In our final episode of the year, Forrest Brazeal talks his journey from home schooling to A Cloud Guru and beyond and performs a special medley of his greatest hits. Forrest Brazeal is an enterprise cloud architect, speaker, and community advocate. Currently Head Of Content for Google Cloud and prior a senior manager at A Cloud Guru, he spent years designing applications for the cloud at Infor and Trek10. One of the original AWS Serverless Heroes, Forrest was also named one of Jefferson Frank's Top 7 Global AWS Experts in 2019
In our final episode of the year, Forrest Brazeal talks his journey from home schooling to A Cloud Guru and beyond and performs a special medley of his greatest hits.
Forrest Brazeal is an enterprise cloud architect, speaker, and community advocate. Currently Head Of Content for Google Cloud and prior a senior manager at A Cloud Guru, he spent years designing applications for the cloud at Infor and Trek10. One of the original AWS Serverless Heroes, Forrest was also named one of Jefferson Frank's Top 7 Global AWS Experts in 2019
Timeline/Topic
00:00 - Opening
00:14 - Introduction to Forrest Brazeal - The Cloud Bard
00:31 - The Journey of Forrest Brazeal
03:01 - Forrest's love of Sci-Fi Writing
05:30 - A Cloud Guru
09:17 - Does music help you be a better technologist?
11:24 - The Read Aloud Cloud book Forrest wrote. (Link below)
14:43 - Forrest Brazeal explains and does a medley of his Greatest Hits
15:30 - Durably: The Ballad of S3
18:05 - That Sinking Feeling (The #HugOps Song)
21:41 - The Ransomware Song (Just Blame Math)
24:41 - 168 AWS Services in 2 Minutes
31:34 - What work is Forrest most proud of?
Episode Links
https://acloudguru.com/blog/author/forrest-brazeal
Forrest's Youtube (some songs from the episode) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt5LsaDWTEBY7FThtp37LfQ
Stan Freberg - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/apr/08/stan-freberg-funny-commercial-parodies
168 AWS Services in 2 Minutes - https://youtu.be/BtJAsvJOlhM
Read Aloud Cloud - https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/1119677629/
Cloud Resume Challenge https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/
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- Hello, everyone. Welcome to the "POPCAST." I got the Bard, he's the Bard the cloud, he's a special guest is an AWS serverless hero. He's my man. This is Forrest Brazeal.
- Hey, it's great to be here, Dan. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
- So on the "POPCAST," we always start with the journey. Let's talk about like before we were the serverless hero, the cloud Bard, I wanna know, like, what do we do? We were playing video games and then we turn into computers? Like where do we go?
- You know, I always like to say my childhood was a lot like if you've ever seen the Disney movie "Tangled," at the beginning of that movie where Rapunzel's up in the tower and she's like doing ventriloquism and pottery and darts and baking, that was me, I was homeschooled for 12 years. So I have basically the skill stack of Rapunzel from "Tangled." So when you see me drawing cartoons or singing or all this other crazy creative stuff, that's where that all comes from.
- Again, super creative person. And you know, we'll get to the songs, everybody. I want the person, I want this guy. I want the guy who's right in the heart, right today. Okay? Lemme get closer to the mic. All right. So, okay. So you were homeschooled, right? I mean, you didn't, again, you didn't go and start doing amazing songs and all of that fun stuff. I wanna know the progression. We homeschooled and then you're like, "Okay, I have a talent for music." Tell me about that.
- Yeah, so, you know, I was a guy who kinda had a piano background for a long time. I was a conservatory in high school. I had this amazing Russian piano teacher named, who one of my science fiction stories is dedicated to her. She really changed my life in a lot of ways, changed a lot about the way I think, the way I perform, the way I compose and went on and continued to do music in college. And post-college, I play, you know, classical gigs still today. And yeah, that's kinda where I'm at.
- In terms of, like I said, do you have a favorite composer?
