Not the Hero We Deserve but The AWS Hero We Need

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All right, the scratchy voice that you're about to hear is not 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 I don't think I've ever had you on a podcast, right? Correct. This is our well.

So we have spoken innumerable times on various podcasts. You've been on the brown bag. We've both been on Cloud Field Day. I just talked to you at Reinvent for for the V brown bag man on the street style interviews. And the reason why my voice is so scratchy right now is because of Reinvent. We did twenty five different interviews for the show for my show. And then subsequently I did a couple of interviews for AWS live the live Twitch stream.

So I feel perfectly fine. I sound terrible. Oh, man. But reinvent I was I was I've been watching the cube coverage of reinvent and twenty seven thousand people was the numbers that the cube gave. I know AWS in theory capped it off at twenty thousand people. Correct. Right. But the unofficial numbers like twenty five, twenty seven thousand people plus people like me that flew in for a day and left. There were plenty of you know, I looked at my Twitter feed.

Matter of fact, that's what got me to decide to go the night before the keynote. I'm like, you know what? What the heck? I'll fly to Vegas for a day. I got a chance to sit with you in the Mongo DB sponsored lounge, which they bought out like the sugar cane. And if you're familiar with the Venetian in the Sands Expo, as you're walking through the Expo hall, there's like restaurant roll and not just Mongo DB, but a couple of brands bought out like the entire restaurant for the whole day in the sugar cane is one of that.

Just because the AWS heroes hung out there. I didn't have a conference pass and Chris graciously invited me as his plus one to come in. And then there was this whole bit about not they're not being a plus one. But either either way, we got in and made it work. We made it work and we had some great conversations. So, you know what? 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 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. 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 respond and say, you know what? T.

governance perspective, capability or even end point. How does this help you sell more services? So, Chris. Yes. Let's let's let's condense seven days of goodness into 15 minutes. What did you find interesting technically at AWS reinvent? OK, so technically from the so every AWS reinvent that happens, there are innumerable announcements. They they they save up the good stuff going into reinvent and then they just unleash a deluge of information onto the masses. You know, there's there's a bunch of people that have spoken about the different announcements that have happened.

Corey Quinn is salivating over the the OpenCFS stuff that's been coming out ad nauseum. Let's see who else has been talking about things. Honestly, my favorite thing. The thing that got me the most excited was the architectural patterns and the sustainability initiatives that Amazon is now. So in 2020, they talked about their sustainability, how they wanted to be more sustainable. And they've talked about being carbon zero and the things towards 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 Verner, on the last day of the Thursday morning keynote, he made a couple of announcements that really. I think are going to be very effective. The first thing that he announced was the sustainability pillar. So there's the AWS well-architected framework is based upon five was based upon five different pillars. 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 front row seat to the game of architecture, 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. 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, one of the when I pull up to it, I actually go to my data center, Colo, 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 how they aim to be or they are.

Carbon neutral for an entire data center across the the entire power that they generate and consume. So as a architect, I really don't consider sustainability when I say, oh, I'm going to 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 honestly, I was the exact same way. 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, you know, pizza boxes or or giant old clunkers that are spewing gas. By by putting by putting sustainability at 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 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, 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, 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 resizing my easy to businesses, 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 easy to instances and showing the the the the carbon footprint savings, you can easily package up this without doing much work on your side other than going through the effort of one, saving money on your AWS bill and then to saving carbon footprint.

Yeah. And I just I pulled up the five pillars that they used to be five. Now it's six. It was operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, efficiency and cost optimization. Those were the those were the the legacy five pillars 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, OK, here's your here's your FinOps diagram of your burn.

Let's layer that over what you've stated your sustainability goals are, what your SLAs are for that. 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. Sustainability. I'm only 50 percent through the vulnerability. Wargles keynote, that's the technical keynote day to 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 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 literally 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 you've mentioned first. What's next? So 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 you and you were a part of this and I thank you for that.

