The Appalachian Cloud Trail: Hiking, Cloud Economics, and Finding Perspective
What happens when two cloud economists leave AWS behind and spend six days hiking 60 miles on the Appalachian Trail? Corey Quinn sits down with Caleb Hurd to share stories from the trail, including exploding sleeping pads, heroic shuttle drivers, lost phones, and the unique community that makes long-distance hiking special. Along the way, they draw surprising parallels between backpacking and cloud economics, discussing everything from serverless architecture and cloud cost optimization to the hidden challenges of on-prem infrastructure. It's a conversation about technology, adventure, perspective, and why sometimes the best way to solve complex problems is to step away from them entirely.
Show highlights:
(00:00) Why Hiking Hooks You
(00:15) Meet Caleb on the Trail
(01:31) Trail Miles and Ultralight Parallels
(05:24) The Sleeping Pad Blowout
(07:46) Shepherd Saves the Day
(09:43) Trail Community and Cloud Community
(11:07) Post Trail Perspective and Inside Jokes
(15:35) Back to Work On Prem vs Cloud Pain
(25:47) Server-less Spend and Lambda Sprawl
(32:29) Wrap Up Where to Find Caleb
About Caleb:
Caleb Hurd is a Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he helps enterprises make sense of their cloud spend. Before moving to the cost side of the house, Caleb spent years in the trenches building and operating large-scale cloud environments and leading the engineering teams behind them across companies ranging from healthcare tech to enterprise Saas. He also founded CostOps.cloud, an AWS cost consulting practice, and is a vocal advocate for engineering-led FinOps — arguing that the people closest to the architecture should be the ones driving cost strategy, not spreadsheet jockeys in finance. Caleb holds a degree from Georgia Tech and made an unconventional journey into tech from a background in carpentry, which may explain his preference for building things over just talking about them. He's based in Atlanta.
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebrhurd/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Last week in AWS re:Invent with Corey Quinn
Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog.
Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.
Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.
TRANSCRIPT
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The Difference Between Marketing and BS with Jonathan Cowperthwait
What’s the difference between marketing and BS? On this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Jonathan Cowperthwait, Duckbill’s brand-new Head of Marketing. Jonathan's career path is a bit unconventional. After all, not everyone can say their professional journey was influenced by The West Wing. Even though he’s a marketer by trade, Jonathan still has the technical know-how needed to work in the often expensive world of cloud economics. Have you ever wanted to know what The Duckbill Group’s relationship with AWS is really like? How fun is it to sit on domains like “oldmanstartup?” Is there a similarity between clouds and butts? This interview is the inside scoop on The Duckbill Group that you never knew you needed.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(1:11) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:45) Acquiring the Duckbill Group office post-pandemic
(2:52) Keeping your pants on during a pandemic so you can officiate your nanny's wedding
(6:07) Jonathan's background prior to joining The Duckbill Group
(11:29) What Duckbill was looking for when they hired Jonathan
(14:54) When marketing begins to feel like spam
(15:40) The fun of having disposable domains and email addresses
(18:20) The importance of a good name for a product
(19:38) Duckbill Group sponsor read
(20:07) The Duckbill Group isn't just Corey Quinn
(21:03) The "Cloud to Butt" extension
(24:01) Corey's beef with Google's AI search engine
(24:57) What can people expect from the Duckbill Group's new marketing effort
(30:58) Where you can find more from Jonathan
About Jonathan Cowperthwait
Jonathan Cowperthwait does positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy to maximize awareness and revenue for technology brands of all sizes.
He prides himself on being a slow runner, fast talker, and good writer.
Links
Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cowperthwait/
Jonathan on Bluesky: https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/cowp.co
Email Jonathan: offmylawn@oldmanstartup.com
Email Corey: corey@shitposting.monster
Sponsor
The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com
Replay- A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette
On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we look back at our conversation with Amy Negrette. Before she joined DigitalOcean Senior Development Advocate, she was a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. Prior to that, Amy worked as a cloud architect at Trek10, Inc., a cloud software engineer lead at Cloudreach, a software developer at ASRC Research and Technology Solutions, and a software engineer at Yahoo, among other positions. She’s also an organizer of Write/Speak/Code, an organization committed to helping Under Represented Genders sharpen their technical speaking and writing capabilities. Join Corey and Amy as they discuss the pros and cons of remote work, what Duckbill’s organizational structure is like, remote work during the pandemic vs. remote work during the before times, why it’s nice to be able to work whenever you want to work instead of during fixed hours, why the future of travel in the tech industry should change, how Corey and Amy met, what makes cloud economics come natural to Amy, a tool that helps recreate physical events online more effectively than Zoom, and more.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(0:57) The Duckbill Group sponsor read
(1:30) Amy’s experience working with The Duckbill Group during the pandemic
(7:20) When Amy was the only cloud economist with a background in software engineering
(12:36) Is it antiquated to go on-site to meet with clients?
