In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud-native technology, APIs, Kubernetes, and service meshes, it's crucial to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and insights from experts in the field. That’s why, there’s no better time to revitalize our popular podcast, Livin’ on the Edge. We’re proud to say we’re back and better than ever!

To kick off Season Three, we figured who better to bring on the show than Flynn, the Tech Evangelist from Buoyant. Flynn was one of the original creators of Emissary and a previous Ambassador Labs team member himself. As someone who’s been a part of the Emissary and Edge Stack story from the early days, his 40 year’s worth of knowledge and experience is something we can all learn from. 

Flynn’s day-to-day life revolves around dealing with the complexity of the cloud-native world and the rapid pace of change that comes with it. I sat down with him to discuss some of those complexities, as well as what he’s looking forward to right now in the cloud-native world.

S3 EP2: Flynn from Buoyant & Cloud-Native Happenings

As they say, the one thing in life you can count on is change. Our latest guest on Livin' On the Edge podcasts is Krishna Modi, a Cloud Engineer at Cisco. The discussion covered a range of topics, including Krishna's professional journey, Cisco’s evolution, Identity and Access Management (IAM), trends in API gateways, and the rise of platform engineering.

"Cisco has always been one of the best company cultures and has always felt like a family; that's why I came back," Krishna stated, noting that he is one of many "boomerangs" who left and then inevitably returned to the company. 

What Krishna shared included insights about how companies must evolve in a cloud-native world and how developer teams need to take platform engineering seriously.

S3, Ep8: The Evolution of Cloud-Native, Platform Engineering, & Gateways

Lynn Langit is a consulting cloud architect who holds recognitions from all three major cloud vendors on her contributions to their respective communities. On today’s podcast, Wes talks with Lynn about a concept she calls 25% time and a project it led her to become involved within genomic research. 25% time is her own method of learning while collaborating with someone else for a greater good. A recent project leads her to become involved with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia. Through cloud adoption and some lean startup practices, they were able to drop the run time for a machine learning algorithm against a genomic dataset from 500 hours to 10 minutes.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - 25% time is a way to learn, study, or collaborate with someone else for a greater good. It’s unbilled time in the service of offers. Using the idea of 25% time along with some personal events that occurred in her life, Lynn became involved with genomic researchers in Australia.
 - Price of genomic sequencing has dropped. The price drop has enabled researchers to create huge repositories of genomic data; however, it was mostly on-prem. The idea of building data pipelines was pretty new in the genome community. Additionally, the genome itself is 3 billion data points. A variant of as little at 10-15 variants can be statistically significant.
 - The challenge was to leverage cloud resources. To gain a quick win and buy-in for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (or CSIRO an independent Australian federal government agency) for cloud adoption, a first step was to capture interest in the idea. So the team stored their reference data in the cloud and enabled access via a Jupyter Notebook.
 - They demonstrated a use case against the genomic data set leveraging a synthetic phenotype (or a fake disease) called hipsterdom. The solution became a basis for global discussion that got more people involved in the community.
 - By leveraging cloud resources, the CSIRO was able to get a run their dataset that took 500 hours against an on-prem Spark cluster to 10 minutes.
 - Learning new programming language has unseen benefits. For example, Ballerina (a language written as an integration language between APIs) interested Lynn because of its live visual diagrams; however, benefited her with some of the cloud pipelines because of its ability to produce YAML files.

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Lynn Langit on 25% Time and Cloud Adoption within Genomic Research Organizations

In this podcast, Daniel Bryant sat down with Dave Sudia, senior DevOps engineer at GoSpotCheck. Topics discussed included: the benefits of PaaS; building a platform with Kubernetes as the foundation; selecting open source components and open standards in order to facilitate the evolution of a platform; and why care should be taken to prioritize the developer experience and create self-service operation of the platform.

Why listen to this podcast: 

 - When starting a business and searching for product-market fit, creating an application using a monolithic code base deployed onto a commercial Platform as a Service (PaaS) product is a very effective way of iterating fast and minimising operational costs.
 - There may come a point where the PaaS cannot provide bespoke requirements, or it has trouble scaling, or the costs become prohibitive. At this point many teams choose to build a custom platform using cloud technologies, such as Kubernetes. 
 - Building a Kubernetes platform can be an effective solution, but appropriate effort needs to be put into designing, building, and maintaining the platform. The platform effectively becomes another product within the business that must be managed accordingly.
 - Embracing open standards provides many benefits, especially for the long term. Implementations that are consumed through well-defined interfaces and abstraction can be more readily swapped at a later point in time. It is also generally easier to integrate components that share common interfaces.
 - Attention and resources must be provided to create an effective developer experience for the platform. It is essential to prioritize self-service operations, and also to understand the core requirements of the engineers and QA specialists that will be using the platform during their daily work.
 - Establishing an effective continuous delivery pipeline can enable more repeatable and scalable testing of applications, and also allows the codification of cross-functional requirements.
 - The cloud native landscape has now evolved to a point where most of the frameworks and tooling required to build a platform have become viable for general purpose usage. However, some assembly may still be required, and engineers should be prepared for change, as the ecosystem moves fast.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/3bj3BTp
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Show Notes

Dave Sudia on Migrating From a PaaS to a Kubernetes-Based Platform

Software developers, platform engineers, and sysadmin/operators listen to the biweekly Ambassador podcasts in order to learn how to build cloud platforms and create an effective developer experience (DevEx) for deploying container-based applications to Kubernetes. We also discuss best practices for releasing functionality via continuous delivery pipelines, and we investigate the latest developer tooling, API gateway technology (e.g Envoy), and service mesh implementations. We interview practitioners and senior technical leaders from organizations such as HashiCorp, Lyft, TicketMaster, Headstart, and Buoyant.

S3, Ep8: The Evolution of Cloud-Native, Platform Engineering, & Gateways

Livin' On the Edge: Ambassador

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