Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.
AI-generated code is no longer just producing low-quality pull requests. According to AWS Principal Engineer and Valkey core maintainer Madelyn Olson, the quality of AI-assisted contributions has improved dramatically in just the last few months.
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn and Madelyn discuss how AI is changing open source development, the growing burden on maintainers, and how projects like Valkey are using AI to find bugs, improve security, and harden production systems. They also explore Valkey's continued growth, the future of software development, and why experience, operational knowledge, and community still matter in an age where code is becoming cheaper to create.
*Since this episode was recorded without video, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to get creative with AI!
Show Highlights:
(00:00) Open Source Stability Push
(00:32) Reinvent Afterglow Banter
(01:40) AI PRs Get Better
(04:36) Whimsy Versus AI Slop
(06:14) AI Security Hunting Reality
(09:12) Maintainers Adapt to AI
(11:28) Valkey Fork Wins Adoption
(14:43) Fighting the AI Tidal Wave
(23:45) Next Five Years and Roadmap
(27:02) Release Woes and Where to Follow
About Madelyn:
Madelyn Olson is a co-creator and core maintainer of Valkey, a high-performance key-value datastore, and a Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She specializes in building secure, highly reliable systems and is passionate about collaborating with open-source communities. In her role at Amazon, Madelyn serves as a Principal Software Development Engineer for Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB, where she focuses on advancing distributed data technologies and contributing to the growth and success of the Valkey project.
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
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
In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Dexter Horthy, CEO and Co-founder of Human Layer, to unpack what engineers are getting wrong about AI, especially when it comes to coding agents.
From the obsession with “just throwing more tokens at the problem” to the reality of building scalable AI workflows, Dexter shares hard-earned insights on how to actually push models to their limits. They dive into the evolution of developer workflows, the rise of AI-powered software factories, and why understanding context and verification matters more than raw model power.
If you’re building with AI or trying to, this episode will challenge how you think about what these systems can (and can’t) do.
Show highlights:
(00:00)Throwing Tokens Too Far
(01:04) Meet Dexter Horthy
(01:52) Personal AI Benchmarks
(04:12) Human Layer Race Condition
(05:59) Rewrites and Tech Debt
(07:19) Software Factories Mindset
(10:20) Verifiable Problems and Token Limits
(13:45) Agents in the Trenches
(18:05) GitHub at Agent Scale
(26:23) Safety Ethics and Closing Thoughts
About Dexter:
Dexter Horthy is the CEO and Co-Founder of HumanLayer, where he helps engineering teams tackle complex problems in large codebases using coding agents. Previously, he worked in DevOps, SRE, and Solutions Engineering at Replicated, and contributed to lunar navigation software at NASA JPL. Outside of work, he’s a fan of tacos and burpees, though not necessarily in that order.
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dexterihorthy/
Website: https://humanlayer.dev
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to explore the next evolution of DevOps.
After two decades of building systems to reduce operational pain, David shares how AWS’s new DevOps Agent is pushing automation to a whole new level, autonomously diagnosing incidents, suggesting fixes, and proactively improving systems before engineers even log in.
From pager overload to autonomous remediation, this conversation is a glimpse into a world where software isn’t the bottleneck anymore, operations are evolving into something entirely new.
If you care about DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or just want fewer 3 a.m. alerts, this episode is for you.
Show highlights:
(00:00) DevOps Meets Agents
(00:13) Welcome and Sponsor Break
(01:29) David Yanacek Backstory
(02:34) DevOps Roots at Amazon
(04:22) DevOps Agent GA Overview
(05:32) LLMs MCP and Any Cloud
(08:32) Guardrails and Safe Changes
(11:47) Beta Results and Consistency
(14:13) Troubleshooting Theory and On Demand
(17:29) Future of DevOps and Closing
About David:
David Yanacek is a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and a lead advisor on the Agentic AI team. His current work focuses on Kiro, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and AWS’s operational agents, where he helps shape the future of intelligent, autonomous systems.
Over a 19+ year career at Amazon and AWS, David has been at the forefront of building services that simplify life for developers and operators. His experience spans serverless, DevOps, and CloudOps, including launching Amazon DynamoDB and AWS IoT Core, and contributing to the direction of cornerstone services like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon CloudWatch.
David also served as the lead publisher for the Amazon Builders’ Library, helping customers apply Amazon’s hard-earned architectural and operational lessons to their own systems.
Outside of engineering, David plays the French horn in a local Seattle ensemble.
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-yanacek/
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/authors/david-yanacek/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
AI agents are moving fast, but the infrastructure behind them is still catching up. In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Paper Compute CEO Brian “B Dougie” Douglas to explore building telemetry for AI agents, open-source infrastructure, token economics, and what it takes to create developer tooling in the AI era. From local-first observability to agent runtimes and the future of AI workflows, this conversation dives into what’s next for AI-powered development.
