Today Corey talks with Guillermo Ruiz, Director of OCI Developer Evangelism. Guillermo starts by discussing the head-turn that is OCI, Oracle’s cloud product, and how it overcame Oracle’s traditionally stodgy reputation. Corey and Guillermo go on to talk multi-cloud, OCI’s dedicated region approach, cloud migration, and more! The conversation ends with a discussion about the future of IoT services and 5G.
Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.
Transcript
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.
Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.
Corey: Let’s face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that you probably can’t prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.
Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I’ve been meaning to get a number of folks on this show for a while and today is absolutely one of those episodes. I’m joined by Guillermo Ruiz who is the Director of OCI Developer Evangelism, slash the Director of Oracle for Startups. Guillermo, thank you for joining me, and is Oracle for Startups an oxymoron because it kind of feels like it in some weird way, in the fullness of time.
Guillermo: [laugh]. Thanks, Corey. It’s a pleasure being in your show.
Corey: Well, thank you. I enjoy having you here. I’ve been trying to get you on for a while. I’m glad I finally wore you down.
Guillermo: [laugh]. Thanks. As I said, well, startup, I think, is the future of the industry, so it’s a fundamental piece of our building blocks for the next generation of services.
Corey: I have to say that I know that you folks at Oracle Cloud have been a recurring sponsor of the show. Thank you for that, incidentally. This is not a promoted guest episode. I invited you on because I wanted to talk to you about these things, which means that I can say more or less whatever I damn well want. And my experience with Oracle Cloud has been one of constantly being surprised since I started using it a few years ago, long before I was even taking sponsorships for this show. It was, “Oh, Oracle has a cloud. This ought to be rich.”
And I started kicking the tires on it and I came away consistently and repeatedly impressed by the technical qualities the platform has. The always-free tier has a model of cloud economics that great. I have a sizable VM running there and have for years and it’s never charged me a dime. Your data egress fees aren’t, you know, a 10th of what a lot of the other cloud providers are charging, also known as, you know, you’re charging in the bounds of reality; good for that. And the platform continues to—although it is different from other cloud providers, in some respects, it continues to impress.
Honestly, I keep saying one of the worst problems that has is the word Oracle at the front of it because Oracle has a 40-some-odd-year history of big enterprise systems, being stodgy, being difficult to work with, all the things you don’t generally tend to think of in terms of cloud. It really is a head turn. How did that happen? And how did you get dragged into the mess?
Guillermo: Well, this came, like, back in five, six years ago, when they started building this whole thing, they picked people that were used to build cloud services from different hyperscalers. They dropped them into a single box in Seattle. And it’s like, “Guys, knowing what you know, how you would build the next generation cloud platform?” And the guys came up with OCI, which was a second generation. And when I got hired by Oracle, they showed me the first one, that classic.
It was totally bullshit. It was like, “Guys, there’s no key differentiator with what’s there in the market.” I didn’t even know Oracle had a cloud, and I’ve been in this space since late-2010. And I had to sign, like, a bunch of NDAs a lot of papers, and they show me what they were cooking in the oven, and oh my gosh, when I saw that SDN out of the box directly in the physical network, CPUs assign, it was [BLEEP] [unintelligible 00:03:45]. It was, like, bare metal. I saw that the future was there. And I think that they built the right solution, so I joined the company to help them leverage the cloud platform.
Corey: The thing that continually surprises me is that, “Oh, we have a cloud.” It has a real, “Hello fellow kids,” energy. Yes, yeah, so does IBM; we’ve seen how that played out. But the more I use it, the more impressed I am. Early on in the serverless function days, you folks more or less acquired Iron.io, and you were streets ahead as far as a lot of the event-driven serverless function style of thing tended to go.
And one of the challenges that I see in the story that’s being told about Oracle Cloud is, the big enterprise customer wins. These are the typical global Fortune 2000s, who have been around for, you know—which is weird for those of us in San Francisco, but apparently, these companies have been around longer than 18 months and they’ve built for platforms that are not the latest model MacBook Pro running the current version of Chrome. What is that? What is that legacy piece of garbage? What does it do? It’s like, “Oh, it does about $4 billion a quarter so maybe show some respect.”
