This week we sit down with Brian Gracely, a senior director of product strategy at Red Hat Open Shift. He hosts The Cloudcast and had lots to say about Kubernetes, Heroku, Docker, and the proliferation of certifications you can earn to break into the industry.
You can follow Brian on Twitter. and check out the Cloudcast here.
If you're just getting started, he has a cloud basics podcast that covers a new topic each month.
And if you are just really, really into containers, well he's got you covered.
Paul was talking with someone who mentors a lot of young coders. What are they all into these days? Typescript? Web Assembly? Nope, they're all getting AWS certified.
A certification for AWS , Azure, and GCP has become an efficient way to break into the job market. Companies like Cloud Guru make it simple to understand what you need. We discuss what this new on-ramp to the world of software means for the rising generation of coders, or those looking to become programmers down the line.
Brian Gracely You know, for the last decade, we've had to care about all these underlying plumbing things, right, with Kubernetes, or its AWS, or whatever it was. I think we're now seeing this sort of new generation, which is, "I'm going to set up a Shopify store, which will take me two clicks, that Shopify store will use Twilio to communicate with people, it'll use whatever it is for getting your credit card information." Like, they'll think of these things which are built on top of the cloud and have global scale and are one API away. They won't even think to be like, I wonder how they work under the covers, they'll just be like, that's what everybody uses. And that's what I found on Stack Overflow is the, you know, 10 most common examples, or I found this in somebody, like, that's the next things that we're seeing is, you know, they're gonna treat those things the way that people treat Heroku 10 years ago.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Ben Popper Hello, everybody! Good morning, and welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast. Hi, Paul. Hi, Sara.
Sara Chipps How's it going?
Paul Ford What! We're doing it again. We're doing it again!
SC Yeah.
BP Can you believe it?
SC It's happening.
PF Look at us. Look at us. Here we are.
BP It's Episode 300 awhile back, but I wonder if it's Episode 100 for the three of us. I'll have to look up that anniversary and we'll celebrate it.
SC Yeah, even if it was two months ago, we should celebrate it. [Ben laughs]
BP Yeah, we can circle back. Sometimes you forget important anniversaries. But you can just apologize.
SC Yes!
BP So we have a great guest with us today. Brian Gracely, who is the Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat and host of The Cloudcast, a podcast all about the cloud. Welcome, Brian.
SC Welcome!
BG Hi to all of you. Yeah, good to be on. Thanks for having me.
PF Hello!
SC So does the Director of Product Strategy work on all the products?
BG So I will primarily focus on the ones that that we would consider to be like cloud computing. So I don't focus on Linux, I focus on things that are like Kubernetes, and building new applications, stuff like Java and those types of things. Yeah, API gateways.
PF Brian, what do you do all day?
BG What do I do all day? Oh, wow. Somebody asked me the other day, if what I do is make one giant PowerPoint at the beginning of the year, and then just sort of like, go to go to hockey games and cocktail parties and stuff, which, that sounded way better--
SC That's the job I wanted.
BG That sounded way better than my day job. [Brian laughs]
PF I tell ya--because in my own life, people could make that assumption as well. Like, just like, "Oh, this again." [Paul laughs]
BG Right, exactly.
PF Okay, so I'm assuming you don't just make one big PowerPoint at the end? So, you know, it's morning, where do you start? What do you do?
BG Yeah, so my, my typical day is, you know, even probably pre-pandemic, you know, it's, it's a little bit of wake up and figure out what's going on. So it might be check Twitter for a little while. See if there's trends, it's a lot of reading in terms of, you know--
PF That's right, that's work. Twitter's work. Everybody needs to know that.
BP Right, it's what you do before breakfast. But yeah, it's, it's trying to figure out what's coming next. It's a little bit of, you know, are certain trends actually making any sense, right, so it's figuring out things like, you know, four or five years ago, people talked about Bitcoin and blockchain and you're like, Okay, do those apply to anybody? Will they go anywhere? It's figuring out, do our customers care about like, do they have these problems, right? Like, I use this this joke all the time, like, we tend to work on this technology called Kubernetes, which started as this Google open source project, it kind of, you know, gained a lot of sort of popularity and lots of community support, and so forth. But a lot of times I go out, and I get a chance to talk to our customers. And, and I'll go look. I almost can guarantee that not one of you woke up this morning and said, I have a Kubernetes problem, right? Like you wanted to make money. You wanted to satisfy what you do with your customers.