Show highlights:
(00:00) Open Source Trust Signal
(00:16) Show Intro and Sponsor
(01:07) What Paper Compute Builds
(01:55) Telemetry for Agents Explained
(04:10) Local First Data and Sharing
(06:18) Second Time Founder Story
(09:06) Token Costs and Pricing Psychology
(14:20) Stereos VM and Safer Runtimes
(20:34) Open Source Strategy and Vibe Coding
(24:54) Whats Next and Wrap Up
About Brian:
Brian is the founder of the Paper Compute Company, a distributed systems primitives for AI agents.
Brian previously founded Open Sauced, a company dedicated to increasing knowledge and insights of open-source communities. In 2024, Open Sauced joined the Linux Foundation, further solidifying Brian’s commitment to advancing open-source initiatives. With a passion for open source, Brian has consistently supported and mentored new contributors through Open Sauced, empowering developers to excel in the open-source ecosystem.
Previously, Brian also led Developer Advocacy at GitHub, where he fostered a community of early adopters through content creation showcasing the newest GitHub features. His experience spans across notable companies in the tech industry, including Netlify, where he worked as an advocate. Brian’s dedication to open source extends beyond his professional endeavors. He currently hosts two podcasts Open Source Ready and The Secret Sauce: A podcast focusing on developer insights and experiences.
Through these platforms, Brian continues to share valuable knowledge and promote open-source culture within the developer community.
Links:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas
Website: https://b.dougie.dev
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
What happens when you stop trying to serve everyone, and start focusing on the right customers?
In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Corey Quinn (yes, really) to talk about specialization, scaling service businesses, and the power of saying no. From growing a digital agency from $20M to $200M to escaping founder-led sales, this conversation dives into practical lessons for founders, marketers, and leaders looking to scale with intention.
Show highlights:
(00:00) Specialization Mindset
(00:21) Show Intro and Sponsor
(01:18) Two Corey Quinns
(02:39) Guest Background and Book
(04:41) Scaling a Service Agency
(06:28) Inbound Limits and Outbound Shift
(10:21) Cookie Gifting Breakthrough
(12:12) Making Gifting Work
(19:09) Retention Through Specialization
(25:20) Founder Bottlenecks and Wrap Up
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyquinn/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should. In this episode, Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer at The New York Times, joins Corey Quinn to talk about real-world cloud decisions, Kubernetes complexity, and the constant trade-off between building your own solutions and buying existing ones. From home labs to enterprise architecture, they unpack what actually works, and what engineers often get wrong.
Show Highlights:
(00:19) Intro
(01:09) From Imposter Syndrome
(06:34) Honest Community Feedback
(09:29) EKS Versus ECS Debate
(21:32) Home Lab Reality Check
(22:40) Build vs Buy Long Game
(28:04) Focus on Core Business
(34:35) Uptime Tradeoffs and Standards
(39:41) Networking and IPv6 Debate
(41:28) Wrap Up and Where to Find
Links:
Ahmed's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmedbebars
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
What happens when cloud economics meets the messy reality of business, AI, and human behavior?
Corey and J.R. Storment unpack why cloud cost management is less about math and more about psychology, the real difference between FinOps for AI vs. AI for FinOps, and why automation still struggles with edge cases (despite all the hype). Along the way, they explore multi-cloud complexity, the rise of consumption-based pricing, and how businesses are navigating massive, unpredictable spend across cloud, SaaS, and AI platforms.
If you’ve ever wondered why your cloud bill feels like chaos, or how to actually get value from it, this episode pulls back the curtain.
Show Highlights:
(00:00) FinOps Royalty Reunion
(03:06) Origin Stories and Naming FinOps
(06:32) AI for FinOps vs FinOps for AI
(11:05) Automation Hype and Human Psychology
(22:16) Contracts Multi Cloud and Commitments
(24:26) Context Beats Optimization
(26:06) Trust and Billing Clarity
(28:14) Focus Standard Flywheel
(30:11) SaaS Coverage and Conformance
(34:06) Contracts Multi-cloud and Wrap Up
Links:
FinOps: https://www.finops.org/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, host Corey Quinn sits down with Roi Lipman, CTO and co-founder of Falco DB, to unpack the evolving role of graph databases in a world overflowing with data stores. Roi shares his journey from building RedisGraph at Redis to spinning it out into Falco DB, along with his enduring love of the C programming language (dad jokes included). The conversation explores why graph databases remain niche, but powerful, especially for pathfinding problems like supply chains and access management, how vector search became a feature rather than a standalone database, and what AI-assisted development means for modern engineering. Along the way, they tackle open source sustainability, Rust rewrites, AI-generated pull request chaos, and the looming question of where the next generation of senior engineers will come from.
