Is It Broken Everywhere or Just for Me with Omri Sass
When your website stops working at 3 AM, you need to answer one question fast: Is it my code or is a big cloud provider having problems? Omri Sass from Datadog explains updog.ai, a tool that monitors whether major services like AWS, CloudFlare, and others are actually working. Instead of asking people to report problems like Down Detector does, updog uses real data from thousands of computers to detect when services go down. Omri shares why this took 6 years to build, how they process massive amounts of data with machine learning, and why cloud providers have been strangely upset about these tools existing.
About Omri:
Omri Sass is a Director of Product Management at Datadog, where he leads and supports a team of 25+ product managers driving initiatives across Bits AI SRE, Data Observability, Service Management, and most recently, the launch of updog.ai. Outside of work, Omri is an avid sci-fi reader, a dedicated yoga practitioner, and happily outmatched by his cat.
Show Highlights:
(02:12) What is Updog and How Does It Work
(03:38) Why Knowing If It's a Global Problem Matters
(04:01) The Problem With Testing Every Endpoint Yourself
(05:52) How Datadog Discovered EC2 Outages From Their Own Systems
(10:38) When AWS Regions Go Down and Cascade Failures
(13:13) What Happens When Services Rebuild Completely
(16:29) The Most Important Learning During a 3 AM Incident
(20:11) Why This Took So Long to Build
(23:40) When Datadog Going Down Isn't Critical Path
(25:22) How They Picked Which AWS Services to Monitor
(27:07) What Comes Next for Updog
(30:11) Where to Find Omri and Updog
Links:
Datadog: datadoghq.com
Omir’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omri-sass-65632a14/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
(BNS) Datadog Founder Olivier Pomel
Today I’m joined by Olivier Pomel, cofounder/CEO of Datadog. We trace his path from French open-source tinkerer to NYC founder, the dev-vs-ops friction that sparked Datadog, finding product-market fit through integrations, and the choice to stay independent en route to a 2019 IPO and S&P 500. Olivier shares scaling war stories, culture and GTM lessons, and what observability means in an AI era. If you build software—or companies—this one’s packed with playbooks, from hiring to pricing to platform bets that work.
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20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere
Dan Fougere is one of the most successful sales leaders of the last decade. Most recently, Dan was Chief Revenue Officer for Datadog, growing revenues from $60 million to $1BN ARR. Before Datadog, Dan was Head of Global Sales at Medallia where he created the Mediallia sales playbook. In addition, Dan is also a minority owner of the New York Yankees.
In Today's Episode with Dan Fougere:
1. Lessons Scaling Sales to $1BN in ARR at Datadog:
What did Datadog not do that Dan wishes they had of done?
What did they not do that Dan wishes they had done?
What does Dan know about scaling sales to $1BN in ARR that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
What stage of the scaling process was hardest? Why?
2. How to Hire the Best Sales Team:
What are the top signals of the best sales candidates?
How does Dan structure the interview process for new candidates?
How does Dan use tasks and take-home assignments to test candidates?
What does Dan think of hiring panels?
What are the biggest hiring mistakes Dan has made? What did he learn?
3. Discounting, Logos and Deal Reviews:
Is discounting always wrong? How should sales leaders use it?
How important is the quality of logo in the early days vs revenue in the door?
What is the right way to structure deal reviews? What makes good vs great?
Is outbound dead in 2024? Advice to founders on outbound?
Replay - Chaos Engineering for Gremlins with Jason Yee
On this Replay, we’re revisiting our conversation with Jason Yee, Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog. At the time of this recording, he was the Director of Advocacy at Gremlin, an enterprise-grade chaos engineering platform. Join Corey and Jason as they talk about what Gremlin is and what a director of advocacy does, making chaos engineering more accessible for the masses, how it’s hard to calculate ROI for developer advocates, how developer advocacy and DevRel changes from one company to the next, why developer advocates need to focus on meaningful connections, why you should start chaos engineering as a mental game, qualities to look for in good developer advocates, the Break Things On Purpose podcast, and more.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(0:31) Blackblaze sponsor read
(0:58) The role of a Director of Advocacy
(3:34) DevRel and twisting job definitions
(5:50) How DevRel confusion manifests into marketing
(11:37) Being able to measure and define a team’s success
(13:42) Building respect and a community in tech
(15:22) Effectively courting a community
(18:02) The challenges of Jason’s job
(21:06) Planning for failure modes
(22:30) Determining your value in tech
(25:41) The growth of Gremlin
(30:16) Where you can find more from Jason
About Jason Yee
Jason Yee is Staff Technical Avdocate at Datadog, where he works to inspire developers and ops engineers with the power of metrics and monitoring. Previously, he was the community manager for DevOps & Performance at O’Reilly Media and a software engineer at MongoDB.
