are you more Tinder or Match.com? Do you want to choose one vendor for life, or prefer to play the field with multicloud? Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud, Forrest Brazeal foresees the inevitable rise of multicloud while Rahul sticks to his single vendor, all-AWS guns.
Rahul declared our old show boring, and in this episode he fixes that. Join Rahul as he welcomes new co-host Hilary Doyle, declares Moore's Law dead as a doorknob, and enjoys a heated (but friendly) debate about NoSQL, Postgres, and the future of distributed and relational DB's in the cloud. Today's guest: Postgres expert Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB.
On this episode, David Hessing, EVP of Cost Optimization at Trilogy, and Rahul Subramaniam, AWS superfan and CTO of ESW Capital of CloudFix, dive deep into AWS Cost Optimization best practices for how to apply cost optimization principles when designing, configuring, and maintaining workloads in AWS Cloud environments.
"You should get 5-10% savings from safe and no-brainer fixes with tools like CloudFix. Resource level optimizations can get you to 50% savings. The hardest is the code-level optimizations that can get you 80-90% savings." - David Hessing, EVP of Cost Optimization at Trilogy
Time Stamps
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(03:57) The spectrum of opportunities for cost optimization
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(11:21) Way for you to safely make changes to your AWS environment
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(19:49) The average utilization of resources in enterprise software
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(25:12) Organization's that should put cost optimization at the top of their strategic list
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(29:30) The best practices for resources
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(36:34) The top tips listeners should know about cost optimism
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Cloudfix
CloudFix automates easy, no risk AWS cost savings. So your team can focus on changing the world.
Links
Connect with David Hessing on LinkedIn
Connect with Rahul Subramaniam on LinkedIn
Connect with Dionn Schaffner on LinkedIn
On this episode, Badri Varadarajan, EVP of product at CloudFix, and Rahul Subramaniam, AWS superfan and CTO of ESW Capital of CloudFix, dive deep into AWS Cost Optimization best practices for how to apply cost optimization principles when designing, configuring, and maintaining workloads in AWS Cloud environments.
"If you keep doing cost optimization, first it's good hygiene, second, you build up your cost optimization muscle. So organizationally, when it becomes a real problem, you can hit the ground running and take commensurate proportional measures, as opposed to just going from not worrying about all, to it being the only thing you worry about." - Badri Varadarajan, EVP of product, CloudFix
Time Stamps
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(01:12) How Rahul and Badri got started with AWS
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(07:08) Recognizing the importance of cost optimization
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(17:13) Simpler ways to save and get results
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(20:59) How to balance cost vs ROI
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(27:32) Organizational playbooks on how to construct to cost
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(36:34) Key factors to making cost optimization projects successful
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(39:47) Takeaways about cost optimization
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Cloudfix
CloudFix automates easy, no risk AWS cost savings. So your team can focus on changing the world.
Links
Connect with Badri Varadarajan on LinkedIn
Connect with Rahul Subramaniam on LinkedIn
Connect with Dionn Schaffner on LinkedIn
On this episode, Omar Zarka, GM of AWS Panorama, dives deep into the structure of AWS Panorama, a machine learning appliance and software development kit that brings computer vision to on-premises internet protocol cameras. Omar discusses how AWS Panorama can make accurate predictions, how to reduce operational overhead, and how to improve the experience for customers.
"One thing that customers love a lot about the Panorama experience is the ease to set up the device. When you buy a device, in five minutes you have your device set up on your network. And not only is the device software stack secured top to bottom but it's connected to our service and you have a reliable connection." Omar Zarka, GM of Amazon Panorama
Time Stamps
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(02:02) How Omar got started with AWS Panorama
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(03:05) The genesis of Panorama as a service
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(06:02) Edge computing compared to cloud computing
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(10:24) Installation of Hardware with AWS Panorama
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(14:17) How customers capture data from multiple accounts
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(20:14) Omar’s favorite use cases of AWS Panorama
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(25:13) Three best practices when using AWS Panorama
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(28:29) Best cost related practices when using AWS Panorama
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Cloudfix
CloudFix automates easy, no risk AWS cost savings. So your team can focus on changing the world.
Links
Connect with Omar Zarka on LinkedIn
Connect with Rahul Subramaniam on LinkedIn
On this episode, Alex dives deep into the intricacies of Amazon DynamoDB, a Planet-Scale NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures. Alex is the author of "The DynamoDB Book," a comprehensive guide to data modeling with DynamoDB. He also has been recognized as an AWS Data Hero. Alex discusses the consistency and predictability in the design of DynamoDB’s performance, and how to best utilize it.
