How do you provide highly available, scalable services to a cloud-native app that’s been architected with microservices? Just stand up a whole lot of virtual IPs and pools? Not exactly.

You need both more capability and more automation. You need a service mesh. And today on the Datanauts podcast we’re joined by sponsor AVI Networks to find out what a service mesh is and how it supports cloud-native applications.

We’re joined by Ashish Shah, Senior Director of Products at AVI Networks.

Broadly speaking, a service mesh ensures that the various components and services that make up a widely distributed application can reach each other using techniques such as service discovery, load balancing, and handling failures.

The Datanauts and Ashish drill into the major concepts of a service mesh, examine critical components and the architectural approaches, and explore the AVI Networks platform.

Find out more at AVI Networks and check out this special offer for Datanauts listeners: you can claim a free backpack here.

 

Show Links:

What is a Service Mesh and how Istio fits in – IBM developerWorks

What’s A Service Mesh? And Why Do I Need One? – Buoyant

AVI Networks Service Mesh – AVI Networks

Application services for OpenShift-Kubernetes clusters – White paper

Tutorial 1: Deploying Production-Ready Container Apps – AVI Networks

Tutorial Part 2

Tutorial Part 3

AVI Networks on Twitter

AVI Networks on LinkedIn

Ashish Shah on Twitter

Ashish Shah on LinkedIn

It’s back to the flea market of ideas that is the Web for the latest in the Datanauts’ ‘Found On The Internet’ series.

Chris and Ethan sift through online baubles, notions, and curiosities to find just the right accent pieces to decorate the bridge of the Datanauts Starship.

Our finds for Series 3 include container adoption, storage network topologies, PowerShell, IT blame culture, and so much more to delight and amaze!

Show Links:

Microsoft: Embrace Containers or Face Extinction – Container Journal

Hope Versus Reality, One Year Later: An Update on Containers – CloudFoundry (PDF)

Kubernetes The Hard Way – Kelsey Hightower via GitHub

Kubernetes: Up and Running – O’Reilly Books

Distributed Storage Network Topology – Niels Hagoort.com

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Products – The Next Platform

v6.0.0-beta.8 release of PowerShell Core – GitHub

PowerShell – GitHub

Visual Studio Code September 2017 (version 1.17) – Visual Studio

Reminder – John Allspaw

Blameless Postmortems and a Just Culture – Code as Craft

Show 357: Beyond Name, Blame And Shame In IT – Packet Pushers

How to handle abandoned projects, Take Two – Katie McLaughlin (YouTube)

Summit: The PowerShell Community’s Global Meet-Up

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 – EventBrite

STARWest: Make Your Team Awesome, Yes You Can!

Serverless Conference 2017 Interviews – The Cube

Tracking cloud costs seems like it should be pretty straightforward: you pay X cents per time unit per resource used.

But as cloud customers quickly learn, costs can get complicated pretty quickly. It can be hard to predict costs month by month, you may get billing surprises, and organizations can spend more than they need to.

Today on the Datanauts starship we’ve beamed aboard Corey Quinn, a cloud economist and consultant who helps customers understand their AWS bills and how to manage their spending. He’s the founder of Quinn Advisory Group, and also writes a free newsletter called Last Week In AWS.

We start the conversation by drilling into how AWS bills for its services, and then talk about how costs and billing tie back to business decisions. You have to understand why you’re moving into the cloud, and how you’re factoring your applications, to really understand what you’ll be spending.

We also explore reasons why bills grow unexpectedly, learn how to set alerts to catch overages, and discuss why the lowest bid for your cloud business shouldn’t be your primary decision point.

While our conversation focuses mostly on AWS, it applies to any public cloud offering.

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Sponsor: LiveAction

Join LiveAction and Ethan Banks for a live Webinar on Thursday, October 26th to learn how to reduce the complexity of SD-WAN technology adoption, provide service assurance governance with proactive insights, and deliver the promised performance enhancement for a better application experience.

Register here today and mark your calendar to join us on October 26th at 2:00 pm Eastern.

Show Links:

Quinn Advisory Group

Last Week In AWS

Dealing with a nasty AWS Billing Surprise: Beware the defaults. – HackerNoon

Ryan Hellyer’s AWS Nightmare: Leaked Access Keys Result in a $6,000 Bill Overnight – WP Tavern

Today on the Datanauts, our infrastructure rocket navigates the rapidly expanding universe of cryptocurrencies–specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum–and the Blockchain distributed database. We also touch on the Grid+ project.

All of these topics could get their own episode (or more) so this is more of an introductory show than a deep dive.

But we’ve got three smart guests to help us make sense of it all: Mark D’Agostino, Managing Partner at ConsenSys Enterprise and Strategy Lead at Grid+; Karl Kreder, Director of Energy at ConsenSys; and Alex Miller, Software Engineer at ConsenSys and Software Lead at Grid+.

Sponsor: Datadog

This week’s show is sponsored by Datadog. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Sign up for a free trial and get a free T-shirt at datadog.com/datanauts.

Show Links:

ConsenSys

What is Blockchain Technology? A Step-by-Step Guide For Beginners – BlockGeeks

What is Cryptocurrency: Everything You Need To Know – BlockGeeks

SXSW Preview: What’s the Next Generation Internet? Surprise: It’s all about the Blockchain! – Don Tapscott via LinkedIn

Grid+ FAQ – Grid+

Grid+ Blog – Grid+

Are you still hosting your own e-mail? Is it on Microsoft Exchange? Are you maybe a little sick of that?