Highlights:
(00:00) C Language
(00:27) Welcome
(01:18) Database Landscape Overview
(03:17) Why Graph Databases Matter
(07:25) AI Built Apps and Data Choices
(10:29) How FalcoDB Fits In
(12:20) Vector Search as a Feature
(16:48) FalcoDB Origin Story
(19:54) Open Source Business and Rust Rewrite
(25:23) Toy Graph Problems and Closing Thoughts
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey sits down with Chris Hill, CEO of Humble Pod, to talk about the messy, nuanced reality of AI in media. From secretly cloning Corey’s voice for an ad using ElevenLabs (and almost getting away with it) to the growing tension between polished production and authentic content, they unpack what AI can actually do versus what it claims to do.
They explore the shifting economics of podcasting, the rise of video-first formats, Netflix’s entrance into the space, and why “good enough” production often beats expensive studio perfection. It’s a candid conversation about trust, automation, creative integrity, and why sometimes the most dangerous AI use case is the one no one notices.
Show Highlights:
(00:00) The AI Voice Clone Ad Nobody Noticed
(00:44) 700 Episodes In: Catching Up with Humble Pod’s Chris Hill
(01:16) New Studio, New Vibes: Building a Podcast Space in Tennessee
(01:51) AI in Podcasting Workflows: Riverside, Editing Promises & Human Judgment
(07:50) Authenticity vs Production Value + Duckbill Hiring & Product Shift
(14:05) Renewals, churn, and why point solutions fail
(14:15) The Doc Tools saga: building the wrong thing (and Disney lawyers)
(15:15) Bahamas studio build: consulting where quality really matters
(16:34) Gear talk & pro tips: teleprompters, cameras, and looking at the lens
(18:50) Podcasting goes video-first: clips, discovery, TikTok, and the wrap-up
About Chris Hill:
Chris Hill is a Knoxville, TN native and founder of Humble Pod, where he helps brands, startups, and thought leaders develop, launch, and grow podcasts across the U.S. and beyond. He works with clients ranging from local Knoxville businesses to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world.
Chris is the co-host and producer of Our Humble Beer Podcast and lectures on podcasting and marketing at the University of Tennessee. He earned his undergraduate degree in Marketing & Entrepreneurship from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and later received his MBA from King University.
He currently serves as President of the American Marketing Association Knoxville chapter and enjoys supporting the local craft beer community, traveling internationally, and exploring the outdoors.
Links:
Humblepod: https://www.humblepod.com/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Eric Anderson, partner at VC firm Scale, talks about why coding agents changed software forever and why the AI bubble can't be avoided. Eric worked on Spot Instances at AWS and data products at Google before becoming a VC. He explains how companies can still compete against Anthropic and OpenAI by staying laser-focused instead of fighting on every front.
Corey and Eric discuss why AWS didn’t kill all startups even when they launched competing products, why the AI bubble can't be avoided when companies go from $1 billion to $7 billion in revenue in one year, and why the best AI products don't scream “AI” everywhere in their marketing.
Show Highlights:
(02:30) Building Spot Instances at AWS
(07:41) Why Coding Agents Changed Everything
(10:35) Agents Doing Code Review Now
(13:53) Competing with Frontier Labs
(17:05) Why AWS Didn’t Kill All Startups
(19:01) Finding the Right Front to Fight On
(22:20) Why the Bubble Is Inevitable
(23:36) AI Pricing Will Eventually Crash
(26:33) Honeycomb’s AI Done Right
(28:04) Where to Find Eric
Links:
Scale: https://www.scalevp.com/
Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmand/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Chase Douglas, CEO at Archodex, talks about AI security problems and why re:Invent has become a nightmare. Chase helps companies capture every AI interaction so they don't get in trouble with compliance. Corey and Chase discuss Shadow AI, why Corey runs Claude Code in an account called “Superfund,” and how re:Invent put metal spikes on benches so people couldn't sit down. They also talk about why AWS released fewer announcement than before, and why Chase is finally optimistic about AI coding tools after months of frustration.
Show Highlights:
(01:51) What Archodex Does
(07:00) The Superfund Account for AI
(08:19) Shadow AI Problem
(11:41) What Happened at re:Invent
(14:59) Sponsorship Costs at re:Invent
(17:00) Metal Spikes on Benches
(21:39) AWS Releases Declining
(25:24) Why Chase Is Finally Optimistic About AI Coding
(27:13) Code Review Changed with AI
(31:22) Where to Find Chase
Links:
Archodex: https://archodex.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedouglas/
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Alyss Noland, who works on Cloud Dev Ecosystem at Nvidia, is back on the show to talk about building software with AI when you're not a real developer. Alyss runs a program that gives AI startups access to Nvidia GPUs and uses AI tools herself to build production software at Nvidia. Corey and Alyss discuss using AI to help curate newsletters without actually writing them, why humans still need to check everything, and the weird reality of people developing relationships with chatbots.