It’s the idea of companies that are doing real-world things, and they absolutely have cloud power. Problems and needs that are being met by a variety of different companies. It’s easy to look at that narrative and overlook the fact that you could come up with some ridiculous Twitter for Pets-style business idea and build it on top of Oracle Cloud and I would not, at this point, call that a poor decision. I’m not even sure how it got there, and I wish that story was being told a little bit better. Given that you are a developer evangelist focusing specifically on startups and run that org, how do you see it?
Guillermo: Well, the thing here is, you mentioned, you know, about Oracle, many startup doesn’t even know we have a cloud provider. So, many of the question comes is like, how we can help on your business. It’s more on the experience, you know, what are the challenges, the gaps, and we go in and identify and try to use our cloud. And even though if I’m not able to fill that gap, that’s why we have this partnership with Microsoft. It’s the first time to cloud providers connect both clouds directly without no third party in between, router to router.
It’s like, let’s leverage the best of these clouds together. I’m a truly believer of multi-cloud. Non-single cloud is perfect. We are evolving, we’re getting better, we are adding services. I don’t want to get to 500 services like other guys do. It’s like, just have a set of things that really works and works really, really well.
Corey: Until you have 40 distinct managed database services and 80 ways to run containers, are you’re really a full cloud provider? I mean, there’s always that question that, at some point, the database Java, the future is going to have to be disambiguating between all the different managed database services on a per workload basis, and that job sounds terrible. I can’t let the multi-cloud advocacy pass unchallenged here because I’m often misunderstood on this, and if I don’t say something, I will get emails, and nobody wants that. I think that the idea of building a workload with the idea that it can flow seamlessly between cloud providers is a ridiculous fantasy that basically no one achieves. The number of workloads that can do that are very small.
That said, the idea of independent workloads living on different cloud providers as is the best fit for placement for those is not just a good idea, it is the—whether it’s a good idea or not as irrelevant because that’s the reality in which we all live now. That is the world we have to deal with.
Guillermo: If you want distributed system, obviously you need to have multiple cloud providers in your strategy. How you federate things—if you go down to the Kubernetes side, how you federate multi-clusters and stuff, that’s a challenge out there where people have. But you mentioned that having multiple apps and things, we have customers that they’ve been running Google Cloud, for example, and we build [unintelligible 00:07:40] that cloud service out there. And the thing is that when they run the network throughput and the performance test, they were like, “Damn, this is even better than what I have in my data center.” It’s like, “Guys, because we are room by room.” It’s here is Google, here it’s Oracle; we land in the same data center, we can provide better connectivity that what you even have.
So, that kind of perception is not well seen in some customers because they realize that they’re two separate clouds, but the reality is that most of us have our infrastructure in the same providers.
Corey: It’s kind of interesting, just to look at the way that the industry is misunderstanding a lot of these things. When you folks came out with your cloud at customer initiatives—the one that jumps out to my mind is the dedicated region approach—a lot of people started making fun of that because, “What is this nonsense? You’re saying that you can deploy a region of your cloud on site at the customer with all of the cloud services? That’s ridiculous. You folks don’t understand cloud.”
My rejoinder to that is people saying that don’t understand customers. You take a look at for example… AWS has their Outpost which is a rack or racks with a subset of services in them. And that, from their perspective, as best I can tell, solves the real problem that customers have, which is running virtual machines on-premises that do not somehow charge an hourly cost back to AWS—I digress—but it does bring a lot of those services closer to customers. You bring all of your services closer to customers and the fact that is a feasible thing is intensely appealing to a wide variety of customer types. Rather than waiting for you to build a region in a certain geographic area that conforms with some regulatory data requirement, “Well, cool, we can ship some racks. Does that work for you?” It really is a game-changer in a whole bunch of respects and I don’t think that the industry is paying close enough attention to just how valuable that is.
Guillermo: Indeed. I’ve been at least hearing since 2010 that next year is the boom; now everybody will move into the cloud. It has been 12 years and still 75% of customers doesn’t have their critical workloads in the cloud. They have developer environments, some little production stuff, but the core business is still relying in the data center. If I come and say, “Hey, what if I build this behind your firewall?”
And it’s not just that you have the whole thing. I’m removing all your operational expenses. Now, you don’t need to think about hardware refresh, upgrade staff, just focus on your business. I think when we came up with a dedicated region, it was awesome. It was one of the best thing I’ve seen their Outpost is a great solution, to be honest, but if you lose the one connectivity, the control plane is still in the cloud.