What if you could outsource some of those pesky infrastructure problems to the cloud?

Well, of course, you can. Microsoft Office 365 would love to help you with that. Catch a ride on board the mail migration rocket on this episode of the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is Theresa Miller. She’s founder of 24×7 IT Connection. She’s a consultant and analyst, and she also blogs and hosts the Current Status podcast.

Theresa and the Datanauts examine the business case for, and technology implications of, migrating from on-premises email to a cloud service.

They also look at the migration process and its impact on users, and discuss the operational challenges of co-existence when IT is managing both the premises system and the cloud service.

Sponsor: LiveAction

Join LiveAction and Ethan Banks for a live Webinar on Thursday, October 26th to learn how to reduce the complexity of SD-WAN technology adoption, provide service assurance governance with proactive insights, and deliver the promised performance enhancement for a better application experience.

Register here today and mark your calendar to join us on October 26th at 2:00 pm Eastern.

Today on the Datanauts, Chris Wahl undertakes an away mission to the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, FL. (Don’t worry, he’s not wearing a red shirt.)

He’s beamed into Microsoft’s Podcast Center to record a live episode with Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow at Microsoft and Chief Architect for Azure Infrastructure and the creator of Powershell.

Chris and Jeffrey delve into the latest developments in PowerShell and PowerShell Core, explore features and use cases for Azure Stack (which was just released to general availability), and review key announcements from Ignite for Azure, SQL Server 2017, and more. Ethan Banks pipes in remotely to offer his takeaways.

Show Links:

Monad Manifesto – Jeffrey Snover

Datacenter transformation – a roadmap for platforms, processes, and people – Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft Ignite presentation)

Azure Stack – Microsoft

Configuring and Operating Microsoft Azure Stack – Microsoft Course

In distributed storage systems and hyperconverged environments, storage is scattered across a bunch of hosts all over the network. So does performance suffer if a workload’s data is across the network somewhere?

Should workloads have local data to perform as well as they ought? In other words, does data locality matter?

The Datanauts beam aboard storage expert Howard Marks to dive into the issue of data locality. Howard is a well known writer, speaker, consultant and Chief Scientist at DeepStorage. He’s also co-host of the Greybeards on Storage podcast.

Howard and the Datanauts discuss the basics of data locality and storage networking; explore the myriad bottlenecks and latency sources that can affect an application’s interaction with a storage system; and delve into the issues around hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), data locality, and replication and resiliency.

Sponsor: Datadog

This week’s show is sponsored by Datadog. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Sign up for a free trial and get a free T-shirt at datadog.com/datanauts.

Show Links:

DeepStorage

HCI And Data Locality – DeepStorage

Evaluating Nutanix’ original & unique implementation of Data Locality – Josh Odgers

Looking for the silver bullet that’s not there? My (and Datrium) response to the Data Locality debacle – Andre Leibovici

In this episode the Datanauts bust the ultimate silo: the executive suite.

We delve into the role of the CIO to understand the priorities and job functions of this position. We also want to learn how engineers, operators, and technologists can work with these and other executives to meet goals and align with business needs.

Our guide into the mind of the CIO is Tim Crawford, a principal at strategic consulting firm AVOA. Tim is a former CIO, and he now advises CIOs and other executives on transforming their IT organizations.

We talk with Tim about the role of the CIO and that person’s job function within an organization, and examine the differences between traditional and transformational CIOs. In essence, a CIO’s role, while focused on the business, is to understand how to take advantage of technology to drive the organization.

Tim also shares his insights into what keeps CIOs up at night, and the appeal of the cloud for executives. And for those with an eye for the executive suite, he offers advice on the skillsets and knowledge required to move up the ladder.

Show Links:

The difference between the Traditional CIO and the Transformational CIO – Tim Crawford (AVOA)

On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft – Bits or pieces?

The Datanauts celebrate their 100th episode with an Ask Me Anything-style show.

Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks answer questions about the future of object storage; VXLAN, VTEP and getting traffic out of the data center (nice to know people didn’t hold back); and how to become a full-stack engineer.

Listeners also wanted to know what advice the hosts would give themselves if they could travel back in time to the start of their podcasting journeys, which episodes they’re most proud of, and unexpected or surprising things they’ve learned.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for the first hundred shows and offered encouragement, constructive criticism, and show ideas. Let us know what you want to hear in the next batch!

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

Datanauts 001 – Hyper Convergence with Scott D. Lowe – The very first episode

Datanauts 058: Kubernetes – A Deep-Dive Introduction – Ethan’s favorite episode

Datanauts 065: Cloudy With A Chance Of Ops – Chris’s favorite episode

EthanCBanks.com

WahlNetwork.com

Microservices is an application architecture that assembles applications from discrete components and services that are loosely coupled. These components and services are linked together over a network and interact via APIs.

By working with decoupled components, you can change and update individual elements without having to update the entire application stack. This can speed up release cycles and enable more flexible operations.

At the same time, however, distributed systems can be vulnerable to issues such as latency and connectivity problems.

The Datanauts drill into the pros and cons of microservices to help you understand if this is the right approach for your organization.

They also look at the infrastructure impacts of this architecture, and discuss ways to transition to microservices without blowing up your applications. They also look at the relationship between microservices and cloud native applications.

Our guest is Bryan Boreham, Director of Engineering at Weaveworks.

Show Links:

Microservices.io

Weaveworks

Datanauts 016: The Realities Of Hybrid Cloud