Show Highlights:
(01:34) What Alyss Does at Nvidia
(05:44) When AI First Worked for Corey
(07:34) Building Internal Tools vs Using AI
(10:39) Using AI to Help Write Last Week in AWS
(13:43) DGX Cloud Innovation Lab
(17:11) Building Production Software with AI
(20:48) The Future of SEO
(25:24) Using AI as a Writing Assistant
(29:51) closing remarks
Links:
Alyss’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssnoland/
Alyss’s Personal Website: https://dev.to/preciselyalyss
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Mike McQuaid, Project Leader of Homebrew, joins Corey Quinn to share how a package manager conceived in a London pub became essential for 10 million Mac users. Homebrew lets you install software with one command instead of downloading files and clicking through installers, maintained by just 30 people who each get $300 a month.
Mike shares the origin story from a drunken conversation about package management, explains how Homebrew Bundle can set up a new Mac with one command, and why Homebrew refuses to package software with fake open source licenses like Terraform's new versions.
Show Highlights:
(01:44) Why Homebrew Works on Linux
(04:02) The Curl Bash Security Problem
(05:02) Homebrew Was Conceived in a London Pub
(06:42) Apps That Auto-Update Four Times a Day
(08:43) Brew Bundle
(14:00) Why Homebrew Auto-Updates Itself
(18:18) Homebrew Maintainers Get $300 a Month
(22:19) The Brew Doctor Command
(29:10) Why Homebrew Doesn't Package Fake Open Source
(32:05) Open Source Is Not a Career
(35:27) When Someone Blamed Homebrew for Breaking Their Business
(37:39) Auto-Update Options for Homebrew
(39:40) Where to Find Mike
Links:
Website: https://mikemcquaid.com
Homebrew: https://brew.sh
GitHub: https://github.com/homebrew
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
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
Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, spent 8 years building Amazon's EFS file storage system, learning exactly why making cloud storage act like a hard drive always fails. Old programs need hard drives, but cloud storage doesn't work like hard drives—a problem that's existed for 20 years.
Now Hunter's building Archil, which puts super-fast storage between programs and S3 so they can finally work together. Your programs think they're talking to a regular disk while your data lives safely in the cloud.
Hunter explains how they're doing what others couldn't, why it costs less than Amazon's own solutions, and why file systems suddenly matter again in the AI era.
Show Highlights:
(01:37) What Archil Does and Why It Exists
(02:26) Why Mounting S3 as a File System Has Always Failed
(03:07) What Building EFS Taught Hunter
(06:55) Using Fast SSDs as a Cache Layer for S3
(09:45) Attaching Archil to Your Existing S3 Buckets
(15:08) Why Archil Costs Less Than EBS When You Do the Math
(17:56) What Happens If Amazon Builds This Feature
(19:20) Competing With EBS Performance on GP3 Volumes
(21:43) Raising $6.7 Million Without an AI Pitch
(23:46) What Customers Get Wrong About Archil
(28:07) Accessing Data Stored in Glacier Deep Archive
(29:24) The Plan to Get Into the Linux Kernel
(30:51) Where to Find Hunter
About Hunter Leath:
Hunter is the founder and CEO of Archil, which transforms S3 buckets into infinite, local file systems that provide instant access to massive data sets. Prior to Archill, Hunter spent the last ten years in the cloud storage industry, including 8 years building Amazon's Elastic File System product and one year on Netflix's core storage team.
Links:
Hunter Leath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hleath/
Hunter Leath on X: https://x.com/jhleath/
Archil’s Website: https://archil.com
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
When AWS has a major outage, what actually happens behind the scenes? Ben Hartshorne, a principal engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey Quinn to discuss a recent AWS outage and how they kept customer data safe even when their systems couldn't fully work. Ben explains why building services that expect things to break is the only way to survive these outages. Ben also shares how Honeycomb used its own tools to cut their AWS Lambda costs in half by tracking five different things in a spreadsheet and making small changes to all of them.
About Ben Hartshorne:
Ben has spent much of his career setting up monitoring systems for startups and now is thrilled to help the industry see a better way. He is always eager to find the right graph to understand a service and will look for every excuse to include a whiteboard in the discussion.
Show highlights:
(02:41)Two Stories About Cost Optimization
(04:20) Cutting Lambda Costs by 50%
(08:01) Surviving the AWS Outage
(09:20) Preserving Customer Data During the Outage
(13:08) Should You Leave AWS After an Outage?
(15:09) Multi-Region Costs 10x More
(18:10) Vendor Dependencies
(22:06) How LaunchDarkly's SDK Handles Outages
(24:40) Rate Limiting Yourself
(29:00) How Much Instrumentation Is Too Much?
(34:28) Where to Find Ben
Links:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benhartshorne/
GitHub: https://github.com/maplebed
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
R. Tyler Croy, a principal engineer at Scribd, joins Corey Quinn to explain what happens when simple tasks cost $100,000. Checking if files are damaged? $100K. Using newer S3 tools? Way too expensive. Normal solutions don't work anymore. Tyler shares how with this much data, you can't just throw money at the problem, but rather you have to engineer your way out.
