Giant Conversations

By Giant Swarm GmbH

Big Ideas. Authentic Perspectives.

Join the Giant Swarm squad each week as we discuss it all — from leading-edge cloud technologies to people-first philosophies — in our new podcast, Giant Conversati... more

· Technology

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FAQs about Giant Conversations:

How many episodes does Giant Conversations have?

The podcast currently has 33 episodes available.

Giant Conversations episodes:

October 03, 2024GC - #23 A day in the life of a maintainer
James Strong and Marco Ebert, both NGINX maintainers open up about becoming maintainers and the good bad and ugly of their passion behind the code.
Giant Conversations Episode #23
Episode Date: October 3, 2024
Topic: Ingress NGINX - or: A day in the life of a maintainer.
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Staring:
James Strong
Marco Ebert
A day in the life of a maintainer.

"Wait, you're doing what? Coding? In your free time? For free? Nobody is paying you?"
In this episode of Giant Conversations we would like to dive into the world of Open Source, find out how you can contribute to it, which challenges you might face, which lessons you can learn, and how you can become a reviewer or a maintainer of a project.
We therefore invited James Strong, Isovalent at Cisco, and Marco Ebert, Giant Swarm, both maintainers of the Kubernetes Ingress NGINX project, to have a chat about their past, present and future experiences and challenges.
Additional Resources
A layered approach to Networking and Kubernetes by James Strong
November 12th at KubeCon: Securing the Future of Ingress-NGINX
[SIG-Network] Ingress NGINX meeting
Meets Every 2 weeks, Thursdays, 11a-12p USA est.
...more
45min
September 26, 2024GC - #22 I wish Zach was Here
Oliver and Tommy muse over the absolute most impressive and good tech news. Zach wasn't invited but would have been nice to have him there.
Giant Conversations Episode #22
Episode Date:
Topic: It's the news!
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Giant Swarm 2024 Onsite Marrakech
https://www.clubmed.de/r/marrakech-la-palmeraie/y
https://www.inaracamp.com/les-terrasses-dagafay/
Swarmalicious News
IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost. IBM continues it's effort to bolster its IT and FinOps capabilities as enterprises increasingly look to better manage their increasingly complex cloud and on-prem infrastructure.
Linux is now a RTOS. PREEMPTRT Real-Time Kernel Support Finally Merged into Linux 6.12 After 20 Years in Development!. PREEMPTRT changes the game by making the Linux kernel way more predictable for real-time tasks. It does this by reducing the time the system can ignore high-priority processes. The kernel becomes fully "preemptible," meaning almost any part of the system can stop what it's doing to handle a more urgent task immediately.
What the heck is Platform-as-a-Product?. Colleague Dominik Kress spoke about these talks in episode 21.
Message from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy - They will return to office 5 days a week
A safety net against "whoops, I just deleted production cluster - Introducing Kubesafe. Colleague Łukasz Piątkowski mentioned he hasn't installed it yet, but is looking forward to testing it.
1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing - The 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024) will bring together researchers and practitioners with a keen interest in low carbon and sustainable computing. The workshop will provide a forum for sharing new ideas, for presenting ongoing work and early results, as well as for bringing forward well-founded criticism.
I wish Zach was here
gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website and more information can be found on Cloud Flare Radar: https://radar.cloudflare.com/
Redefining CNAPP: A Complete Guide To the Future of Cloud Security. Out CTO Timo Derstappen went for it and prompted an entire Podcast from this article using Googles notebooklm
...more
41min
September 12, 2024GC - #21 Platform-as-a-Product
Dominik Kress joins Tommy Hobin to discuss his speaker circuit and introduce Platform-as-a-Product
Giant Conversations Episode #09
Topic
Talking the talk: Platform-as-a-Product with Dominik Kress
Hosted by:
Tommy Hobin
Starring: Dominik Kress
Main topic: Interviewing Dominik Kress
Dominik Kress joins Tommy Hobin to discuss his speaker circuit and introduce Platform-as-a-Product
Questions:
Tell us about your background - how did you decide to join Giant Swarm
What are your functions here at Giant Swarm
You've traveled quite a bit discussing Platform-as-a-Product: Hometown Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, more more more…
The title of your last talk on Container Days: "What the heck is Platform-as-a-Product? - How Product Thinking drives your platform Maturity" - so what the heck is it?
What have your audiences been like - who attends a Platform-as-a-Product talk
Any questions you've received from the community where you had to rethink your talk?
Do we do Platform-as-a-Product within Giant Swarm?