PF Plenty of people wake up every day and say I have a Kubernetes problem. [Paul & Brian laugh]
BG They may have a problem, yeah. after the fact, they're like, what did I get myself into?
PF No, but yes, you know, there's a whole class of problems in technology. And actually, this is also, where enterprise software--like Salesforce is a great example. It buys Slack, and everybody's like, what the hell is Salesforce, right? And if you know what Salesforce is, you're like, "It's Salesforce." And then someone's like, "Well, can you explain it to me?" And you're like, "It's Salesforce."
SC It's natural resources at this point.
PF Yeah and they're like, "What does it do?" And you're like, "Well, it has 360." Like, I mean, it's just these things are their own world, right? And when you're in them, they can make sense. But when you're outside, you actually don't understand the problem domain. Actually, that's a great like, can you define the problem domain that Kubernetes actually seeks to address? Like, if I'm, if I'm really just trying to wrap my head around this in a very broad sense, what what would you say?
BG I think the way I explain it to people is, is sort of two things. One, if you want to manage a whole bunch of computers, a whole bunch of servers as if they're like one server, Kubernetes does that, right? So in the in the same way that you used to say, look, I have one server, it needs an operating system, and I kind of maintain that thing and manage it. If I want to manage a whole bunch of them because the application I have or the applications we have need a bunch of servers, but they needed to sort of look like one. Kubernetes is good at that. The other thing Kubernetes is potentially good at--and this is where you get into, "Do people really have this problem?" is Kubernetes is one of these things that says, no matter where I run, it's going to look consistent. So what that comes into play in terms of a problem is, we have a lot of customers who say, "Look, I have applications today that live in our local data center, they've been there for four years, five years, 20 years, whatever it's been. And that public cloud thing looks really appealing. Do we want to run stuff in the public cloud as opposed to our data centers?" And for some set of customers, or some set of companies, the idea of moving to the cloud, if I could do that without having to like change everything I know, that's potentially appealing for a different set of companies. They go, "No, no, no, moving to the cloud is the equivalent of like, moving out of my house and not taking everything out of the attic. I don't want to drag anything with me, I'm perfectly fine learning something new." But for those who want to be somewhat consistent, Kubernetes kind of helps solve that problem, too.
SC When I think of Kubernetes, I think a lot about the Heroku instance, like Heroku, right? where you're like a startup, you have five people, you don't have the infrastructure to scale, you don't know something might happen. You might have a million users tomorrow, that would be awesome. You can scale up really fast. When I think of Kubernetes I think, okay, that means I don't need to have a DevOps team, it makes it a lot easier. But for me thinking about that use case, I see a lot of enterprise companies approaching Kubernetes and thinking about it as their future. What is the problem statement there? Besides "all our data lives in some guy's house in Ohio, we want to put it in the cloud." Why is Kubernetes the answer for these larger companies?
BG Yeah, so in your comparison with Heroku was great. So Heroku--
PF A Salesforce product, by the way. [Sara laughs]
BG Exactly. Everything becomes a Salesforce product.
PF It's just--wooof--it's coming for us.
BP It's the laws of physics.
PF This podcast will be owned by Salesforce before we're done recording. Keep going, keep going.
BG Yeah, so. So Heroku is great. If the thing you were trying to build, you said, look, we're going to build it in this this one language. And I believe if I remember, right, Heroku was primarily around Ruby. So if you loved writing in Ruby, I think that was--I hope I didn't get that wrong.
SC Originally was, yeah, yeah.
PF It was. And I mean, it's lots of things now, yeah.
BG Right, it's lots of things now. And you said, look, my application is going to kind of follow those, those 12 factor principles, right? Like the way I want to write it as stateless. And I'm not going to, you know, maintain any data locally, if the opinions about how you write your application fit what Heroku did, Heroku was perfect. Because it was like, all I want to do is write code, I just want to push it, I want to get all the operations out of the way, let it take care of things for me. And that was that was like an awesome way of writing applications.
PF Orthodox web architecture, right? Just like super scalable. If you follow these rules, and we'll take it from there.
