Information security is a difficult job. On today’s Day Two Cloud we talk about how to build a successful security practice within your organization. Our guest is Swathi Joshi, VP, SaaS Cloud Security at Oracle. She breaks down security teams into three core groups: proactive security (making products secure from the get-go ), defensive security (detecting and responding to vulnerabilities and threats), and assurance (risk reduction, enabling secure access, meeting compliance...

The goal of private AI is to bring AI models and compute to where your data is stored to ensure privacy and control. On today’s Day Two Cloud, sponsored by VMware, we dig more deeply into private AI, major use cases, and the kinds of data that get fed into a private AI system. We also discuss the elements required to build out a private AI platform, how to connect to your data stores, and  VMware’s role in delivering infrastructure to enable private AI. We also discuss how to scale an AI...

Today’s Day Two Cloud covers highlights from a recent Edge Field Day event. Ned Bellavance was a delegate at the event and will share perceptions and insights based on presentations from the event. Topics include a working definition of edge, the constraints of hosting infrastructure in edge locations (power, space, network connectivity and others), and operational models for running software and services in these environments. Presenters include NodeWeaver, Solidigm, HPE, and StorMagic, and...

Welcome to Day Two Cloud. While it might be a cliche to say that automation is a journey, it’s also true. And if you want your journey to be successful, you have to prepare. On today’s show we talk about groundwork you can lay to implement infrastructure automation or Infrastructure as Code (IaC). And this isn’t just about tools and training (though we do also discuss these). There are organizational, team, and personal elements required to help people to incorporate automation into their...

Welcome to Day Two Cloud! Today we talk with sponsor Mirantis about Lens AppIQ. If you’ve started using Kuberentes and you’ve got multiple clusters supporting many applications, Lens AppIQ help you get visibility into what’s going on. Lens AppIQ is a SaaS service that provides app-centric visibility, policy management, and governance. It’s targeted at developers and DevOps teams. Our guest and guide for today’s show is Mirantis’s Daniel Echegaray, Team Lead, Lens AppIQ. We discuss: * The...

Day Two Cloud continues the Cloud Essentials series with cloud storage. We focus specifically on AWS’s offering, which include object, file, and block storage options. We also discuss special file systems, file caching, instance stores, and more. We cover use cases for the major storage options and their costs. We also touch briefly on storage services including data migration, hybrid cloud storage, and disaster recovery and backup. Before diving into the storage conversation, we address a...

Today on Day Two Cloud we go deep on new areas of cloud security that you may not be familiar with. There are forces out there that are driving the rise of new security tools and processes. Security issues we cover include: * CSPM – Cloud Security Posture Management * CWPP – Cloud Workflow Protection Platform * CIEM – Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management * CNAPP – Cloud Native Application Protection Platform Our guest is Jo Peterson, VP Cloud and Security, at...

Network automation is a mess. Networks are full of dependencies, the risk of unintended consequences is high, processes are immature or non-existent, there’s a learning curve on tools, and lots of networking teams struggle to get beyond a handful of tried-and-true scripts. While cloud automation isn’t a technological utopia, it’s in a much better state than its counterpart. Can network automation catch up? On today’s Day Two Cloud we discuss the state of  network automation and whether and...

Today’s Day Two Cloud kicks off an occasional series on cloud essentials. For the first episode we discuss the Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC. A VPC is an fundamental construct of a public cloud. It’s essentially your slice of the shared cloud infrastructure, and you can launch and run other elements within a VPC to support your workload. In this episode, Ned Bellavance walks through key components of the VPC including regions and availability zones, networking and IP addressing, paid...

Today on Day Two Cloud we dive into the implications of licensing changes that HashiCorp has made to its popular Terraform software. In short, the company has switched from an open source to a business source license. HashiCorp says it felt compelled to make the change to ensure that some other business entity doesn’t take the open-source software and turn it into a competing product (looking at you, AWS). Will the licensing change have a significant impact? For 99% of users probably not, but...

Today on Day Two Cloud we serve up a bowl of acronym soup: SSE, SASE, and SD-WAN. SSE (Secure Service Edge) and SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) are Gartner terms for cloud-delivered security services including firewalls, IDS/IPS, secure Web gateways, cloud access security brokers, and others. The general difference between the two is that SASE tends to incorporate SD-WAN, which provides the network access to the cloud services. With SSE, you have to bring your own connections. On today’s...

Red teams attack a customer’s security systems. The idea of a red team, whether as consultants or in-house, is to approach the target like an attacker would. A red team includes technical and human-based exploit and attempts to test defenses, probe for weaknesses, and identify vulnerable systems and processes. While red teaming is similar to a penetration test, a penetration test tends to limit its scope to a single technology or application and report on all vulnerabilities uncovered. A red...

