Today’s Day Two Cloud is a discussion about how to build your multicloud fluency. That is, having knowledge of, and competence in, more than one cloud. The short answer? Learn to code. That’s the position of our guest, and he brings his justifications.
Of course, “learn to code” is easy to say but harder to do, so we talk about skills development, where to go deep and where to go broad, how many clouds to learn, which tools and stacks to focus on, cloud-native vs. third-party infrastructure tools, plus advice and resources.
Our guest is Forrest Brazeal, Head of Content at Google Cloud and a well-known industry blogger.
Takeaways:
- Learn to code.
- Two clouds is the sweet spot.
- Go deep on your 1st cloud, broad on your 2nd.
Sponsor: StrongDM
StrongDM is secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. StrongDM proxies connections between your infrastructure and Sysadmins, giving your IT team auditable, policy-driven, IaC-configurable access to whatever they need, wherever they are. Find out more at StrongDM.com/packetpushers.
Sponsor: ITProTV
Start or grow your IT career with online training from ITProTV. From CompTIA to Cisco and Microsoft, ITProTV offers more than 5,800 hours of on-demand training. Courses are listed by category, certification, and job role. Day Two Cloud listeners can sign up and save 30% off all plans. Go to itpro.tv/daytwocloud and use promo code CLOUD to save 30%.
Tech Bytes: Singtel
On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, we discuss the importance of getting the underlay network architecture correct with sponsor Singtel. And we don’t mean just the circuits. We mean the management of the underlay as well.
Show Links:
@forrestbrazeal – Forrest on Twitter
Cloud Resume Challenge Book – Forrest Brazeal
Welcome To Qwiklabs – YouTube
The multicloud gelatinous cube – Gartner
Transcript:
[00:00:01.090] – EthanSponsor StrongDM is secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. Strongdm proxies connections between your infrastructure and Sysadmins, giving your It team auditable, policy driven IEC configurable access to whatever they need, wherever they are. Find out more@strongdm.com PacketPushers this episode of Day Two Cloud is brought to you in part by ITProTV Start or grow your It career with online It training from ITProTV, and we have a special offer for all you amazing Day Two Cloud listeners. Sign up and save 30% off all plans. [00:00:52.650] – Ned
Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today we’re talking about multi cloud fluency. What does that mean? It means having knowledge of more than one cloud. And our guest today is the one and only Forrest Brazeal. And he has some rather contentious things to say during the course of the episode. Ethan, what stuck out to you? [00:01:13.590] – Ethan
You mean you set me up for that, man? Learn to code. Learn to code. [00:01:17.830] – Ned
Yeah. [00:01:18.130] – Ethan
Forrest takes a very hard line on the whole you need to learn to code thing. And we have a pretty good discussion about it. And we have Forrest justify why he is so insistent that folks that are going to become multicloud fluent learn to code. [00:01:33.630] – Ned
Or even just cloud engineers at all. So if you’re curious about that justification, enjoy this episode with Forest Brazil, head of content at Google Cloud. Forest, welcome to Day Two Cloud. And before we jump into the topic at hand, can you tell the good folks out there a little bit about yourself? Who are you and what you do? [00:01:52.050] – Forrest
Sure thing. It’s great to be here. My name is Forrest Brazeal. I’ve been building and educating folks on the cloud for a long time as an engineer, a manager of engineers, a consultant at companies ranging from startups all the way up to the Fortune 50. The company I work for now is Google Cloud. I’m the head of content there, and that’s a title that kind of is what you make of it. But I am fortunate to lead a really talented team, and we kind of work to help tell the story of Google Cloud to the world. [00:02:19.890] – Ned
Okay. And when you say content, is that just any media that you can get your hands on? Singing songs, doing videos, all of the jazz. [00:02:28.480] – Forrest
I am definitely infamous for singing tech songs, and you can find those scattered around on the Internet. But yeah, it’s all forms of media discovered and yet to be discovered. [00:02:38.010] – Ned
All right. Awesome. Well, I definitely recommend checking out the songs. Listeners have not checked them out. They’re awesome. But we’re not here to talk about singing today. We’re here to talk about multi cloud skills. And let’s start with the most basic of basics. When you’re talking about multicloud. And this is based off a really awesome blog post that you put up recently. What are you talking about when you’re talking about multi cloud? Is this exclusively the big three? Ish? [00:03:04.650] – Forrest
Yeah. [00:03:05.040] – Forrest
So my background is with the major public cloud providers. I was an AWS hero for a long time before kind of making the switch over to the other cloud and working for Google. And so that’s where my head was at when I wrote this post. But I do make it clear, as I’m talking about this concept of multi cloud skills, that it’s not just about the big providers, and it’s not even just about the smaller providers like Linode, Digital Ocean, those. But it’s really any kind of a SAS product or third party product you can integrate as well. I’ll give you an example. Aws had an outage recently. Google cloud had their outages too. I’m not here to say one cloud provider has more outages or fewer than the other, but they had an outage where their DNS was out. And some people were saying, well, I can’t fail over to another region like I had planned because I actually don’t have the ability to edit my DNS configurations. And so if I had been just running DNS like on Cloudflare, but everything else was in AWS, that would have removed that particular failure mode from my design. [00:04:02.420] – Forrest
I would consider that to be a multi cloud architecture, even though it’s literally just public cloud plus an external DNS provider. I think that’s a completely reasonable thing to talk about. [00:04:11.130] – Ethan
Is multi cloud also in your definition than if I’m hosting cloudlike services privately? [00:04:18.270] – Forrest
No, I probably would not use that definition. I’d use a different term, like hybrid cloud. It’s funny, I actually heard someone use the term multi Prem recently, which kind of scared me to death. [00:04:29.370] – Ethan
Well, okay, I’m glad you qualified that, because multi cloud seems like it’s taking over what hybrid cloud and multi cloud used to mean as an all in one convenient term. So for purposes of our conversation, that multi cloud means things you’re not doing on premises. [00:04:45.150] – Forrest
Yeah, it said more than one of the three major public cloud providers is kind of the way I would set the bar for this discussion. Not saying there’s anything wrong with having things on premises combined with in the cloud. That’s just a little bit different discussion. [00:04:58.360] – Ned
Now, in terms of folks getting into multi cloud, do you think that multi cloud is basically inevitable for all organizations, or can you really avoid it by focusing on a single cloud for all of your needs? [00:05:12.170] – Forrest
It really depends on your organization and particularly on the size of your organization. But past some probably distressingly small size, your organization is likely going to run into multiple cloud providers at some point. Liddellion, who’s a Gartner analyst, has a fantastic piece about this called the Multicloud Gelatinous Cube that I recommend. Everybody on this listening to this podcast, go ahead and read where she talks about the reasons that most organizations end up with multiple clouds. And it’s not always a strategic thing, like someone saying, Well, I just really feel like we need to have a posture where we have applications spread across two clouds for resiliency or to hedge our bets against lock in or something like that. I’m not saying that would be a good strategy even if you did have it, but a lot of people don’t have that strategy. It’s more like multi cloud. It’s just something that happens to them either because of acquisitions. I bought a company, I bought a little startup that was using Azure, and I don’t want to rebuild their whole stack. So we’re just going to kind of make them live in our AWS world. It could be a situation where you just kind of let multicloud happen to you because you have a best of breed service over here that you really want to use, but you have this other team that says, Well, I actually need to use some data services on cloud B. [00:06:20.540] – Forrest