BP Right. And the reason the Kubernetes, and containers--so like, if you if you went back historically, like, the first thing that kind of came along was was people said, oh, here's this thing called Docker. And Docker, the big thing Docker did was it said, you can use any language you want. So some of the early Heroku type things were kind of language limited. And it said, you know, if you want to package all your dependencies together, and sort of, you know, keep them in one place, great, right? Like, you could do that. And then Kubernetes came along and said, well, if you want to do lots of Dockers, I can help you scale it. The real reason, if you get to, like, what's a real problem that it solves, is a lot of companies or a lot of developers said, "I would have liked to use the Heroku thing. In fact, I still love the idea of like, I want to write my code, and I want everything else to get out of my way. It's just my code, or my application doesn't always look exactly like that, right? Like I might want different language support, I may want to intermingle a stateful application, I may, I may want to have sort of a unique way of scaling it that I sort of have control over." And that's kind of the void that Kubernetes and Docker and those things filled was, if you want to have a little more control over what you're doing, this is going to do it. Now the flip side of that is, you know, anytime you give people access to a bunch of nerd knobs, they sort of nerd out on them [Paul laughs] and potentially, potentially create some more complexity. So, you know, it's it's sort of that trade off of, do you want it super simple, but you're always going in a straight line? Or do you want a little more flexibility?
PF You know, I want to go back to something you said earlier, because it really stuck in my mind, because I remember before I got into this industry, and as I was kind of coming up the ranks, I always assumed there were these pools of secret knowledge. And you could be if you were inside of a big company, you would have access to like the ultimate secret news about how things were going. And you wake up and check Twitter to learn what's happening in the world of containers and otherwise, right like, yeah, and we all do it. I mean, you certainly if you're Google, you have a set of statistics or you know, same with Facebook that other people don't have, but ultimately this is all just kind of happening out in the open and you're, you're figuring out your customers the same way everybody else is just kind of listening to what they complain about.
BG Yeah, it's that and, and there's a certain amount of things that happen in our industry. And you all probably see this is, you know, there are bubbles that that we live in. So for example, and this is no sort of, you know, knock on any of them. But like, if you live exclusively, like in Silicon Valley, or if you live in Seattle, or whatever your take is, there are no other companies in the world that don't operate the way that we do, right? There's no idea, there's no concept of like, somebody owning their own data center, there's no idea of somebody having an application that's older than two years old. And then you kind of get outside of those bubbles, you deal with things like oh, I'm talking to an insurance company who takes, you know, six months to be able to give their developers resources. And that's not unusual. Or I'm working with a government agency who because of the high level of work they do, nothing they do can be connected to the internet. And so you start realizing like, oh, wow, there's a lot of variation in the world, and you're trying to get a sense of, you know, I have a finite amount of resources. There's only so much technology, do I go after everything and spread it thin like peanut butter? Do I go after certain things, you know, really heavily? And that's, that's sort of a unique thing. And that's where that's where you sort of are trying to figure things out is just like, is the big trend going in direction to the right or to the left or somewhere in the middle? And you're just trying to sort out what what do I do on any given day?
BP Have any of you read the Three Body Problem? Have you ever read that piece of science fiction?
PF Sure.
SC One of my favorites.
BP So yeah, so you know that there's all these comparisons to like naval battles, where it's like, if I start turning now, in an hour of turn the amount I need to do this, but if I turn the other way, then I have these other options, you're trying to, like predict things, you know, into the future, all the different possible paths. And with all these battleships turning slowly, or they talk about technology all the time, like, what kind of engine should we be working on if in 200 years, you know, we need to meet these aliens. So I feel like not to say that governments and large enterprises are aliens, but they are battleships that turn slowly. And so trying to make the right prediction.
PF You're also dealing with the fact that these are things that were created for the tech industry to deal with its own needs. And then you're trying to spread that way of working out into the world. And like the world does not work like the tech industry, government is a perfect example. Like, maybe it's not connected the internet, maybe there's a complicated set of contracting requirements, you know, or I've been in those same environments where it's just like, yeah, it takes about three months for someone to get their development environment all set up. And you're like, Whoa, that could be three minutes, but--
SC And in the meantime, you can read the Three Body Problem. [Sara laughs]
PF Like, there are plenty of environments in which developers sit and read while they wait for resources to come online that they can then use--it actually, is that ridiculous, right?
SC Sounds like a nice meditation. [Brian laughs]
PF It used to be. Now it just feels bad.
BP Yeah you're like, I should have been working on my side projects.