Links
Break Things On Purpose podcast: https://www.gremlin.com/podcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitbisect
Original episode
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/chaos-engineering-for-gremlins-with-jason-yee/
Sponsor
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
SaaStr 761: How to Build Pipeline and GTM Alignment with Datadog's CMO Sara Varni
SaaStr 761: How to Build Pipeline and GTM Alignment with Datadog's CMO Sara Varni
Sara Varni, Datadog's CMO, shares how to build pipeline and create alignment across sales and marketing. The CMO role at Datadog covers the usual aspects of marketing, including product marketing, corporate communications, events, partnership marketing, and solutions marketing.
While these insights seem like pipeline 101, they aren't always implemented. Let's look at some quick facts about Sara's experience. She spent a decade at Salesforce before moving on to Twilio as CMO when they were at about $400M ARR with 30 sales reps. They had a healthy self-service motion, but growth was flattening.
About four years later, she joined Attentive as CMO, a late-stage startup in the SMS marketing space. Now, she's the CMO at Datadog. Each of these companies had different GTM motions.
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Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code jason50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This episode is sponsored by: remote.com
When the right person for the job is a world away, Remote Talent brings the world to you. As the top job board for remote-first companies, we give you powerful tools to post your listings and reach the world's top candidates and remote professionals. Start building your dream team from anywhere—visit Remote.com/jobs today.
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This episode is sponsored by: Anrok
A question for SaaS finance leaders, do you know where your customers are? Anrok tracks where your sales are creating exposure, and automates tax calculation and filing worldwide. Built for high-growth software companies, Anrok protects your revenue and saves you time. Visit anrok.com/saastr to learn more.
Summer Replay - That Datadog Will Hunt with Dann Berg
In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Dann Berg. At the time, he was a Senior Cloud Analyst at Datadog, but he now provides community support for the FinOps Foundation. Dann and Corey go into the weeds of cost optimization, and each of them bring their respective experiences forward. Dann’s offers his take on multi-cloud and how Datadog is tackling its customer needs there. But the talent doesn’t end there, Dann is also an emerging thinker and influencer in the space, and to boot, an accomplished writer and playwright. Two of his plays have been produced in NYC and China. Check out their conversation!
Show Highlights:
(0:00) Intro
(1:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:36) Transitioning to Senior Cloud Ops Analyst
(5:12) The composition of Dann's team
(6:54) Cloud cost optimization in the regular business cycle
(10:43) Helping customers understand their cloud bills
(17:42) Paying attention to pricing changes
(21:06) The psychology of cloud economics
(23:20) Working with multiple clouds
(25:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(25:46) Spending too much money to save too little money
(31:12) The dangers of relying on third-party tools
(34:01) Pricing woes
(36:25) Where you can find Dann
About Dann Berg
Dann Berg currently works part-time with FinOps after spending more than a decade in the industry. He is also an active member of the larger technical community, hosting the monthly New York City FinOps Meetup, and has been published multiple times in places such as MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others. When he’s not saving companies millions of dollars, he’s writing plays, and has had two full-lengh plays produced in New York City and China., Dann is the Director of Community at Vantage. Previously, first FinOps Practitioner at Datadog and FullStory. Host of the NYC FinOps Meetup for almost three years. He also writes plays.