- Yeah, you know, I have a few that, I think, have resonated with me over the years and some of them are just fun ones. I like Tom Lehrer a lot. You'll hear some of that in the piano music that I play, the guy who wrote, "The Elements," and other songs that they're just hardcore and nerdery, but there's a lot of artistry behind that as well. He was a very sharp satirist. He could produce songs at the drop of a hat and actually did that for a long time. He was doing real-time satire on the news of the week, back on TV in the day. Bo Burnham, I like a lot, the work that he's done. One of my favorite musical satirists from back in the day, Stan Freberg actually one of the founders of modern advertising as well. But before he was an advertising man, he was a musician. You'll find his old recordings from back in the 50s. If you have a rabbit hole to spend an hour on YouTube, highly recommend looking up Stan Freberg.
- So we're gonna have that in the episode notes here, so you'll be able to that up, all right? So you said, we talk about Sci-Fi there. Again, it's like we have this, you're such a creative dude, you know, like I know of you initially for you songs, but also like, you know, cloud guru stuff that you've done, you know, you's helped me a lot in terms of like, you know, getting some, my early certs and all of that. So really cool dude. But like, so you're a science fiction writer too. I mean, you know, explain, you know, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America like that piece.
- Yeah, and, you know, I think look, a lot of us that are in tech, we resonate with the "Black Mirrors," of the world and the near future science fiction type of thing. 'Cause it feels so much like what we're living in. In a way it's almost like a way to process what we're seeing and working through because it feels like we're living in the future and we're encountering ethical and moral dilemmas every day, right? That arise from these unusual technologies, the unconscious bias that we see showing up in machine learning. You know, and as a way to write and to work through that, I think just mentally and morally, sometimes it helps to be able to put a fictional construct around it. Sometimes you can speak to people better that way too, you know, think about a book like, I don't know, "1984," right, or "Animal Farm," or something that... Because it's got that fictional veneer near around it, "Fahrenheit 451," it causes people to grapple with the realities of the future in a way, that I think, they wouldn't be as prone to do if it was just handed to them in a flat non-fiction format. The movie "Gattica," is a great example. I think of this. You know, you'll never be able to think about genetic engineering the same way once you've seen that movie. 'Cause it makes a very powerful, fictional case whether or not you agree with every aspect of it. So that's what's really appealing to me about science fiction. And a lot of the writing that I do is it's near future and it's focused on, you know, what would happen if you know, you did have some form of brain augmentation, what would that look like for your family? What would that look like for your schooling? What would that look like if you were, you know, in a, I don't know, like Amish type community, and now you're trying to deal with this technology on top of all the other things you're not supposed to be aware of, you know. 'Cause the rest of the world doesn't slow down just because we have this little bit of futuristic technology in one corner of it. And I like to combine those elements. So I'm a active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which is the professional organization for science fiction writers. You have to have a certain number of published credits to be able to achieve that. And yeah, I continue to write and it's just, it's a way for me to process.
- Again, multi-talented, multi-faceted man. Really, really awesome. So, and we're gonna get into your book, but like, I'm gonna talk about a cloud guru. How did that happen? Like where did the, you know... Again, somebody who's science fiction person, you know, somebody who's, you know, classically trained pianist, how do you get into, you know, working at Cloud Guru? Let's talk about.
- Yeah, and to be clear, I mean, a lot of the sort of creative extracurricular things have always been extracurricular for me. My educational background is in computer science. I have two degrees in computer science. I've been a cloud architect. I've been a software engineer. I've done... Been a database administrator. I've crawled around you know, laying cables, working for an MSP, all kinds of things. If you can name it, I've probably done it in tech and I did-
- Look at all you under achievers out here. Look, he's laying cable. He's writing songs, for God's sakes.
