Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Foundational Data Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her technique for spending time intentionally and prioritizing work-life balance called balcony-hopping. Mai-Lan explains how she created the concept of balcony-hopping and how it has helped her to be a better leader, mother, wife, and boxer. Corey and Mai-Lan discuss how in today’s age, attention is a form of currency and why it’s so important to be intentional with how and where you spend your attention. Mai-Lan also offers practical insights to anyone seeking to feel more productive, present, and balanced. 

Kannan Solaiappan, Head of Reliability and Data Engineering at Circles Life, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss building a team in a start-up environment and the complexities of balancing reliability and security with scale. Kannan describes the challenges of building a semi-platform multiple instances model and how products like Severalnines have helped identify and optimize potential problems before they affect customers. Kannan and Corey also discuss the impact that major outages had on the world at large when it came to fault-tolerance on entry points, and Kannan explains how guardrails can improve reliability without creating the same resistance from engineers that governance can.

Episode Summary

Álvaro Hernandez, Founder of OnGres, joins Corey on Screaming in the cloud to discuss his hobby project Dyna53, the balkanization of AWS services, and all things Postgres. Álvaro and Corey discuss what it means to be an AWS Community Hero these days, and Álvaro shares some of his experiences as being one of the first Heroes to provide feedback on AWS services. Álvaro also shares his thoughts on why people shouldn’t underestimate the importance of selecting the right database, why he feels Postgres and Kubernetes work so well together, and the ever-growing ecosystem of Postgres.

Catharine Strauss joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how doom scrolling lead her to a passionate career in cloud sustainability. Catharine talks about the surprising amount of carbon data creates, and her hopes for the future. She walks through a talk track and action strategy for employees who want to spearhead a sustainability effort in their own companies, as well as her hopes for Amazon’s latest development on their carbon footprint tool. Catharine also explains why it’s necessary to think in terms of the “fourth dimension” like Doc Brown in Back to the Future III when planning for cloud sustainability efforts.

Jeremy Meiss, Director of DevRel at CircleCI, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to define what DevRel is and what it isn’t. Listen as Jeremy explains where he feels DevRel is best positioned to sit in a company, as well as why it’s important to view DevRel as “just marketing” or “just product”. Jeremy also reveals how he sees the role of DevRel evolving as we face economic changes in the market, as well as how DevRel teams can connect to a sense of meaning and purpose in their work to avoid burnout.

Emily Ruppe, Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the best practices she’s discovered for effectively handling incident responses. Emily explains how she fell into incident response and why it suits her mindset, as well as the different ways she’s seen organizations handle incident response and what seems to be most effective. Emily describes how she managed to not only survive but thrive through an acquisition, why blameless root causes analysis is well intentioned but misses finer points for learning, and what she has most enjoyed about working at Jeli.io.

Aerin Booth, Founder of Cloud Sustainably, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how they were inspired to pursue a career in cloud sustainability, and the cloud sustainability conference they’re launching this year called The State of Open. In this conversation Aerin highlights the importance of creating boundaries in the cloud to promote innovation and efficiency, drawing interesting parallels between early video games and the current state of cloud. Corey and Aerin discuss the importance and shortcomings of AWS’s focus on sustainability, and Aerin reinforces the importance of doing work that you enjoy and makes a positive difference in the world.

Chris Farris, Cloud Security Nerd at Turbot, joins Corey to discuss how he wound up in the world of DevRel at Turbot and what he sees for the future of multi-cloud security practitioners. Chris explains that while 90% of what he works on revolves around AWS, it’s important to close the gap on learning the other cloud providers because they make up more than 10% of his risk. He also reveals his major concerns about Azure, the potential of a return to on-prem for sovereign data reasons, and Oracle’s interesting approach to entering the cloud development arena.

Chris Vermilion, Senior Software Developer at Remix Labs, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he went from working in academia to being a remote software developer based in Maine. Chris describes the start-up ouroboros he observed and how he’s seeing many start-ups shift to solving broader problems, as well as the benefits he’s found to creating communities through Slack and annual conferences. Chris also explains why he left particle physics to live in Maine as a software developer, and the pros and cons to both lifestyles.

Alyss Noland, Head of DevRel^2 and PMM at Common Room, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the value of community and best practices around scaling that value in the world of DevRel. Corey and Alyss discuss how DevRel is still a relatively new position, and how to show the true value of the DelRel position to other stakeholders in the company, as well as how to be a valuable asset to the developers in your community. Alyss shares best practices around understanding your customers’ needs, creating and nurturing a self-supporting community, and which metrics and activities have the most impact.

Pete Cheslock, Head of Growth and Community at AppMap, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for their annual time-honored tradition of reflecting on and recapping re:Invent. Corey and Pete discuss how the conference has scaled since its inception and the changes they’ve seen as a result. Pete highlights the importance of storytelling throughout product launches, as well as the costs of sponsoring re:Invent and how this year was different in the Expo Hall. Pete and Corey also discuss how 2022’s conference seemed to neglect the most valuable part of re:Invent - creating opportunities and spaces for people to work and socialize together.