Links:
Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com
Personal Website: https://dannb.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannberg
Monthly newsletter: https://dannb.org/newsletter/
Previous SITC episode with Dann Berg, Episode 51: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-51-size-of-cloud-bill-not-about-number-of-customers-but-number-of-engineers-you-ve-hired/
Original Episode:
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/that-datadog-will-hunt-with-dann-berg/
Sponsor:
The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/
EP 108: Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog) Shares Every Lesson From Scaling to $40B
Olivier Pomel built Datadog into a $40B company while burning only $25M in capital. In our conversation, he shares the fundraising lessons, operating principles, and core insights that made this possible. He also discusses the pros and cons of building a tech company in NYC, how early-career professionals should approach learning AI tools, how Datadog is building a trusted relationship with their users around AI features, and much more
(00:00) Intro
(01:30) Datadog's Early Challenges and Lessons
(04:32) The Core Insight Behind Datadog
(05:20) Building the Right Product
(07:46) Transitioning to Open Beta
(09:38) Expanding Datadog's Product Line
(11:26) Platform Vision and Modular Products
(18:12) Empowering Product Teams
(22:14) Acquisitions and Integration Strategy
(33:18) Customer-Centric Approach
(36:39) Bottom-Up Sales Strategy
(46:04) Navigating Founder Challenges
(46:37) Building a Collaborative Management Team
(48:32) Staying Close to Customers
(51:36) Maintaining a Culture of Discipline and Efficiency
(56:26) Pricing Strategy and Market Positioning
(01:01:24) Fostering a Low-Ego, High-Performance Culture
(01:06:32) Hiring and Promoting for Long-Term Success
(01:12:21) Fundraising and Investor Relations
(01:16:03) Deciding Whether to Sell or Scale
(01:18:26) The Impact of AI on Software Development
(01:23:24) Choosing New York Over Silicon Valley
(01:28:04) Final Thoughts and Reflections
Executive Producer: Rashad Assir
Producer: Leah Clapper
Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky
Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA
🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1
Follow on Socials
📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow
📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow
🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow
About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member.
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The magic of a trace
Felix Geisendörfer & Michael Knyszek join Natalie to discuss Go execution traces: why they’re awesome, common use cases, how they’ve gotten better of late & more.
Join the discussion
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Sponsors:
Boot.dev – Learn backend development the smart way. Boot.dev is the most captivating, finger-flying, addictive way to learn to code.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Featuring:
Felix Geisendörfer – Website, GitHub, X
Michael Knyszek – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Natalie Pistunovich – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Making Go more efficient (Go Time #260)
More powerful Go execution traces
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
SaaStr 695: How to Close More Deals with Less Budget with Datadog's CMO Alex Rosemblat
As SaaS companies slash campaign budgets, marketing leaders need to find other ways to augment customer wins from their remaining campaigns. Increasing down-funnel conversions by having marketing enable sellers to "all-star" levels along the funnel can help make up the difference.
In this episode, Datadog's CMO Alex Rosemblat will explore the tactics, personas, best practices, and tracking metrics to significantly up-level product and campaign-level sales enablement.
What happens to Observability If Code is AI-Generated? The Potential for AI in DevOps, with Datadog Co-founder/CEO Olivier Pomel
Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, the leading observability company, discusses the company’s founding story, early product sequencing, platform strategy, and acquisitions. Olivier also shares his thoughts on their more recent expansion into security, and why he’s bullish on the potential for AI in DevOps.
** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. **
No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.
Show Links:
Nov 22, 2022: Product-led Growth: Founder 1-on-1 with Datadog and Aiven - Olivier Pomel & Oskari Saarenmaa
May 25, 2022: Datadog, Inc. (DDOG) CEO Olivier Pomel Presents at J.P. Morgan's 50th Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference
Jan 6, 2021: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook
Datadog’s Official Website
Olivier Pomel LinkedIn
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Oliveur
Show Notes:
[00:10] - DevOps and AI Potential
[06:54] - Datadog and Generative AI
[20:40] - Datadog's Acquisition and Expansion Strategy
[31:46] - LLMs in Automation and Precision
[42:35] - Datadog's Customer Value and Growth
#408: Hatch: A Modern Python Workflow
See the full show notes for this episode on the website at talkpython.fm/408
Engineering interview tips & tricks
In this episode, we will be exploring interviewing as a Software Engineer. Tips, tricks, and gotchas, as well as potentially some interviewing horror stories and red flags to avoid at all costs. We’re joined by Emma Draper, Engineering Manager at the New York Times based in Arizona, and Kate Jonas, goes by Jonas, Technical Enablement Manager at Datadog based in Denver.
