The Unspoken Challenges of Deploying to Customer Clouds
This episode we are joined by Andrew Moreland, co-founder of Chalk. Andrew explains how their company’s core business model is to deploy their software directly into their customers’ cloud environments. This decision was driven by the need to handle highly sensitive data, like PII and financial records, that customers don't want to hand over to a third-party startup. The conversation delves into the surprising and complex challenges of this approach, which include managing granular IAM permissions and dealing with hidden global policies that can block their application. Andrew and Warren also discuss the real-world network congestion issues that affect cross-cloud traffic, a problem they've encountered multiple times. Andrew shares Chalk's mature philosophy on software releases, where they prioritize backwards compatibility to prevent customer churn, which is a key learning from a competitor.Finally, the episode explores the advanced technical solutions Chalk has built, such as their unique approach to "bitemporal modeling" to prevent training bias in machine learning datasets. As well as, the decision to move from Python to C++ and Rust for performance, using a symbolic interpreter to execute customer code written in Python without a Python runtime. The episode concludes with picks, including a surprisingly popular hobby and a unique take on high-quality chocolate.Notable FactsFact - The $1M hidden Kubernetes spendGiraffe and Medical Ruler training data biasSOLID principles don't produce better code?Veritasium - The Hole at the Bottom of MathEpisode: Auth Showdown on backwards compatible changesPicks:Warren - Switzerland Grocery Store ChocolateAndrew - Trek E-Bikes
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How to build in Observability at Petabyte Scale
We welcome guest Ang Li and dive into the immense challenge of observability at scale, where some customers are generating petabytes of data per day. Ang explains that instead of building a database from scratch—a decision he says went "against all the instincts" of a founding engineer—Observe chose to build its platform on top of Snowflake, leveraging its separation of compute and storage on EC2 and S3.The discussion delves into the technical stack and architectural decisions, including the use of Kafka to absorb large bursts of incoming customer data and smooth it out for Snowflake's batch-based engine. Ang notes this choice was also strategic for avoiding tight coupling with a single cloud provider like AWS Kinesis, which would hinder future multi-cloud deployments on GCP or Azure. The discussion also covers their unique pricing model, which avoids surprising customers with high bills by providing a lower cost for data ingestion and then using a usage-based model for queries. This is contrasted with Warren's experience with his company's user-based pricing, which can lead to negative customer experiences when limits are exceeded.The episode also explores Observe’s "love-hate relationship" with Snowflake, as Observe's usage accounts for over 2% of Snowflake's compute, which has helped them discover a lot of bugs but also caused sleepless nights for Snowflake's on-call engineers. Ang discusses hedging their bets for the future by leveraging open data formats like Iceberg, which can be stored directly in customer S3 buckets to enable true data ownership and portability. The episode concludes with a deep dive into the security challenges of providing multi-account access to customer data using IAM trust policies, and a look at the personal picks from the hosts.Notable LinksFact - Passkeys: Phishing on Google's own domain and It isn't even newEpisode: All About OTELEpisode: Self Healing SystemsPicks:Warren - The Shadow (1994 film)Ang - Xreal Pro AR Glasses
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The Open-Source Product Leader Challenge: Navigating Community, Code, and Collaboration Chaos
In a special solo flight, Warren welcomes Meagan Cojocar, General Manager at Pulumi and a self-proclaimed graduate of “PM school” at AWS. They dive into what it’s like to own an entire product line and why giving up that startup hustle for the big leagues sometimes means you miss the direct signal from your users. The conversation goes deep on the paradox of open-source where direct feedback is gold, but dealing with license-shifting competitors can make you wary. From the notorious HashiCorp kerfuffle to the rise of OpenTofu, they explore how Pulumi maintains its commitment to the community amidst a wave of customer distrust.Meagan highlights the invaluable feedback loop provided by the community, allowing for direct interaction between users and the engineering team. This contrasts with the "telephone game" that can happen in proprietary product development. The conversation also addresses the recent industry shift and then immediate back-peddling from open-source licenses, discussing the subsequent customer distrust and how Pulumi maintains its commitment to the open-source model.And finally, the duo tackles the elephant in the cloud: LLMs, and extends on the early MCP episode. They debate the great code quality vs. speed trade-off, the risk of a "botched" infrastructure deployment, and whether these models can solve anything more than a glorified statistical guessing game. It's a candid look at the future of DevOps, where the real chaos isn't the code, but the tools that write it. The conversation concludes with a philosophical debate on the fundamental capabilities of LLMs, questioning whether they can truly solve "hard problems" or are merely powerful statistical next-word predictors.Notable LinksVeritasium - the Math that predicts everythingFact - Don't outsource your customer support: Clorox sues CognizantCloudFlare uses an LLM to generate an OAuth2 LibraryPicks:Warren - Rands Leadership CommunityMeagan - The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier
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FinOps: Holding engineering teams accountable for spend
In this episode of Adventures in DevOps, we dive into the world of FinOps, a concept that aims to apply the DevOps mindset to financial accountability. Yasmin Rajabi, Chief Strategy Officer at CloudBolt, joins us to demystify, as we acknowledge the critical challenge of bringing together financial accountability and engineering teams who often are not paying attention to the business.The discussion further explores the practicalities of FinOps in the context of cloud spending and Kubernetes. Yasmin highlights that a significant amount of waste in organizations comes from simply not turning off unused systems and not right-sizing resources. She explains how tools like Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) can help, but also points out the complexities of optimizing across horizontal and vertical scaling behaviors. The conversation touches on "shame back reporting" as a way to provide visibility into costs for engineering teams, although the conversation emphasizes that providing tooling and insights is more effective than simply telling developers to change configurations.The episode also delves into the evolving mindset around cloud costs, especially with the rise of AI and machine learning workloads. While historically engineering salaries eclipsed cloud spending, the increasing hardware requirements for ML and data workloads are making cost optimization a more pressing concern. Spending-conscious teams are increasingly asking about GPU optimization, even if AI/ML teams are still largely focused on limitless spending to drive unjustified "innovation". The conclude by discussing the challenges of on-premise versus cloud deployments and the importance of addressing "day two problems" regardless of the infrastructure choice.PicksWarren - Lions and Dolphins cannot make babiesAimee - The Equip Protein Powder and Protein BarYasmin - Bone Broth drink by 1990 Snacks
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The Auth Showdown: Single tenant versus Multitenant Architectures
Get ready for a lively debate on this episode of Adventures in DevOps. We're joined by Brian Pontarelli, founder of FusionAuth and CleanSpeak. Warren and Brian face off by diving into the controversial topic of multitenant versus single-tenant architecture. Expert co-host Aimee Knight joins to moderate the discussion. Ever wondered how someone becomes an "auth expert"? Warren spills the beans on his journey, explaining it's less about a direct path and more about figuring out what it means for yourself. Brian chimes in with his own "random chance" story, revealing how they fell into it after their forum-based product didn't pan out.Aimee confesses her "alarm bells" start ringing whenever multitenant architecture is mentioned, jokingly demanding "details" and admitting her preference for more separation when it comes to reliability. Brian makes a compelling case for his company's chosen path, explaining how their high-performance, downloadable single-tenant profanity filter, CleanSpeak, handles billions of chat messages a month with extreme low latency. This architectural choice became a competitive advantage, attracting companies that couldn't use cloud-based multitenant competitors due to their need to run solutions in their own data centers.We critique cloud providers' tendency to push users towards their most profitable services, citing AWS Cognito as an example of a cost-effective solution for small-scale use that becomes cost-prohibitive with scaling and feature enablement. The challenges of integrating with Cognito, including its reliance on numerous other AWS services and the need for custom Lambda functions for configuration, are also a point of contention. The conversation extends to the frustrations of managing upgrades and breaking changes in both multitenant and single-tenant systems and the inherent difficulties of ensuring compatibility across different software versions and integrations. The episode concludes with a humorous take on the current state and perceived limitations of AI in software development, particularly concerning security.PicksWarren - Scarpa Hiking shoes - Planet Mojito SuadeAimee - Peloton TreadBrian - Searchcraft and Fight or Flight
Join us in listening to the experienced experts discuss cutting edge challenges in the world of DevOps. From applying the mindset at your company, to career growth and leadership challenges within engineering teams, and avoiding the common antipatterns. Every episode you'll meet a new industry veteran guest with their own unique story.
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