About R. Tyler:
R. Tyler Croy leads infrastructure architecture at Scribd and has been an open source developer for over 14 years. His work spans the FreeBSD, Python, Ruby, Puppet, Jenkins, and Delta Lake communities. Under his leadership, Scribd’s Infrastructure Engineering team built Delta Lake for Rust to support a wide variety of high performance data processing systems. That experience led to Tyler developing the next big iteration of storage architecture to power large-scale fulltext compute challenges facing the organization.
Show Highlights:
01:48 Scribd's 18-Year History
04:00 One Document Becomes Billions of Files
05:47 When Normal Physics Stop Working
08:02 Why S3 Metadata Costs Too Much
10:50 How AI Made Old Documents Valuable
13:30 From 100 Billion to 100 Million Objects
15:05 The Curse of Retail Pricing
19:17 How Data Scientists Create Growth
21:18 De-Normalizing Data Problems
25:29 Evolving Old Systems
27:45 Billions Added Since Summer
29:29 Underused S3 Features
31:48 Where to Find Tyler
Links:
Scribd: https://tech.scribd.com
Mastodon: https://hacky.town/@rtyler
GitHub: https://github.com/rtyler
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Corey Quinn sits down with Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, for a deep dive into how the company is reinventing networking for the modern era. From finally making VPNs behave the way they should to tackling AI security with zero-click authentication, Avery shares candid insights on building infrastructure people actually love using, and love talking about.
They get into everything: surviving 100% year-over-year growth, why running on two tailnets at once is pure chaos, and how Tailscale makes “secure by default” feel effortless. Plus, they dig into why FreeBSD firewalls needed some tough love, the uncomfortable truth behind POCs, and even the surprisingly useful trick of turning your Apple TV into an exit node.
About Avery:
Avery Pennarun is the co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, where he’s redefining secure networking with a simple, Zero Trust approach. A veteran software engineer with experience ranging from startups to Google, he’s known for turning complex systems into approachable, user-friendly tools. His contributions to projects like wvdial, bup, and sshuttle reflect his belief that great technology should be both powerful and easy to use. With a mix of technical depth and dry humor, Avery shares insights on modern networking, internet evolution, and the realities of scaling a startup.
Highlights:
(0:00) Introduction to Tailscale and Security
(00:52) Sponsorship and Personal Experiences
(02:07) Technical Deep Dive into Tail Scale
(06:10) Challenges and Future of Tail Scale
(22:45) Building the Tail Net's API
(23:54) Connecting Cloud Providers with Tailscale
(25:22) Tailscale as a Security Solution
(26:44) Innovations and Future of Tailscale
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Most open source companies do the same thing. They take investor money, lock their best features behind paywalls, sell the company, and disappoint everyone. Grokability did something different.
Jeremy Price, VP of Technology at Grokability talks with Corey Quinn about how they built a business that makes enough money without chasing endless growth. From why they use simple technology to how they run thousands of separate installations for customers, Jeremy explains what happens when you care more about making a good product than explosive growth.
Show Highlights:
(00:51) Welcoming Jeremy Price from Grokability
(03:34) How Snipe-IT Started With a Bet
(05:30) Paying for Software Can Change Everything
(07:40) When AWS Competes With Open Source
(10:10) Boring Businesses Make Money
(15:30) Balancing Hosting Needs and Product Quality
(18:00) Pricing That Avoids Big Customer Problems
(21:06) Better Than a Google Sheet
(27:02) The Psychology of Buying
(29:33) Where to Find Jeremy and Grokability
Links:
https://jermops.com/about/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygprice/
https://snipeitapp.com/company
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Corey Quinn reconnects with Keith Townsend, founder of The CTO Advisor, for a candid conversation about the massive gap between AI hype and enterprise reality. Keith shares why a biopharma company gave Microsoft Copilot a hard no, and why AI has genuinely 10x’d his personal productivity while Fortune 500 companies treat it like radioactive material. From building apps with Cursor to watching enterprises freeze in fear of being the next AI disaster in the news, Keith and Corey dig into why the tools transforming solo founders and small teams are dead on arrival in the enterprise, and what it'll actually take to bridge that gap.
About Keith Townsend
Keith Townsend is an enterprise technologist and founder of The Advisor Bench LLC, where he helps major IT vendors refine their go-to-market strategies through practitioner-driven insights from CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects. Known as “The CTO Advisor,” Keith blends deep expertise in IT infrastructure, AI, and cloud with a talent for translating complex technology into clear business strategy.
