The AWS Hero we Need: reInvent Recap
Transcript
[Music] all right the scratchy voice that you're about to hear is not uh some smooth jazz listening it is chris williams oh yeah and chris i'll introduce you as a aws hero because you're not the hero i deserve but you're the hero that i need for this podcast how's it going my friend i'm doing great keith thanks for having me on the show so uh i don't think i've ever had you on a podcast right correct this is this is our well so we have spoken
innumerable times on various podcasts you've been on v brown bag we've both been on cloud field day um i just talked to you at reinvent for for the v brown bag man on the street uh style interviews and and the reason why my voice is so scratchy right now is because of re invent uh we did 25 different interviews for the show for my show and and then subsequently i did a couple of interviews for aws uh live the live twitch stream so i feel perfectly
fine i sound terrible oh man but reinvent out the i was i was i've been watching the cube coverage of re event and 27 000 people uh was the numbers that the cube gave i know aws in theory capped it off at 20 000 people correct right but uh the unofficial numbers like 25 27 000 people plus people like me that flew in for a day and left there were plenty of i you know i looked at my twitter feed matter of fact that's what gap
media decided to go the night before uh the keynote i'm like you know what what the heck i'll fly to vegas for a day uh i got a chance to sit with you in the mongodb sponsored uh lounge which they bought out like the sugar cane if you're familiar with the venetian uh in the sands espo as you're working walking through the espro hall there's like restaurant roll and not just mongodb but a couple of brands bought out like the entire restaurant for the whole day
in the sugarcane is of one of that just because and the aws heroes hung out there i didn't have a conference pass and chris uh graciously invited me as his plus one to come in and then there was this whole bit about not there not being a plus one but either either way we got it made it work we made it working we had some great conversations so you know what we're we're going to play a little game this is the cto advisor for those who
don't know chris williams is a aws hero that means that he participates actively in the aws community helping people uh solve their challenges in aws he does public cloud as part of his full-day full-time day job and he's extremely technical when i have a technical question chris is one of the people that i go to uh we're going to chris is going to give me a series of like technical announcements that he found interesting from aws after each announcement i'll respond and say you know what
here's kind of like the business angle and why this is important from either a i.t governance perspective capability or even endpoint how does this help you sell more services so chris yes less i'm ready let's continue let's condense seven days of goodness into 15 minutes what did you find interesting technically at aws re event okay so technically from the so every aws re invent that happens there are innumerable announcements uh they they they save up the good stuff uh going into reinvent and then they just
unleash a deluge of of information onto the masses um you know there's there's a bunch of people that have spoken uh about the the different announcements that have happened uh corey quinn is salivating over the uh the open cfs stuff that's that's been coming out uh ad nauseam um let's see who else has been talking about things honestly my favorite thing the the thing that got me the most excited was the architectural patterns and the sustainability initiatives that amazon is is now so in 2020 they
talked about their sustainable how they wanted to be more sustainable and they've talked about being carbon zero and the the things towards that the things that they're moving towards that end but what they never really got into was they didn't get into how we are going to enable our customers to help start not burning energy and uh werner on the last day of the the thursday morning keynote he made a couple of announcements that really i think are going to be very effective um the first
thing that he announced was the sustainability pillar so there's the aws well architected framework is based upon um five different was based upon five different pillars uh and i'd have to google them to name them all but it's cost optimization operational excellence availability that all of the different things that you want to think about when you're designing within aws the announcement on thursday which i thought was really big was that they are adding a new pillar called sustainability so this this is a sixth column of
the framework that you want to think about when you are designing within aws so that's that's kind of big news to me because it's putting it at the forefront it's just as important as operational excellence it's just as important as high availability they are giving it a a front row seat to the game of architecture of of process so they're making it they're making people think about it more and they're asking good architectural questions within the pillar for sustainability now so that's really interesting because when
i think about consuming public cloud the let's take a step back even in my data center colo uh one of the when when i pull up to it i actually go to my data center cola because here in chicago they have office space and it's a good place to have like meetings when i meet with somebody a couple of times a year there's a big sign that talks about uh how they aim to be or they are carbon neutral for an entire data center across uh