- No, I mean, look, I started my career on a help desk. I think a lot of us have. And that's one of the reasons that I have a lot of empathy for people who are starting their careers and are looking to make that next move into cloud or whatever it may be. And so at some point I got connected with the founders of A Cloud Guru because I was very into serverless technology at the time, as were they, A Cloud Guru likes to call itself the first serverless startup. I don't know exactly how you calculate that, but at any rate, they were very early on in their use of AWS Lambda and API Gateway and trying to plug together applications without using server resources under the hood. So I met them at Serverless Conf where I was speaking and we just really clicked and I actually helped them for a while with various developer marketing things and kind of worked for them as a consultant for a while. So that by the time I came on full-time to ACG, shortly before the pandemic, 'cause that's how we think about life now, right? Pre and post COVID. It was slightly pre-COVID when I came on there full-time, to kind of lead their community motions and just to help tell the story of the cloud to more people, get more people excited about cloud computing. And I think that's really where I found my calling 'cause I loved my time as an engineer, got to build some really cool things, some amazing production systems that are still running today and in significant load bearing capacities, but there's tremendous value and meaning for me in helping other people to cross that chasm from where I started, you know, as a kid who came from a tremendously non-technical background, found my way through a help desk and you know, every other aspect of technology to get into the cloud, helping other people find that journey and find a version of that story that works for them. I love collecting stories of people who have made amazing career transitions in the cloud. One of my favorites is a gentleman, I met a year or two ago, who was a commercial plumber in Atlanta and transitioned from that to being a dev ops engineer. So he went from sewer pipelines to CI/CD pipelines. I love that. Just met a guy the other day here in Charlotte, where I live, who spent a few years as a commercial pest engineer. So he's going around and spraying people's houses for bugs. Now he's getting into cybersecurity, he's gonna be chasing down different kinds of, you know, breaches and bugs. I think that's wonderful. And you know, I think sometimes especially those of us who've only done tech and never done anything but tech, we get this idea that there's something unique and special about us that makes us able to grapple with technical problems. And that's not only not true, it's the opposite of true. I'm never more blown away than by the folks I meet who have brought these amazing skillsets from completely disparate disciplines, brought them into tech and they've used that to become stronger. And they've used that to bring really incredibly unique perspectives to their teams.
- Incredible.
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- And let me ask you this, 'cause I've had other folks that have been on the show that do music, you'll see their guitars in the background and all of this, like, you know, I'm a musician as well, right? And so like I went to school for music and computer science. Do you feel like music helps you be a better technologist, meaning like the discipline aspect of it? The repetition aspect of it? What would you say?
- That's an interesting question. And I'd love to get your thoughts on that too, Dan. I certainly meet a lot of people who are musicians and technologists in some order, right? Math and music and technology always seem to go together. And I think that part of it's because of the, you know, the inherent order, right? And logic of music seems to appeal to the same centers of the brain. I will say as well though, in some ways it does feel like the opposite. There's something very therapeutic for me about after having spent a day staring at a screen to go and play the piano or stack chords together, it just feels like the complete opposite. And I enjoy that a lot. What are your thoughts?
- I love how you flipped it on me on my own channel. I love that. But it's cool. I have this very similar thought to you as well. I mean, again, you know, I see the discipline aspect of it, the repetition aspect of it, but also like you said, the therapeutic aspect, like walking away and being like, "Well, okay, I'm gonna, you know, play something I've been, you know, either like by ear of something I heard today and I'm like, 'Oh, you know, there's nuance to that.'" And so like, in terms of my career, like you talk about something like, you know, my career, I was supposed to be working on a music studio in Manhattan, right. And I went there and then I was like, "All right, you know, this is not for me." And I ended up working at Comedy Central Television Network, right. And being the Mac tech support specialist, 'cause I was always fixing the computers in the studio, right. So it's like, that journey is different. Like you said, it was like, you know, you pick this thing up, I wasn't expecting this. I was expecting to be like, you know, like on a board doing like, you know, mastering and all of that fun stuff, but this is where we are, you know? So...
- Yeah. It's amazing to reflect on the kind of twists and turns in your life and think about where you'd be if something had broken just a little bit differently, but glad to be here.
- No doubts, glad to be here with you today. So this, first off again, you're an amazing writer. You have a bunch of blogs, and we'll link to this, you know, But also there's a book you wrote, "The Read Aloud Cloud Innocence Guide to the Tech Inside." Talk to me about writing that. Like what was the mission for that one?