So a lot of times we find that multicloud is just there at the end of the day and it’s not something that you plan for, but you’re going to have to find a way to deal with it, because just the fact that it wasn’t part of the initial strategy doesn’t mean that you’re not still going to have to secure it and make sure you have people that are on staff that know how to handle it. [00:06:37.130] – Ethan
What does that mean for individual contributors then, for us? Should an engineer special? Is it still possible if all I want to do is specialize in one cloud, that I can do that? Or do I really, as an IC, need to be thinking about I got to get good at more than one cloud at this point. [00:06:54.390] – Forrest
I think it’s kind of an overwhelming question to confront if you are someone who does not have cloud skills today, because it’s easy to say, well, you need to know multiple clouds. But if I know zero clouds, that’s not really a helpful piece of advice. So I would recommend, if you’re just starting your cloud journey, pick a cloud, pick a cloud, any cloud, and get good at it. Get hands on with it, get deep into it, build some projects, show some expertise. That’s what’s going to get you hired, rather than this mile wide, inch deep approach where you know some basic facts, but you haven’t really built anything of substance anywhere. However, if you’ve been in this game for a while, it’s quite likely that you’re going to end up encountering multiple cloud providers in your environment, unless you’re doing something like working for a consultancy or being an independent consultant, where you get to choose the specific type of projects you work on. And you can say, I’m going to pin myself to Google Cloud and I don’t ever want to see or touch a different cloud provider. You can get away with that to some extent if you’re an agency, but it’s harder to do if you’re in house somewhere where it’s a complex environment, and services are moving and changing over time. [00:07:59.690] – Forrest
I mean, think about it. What technology and history have you been able to pin yourself to and say, I’m going to learn just this, only this. My skills are never going to change and I’m going to be set till retirement. That’s not the way it works, right? So eventually you’re going to have to branch out. [00:08:13.250] – Ethan
It isn’t. To speak to your point, if you pick a cloud, any cloud, and just learn that one, and then you need to acquire skills in a different cloud. Well, some of those skills are portable, at least insofar as a lot of the concepts are very similar cloud to cloud. [00:08:28.470] – Forrest
They are similar cloud to cloud. And this is where I want to get into a really key nuance here, because it might be the case that you’re in house somewhere, you’re working in a shop. Let’s say it’s totally an AWS shop, or it’s totally a Google Cloud shop. And there’s no indication on the horizon that other cloud services are going to come in. There’s lots of places that are like that. They’re all in on one cloud provider. Maybe they’ve even got some deal with the cloud provider where they Azure financially incentivized to be all in. It’s unlikely that they’re going to expand much beyond that. It can still be to your advantage to know the basics of a second cloud provider because especially if you’re moving more up into like an architect world, when it’s time for you to make decisions, when it’s time for you to pattern match and figure out what combination of services you’re going to use to solve a problem, it really does behoove you to understand what else is out there in the landscape. You just mentioned that a lot of these providers have some basic concepts that are similar around how they do virtual networking, how they do IAM, but they’re also going to have subtle differences to how they build things. [00:09:27.080] – Forrest
So, for example, I might be building on Google Cloud and I might be thinking about this data warehousing solution I want to build on top of BigQuery. It might be really helpful for me to know, like, how Snowflake does it, which actually not one of the three big cloud providers that’s really big in the data space, might be helpful for me to know how Snowflake works so that I can make better choices, more informed choices around what I’m doing. Same if I’m in consulting, by the way, and focusing on one cloud provider. If I only provide AWS consulting, I still want my clients to know that I’ve thought about what Azure solution is to this problem and why I’m recommending they choose the AWS approach. It just helps my credibility, right? [00:10:03.170] – Ned
You could get asked a question about one of the other clouds you’re not focused on, and you don’t want to sit there like a deer in headlights and the consultant being like, I have no idea. You usually like to be able to say, I think I have a little bit of an idea, and then you can go back and do some research if you need to. But being able to give some portion of an answer and consulting is usually the clients like that. [00:10:24.830] – Forrest
Yeah. [00:10:25.150] – Forrest
I mean, nobody’s saying you have to pretend to be an expert in something you’re not an expert in, but situational awareness is just part of being a professional in this space. You’re not doing anyone any favors by sticking your head in the sand and saying, Well, I know Lambda and step function. So now I’m good. [00:10:39.970] – Ned
Now, you recently joined Google Cloud as head of content, but before that you mentioned you were an AWS hero and you were working for a cloud guru, which is like the first time we met, I think. Did the process of moving over to Google Cloud transform the way you’re thinking about learning cloud skills? [00:10:59.290] – Forrest
I think it’s been an ongoing evolution for me. I mean, even at a cloud guru, of course that was a quote unquote multi cloud shop because we were teaching and building about AWS and Azure and Google Cloud and all sorts of other things all at the same time. Prior to that, I had really been very AWS focused in my career. I had worked at multiple shops that were all in on AWS, and it’s been kind of a gradual process for me to expand my awareness beyond just that cloud provider. But yeah, my learning does continue to evolve to transform. And I think the things that I’ve learned and had exposure to since I’ve been at Google have helped me to understand that I’m a better technologist when I understand both clouds. And not only that, I believe it’s the case that the industry as a whole is a lot better when there’s healthy competition among the cloud providers. If AWS for some reason feels pressure to improve, like their billing and identity and their free tier things that are all differentiators for Google Cloud today, everybody wins, customers win. I think the cloud providers get better. [00:12:03.330] – Forrest
So I’m trying to do what I can to be a good citizen of the cloud community as a whole and try to advocate for best practices wherever I see them. [00:12:12.070] – Ned
If AWS could do anything about their Im permissions set up and whether they approach it, that would be fantastic. And I think maybe some of the pressure coming from Azure and Google and the way that they simplified that, you could see that change coming and then maybe not too distant future. That would be nice. I appreciate that. Now, obviously you didn’t start out knowing everything about the cloud, to be clear. [00:12:35.850] – Forrest
Still don’t. [00:12:37.630] – Ned
So you had to pick up skills and learn things along the way. Can you tell me a little bit about that learning journey, kind of where it started and how it’s evolved. [00:12:45.850] – Forrest
