StackPod

In today’s episode we are talking to Andreas Prins. Andreas has over 5 years of experience in different product management and product strategy roles and at the moment he is our VP of product here at StackState. So, if you are familiar with the product management role - either because you are in a similar role or you work closely with product managers in your job - you might be aware of the fact that product management is often a very diverse role: you’re responsible for the product roadmap, you’re the one who’s connecting different teams so that everyone works towards this certain goal, and you are often also the external spokesperson when it comes to things like webinars and interviews. And then I probably still forget some tasks and responsibilities.

So, you can imagine we were very stoked when Andreas said yes when we invited him to the podcast. Not just because he’s a great guy and because he’s great at explaining things very clearly, but also because we were looking forward to hearing directly from him about what it’s like to be a product manager. How do you make sure the team stays focused on the long term goals? How do you make decisions in a scale up when you have big hairy goals but perhaps not the big, hairy resources? Also, and this may sound like they are wandering off but not so much - what do baking the perfect stone oven pizza and Lego have to do with software development? Well, that’s exactly what Andreas and Anthony talk about in this episode.

So in this episode, Anthony talks to Murali Suriar. Up until a few months ago, Murali worked as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, where he also edited the ground breaking book that is the foundation of the SRE practice: The SRE playbook by Google.

So, to give you a quick overview of his career: after finishing his computer science studies, Murali first started working as a support and then network engineer at Goldman Sachs. After Goldman Sachs, he started as a network engineer at Google, then dove into the SRE roles and ultimately became an SRE tech lead for one of Google’s services. After about 8 years at Google, he very recently switched roles: Murali now works as a senior site reliability engineer at Snowflake - a cloud data as a service provider.

We were very happy that Murali said yes when we invited him to the StackPod, because he has a lot of experience in different roles at these very different types of companies: from a very large, perhaps more traditional bank, to a tech giant and the founder of the SRE practice to a - still big but much smaller than his previous companies - software scale-up.

So, in this episode, Murali and Anthony discuss how and why Murali got into SRE from network engineering, what are some of the differences and perhaps similarities when implementing the SRE practice at different types of companies and how you can implement the SRE practice if you are interested in it, but - for example - you work at a smaller company and perhaps you don’t have that many resources. Murali has some great tips on that too. Enjoy the episode!

In this episode, we’re talking to Michael Hausenblas. Michael is an open source observability enthusiast and is currently part of the open source service team at AWS. This means that he keeps a close eye on new open source platforms and technologies like Promotheus, Grafana and - of course - OpenTelemetry to see how AWS should integrate with these new technologies to provide the most value for the customer. Michael also wrote a couple of books about observability, he has a weekly observability newsletter that you can sign up for and he’s very active on Twitter, so we’ll make sure to add links to these in the transcript of this episode on our website, stackstate.com. 

So today, we are going to talk about a subject that’s been getting a lot of attention in the observability branche lately: OpenTelemetry. In StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces and Melcom van Eeden was one of our great developers who built this feature. He also wrote a blog about it, he created a tutorial video on how to use OpenTelemetry within StackState and is, as you will hear in a minute, very passionate about the subject. So, needless to say, Melcom is the perfect person to talk about OpenTelemetry. He and Anthony discuss topics like: what does ‘serverless’ have to do with OpenTelemetry? What is OpenTelemetry exactly? Why is it such an innovative new standard that can help a lot of people (from developers to DevOps and SRE teams)? So, needless to say, OpenTelemetry is a topic we are very excited about and we are happy to share this episode with you.

Today, we invited Yousef Sedky. Yousef is a DevOps team lead and AWS Cloud architect at Axiom and its sister company Hyke. Axiom Telecom is one of the largest telephone retailers of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Hyke, its sister company, is a distribution platform for mobile products. Yousef joined Hyke about 2.5 years ago. His first challenge was to build the architecture from scratch. At the same time, Hyke was growing very fast, so Yousef decided to implement the SRE practice to make sure they could continue to deploy fast, with zero to minimal downtime. In this episode, Yousef talks to Anthony about his lessons learned while implementing the SRE practice: how did they decide what their SRE strategy would look like, how did he build the team, how did Yousef and his team make sure the rest of the organization was on board, what are the lessons learned, and much more. 