With more than 20 years of experience, including roles as a systems engineer, enterprise architect, and PwC consultant, Keith has advised clients such as HPE, Google Cloud, Adobe, Intel, and AWS. His content series, 100 Days of AI and CloudEveryday.dev, provide practical, plainspoken guidance for IT leaders. A frequent speaker at VMware Explore, Interop, and Tech Field Day, Keith is a trusted voice on cloud and infrastructure transformation.
Show Highlights
(01:25) Life After the Futurum Group Acquisition
(03:56) Building Apps You're Not Qualified to Build with Cursor
(05:45)Creating an AI-Powered RSS Reader
(09:01) Why AI is Great at Language But Not Intelligence
(11:39) Are You Looking for Advice or Just Validation?
(13:49) Why Startups Can Risk AI Disasters and AWS Can't
(17:28) You Can't Outsource Responsibility
(19:52) Business Users Are Scared of AI Too
(23:00) LinkedIn's AI Writing Tool Misses the Point
(26:42) Private AI is Starting to Look Appealing
(29:00) Never Going Back to Pre-AI Development
(34:27) AI for Jobs You'd Never Hire Someone to Do
(39:09) Where to Find Keith and Closing Thoughts
Links
The CTO Advisor: https://thectoadvisor.com
Sponsor:
https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/dojo-ai
https://wiz.io/crying-out-cloud
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Rubrik’s GM of AI, Dev Rishi, to unpack the real story behind enterprise AI adoption, the rise of agentic systems, and why most organizations are still stuck in read-only mode. Dev breaks down how Rubrik’s Agent Rewind brings safety, observability, and resilience to AI-driven actions, solving the “Oh no, the agent deleted production data” problem before it happens. From deep learning’s evolution to the massive gap between consumer AI enthusiasm and enterprise risk posture, this conversation is a candid, insightful look at the AI future Global 2000 companies are racing toward… or cautiously tiptoeing into.
Show Highlights
(00:25) Understanding Rubrik and Agent Rewind
(00:50) Challenges in AI and Disaster Recovery
(01:27) Guest Introduction: Dev Rishi from Rubrik
(01:44) The Evolution of AI in Enterprises
(02:33) Starting an AI Company: The Backstory
(05:10) Generative AI and Its Impact
(07:15) Enterprise AI Trends and Challenges
(08:56) The Future of Agentic AI
(18:03) AI in Customer Support
(22:03) Rubrik's Acquisition and AI Strategy
(29:30) Launching Rubrik Agent Cloud
(31:26) Lessons from Starting a Machine Learning Company
(35:25) Conclusion and Contact Information
Sponsor:
Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/sitc
André Arko, CEO of Spinel Cooperative and longtime Bundler maintainer, joins Corey Quinn to introduce RV, a new Ruby tool that installs Ruby in one second instead of 10-40 minutes by using precompiled binaries. Inspired by Python's UV, RV aims to simplify Ruby dependency management without the complexity of older tools like RVM and rbenv. They talk about why Ruby isn't actually dead, Apple's problem with shipping a five-year-old end-of-life Ruby in macOS, and the challenges of writing dependency managers in the language they manage. André also shares how he transitioned from a struggling nonprofit model to a cooperative that charges companies for expertise, proving that open source maintainers can build sustainable businesses without relying on donations.
Show Highlights:
(03:50) Introducing RV
(05:12) The RVM vs rbenv Wars and Why They All Break Bundler
(09:00) Why Your Mac Still Shows Ruby 3.0.0 in Your Prompt
(11:00) The Chef vs Puppet Philosophy Divide
(16:30) Installing Ruby in One Second vs 40 Minutes
(18:13) Apple’s Ancient System Ruby Problem
(22:20) RV’s Incremental Approach
(24:23) Is Ruby Dead?
(28:44) Why RV Is Written in Rust, Not Ruby
(31:10) The Bundler Problem
(32:15) The Financial Reality
(38:00) Spinel’s Plans to Make Money
(39:23) How to Stay In Contact with André
Links:
André Arko: https://arko.net
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/indirect.io
Spinel Cooperative: https://spinel.coop
Sponsor:
Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/sitc
When attackers are smart enough to hit your backups, recovery becomes your best defense. Rubrik’s Chief Product Officer, Anneka Gupta, joins host Corey Quinn to break down what true cyber resilience looks like in today’s multi-cloud world. From AI-driven recovery to surviving ransomware with your data (and reputation) intact, this episode covers what it really takes to bounce back when everything goes sideways.
Show Highlights
(00:00) Introduction to Ransomware and Backups
(00:25) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud
(00:32) Introducing Rubrik and Annika Gupta
(01:26) What Does Rubrik Do?