the entire power that they generate and consume so as a architect i really don't consider sustainability when i say oh i'm gonna put some old dell 730 xds into the data center because you know the overall data center itself is sustainable probably not the best way to approach being sustainable myself but by but i'm sure i'm not alone when i think about when aws makes the commitment to being sustainable i then outsource that so it sounds like there's kind of like security there's a shared responsibility
model on this exactly so and and honestly i was the exact same way um if i if i'm paying a monthly fee to a colo they're giving me juice i honestly don't care if i have you know brand new low carbon footprint uh you know pizza boxes or or or giant old clunkers that that are spewing gas um by by putting by putting sustainability the forefront and and also giving us a an actionable tool so another announcement that they made was the carbon footprint tool you
can now take a look at your monthly bill from a dollar perspective and from a how much carbon did you burn perspective so i i think i think this is ingenious of them because they are always pushing people to lower their bill i mean they don't want you to but you know that they're lowering prices they're making sure that you know we have the opportunity to lower our bill and now they are commensurately giving us the opportunity to lower our carbon footprint which goes hand in
glove with lowering your bill so if you are burning less energy if you are using less cycles you are spending less money and you know doing your part doing more of your part to save the planet so yeah so i think i'm sorry no i was about to say you know from the if we're playing the game i would like to say that if your organization has a sustainability goal and you really didn't care much for price let's say you did a lift and shift to
cloud one of the challenges of lift and shift is that i end up i almost always end up having more cpu more storage more memory than i need you are burning more power than you need but you know what the price is what i expected so i'm not going to spend the energy uh resizing my ec2 instances for example this actually gives you the simple tools that if you have a sustainability goal in your kpis for the year you literally just by resizing some ec2 instances
and showing the uh the this the carbon footprint savings you can easily package up this without doing much work on your site other than going through the effort of one saving money on your aws bill and then two uh saving carbon footprint yeah and and i just i pulled up the five pillars that the it used to be five now at six it was operational excellence security reliability performance efficiency and cost optimization those were the those are the the legacy five uh pillars of of the
well architected framework there's they are saying basically that sustainability is now just as important as security reliability performance efficiency cost optimization and operational excellence i think i think it's a big deal i i'm very excited about how how i can use that with my customers because i can now say okay here's your here's your fin ops diagram of your burn let's layer that over what you've stated your sustainability goals are what your slas are for that and and we can a save you money and b
meet your sustainability slas as well so so i'm i'm excited about that all right so that's one point uh sustainability i'm only 50 percent through the vulner worgles uh keynote that's the technical keynote day two day two i was on the flight back to chicago so i'm watching it on a treadmill and if you've ever seen werner uh present you might question who's sweating more me or him the guy put in some work on the keynote stage and you know he's you can see the passion
larry pouring from his pores all right sustainability one most important thing for you that you've gotten out so far at least the one you've you've mentioned first what's next so um a lot a lot of it so one of the questions that i asked when i was going through the days what so for v brown bag and and you and you were a part of this and i thank you for that i asked everybody what were you excited about here at re invent and what was
what was the thing that you wanted to leave re invent with and by by an overwhelming majority everybody said community everybody was talking about how important community was to them to the to you know their their their future career asp prospects uh you know getting out and meeting people for you know getting hiring new employees or moving to a new company or or doing the things in in a community base like for example the boston user group where we're just all sharing ideas um the other
announcement was aws repost i'm i'm calling it aws version of stack overflow uh i i've i've spent a a tiny amount of time on there but it's effectively you know a q a specifically for aws centered questions it's like reddit stack overflow for for aws specific content um i i think that that is going to be so we all know that aws has has a very strong and centered messaging platform they want to make sure that that everybody is saying the same thing that you have
to be you know speaker certified to even be able to be recorded if you are an aws employee by doing that they're kind of they're kind of not shooting themselves in the foot but they're they're missing out on a whole stack of of uh third-party efforts third-party community efforts that can help that can assist and by standing up repost and letting people in the community just help each other help each other out and not always having to submit a support ticket that's not necessarily um needed
they're they're they're finally tapping into a larger third-party community that can really be helpful so one of the challenges i've always had with the aws community in general and i think we have the perfect guest on the talk about this because you you have your foot in kind of two major communities literally the brown bag for those who you don't know started as a way to help people with their vmware certifications it has morphed to just helping people with cloud related technologies you guys did you
