O'Reilly Bots Podcast

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"Incremental change may be good theory, but in practice you have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with to make everything move at once". So shares Adrian Cockcroft, who helped lead Netflix's migration from datacenter to the cloud -- and from monolithic to microservices architecture -- when their streaming business (the "stick"!) was exploding.

So how did they -- and how can other companies -- make such big, bet-the-company kind of moves, without getting mired in fanatical internal debates? Does organizational structure need to change, especially if moving from a more product-, than project-based, approach? What happens to security? And finally, what happens to the role of CIOs; what can/should they do?

Most interestingly: How will the entire industry be affected as companies not only adopt, but essentially offer, microservices or narrow cloud APIs? How do the trends of microservices, containers, devops, cloud, as-a-service/ on-demand, serverless -- all moves towards more and more ephemerality -- change the future of computing and even work? Cockcroft (who is now a technology fellow at Battery Ventures) joins this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Frank Chen and Martin Casado (and Sonal Chokshi) to discuss these shifts and more.

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a16z Podcast: All About Microservices

Docker Distributed Systems Summit Opening Words by Solomon Hykes

In this interview, Anil Gaur, Group Vice President of Engineering at Oracle, sheds some light on Oracle’s Java EE strategy and roadmap.  He describes how the platform will evolve to support the cloud and companies wanting to move to the cloud, comments on the future of the Microprofile.IO, and explains why Java EE 8 is being delayed until the end of 2017.  Anil also provides his perspective on one of the popular choices for Java-based development on the cloud today - Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry - and what developers can expect from Java EE in the future.  

Anil is Group Vice President of Engineering at Oracle. Prior to joining Oracle, Anil led the global team that produced key middleware technologies at Sun Microsystems including the Java EE platform, GlassFish Server, and Java Message Queue. Anil has played an instrumental role in open-sourcing the Java EE platform through the GlassFish community. He has also led the integration of MySQL with Sun's middleware product portfolio.

InfoQ Podcast

The Future of Java EE and Java on the Cloud

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of X.ai, a personal assistant bot that handles meeting scheduling through email.

Dennis Mortensen on Email Bots

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Brad Abrams, group product manager of Google Assistant, the company’s new AI-driven bot that lives in many different contexts, including the Pixel phone, the Allo messaging app, and the Google Home voice-controlled speaker.

Brad Abrams on Google Assistant

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Chris Messina, bot evangelist, creator of the hashtag, and, until recently, developer experience lead at Uber. We talk about the origins of MessinaBot, ruminate on the need for bots that truly exploit their medium rather than imitating older apps, and take a look at what’s ahead for bots in 2017.

Chris Messina on Conversational Commerce

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Tim Hwang, an affiliated researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, about AI-driven psyops bots and their capacity for social destabilization.

Tim Hwang on Bots That Cause Chaos

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Tom Coates, co-founder of Thington, a service layer for the Internet of Things. Thington provides a conversational, messaging-like interface for controlling devices like lights and thermostats, but it’s also conversational at a deeper level: its very architecture treats the interactions between different devices like a conversation, allowing devices to make announcements to any other device that cares to listen.

Tom Coates on Conversational Devices

Dan Gailey (@dpg) and Nathan Ross (@nathantross) talk about Enterprise Chatbots, Bot-to-Bot Communication, Bots as first class citizens, and Bot UX.

BotWorld Podcast #1 - Dan Gailey and Nathan Ross

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I talk about deep learning at the extremes of scale and computing power with Prabhat, who leads the data and analytics group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s supercomputing center. If you’re working on commercial AI, it’s worth glancing across the divide at scientific AI.

Prabhat on Deep Learning for Science

In this episode of the Bots Podcast, we peer into the giant companies that are beginning to adopt messaging and bots. My guest is Tom Hadfield, founder of Message.io, a service that syndicates bots across many different messaging platforms.

Tom Hadfield on Bots in the Enterprise

In this episode of the Bots Podcast, Chris Messina and I reflect on what Facebook has become, the role that it now plays in our lives, and what it all means for developers. We recorded this discussion shortly after attending Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference in San Jose.

Chris Messina on Facebook as a Utility

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk to Jason Laska and Michael Akilian of Clara Labs, creator of a virtual assistant—Clara—that schedules meetings and interacts in natural language through email.

E-mail is, to me, a highly promising (and somewhat underrated) venue for bots. Messaging is growing quickly, but e-mail is still the standard way to communicate within businesses and especially between businesses. E-mail conventions are somewhat standardized, and much of it is highly routinized—automatically generated reports, receipts, etc.—so it’s ripe for automation.

Laska, who leads the machine learning efforts at Clara Labs, and Akilian, the company’s co-founder and CTO, talk about the reality of developing an AI-driven product, and explain Clara’s human-in-the-loop system. “People are still there to do some of the most challenging aspects of this work, and that’s exactly what you want to use people for,” says Laska.

Jason Laska and Michael Akilian on Scheduling Bots

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Tom Hadfield on Bots in the Enterprise

O'Reilly Radar