Autumn Nash: Okay, so what was maybe not just like technical-wise, but what was your coolest job? Because you’ve had some – like, what is being a cloud economist? You’ve got so many layers. Like, we heard about your DevOps career, but what about – I feel like you’ve…

Jerod Santo: 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?”

Adam Stacoviak: And the reason they do that is because you’re not trying to knock down buildings, you’re trying to make sure the stop signs are in the right place, and the stop lights and whatnot work. You’re not knocking down buildings to build your own city. You’re helping other people make sure their buildings and their foundations are strong, and the community is strong… And then interoperability is huge and crucial in open source, especially as you look at what cloud is. If you’re a player in the cloud, you kind of have to – well, you should; you don’t have to, but you should optimize for interoperability and openness and things like that, because you’ve got a lot of players in that space… More than just simply Grafana Labs and Grafana Loki. There’s more to the stack than those two or three things. It’s a bigger piece, a bigger puzzle.

Jaana Dogan: Yeah, so I actually switched to the Spanner team almost a month ago, or maybe it’s been more than a month… Time is flying to me nowadays. One reason I actually wanted to work on Spanner is I wanted to go back to databases. Before coming to Google I was mainly working on databases… And the reason I came to Google is actually I was table-flipping every day, because we were losing data, or we had performance problems and so on, and I just wanted to go to a company where databases are sorted out, so I can delegate my state work, state problems to something else, and I can focus on my app, my business logic, my higher-level stuff.

It’s funny now, because I came to this company not to work on databases, but I eventually ended up working on databases… And I was talking about the Spanner team a couple of months ago, maybe around February, and I was wondering “Hey, what’s going on?” I used to think that Spanner has a very different approach to some of the problems we’re discussing right here, and I was wondering “What’s going on with their –” they have a cloud product also, “What is the usage?” and so on. I thought that it’s a huge missed opportunity; nobody’s actually talking about Spanner, nobody’s actually filling the gaps for Spanner, because its approach - which I can explain briefly what it does - is very different.

[20:20] It’s a really interesting mental exercise for me to go back to databases, because it’s on the other side of the spectrum, and from that perspective I learn more about the traditional databases. I constantly am comparing the design decisions and different fail modes and so on.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I think in the past you were thinking “What would it take for me, if I wanted to have my own server?” I call up Dell and say “Hello! Can you send me an Epic box with 48 cores? And here’s the address to the data center I want it delivered.” The jump from getting that piece of iron able to host your application was kind of tricky. It was quite different from the Heroku path. Like, anyone could set up Heroku; far fewer people would feel comfortable setting up a physical box. I want to shrink that gap, such that the bare metal deployment scenario looks virtually identical to the cloud deployment scenario. That it’s not a different category. It’s using the same tools, it’s using the same configuration, it’s using the same method of thinking about it… But also, most people don’t start by phoning up Dell to order a $5,000 piece of hardware. They go “Oh, I have an idea. I’d like that idea to get online.” “Oh, Hetzner has a VPS for $12 a month, with a couple of cores and enough RAM for me to run it… I’m going to deploy there first.”

So I think still the path for most developers will go through the cloud first. I want to make sure that when they do that, they don’t end up getting locked in to a commercial platform, which I’ve seen time and again happen, including on Heroku, where some relatively large services suddenly have some very, very large bills that are making things quite difficult for them, and they kind of don’t feel like they can get out. They feel like they’re in too deep, and that would be a huge project to move off Heroku. I want to make it a trivial project.

So as I said, you can start in the cloud, because I think most people should. Now, what is cloud? I think there’s a discussion there, too.

Dustin Schau: Yeah, I’m really glad you asked that. It’s a great illustration of what we can do with being more of a specialist in Gatsby applications. So what we launched on January 27th was our Build product. That was kind of painting a picture for completion on Gatsby Cloud. So what we launched on that day is what we call Distributed Builds. That enables, of course, faster builds, but the how of how we did that is the open source product exposed a communication mechanism over IPC, and then Cloud can then listen to that communication mechanism and then offload work to Cloud. So it’s really just Lambda functions behind the scenes. What that’s doing - it is offloading heavy work off of the main core process, single-threaded note, into a cloud environment.

