Song Encoder: Forrest Brazeal

There’s MQ, EC2,

And RedShift and GameLift and Glue.

There’s Lumberyard, Lightsail and Workdocs and Workmail, with Worklink and PrivateLink too.

Detective, Inspector, and Trusted Advisor, Cognito, Corretto, S3 -

Data Pipeline and DataSync, AppMesh and AppSync,

or you can use SimpleDB. But don’t!

Appstream, Timestream, Augmented AI, Auto Scaling, Lambda, Amplify.

Oh, DirectConnect or just Connect, Config and RDS -

These are the major services of AWS.

You’re listening to Song Encoder, a special series of the Changelog Podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. My name is Jerod Santo. Big thanks to our partners at Fastly for delivering our shows super-fast, all around the world. Check them out at Fastly.com.

…Ohh there’s CloudFormation, Lake Formation, Free RTOS -

These are the major services of AWS.

Forrest Brazeal refers to himself as a Cloud Bard. He plays the piano, sings, raps, and even yodels about cloud-based technologies and services. When I saw Forrest’s HugOps song go viral on Twitter, I couldn’t help but chase him down and ask “What the heck is a Cloud Bard?”

Well, a Cloud Bard is something that I made up, because you can define any category, arbitrary and small enough, to be the best at it, and… As far as I know, I’m the only person that calls himself a Cloud Bard, so I’m number one.

[laughs]

No, but - basically, I’m an educator, a cloud advocate. I’ve been teaching people about the cloud, building on the cloud for many years, and this is just a way for me to encapsulate the way that I like to do that, which is creatively, thinking outside the box, with a little bit of fun, a little bit of magic. It seems to help people get excited about technologies that can be a little bit arcane, a little bit abstract, unless you put them in a format that you can easily grab onto.

Do you remember the first spark, the first time you decided “I’m gonna start singing about technology?”

Yeah, actually I do. It was at a conference called Serverless Conf, dearly departed, back in Austin, Texas. This was 2017. I was giving a talk, it was about serverless functions, something like that. I decided that I would end the talk by rapping… Acapella rap, which is just the worst thing you can imagine.

So how long have you been doing music?

I mean, a long time… I was Conservatory-trained, I’m a classical musician on the side; at some point in the past decade or so I figured out that I could combine that with my dayjob to do something that was more fun than either of them, so here we are.

So has this accelerated your career, do you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I would not be doing what I am now, I would not have had the opportunities I have, I would not have met the people that I’ve met if not for putting these songs out there. And it’s surprising how quickly music can cut through the noise and help you to all of a sudden start having a different conversation than everybody else is having.

I think about the song that I wrote on ransomware back when everybody was thinking about “Hey, there’s no gas right now, there’s no meat…” Every day there was a new business getting hacked, and people didn’t understand what was going on, and so I spent some time trying to understand what was behind this phenomenon, putting it into music in a way that was pithy and easy to understand.

That song ended up winning what’s called a Pony Award at Black Hat. I got to meet a lot of cool security people through that, I got to partner a little bit with CISA, the government agency that’s responsible for cybersecurity… And yeah, you just never know what doors are gonna be opened once you start singing.

For those of us who don’t write music, we just listen to the songs once they’re fully-formed, what does your creation process look like?

I think it comes down to wanting to have something on your mind that’s important to share. I’m not writing stuff just to write it. Earlier this summer I did a piece called “That sinking feeling. A HugOps song”, which is about the terrible feeling that we’ve all experienced as developers when you one-second-too-late realize you’ve pushed something to production that you should never have pushed, and you’ve taken down the site, and the pager is blowing up… What are you gonna do about that? Are you still gonna have a job? Are you gonna survive? And it brings in these concepts of blameless postmortems and how to build a team that can be resilient to something like this.

I knew I wanted to put that into song format, because every couple of weeks you’ll see something like this floating around on the internet; someone else who’s panicked about it. I think it was right around the time that that HBO intern had sent out an integration test email to their entire multi-million email list, and I just wanted to capture that feeling in a way that would resonate.

So from that point, it becomes “Well, what’s it gonna sound like? How are you gonna make this accessible, and also kind of cut through the noise”, like I said before, in a way that people maybe haven’t seen before?

In that case, I ended up putting the song together as a – there’s a few different instruments involved. There’s a little rap break in the middle of it, and it’s got a pop sound to it that’s very easy on the ears. I wanted it to sound like an oral hug to help you feel a little bit better about the problem you just caused. Kind of the audio equivalent of the HugOps discipline. So you know, it depends on the setting, it depends on the time, it depends on the concept you’re trying to get across.

So in your day-to-day work, have you ever been on the receiving end of a HugOps, or have you ever been the guilty party on one of these outages?

Absolutely I have. I remember a few years ago I’d written this thing that shut down cloud instances outside of work hours… And it was great, because it saved a lot of money, so we turned it on in development accounts, and at 5 PM it would shut down everybody’s servers. Guess who accidentally changed the config to have it run on production instead of on development? I shut down 600 live databases, so… Yeah.

[laughs]

I’ve been there. It was a long day.

Singing from experience then.

Yes.

It seems like a lot of the stuff that you sing about is about what you’re currently doing. So you have a lot of AWS stuff, I saw some stuff for A Cloud Guru, I assume there’s some sort of relationship there…

Yes, I used to work for A Cloud Guru. I never actually worked directly for Amazon. I was what’s called an AWS hero for a long time, which is kind of like an unpaid developer advocate for AWS; something like a Microsoft MVP or Google Developer expert. As a result of that, I was constantly involved with AWS technologies and trying to explicate those.