Yeah, it’s interesting. My cloud journey, I think like a lot of people evolved out of a more traditional It profile. I started my career on a help desk like a lot of people do. And there was a time in my career where I was an It field engineer and I was standing beside people’s computers, installing antivirus. I remember being in a surgery center one time and updating software on a machine during a live cataract surgery, which was a horrifying thing to have done all scrubbed up and try not to look at whatever shenanigans are going on during the surgery. But at some point, I became a database administrator and was working at a large company called Infor that was actually they just gone all in on AWS. Their CEO was the guy who got up on stage to reinvent and said, friends don’t let friends build data centers. And right after that, they started moving these massive ERP applications out of their private on premises data centers and moving them to AWS. This was like early 2014. I was part of the team that moved some of those first applications. So taking more traditional like SQL Server DBA skills, becoming a DevOps DBA, and then all of a sudden becoming a cloud database administrator, I went on from there building internal cloud tools and then moving into the world of consulting and building applications for a variety of different companies. [00:14:00.990] – Forrest
And so it was just a very ladder like process for me, step by step. And it’s hard to go back now and look at that and say, well, if someone had just told me everything I needed to know about the cloud seven or eight years ago that I could have just dived right in and been a really effective cloud engineer. I think to some extent you have to come to the surface and you almost have to recapitulate the history of it in yourself before you can really be an effective cloud engineer. Sort of like the old evolutionary diagrams that used to show the embryo becoming a fish and becoming a cow and all these things. I don’t know if that’s actually scientifically accurate anymore or not, but that’s sometimes how I think about my career as this evolution toward the modern cloud. I think it’s helpful if you can go through that. There are absolutely shortcuts, there are levers you can pull. Certification is one of them. I have several cloud certifications. Several are expired. Now, I probably shouldn’t admit that, but having worked today cloud guru and help many folks get certified there. I’m a fan of that as an approach. [00:14:59.950] – Forrest
But you have to get hands on. You have to build and understand why you’re building and what the history of it is. [00:15:05.340] – Ned
Yeah, that context is very important. As I came up through my tech career, I also started in more traditional roles in the data center, working help desk to start out with. And that cost me some soft skills that really apply to the cloud today. So I think there’s definitely a lot of value in having that context and background to technology. But if I’m a junior engineer just coming in, does it make sense for me to try to gather all that context up, or should I instead be focusing on the future and just learning about cloud and all the services that it includes? [00:15:39.070] – Forrest
Yeah. I mean, what even is a junior engineer that’s such an ill defined role, and it’s never been harder to get hired as a junior cloud engineer, a cloud associate. In the companies that are forward thinking enough and well built enough to be able to support roles like that, usually they’re putting a lot of support and expertise around those juniors to help them get up to speed. It’s not just throwing them into the deep end and saying, okay, you’re here. Now we assume you know the cloud and it’s gotten even harder in these pandemic times. Aks more and more people are working remote and relatively few companies feel comfortable, I think, onboarding juniors without being able to sit right next to them and pair program and all that. So to your question, how should a junior engineer approach learning cloud? It may be the case that you’re going to need to work your way into that cloud role through a series of more, maybe support oriented roles or other things. Maybe the case that you want to try to Polish up your coding skills and actually do some software engineering. It’s a lot easier to move into a cloud role from software engineering background than it is from an It background in terms of what people are willing to hire you for. [00:16:46.390] – Forrest
And sometimes there Azure companies that have a little bit better and more established, understood path for onboarding, let’s say a front end engineer than they do a back end or a cloud engineer. [00:16:58.570] – Ned
I want to dig into that a little bit because I came from an infrastructure background. So did Ethan. Sounds like you did as well to a certain degree. Why do you feel that it’s more difficult to make that transition if you come from a traditional infrastructure background? [00:17:12.040] – Forrest
There’s one word and the word is code. Code is the barrier. Code is the bridge. That’s what separates traditional It from cloud engineering. It’s something that’s inherent to you if you are in the software development world. It’s not inherent to you if you are a point and click DBA or you’re someone who’s been racking and stacking servers, that is what is probably preventing you from being an effective cloud engineer. If you’re trying to make that gap and you don’t know how to code. [00:17:36.400] – Ethan
Do you mean mostly infrastructure is code and pipelines the tooling around it or actual code? [00:17:42.140] – Forrest
I mean actual code? A cloud engineer is likely going to need to be proficient in at least one modern programming language. I always recommend Python because it does show up and everything from internal tooling to back end services to data engineering. So, yeah, but of course, infrastructure is good, and being able to write configuration around that is a key part as well. [00:18:04.930] – Ned
To me, that’s almost the gauntlet being thrown, because a lot of the infrastructure folks I know have been very resistant to learning a true general purpose programming language. They’re happy to learn scripting. They’re happy to do things in Bash or PowerShell or even adopt something like TerraForm that’s approaching a general purpose language, but they’re still hesitant to go all in on something like Python or Go or whatever. What would you say to those folks who are hesitant about getting on that bus? [00:18:34.200] – Forrest
Well, first I would want to meet them where they are. I mean, even like, being proficient with PowerShell is actually a really great first step. And there’s a lot of people that aren’t there or don’t feel comfortable with that. So if you can rough out some procedural logic in PowerShell or Bash, you’re way more than halfway to being able to competently pick up a Python or a Go. So I would first want to see somebody get there. But if there’s someone who for some reason is hanging out in this world of maybe writing batch scripts, batch, not Bash, and maybe it’s comfortable slinging a little bit of JSON or YAML or filling out a config file, but just doesn’t feel like there anything close to a software engineer or anything close to architecting a software application and being able to fit those parts together. I would understand that. I’m not saying that you necessarily have to have the skills that you would have as a true software engineer, but you need to be able to show that you can take a general purpose programming language and manipulate data with it and to perform basic procedural operations imperative coding. [00:19:33.930] – Forrest
It’s going to be really important that you can do that, even just to get hired into these rules. You’re going to land in technical interviews where you’re asked to do that, even if it doesn’t end up forming a tremendously huge part of your time on the job. So, yeah, I guess I am throwing down a gauntlet a little bit. If someone comes to me and says, hey, I’m struggling, I can’t seem to make the transition to Cloud, that’s going to be my first question. Okay, how are your coding skills and if they’re not there? Okay, let’s work on them to get them up to speed. But you’re probably going to run into frustration and pain and an unnecessarily long road if you are holding yourself back from cracking open the lid on coding skills. [00:20:07.270] – Ethan
Interesting. Yeah. Ned, I Echo what you said about the gauntlet being thrown. That’s interesting. And for us, you’re taking a position that’s not it’s common enough, but I don’t think it’s popular. It’s certainly not popular amongst the infrastructure crowd. Folks are more open to It, but to embrace it fully, as you’re suggesting. I think there is resistance to that. [00:20:29.990] – Forrest
