Andrew Guenther: Yeah, for sure. So I’m Andrew Guenther, I work for a company called Orbital Sidekick… So Orbital Sidekick operates a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites. And basically, what that means is they have these cameras that can see way outside of the visible spectrum of light, so they can effectively perform spectroscopy from space. So gases that would normally be invisible to the naked eye are things that their cameras can see.

Their primary market right now is customers like oil and gas, who are like “Hey, let us know if our pipelines are leaking.” So OSK basically processes their own imagery, determines where leak sites are, and forwards those on to customers. They have customers in government, who buy raw imagery looking to expand out into other industries. As you can imagine, with these kinds of cameras there’s all kinds of cool stuff you can do. You can monitor plant health, you can help with mining prospecting… Very, very cool technology. Still in the early stages. Three satellites in orbit right now, two more launching in March-ish. I don’t have exact dates yet.

A little bit more about me… So I am principal software engineer at Orbital Sidekick. Prior to that, I worked at AWS for seven years… So basically, I left AWS, joined OSK as lucky employee number 13, and got to build a lot of their ground segments systems from the ground up. As time went on, I got to be a little bit more involved and help out on payload side as well… So kind of the v1 of all of OSK systems I got to sort of touch, and then moved into this role of wherever the fires are, I move around to put those out.

Andrew Guenther: Yeah, for sure. So I’m Andrew Guenther, I work for a company called Orbital Sidekick… So Orbital Sidekick operates a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites. And basically, what that means is they have these cameras that can see way outside of the visible spectrum of light, so they can effectively perform spectroscopy from space. So gases that would normally be invisible to the naked eye are things that their cameras can see.

Their primary market right now is customers like oil and gas, who are like “Hey, let us know if our pipelines are leaking.” So OSK basically processes their own imagery, determines where leak sites are, and forwards those on to customers. They have customers in government, who buy raw imagery looking to expand out into other industries. As you can imagine, with these kinds of cameras there’s all kinds of cool stuff you can do. You can monitor plant health, you can help with mining prospecting… Very, very cool technology. Still in the early stages. Three satellites in orbit right now, two more launching in March-ish. I don’t have exact dates yet.

A little bit more about me… So I am principal software engineer at Orbital Sidekick. Prior to that, I worked at AWS for seven years… So basically, I left AWS, joined OSK as lucky employee number 13, and got to build a lot of their ground segments systems from the ground up. As time went on, I got to be a little bit more involved and help out on payload side as well… So kind of the v1 of all of OSK systems I got to sort of touch, and then moved into this role of wherever the fires are, I move around to put those out.

Jerod Santo: [22:04] Just thinking about that timeframe, you brought me back, mentioning EC2, or Slicehouse as well, I was like “I haven’t heard that name in a long time.” Ultimately, I think Rackspace ended up buying Slicehost, and trying to provide some VPS services of their own through that acquisition… But I’m just thinking about all of the things that were burgeoning at this time that Heroku, that you guys started to execute. You had Git and GitHub around the same timeframe, you really had the birth of AWS, specifically the EC2 offering; I believe it was at the end of the 2000s; what do you call them, oughts? I don’t know. Like 2008-ish was EC2. S3 was a couple of years earlier… So you have like the actual – your guys’ access to that ability - you can talk about how you built the platform out, but building Heroku on top of that.

Then you had Ruby on Rails, of course, which had been around for a while, but it was becoming so successful that your potential customer base was exploding, and then the pain of deployment for Rails being kind of the sore thumb of what is otherwise an excellent building experience. There were so many things lining up for you; I’m not trying to take anything away from your execution, but when we talk about reasons why businesses, startups succeed, a lot of it is timing… And you guys were in a very fertile ground to build something like this.

Anurag Goel: Yeah. And I think people on Render will always – they should always be able to use specialized compute or specialized services on other cloud providers, right? And so we actually – if you have some compute running on AWS, then Render can set a private link from Render to AWS, so you can always connect your services on AWS securely and privately. And a lot of our customers really appreciate that.

Ashley Jeffs: I don’t know, because the goal wasn’t just to like get the most amount of money in the shortest space of time… And I kind of always had my head on the idea that if at any point I felt like I wasn’t actually enjoying what I’m doing, then at that stage, I would just stop, because it was kind of silly at that point. Like, I’m not going to make more money from running Benthos as almost like a – I used to say like a hot dog stand on the street. That was kind of like the mentality I had. I just wanted to be like small potatoes, a small operation, doing the thing that I enjoy. But if I didn’t enjoy it, I was quite happy to just walk away. I think a lot of open source developers get stuck because they still want to work on this thing and they feel kind of like obligated to, but they don’t enjoy it anymore. And at that point you’re kind of trapped. But I kind of had my head on straight about that aspect of things. Like, if I don’t enjoy it, I’ll just let go.

[00:56:14.04] So joining Redpanda and then suddenly we can tap into all these customers and stuff was – it’s exciting. It’s great. But it wasn’t like before that I was like frustrated about “Oh, I just want to tap that revenue.” It was more just I wanted to find – if I could have found a hundred startups that were willing to pay like a nominal amount regularly to keep the project going and if that were enough for me to start building the team out, then I probably would have gone for it… But I’m just not good at wrangling up the startups. There were lots of them, but it’s very difficult to get them to pay a significant amount. Because you imagine a significant amount would end up being more than they’re probably paying for anything else that they’re doing, unless they’re like spending a lot on AWS…

Kurt Mackey: I mean, I really love this, though. This is the exact type of thing that I would love seeing on Fly. It’s like “You can’t do this on AWS, or DigitalOcean, or Heroku, or anywhere else. It only works here.” It’s very cool.