I have moved on to Google, I work there now, so you can expect to see more Google Cloud-related songs coming out, I’m sure. It’s certainly what I’m thinking about, what’s on the top of my mind.

How did you come to work at Google? Did your singing play a role in that directly or indirectly?

Yeah, it was interesting… Somebody had hit me up on a Friday night, like “Hey, you should do a serverless versus containers rap battle”, and I said “If this person’s tweet gets X amount of shares by Monday, I’ll go ahead and write one.” And so they did, and I ended up writing it over the weekend.

On Monday I got on a plane and went out to Seattle and we had a bunch of AWS folks out there for a developer summit… So I got out there and everybody had heard it, and it was just kind of a great conversation starter.

The guy that was over top of the AWS Hero program at that time, Brian Hall, AWS’s VP of marketing, ended up going on to Google, and he’s now the VP that I report to at Google. So it was a great way for us to meet and start a conversation, and we kind of continued that relationship through the years.

What’s your role at Google look like? What is your goal, and what do you do for them?

My title is head of content, which is kind of – it’s more what you make of it than what it actually says it is… [laughter] But I lead a group of extremely talented people who are responsible for telling the story of Google Cloud to the world. So it’s specifically the cloud side of the business.

But you’re talking about a cloud provider that - hey, it’s third out of three. They’re in a challenger position. And one of the advantages of doing that is you can be pretty outside the box in how you tell your story and what you’re willing to do. So you can expect to see more unusual, creative storytelling coming out of Google Cloud. Will there be some music? I certainly can’t deny that there might be some, you know…

So we can expect more Google Cloud content, of course… But what else? What’s next for the Cloud Bard?

I’d like to expand a little bit and sing about some things that are maybe more tangential to tech. I feel like we need a supply chain song in these trying times, so… We’ll see if that happens.

We need a supply chain song… [laughs] There you go. Go mainstream with that stuff.

Yeah, man.

You do have one that’s related to tech, but it’s not so much cloud and infrastructure and explaining concepts. Your 168 AWS services in 2 minutes is a really fun way of kind of poking fun at AWS, and how many services there are, and how hard it is to remember all their names… But then more recently you have the Big Tech ((It’s Probably Fine)). This almost seems like a little bit of a commentary, right?

Yeah. There’s a song from back in the ‘60s called “The merry minuet”, made popular by a group called The Kingston Trio. It’s all about the atomic age, and the razor edge of nuclear Armageddon that everybody was living on back then. But the very kind of serious commentary nature of the song is undercut by these whimsical lyrics, and it’s a very light melody. It actually has a minuet feel to it, and it just trips along very whimsically. So the intentional triviality of the music and of the way it’s phrased is in complete contrast to the civilization-destroying implications of what they’re talking about.

So I wanted to write something like that about big tech. So if you listen to that song, you’ll hear - it’s a very kind of calm, flowing, cheerful melody.

You know, it just kind of flows along like that, but you’re singing about a world where people are not in control of their own thoughts and feelings, and where you have a small number of oligarchic technology companies that are making decisions about who can speak, and who’s not allowed to speak… That’s our version of Armageddon that we’re contemplating, in some ways, and I just wanted to back that with music that absolutely didn’t sound like it at all.

What is it about cloud tech, serverless, this particular realm of the industry that excites you and keeps you so interested?

You know, it’s changed a lot for me over the years. There was a time when my answer to that would have been very tactical-engineering-focused and saying “Hey, I really just love not having to configure a server” or “I love not having to go out and rack and stack something. I really like just being able to deal with this API and have material provisioned for me.” I think as I’ve progressed, some of the things that I’ve grown to appreciate about cloud are just about the consolidated and centralized nature of expertise that you have access to… And of best practices, and even, honestly, sometimes corporate responsibility.

Something that I really loved - and this was a super-small announcement that came out at Google Cloud Next, where it could have even just flown completely under the radar… This tiny feature where they added a sustainability recommendation into this tool they have called Unattended Project Reminder, where Google’s now able to tell you “Hey, you created this project, but it doesn’t seem like you’ve really been using the resources in it. Do you wanna shut it down to help reduce your carbon footprint?”

A lot of us, for a lot of years, have thought about cloud resource optimization as something that is just about optimizing our build. But when you think about it, it’s actually something that has a societal and planet-scale implication. That gets very interesting.

Do you find that you have to balance the leveling up of your skills, or is this something you have to continue to work on, in addition to keeping up with everything that’s changing out in the cloud and in technology all the time?

I think it would be harder if I wasn’t working full-time in this space. I’m always amazed by people like Randall Munroe at xkcd, who are able to remain credible and get way down in the weeds with all kinds of dense, STEM type of topics, whether it’s computer science, or math, or all sorts of hard sciences that he writes about, without seemingly having much professional experience in any of them.

That’s someone who has an incredible, obviously, commitment to researching and somehow staying up to speed on a lot of different fields. I’m not sure I could do that if I wasn’t working in cloud. A lot of what you’ll hear from me - it’s just coming right out of what I’m working on. I’m not trying to go out and look at the broad landscape of the world and say “Well, materials should exist on this topic. I should go and create content.” So it’s not a content-first experience. It’s very much content as an outgrowth of things that I’ve learned and experienced. And ultimately, I think that does have a good chance of resonating with more people.

Well, speaking of things that resonate… Yodeling. Some people love it, others not so much… But either way, it is certainly a rare skill. Can you give us a taste?

You really don’t wanna hear this, I promise, but… [laughter] So, for context, this is - a while back I had done a yodel about Elastic Load Balancers, which I’ve always thought are a yodelable concept, just because of the sound of the phrase…

Right?

And so it was something like…