Join the discussion
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Sponsors:
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Chronosphere – Chronosphere is the observability platform for cloud-native teams operating at scale. When it comes to observability, teams need a reliable, scalable, and efficient solution so they can know about issues well before their customers do. Teams choose Chronosphere to help them move faster than the competition. Learn more and get a demo at chronosphere.io.
Featuring:
Emma Draper – GitHub, LinkedIn
Jonas – LinkedIn, X
Natalie Pistunovich – GitHub, X
Angelica Hill – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
SaaStr 575: The State of SaaS Marketing in 2022: Mutiny & SaaStr CMO Panel
The last few years have certainly tested marketers, but 2022 serves up a brand new array of challenges. Uncharted territory stretches ahead, but the unknown can also present opportunities for growth and greatness.
At Mutiny's The Second Lever digital conference, SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin hosted a star-studded CMO panel featuring Salesforce President & CMO Sarah Franklin, Box CMO Chris Koehler, and Attentive CMO Sara Varni. In the eye-opening session, these marketing leaders discuss the market pulse, impactful branding, and strategies for the future.
Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.
Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform
Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976
Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/
Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh
Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8
Developer Advocacy, Empathy, and Imposter Syndrome with Brandon West
About Brandon
Brandon West was raised in part by video games and BBSes and has been working on web applications since 1999. He entered the world of Developer Relations in 2011 as an evangelist for a small startup called SendGrid and has since held leadership roles at companies like AWS. At Datadog, Brandon is focused on helping developers improve the performance and developer experience of the things they build. He lives in Seattle where enjoys paddle-boarding, fishing, and playing music.
Links Referenced:
Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwest
SaaStr 518: Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Building Marketing Channels Slowly to Achieve Massive Scale with Datadog's CMO Alex Rosemblat
Building out a marketing channel is like building product. It takes countless iterations and constant market feedback to get right. This session will introduce tactics on how to slowly and methodically test, assess success, and eventually scale a marketing channel until it hits a ceiling and it's time to move to the next one.
CMO Attentive, Sara Varni: Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers
B2B marketing powerhouse, Sara Varni joins this episode on her final day at Twilio to discuss her journey and what lies ahead as she steps into her new role as Chief Marketing Officer at Attentive. Sara demonstrates a stellar track record of marketing know-how and creativity and has a refreshing take on the ever-changing marketing landscape.
In this episode, Sara shares insight on what it means to speak to your audience and uses an example from her Twitter to show how products can market themselves. She reflects on her time at Salesforce and Twilio, discusses why it’s important for marketers to recharge, and explores how her disciplined mindset contributes to her success. Sara and Joubin also discuss their shared love of bowling and Sara shares her thoughts on joining Attentive at the beginning of its next phase of growth.
In this episode, we cover:
“The full slice of life at the bowling alley”: Sara and Joubin connect over their love for bowling. (04:26)
How Sara learned from her father’s disciplined mentality - and what it means to create a home for her children. (07:17)
Sara follows up on her tweet about product marketing - and she shares why her 10 years at Salesforce was “the best marketing training.” (15:14)
A look back at the marketing structural changes at Salesforce and Sara’s role as CMO - and a conversation about writing memorable copy and earning “the right to speak to your audience.” (26:14)
Sara’s insight on why managers play a key role in cultivating a motivated team - and her take on the balancing act of working remotely. (35:39)
Why it’s important for marketers to recharge and how that mindset led Sara from Salesforce to Twilio. (39:53)
Twilio’s aggressive customer-centric values and go-to-market approach - how Sara navigated her son’s autism diagnosis during that stressful time of her career and what gives her peace of mind. (48:31)
Advice Sara received from her career coach and the benefits of a consistent feedback loop for people at any stage in their career. (56:16)
Reflecting on Sara’s last day at Twilio and why she loves being a CMO. (01:02:49)
Links:
Connect with SaraLinkedIn
Twitter
Attentive
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
That Datadog Will Hunt with Dann Berg
About Dann
Dann Berg is a Senior CloudOps Analyst at Datadog, and has nearly a decade of experience working in the cloud and optimizing multi-million dollar budgets. He is also an active member of the larger technical community, hosting the monthly New York City FinOps Meetup, and has been published multiple times in places such as MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others. When he’s not saving companies millions of dollars, he’s writing plays, and has had two full-lengh plays produced in New York City and China.