(02:18) Evolution of Backup and Recovery
(03:37) Challenges in Cyber Recovery
(05:33) Rubrik's Approach to Cyber Resilience
(08:44) Importance of Cyber Recovery Simulations
(09:40) Security vs. Operational Recovery
(11:28) Assume Breach: A New Security Paradigm
(14:29) Multi-Cloud Complexities and Security
(27:45) Hybrid Cloud and Cyber Resilience
(29:25) AI in Cyber Resilience
(33:09) Conclusion and Contact Information
About Anneka Gupta
Anneka Gupta is a senior executive leader with a proven track record of scaling successful B2B SaaS businesses from the ground up. She’s led across product, tech, go-to-market, and operations, always with a customer-first mindset. Known for turning complex challenges into big wins, Anneka brings energy, innovation, and real-world results to every team she leads.
She’s been recognized as one of San Francisco Business Times’ Most Influential Women in Business and 40 Under 40, as well as a Rising Star by AdExchanger and Marketing EDGE. Oh, and AdAge once named her one of the Top 10 Digital Marketing Innovators.
Links
rubrik.com/sitc
https://www.linkedin.com/in/annekagupta/
Sponsor:
Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/sitc
Deana Solis, 2022 FinOps Foundation Evangelist of the Year, joins Corey Quinn to discuss her winding career path from electrical engineering to healthcare IT to FinOps. She shares why certifications are "largely performative," warns that AI can turn your AWS bill into "a telephone number," and explains why NAT Gateway costs hit everyone from hobbyists to enterprises. The episode covers cloud repatriation conspiracy theories, translating between engineering and finance teams, and why good FinOps work is really just getting humans in a room to talk.
Show Highlights:
(02:36) FinOps Foundation
(03:15) FinOps as Marriage Counseling Between Engineering and Finance
(06:00) Deana’s Journey From Electrical Engineering to FinOps
(12:41) The Performative Nature of Certifications
(16:22) AI as Both a Threat and Tool in FinOps
(20:41) Why AI Is Flooding the Job Market with Noise
(25:09) Why FinOps Is Never Boring Despite Sounding Like It
(29:10) The NAT Gateway Problem
(33:09) The Generational Divide in Cloud Platform Preferences
(37:23) Stay In Contact With Deana Solis
About Deana Solis:
Deana Solis is a senior FinOps engineer with more than 20 years of infrastructure management experience. Recognized as the FinOps Evangelist of the Year by the FinOps Foundation in 2022, she has become a leading voice in driving cloud financial accountability and culture.
Beyond her technical expertise, Deana is passionate about humanizing technology. She serves as a FinOps Foundation ambassador and mentor, using her voice to elevate Women in FinOps and underrepresented folks in technology.
Her unique journey, from electrical engineering to liberal studies to FinOps, embodies both analytical rigor and emotional intelligence. Deana isn’t just shaping the way organizations think about cloud costs; she’s helping reshape the culture of technology itself.
Sponsor: https://www.wiz.io/
On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey welcomes back Chris Weichel, CTO of Ona (formerly Gitpod). Chris explains the rebrand and why Ona is building for a future where coding agents, not just humans, write software.
They discuss what changes when agents spin up environments, why multi-agent workflows feel addictive, and how Ona is solving the scaling and safety challenges behind it.
If you’re curious about the next wave of software engineering and how AI will reshape developer tools, this episode is for you.
About Chris: Chris Weichel is the Chief Technology Officer at Ona (formerly Gitpod), where he leads the engineering team behind the company’s cloud-native development platform. With more than two decades of experience spanning software engineering and human–computer interaction, Chris brings a rare combination of technical depth and user-centered perspective to the systems he helps design and build.
He is passionate about creating technology that empowers people and tackling complex engineering challenges. His expertise in cloud-native architecture, programming, and digital fabrication has earned him multiple publications, patents, and industry awards. Chris is continually exploring new opportunities to apply his broad skill set and enthusiasm for building transformative technology in both commercial and research settings.
Show Highlights
(00:00) Introduction to Modern Software Interfaces
(00:55) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud
(01:02) Introducing Chris Weichel and Ona
(02:23) The Evolution from Git Pod to Ona
(03:26) Challenges and Insights on Company Renaming
(05:16) The Changing Landscape of Software Engineering
(05:54) The Role of AI in Code Generation
(12:04) The Importance of Development Environments
(15:44) The Future of Software Development with Ona
(21:31) Practical Applications and Challenges of AI Agents
(30:01) The Economics of AI in Software Development
(38:11) The Future Vision for Ona
(39:41) Conclusion and Contact Information
Links:
Christian Weichel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-weichel-740b4224/?originalSubdomain=de
Ona: https://ona.com/
https://csweichel.de/
Sponsor: Ona: https://ona.com/
Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, the company building Fin.ai, joins Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Intercom’s move from AWS Aurora to PlanetScale’s managed Vitess after years of scaling challenges with their Ruby on Rails monolith. He explains how 13 Aurora clusters created operational pain and why PlanetScale’s white-glove, partnership-driven model won out over Amazon’s building-block approach.