guys did an excellent section a couple of years ago uh actually during this time of the year learning python like 25 days of python for christmas or something like that uh and then uh there's been a lot of aws central uh centralized training for getting your aws associates certification etc so a lot of great technical content but one of the things that has come naturally for the vmware community has been this community kind of the the these third-party communities springing up and it's fairly easy as
a v-admin to kind of going to vmworld and or to twitter and fall into the v admin or v community as we call it one of the things that i've had a little bit more difficult time doing until aws re invent has just gotten massive and all of my v admin friends are now at aws re invent was finding community yes uh is this the shot and arm you think aws from the community needs for aws to kind of have a sponsor place for aws minded
folks to go i'm i'm really glad you asked that so yes i i think it is i think it is the shot in the arm um in in conjunction with the repost announcement they also um emily freeman uh she's editing emily on twitter announced that she is now coming over to aws and she is going to be i believe that the head of the third party community efforts from aws so they're they're putting their money where their mouth is on this um i'm gonna i'm gonna
hopefully have a conversation with her in the near future to see if we can start integrating some of the v brown bag community efforts on site at re invent the same way that we were doing at vmworld at ignite and at openstack um and and it seems like the tide is turning on the acceptance of third-party information third-party contributions that you know don't put aws in like this glowing perfect light everything is wonderful and nothing is bad because that's that's not ever true um so so
i i think that i think i think that the tide is turning on on aws accepting of community in in the broader spectrum of allowing us to show the bumps and bruises which which is exactly what v brown bag was founded on you know show a technology with all the bumps and bruises to so that people have a good understanding of how it works in the real world as opposed to just the pretty white paper of of okay this is this is what would happen in
a pristine greenfield environment because that's that's never the case in a large organization yeah it's all about how do you help me get my job done i think what people come to communities about this stuff is hard i talk about how hard this stuff is and we need to be able to get past the vendor fluff marketing and just say you know what at the end of the day how do i you know how do i i still have windows server 2008 servers literally born in
the cloud how do i get that stuff moved off when there's not investment et cetera et cetera don't give me the rosy uh glass rose colored glasses give me the unvarnished truth okay we have time for one last one what what's the third thing a third thing uh let's see honestly i was so i just got my first back [Laughter] everybody was astonished that that i i had not yet fallen into the mac ecosphere so the um the new uh ec i mean i mean it's
i mean ec2 is is has been around for a very very long time and so when when ec2 announcements come out everybody's like okay great yeah a new thing 475 minutes yeah 475 different big deal well there's there's a lot out there but the the m1 mac instances so ec2 now has m1 mac instances that i can spin up and try something on something that i can tear down before i start deploying and implementing it on my local m1 mac so so that i can uh
you know break that instead of my my new little baby well you know not just they're very selfish not not just that i've i've thought about the m1 mac uh thing like if you're developing games or you're developing for the mac or you're developing for the iphone and you're in the all mac environment and you're using the mac kde m1 and m1 pro m1 max does the price for performance is amazing versus intel amd x86 in general i don't know how it competes against galvatron gavitron
but uh there's like a use case that if you know i don't want to i need to develop a code i don't want to buy mac or i need to sometimes uh do bigger jobs you can literally just buy by the the compute hour and and and and process your code or transcode video and code video i i can store stuff in aw i can store raw video in s3 uh uh do the xml edits export it into final cut in an m1 mac based in
the cloud and save myself you know 30 minutes of encoding time so you know uh there's some good stuff there so chris we could go on for easily another half an hour but you have a hard stop and i want to respect that hard stop for people who want to find out more about v brown bags specifically how do they find this v brown bed content that we've talked about so we have the website vbrownbag.com uh we have the twitter handle at vbrownbag and of course
we have the youtube channel where we have all of the content we are up to almost uh 3 000 videos now we've been going for quite a long time now so we've got we've got a ton of videos out there um so it's and it's v brownback v-b-r-o-w-n-b-a-g just like like the the lunchtime lunch and learn but virtualized and how do people follow you on the twitters you you can find me at well if if you watch a v brown bag episode you'll see me there
but if you want to follow me on twitter you can find me at mistwire m-i-s-t-w-i-r-e and if you want to find me you can follow me at ctoadvisor on twitter the ctoadvisor.com is the website we'll talk to you next cto does oh yeah well for those of you who are listening we are going to publish the video format of this as well on the youtubes so youtube.com ctoadvisor wonderful
