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