The discussion also covers Intercom’s volunteer-based on-call system, their pivot to AI agents after ChatGPT’s launch, concerns about the shrinking pipeline of systems engineers, and how companies like PlanetScale and Snowflake are outpacing AWS by delivering superior user experiences.
About Brian: Brian is an engineer based in Intercom’s Dublin office. He fixes problems, builds things, and grows people.
Show Highlights
(01:34) The Digital Clippy Rant
(2:16) The Good Chatbot vs. Bad Chatbot
(03:51) The AI Chatbot Revolution
(04:33) Unexpected Consequences of Good Chatbots
(05:42) AI Support vs. Human Support
(05:59) The Alexa Problem and Feature Discoverability
(19:03) Amazon's Struggles Moving Up the Stack
(26:55) The Unix Networking Society Origins
(34:43) The Global On-Call Challenge
(42:09) LinkedIn: The World's Largest Porn Site
Links
Intercom: intercom.com
Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/
Brian on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bscanlan.bsky.social
Sponsor
Wiz - Listen to Crying Out Cloud: wiz.io/crying-out-cloud
AI is rewriting the rules of code review and CodeRabbit is leading the charge. In this featured episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Harjot Gill shares with Corey Quinn how his team built the most-installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab, nailed positive unit economics, and turned code review into a powerful guardrail for the AI era.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Entrepreneurial Journey and Code Rabbit's Origin
(3:06) The Broken Nature of Code Reviews
(5:47) Developer Feedback and the Future of Code Review
(9:50) AI-Generated Code and the Code Review Burden
(11:46) Traditional Tools vs. AI in Code Review
(13:41) Keeping Up with State-of-the-Art Models
(16:16) Cloud Architecture and Google Cloud Run
(18:21) Context Engineering for Large Codebases
(20:52) Taming LLMs and Balancing Feedback
(22:30) Business Model and Open Source Strategy
About Harjot Gill
Harjot is the CEO of CodeRabbit, a leading AI-first developer tools company.
Links
Harjot on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harjotsgill/
Sponsor
CodeRabbit: https://coderabbit.link/corey
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Jonathan Schneider, CEO of Moderne and author on Java microservices and automated code remediation. They explore why upgrading legacy systems is so hard, Schneider’s journey from Netflix to building large-scale code transformation tools like OpenRewrite, and how major companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft use it.
They also discuss AI in software development, cutting through the hype to show where it genuinely helps, and the human and technical challenges of modernization. The conversation offers a practical look at how AI and automation can boost productivity without replacing the need for expert oversight.
Show Highlights
(2:07) Book Writing and the Pain of Documentation
(4:03) Why Software Modernization Is So Hard
(6:53) Automating Software Modernization at Netflix
(8:07) Culture and Modernization: Netflix vs. Google vs. JP Morgan
(10:40) Social Engineering Problems in Software Modernization
(13:20) The Geometric Explosion of Software Complexity
(17:57) The Foundation for LLMs in Software Modernization
(21:16) AI Coding Assistants: Confidence, Fallibility, and Collaboration
(22:37) The Python 2 to 3 Migration: Lessons for Modernization
(27:56) The Human Element: Responsibility, Skepticism, and the Future of Work
Links
Crying Out Cloud Podcast & Newsletter: https://www.wiz.io/crying-out-cloud
Modern (Jonathan Schneider's company): https://modern.ai
LinkedIn (Jonathan Schneider): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanschneider/
On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and creator of LLM CLI about AI’s realities versus the hype. They dive into Simon’s “lethal trifecta” of AI security risks, his prediction of a major breach within six months, and real-world use cases of his open source tools, from investigative journalism to OSINT sleuthing. Simon shares grounded insights on coding with AI, the real environmental impact, AGI skepticism, and why human expertise still matters. A candid, hype-free take from someone who truly knows the space.
Highlights:
00:00 Introduction and Security Concerns
02:32 Conversations and Kindness
04:56 Niche Museums and Collecting
06:52 Blogging as a Superpower
08:01 Challenges of Writing and AI
15:08 Unique Use Cases of Dataset
19:33 The Evolution of Open Source
21:09 Security Vulnerabilities in AI
32:18 Future of AI and AGI Concerns
37:10 Learning Programming with AI
39:12 Vibe Coding and Its Risks
41:49 Environmental Impact of AI
46:34 AI in Legal and Creative Fields
54:20 Voice AI and Ethical Concerns
01:00:07 Monetizing Content Creatively
Links:
Simon Willison’s Blog
Datasette Project
LLM command-line tool and Python library
Niche Museums
GitHub MCP prompt injection example
Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt
AI energy usage tag
AI assisted search-based research actually works now
POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
Bellingcat
Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused (May 2023)
AI hallucination cases database
Sponsor Simon to get his monthly summary newsletter
https://simonwillison.net/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonwillison
https://datasette.io/
Sponsor
Augment Code: https://www.augmentcode.com/
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