Links:
Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com
Personal Website: https://dannb.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannberg
Monthly newsletter: https://dannb.org/newsletter/
Previous SITC episode with Dann Berg, Episode 51: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-51-size-of-cloud-bill-not-about-number-of-customers-but-number-of-engineers-you-ve-hired/
Chaos Engineering for Gremlins with Jason Yee
About Jason
Jason Yee is Director of Advocacy at Gremlin where he helps companies build more resilient systems by learning from how they fail. He also leads the internal Chaos Engineering practices to make Gremlin more reliable. Previously, he worked at Datadog, O’Reilly Media, and MongoDB. His pandemic-coping activities include drinking whiskey, cooking everything in a waffle iron, and making craft chocolate.
Links:
Break Things On Purpose podcast: https://www.gremlin.com/podcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitbisect
20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals
Olivier Pomel is the Founder & CEO @ Datadog, the company building the next generation of tools for DevOps teams. Prior to their incredibly successful IPO in 2019, Olivier raised over $147M for the company from Index, ICONIQ, Meritech, IA Ventures, Amplify and OpenView, to name a few. Prior to founding Datadog and changing the world of devops, Olivier was a VP with Wireless Generation for 8 years leading an engineering team of close to 100 of the best developers in NYC.
In Today's Episode with Olivier Pomel You Will Learn:
1.) How Olivier made his way into the world of startups and what was the a-ha founding moment for his creating of Datadog, changing the world of devops?
2.) Why does Olivier believe that "short term failure is a source of long term success?" Why did both seed and Series A investors not get Datadog? What would Olivier have done differently if fundraising again? What do investors misunderstand today when investing in big markets looking for the "entry wedge"?
3.) What has been Olivier's biggest learnings on how to run Datadog during a pandemic? What attributes does Olivier look for when hiring senior leaders? Why does Olivier believe the CEO has to be the "equaliser in chief"? What does that mean in practice? How can leaders creat eenvironments of safety where their team can approach them with anything?
4.) What have been the biggest challenges in moving from a single product to a multi-product company? How does one know when is the right time to add additional products? What is Olivier's decision-making process to determine which products to build next?
5.) How does Olivier assess his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time? In what ways has becoming a father impacted Olivier's operating mindset? What 3 traits would Olivier most like his children to adopt?
Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Olivier Pomel
Olivier's Favourite Book: Kurt Vonnegut
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Datadog and the Container Report, with Michael Gerstenhaber
Michael Gerstenhaber is a Director of Product Management at Datadog, and the curator of their annual Container Report. He joins Craig to discuss why they release it, some recent trends, and how it helps people validate their assumptions about technology.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
web: kubernetespodcast.com
mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
twitter: @kubernetespod
Chatter of the week Episode 103, with Saad Ali
New TOC members Episode 62, with Ricardo Rocha, Lukas Heinrch and Clemens Lange
Malaysian roti in London
Elgin Marbles
News of the week OPA graduates in the CNCF Episode 101, with Tim Hinrichs and Torin Sandall
Docker Distribution donated to the CNCF
Red Hat Quay 3.4 released CNCF proposal
Hildegard malware writeup from Unit42 The original TeamTNT
Attacking Kubernetes clusters using the Kubelet API by Eduardo Baitello
Jetstack Secure
Traefik Using Traefik as an ingress controller with Istio
Kong Konnect is GA Kong raises $100M at a $1.4b valuation
Get your KubeCon EU tickets early
Buildpacks vs Dockerfiles by Genevieve L'Esperance
Why Helm never felt like it belonged by Luka Skugor
Links from the interview iOS and iOS
The Happy Cloud Happy Cloud Taps the Cloud to Speed Up Video Game Downloads by Ryan Kim at GigaOM
Datadog Live Container monitoring
Live Process monitoring
Golden signals
Work metrics and resource metrics
Datadog reports: Docker adoption 2015
2016
2017
2018
Container orchestration 2018
Container Report 2019
2020
KubeCon EU 2019 talk: 10 Ways to Shoot Yourself in the Foot with Kubernetes, #9 Will Surprise You by Laurent Bernaille & Robert Boll
Autopilot: Workload Autoscaling at Google Scale
Snow in NYC #17 on the all-time list by inches of snowfall
Michael Gerstenhaber on Twitter
Talking Shop with a Unix Historian with Tabitha Sable
About the Guest
Tabitha Sable has been a hacker and sysadmin since the turn of the century. She serves Kubernetes as co-chair of SIG Security and an associate member of the Product Security Committee. She loves to build tools and make friends, and puts those skills to work coordinating the efforts of the infrastructure, security, and product teams at Datadog. Outside of work, she can often be found organizing or participating in Capture the Flag contests and loves "pretty much anything with wheels."