(16:23) Amy’s time spent working at NASA
(17:55) The Duckbill Group sponsor read
(18:38) What it’s like working IT for NASA
(20:28) Amy’s background prior to cloud consulting
(24:15) Amy’s view on public speaking events coming out of the pandemic
(29:21) Corey’s qualms with re:Invent
(31:51) Where you can find more from Amy
About Amy Arambulo Negrette
With over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. Amy believe that strong and consistent communication can produce the best product and overall customer experience, whether it's in gaming, educational outreach, or internal tools. Her long term goal is to lead people and have creative control over my projects.
Links
The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/
Amy’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws
Original Episode
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/a-conversation-between-cloud-economists-with-amy-arambulo-negrette/
Sponsor
The Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com
Navigating the Cloud-First World with Eric Pullen
Corey is joined by cloud economist Eric Pullen to discuss Eric’s journey at AWS that led to his current role as a cloud economist at Duckbill Group. They explore Eric’s early career building data centers and learning IT finance, highlighting how today’s cloud-first world has transformed career paths. The conversation also addresses the hype around cloud repatriation, with Eric arguing that enterprises are unlikely to return to on-prem due to the efficiency of cloud solutions. Additionally, they touch on cloud cost optimization, AWS service deprecation, and the importance of aligning cloud spending with business value rather than cutting costs blindly.
Show Highlights:
(1:35) Eric Pullen’s background before joining The Duckbill Group
(3:22) What’s going on with cloud repatriation
(6:39) Eric’s advice for getting into the IT industry
(7:08) How Eric got involved with AWS
(10:51) Different aspects of Eric’s time at AWS, including Well-Architected
(15:02) The rise of service deprecation in AWS
(17:47) Why Eric joined The Duckbill Group
(22:42) Eric’s concept of consulting at scale
(26:23) How cost can affect performance
(32:32) Problems with standardization in enterprises
(39:10) Where to learn more about Eric and his work
About Eric Pullen
I'm Eric Pullen, and I live just outside of Louisville, Kentucky. I've been following Duckbill Group for a while now, and when I saw an opportunity to join as a Cloud Economist, I couldn't pass it up. Before AWS, I worked at Appriss, Inc. for over 14 years, where I was the Director of IT and helped grow several SaaS products, including VINE, JusticeXchange, and MethCheck. In 2015 I joined AWS, where I worked as a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect, the Global Performance Efficiency Pillar Lead for the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and most recently as a Global Solutions Architect in their Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) division. During my time at AWS, I had the chance to work with some of their biggest customers, including GE, Siemens, and AstraZeneca.
Outside of work, I've been married to Kelly for almost 19 years, and we have two daughters: Jordan, who is 26 and fully embracing adulthood, and Myia, who is 15. We also have two pets: Rocky, my charcoal Lab, and Turbo, our Lionhead bunny.
Links
Personal site: https://www.ericpullen.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericpullen/
Twitter: https://x.com/ericpullen
Sponsors
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
The Man Behind the Cloud Curtain with Jeremy Tangren
Jeremy Tangren, Director of Media Operations at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he went from being a Project Manager in IT to running Media Operations at a cloud costs consultancy. Jeremy provides insight into how his background as a Project Manager has helped him tackle everything that’s necessary in a media production environment, as well as what it was like to shift from a career on the IT side to working at a company that is purely cloud-focused. Corey and Jeremy also discuss the coordination of large events like re:Invent, and what attendance is really like when you’re producing the highlight reels that other people get to watch from the comfort of their own homes.