- You know, it's funny because I think, one thing that I learned in my years as a cloud architect is I try to explain what I did to people and I get these blank stares and I fumble around and eventually I just kinda start stuttering. When I tried to explain it, I just, my brain would go blank. And it's ridiculous because you know, it's not like doctors and lawyers have trouble explaining what they do. And I think their jobs are a lot harder and stranger sometimes than the job of being a cloud architect. But I think what's going on there is we have some sort of a mental framework for why a doctor exists or why a lawyer exists. Culturally, we have some concept of that, but you know, what is a cloud architect for? What value are they bringing to the world? We don't understand that as a culture. So what I wanted to do, and this came to me very clearly, a couple of years ago, is I wanted to put something out into the world that would help me explain to my kids, to my family and hopefully help my peers, explain to their families and friends why the cloud exists, why it's important, what jobs in the cloud are, why they matter and why you should care about it, even if it's not something you wanna do as a career. So the book talks for example, about privacy. There's a whole chapter on, you know, why you need to care about the privacy of your data, whether or not you wanna be a cloud engineer. There's a chapter that talks about security. There's chapters that talk about applications and, you know, data centers and where your data goes when it's traveling over the internet. And so I put the book out with Wiley. It came out last year, last fall, and I've gotten some great feedback from folks who have been able to use it. I think the funniest thing is, when I hear from someone who says, "You know, I took this to my parent or spouse or whoever, who didn't understand the cloud and they read it and they still didn't understand the cloud, but at least now they're asking me the right questions." And like, that's all I can ask for. You know, maybe if it opens up a conversation and you have some shared basis of understanding, then I think the book has been a success.
- We'll have a link in the notes of the episode. So you all can check it out again. Very good book. Excellent book.
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- What if you could build like Big Tech? Use the same powerful infrastructure that they spent engineering centuries building. It's actually possible now, with cockroach DB. The founders have spent the last eight years creating a cloud native distributed SQL database that provides the consistency, ultra resilience, data locality, and a massive scale for modern cloud applications. Tech that was once only available to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Check them out and get started for free @cockroachlabs.com/popcast. That's C-O-C-K-R-O-A-C-H-L-A-B-S.C-O-M/P-O-P-C-A-S-T. Check them out. So everyone, this man writes incredible songs. All right, look, I'm gonna throw it out there. When I first heard a couple of these songs, I was like, look, "He gets it." He gets it. He's able to like take all these insanely difficult topics and distill 'em to fun, just, you know, very awesome melodies and all that. So we're gonna talk songs. We're gonna talk, what were your thought process and maybe, you know, do a little medley, just nothing too crazy. I don't wanna put you on the spot. So...
- Noodle a little bit. I spent all this time getting my keyboard plugged in so that it would come through. So hopefully it still works when we get to it.
- A "POPCAST," first here, we have music live here. Well, prerecorded, but you get the gist of it. So first song, "Durably, The Ballot of S3." Can you talk about that one?
- You know, this one's funny because, we had done a poll at A Cloud Guru, like a March madness style bracket to figure out what was the greatest cloud service of all time. And a lot of us thought it was going to be Lambda, just because of the serverless connection that we already talked about, but S3 ended up winning it in a walk. And I think that was absolutely the right decision as I was studying and learning more about the history of S3 and the technology behind it and watching old re:Invent talks. My mind was just continually blown by the scale of this service. And of course by the durability of this service and what it's grown to be as well as it's kind of Seminole foundational role in making the cloud a viable option for so many people. You think about back in 2006, 2007, you know, if I'm running a data center and I'm thinking about, "Am I really gonna trust the cloud with my data?" The first use case was probably backups, you know, and S3 was right there at that time. And it provided people with a way to say, "Hey, you know, this makes a lot more sense than putting tape drives in a station wagon and sending them down the road to the off site. You know, why don't I start connecting some of this to the cloud?" And S3 in a way was kind of like the gateway drug to everything that came after it, the EC2 and VPC and RDS. And of course you see where the world has gone from there. So S3 is the OG cloud service and as well as the truly unique and kind of insane engineering talent behind it, it just, I don't know, made me feel like singing. What can I say? And so you can check out "Durably the Ballot of S3," I can play a few bars of it for you, give you an idea of what it goes like. So, it's a love song. It's a ballad, you know, and it's got this 80's feel to it. ♪ 'Cause baby, I'm S3 ♪ ♪ And I got strong consistency day after night ♪ ♪ Read after write and also anytime you're listing me ♪ ♪ Well, I got exabytes of love for you. ♪ ♪ And I'll keep 'em warm the whole night through ♪ ♪ 'Cause that's what I was made to do ♪ ♪ Yeah, you can always count on me ♪ ♪ Durably ♪ Anyway, that idea.