Links Referenced:
Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/
“The Ironies of Automation”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0005109883900468
International Journal of Proof of Concept, or Get Out The [BLEEP] out: https://pocorgtfo.hacke.rs/
“Reliable Code Execution on a Tamagotchi”: https://doc8643.com/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo02.pdf
“What happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?": https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tabbysable
SaaStr 313: What The World's Largest SaaS Incumbents Taught Me About Founding & Scaling SaaS Businesses
Today we deep dive into what startups can learn from the large SaaS incumbents of today.
Sara Varni: CMO @ Twilio on her biggest takeaways from her time at Salesforce.
Erica Schultz: President of Field Operations @ Confluent on her biggest takeaways from her time at Oracle.
Whitney Bouck: COO @ Hellosign on her biggest takeaways from her time at Box.
Leyla Seka: Partner @ Operator Collective on her biggest takeaways from her time at Salesforce.
Ryan Bonnici: CMO @ G2 on his biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce.
Ryan Barretto: SVP @ Sprout Social on his biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce
Tien Tzuo: Founder & CEO @ Zuora on his biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce.
Paul Albright: Board member @ Clarizen on his biggest takeaways from his time at SuccessFactors.
Jaleh Rezaei: Founder & CEO @ Mutiny on her biggest takeaways from her time at Gusto.
Eugenio Pace: Founder & CEO @ Auth0 on his biggest takeaways from his time at Microsoft.
Liat Bycel: VP @ Airtable on her biggest takeaways from her time at Twitter.
Mark Goldberg: Partner @ Index on his biggest takeaways from his time at Dropbox.
Read the full transcript on our blog.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Building The DataDog Platform For Processing Timeseries Data At Massive Scale
Summary
DataDog is one of the most successful companies in the space of metrics and monitoring for servers and cloud infrastructure. In order to support their customers, they need to capture, process, and analyze massive amounts of timeseries data with a high degree of uptime and reliability. Vadim Semenov works on their data engineering team and joins the podcast in this episode to discuss the challenges that he works through, the systems that DataDog has built to power their business, and how their teams are organized to allow for rapid growth and massive scale. Getting an inside look at the companies behind the services we use is always useful, and this conversation was no exception.
Announcements
Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today.
Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Vadim Semenov about how data engineers work at DataDog
Interview
Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
For anyone who isn’t familiar with DataDog, can you start by describing the types and volumes of data that you’re dealing with?
What are the main components of your platform for managing that information?
How are the data teams at DataDog organized and what are your primary responsibilities in the organization?
What are some of the complexities and challenges that you face in your work as a result of the volume of data that you are processing?
What are some of the strategies which have proven to be most useful in overcoming those challenges?
Who are the main consumers of your work and how do you build in feedback cycles to ensure that their needs are being met?
Given that the majority of the data being ingested by DataDog is timeseries, what are your lifecycle and retention policies for that information?
Most of the data that you are working with is customer generated from your deployed agents and API integrations. How do you manage cleanliness and schema enforcement for the events as they are being delivered?
What are some of the upcoming projects that you have planned for the upcoming months and years?
What are some of the technologies, patterns, or practices that you are hoping to adopt?
Contact Info
LinkedIn
@databuryat on Twitter
Parting Question
From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com) with your story.