Tom Occhino: Yeah, we have a lot of underlying providers, but we are very much a partner with AWS on a lot of stuff. So in some ways you can kind of consider Vercel or parts of Vercel a control plane over AWS… But we have other providers underneath that we kind of stitch together seamlessly.

David Heinemeier Hansson: [00:49:38.25] A little bit, right? So I think it is all quite fluid. And also, fundamentally, I’m fine with that fluidity. I don’t care. I just want you to have a path, a roadmap, a tool to get from A to B to C to D to E without it feeling like there are hard lines and hard walls. I want you to be able to start on a VPS, or a VM, or a dedicated box, and move every which way around them.

In the Kamal config, for example, that we ship with new Rails 8 installations - Kamal is the deployment tool that we’ve made default - it should be as simple as changing the IP deployment addresses. And that IP can point to the VM, it can point to the VPS, it can point to the dedicated box, it can point to your own hardware, and Kamal won’t care. It’ll be the same.

Now, part of the pitch for Kubernetes, for example, was that that was going to be true sort of at a broad scale, and [unintelligible 00:50:29.05] was not true at all. I’ve never, ever seen a Kubernetes installation of any sophistication being able to just, “Oh, we’re on Amazon? Flip the switch, George. Ket’s move over to GCP.” “What?! No.” That’s like “Flip the switch, George. We’ll start having the meetings about the meetings about how we can move out four years from now.” That’s what the Kubernetes migration path often is. And I was just like “Yeah, there’s got to be a better way for that”, at least for some style of application.

Now, again, I actually think Kubernetes is an amazing piece of open source infrastructure, and if you have it in your heart that you want to start the next AWS, or the next GCP, or the next even Digital Ocean, you should probably look into Kubernetes. You’re going to be operating at that scale, and you’re going to have hundreds of engineers, and it’s going to be very complicated. Great. Kubernetes sounds wonderful for you.

I’ve looked at Kubernetes enough. We ran Kubernetes on AWS for long enough that I realized that is not what I want to do with my time. And it is not proportionate to the kind of problems that we have. Something far simpler is possible. And if that simplicity is achieved, we also get portability. And I think portability is actually less of a thing at super-high scale. It’s not that common that huge applications and businesses move from one provider to another. Where I want to make sure that the portability is present is in the early days. Is that you start your startup, and maybe you start it on Heroku, whatever, or something else like that, and you could just move on. You don’t get locked in. You don’t get locked into a cost basis that’s prohibitive.

Adam Azzam: I like to think about workflow orchestration as if you tell us what to run, where to run it, when to run it, and what to do when it fails, Prefect makes it extremely easy to author those rules on your typical script that you’ve got running locally.

So if you’ve got your Hello World script, you’ve got your callout to Open AI script, you’ve got your “go scrape this web page, and then go extract a bunch of data from it”, we give you the tools to say “Great. This works locally. But now if I want to run it on a massive K8s instance, or I want to run on AWS, or I want to run it on Azure”, you can do that in a line of code.

If you want to run it every third Thursday when there’s a full moon, we make it incredibly easy to express. When you want to say – if you start getting a bunch of 503 errors, because the resource is down, or maybe you start getting 429 errors because LinkedIn is onto your scraping work, you’re sort of scraping, let’s say, pipelining off of it, you can control the custom behavior of saying “Well, pause this workflow, or maybe start using a different IP address.” So we allow you to bake in different handlings of failure, and sort of native resiliency into that. So retries, idempotency, caching, transactions.

Du’An Lightfoot: I think the first thing you have to understand is that it’s the physical part, the layer one side - take that out of your mind. Even the layer two connectivity, kind of take that out of your mind, and really start from that layer three when it comes to networking. So the IP addressing, and the routing - all of that is there. So if you’re getting started with network on AWS, you’re going to start at that Amazon VPC. So think of this like a container for all of your compute. You store your compute, whether it’s EC2, you can actually connect to Lambda functions through databases, et cetera, and through the VPC. And then from that VPC, you start to establish connectivity to different VPCs, other clouds on-prem, and et cetera. So you’re kind of building your own data center inside of that VPC.

Justin Garrison: Right. When I worked at AWS, everyone came and told me all the things they hate about AWS. I was like “You don’t hate AWS as much as the AWS engineers.” Because AWS was built on AWS, and they know all of those edge cases, as much or more than any customer. And it’s one of the superpowers that I’ve always thought that’s AWS has over other cloud providers, where AWS is built on AWS almost all the way down to the bottom, there is a layer that is just raw infrastructure. But GCP isn’t built on GCP. It’s built on Borg.

Jerod Santo: Right. That runs on AWS, and –

Justin Garrison: It is the most expensive compute option on AWS.

Jerod Santo: The sneaky costs of scaling serverless

Zach Leatherman decided to migrate the 11ty Screenshots API off Netlify and learned a few things along the way! He ended up parking it on AWS Lambda, but shared the entire journey, plus a handy little spreadsheet that shows how different serverless providers grow based on hours of usage at various memory configurations. Link in the newsletter!

Zach’s final word on AWS is it’s “a huge pain to setup but it’s nice to have a fallback plan that isn’t going to cost an arm and a leg.”