BG And those folks are no different than than the rest. Like, look, we all wake up at some point, like on January 1, and go, you write your resolutions, and you know, half the world goes like "I'd like to get healthier." Yeah, that's great. And maybe you do a buying a diet book. And maybe you do it by, you know, buying a mirror or a Peloton or whatever, like, there's a million ways to solve the same problem. It's like, are you motivated to do it? Does it really benefit you at all? That I mean, people that work in technology in some of those places aren't sitting around going, how slow can I be? How bureaucratic could I be? They're just like, this is kind of the world that I live in. And, you know, they're trying to figure out like, Can I be 10 minutes better than another insurance company? As opposed to do I really need to be another Google? Like, is that what we need to be? Maybe they don't. And that's the that's the thing that's weird to people.
PF You know, Brian, this, I think everybody's just like, well, we need to be the next Google. That's the most uninspired thing that people say, right? Because they're just like, "I need to be the biggest thing that makes the most money." [Sara laughs] And it's like, yeah, we should all do that. That sounds fantastic. Maybe you could get to know your customers first, before you provide a digital experience they don't give a--anyway. Do you have a mental model for the different clouds? Like how can you--we all like to make fun of the different cloud service providers. How would you contrast them like, you know, as you're like, I'm like AWS, I just think of a million little lozenges scattered all over the floor. And it's like, go pick it. It's literally they it's like Jeff Bezos had changed in his pockets. And he just threw it. And he was like, "Hey, help yourself, whatever you want." And then Google Cloud, I'm just like, what else can we get inside that hamburger menu? [Sara chuckle] Like it eventually will approach infinity. Like, what is your mental model? When somebody is like, hey, what should I do with the cloud? You know, how do you guide them in one direction or another?
BG So it's a couple things. So I think the first thing is you sort of break down do you care about this thing a lot? Or do you kind of want to sort of outsource it, if you will, right. So this is your point of saying, how much stuff do you want to just be Salesforce? Or do you want it to be WebEx or Zoom or whatever it is, right. And so that that sort of covers the the sort of SAS part of the world which that part's actually easy. That's like, what do you want to do? Do you not want to do it? Cool. There's a SAS for that. When you get into that sort of three or four big public clouds. On one hand, there's a good majority of the population that just sort of thinks they're all the same, because we always lumped them the same we say, Oh, it's AWS, Azure, and Google. And so they go, yeah, they all have all this stuff. It's the equivalent of like, I could go to Home Depot or go to Lowe's, because I just need a hammer, whichever one's closer to me. In terms of their business, though, I think they do have some sort of distinct personalities, right? Like Amazon, very much believes. In general, if I have everything, you know, the psychology is, you will come to me for--once you start working with us, you'll just come to me for everything. So they very much have this everything store mentality in AWS. And they're the first to tell you like, some of it is really, really good. The stuff that's either been around for a while, or some of its really unique, like a Lambda or something. And other parts of it. I don't even think they hide anymore, that they're just like, last year, I had 157 services. And this year, I have 193, and the next year out of 286. And like, you'll just, you don't need to go anywhere else.
PF They're running out of pixels for those logos. [Brian & Sara laugh]
BG Their console is going to be impossible to read.
SC Especially when you only have four colors.
PF You're right, there are things like s3 that essentially sets the API for how object storage should work.
BG It is the world standard. Yeah, yeah, Microsoft, I think is probably the one that has the most personality, I would say in terms of, there's part of what they do that's the Microsoft, you've known forever, you know, so you're buying Office 365, or they're bundling stuff like Teams so that they can compete against Slack, they do the things that they've always done. And then there's a part of them, that's we're trying to be, you know, the next generation of Microsoft, and we support open source and we support, you know, Linux and stuff that you never would have, you know, seen from the Ballmer and the, and the Gates's of the world. And I think, you know, Amazon and Azure, wake up every single like, I wake up every day, go and look at Twitter for stuff, those two wake up every day, look out their bedroom window at the other person and go, what did they do? Do I need to do that, right? Like, there's very much a fast follower between each one of them, and some of them get ahead of the other. Google's the odd one out in that, I always say this, and I don't mean a derogatory way. But like, Google doesn't like to talk to people, like Google people don't like to talk to people.
PF Never have.
BG It's not in their DNA. And, and so that's great if you're building Maps, or whatever, but when you're selling to the enterprise, like selling to the enterprise is about people. And they're trying to figure out how do they do that, right. And so we've seen them, they're really good at data, everybody loves their data services, their networks are really fast. They're really good at the computer part of computing. And they're trying to figure out like, Can we hire enough non-Google people, non-DNA people to run our cloud such that we can do the talking to people part? And, you know, they're kind of learning it with mixed results. And but they're the one that's kind of different, because they've never the people, part of it is never been part of what they enjoy doing. But people like the data part.