What does this mean for Giant Swarm customers?
The CNCF Platform Maturity Model - What exactly is it?
Links to Platform-as-a-Product
How Platform-as-a-Product drives cloud native platform maturity
Introducing the Observability Platform
...more
35min
September 06, 2024GC - #20 Is this thing on?
Oliver Thylmann and his token American tackle the latest in tech news
Giant Conversations Episode #20
Topic: Is this thing on - it's the news!
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Swarmalicious News
Are we live - i so pale
Elastic Search is Open Source again
Elastic is adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks. We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have. Note from Joe Salisbury: The tl;dr is that we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL
Lidl’s Cloud Gambit: Europe’s Shift to Sovereign Computing
Although there is the AWS Sovereign Cloud. Lidl is stepping up as the potential "low-cost" EuroCloud alternative. Fueled by GDPR, businesses are demanding cloud services that operate entirely within the EU’s borders.
STACKIT –The German business cloud
Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Schule und LIDL?
– LIDL lohnt sich.
Reclaim is joining Dropbox: Popular AI assisted calendar Reclaim.ai has been purchased by Dropbox.
Beware, there is an ongoing spambot attack in #GitHub issues. Where random people suggest "the fix" is to download a file from mediafire.com.
Good deal on up to 24 O'reilly books on Software Architecture on Humble Bundle which ends in more than 2 weeks: Theory of a Humble Bundle:
You pay what you want
A portion of the cost goes to Charity
Play or read online like a usual product
Example: O'Reilly books value: €1,274. In the Humble Bundle, you can pay as little as €1 for 3 items, €16 for 9 items, etc.
Exploring China’s 0-day vulnerability research capabilities:: Chinese businesses above a certain size must have a representative that reports to the Ministry of State Security. There is also a mandate that if you as a Chinese researcher/company find a vulnerability, you have to tell the government. This allows the Government to incentivize and coordinate the research and find "boatloads" of vulnerabilities.
Platform engineering Q&A with Kelsey Hightower and Kaspar von Grünberg: Great interview with Kelsey. A few topics he covers:
Communication with executives
PO's and Big picture over micro-improvements
Will Platform Engineering end the era of dominance of the primary cloud provider
Security
AI
AI News
AI Search Engine for Research: Also mentioned from Oliver, Eric Schmidt predicts a groundbreaking shift in AI for 2024, with models uniting large context windows, agents, and text-to-action.
OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's new safety-focused AI startup SSI raises $1 billion
News to me
Is my blue your blue?
Draw an iceberg and see how it will float
Easter Egg: https://youtu.be/n3k5QlQvdio?si=eT_Qp-s0K0-t7ijR
...more
42min
August 30, 2024GC - #19 We're Baaack!
After a short break, Oli and Tommy tackle the big tech news
Giant Conversations Episode #19
Topic: News from the Ecosystem
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Swarmalicious News
CNCF accepted Flatcar for incubation:
Quote from Thilo Fromm from Microsoft mentioned on Mastadon "After 18 months of work (much more counting preps from before we filed the request." On January 6th Flatcar submitted to be a CNCF project. Was voted in favor at 81% (threshhold needed to be 66% to pass).
CNCF project, External Secrets - ESO Inc. is launched
From an advisor of ESO "Let me be super clear on this. Like (u/dshurupov) said, ESO is a CNCF project. It will not change, it will not be hijacted, it will not be closed it will not be taken away from the community. :)"
Crowdstrike External Technical Root Cause Analysis. In a short discussion. Our colleague Joe Salisbury ran the analysis and summed it up for us: "The report on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform incident dated August 6, 2024, details a system crash caused by a mismatch in input parameters for the IPC Template Type in sensor version 7.11. A new Template Type requiring 21 inputs was only provided 20 by the Content Interpreter, leading to an out-of-bounds read and crashes. Mitigations include validating input fields at compile time, adding runtime bounds checks, expanding test coverage, and implementing staged deployments for new Template Instances. The report also outlines ongoing improvements and third-party
reviews to prevent future occurrences."
Improvement of oncall experience, but only supports datadog for now: Opslane Reducing alert fatigue for on-call engineers. Colleagues Theo and Simon had an interesting conversation about Opslane as a tool. Some good insights: The tool offers context and solutions for actionable alerts, supposedly it can grab context from slack or a runbook base. Simoon diagreed mentioning that nothing can beat a well-written Ops-Recipe.
Is it time to version Observability? (signs point to "yes")