What we did is that one of the heaviest and potentially slowest pieces of a Gatsby build is generating responsive images, which again, it’s worth it; that’s something that your users want. If anyone hasn’t checked out the gatsby-image component, check it out. That’s why you are generating these images. So what you’d often find is that builds were timing out, or they were taking 10-15 minutes for generating those images alone… So by off-loading it to the cloud platform we can 1) build out the application faster, and then 2) especially on subsequent builds, we just short-circuit that work that we’ve already done, so you don’t redo work that you oftentimes do on other platforms.

Adam Stacoviak: It seriously has been too long. As an owner of many, many generations, current owner of four… As a matter of fact, we’re speaking right now through a few Mac minis… We use them as Skype machines every single day to do live broadcasts and to do our recording. It’s part of a system that just works for us, so we have networked Mac minis, four of them, that all feed back into our multi-channel interface.

They’re essentially Skype machines. I call them cloud microphones, basically, because that’s what it is; each one is a cloud microphone. It allows me to connect people in the cloud to here locally, as a local mic, via the audio in and out. If it weren’t for those machines, our setup would be just a little less professional, let’s just say…

And I don’t think – we don’t really need to upgrade to a this newest version of Mac mini. I don’t think our needs in that case need this new Mac mini. However, for anyone holding on to who’s bought the oldest trash can possible Mac Pro, and just kept it because – you know, it does look sexy; it is a very nice machine, and you’ve kept it, or you’ve desired to keep it, or desired to go back onto the market of eBay and buy one because you don’t wanna buy the non-existent Mac Pro now, and you want Pro-type server related stuff to the Mac mini of today, prior to today, real-today couldn’t handle, then you probably either went Hackintosh, you probably went PC, and you’re not too much [unintelligible 00:35:20.00] in our show because the Mac mini just didn’t compete for you. Or you pushed to Mac mini and just bought two versus one, I don’t know… But the current Mac mini is pretty freakin’ awesome.

Gerhard Lazu: That’s crazy. Okay. Okay. Was the cost of bandwidth a factor for you to choose a specific cloud provider? Google versus AWS is what I’m thinking here.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. I think it gives a reason for complete respect for building that kind of business. Amazon - and you could talk to your competition over the years, or having to compete with Amazon in terms of spend, in terms of, as you mentioned this one last swing, because you’ve gotta double your acquisition, and in this case you said you 100x-ed it… But just this idea that – it’s not easy to build that kind of business, logistically, technically, financially, in all ways… Going back to Reid Hoffman, what he had said, like you’re falling off the cliff, with jet packs on, trying to build a plane. That’s very difficult. But it gives a new respect as an end user just to think “Oh man, this server’s not acting right”, or the SLA, for example, the uptime necessary, or just “Oh, I want it for less.” Five bucks is probably as inexpensive as you can make that kind of server today. You call it a droplet, for example.

But just a sheer amount of respect required to what you all have done with DigitalOcean… That’s just awesome. I love DigitalOcean. I think it’s a super-awesome company, and in many ways you changed what the cloud is. You brought competition to a doorstep that did not have competition. You can speak to that if you want to, but I remember in Jason’s interview you had said how investors were even scared to invest because they didn’t wanna compete with Amazon.

Alex Kretzschmar: Next Cloud is what I use to host – that’s like a Google Drive replacement, Dropbox replacement…

Theresa Kushner: That’s an internal discussion always. And every customer’s environment is different, too. A lot of customers’ environments are not set up to do this kind of data exchange. And so that’s one of the reasons why NTT Data Services looks at that, is because that’s what we do, is that we help you create those kinds of environments that are data-rich and responsive to all kinds of applications. And so we’re in the troves of trying to make sure that when we release these technologies, that we get companies that have the backbone in order to do it to begin with. Because it’s just frustrating to companies. Like you said, the computing power, the capability… A lot of what we do is in the cloud, but then again, you have to push our friends from the hyperscalers to do high-performance computing, at a cost that’s available to ordinary humans. So that’s another area that we look at constantly.