I asked everybody, what were you excited about here at reinvent? And what was what was the thing that you want to leave reinvent with? And by a by an overwhelming majority, everybody said community. Everybody was talking about how important community was to them, to to, you know, their their their future career prospects, 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 a community based, like, for example, the Boston User Group, where we're just all sharing ideas.

S. repost. S. version of Stack Overflow. S. centered questions. S. specific content. I think that that is going to be. S. 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 speaker certified to even be able to be recorded. If you are an employee by 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 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 needed. They're they're they're finally tapping into a larger third party community that can really be helpful. S. community in general, and I think we have the perfect guest on the talk about this because you have your foot in kind of two major communities, literally. Brown bag, for those of 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. Actually, during this time of the year, learning Python like twenty five days of Python for Christmas or something like that. And then there's been a lot of AWS central centralized training for getting your AWS associates certification, et cetera. 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 these third party communities springing up.

And it's fairly easy as a V admin to kind of go 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 reinvent has just gotten massive. And all of my V admin friends are now at AWS reinvent was finding community. Yes. Is this is this the shot in the arm? You think AWS from a community needs for AWS to kind of have a sponsor place for AWS minded folks to go?

I'm really glad you asked that. So, yes, I think it is. I think it is the shot in the arm in conjunction with the repost announcement. They also Emily Freeman. She's editing Emily on Twitter announced that she is now coming over to AWS and she is going to be, I believe, the head of the third party community efforts from AWS. So they're they're putting their money where their mouth is on this. I'm going to I'm going to 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 reinvent the same way that we were doing at VMworld, at Ignite and at OpenStack.

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. So so I think that. I think I think that the tide is turning on on AWS, accepting of community 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, OK, 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 think 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 one new server, 2008 servers literally born in a cloud. How do I get that stuff moved off when there's not investment, et cetera, et cetera?

Don't give me the rosy glass rose colored glasses. Give me the unvarnished truth. OK, we have time for one last one. What was a third thing? A third thing. Let's see. Honestly, I was so I just got my first Mac. So everybody was astonished that that I had not yet fallen into the Mac ecosphere. So the the new easy. I mean, I mean, it's I mean, easy to is is has been around for a very, very long time.

And so when when an easy to announcements come out, everybody's like, OK, great. Yeah. A new four hundred seventy five minutes. Yeah. Four hundred seventy five. Yeah. Big deal. Well, there's there's a lot out there. But the M1 Mac instances. So easy to 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, you know, break that instead of my my my new little baby.

Well, you know, not just very selfish, not not just that. I've I've thought about the M1 Mac 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 an all Mac environment and you're using the Mac, Katie, M1 and M1 pro and one max does the price for performance is amazing versus Intel AMD X86 in general. I don't know how it competes against Gavitron, Gavitron, but the 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 a Mac or I need to sometimes do bigger jobs. You can literally just buy it by the the compute hour and and and and process your code or transcode video and code video. I can store stuff in a W. I can store raw video in S3, do the XML edX, 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, there's some good stuff there.

So, Chris, we can go on for easily another half an hour. You have a hard stop and I want to respect that hard stop for people who want to find out more about the brown bag specifically. How do they find this? The brown bag content that we've talked about. So we have the Web site, the brown bag dot com. We have the Twitter handle at the brown bag. And of course, we have the YouTube channel where we have all of the content.

We are up to almost 3000 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. So it's and it's the brown bag. G. Just like like the the lunchtime lunch and learn, but virtualized. And how do people follow you on the Twitter? You you can find me at. Well, 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.

E. And if you want to find me, you can follow me at CTO advisor on Twitter. The CTO advisor dot com is the Web site. We'll talk to you next. CTO dose. Oh, yeah. Well, we're for those of you who are listening. We are going to publish the video format of this as well on the YouTube. So YouTube dot com for slash CTO advisor. Wonderful.