PF There's a kind of undercurrent here that I think our audience--I just want to call out for our audience, right, which is, I think, if you're a developer and you think about cloud services, you think about the utility to cloud services, you know, is it easy to figure out what I need to do and how I need to do it? And how is the console experience and so on, but the cloud service providers, and they care about that, like they're humans, they know that there's--but their lives are wrapped up in really big enterprise contracts with organizations like the United States government, or General Electric, right, like things like that. And, and it's the difference between $2.49 a year from you, or $250 million from somebody else, right? And so it's a tricky thing to hold in your mind when you're dealing with these, because they're kind of like weird pseudo operating systems at this point, right? You go in and you're digging around, you're like, Who is this for? And it's like, it's kind of for you, the developer, but the energy in the new product development thinking is going a lot into what are the needs of the giant enterprise orgs. And I remember, it took me a while to wrap my head around that because I kept seeing them almost as consumer products, but for devs. And that's actually not where the money is coming from.
SC That's actually a big leap that a lot of these companies are making. At some point, I think it'd be great to dig into this, like, how many of these tools started out as dev tool, you're a dev, get to know this. And then when did that bit flip of now we're an enterprise tool. And now we do enterprise things.
BP To the one thing, you're saying, like Paul, that this is an interface. And Brian is saying like, you know, some companies are good at the computing part of computers or whatever, you know, remember that company Solar Winds that was like responsible for the giant hack. They were really really good at the people part, like their enterprise sales team must have been just killer because they sold to everybody in government and every big tech company. And meanwhile, their security was just like nonsense. It was total, the technology was missing but the enterprise sales on point.
PF Oh, it's real.
BG And that one point is probably the the tipping point like--so if you just said like, hey, what makes things kind of sit on one side of the fence. Security is probably the most easy thing to point to. Right. So, you know, you start off as a super developer friendly kind of consumer type of thing. And then you go, Well, okay, you want to put that application into production? What's the thing that potentially becomes your bottleneck? It's probably security. Because at some point, somebody goes, What if we get hacked? Is their consumer data behind this is their credit card data? Someone you're like, dude, I don't care. I just wanted to push 10 times a day, because I wanted to be able to speak at the O'Reilly conference. And that sounds cool. And you're like, Yeah, but what happens when we end up on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, or we end up on the top of Hacker News, or, you know, whatever it is, like security is probably that thing that does become the tipping point of like, Am I an enterprise thing? Or am I just a super friendly developer thing? Because, you know, it's not something you want to think about, you know, you have to but some companies make it their, their calling card and other companies are like, yeah, we'll get around to it, we'll get around to it.
PF Where is growth? Is it just going to be like 10 more years of serving the enterprise for the different cloud services? Or do you see them getting more interested in sort of wrapping things up for consumers so that, you know, your operating system and your day to day computing is happening more in their cloud?
BG I think they do. And I think that, I mean, it's the it's the hard part about, you know, we used to have, you know, kind of silos, if you will, or sort of segments where certain companies would play in certain spaces, right, so, you're never going to see Fortnite, you know, build Fortnite for General Motors, like, that's never going to happen, but, but if you, you know, if you go to an AWS reinvent show, it may not necessarily make the main keynote anymore, but there's still a whole section on, you know, hey, I want to build cool games. And here's how I, you know, build rendering engines. And here's, I don't know that, you know, here's a company that's building an interesting social media for moms that want to be able to do, you know, kid playdates in, you know, certain city, like, there's still that thing that can be done in the public cloud, but it may not get, you know, nearly as much attention. And then the hard part of it is, it used to be, you could spin off a company, like some VC would go, hey, you have a great idea, you could spin off a company or you know, start a new company. The hard part is nobody can afford to replicate an Amazon, Azure, Google set of cloud, so you probably have to build it on top of somebody else. So, I don't think we're ever going to see digitalocean for consumer gaming, that they own the whole cloud thing, like the economics don't work, but it doesn't mean somebody couldn't build that on an Azure or Google or, you know, Oracle Cloud or whatever.