Mauricio Salatino: [laughs] Because I think that we have learned so much from Kubernetes that now it’s time to create a developer experience that basically hides Kubernetes from you. That’s kind of like what Cloud Run and Func is, basically. I want a CLI or a tool that basically allows me to point the Git repository, and then just get something up and running somewhere. I don’t want to care about all the other pieces that need to be there for things to get built in a secure way. I think that the supply chain, and the security supply chain is coming really hard these days… And I do care about security, but I do feel that those things need to get solved, and they need to get solved for me as a developer. So I know that I’m working in software, I’m responsible for the libraries that I use, I’m responsible for the things that I choose to use, but when I’m deploying something into production… You know, first of all we can repl use it, and then it’s secure enough for me not to care much about how things get in there, right?

David Cramer: The next time we fundraised, which was our series A, that question didn’t come up anymore, because we had proven them that there was no fear. And also, for what it’s worth, when they were asking why people would pay, we had revenue, and it was fine. But the next time around, the question was very different; it was “What stops Amazon from running this? Hosting this themselves and selling it? If you can make money here, why would Amazon or any of the big companies - why would they not capitalize on that? …as they’ve shown themselves to do in many ways.” And my response was “It’s not happening today. We’ll figure it out. I’m not worried about that.” I said that with conviction, and I believed in it because Sentry is a product, not an infrastructure piece. So it’s a little bit different than what their status quo is.

[unintelligible 00:27:15.29] I don’t know that much about how Elastic worked internally, and all these other things, but Amazon sells Elasticsearch, right? Elastic sells Elasticsearch. There’s competition there. But Elastic is just an infrastructure tool. It’s basically a database. That’s the way I’d reason about anything; it’s a database, or a web server, or something like that… And that’s what the cloud providers ultimately sell. Because a product is very different. You have to constantly build and change and evolve the product… And our bet was that Amazon isn’t gonna invest in that, because it’s a high-risk move. They could have chosen to try to run the open source thing and assumed that we would invest in it, but we just didn’t think that would happen. So we took that risk and we accepted it, as did our investors and everybody else.

[27:55] That question didn’t come up in the future after that, for what it’s worth. Nobody was concerned going forward. But we did always think about it, and we had many, many conversations, kind of just like riffing… Like “Well, what would we do if tomorrow Amazon’s like “Well, we’re selling Sentry.” And for many people, that’s a much scarier idea than us. I think we’re a little bit – I’m gonna call it confident; probably arrogant… But we’re very confident in our ability to win and execute in our space, and I think we’ve shown that really well, where we’re the market leader, and we’ve had a lot of stiff competition for many years.

So when we talked about this, other than like “Oh yeah, we’re confident we’ll win against Amazon”, our confidence was a little shaken… And the way we thought about it was like “Okay, what would we do if Amazon did this tomorrow? What would be our recourse?” And the idealistic approach is that the community would come to your calling and they would battle and rebel against Amazon, and even if that happened, it wouldn’t matter. Amazon would still just completely demolish anything, and it just wouldn’t matter. It’s like one of the biggest businesses in history at this point, right?

Jerod Santo: Well, let’s see how simple it is just to describe what it is and what it offers, maybe from a first run perspective of somebody who says “Okay, I would like to run some functions as a service. I’d like to execute my functions that I have or haven’t written yet (choose your own adventure) on a cloud, and I heard OpenFaaS is cool.” So what happens next? Tell us the use case and what it feels like to use it.

Julia White: [20:02] Yeah, right? And it’s all about protecting the franchise, and… It was so fun to switch over to Azure, where you’re like “Oh no, we’ve gotta go, baby!” So how are we differentiated - actually, the core of it goes back to that developer experience. We spent some time, like “What’s the soul of Azure and the company?” Satya made us all spend the time, like “What’s the soul of Microsoft? Why do we exist?”, in his very interesting and philosophical approach to problems… And we did the same thing on Azure, like “What’s our soul? What do we wanna stand for?”

The thing we came back to is the developer being productive, and having that incredible developer productivity experience is part of our cloud. It’s just a developer platform, it’s what it is, so that’s our core - how do we do that differently? There’s tech - fine, we’ll just support all the same tech everyone else does, and other things, but HOW we do it.