In our site, you have the control plane inside your data center so you can still operate and manage your services, even if there is an outage on your one site. One of the common questions we find on that area is, like, “Damn, this is great, but we would like to have a smaller size of this dedicated region.” Well, stay tuned because maybe we come with smaller versions of our dedicated regions so you guys can go and deploy whatever you need there.
Corey: It turns out that, in the fullness of time, I like this computer but I want it to be smaller is generally a need that gets met super well. One thing that I’ve looked into recently has been the evolution of companies, in the fullness of time—which this is what completely renders me a terrible analyst in any traditional sense; I think more than one or two quarters ahead, and I look at these things—the average tenure of a company in the S&P 500 index is 21 years or so. Which means that if we take a look at what’s going on 20 years or so from now in the 2040s, roughly half—give or take—of the constituency of the S&P 500 may very well not have been founded yet. So, when someone goes out and founds a company tomorrow as an idea that they’re kicking around, let’s be clear, with a couple of very distinct exceptions, they’re going to build it on Cloud. There’s a lot of reasons to do that until you hit certain inflection points.
So, this idea that, oh, we’re going to rent a rack, and we’re going to go build some nonsense, and yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s just, it’s a fantasy. So, the question that I see for a lot of companies is the longtail legacy where if I take that startup and found it tomorrow and drive it all the way toward being a multinational, at what point did they become a customer for whatever these companies are selling? A lot of the big E enterprise vendors don’t have a story for that, which tells me long-term, they have problems. Looking increasingly at what Oracle Cloud is doing, I have to level with you, I viewed Oracle as being very much in that slow-eroding dinosaur perspective until I started using the platform in some depth. I am increasingly of the mind that there’s a bright future. I’m just not sure that has sunk into the industry’s level of awareness these days.
Guillermo: Yeah, I can agree with you in that sense. Mainly, I think we need to work on that awareness side. Because for example, if I go back to the other products we have in the company, you know, like the database, what the database team has done—and I’m not a database guy—and it’s like, “Guys, even being an infrastructure guy, customers doesn’t care about infrastructure. They just want to run their service, that it doesn’t fail, you don’t have a disruption; let me evolve my business.” But even though they came with this converged database, I was really impressed that you can do everything in a single-engine rather than having multiple database implemented. Now, you can use the MongoDB APIs.
It’s like, this is the key of success. When you remove the learning curve and the frictions for people to use your services. I’m a [unintelligible 00:13:23] guy and I always say, “Guys, click, click, click. In three clicks, I should have my service up and running.” I think that the world is moving so fast and we have so much information today, that’s just 24 hours a day that I have to grab the right information. I don’t have time to go and start learning something from scratch and taking a course of six months because results needs to be done in the next few weeks.
Corey: One thing that I think that really reinforces this is—so as I mentioned before, I have a free tier account with you folks, have for years, whenever I log into the thing, I’m presented with the default dashboard view, which recommends a bunch of quickstarts. And none of the quickstarts that you folks are recommending to me involve step one, migrate your legacy data center or mainframe into the cloud. It’s all stuff like using analytics to predict things with AI services, it’s about observability, it’s about governance of deploy a landing zone as you build these things out. Here’s how to do a low-code app using Apex—which is awesome, let’s be clear here—and even then launching resources is all about things that you would tend to expect of launch database, create a stack, spin up some VMs, et cetera. And that’s about as far as it goes toward a legacy way of thinking.
It is very clear that there is a story here, but it seems that all the cloud providers these days are chasing the migration story. But I have to say that with a few notable exceptions, the way that those companies move to cloud, it always starts off by looking like an extension of their data center. Which is fine. In that phase, they are improving their data center environment at the expense of being particularly cloudy, but I don’t think that is necessarily an adoption model that puts any of these platforms—Oracle Cloud included—in their best light.
Guillermo: Yeah, well, people was laughing to us, when we released Layer 2 in the network in the cloud. They were like, “Guys, you’re taking the legacy to the cloud. It’s like, you’re lifting the shit and putting the shit up there.” Is like, “Guys, there are customers that cannot refactor and do anything there. They need to still run Layer 2 there. Why not giving people options?”
That’s my question is, like, there’s no right answers to the cloud. You just need to ensure that you have the right options for people that they can choose and build their strategy around that.