Let me put it this way again. I come out of traditional infrastructure years ago when I talked about making those first migrations to the cloud inside of a large traditional It organization, I would say there were two categories of co workers that I had. There were people who embraced the shift to code, to source control, to automating their work, and there were people who resisted that and who embraced the old ways and not wanting to change their comfortable, GUI driven approaches to programming. Or perhaps they clutched onto these kind of bespoke one off scripts they had created and they couldn’t get involved with modern ways of doing CI, CD and sharing code and all that kind of thing. The people who embraced code, grew in their careers, found better jobs. They’ve moved on. They’re cloud professionals. Today, the people who resisted that are either stuck in limbo or they are having trouble finding positions. Today, the stream of It moves on. It and software development are converging in terms of the value they provide in the cloud where everything is automated. And if you’re not moving along with that, you are going to get left behind. [00:21:35.510] – Ethan
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Life with Strong DM means you can reduce the volume of credentials you are tracking. If you’re the human managing everyone’s infrastructure access, you get better control over the infrastructure management plane. You can simplify firewall policy. You can centrally revoke someone’s access to everything they had access to with just a click. Strongdm invites you to 100% doubt this ad and go sign up for a no BS demo. Do that@strongdm.com PacketPushers they suggested. We say no BS and if you review their website, that is kind of their whole attitude. They solve a problem you have and they want you to demo their solution and prove to yourself it will work. Strongdm.com packet pushers and join other companies like Peloton, Sulfi, Yext and Chime. Strongdm.com packet pushers. And now back to the podcast. Of course, let me ask you a different way around career and career roles in the way the way they’ve evolved infrastructure for a long time has been broken up, often along technology lines the network person, the backup person, the storage person, the database person, et cetera. Do we still have that line of thinking, or are the skills more I’m a cloud engineer now, which is kind of the context of this conversation, like I’m a cloud engineer, but is that actually a thing? [00:24:03.470] – Forrest
It is. And this is where I want to bring in some more encouragement into the conversation, because I realized that I sounded a little bit unforgiving in what we were just saying about code. But the reality is, if you’ve been in it for a while, you do bring really, really important foundational skills to the table. You may be a networking specialist, you might be a security specialist, you might be a DBA. You might have traditional sysadmin skills. These are all things that we’re kind of siloed a little bit in the traditional It world, just like software development was siloed and the whole DevOps movement was about let’s bring together these practices to unify them. But in the cloud, while you may be a cloud engineer, there’s likely going to be a focus to what you do that those traditional skills can really inform and make you better at. And you can position yourself this way, by the way, in interviews, if you’re trying to make that transition to the cloud. So just like there are network engineers, there are cloud networking engineers. But what’s the difference between the two? A cloud networking engineer is someone who’s really comfortable with automation and code because you’re probably not touching routers and switches directly anymore. [00:25:02.430] – Ned
Right. [00:25:02.580] – Forrest
It’s all software defined networking. You’ve got to be comfortable with that. In the infosec world, if you’re going to be a cloud security engineer, you’d better be really comfortable with IAM and with access control in the sense of like SSO and everything that’s involved there. You better be really comfortable with security being something that’s automated and that is rolled out at scale to large numbers of ephemeral machines rather than something that you’re hand tuning via group policy or something like that. [00:25:29.700] – Ned
Taking me back with group policy. [00:25:31.750] – Forrest
Right. [00:25:32.320] – Ned
I’m happy to have not touched group policy in a solid four or five years at this point. Do not miss it. Well, say you’ve convinced our listeners that they do need to start scaling up and getting proficiency on a single cloud. Do you think they should focus on some core technologies in a single cloud, or should they get into the more specialized portions, like Where’s a good jumping off point for that first cloud that they’re going to get into? [00:25:59.510] – Forrest
That’s a good question. I think it depends on what your existing skill level is and it depends on the exposure that you have to in your current role. Because if you’re in a job right now where you have some ability to get started with cloud in the context of your daily work, I would say take it immediately, even if it’s not like the most classic cloud service you could possibly be working on. Like, let’s say you’re in an environment where they’ve all of a sudden decided that they’re going to move their mail server and host it on Google Cloud. They’re just going to run a classic SMTP server there. I don’t know exactly why someone would choose to do that. I just made that up. But that’s the thing you have access to work on. So go ahead and work on that and you can fill in the blank in terms of what’s available to you in your environment. But if you’re truly starting this from scratch, you’re starting in a vacuum. You say I can construct my cloud experience from nothing. Here’s what I would recommend that you do a make sure that you’re working on a foundational certification. [00:26:58.790] – Forrest
So in the Google Cloud world, this could be something like the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Cert that’s going to give you the broad spectrum of exposure to a wide variety of cloud systems and services. Even if you never actually take the certification exam, just covering the components of that certification training will help. You know, you haven’t missed big areas in your study. It will help reduce your unknown unknowns, and then you’re going to want to dive in deep on core cloud services. So for me, this would be if you want to be someone who has what we call traditional cloud engineering skillset, you want to make sure that you can work with containers, that you can deploy containers to the cloud. You want to understand the IAM, the networking, and potentially to some extent the underlying compute and storage abstractions that are used to make these things run in the cloud, I would say start there. The things that Bolt on to those like the more higher level managed services, the workflow abstractions, perhaps some of the data services that kind of sit over in their own part of the stack, those are great things to drill down into and become specialist. [00:28:03.740] – Forrest
But I do believe that everybody should have some basic core fundamental understanding of how do I stand up and deploy an application in the cloud with the security, networking and infrastructure AKS code skills that that implies? [00:28:17.100] – Ethan
Would you say that’s true if I started with a single cloud here in the context of this part of the conversation, when I go multi cloud and I pick up a second or a third cloud, that same core set for us is what I should be going after as well, potentially. [00:28:31.130] – Forrest