“I think the most important thing to know about Dynamo, it has that primary key structure that we talked about, but every single item is going to have what's called a partition key, and what this partition key is doing is basically helping decide to which shard or node, a particular item is going to go to. So when a request comes into DynamoDB, the first thing that's going to hit is just this global request router that's deployed across the entire region. It handles all the tables within a particular region, and it gets that item, it pulls up the metadata for that table, it hashes the partition key value that was sent in for a particular item, and then based on that, it knows which node to go to in the fleet.” Alex DeBrie, Principal at DeBrie Advisory and Author of “The DynamoDB Book.”
Time Stamps
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(01:50) DynamoDB scale cases
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(05:49) The architecture of DynamoDB that allows it to theoretically scale
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(09:37) The top three tips for DynamoDB customers
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(11:51) The value of doing the math for your application
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(13:14) What mistakes to avoid to keep your costs low
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(16:28) Examples of managing costs with DynamoDB
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Cloudfix
CloudFix automates easy, no risk AWS cost savings. So your team can focus on changing the world.
Links
Connect with Alex DeBrie on LinkedIn
Connect with Rahul Subramaniam on LinkedIn
On this episode, Alex dives deep into the intricacies of Amazon DynamoDB, a Planet-Scale NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures. Alex discusses the consistency and predictability in the design of DynamoDB’s performance, and how to best utilize it.
“How is Dynamo different than a relational database? I’d say the biggest thing is, it’s designed for consistency and predictability, especially around its performance and what that response time is going to be, and also how high it can scale up on different axes.” Alex DeBrie, Principal at DeBrie Advisory and Author of “The DynamoDB Book”.
Time Stamps
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(02:08) How Alex discovered and got started with Amazon DynamoDB
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(04:34) The value of writing “The DynamoDB Book”
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(07:08) The underlying architecture and the unique qualities of Amazon DynamoDB
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(13:45) The advantages of single table design
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(17:48) Illustrating examples of single table design
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(21:45) Doing the math with Amazon DynamoDB for consistency and predictability
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Cloudfix
CloudFix automates easy, no risk AWS cost savings. So your team can focus on changing the world.
Links
Connect with Alex DeBrie on LinkedIn
Connect with Rahul Subramaniam on LinkedIn
On this episode, Ankur Mehrotra dives deep into Amazon Personalize, a fully managed machine learning service that goes beyond static, rule-based recommendation systems and trains, tunes, and deploys custom ML models. Ankur explains how it allows for delivery of highly customized recommendations to customers across industries, how Personalize can drive meaningful business results, and much more.
“Consumer habits are changing and the way they're engaging with different businesses are changing. We're seeing the need for personalization or the need for creating better user experiences in digital channels increase and we've seen that happen across different verticals." - Ankur Mehrotra
Time Stamps
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(04:31) Metrics for customers on AWS and how Amazon Personalize can impact their business
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(12:46) How personalization can directly impact business output
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(13:42) Measuring relevance cycle time with Amazon Personalize
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(16:34) Three pieces of advice to customers as they're getting started with Amazon Personalize
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(18:31) How to think about quantum of data
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(22:11) Recommendations to avoid cost overruns while using Amazon Personalize
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(26:36) Success stories with Amazon Personalize
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by CloudFix
CloudFix automates easy, no risk AWS cost savings. So your team can focus on changing the world.
Links
Connect with Ankur Mehrotra on LinkedIn
Connect with Rahul Subramaniam on LinkedIn
The most innovative businesses in the world run on AWS. Top companies in every industry, from automobiles to healthcare to telecom, they all use AWS to build sophisticated applications that power the growth and future of their businesses.
But with more than 250 products and services, keeping up with all of AWS's innovations—and making sure you are using them to their fullest potential—can be tricky.
That’s why we created this podcast: AWS Insiders.
In each episode, we will explain how today’s tech leaders can stay ahead of Amazon’s constantly evolving pace of innovation. You’ll hear from Amazon’s top product managers as they detail their secrets and strategies to reduce costs, save time, and improve performance.
You will also hear from top companies who are using AWS to drive incredible innovation.
We will share hands-on tips for making AWS easier and detail why AWS is the operating system of the future.
Welcome to AWS Insiders: Secrets and strategies from the smartest minds in AWS.
Hosted by AWS superfan and ESW Capital CTO Rahul Subramaniam, and powered by the team at CloudFix.
AWS Insiders is available anywhere you get your podcasts.