- Alright, "Durably." Was it take a little takeoff of "Journey"?
- You know, I wanted to give you that vibe, but as a general rule, I try not to do song parodies, nothing against people that do them, but I like to try to bring my own music in.
- That was good. It's awesome, man. So next one up, we have that sinking feeling, the "Hug Ups," song. This is a awesome one yet again. I mean, just, a hit dude. A hit.
- Yeah, and it's hard to give you a sense of this one, if you haven't seen it, because it has a, you know, split screen and multiple versions of Forrest. So, if you feel like one is enough for you already, probably don't wanna go chase the song down, but I just, I wanted to put something out there that you could share with, you know, the intern, with the junior engineer, who's just had that first career defining screw up, or it feels like a career defining screw up in that moment, you know, because you've just, you've knocked down production. You've sent out that email, like that HPO intern did earlier this summer, you've sent the integration-
- Let's talk about that though. Was that the inspiration for that? I mean like, like honestly, like, or it was a culmination of it because you know what happens, we're on Twitter, right? And then you get that, "Hey, 'Hug Ups,'" to, like something happened with Zoom or something happen with Slack, right? That HPO one just really hit everybody hard because we've all been there. We've all done something nuts.
- Of course we have. Right. And then you're right. It just keeps coming up over and over and over again. Every week, every couple of weeks, even this week, GitHub had a major outage. Right. I mean, now that I'm kind of watching for it, I keep seeing them over and over again. And so, you know, you can sound like a broken record, but there's always someone who in that moment, you know, feels the sinking feeling and just needs a little bit of encouragement that it's going to be okay. And even more than that, I think there's a need to model psychological safety and empathetic behavior for the teams of those people right? And for the managers of those people, because I've been in environments that were not especially safe in that regard, and that had this feeling of, you know, everyone was not on your side if that were to happen. So I think if we can put a little bit more, a little better vibes into the world around that and just create an expectation and understanding that we are going to have outages what's important is that we learn from them, obviously that we put in processes so that they don't happen that way again. But that it's, unless somebody has got gross negligence or malice going on, it really likely is a process issue when something goes wrong and you know, we don't need to make it about the person. It's not that they're a bad engineer. It's not that they failed in some way. They helped us uncover a way to get better. And that's what this song is trying to celebrate.
- Incredible, man, you got a couple of bars for me here? And for our listeners?
- I'll see what I got for you. Again, checked this one out because there's more to it than just one person singing, so it'd be this idea like say. ♪ My day was going great ♪ ♪ Just pushed a code update ♪ ♪ But then the pager started humming whoa ♪ ♪ Oops did I just delete ♪ ♪ Half the production fleet ♪ ♪ That sinking feeling's coming ♪ ♪ From deep within my plumbing ♪ ♪ Now my life is flashin' ♪ ♪ Hope my boss will show compassion ♪ ♪ And I really, really need someone to say ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay ♪ ♪ You didn't just set fire to your resume ♪ ♪ This happens to the best ♪ ♪ Try not to get too stressed ♪ ♪ It'll be an awesome story someday ♪
- Incredible man. Just You captured everybody like on... Like that sympathetic feeling, you captured in that song. So freaking well, dude. Props
- Dude, look, I've been there, right? I mean, I well remember being a junior engineer and running a script that I thought was running on the test AWS account and instead ran on the production account and took 600 databases offline. I will never forget that day, nor anyone else who had to help me clean up that mess, right? So there's an understanding that your actions do affect more than just you and I don't wanna minimize that, but you know, I learned and grew from that and learned to check my config settings for sure.
- No doubt. Alright. And the recently award winning Pwnie award winning, at Black Cat, "The Ransomware Song," again, nailed it.