About Jeremy
With over 15 years of experience in big tech, Jeremy brings a unique perspective to The Duckbill Group and its Media Team. Jeremy handles all things Media Operations. From organizing the team and projects to making sure publications go out on time, Jeremy does a bit of everything!
Links Referenced:
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
requinnvent.com: https://requinnvent.com
Solving the Case of the Infinite Cloud Spend with John Wynkoop
John Wynkoop, Cloud Economist & Platypus Herder at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why he decided to make a career move and become an AWS billing consultant. Corey and John discuss how once you’re deeply familiar with one cloud provider, those skills become transferable to other cloud providers as well. John also shares the trends he has seen post-pandemic in the world of cloud, including the increased adoption of a multi-cloud strategy and the need for costs control even for VC-funded start-ups.
About John
With over 25 years in IT, John’s done almost every job in the industry, from running cable and answering helpdesk calls to leading engineering teams and advising the C-suite. Before joining The Duckbill Group, he worked across multiple industries including private sector, higher education, and national defense. Most recently he helped IGNW, an industry leading systems integration partner, get acquired by industry powerhouse CDW. When he’s not helping customers spend smarter on their cloud bill, you can find him enjoying time with his family in the beautiful Smoky Mountains near his home in Knoxville, TN.
Links Referenced:
The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlwynkoop/
Storytelling and Relationship-Building in Tech with Colleen Coll
Colleen Coll, Account Executive at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her journey of breaking into tech and why it’s so important to make your presence known. Colleen explains how she wound up working for The Duckbill Group after taking the initiative to go and meet Corey at a networking event, and what motivates her to take risks and do things that might feel intimidating in order to advance her career. Colleen and Corey also discuss the power of influencer marketing, as well as the focus The Duckbill Group has on setting a high standard for employee onboarding and culture.
About Colleen
Colleen Coll is a native of Pittsburgh and wannabe tech geek working in tech media sales, events, writing and marketing. She’s an advocate for women and underrepresented communities in tech and is extremely proud of her efforts to learn coding languages and engage and connect diversity in the open source circle! When she’s not geeking out and traveling the globe (and virtually) producing/ hosting tech podcasts and livestreams, she enjoys trips to local wineries, binging sci-fi, and hosting bolognese dinner parties.
Links Referenced:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/colleencoll
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-coll-b971505/
Last Week in AWS sponsorship form: https://lastweekinaws.com/sponsorship
How To Effectively Manage Your Co-Founder with Mike Julian
About Mike
Besides his duties as The Duckbill Group’s CEO, Mike is the author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.
Links Referenced:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mike_Julian
mikejulian.com: https://mikejulian.com
Consulting the Aspiring Consultant with Mike Julian
About Mike
Beside his duties as The Duckbill Group’s CEO, Mike is the author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.
Links Referenced:
@Mike_Julian: https://twitter.com/Mike_Julian
mikejulian.com: https://mikejulian.com
duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
Invisible Infrastructure and Data Solutions with Alex Rasmussen
About Alex
Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he’s had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. He also had a brief stint as a Cloud Economist with the Duckbill Group, helping AWS customers save money on their AWS bills. He's currently a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage, and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Links Referenced:
Company website: https://bitsondisk.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexras/
Building a Healthier Sales Environment with Ashleigh Early
About Ashleigh
Ashleigh Early is a passionate advocate for sales people and through her consulting, coaching, and The Other Side of Sales, she is devoted to making B2B sales culture more inclusive so anyone can thrive. Over the past ten years Ashleigh has led, built, re-built, and consulted for 2 unicorns, 3 acquisitions, 1 abject failure and every step in between. She is also the Head of Sales at the Duckbill Group! You can find Ashleigh on Twitter @AshleighatWork and more about the Other Side of Sales at Othersideofsales.com
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashleighatwork
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighearly
Diving Duckbill First into the Depths of Data with Alex Rasmussen
About Alex
Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he’s had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. Prior to joining the Duckbill Group, Alex spent a few years as a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras/
Personal page: https://alexras.info
Old Consulting website with blog: https://bitsondisk.com
Leveling Financial Brevity with Dan Shapiro
About Dan
After earning his CPA in New York, Dan dedicated his early career to education, helping to build eight schools across two continents. Three of those schools make up the charter school network Coney Island Prep, a 160-person, $20mm+ organization where Dan served as both CFO and COO.