Corey: This has been a global problem where so many of these services get built and launched from all of the vendors that it becomes very unclear as a customer, is this thing for me or not? And honestly, sometimes one of the best ways to figure that out is to all right, what does it cost because that, it turns out, is going to tell me an awful lot. When it comes to the price tag of millions of dollars a year, this is probably not for my tiny startup. Whereas when it comes to a, oh, it’s in the always free tier or it winds up costing pennies per hour, okay, this is absolutely something I want to wind up exploring and seeing what happens. And it becomes a really polished experience across the board.
I also will say this is your generation two cloud—Gen 2, not to be confused with Gentoo, the Linux distribution for people with way more time on their hands than they have sense—and what I find interesting about it is, unlike a lot of the—please don’t take this the wrong way—late-comers to cloud compared to the last 15 years of experience of Amazon being out in front of everyone, you didn’t just look at what other providers have done and implement the exact same models, the exact same approaches to things. You’ve clearly gone in your own direction and that’s leading to some really interesting places.
Guillermo: Yeah, I think that doing what others are doing, you just follow the chain, no? That will never position you as a top number one out there. Being number one so many years in the cloud space as other cloud providers, sometimes you lose the perception of how to treat and speak to customers you know? It’s like, “I’m the number one. Who cares if this guy is coming with me or not?” I think that there’s more on the empathy side on how we treat customers and how we try to work and solve.
For example, in the startup team, we find a lot of people that hasn’t have infrastructure teams. We put for free our architects that will give you your GitHub or your GitLab account and we’ll build the Terraform modules and give that for you. It’s like now you can reuse it, spin up, modify whatever you want. Trying to make life easier for people so they can adopt and leverage their business in the cloud side, you know?
Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don’t leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they’re too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn’t build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.
Corey: There’s so much that we folks get right. Honestly, one of the best things that recommends this is the always free tier does exactly what it says on the tin. Yeah, sure. I don’t get to use every edge case service that you’ve built across the board, but I’ve also had this thing since 2019, and never had to pay a penny for any of it, whereas recently—as we’re recording this, it was a week or two ago—that I saw someone wondering what happened to their AWS account because over the past week, suddenly they went from not using SageMaker to being charged $270,000 on SageMaker. And it’s… yeah, that’s not the kind of thing that is going to endear the platform to frickin’ anyone.
And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the thing says Oracle on the front of it and I’m recommending it because it doesn’t wind up surprising you with a bill later. It feels like I’ve woken up in bizarro world. But it’s great.
Guillermo: Yep. I think that’s one of the clever things we’ve done on that side. We’ve built a very robust platform, really cool services. But it’s key on how people can start learning and testing the flavors of your cloud. But not only what you have in the fleet here, you have also the Ampere instances.
We’re moving into a more sustainable world, and I think that having, like, the ARM architectures in the cloud and providing that on the free space of people can just go and develop on top, I think that was one of the great things we’ve done in the last year-and-a-half, something like that. Definitely a full fan of a free tier.
Corey: You also, working over in the Developer Evangelist slash advocacy side of the world—devrelopers, as I tend to call it much to the irritation of basically everyone who works in developer relations—one of the things that I think is a challenge for you is that when I wind up trying to do something ridiculous—I don’t know maybe it’s a URL shortener; maybe it is build a small app that does something that’s fairly generic—with a lot of the other platforms. There’s a universe of blog posts out there, “Here’s how I did it on this platform,” and then it’s more or less you go to GitHub—or gif-UB, and I have mispronounced that too—and click the button and I wind up getting a deploy, whereas in things that are rapidly emerging with the Oracle Cloud space, it feels like, on some level, I wind up getting to be a bit of a trailblazer and figure some of these things out myself. That is diminishing. I’m starting to see more and more content around this stuff. I have to assume that is at least partially due to your organization’s work.
Guillermo: Oh, yeah, but things have changed. For example, we used to have our GitHub repository just as a software release, and we push to have that as a content management, you know, it’s like, I always say that give—let people steal the code. You just put the example that will come with other ideas, other extensions, plug-in connectors, but you need to have something where you can start. So, we created this DevRel Quickstart that now is managed by the new DevRel organization where we try to put those examples. So, you just can go and put it.
I’ve been working with the community on building, like, a content aggregator of how people is using our technology. We used to have ocigeek.com, that was a website with more than 1000 blog and, like, 500 visits a day looking after what other people were doing, but unfortunately, we had to, because of… the amount of X reasons we have to pull it off.