- Who knew you could win a best song award in tech. And if you haven't been to Black Cat if you checked out the Pwnie Awards. It's a very idiosyncratic thing. Pwnie is spelled, you know, P-W-N. But the actual award itself is literally a, my little pony, and they spray paint them some kind of color. I would show you the one, but it hasn't arrived here. They had to mail it to me because the gentleman who was there and accepted it for me, couldn't take it back on the plane. 'Cause it has like hypodermic needle sticking out of it. It's a creation. It's a kind of a spiky and disturbing work of art, as you would expect from something that originated at Black Cat. Probably have to make sure it's not bugged in some way when it gets here into the house. But anyway, yeah, so it's a fun thing. But the "Ransomware," song was, you know, I feel like earlier this summer, we were hearing so much about ransomware and I didn't have a good handle on what it was. I'm not an InfoSec guy by my nature. And I think some of the preconceptions I had about it and that a lot of people even in tech had about it, were wrong, for example, I had this perception that, "Hey, it's because of the rise of cryptocurrency, that's making it so much easier for ransomware to happen." And there is an element of that, but after talking to some people who did understand what was going on, I got a better grasp of the fact that, really, it's more about just the maturation of the organized crime aspects of ransomware, right? And the ability for, you know, a whole layers of the stack to be created and rented out to the highest bidder. It's almost like platforms being created just like the cloud for ransomware and cryptocurrency is just a small piece of that stack. And so after getting a better feel for that, I wanted to write about it. And it goes a little something like this. ♪ One day I asked my teacher ♪ ♪ What use is math to me ♪ ♪ She answered when you're older ♪ ♪ Someday my boy, you'll see ♪ ♪ There's a world of computer systems out there ♪ ♪ Full of valuable data ♪ ♪ And not secured with care ♪ ♪ And you can make a fortune in ransomware ♪ ♪ With a little bit of math ♪ ♪ It's called encryption just a little bit of math ♪ ♪ Caused the conniption, lock the data ♪ ♪ Hide the key they'll pay up eventually ♪ ♪ It's the power of math ♪ Anyway, it goes on like that. So just blame math, right?
- You deserve that Pwnie with the hypodermic needles by far. Amongst many, many other blessings in this world man.
- Yeah, and to be clear, like there are many ponies given out in there for things like "Lamest Vendor Response to a Bug," and things like that. So very tongue in cheek and not everyone who receives one is happy about it, but I was very happy to win that.
- Awesome. There's a next song. It's the Emily song. I wanna know who Emily is.
- Yeah. Emily's my wife. So not every song on my YouTube channel is specifically technically related, but that was a song I had written for her as an anniversary present several years ago. And you know, it's just, I don't know. I don't know how it made it down there, but yeah, it definitely reflects how I feel.
- Awesome. The "We're Bringing Down the House." I mean, this is the one I think, you're known for so many awesome songs, but this is the one that put you, I think, on the map. So much more than obviously you're on that map right now. So "168 AWS Services In Two Minutes."
- Yeah-
- This comes out in 2020 where I think it was fairly like early in the panty, right? And like, we're all like, "Okay, he nailed it." He nailed this. How in God... I wanna know where this came from. I wanna know the inspiration for this.
- You know, honestly, I can't remember now why I decided to do it, but I knew I wanted to do something that was in the vein of "Yakko's World," from "Animaniacs," or some of the other great lists songs like Tom Lehrer's, "The Elements." And I came up with the idea of trying to fit as many AWS services that I could into one song. I didn't quite fit 'em all in. And actually the speed of AWS releases is such that the song was getting out of date while I was writing it. I had to incorporate more services. There's at least two services in that song that didn't exist when I started working on the song and in the span of weeks that I was trying to learn it and memorize to be able to play, had to add more. And of course now it's hopelessly out of date because there's been probably a couple of dozen more top level named services released since then, but it doesn't claim to be all AWS services in two minutes, it's just 168. And given that AWS never deprecates anything or never actually turns anything off, this song hopefully will remain valid for some time to come. And, you know, I put it out. I had some wonderful help from the video editors at A Cloud Guru to put this together. We actually animated all 168 service icons. And they flash by as the song goes by, which I think is the really fun part of watching it because it kinda confirms that like, I didn't make this up. Right? These are all real services.