But I would think about it a little bit differently. For your core cloud, you really want to go deep and you want to show that you have the kind of expertise where someone will hire you to professionally administer that cloud. So that really means getting hands on. And sometimes it’s not helpful to just say get hands on. What does that even mean? Does that mean do a hands on lab? Does that mean build a project from scratch? I would really push you toward build some real projects, commit them to source control, and be able to show value with them, particularly in the job interview. Whereas your secondary cloud, you might not do that so much. It might be enough for you just to go ahead and get one of those foundational certifications. So you have the landscape awareness and you have some analogy type reasoning for how these two clouds interrelate. We know adults learn by analogy. That was a big thing. We emphasize today cloud guru and our androgaji which means adult learning. Maybe another way to put this is build on your primary cloud. Get certified on your secondary cloud. [00:29:25.680] – Ned
I want to go back to certifications briefly here, because I think you mentioned something really key that folks should pay attention to. If you’re looking to learn a cloud, look at the way they’ve structured their certifications, and that will give you a good idea of where to start and then what are considered specialties in that cloud. Because I know looking at the way that Azure and AWS and I’m assuming Google has done this as well. All of them have a foundation like a cloud practitioner Cert that they can take. That gives you some just basics around cloud computing and a few core constructs, and then they get into a little bit of specialization, whether you’re more software development focused or data focused or whatever. And then they have these totally separate specialty certifications for those other services you were talking about that one would want to specialize in. Does that line up with your thinking in terms of certifications? [00:30:17.150] – Forrest
Yeah, that’s really well put. That’s exactly how I’m thinking about it. Use the certification as your roadmap to what the cloud provider thinks is important. [00:30:24.020] – Ned
Right. And like you said, you don’t necessarily have to take the exam if that’s something that’s really expensive or if you get really nervous during tests. But just going through the training is going to be immensely helpful. [00:30:35.580] – Forrest
Right. To be clear, there are places where the actual certification credential is important in the consulting world. It can be important because it affects their relationship with the partnership level they have with the cloud provider. There are certain things you can do. I don’t know if it’s still true, but it used to be you couldn’t do an AWS well architected review unless you held the solutions architect professional Cert. So there’s reasons why you may want one. [00:30:57.420] – Ned
Why? [00:30:57.540] – Forrest
They’re valuable to you, but yeah, if you’re just going after for the piece of paper and you’re trying to skate through or cram for it and not really learn to understand the concepts, you’ve missed 95% of the value. [00:31:08.090] – Ned
It’s interesting you should mention the AWS SA Pro Cert, because I actually had to get that for the exact reason you were talking about. I was already pretty seasoned and using AWS, but the consultancy I was working for wanted to start doing the Well Architected reviews. And at the time, I don’t know if this is still the case a few years ago, but at the time you couldn’t officially conduct those if you didn’t have that level of certification. [00:31:31.030] – Forrest
Exactly. [00:31:32.150] – Ned
Good. Go get it first. [00:31:35.070] – Ethan
Another thing you’ve mentioned along the way, as you threw the gauntlet down about code and coding, and you also mentioned source control. That’s a generic term. Do you mean something as specific as Get or just broadly some kind of source control? [00:31:51.950] – Forrest
At this point, I think source control means get. If you’re using like SVN or something older, it’s probably time to add get to your toolbox. [00:31:59.220] – Ned
Yeah. In that same vein, when you’re thinking of learning about source control or even some of the other services that sort of glue the cloud together. Right. Are you generally thinking in terms of specific services each cloud has? I’m thinking like Azure DevOps workflows on Google Cloud or do you instead turn to third party solutions? Should someone have a background in those as well? [00:32:24.240] – Forrest
I formulated it this way and it seems to be helpful to a lot of people. I say bet on cloud native services and open source tooling. The value of the cloud providers is in their deep services. So on the Google Cloud site, it might be something like BigQuery, which I’ve already mentioned some of these really powerful services, Azure like Google Cloud Spanner, which is this fascinating managed, globally distributed, row level distributed database service that provides relational consistency across these wide geographical areas. It’s a really interesting thing. It would be extremely hard to build yourself. A lot of the value of it comes from Google’s own implementation of it and the way that they have it spread out across their data centers. That’s something that you couldn’t get without going to Google Cloud is how I would put it. So if you’re building in Google Cloud, that’s actually a big draw. That’s a big advantage to get. You can look up Pokemon Go. They’ve told some interesting stories about this publicly about how they’ve built their global extremely high throughput system using Google Cloud Spanner. That’s a big draw for them. But at the same time, again, you might not spend your whole career at Google Cloud. [00:33:37.590] – Forrest
You might not spend your whole career working for AWS or on AWS services, but you probably will. No matter where you end up, you’ll probably end up using TerraForm at some point to configure resources, you might end up encountering Kubernetes at a wide, wide variety of shops. So where possible, try to learn those portable tools that you can bring with you from job to job, and that will help you get deep in on the services that are really the unique value AKS that the cloud providers have. [00:34:05.510] – Ethan
Finally, the word Kubernetes was uttered 30 odd minutes into this conversation. I don’t think it had come up before. Now one could argue you can build your own cloud on Kubernetes in your own data center, et cetera. And then of course, the public cloud providers have their own Kubernetes platform offerings. What is the drive here for me as a budding cloud engineer to learn Kubernetes and add that to the mix? [00:34:30.190] – Forrest
Well, I wouldn’t actually start there. I would start with just understanding the concept of containerization. Remember how we talked about this sort of evolutionary rise up the layers of the stack as you learn the technology. So I would not try to dig into Kubernetes until you understand the problem that it’s trying to solve. The orchestration of containers, you want to know what containerization means, how it works may be situated in a Linux context, and make sure you get that when you are ready to think about Kubernetes. You won’t be able to think about higher level concepts like a service mesh until you understand what Kubernetes does. And maybe just as crucially, what it doesn’t do, what its limitations are around like networking and how services communicate inside of a Kubernetes cluster. Okay, that’s why it might make sense for me to bring in like sidecars and a service mesh on top of that. So you’ve got to work your way up to the point where you really feel comfortable with it. And the only way you’ll do that is by building and then getting stuck and reading documentation and going back and building again. [00:35:23.930] – Ethan
I’m going to interrupt the podcast for a minute here to talk about it training. You remember the ransomware attack on the gas pipeline last year? It caught your attention, probably caught mine. There’s a key thing here. Cybersecurity professionals are in demand to prevent that kind of thing. But there are not enough humans out there to fill all the positions. There’s over 500,000 open cybersecurity roles. You can become a cybersecurity professional if you get some training, some online training. It is never too late to start a new career in it or move up the ladder. It pro TV has you covered for your training. [00:36:01.930] – Forrest