In this episode, we’re talking to Russel Foster. Russel is a DevOps engineer at StackState and he is responsible for making sure our SaaS product runs smoothly on AWS. Russel has a lot of experience in monitoring and observability: he's worked at both startups and more mature companies. His responsibilities include keeping things up and running in cloud environments to making sure hybrid and on-prem environments remain stable and reliable. So, as you can imagine, Russel is the perfect person to talk to about some of the observability challenges that pop up when you’re taking on-premise software products to the cloud, something StackState did. Russel answers questions such as, Why did StackState choose AWS to run our SaaS solution on? What does observability for SaaS solutions on AWS look like? How can you make sure you’re scaling your SaaS product in the most effective and cost-efficient way? Enjoy the podcast.

Today Anthony is speaking to Akshat Srivastava, solutions architect at AWS and founder of SENY (Sales Engineers of New York). He has worked in the pre-sales industry for about 8 years and now manages a team of solution architect tied to enterprise sales. And as a founder of SENY, he provides a networking group for current or aspiring pre-sales engineers to help them evolve in their career.

In today's episode we talk to Zandré Witte, senior software engineer and technical lead of our integrations team here at StackState. That means he and his team work on integrations of the StackState observability product. One of the most of our integrations of our product is the Kubernetes integration, which means Zandré is the perfect person to talk to about observability for Kubernetes-environments in general and more specifically: container runtimes. Because, first of all: what does that mean (a container runtime) and why do they matter for observability, for example. 

In this episode, we invited Ramfis Adrichem. As a security specialist, Ramfis deals with preventing cybercrime and threat handling all day long. Ramfis and Anthony talk about what kinds of cybercrime Ramfis deals with, why he states that the human brain is the most important computer and that you should never underestimate its power, and how Ramfis thinks observability tools and concepts like AI can support the human brain in solving and preventing cybercrime. Enjoy the podcast!

For this episode, we invited Bram Schuur. Bram is one of the developers that have been with StackState from almost day one, and he has been working on our time series graph database (or our StackGraph, as we call it internally – you might hear Bram call it that way). ‘What is that?’, You may say? Well, the time series graph database is the database that is at the basis of our topology-based observability solution: it helps our customers to go back in time to see exactly what their topology looked like, for example to find out what specific change caused an incident.

Listen to this episode to hear Bram talk about why we decided to build our own database, instead of just using an existing one like Neo4.js, for example, and the challenges of building our own proprietary technology – which can take up a lot of time and effort.

Today's guest is a Lead SRE at the biggest e-commerce platform in the Netherlands, bol.com. His name is Bart Enkelaar. Bart is not only crazy about site reliability engineering, but also about music and how to combine SRE and music, which is quite the unusual combination. Enjoy the podcast!

Our guest today is a special one. He recently joined StackState as Chief Executive Officer. His name: Toffer Winslow. Anthony and Toffer are talking about the starting of Toffer’s career, how he became a CEO and why joined StackState.

In this episode Anthony talks to Tutti Taygerly. Tutti is an executive- and leadershipcoach with more then 20 years of experience at large companies, design agencies and startups in Sillicon Valley, including Disney and Facebook. She now helps woman and men to be the leader they want to be in tech, by basically being true to yourself. Also, she's a fanatic surfer, and you'll hear why surfing is actually a great metaphor for being a true leader. Enjoy the podcast!

Anthony will be talking to our customer, Georg Höllebauer. Georg is an Enterprise Metrics Architect at APA-tech. They are responsible for all IT services for the Austrian Press Agency, which is the largest press agency in Austria. In this podcast Georg talks about his career, how he became an Enterprise Metrics Architect, what it means, what he loves about his job, and - because he is our customer, also how he uses StackState to make his demanding job a little easier.

Welcome to this first episode of the StackPod! Today, we talk with StackState's co-founders Lodewijk Bogaards and Mark Bakker. Anthony interviews them about observability and why a time-traveling topology is crucial for that, the move to the cloud and how that affects observability, cloud costs and much more.