- That was the beauty of it. That was like, for the rest of us, DevOps folk, community folks that saw that, it was like, that takes it to the next level. It's like, this guy is like, you know, he's writing the songs and then he's animated the one, It's so like, if you think about somebody, a lay user, that's like, I don't what's out there right now. Like you said, there's a hundreds of services they don't know. And you put 'em on the screen and you kind of lay them out. I just, I thought it was brilliant in this execution, man. Bravo on that one, I'd give you a Pwnie, I'd give you a poppy.
- Yeah. I don't know. Right. The goal would be to try to do that onstage at re:Invent someday, but maybe one of these years. Anyhow. Yeah. I don't know if we can just do a snippet of this one, man. I will tell you this, due to the pandemic, I don't think anyone's ever actually sat down and heard this live, except maybe like my family sitting in the house with me. I have been told by my wife, that listening to this performed live in its entirety is a uniquely innervating experience. It's quite overwhelming and there's a lot to it. And as time has gone by, I think it's actually getting faster. I'm slowly getting the ability to do it faster. So my question to you is, do you wanna hear the whole thing? Should we try to do this in two minutes?
- Let's do it. Let's do it.
- Let's give it a try. Okay. Apologies in advance, this is very much live. So if I fall off the wagon, we're gonna just do a quick ninja edit. And we're gonna try this again. Okay? All right. Here we go. Okay. ♪ There's MQ, EC2, ♪ ♪ And RedShift and GameLift and Glue ♪ ♪ There's Lumberyard, Lightsail ♪ ♪ And Workdocs and Workmail and Worklink and PrivateLike too ♪ ♪ Detective, Inspector and Trusted Advisor, Cognito ♪ ♪ Corretto, S3, Data Pipeline and DataSync ♪ ♪ AppMesh and AppSync or you can use Simple DB, but don't ♪ ♪ Appstream, Timestream, Augmented AI ♪ ♪ Auto Scaling, Lambda, Amplify ♪ ♪ Ooh, Direct Connect or just Connect ♪ ♪ Config, RSD ♪ ♪ These are the major services of AWS ♪ ♪ CLI, CDK ♪ ♪ Textract, Lex, Fsx and Xray ♪ ♪ SNS, SES, SQS, STS, EFS ♪ ♪ Do your best, it's okay ♪ ♪ Athena and Polly and Kendra and Macie ♪ ♪ Alexa for Business, Cloud 9, Code Artifact ♪ ♪ CodeBuild and CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, CodePipeline ♪ ♪ CodeGuru, CodeStar and Chatbot and Chime ♪ ♪ Translate, Transcribe, Transfer Family ♪ ♪ All the many things of IoT ♪ ♪ Ooh, there's CloudFormation, Lake Formation, Free RTOS ♪ ♪ These are the major services of AWS ♪ ♪ Honeycode, Elemental, VMWare on AWS ♪ ♪ This key change is brought to you by KMS ♪ ♪ Comprehend, Inferentia ♪ ♪ Deep Learning, DeepRacer, DeepLens ♪ ♪ DeepComposer, Aurora ♪ ♪ And then CostExplorer to track your expanding expense ♪ ♪ Service Catalog, Artifact, Quicksight, Device Farm ♪ ♪ And Workspaces, Glacier is cold ♪ ♪ Robomaker, Sumerian, Kafka ♪ ♪ Kinesis, Control Tower, Pinpoint ♪ ♪ And Fargate I'm told ♪ ♪ Rekognition, Fraud Detector's cool ♪ ♪ Wavelength, Blockchain, Well-Architected Tool ♪ ♪ Although half of 'em start with Amazon ♪ ♪ For reasons we can't guess ♪ ♪ These ae the major services of AWS ♪ ♪ Now it's time to deploy Global Accelerator ♪ ♪ VPC, ELB, and the database Route53 ♪ ♪ There's Compute Optimizer and Personalize ♪ ♪ Or Eventbridge and QLDB ♪ ♪ There's CloudSearch and CloudWatch ♪ ♪ CloudMap and CloudFront and CloudTrail and CloudHSM ♪ ♪ And there's Sagemaker, Step Functions, WAF, ACM ♪ ♪ ECR, EMR, SAR, IAM ♪ ♪ And there's Outposts and OpsWorks ♪ ♪ And Organizations and Snow, SSO ♪ ♪ And AppFlow and Ground Station and DynamoDB and DocumentDB ♪ ♪ And Neptune and Keyspaces, Shield and GuardDuty ♪ ♪ And the Elastics and Managers ♪ ♪ And the Dashbords and the Hubs, I'm cheating now ♪ ♪ We gotta wrap this up ♪ ♪ Greengrass, Forecast, Tools and SDKs ♪ ♪ Storage, Transit and API Gateways ♪ ♪ Oh, there's Braket and Budgets and Backup and Batch ♪ ♪ ECS, EKS, EBS, ♪ ♪ These are the major services for all intents and purposes ♪ ♪ 'Til re:Invent writes a new verse, that is ♪ ♪ Of AWS ♪ So...