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
Links
DataDog
Hadoop
Hive
Yarn
Chef
SRE == Site Reliability Engineer
Application Performance Management (APM)
Apache Kafka
RocksDB
Cassandra
Apache Parquet data serialization format
SLA == Service Level Agreement
WatchDog
Apache Spark
Podcast Episode
Apache Pig
Databricks
JVM == Java Virtual Machine
Kubernetes
SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services)
Pentaho
JasperSoft
Apache Airflow
Podcast.__init__ Episode
Apache NiFi
Podcast Episode
Luigi
Dagster
Podcast Episode
Prefect
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
Support Data Engineering Podcast
SaaStr 243: Twilio CMO Sara Varni on The 1 Question That Must Be Top Of Mind For All Marketers, The Truth About Enablement and How It Can Be Used Effectively & The Marketing Playbook, When To Use It vs Throw It Out Of The Window
Sara Varni is the CMO @ Twilio, the company building the future of communications allowing you to engage customers like never before on voice, SMS, WhatsApp or Video. Prior to their IPO in 2016, Twilio had raised over $250m in VC funding from some of the best in venture including USV, Bessemer, Salesforce and Techstars just to name a few. As for Sara, prior to Twilio she spent 10 years with Salesforce in numerous roles including SVP of Marketing for Salesforce's Sales Cloud and CMO @ Desk.com, among other roles. If that wasn't enough, Sara is also an advisor @ Anthos Capital.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
How did Sara made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be one of the industry's leading CMOs with Twilio today? What were Sara's biggest takeaways from her 10 years at Salesforce seeing the incredible hyper-growth first hand?
What does Sara mean when she says, "you have to have a creative plan to get your message to market"? Does Sara really believe that there is a playbook when it comes to marketing? How does Sara determine when to throw the playbook out of the window? What resounding question do you always have to ask yourself when thinking messaging?
Messaging is very dependent on the customer being targeted, how does the messaging need to be different when targeting SMB vs enterprise? How does the creative plan to get the message to the target customer change dependent on SMB vs enterprise? Where does Sara see most people go wrong here?
Why does Sara so strongly believe in the power of customer stories? What makes the very best customer stories? What would Sara's advice be to someone who is wanting to start creating them? Where does Sara see so many people go wrong? What are Sara's tips for creating this alignment between the marketing team that make the stories and the sales team that sell them? Where are there often points of tension?
What does the very commonly used term, "enablement", really mean to Sara? Does it mean you can hire lower quality candidates and upgrade them? How does Sara distinguish between a stretch VP and a stretch too far? What questions does Sara find most revealing in the interview process?
60 Second SaaStr:
What does Sara know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
Who is crushing it in the world of SaaS marketing today?
What is the most common reason for the breakdown of an efficient funnel?
Read the full transcript on our blog.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Sara Varni
Episode 51: Size of Cloud Bill: Not About Number of Customers, but Number of Engineers You've Hired
Years ago, if you wanted to launch an Internet company or Web application, you had to own necessary hardware. Now, the economics have changed drastically with the ease of Cloud computing. It’s still a new industry that people are trying to figure out, especially when it comes to cost and optimization.
Today, we’re talking to Dann Berg, a Cloud ops analyst at Datadog. He helps others understand and lower the cost of Cloud operations. Dann is a detective who is dedicated to figuring out why a company’s Cloud bill is so high.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Companies struggle with field of Cloud economics; can be overwhelming because there’s so much to learn about products and implementation
Companies use the Cloud to grow quickly, which makes their Cloud costs grow quickly and more than expected
Only access to full list of every resource being used is the Cloud bill; there’s no comprehensive inventory service available
Companies need to offer visibility to Cloud bill; not everyone has access to understand how their actions impact the bill
Cost of Cloud bill is dependant on different factors, including new features, new users, and cost of goods sold (COGS)
Scale and manage bill by using a platform app or hiring a consultant/team
Understand pricing of AWS and learn best practices for cost controls early on
Don’t leave money on the table by focusing on engineering time - not best use of resources; focus on the smallest things that have the biggest impact
Cost is important, but don’t slow down those developing in the Cloud; open lines of communication to create culture to understand cost, value what’s measured
Links:
Dann Berg on Twitter
Datadog
re:Invent
AWS
Cost Explorer
CloudHealth
CloudCheckr
Cloudability
Lambda
EC2
GCP
Azure
CHAOSSEARCH
.
Episode 15: Nagios was the Original Call of Duty
Let’s chat about the Cloud and everything in between. The people in this world are pretty comfortable with not running physical servers on their own, but trusting someone else to run them. Yet, people suffer from the psychological barrier of thinking they need to build, design, and run their own monitoring system. Fortunately, more companies are turning to Datadog.