One of the things I talk about is around serverless; event-driven came out… So AWS launched Lambda. Innovative, new, but they didn’t put a lot of support around it; you had to kind of figure it out… On the forums people were like “This is kind of complicated. I don’t get it yet.” And then when we brought out Functions, it had the whole VS toolkit ready, with SDKs, we had support and docs around it, so that you can just get going… And it’s a subtle thing, but to me it’s a good example of how we think about what we want. Every developer, whether you’ve never heard of serverless in your whole life, or whether you’re the master at it… we want you to be great at this. We wanna make sure you can be incredibly productive with building whatever you wanna build.

So as we think about the technology and how we support that delivery of it, it’s much about how we wanna be different and more helpful, frankly. And then also, there’s a little bit of – you know, Microsoft has always been great at saying “We want everyone to be on this. We wanna make it something that everyone has access to, and not have any judgment. And I look at some of the competitors and I see there’s a little bit of judgment; like, if you’re not like the leading edge developer and you don’t totally get cloud, there’s a little bit of like “Hm…”

Abdel Sghiouar: [27:53] Have you had a chance to look at Google Cloud Run ? …which is what Fargate is the equivalent of, essentially. Fargate or ECS, I think, is kind of the same.

Sam Lambert: Well, I think it’s what the cloud is supposed to have been. You look at what a lot of the major clouds provide for you now. Some provide very good services. Amazon has some great services, like S3 and whatever… But that didn’t go far enough. I think the real promise of the cloud is yet to be met and it’s starting with serverless. We think of this cloud as this ever-expanding, powerful thing, that can just enable so much for what we do, and everything is connected to the cloud, and whatever… But it’s got a long way to go in terms of user experience and usability, and it’s complex, and people who, say they have a large Amazon architecture or whatever, they’ve got a large operations team behind that. And with this new era of products and these new companies that are kind of baking themselves into this mold of this serverless model, I think that will start to change. We’ll still need operators; of course we will. They’re so important; they’re critically important internally in what we do. But it’s not just about that. It’s about what our customers can do without having to hire up massive teams.

I’ve said this before, and a lot of people have made a similar prediction which is there’s gonna be massive, multi-billion-dollar companies that are like 5 or 10 people, because they have managed to leverage so many of the tools and serverless platforms out there. So serverless is this all-in, much more refined view of how you can deliver cloud products without passing on silly, meaningless abstractions.

I remember I signed up when I was doing my sort of early discovery of what we should build as a product - I was signing up for other database products, and it’s like, they’re asking you to specify VCPUs, and stuff like this. And it’s like, if you’re a founder with the next Stripe in your head, that you need to bring to the world, why the hell are you trying to work out what a VCPU means? What does it mean? Like, I don’t know how bad your software is; I don’t know what resources are consumed. I just wanna do the thing you promised you were gonna do. How do I reason about 10 VCPUs versus 24 VCPUs on software I’ve never used before? It’s just silly. It’s lazy, it’s hostile to the user.

We just say “We’re gonna give you a performant database, and we’re gonna charge you for the things you know you do with it, which is query it and store data on it.” And that’s the experience.

Mike McQuaid: Yeah. And I think the interesting thing from our perspective is that – others may well draw different conclusions, but our perspective would probably be that it was an example of our weakness being exploited, which is what, I guess like other open source projects, most of us would rather be writing code than doing system administration… So as a result, we have a Jenkins instance, and – I mean, shout-out to anyone working on Jenkins here; it’s great software, that we’ve used for a very long time, but compared to what we’re increasingly used to with, say, Travis CI, and Azure pipelines, which is what we use now, and a lot of these cloud tools, where effectively keeping everything up to date and keeping the configuration sane is not something you need to worry about yourself… Whereas any of these open source projects where you’re installing the software yourself, you’re maintaining it on that system. Getting the balance right between applying all the security updates in Jenkins, and then all the plugins, which then change behavior between versions…

[08:01] This was one of these annoying cases where it was an intersection between plugins, where one plugin which had previously filtered out the tokens was updated, and then that responsibility was delegated to another plugin, which had been configured to do it correctly, and all this type of thing… And it’s kind of tricky, because it slips through the cracks, and our longer-term solution that we’re working towards now is basically just get rid of any infrastructure we have to maintain ourselves.