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Comp Tia to Cisco to EC, Council to Microsoft. They’ve got all of it, including the cloudy stuff, more than 5800 hours of on demand training, and the way they present the information. Some presenters Azure like they’re reading from the book and they’re super boring. That is not itprotv’s format at all. They use engaging hosts that they’re going to present the information in a talk show format and really keep it interesting. And they do it live. They’re live every day. And then once they’ve recorded that live show, it goes studio to web in 24 hours. As you’re digging through their website looking for content, all the courses are conveniently listed by category, certification, job role. You can find what you’re looking for without a lot of trouble. And then when you pick the thing and you’re ready to go, you can stream it pro TV courses, either the live stuff or the on demand stuff from anywhere in the world via whatever platform you like. Roku, Apple TV, PC or there’s apps on iOS or Android. Learn it, pass your Certs, and then get a great job maybe in cybersecurity with ITProTV. Visit ITPro TV daytodloud for 30% off all plans. [00:37:13.340] – Ethan
Use promo CodeCloud at checkout. That’s ITPro day two cloud, day two cloud is day the number two cloud. And then use promo code cloud at checkout one more time. It pro TV day two cloud and use promo code cloud at checkout to save 30% off all plans. And now let’s get back to the podcast. Do you think Kubernetes becomes ubiquitous where that’s definitely should be on my learning map. [00:37:44.190] – Forrest
There’s a lot of different views about this. And again, keep in mind, I work for Google Cloud, so take whatever I’m going to say with a grain of salt or not. [00:37:50.260] – Ethan
Fair point. Yes. [00:37:51.890] – Forrest
If you are going to run Kubernetes, my bias, but also informed opinion is there’s no better place to run it than GKE, Google Kubernetes engine. And the reason for that is that Kubernetes can be really hard to run. It’s complicated. There’s a lot of moving parts to it, and it’s in a lot of cases better to let a cloud provider run that for you and focus on building on top of it. [00:38:11.460] – Ned
Again, going back to your mantra of leverage the cloud native services because they’re taking care of a lot of the moving parts behind everything. [00:38:19.980] – Forrest
Right. [00:38:20.610] – Ned
And take advantage of open source tooling. So Cube, Cuddle or Cubectl, I don’t know where you stand on that camp, but Cubectl, that’s an open source tool, so I would learn to use that really well. But the thing I’m going to be using it against is probably going to be a cloud native service. [00:38:36.430] – Forrest
Yeah, exactly. And this gets right back to what we talked about, where even if you’re only using one cloud provider, understanding a little bit of another cloud provider still helps you to make better decisions. So if I’m running Kubernetes, it really would help me to know, okay, what does EKS have in common with GKE? How are they different? How are they the same? And if I’m going to Bolt higher level things onto it, like a service mesh like Istio, do I want to use the service mesh checkbox option that’s on the cloud providers manage Kubernetes, or do I want to bring in another service mesh like a Linkerd. What’s the difference between those two? [00:39:08.650] – Ned
I’ve often found that what I like to do is deploy that thing on my own first at first understand where the corners are on it that I’m going to bump myself against and then let one of the services take care of it for me beyond that. But installing it myself the first time really gives me a better idea. It’s kind of like Kubernetes the hard way, right? That gives you a great idea of what’s going on behind the covers. But that’s probably not how you actually want to run Kubernetes in production. [00:39:36.790] – Forrest
Oh, yeah. I’m a big fan of, like, click Ops as the first approach to something. That’s why I think it’s so important that cloud provider consoles, the web interfaces, be really discoverable and help you surface what you want to do. A friend of mine was saying yesterday that his approach to learning a new service like this, and this is great advice for someone who’s trying to get into cloud, by the way, is first you build it so you click opposite, you stand it up by any means necessary. The thing you’re already familiar with in cloud seconds, you automate it. So you go back and figure out how to deploy it using TerraForm and put it in source control, build CICD around it. All that good stuff. So it’s running like you would run it in a production context and then go back and see if you can replicate that same thing using the cloud providers manage services. [00:40:16.730] – Ned
I really like that walk through because I was missing that first portion where it’s like, no, don’t try to deploy it with TerraForm and figure out what these 26 different arguments are supposed to mean. Just click through the console and let that make for you the first time. Awesome. All right, so if someone is just getting started, I know you talked about certifications a little bit. What are some other really good resources out there they might leverage to learn more about a single cloud and then branch out to multiple clouds. [00:40:47.360] – Forrest
Yeah. So again, Google cloud bias. Here the writer and everything I’m about to say. I have gotten into Google Cloud Skills Boost recently, which is this learning platform Google cloud provider built off of Qwiklabs, which they acquired a few years back. And it’s got some great kind of subway map style processes that will get you through the technologies you need to get hands on with to, let’s say, get one of the core Google Cloud certifications. Some of them are timed. They’re challenge labs. You can go through and achieve an objective and go back and review what you missed. I think it’s a really nice learning environment when you’re ready to move beyond that, and maybe when you’re ready to move out and consider a second cloud, I would recommend doing some project based learning. This is where I’m going to put in a plug for this community thing I’ve been running for the past couple of years called the Cloud Resume Challenge. And this is a project that you can build, you can do it on AWS, you can do it on Azure, you can do it on Google Cloud. All the instructions are freely available. [00:41:40.680] – Forrest
You can get them at Cloud resumechallenge Dev, and there’s a large group of community members who are standing by ready to assist you with it. What makes the Cloud Resume Challenge, I think interesting and unique in this space is that it’s not just a tutorial where it says, okay, do this, and then do this, and then do this. And if you copy and paste all these things and you’ll end up with a working project, the thing it asks you to do, which is to basically deploy your resume in the cloud and create a full front and back end full stack cloud application. In order to do that, it doesn’t really give you exact direct instructions. It gives you a series of outcomes you have to achieve. And then inside of each step it’s up to you to go through and do the Googling and maybe do a little bit of learning and apply and try and fail and bang your head against it for three days and come back just like you would in a real project in a professional environment. And so what that does for you when you’re able to complete it and many hundreds of people have completed it now is it gives you the ability in a job interview when they ask you, hey, tell me how DNS works. [00:42:36.920] – Forrest
You don’t have to rack your brain to think about it. You remember the three days you spent beating your head on it, and you can just answer that from the depths of your own interior emotional pain. So it is interior pain as a service, which has been very helpful to a lot of people in beginning their cloud career because it sets you up well for what’s to come. If you end up not liking it, that’s a good indication you’re not going to like what cloud engineers do every day. [00:42:58.850] – Ned
I’m laughing along because all day today before this, I’ve been working on a pipeline that just keeps breaking and then I fix something and then something else breaks. And that’s just the reality of cloud engineering. Is everything’s going to be red until it’s green? Last thing I want to ask about is to what degree? If I’m currently employed and working on a cloud or not, to what degree should I let my employer dictate what I’m focused on? Or should I try to take on challenges outside of that in my off hours? [00:43:30.430] – Forrest