BP Yeah, I mean, these interesting services come along, that, you know, don't take that long to get to a really terrific scale, like a Twilio or something where they just like, invest really, in the telephony, and the SMS, and suddenly, you know, they have a big public business, or even like snowflake, you know, a new database idea can go from zero to IPO, and was like five or six years or something like that mean, right, they're not replicating the whole cloud, they probably still rely in some way on one of those big three, but you can have a very large, you know, idea and a successful company.
PF Actually out of curiosity, the giants like Netflix, because for a while, you know, Netflix was famously AWS, then it was like, we were gonna build our own data centers, do they stay in their own data centers? Or is it hybrid? Are people migrating back to the clouds? Like, I saw that Zoom made a big deal with Oracle and just in your head, like, what are the limits for the really big orgs?
BG Yeah, I think in general, and even Netflix, I don't think ever left AWS, they just said, hey, you know, over time, they loved us, they kept us. I think the stories of the company, you know, some big company, like a Dropbox of moving back into their own data centers, like, those are going to be really, really few and far between. The trend is going to be I move away from my own data center into the public cloud, maybe I leverage multiple public clouds, because, you know, it could be a lot of things, we acquired companies, there were certain regions of the world that they didn't have a presence in, and we needed to get there. That's more the trend that we'll see. I don't think we'll see--every once in a while that like the new little trend we've seen for the last year or so is some company, it could be a Spotify, it could be you know, Twilio, it could be a Zoom or whatever those folks now have to put in like their--what was it--their S1 when they want to go public, like where's your spend? And so, they have to lay out like, Hey, we have, you know, $100 million a year spend with Google. But we also have a, you know, $400 million commit over--and really that's really just accounting, but the cloud providers love to look at that and go see, Spotify loves us and we solve every problem for Spotify. And it's like, dude, people love Spotify because they love music and they love how you personalize it. What computers they use has nothing to do with that.
PF Boy, is that true. Or even I mean Spotify desktop interface is something I like to complain about a lot right but it's there's the music.
BP I feel for my fellow content marketers doing those really ungainly things where it's like "This hip cool service brought to you at the backbone enterprise company you don't care about." [Paul & Sara laugh]
PF There's a point where you get big enough that you--that you just stop, like you know at Verizon rarely comes in and it's just like, "We enable so many emails" you know, it's just like ehh.
BP But to Sara's point earlier, I do wonder if there'll be a generation coming up the way like, you know, people in their teens today don't think anything about creating their own website or building an app who will interface with the cloud. I know lots of young kids, their first experience is spinning up like a minecraft server for folks to play in the neighborhood. Or Roblox is really huge. Now, my kids are obsessed, and you can go on there and make your own game. And at a certain point, if it gets to a certain level, you're like, Oh, I want to, you know, want to take control of this in my own way. So maybe, as people are able to spin things up quicker. And Sara, when you mentioned Heroku, I thought immediately of the Bernie meme app. Which got so big. It crashed its Heroku instance, right?
SC Really? I didn't even see that that happened this week.
BP It happened. I mean, it came back on, you know, they just had to flip a few more dials.
SC If they had put it in the cloud..
PF It's actually more specific. Heroku reached out to help. But Google didn't. So it had to get shut down. Because the Google Maps API for gluing Bernie on was too expensive for the for the poor NYU student who is ready to do that. [Ben & Sara laugh] So Heroku, like Heroku got in there. They were just like, "Hey, what do you need, man?"
BG I think to your point, so you know, for the last decade, we've had to care about all these underlying plumbing things right with Kubernetes, or its AWS, or whatever it was, I think we're now seeing this sort of new generation, which is, if I'm a kid who you know, wants to build something out, like, let's say you're sitting at college, and you want to sell sweatshirts, with Bernie's meme on the front of it, whatever, like you're going to go, I'm going to set up a Shopify store, which will take me to clicks, that Shopify store will use Twilio to communicate with people, it'll use whatever it is for getting your credit card information. Like, they'll think of these things which are built on top of the cloud and have global scale and are one API away, they won't even think to be like, I wonder how they work under the covers, they'll just be like, that's what everybody uses. And that's what I found on Stack Overflow is the, you know, 10 most common examples, or I found this in somebody's--like, that's the next things that we're seeing is, you know, they're gonna treat those things the way that people treat Heroku 10 years ago, which was like, Oh, I need an app with a database and or whatever. They're gonna look at them that way. There'll be a Minecraft API, there'll be a whatever API, that's the way they're gonna build on stuff. They won't, yeah, they won't care about is this on AWS or Google or whatever.