But we want to come with something like that. I think that information should be available. I don’t want people to think when it comes to my cloud is like, “Oh, how you use this product?” It’s like no, guys how I can build with Angular, React the content management system? You will do it in my cloud because that example I’m doing, but I want you to learn the basics and the context of running Python and doing other things there rather than go into oh, no, this is something specific to me. No, no, that will never work.
Corey: That was the big problem I found with doing a lot of the serverless stuff in years past where my first Lambda application took me two weeks to build because I’m terrible at programming. And now it takes me ten minutes to build because I’m terrible at programming and don’t know what tests are. But the problem I ran into for that first one was, what is the integration format? What is the event structure? How do I wind up accessing that?
What is the thing that I’m integrating with expecting because, “Mmm, that’s not it; try again,” is a terrible error message. And so, much of it felt like it was the undifferentiated gluing things together. The only way to make that stuff work is good documentation and numerous examples that come at the problem from a bunch of different ways. And increasingly, Oracle’s documentation is great.
Guillermo: Yeah, well, in my view, for example, you have the Three-Tier Oracle. We should have a catalog of 100 things that you can do in the free tier, even though when I propose some of the articles, I was even talking about VMware, and people was like, “[unintelligible 00:22:34], you cannot deploy VMware.” It’s like, “Yeah, but I can connect my [crosstalk 00:22:39]—”
Corey: Well, not with that attitude.
Guillermo: Yeah. And I was like, “Yeah, but I can connect to the cloud and just use it as a backup place where I can put my image and my stuff. Now, you’re connecting to things: VMware with free tier.” Stuff like that. There are multiple things that you can do.
And just having three blocks is things that you can do in the free tier, then having developer architectures. Show me how you can deploy an architecture directly from the command line, how I can run my DevOps service without going to the console, just purely using SDKs and stuff like that. And give me the option of how people is working and expanding that content and things there. If you put those three blocks together, I think you’re done on how people can adopt and leverage your cloud. It’s like, I want to learn; I don’t want to know the basics of I don’t know, it’s—I’m not a database guy, so I don’t understand those things and I don’t want to go into details.
I just they just need a database to store my profiles and my stuff so I can pick that and do computer vision. How I can pick and say, “Hey, I’m speaking with Corey Quinn and I have a drone flying here, he recommends your face and give me your background from all the different profiles.” That’s the kind of solutions I want to build. But I don’t want to be an expert on those areas.
Corey: Because with all the pictures of me with my mouth open, you wouldn’t be able to under—it would make no sense of me until I make that pose. There’s method to—
Guillermo: [laugh].
Corey: —my insane madness over here.
Guillermo: [laugh] [unintelligible 00:23:58].
Corey: Yeah. But yeah, there’s a lot of value as you move up the stack on these things. There’s also something to be said, as well, for a direction that you folks have been moving in recently, that I—let me be fair here—I think it’s clown shoes because I tend to think in terms of software because I have more or less the hardware destruction bunny level of aura when it comes to being near expensive things. And I look around the world and I don’t have a whole lot of problems that I can legally solve with an army of robots.
But there are customers who very much do. And that’s why we see sort of the twin linking of things like IoT services and 5G, which when I first started seeing cloud providers talking about this, I thought was Looney Tunes. And you folks are getting into it too, so, “Oh, great. The hype wound up affecting you too.” And the thing that changed my mind was not anything cloud providers have to say—because let’s be clear, everyone has an agenda they’re trying to push for—but who doesn’t have an agenda is the customers talking about these things and the neat things that they’re able to achieve with it, at which point I stopped making fun, I shut up and listen in the hopes that I might learn something. How have you seen that whole 5G slash IoT slash internet of Nonsense space evolving?
Guillermo: That’s the future. That’s what we’re going to see in the next five years. I run some innovation sessions with a lot of customers and one of the main components I speak about is this area. With 5G, the number of IoT devices will exponentially grow. That means that you’re going to have more data points, more data volume out there.
How can you provide the real value, how you can classify, index, and provide the right information in just 24 hours, that’s what people is looking. Things needs to be instant. If you say to the kids today, they cannot watch a football match, 90 minutes. If you don’t get the answer in ten, they move to the next thing. That’s how this society is moving [unintelligible 00:25:50].