In an ideal world, we would all be on Travis and EC2 and Azure pipelines, and that would be the end of the day… But unfortunately, again, the complexity of our project is that we have to build binary packages on macOS, and there is not a freely available macOS hosting platform for building stuff at the scale that we need, yet. We’re getting optimistic that there will be in the future; we’ve had some really good conversations with Microsoft about Azure pipelines, but right now as of today we still need to maintain our own infrastructure, which in this case the configuration of that infrastructure is the weak point.

So that’s my number one goal on my list of stuff to do this year, is to get us entirely onto other people’s infrastructure for this stuff. But again, I guess it’s one of those ones where I will do it by the end of the year, I’m fairly confident, but I can’t really be bothered. It’s one of those tricky ones in Homebrew where if I don’t do it, chances are pretty low that anyone else is gonna step up to do this work.

Dan Kohn: Oh, definitely. We’ve needed to hire more people, and then we’ve just needed to standardize a lot of processes. CNCF started with just Kubernetes, and then it took six months or something for us to get Prometheus. Then I think Fluentd was number three after like eight months. So during those phases, if you needed something, you would just send an email to me or our Chief Operating Officer, Chris Aniszczyk, and say “Hey, can you help us with this event?” “Oh, I need to set up an account for so and so.” “Oh, I’m having this issue.”

That worked fine at first, but I think almost like any organization or software company, you just have to put processes in place going forward. So we have something we call the Service Desk, and it’s just a ticket tracking system… But any of the maintainers of any of those 26 projects can in principle ask for anything – I mean, conveniently, we’ve had the budget so far that we haven’t needed to turn them down for a lot or for much at all.

[39:58] But the specific requests tend to be – I mean, a lot of them are just like super-minor things, like “Oh, can we have an official Kubernetes slide deck that people can do community presentations without having to use their company’s slide decks?” Or for Prometheus, it was “Hey, we wanna run a community event for about 250 people. Can you help us organize that, handle all the money for us for the sponsors that wanna come in, help us sell it, and such?”, and so we’re very happy to do it.

And then, you know, presenting to our end-user community, engagement there… All of our projects are very eager to be involved in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, so although we do have this competitive track system, we also have slots, internal deep-dive slots for each of the projects… So they definitely appreciate that opportunity to get in front of the audiences.

We do a lot of work with them on social media, on press relations and analyst relations, on giving them some kind of tracking on how things are going…

I mean, one way of thinking about it is that if you’re a big company, like a Red Hat or a Google and you have an open source project that you’re trying to promote, for commercial reasons, your company can provide you with a set of services. But what we’re suggesting is that for a lot of core cloud native projects, it’s much better for it to be hosted by a neutral foundation… But you’re still gonna want those services, so we try and provide a lot of those same things.

I mentioned the certification process, and we also offer training courses with it. And then thankfully, it hasn’t been that involved yet, but also offer a variety of legal services around trademarks, contributor license agreement if they want that… We generally recommend that projects instead go with a DCO (developer certificate of origin), which as you may know, originated with Linux. So we just work with the projects here…

But the sort of bigger picture is that what a foundation needs to provide has certainly changed significantly in the last 20 years. When Apache started up, it was a huge deal to have a source code repository, to have a web page, to have some basic kind of continuous integration infrastructure… And today, basically any open source project can get that for free from GitHub, from Travis, CircleCI and similar kinds of services… And we actually encourage them to do that. We don’t try and move them over to our infrastructure, but we do try and provide a set of services that remain useful.

Alan Duric: Yeah, excellent question and also a very difficult question, so I hope I’ll be able to explain it in simple words. Basically, what is happening with the end-to-end encryption, we have a cloud communication model fundamentally changing. So for instance, some of the core functionality that relies on a cloud, let’s say like a search in a Slack - search is happening in the cloud. For us, search cannot happen in the cloud on the content of the conversations simply because everything is encrypted and we have no clue if a certain message that passed through our cloud is, for instance, a call that I’m making to you, if it is a text message, if it is just acknowledgement of the message that you sent to me and you’re getting back delivery receipt, or if it is a file that was sent, or a screen that is being shared… For all those messages you have no clue really what is happening there. So search cannot be done in the core.