Today’s Day Two Cloud peers inside the box of quantum computing. We explore how it works, what qbits are and why they matter, the current state of quantum computing hardware, what problems could be solved with quantum computing, and how you can get involved with it. More specifically, one way to get involved is Qiskit, an open-source project that provides a Python-based SDK for working with quantum computers. Our guest is Abby Mitchell, Quantum Developer Advocate at IBM. And thank goodness...

Welcome to Day Two Cloud. The Security Service Edge or SSE is a combination of security services delivered in one package. These services typically include zero trust network access, a secure web gateway, and a cloud access security broker. If you noticed a theme there, all three have a big idea of filtering traffic between a client and an app, looking for bad things happening, and making sure they don’t. Our sponsor today is Cisco Systems. At Cisco Live US in June 2023, Cisco announced an...

The role of Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) requires strong software skills. You also have to be versed in observability, incident response, capacity planning, change management, performance, even security. But wait, there’s more! Our guest on today’s Day Two Cloud also argues that you need strong communication skills, emotional intelligence, personal resilience, and the ability to work with a team. Our guest is Amin Astaneh, a consultant at Certo Modo and former SRE. We talk about the SRE...

The goal of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is to make common tasks repeatable. Microsoft Azure has IaC offerings including Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and Bicep (an abstraction of ARM) for deploying Azure infrastructure. But ARM and Bicep aren’t the only players, For example, HashiCorp’s Terraform is widely adopted. On today’s Day Two Cloud, we talk with Microsoft about how it’s embracing Terraform to make it Azure-friendly, including the Terraform Export Tool, the AzAPI Provider, and a...

Today we talk about Large Language Models (LLMs) and developing products and applications that use LLMs. An LLM is a training model for generative AI systems that can write text in response to questions and prompts. Our guest is Phillip Carter, Principal PM at Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb makes an observability tool for site reliability engineers, and Carter worked on a project called Query Assistant that helps Honeycomb customers get insights from the product via natural language queries. We...

Maybe you’re a technical person who’s ended up in the role of manager—you don’t necessarily have any background or training in management, but now that you’re in the job you want to get better. Or maybe managing a team or a company is a career goal, and you want to be prepared. On today’s Day Two Cloud we talk with a management coach to understand what it means to be a manager, primary responsibilities of the role (results and retention), how to know if you’re meeting those responsibilities,...

Welcome to this episode of Day Two Cloud! Today, we’ll be diving into the world of platform engineering and internal developer portals. Our special guest, Suzanne Daniels, Developer Relations Lead at Port, will be sharing her insights on how platform engineering can take your DevOps journey to the next level. With platform engineering, you can treat technology as a product and developers as customers, resulting in a more efficient and effective workflow. Suzanne will also be discussing the...

In today’s Day Two Cloud episode, Ned Bellavance, Ethan Banks, and guest Michael Levan identify themes they noticed in presentations made by enterprise cloud vendors at Cloud Field Day 17, an event hosted by TechFieldDay.com. These themes included platform engineering and data protection and recovery. Vendors mentioned along the way were HYCU (pronounced “haiku”), Morpheus Data, RackN, Zerto and JetStream Software. Yet another theme was that old technology never dies. In the very cloudy...

On today’s Day Two Cloud we dive into a standard for Decentralized Identity, or DID. According to the W3C, which maintains the standard, DIDs “are a new type of globally unique identifier. They are designed to enable individuals and organizations to generate their own identifiers using systems they trust. These new identifiers enable entities to prove control over them by authenticating using cryptographic proofs such as digital signatures.” A DID can be a person, an object, an organization,...

Today’s show gets behind the curtain of a cloud service called Podsqueeze. Podsqueeze is an application that ingests audio and video files and then produces text-based output including a show description, an episode transcript, suggested headlines, segment timestamps, suggested social media posts, and more. The Packet Pushers are experimenting with Podsqueeze as part of our own production. Being curious nerds, we thought this was a good opportunity to see how the service really works. Our...

Today’s Day Two Cloud explores post-quantum cryptography and how to make your cryptographic secrets safe from quantum computers. We’re looking at a time horizon of at least five or ten years, so this isn’t an immediate threat, but it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about it now. We dive into how quantum computing and quantum encryption work, their impact on cryptographic secrets, what it means for technologies such as IPSec VPNs, and more. Melchior Aelmans is our guest. Melchior works on the...

When you’re deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it’s helpful to step back and get a broader view of what’s happening in the industry. On today’s Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey by Flexera to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. The survey has 750 respondents. Note that this is episode is not...

One appeal of public cloud is that some parts of the IT stack become someone else’s problem. Maybe you got into cloud with the hope that networking could be one of those parts. But what if, now that you’re in the public cloud, you’ve realized that maybe networking should be your problem? On today’s Day Two Cloud we explore cloud networking certifications. Who do these certs make sense for? Which clouds should you focus on? What do certifications typically cover? Where do third-party devices...