Having all these solutions from a data perspective, and I think that Oracle has a great advantage in that space because we’ve been doing that for 43 years, right? It’s like, how we do the abstraction? How I can pick all that information and provide added value? We build the robot as a service. I can configure it from my browser, any robot anywhere in the world.
And I can do it in Python, Java. I can [unintelligible 00:26:14] applications. Two weeks ago, we were testing on connecting IoT devices and flashing the firmware. And it was working. And this is something that we didn’t do it alone. We did it with a startup.
The guys came and had a sandbox already there, is like, “let’s enable this on [unintelligible 00:26:28]. Let’s start working together.” Now, I can go to my customers and provide them a solution that is like, hey, let’s connect Boston Dynamics, or [unintelligible 00:26:37] Robotics. Let’s start doing those things and take the benefits of using Oracle’s AI and ML services. Pick that, let’s do computer vision, natural language processing.
Now, you’re connecting what I say, an end-to-end solution that provides real value for customers. Connected cars, we turn our car into a wallet. I can go and pay on the petrol station without leaving my car. If I’m taking the kids to takeaway, I can just pay these kind of things is like, “Whoa, this is really cool.” But what if I [laugh] get that information for your insurance company.
Next year, Corey, you will pay double because you’re a crazy driver. And we know how you drive in the car because we have all that information in place. That’s how the things will roll out in the next five to ten years. And [unintelligible 00:27:24] healthcare. We build something for emergencies that if you have a car crash, they have the guys that go and attend can have your blood type and some information about your car, where to cut the chassis and stuff when you get prisoner inside.
And I got people saying, “Oh gee, GDPR because we are in Europe.” It’s like, “Guys, if I’m going to die, I don’t care if they have my information.” That’s the point where people really need to balance the whole thing, right? Obviously, we protect the information and the whole thing, but in those situations is like hey, there’s so many things we can do. There are countless opportunities out there.
Corey: The way that I square that circle personally has always been it’s about informed consent, when if people are given a choice, then an awful lot of those objections that people have seemed to melt away. Provided, of course, that is an actual choice and it’s not one of those, “Well, you can either choose to”—quote-unquote—“Choose to do this, or you can pay $9,000 a month extra.” Which is, that’s not really a choice. But as long as there’s a reasonable way to get informed consent, I think that people don’t particularly mind, I think it’s when they wind up feeling that they have been spied upon without their knowledge, that’s when everything tends to blow up. It turns out, if you tell people in advance what you’re going to do with their information, they’re a lot less upset. And I don’t mean burying it deep and the terms and conditions.
Guillermo: And that’s a good example. We run a demo with one of our customers showing them how dangerous the public information you have out there. You usually sign and click and give rights to everybody. We found in Stack Overflow, there was a user that you just have the username there, nothing else. And we build a platform with six terabytes of information grabbing from Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many other social media channels, and we show how we identify that this guy was living in Bangalore in India and was working for a specific company out there.
So, people was like, “Damn, just having that name, you end up knowing that?” It’s like there’s so much information out there of value. And we’ve seen other companies doing that illegally in other places, you know, Cambridge Analytics and things like that. But that’s the risk of giving your information for free out there.
Corey: It’s always a matter of trade-offs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and honestly, if there were it feels like we wouldn’t have cloud providers; we would just have the turnkey solution that gives the same thing that everyone needs and calls it good. I dream of such a day, but it turns out that customers are different, people are different, and there’s no escaping that.
Guillermo: [laugh]. Well, you mentioned dreamer; I dream direct routing between satellites, and look where I am; I’m just in the cloud, one step lower. [laugh].
Corey: You know, bit by bit, we’re going to get there one way or another, for an altitude perspective. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where’s the right place to find you?
Guillermo: Well, I have the @IaaSgeek Twitter account, and you can find me on LinkedIn gruizesteban there. Just people wants to talk about anything there, I’m open to any kind of conversation. Just feel free to reach out. And it was a pleasure finally meeting you, in person. Not—well in person; through a camera, at least being in the show with you.
Corey: Other than on the other side of a Twitter feed. No, I hear you.
Guillermo: [laugh].
Corey: We will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:30:43]. Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.
Guillermo: Thanks very much. So, you soon.
Corey: Guillermo Ruiz, Director of OCI Developer Evangelism. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment, to which I will respond with a surprise $270,000 bill.
Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.