Also, a number of other functions, such as a sync across different devices depend heavily on endpoints. So you have a hybrid logic there. Most of the intelligence is moved towards the endpoints, but there is still some intelligence that is in the cloud. We’ve seen this in the past in communication networks - for instance, you had intelligent network in telecoms where all of the intelligence was in the cloud. Then with the rise of Skype we had the peer-to-peer fully distributed model where all of the intelligence moved back to the endpoints or to the peer of the network. No pendulum is again swinging to a cloud; everything was moved to the cloud, all the intelligence is in the cloud, and now pendulum is swinging again and going more towards the endpoints, and we have this hybrid model. With this in mind, as I mentioned, any feature that you are developing, it needs to be developed in a quite different way than if you do not encrypt the data. So it has some overhead, it has tougher test automation etc, but we are committed to it and we know that this is the right way forward.

Brian Ketelsen: No, it’s in the cloud! My dad was over here a couple days ago and he’s like, “What is the cloud?” and I said, “Somebody else’s computer.” “Oh! Well, that makes more sense.” He totally got that… Yeah, that’s just somebody else’s computer.

Beyang Liu: Yeah, so I’ll kind of start with the why. The problem that it kind of solves was… Like many web services, Sourcegraph uses an uptime monitoring service to make sure that our site is up and to make sure that someone gets paged when things go down. We kind of ran into a couple of pains that were kind of surprising using the standard uptime monitoring services.

The biggest pain for us was just like it was so hard to use the UI of these things. Like, you’d think it’d be the simplest UI in the world, like you’ve got some URLs that you wanna hit and I put them in and you tell me whether they’re green or not. But a lot of the UI’s just take multiple seconds to load a single page. You’re sitting there as an engineer… Like, efficiency is the most important thing, and you’re sitting there waiting for a page to load, and you can’t help but appreciate the irony that the thing that’s monitoring your site to make sure that your latencies are below one second itself is taking like seven seconds to load.

That coupled with the fact that there was no way to programmatically update the endpoints for a lot of services - or no easy way, I should say - that kind of got us thinking like, “Wow, you know, this is uptime monitoring, it’s not rocket science. It’s actually very simple. Ideally, we should be able to run these things as a unit test.” Like, wouldn’t it be great if I could actually run uptime checks in development, just to make sure that… You know, obviously you still need it in production in case of some weird production issue comes up, but a lot of times you break an endpoint just because you pushed a bug that breaks a page, so you could catch it in CI or in development.

So we got to thinking… And we really did not wanna build this ourselves. We were like, “Surely there must be something out there that does this the way we wanted to”, but we looked around and just couldn’t find anything.

Matt Holt is kind of friend of Sourcegraph as well and we talk to him from time to time, and he kind of had his own frustrations of this sort. I’m sure he’s heard a lot from folks who use the Caddy Web Server.

[01:19:51.25] So we got into talking and he was like, “You know I’ve been thinking about building this thing” and we were like, “We’d love to sponsor you. We would definitely use it.” So he went and built this library for us, that’s also a command line tool. What it essentially does is you can run it as a command line tool, which means you can run it basically like on any EC2 or Google Cloud instance.

And what it does is you give it a set of endpoints, programmatically - it’s some config file that you can version in with your code. You run this command, it hits all the endpoint and then it uploads the data that it records to an S3 bucket. Then there’s a separate command that pulls up a dashboard that pulls the data from the S3 bucket and that’s the thing that tells you whether your site is up or down.

And so you can run the uptime command from any EC2 instances or any set of geographically-distributed EC2 instances and pull uptime data from all across the world, push it to an S3 bucket and then checking your uptime is as simple as running a command or display of dashboard. As a side benefit, because it’s so simple, you can also run it in CI, or even development.

Kendall Miller: So yeah, I’m currently working with this company Civo, which is interesting because Civo is a cloud company… I mean, think an AWS or at Google; they’re Kubernetes-first. What makes them different is a couple of things. One, it’s UK-based, which right now happens to be really good for business, for #IDontKnow reasons… But the thing that’s also interesting is they will ship you the whole software stack. So it’d be like if you used AWS for a few weeks and you’re like “Hey guys, this is great. Can we have it?” And then AWS just shipped you AWS. So Civo will do that. You can buy the software stack.