Today, we’re talking to Ilan Rabinovitch, Datadog’s vice president of product and community. He spends his days diving into container monitoring metrics, collaborating with Datadog’s open source community, and evangelizing observability best practices. Previously, Ilan led infrastructure and reliability engineering teams at various organizations, including Ooyala and Edmunds.com. He’s active in the open source and DevOps communities, where he is a co-organizer of events, such as SCALE and Texas Linux Fest.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Datadog is well-known, especially because it is a frequent sponsor
More organizations know their core competency is not monitoring or managing servers
Monitoring/metrics is a big data problem; Datadog takes monitoring off your plate
Alternate ways, other than using Nagios, to monitor instances and regenerate configurations
Datadog is first to identify patterns when there is a widespread underlying infrastructure issue
Trends of moving from on-premise to Cloud; serverless is on the horizon
How trends affect evolution of Datadog; adjusting tools to monitor customers’ environments
Datadog’s scope is enormous; the company tries to present relevant information as the scale of what it’s watching continues to grow
Datadog’s pricing is straightforward and simple to understand; how much Cloud providers charge to use Datadog is less clear
Single Pane of Glass: Too much data to gather in small areas (dashboards)
Why didn’t monitoring catch this? Alerts need to be actionable and relevant
How to use Datadog’s workflow for setting alerts and work metrics
Datadog’s first Dash user conference will be held in July in New York; addresses how to solve real business problems, how to scale/speed up your organization
Links:
Ilan Rabinovitch on Twitter
Datadog
Docker Adoption Survey Results
Rubric for Setting Alerts/Work Metrics
Dash Conference
re:Invent
Nagios
.
SaaStr 117: How, Why & When To Launch A Second SaaS Product & Is There A No Man's Land In SaaS ACV's with Amit Agarwal, Chief Product Officer @ Datadog
Amit Agarwal is the Chief Product Officer @ Datadog, the startup that provides cloud scale monitoring that tracks your dynamic infrastructure and applications. They have raised over $140m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, IA Ventures, OpenView and RRE just to name a few. As for Amit, before Datadog, Amit was the Director of Product Management at Quest Software (now Dell), where he led the team responsible for application performance monitoring. Previously, Amit held product management roles at Datamirror (now IBM) and Embarcadero Technologies.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
How did Amit make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Chief Product Officer @ Datadog?
Why did Datadog not have a marketing strategy for the early days? What would Amit advise early stage founders with regards to optimising their marketing in the early days?
Obviously a multi-product line is crucial for a SaaS startup to be successful, what is Amit's take on how, when and why to launch a second product? What have been his big learnings on this from Datadog?
Amit has said before that it is tough to sell to large enterprises in the early days, does that mean startups should always start with SME's? At what price point does it become a challenge? Does Amit agree that if you are between 25K-100K you are in the valley of death price wise?
60 Second SaaStr
What does Amit know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
What is Amit's favourite SaaS reading material?
When is the right time to hire a CPO and why?
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Amit Agarwal
Node.js and Server-Side JavaScript (Interview)
Adam and Wynn caught up with Felix Geisendörfer to talk about Node.js, server-side JavaScript, and JSConf 2010.
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
NodeJS “First server-side JavaScript implementation you’d actually like to use”
Ryan Dahl Creator of Node.js
C64 The official home computer of the 80s
CakePHP CakePHP enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications.
Ubuntu Upstart Daemonize your Node
Google V8 Google’s open source JavaScript engine.
ECMAScript International standardization of JavaScript family of languages
WebSockets HTML5 protocol for two-way communication with a remote host
Do from Tim Caswell simple async JavaScript library
HowToNode.org Learn Node.js via an open blog featured on Episode 0.1.7
Kiwi Node.js package management system inspired by RubyGems
Express.js High performance, high class web development for Node.js with a Ruby flavor
Fab Rack-esque framework for Node.js
CommonJS aims to fill gaps by defining APIs in a standard library as rich as those in Python, Ruby, and Java
jspec BDD for JavaScript
Transloadit Because uploads and video encoding sucks
JSConf 2010 Arrrrrrr you going to THE JavaScript conference?
node-dirty NoSQL for the little man
berlinjs JavaScript user group in Berlin
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!