He has served as CFO of many fast-growth start-ups, is a recurring guest lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is an avid adventurer and musician. But most importantly, he's a dedicated husband and an enamored father who, at this point, knows the lyrics to each and every Raffi song ever created.
Links:
Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
Focusing on the Humanity in Marketing with Natalie Williams
About Natalie
Natalie is the Director of Marketing at the Duckbill Group. Her background includes marketing roles in the localization and SaaS industries. In her free time, she teaches yoga, creates beadwork, and tries to keep up with her toddler. All of which impacts how she approaches growth and storytelling. Natalie resides in Missoula, Montana with her husband, daughter, and two wild corgis
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/natveiswilliams
A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette
About Amy
With over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. More recently, she built APIs for enterprise clients for a cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children.
Links:
The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/
@nerdypaws: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws
The Operations of Operations with Jesse DeRose
About Jesse
Jesse is a seasoned operations engineer with a deep passion for understanding complex technical and organizational systems. He's spent his career helping Engineering teams achieve their business goals by improving how they interact with their technical systems, and with each other. He's currently a Cloud Economist with Duckbill Group, guiding organizations along their journey of cloud cost optimization and management.
Links:
The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/
Jesse’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jesse_derose
AWS Morning Brief: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/
Data Center War Stories with Mike Julian
About Mike
Beside his duties as The Duckbill Group’s CEO, Mike is the author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.
Links:
Software Engineering Daily podcast: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/all-episodes/exclusive-content/Podcast/
Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
The DuckTale of DuckTools with Kevin Kuchta
About Kevin
Kevin's the Lead Product Owner and Engineer on Ducktools, a recently-released set of AWS Cost Management power tools.
Links:
Stop Lying Cloud: https://stop.lying.cloud/
TabDB.io: https://tabdb.io/
Personal website: https://kevinkuchta.com/
Learning to Code in a Foreign Language with Caroline Carter
About Caroline Carter
Caroline is our sponsorships manager at The Duckbill Group for our three media publications: Screaming in the Cloud, AWS Morning Brief, and Last Week in AWS. She also helped us create our first-ever re:Quinnvent digital conference in December of 2020. Before joining the Duckbill Group, Caroline sold market insights software to Fortune 500 companies at CB Insights and payment software to businesses at Square. Prior to her sales career, she worked in client operations at FutureAdvisor helping clients invest their money digitally. She lived in Paris for 3 years, which is where she caught the tech bug and did a coding boot camp.
Join Corey and Caroline as they discuss their mutual love of fintech, how learning to code in a foreign language can be tough, why people are reluctant to make changes in their careers, how to find better mentors, and more.
Links:
Caroline’s email: caroline@theduckbillgroup.com
Episode 7: The Exact Opposite of a Job Creator
Monitoring in the entire technical world is terrible and continues to be a giant, confusing mess. How do you monitor? Are you monitoring things the wrong way? Why not hire a monitoring consultant!
Today, we’re talking to monitoring consultant Mike Julian, who is the editor of the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring. He is the voice of monitoring.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Observability comes from control theory and monitoring is for what we can anticipate
Industry’s lack of interest and focus on monitoring
When there’s an outage, why doesn’t monitoring catch it?” Unforeseen things.
Cost and failure of running tools and systems that are obtuse to monitor
Outsource monitoring instead of devoting time, energy, and personnel to it
Outsourcing infrastructure means you give up some control; how you monitor and manage systems changes when on the Cloud
CloudWatch: Where metrics go to die
Distributed and Implemented Tracing: Tracing calls as they move through a system
Serverless Functions: Difficulties experienced and techniques to use
Warm vs. Cold Start: If a container isn't up and running, it has to set up database connections
Monitoring can't fix a bad architecture; it can't fix anything; improve the application architecture
Visibility of outages and pain perceived; different services have different availability levels
Links:
Mike Julian
Monitoring Weekly
Copy Construct on Twitter
Baron Schwartz on Twitter
Charity Majors on Twitter
Redis
Kubernetes
Nagios
Datadog
New Relic
Sumo Logic
Prometheus
Honeycomb
Honeycomb Blog
CloudWatch
Zipkin
X-Ray
Lambda
DynamoDB
Pinboard
Slack
Digital Ocean
.