Ultimately, you are responsible for your career success, not the team that you’re on, not your employer, not the technology stack choices that they’ve made. So if you feel that you’re stagnating, if you feel you’re not getting the opportunities you need to progress, then it is up to you to make a change. And that could involve doing some work on the side to Polish up skills to be able to transition. It could involve making a calculated effort to get involved in some different things internally if those opportunities are available to you. But I do want to encourage you with this. If you’re someone who’s maybe mid career and you’re looking at where you are and you say, Well, I’ve topped out, I’m at a dead end at the job that I’m currently at. And if I’m going to meaningfully change what I do say to get into cloud, I’m going to have to go back to square one. I’m going to have to rewind my career, take a switch back in my career road, and go take a junior role. I would encourage you not to think about it that way. Please don’t do that. Please don’t reset back from zero because you have kind of an unfair advantage here. [00:44:23.670] – Forrest
It is already in your blood, right? You’ve worked with virtualization, you’ve worked with networking, you’ve worked with all these things. You’ve got troubleshooting skills you’ve honed over years and years. Things are going to come in incredibly handy in the cloud that sets you way above someone who’s truly entry level in the field. So I would be looking for ways that you can apply what you already know to build cloud projects that let you level up and take a step up. You might have to take a stepping stone role, maybe to get to that cloud engineering or architecture role that you really want. I mean, there’s roles like technical program managers and Tams that are extremely technical, extremely hands on with cloud providers and their customers that could help you get where you want to be. But I’m encouraging you. Try to find a way forward. Don’t go back to go forward. I think the opportunities with your skill set are just too great for you to need to think about that. [00:45:13.340] – Ned
I love that. That’s a great note to end on. If you had a few key points, key takeaways for folks who’ve been listening today, are there some points you’d like to summarize from the conversation? [00:45:23.840] – Forrest
Well, let’s think. I think the first one, because we spent so long in it, is just learn to code. If you have not learned to code or for some reason been putting it off, thinking that, well, I can just kind of fake my way through the rest of my career without it. Even if you can, the opportunities are going to be so much greater if you don’t do that. Just learn to code. Make it happen. You’ll never be sorry. The best time, it’s like planting a tree. The best time to do it was ten years ago. The second best time is now. Just learn to code. Okay, second thing, talking about multicloud, if you’re going to integrate two clouds into your skill set. I think two clouds is probably the sweet spot. Don’t I think anybody can keep up on three clouds, and even if you could, you’re going to have trouble holding it all in your head at once. So I would say one is less than two, which is greater than three on clouds, if that makes sense. And again, go broad on your primary cloud. Sorry. [00:46:15.990] – Forrest
Go deep on your primary cloud. Go broad on your secondary cloud. Those will be my three takeaways. [00:46:20.720] – Ned
Awesome. Well, Forrest, is there somewhere you’d like people to go to find you on the Internet, Twitter or website? [00:46:28.560] – Forrest
I am most active on Twitter. You can find me there at Twitter Com forrestbrazeal. You can also catch up with the cloud resume challenge, which I’m very active on at Cloudresument Dev. There’s a discord server there you can join that has thousands of people in it. And then you can keep up with my latest writing on the Google Cloud blog. Awesome. [00:46:47.960] – Ned
And that cloud resume challenge, that’s ongoing all the time, or is that a seasonal thing? [00:46:52.350] – Forrest
It is ongoing all the time. We do have mentorship available for people to complete it, and that takes place in Cohorts. But anybody can start the clutter AKS a challenge. You can start it today. And in fact, I hope that you will. [00:47:02.160] – Ned
Awesome. Well, Forrest Brazil, thank you so much for being a guest today on day Two Cloud. [00:47:06.810] – Forrest
It was my pleasure. It was wonderful to chat with both of you. [00:47:09.240] – Ned
Forrest Brazil, head of content at Google Cloud. And hey, listener, thank you for tuning in today. Stay tuned. Up next, we have a sponsored Tech Bites conversation with Singtel. Welcome to the Tech Bites portion of our episode. Today concludes a sixpart series with Singtel about cloud networking that is, how to make your existing wide area network communicate with cloud services in an effective way that maybe your legacy WinRM isn’t able to. We’ve been chatting with Mark Seabrook, global solutions manager at Singto. We’re discussing the importance of getting the underlay network architecture correct. And we don’t just mean the circuits, we mean the management of the underlay as well. Now, Mark, in previous episodes in this series, we’ve mentioned the underlay a few times and you kind of made this allusion to how the underlay is the foundation. And if you get the foundation wrong, nothing else matters. So can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah. [00:48:08.900] – Mark
I mean, I’d go even one step further than a foundation. I’d look at it like a development, a housing development. So you’ve got to have the roads marked out. You’ve got to have your sewer lines, your electric mains, all your telco lines. So using that as an analogy, you really need to really think about what your underlay is going to look like, not just in a country, not just regional, but if you’re a global network, how it’s all going to piece together if you don’t get that right from the start, and then you start building overlays with SDWAN on top of it. If the underlay is not good and solid and well thought out, then you’re going to have a lot of problems. [00:48:54.830] – Ned
Yeah, talk about it. I love that analogy of the more of a development and you’re putting in the electric lines and sewage lines and the water lines. If you get something wrong and you’ve already built all these houses, changing that thing is not going to be pretty it could be pretty dangerous. So if I’m working with you to design my underlay network, what kind of questions are you going to ask me to get it right? Yeah. [00:49:21.100] – Mark
So basically it’s going to come down to what your mission is, what the customer’s mission is. So what their sites are going to look like, what kind of traffic they’re going to be processing, what their cloud strategy is in that region might have a different cloud strategy for different parts of the world for obvious reasons. So we really need to button down all of that traffic flow before we can really start looking at an underlay. Once we’ve got that down, we can start building the underlay in various regions and get that done correctly and upfront. [00:50:01.200] – Ned
Okay. So I want to back up there a second because you said it should be obvious that you might want different cloud strategies for different regions of the world, but that’s not necessarily obvious to everyone. Can you expand on that a little bit and how that impacts the underlying design? [00:50:14.760] – Mark
Sure. We’ve mentioned before that if you’ve got all of your sites in, say, for example, the US, you’re probably not going to have any problems because you’ve got multiple public Internet cloud gateways to hit. You’re not restricted anywhere. Your peering is just top notch, multiple carriers similar to Europe. If you go to some parts of Asia, you’re going to get some restrictions. Obviously, with the Chinese firewall, that’s a big one. Other parts of the world, certain traffic is restricted as well. Or just the reliability of the underlay is not going to be there the same as what you’re going to experience in, say, the US or Europe. [00:51:02.610] – Ethan
No, Mark, with Singtel, we’ve talked a lot about SDWAN in this series, which is kind of over the top, but you also will sell me physical circuits, right? [00:51:12.970] – Ned