PF I might have mentioned this on the show before, I can't remember, because it really, it really threw me when I first started. I was talking to somebody who mentors a lot of young developers. And I was like, so what are they all into? I was kind of expecting TypeScript, you know, or some weird library I've never heard of.
SC React components.
PF Yeah WebAssembly on the server. I don't know, whatever it was gonna be. And he's like, "Oh, yeah, they're all they're all getting AWS certified". I'm literally like, what's the new programming language? And he looked me in the eye went "AWS certification." I was like, ah, like, okay, it's one of those moments where I just was like, oh, okay, it's all changing again, it's not just gonna be like, when we all went to JavaScript, it's like, no, people are starting to see that as the on road to getting a good middle class career out of this industry.
BP Right, Sara, do you notice that on your teams? Definitely in coming to Stack Overflow, for the first time I met people like that, who came on as a Salesforce administrator or you know, an AWS administrator, another good example, that's there on ramp, because you can learn that quickly, get a certification, which is required in the job description. And then you can move sideways into other you know, engineering jobs, which might be more interesting to you after a while.
SC I haven't heard anything about the AWS certification. Actually, this is the first time I've heard of that. In the past, I think of like A+ and things like that, which is like, networking, networking certification. Like it's very weird, right? Because you think of if I was going to get AWS certified, isn't that kind of DevOps? Is that like, is that an on ramp? Or is DevOps a thing?
PF Well, I think it's like, what's the entry point that will get me the job the soonest?
BG Yeah, it's a brand new put on your resume, that'll get picked up in a search. And, yeah, I mean, I'll give you an interesting story. So I, like you, do podcasts. And about four or five years ago, we met these guys who, at the time were two brothers, one was like in Austin, and one was in Australia, they had formerly been at Microsoft, and they were like, hey, the training world isn't like doesn't serve us this thing we want to go after. And at the time, they were like, we're gonna try and build a thing for people to learn AWS. And the thing that was interesting about their business was not that they were like, Hey, we're gonna create 100 courses and you can take these things, but they actually built it on top of AWS, using this thing called Lambda or Serverless. And so they literally built it in a way that they were like, everybody else does it such that they're like having to stream a bunch of content, or they're having to run a bunch of servers, and they're like, I have no money. They built this business it's now called A Cloud Guru, or A Cloud dot Guru, that the whole thing runs on top of Lambda. So they built a whole AWS business, to certify AWS on top of basically the cheapest AWS service. So they not only figured out how to service that thing that you're talking about, which is lots of people want this certification, but they figured out how to do it using this sort of like most cutting edge cloud stuff such that running their businesses, it's literally pennies, but like they don't spend a dime until people actually start engaging it. So it's an interesting way of being like, Oh, it's not only that trend is is important, but they figured out how to completely change sort of the training game because the underlying technology is there. So we're seeing these sort of like stepping on each other's shoulders or stand on each other's shoulders kind of things happening.
PF The dot guru domain to me is always like--
SC So great.
PF Well it is, it's also just like, you know, you're a young entrepreneur when you're like, alright, I'll use dot guru. [Brian laughs] All the olds like me are just sort of like, oh, no, not dot guru!
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BP Alright, everybody, today's lifeboat badge winner, somebody who got an answer score of 20, or more from a question that was going to the dustbin of history. LeoNerd, awarded yesterday: Capture the output of Perl system(). So thank you, LeoNerd.
SC So great!
PF That is a lifeboat and a half right there.
BP Yeah. I am Ben popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter @BenPopper. And you can email us podcast@stackoverflow.com.
SC And I'm Sara Chipps, Director of Community here at Stack Overflow. And you can find me at @SaraJo on GitHub.
PF Brian, if people want to get in touch what should they do?
BG Sure, @bgracely on Twitter, or if you want to check out The Cloudcast podcast, we do a weekly show, talking about all sorts of things cloud computing.
PF Alright, I'm typing it in, hitting that follow button right now.
BG Appreciate it.
SC Nice!
BP Like and Subscribe. Leave a review for Brian or us. Exactly.
PF Got it. Alright. I didn't see who I was, Ben! What if people don't know?
SC We don't know who that is!
SC Oh, Paul. I'm sorry, Paul! Go!
PF My name is Paul Ford. I'm the co-founder of a software firm called Postlight. Check us out online. We are hiring. And I would love to hear from you.
BP Yes.
PF Thanks.
BP Terrific.
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