[00:44:20.05] They’ll also ship you a hardware appliance where you can throw it in a rack. So what’s interesting to me about that is the 10 years that I was in China, I basically missed the data center world… Because you know, in 2004, at that startup I mentioned, that built Twitter a little too early, we had some server rooms in the back that we would shut down a machine at a time and install the newest version, and then shut down the next one, and install the newer version… Or we’d put up a website that said “Down for scheduled maintenance.” Remember those?

Kurt Mackey: They have a top what people pay the most for in AWS. If you look at the top 10, those should just be individual, standalone companies that are building the best possible version of that thing. And the best example I can give of why I think this should be is like S3 was innovative in 2008. It made it so I could build new kinds of applications that I couldn’t previously build, which to me is what cloud services should be offering. And then it ceased to do anything. And then ultimately, it’s not doing that anymore. S3 features are not allowing me to build new applications I couldn’t previously build. But then you’ve got Tigris, who - I’m 99% sure I’m supposed to say Tigris, but it could be Tigris. I’m gonna check after this, but I’m gonna keep going with Tigris.

Gerhard Lazu: Yeah. One thing that we talked about previously, and I thought was a really important point, was around what makes a good developer. [unintelligible 01:12:26.29] go further, what makes a good engineer, a good software engineer. And it is not the documentation, even though that plays a very important role. It is not the code that they write, even though that has to be present. It is not how they present and how they talk. But again, that has to be present. How they share ideas, how they show into the world, and do whatever they have to do… Those are well-rounded individuals. And that well-roundedness, I can see how it translates to what is the cloud, what is the on-prem… Whatever the next thing is, you need to be well-rounded in all these things. And you should be using all of them. Because if you don’t use it, you lose it, right? Very simple, very true. It will never change.

So you should be using the cloud, but you should be using the cloud the way the cloud was meant to be used. And Justin, you made a very good point, at Disney, how you were using the cloud; possibly the best example of using the cloud correctly, right? Span out, stand up all these instances, and then tear them down. That’s how it’s supposed to be used, right? It’s capacity on demand, massive capacity. You would not want to buy that. But when you need it, it’s there, and it’s a great commodity. It is a hundred times more expensive, because that’s what this commodity costs you. Where else can you turn up and say “Hey, spin up a hundred beef instances?” That wouldn’t take months, it would take maybe years to source all of those things. And by the way - no, no, I don’t want that AMD CPU. I want that Intel CPU. Oh, ARM? I think I’m going to have some ARM. And by the way, I’m going to have, I don’t know, 10,000 ARM CPUs. Where can you get that? It’s the convenience of that.

[01:14:09.20] Now, if you know what you need, as a business that is successful, as a startup that’s successful - well, for the things that you know that you definitely need, and that’s like your baseline operating budget in terms of infrastructure, have that in a place that makes sense. Have that cheap. Have that - cheap, I say cost-efficient. Do what makes sense. Hybrid cloud.

What about WASM? What about the WASI runtimes? How do they change how we see containers and how we work with containers? Is that coming? Well, I can tell you that React did not work for Dagger Cloud. React, the DOM, to generate all the things that we had to generate, was just breaking down. The tech was not up to scratch. So what did we do? We looked at WASM v3. That’s the v3 cloud. We went through three rewrites to get it to a point where it’s as performant as it should be.

And there’s so many dragons there. Don’t think that this is like the holy place where you pick it up and everything is awesome. Oh, no. The cycle starts again. But that’s it. That’s the beauty of it. Start those cycles, keep going through them, keep learning, keep iterating… Eventually, you will be able to consider yourself well-rounded. And others will look at you and will say “Wow, I wish he responded to my pull requests. I wish he left some comments, and did some reviews, because I like his reviews. I wish he blogged more. Or I wish she went and gave some talks, because she’s an excellent presenter.” So look for well-rounded, not for 10x.

Autumn Nash: Yeah. On-prem is better. But when you’re going to experiment or build a new project, or for certain use cases, the cloud is a really good tool. And I think we went through this whole “Oh my God, put everything in the cloud.” And then people were like “Oh wait, this is expensive.” You know what I mean? So I think this could also be a great way to like experiment and to learn new things about your infrastructure, too.