- Standing ov dude, standing ov. Incredible, man. Incredible!
- When you finish that, you got like slobber rolling down your face and everything. It's just... Just nasty.
- My goodness. Again, thank you so much for doing that. That was incredible. It shows again, you are one of the most talented people out there, and I appreciate you doing that. CIVO was an alternative to the big hyperscale cloud providers. They've launched the world's first Kubernetes service powered exclusively by K3S. With sub 92nd cluster launch times, a simplified Kubernetes experience and predictable billing, CIVO's on a mission to create a better developer experience. Get $250 free credit to get started. Sign up today at civocloud.com/popcast. That's C-I-V-O.C-O-M/P-O-P-C-A-S-T. Go check them out. Teleport allows engineers and security professionals to unify access for SSH servers. Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. You can download teleport right now @goteleport.com. That's G-O-T-E-L-E-P-O-R-T.com. Let me ask you the last question.
- All right.
- What work are you most proud of, do you wanna do a slobber break first or...
- Yeah. just yeah. Have to rehydrate, after that. Dries out your tongue. So yeah, you know, I'm proud of a lot of the things that I've been able to work on, but I think the thing that really stands out from the last year or two is an initiative that I've been working on called "The Cloud Resume Challenge." And "The Cloud Resume Challenge," is something I put together right at the start of the pandemic. And it gets back to what I was saying about there's so many folks who have the opportunity or have the ability to be fantastic in a technical role in a cloud career. And they're really eager to do that, but they're just lacking that mentor in their life. They're lacking that person to help curate a set of steps for them that will take them from non-technical to ready to get a job in the cloud. And, you know, they can get certified, but what closes that gap? What closes the gap from cert to job for them? And so, "The Cloud Resume Challenge" was an initiative that I designed, it's like a spec based project. And what you do is you put your resume in the cloud, you've deploy it on S3, but there's a few other tweaks in the challenge, you've got to use some basic dev ops skills. Some CI/CD, some source control. You've gotta plug in a little API backend. And so before you know it, you've learned some code, you've learned some security, you've learned some networking, you've learned some basic cloud services and it's not super easy to do, but if you can do it, you've got all that out there, it's online. You can take it into a job interview. I put that together in April of 2020, and I thought, "Well, if I can get one or two people to give this a try, and maybe it works for someone, that would be a win." We're now what? 18 months? Almost 18 months into this? We've seen literally thousands of people work on this challenge. We've seen hundreds of them that have actually completed, despite having zero previous technical experience. Many of them have gotten hired into their first cloud role. Some from backgrounds as diverse as that commercial plumber that I mentioned to you, he's a huge success story out of this challenge. You know, people in banking, people in retail, people in HR, it just doesn't matter, what matters is what's inside the person. The magic about "The Cloud Resume Challenge," and ready to succeed, at right bit of mentorship and guidance at the right time. And I'm very proud that "The Cloud Resume Challenge," has been that at that point, for those people.
- That is fantastic, such a altruistic thing. Again, seems like during the course of your career, that's what you've done, you know, post getting into like cloud guru and all that. So dude, this is exactly what you did, it was a phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal interview, man. Thank you so much for being on the "POPCAST."
- Dude, this was fantastic. I enjoyed it a lot. And yeah, I'm kind of cringing in how this turns out, but maybe I just won't watch it.