Yeah, absolutely. [00:51:13.660] – Mark
So we have our MPLS network all over the world. We have 428 pops. We have points of point, eleven, points of point waves. We’ve got our SD Connect product. Sd Connect is a cloud product that allows you to hit cloud targets or do virtual VLANs between data centers. We also have our IP transit, which we call sticks, Singapore Telecom Internet Exchange. And we have our IP transit across the world as well. [00:51:46.550] – Ned
Okay, let’s expand on SD Connect a little bit. How does that connect me to the cloud or allow peering and is that an underlay specific product? [00:51:55.730] – Mark
Yeah, it’s an underlay. It’s all around the world. We’ve got it in multiple data centers all across the globe. Customer buyers, for example, a ten gig Port, they have a portal, they go into the portal, they set up VXLAN, and then they can point those VLANs at AWS, Google, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle, or they can even point them back to other SD Connect ports around the world as well. So they can pull up a layer to effectively you’re basically pulling up a layer to Eline ad hoc and tearing it down whenever you want. [00:52:37.250] – Ned
Okay. So when you go through that traffic flow stage of the design, you can pick out some places where. Okay, it wouldn’t make sense to put an SD Connect there because that’s where you want to on ramp to one of these clouds or create some sort of mesh. [00:52:51.680] – Mark
Absolutely. So, yeah, we will typically in a site to regional hub type SDWAN deployment, will have local Internet breakout, but we also have SD connects at the hub sites so that we can turn traffic. Depending on the customer, we can route via a tunnel, hits the SD Connect Port, then hits the target within the cloud that they want. [00:53:17.890] – Ethan
Mark, is there any standard routing protocols that are even happening anymore? Because it feels like everything we’re doing, we can custom design any sort of forwarding paradigm that we need. So, I mean, is BGP even working anymore? Does it matter in this design? [00:53:35.000] – Mark
Yeah, absolutely. And it still always will be. I mean, that’s the magic of it. The brains behind the global Internet. We do actually have some deterministic Internet relationships with other partners. So we can determine a better or we can at least guarantee latency and routing over certain Internet routes. We’ve even got some of our pops around the world where we have Internet gateways, SDWAN Gateway. So we can point to those pops over a local Internet through a partner, but then guarantee the traffic past the pop to the other pop and hand off in a similar fashion at the other end. [00:54:21.050] – Ethan
Mark, we were talking a good bit about the SD Connect product there and how some of that traffic has moved around in that product. You also mentioned an Internet Exchange product, IP Transit. Can you describe that? I asked that in the context of when I think of Internet Exchange, it’s a group of people who need to come together to exchange traffic over that Internet Exchange point. Is it like that or something else? [00:54:42.610] – Mark
So our Sticks product, which is Singapore Telecom Internet Exchange, it’s our IP Transit product. It’s in all of our data centers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan. We’ve got it in the US. In Europe, a lot of customers would use our IP Transit. Big content providers need it and use it. We can also use it in a slightly nontraditional way for IP transit where we’re using it because it’s got the deterministic route. So for example, you have a customer in the US, they could point to our sticks, pop in, say La or San Jose, and then they’ve got a guaranteed SLA and guaranteed deterministic route back to say Singapore or Hong Kong. [00:55:34.760] – Ned
We’re talking about all these different products and serverless that all filter into the underlay once I have the underlay in. We talked before about how you can use SDWAN and an orchestrator to control your network, the overlay through policy and all that. What tools do I have available to help manage the underlay? Yeah. [00:55:53.490] – Mark
So for pure underlay, we have a portal that we make available to all of our customers. We call it Liquid Infrastructure portal. Customer goes onto the portal, they can see all of their physical underlay, so they can see all of their MPLS, all of their internet, all of their Elines, whatever they’ve got with us, they’ll see group together and it’s fully graphical. So they can click on a circuit. They can see it come up on a map where it is. They can see real time stats on it availability. They can do an add move change, they can bump up the bandwidth, put a request into disconnected or add a new service or any kind of trouble ticket they can run through that portal. So we have the portal as a 10,000 foot overview globally of all their underlay, which kind of complements what we do. We’ve with the SDWAN, with the overlay. [00:56:53.420] – Ned
Got you. Okay. And no one’s filling out a Word document and submitting it through a Fax machine to provision to start the bandwidth. [00:57:02.690] – Mark
Thankfully not these days. No, it’s all done through our portals. [00:57:08.210] – Ned
I missed the Fax machine telling you that I’ve loaded the paper the wrong way or the bot is wrong. Can I also manage down to the physical device layer? Do I have access to the uCPE that we talked about in a previous tech bite? [00:57:25.870] – Mark
So the uCPE the customer would have access to what the instance that they’re running so they can go into that instance? Well, effectively then let’s just say they’re using Silver Peak. They’re not going to actually go to that instance on that uCPE, they’re going to be looking at it via the orchestrator. So they’re going to go to the orchestrator. The orchestrator knows it’s, telling them what’s happening at that particular site, the uCPE, the physical uCPE. That will be our responsibility to make sure that’s healthy and running correctly. [00:58:02.400] – Ned
Okay, what other support does sink, tell provide as part of the underlay service? Are you running a knock for me or letting me know when issues are cropping up? [00:58:14.070] – Mark
Yes, we have Proactive management through our knock, so all of the underlay circuits, if there’s any alarms that come up, any failures, customer will get notified. Same with the account management team. We will then work with the customer to fix the issue or fix a way around it. Until it gets resolved. [00:58:42.150] – Ned
Mark, if this has piqued people’s interest and they want to hear more about the solution or just talk to you because you’re pretty interesting, fella, where could they reach out to you? [00:58:52.700] – Mark
Sure. [00:58:53.150] – Mark
So, yeah, just contact me on LinkedIn under my name or just contact us through singtel.com. [00:59:00.430] – Ned
All right. Awesome. We’ll include links in the show notes, of course. Thank you for joining us, Mark. And hey, humans out there. Thank you for listening to this tech bite. This was the conclusion of our six part series with Singtel on building cloud ready networks. If you own a legacy MPLS based SDWAN and want to bring it into the modern era, Singtel is a global telecommunications provider with the technical competence to help you with your project. If you give them a call, be sure to tell them you heard about them on day two cloud part of the packet pushers network. Hope you enjoyed that tech bite from Singtel and hey, virtual high fives to you for tuning in. If you have suggestions for future shows, we would love to hear them. You can hit either Ethan or I up on Twitter at day two cloud show. We both monitor that or you can fill up the form on my fancy website. Nedinthecloud.com, do you have a way cool cloud product you want to share with our audience of It professionals? Well, you could become a day two cloud sponsor. You’ll reach several thousand listeners, all of whom have problems to solve. [01:00:06.510] – Ned
Maybe your product fixes their problem. They’ll never know unless you tell them about your amazing solution. You can find out more at PacketPushers netsponsorship. Until next time, just remember cloud is what happens while it is making other plans.
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