Charity Majors from Honeycomb wrote in a recent blog explaining the differences in what she deems Observability 1.0 in comparison to Observability 2.0. She Breaks down her thoughts about the outdated explanation of the three pillars of observability: metrics, logs and traces. Charity defines and breaks down Observability 2.0 into arbitrarily-wide structured log events and a single source of truth.
A brief history of block storage at AWS: Great article with a lot of interesting data giving you an idea of the scale, like delivering 140 trillion operations across a fleet of SSDs a DAY. Adding Nitro offload cards to speed up networking by not having the hypervisor dedicate CPU cycles to networking.
AI News
Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results. Google has put the hard word on publishers: you can block your stuff from the AI feature — but then you won’t show up in searches.
Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet - Podcast with Lex Fridman: Arvind Srinivas is CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans find answers to questions on the Internet.
News to me
Invisible laser beam detects what a MacBook user is typing: The engineer pointed the laser at the back of the computer and was able to decipher the keys typed based on the vibrations of the computer. MacBooks turned out to be the perfect target for the attack, because it works best when you have a very reflective surface to use as the laser target – and the Apple logo on the back of a MacBook screen has an almost mirror-like finish.
Flight-free holidays designed by sustainable travel experts including trains, buses, ferries and accommodation from Byway
Discover the world’s best routes with the route planner in ROADS
...more
40min
July 12, 2024GC - #18 1:1 with Alexis Richardson - Listen Up
1:1 with Alexis Richardson
Giant Conversations Episode #18
Topic
Meet Alexis Richardson
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Alexis Richardson
Main topic: Interview
Let's start with you, where do you come from, what did you study and how did you end up in the K8s space? There is the saying: we stumbled upon our greatest successes, but you only stumble if you are walking? Did you just walk where you liked it or did you target something?
You then started WeaveWorks, what was the idea, what was it that the big VCs that invested believed in?
How's your view on the future of open source changed over the years?
You've been a thoughtful leader during your tenure, what's your advice to new leaders in tech?
If you could take over kubernetes.io for a day. Clean slate, one page, to everyone in our ecosystem and add your your idea or message. AND everyone has to do "it" — what would be your message and why?
Questions from Swarmies:
From Martin: Despite the early interest in gimlet-io/capacitor as a UI for flux, there hasn't been a commit to the repo in over 2 months leaving many to wonder if the project has been abandoned. With this in mind, and with all indications being that nobody else is currently looking at UIs for Flux beyond what we are doing with Backstage, where do you see the future being?
...more
1h 10min
July 04, 2024GC - #17 Happy 10th Birthday Giant Swarm
It's Giant Swarm's 10th (and Oli had a birthday recently too). Tune in to the musings of your hosts who discuss Microsoft's Project Natick, the trick to a cleaner Google search, Rakuten Viber, and AI in all directions.
Giant Conversations Episode #17
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Main topic: Happy Birthday Giant Swarm
Happy birthday to Oliver Thylmann and Giant Swarm!
Swarmalicious News
Microsoft waves goodbye to underwater data centers: Microsoft's Project Natick was deemed a successful trial for it's testing grounds but has no plans on submersing any more data centers. Underwater data centers saw one-eighth of the failure rate compared to on-land counterparts:
Pros of underwater data centers:
Low cooling costs
Abundant real estate
Potentially sustainable energy sourcing (eg. electricity from wave)
Cons
Higher hardware maintenance and upgrade costs
Higher network costs (1 cable = single point of failure)
Physical security (eg. sabotage)
On Twitter, Ken Shirriff took it upon himself to open up a subway paper ticket.
The goal was to find out how the RFID works and how could it be manufactured cheaply enough to mass produce.
You can buy an 8-inch silicon wafer with these chips for $9000. That sounds expensive, but a wafer holds an amazing 100,587 tiny chips. That yields a price of nine cents per chip, making them cheap enough to use in disposable tickets.
Perses, a Grafana alternative is currently in the process of becoming a sandbox CNCF project.
Marian mentioned this about the project "My first impression: It works. It appears familiar (for a Grafana user). The look and feel isn’t as polished as Grafana’s." Other comments focused on GitOps as Code and
AI in the News
OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform
The Trick to a Cleaner Google Search. The search added AI overviews on top of older extras, but you can get rid of all that. Once the trick is used, there is no surfacing metadata like address or link info or no knowledge panels, but also, no ads. Tommy couldn't handle the parameters of basic URL so wen to https://udm14.com/ to get AI Fee search.
Rakuten Viber’s New AI-powered Feature Summarizes Group Chats in an Instant. Viber has over 1.17 Billion users globally. Used commonly in Southeast Asia, or Central and Eastern Europe.
News to me
Is 2024 the year for robots in hotels? In short, the answer is "No" but Co-Bots are being experimented with since the opening of the Henn na Hotel in Tokyo 9 years ago, which is staffed by robots and humans..
The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnastics. SPOILER: It doesn't look real at all!
...more
28min
June 28, 2024GC - #16 Giant Swarm Trainings
Account Engineer Lorenzo Soligo joins us to reveal Giant Swarm's approach to client education on cloud native technologies and our infrastructure.
Giant Conversations Episode #16
Topic
Giant Swarm's Training Schedule Explained
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Lorenzo Soligo
Main topic: Giant Swarm's Training Schedule
Present Training Schedule:
Management 101: high level overview of management at Giant Swarm
Giant Swarm 101: introduction to Giant Swarm (company, support model, architecture, …)
Kubernetes 101: introduction to Kubernetes (why use it, how to deploy an app, …)
Troubleshooting and Best Practices 101: how to troubleshoot apps in Kubernetes and best practices to be used to avoid problems (PDB, VPA, HPA, debug containers, using Hubble, …)
GitOps 101: what is GitOps, why to use it, desired state, why not all-in on Jenkins, …
Security 101: introduction to the holistic security required in Cloud Native environments + toolings
Observability 101: what is observability, why is it important, which tools do we provide, …
Future Training Schedule:
Connectivity 101
Advanced GitOps
Advanced Kubernetes
...more
30min
June 20, 2024GC - #15 Giant Swarm On-sites & Mansions
Tommy jumps on with Joshua Olson-Kerrigan (otherwise known as Dr. OK) to talk On-sites and mansions, with a cameo from Oliver from his On-site.
Giant Conversations Episode #15
Topic Giant Mansions: How we bring a remote team together
Hosted by:
Joshua Olson - Kerrigan
Tommy Hobin
* Cameo from Oliver Thylmann
Main topic
On-sites and Mansions
Intro to Josh
Human Resources / HR Teams Involvement
Why we do On-sites
Planning and Logistics
Benefits
Retro's done in the past
Slide Deck to Teams' mansions
Has Team-Team noticed any "changes" in the team(s) after an onsite? (negative or positive but looking for positive of course)
On Location
Program / Agenda During on-sites
Activities (Planned vs. spontaneous)
Locations we've been
Frequency: (used to do 2 per year)
Team Mansions vs. Company On-sites
History (One Villa in Mallorca)
Budgets team coordination, why it's important to coordinate Giant Mansions
Personal - type questions:
What makes our on-sites different?
With an unlimited budget, what / where would you go and do?
Where we've been
https://www.giantswarm.io/hubfs/Illustrations/gs23-team-onsite-map-2023.svg
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14CJxNU42BR1Re6mVcSjeMqh_Cdd_u_dQY4T1cxKS2Nc/edit#slide=id.g268ad0de9ad_1_6
Further Reading
https://www.giantswarm.io/blog/all-work-all-play-the-giant-mansions
...more
33min
June 13, 2024GC - #14 Total Recall
Enjoy the musings of Oliver Thylmann and Tommy Hobin as they discuss Kubernetes Ecosystem news, AI and our Slack channel #YELLING
Giant Conversations Episode #14
Topic News from the Ecosystem
Hosted by:
Oliver Thylmann
Tommy Hobin
Swarmalicious News
Introducing Hydrophone: a lightweight runner designed to streamline Kubernetes tests using the official conformance images released by the Kubernetes release team.
Microsoft's new recall feature seems to be a really good idea… This very simple tool extracts and displays data from the Recall feature in Windows 11, providing an easy way to access information about your PC's activity snapshots.
@kubernetesio, the official account for Kubernetes - K8s, seems to have been silently deleted or deactivated because it is underage
Understanding DNS in Kubernetes Delve into DNS resolution mechanics Kubernetes DNS policies like ClusterFirst, Default, and None, and their impact on DNS queries within Pods.
IT pros rush to cloud-native Kubernetes platforms to speed app development
AI News
Series B Funding Round xAI is pleased to announce our series B funding round of $6 billion.
CNCF AI Whitepaper just landed and gives good overview over the landscape
Apple signs deal with OpenAI for iOS, still wants Google as an 'option'
Elon Musk threatens Apple ban over OpenAI integration, cybersecurity experts raise alarms
NVIDIA stock split 1-10
News to me
Our colleague Antonia von den Driesch ran keyword stats in our #YELLING channel and came up with these metrics:
SLACK
AZURE
GITHUB/AWS
MICROSOFT5
HELM
Giant Swarm & Friends happening again on July 9th: Developer Productivity
...more
35min

FAQs about Giant Conversations:

How many episodes does Giant Conversations have?

The podcast currently has 33 episodes available.