Ep. 23 - Turbocharged: Mastering Performance in Cloud Architecture
CloudChat
Cloud performance is one of those words that everyone agrees matters, but often means different things depending on who you ask. Is it latency? Is it autoscaling? Is it picking the right SKU size? We cover the fundamentals of designing for performance in the cloud: how to select the right compute options, when to scale up or out, and what it takes to reduce latency across global workloads. We explore autoscaling strategies, observability tooling, cost tradeoffs, and real-world tuning stories—plus we wrap with a cheat sheet of optimization tools across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Performance...
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Ep. 22 - What is Cloud Resiliency, Really?
CloudChat
Carl and Brandon break down the core concepts behind cloud resiliency, availability, reliability, and redundancy — how they relate, where they differ, and why understanding those distinctions is critical. Just because a service is “always on” doesn’t mean it’s resilient. They explore the difference between planned and unplanned outages, how graceful degradation works in practice, and why resiliency is measured by recovery, not just uptime. It’s not just about uptime. It’s about what breaks, how you recover, and what keeps going when everything else doesn’t. They also cover...
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Ep. 21 - The 9 Circles of Dependency Hell 🔥
CloudChat
Carl and Brandon descend into the fiery depths of Dependency Hell, exploring nine common (and painful) challenges that plague developers working in modern cloud environments. From version mismatches to licensing traps, each “circle” offers insights, real-world examples, and actionable tips for escaping the chaos. If you’ve ever watched a cloud deployment crash because of a transitive dependency or scrambled to patch a vulnerability from three layers down in your stack, this episode is for you. Links Visit us at:
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Ep. 20 - The 3 M's of Going to the Cloud
CloudChat
If you’ve been thinking of moving to the cloud, or are in the first steps of your journey, Carl and Brandon cover the 3 M’s of going to the cloud: Migrate, Modernize, and Manage. The hosts cover key points in planning your move, including analyzing and taking inventory if your current on-premises environment, multiple cloud provider options, and the importance of understanding your technical needs based on possibly hidden dependencies in your solution, and starting to think about Day 2 Operations. Sharing real world experience of their own journeys, this episode will give you a lot to...
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Ep. 19 - All Your Data Are Belong to Us
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In this episode, Carl and Brandon deep dive into the world of data storage in the cloud! With numerous options, different paradigms, and a plethora of scenarios to consider, they discuss the pros and cons of each. They also touch on some “non-traditional” data storage options, such as using an in-memory cache as your primary database. Are you a polyglot database user? Do you have a favorite database that you use no matter what the scenario is? Join us to hear the discussion on both sides of the issue! Links Visit us at:
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Ep. 18 - We Can Hardly Contain Ourselves!
CloudChat
In today’s episode, Carl and Brandon dive deep into container technology. They cover everything from the container file to orchestrating containers on a cloud platform. Furthermore, Carl and Brandon discuss how Docker is not the end-all-be-all of container technology, and options that you have to use instead of Docker. If you want to learn more about what containers are, how they work, why you would want to use them, and how they apply to more than just the cloud, this is the episode for you! Links Visit us at:
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Ep. 17 - The Source is with Us
CloudChat
In this episode, Carl and Brandon speak with Brian Munzenmayer, who shares his extensive experience in the open-source community. Brian discusses his journey from fixing simple typos in documentation to becoming a key maintainer of a large open source website that you’ve probably used. The discussion delves into the importance of community engagement in open-source projects, the spectrum of contributions, and the various roles individuals can play, from coding to organizing and managing projects. Brian also touches on the challenges of maintaining open-source projects, including the risk of...
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Ep. 16 - Control All the Things! 🛩️
CloudChat
In this episode, Carl and Brandon dive into the world of control planes, starting with what they are and how they differ from other planes you may see in your solutions and the providers they run on. They chat about the balance between automation and manual operations, and share examples from popular cloud services and technologies like Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure. Then, they explore the key functions of a control plane, such as resource management, policy enforcement, and tenant, security, monitoring, and configuration management. Carl and Brandon also take a closer look at control planes in...
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Ep. 15 - Dude, Where's My Server?
CloudChat
Today, Carl and Brandon cover a comprehensive overview of serverless computing, starting with its importance and benefits. We explain the serverless model, highlighting the differences between serverless and traditional computing, and addresses common misconceptions. The Big Three Cloud provider offerings are covered, including Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud Run. Each service is explored, with real-world use cases, key features, and best practices for building and deploying serverless functions. We also delve into the challenges and considerations of serverless computing, such...
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Ep. 14 - Smooooth Operator: Configuring Your Architecture 🛠️
CloudChat
In this episode, Carl and Brandon dive deep into the world of configuration, exploring various methods for system, app, and user-facing config. Starting with hard-coded values and whether there is ever a time for hard-coding, weighing the benefits and drawbacks. The conversation then shifts to configuration files, including web.config, app.config, and various environment-specific files such as .env files for backend and frontend uses. Carl and Brandon also explore feature flags, databases, and SaaS options for configuration, such as LaunchDarkly, and delve into DevOps patterns, including...
info_outlineEpisode 0010 - Risky Bidness: Ripped from the Headlines
In this episode, Carl and Brandon explored the recent CrowdStrike outage and the lessons to take from the event as it relates to high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery (HA/BCDR) strategies in the cloud. The incident underscored the need for redundancy, swift response, and well-defined recovery procedures.
Surprisingly, we drew parallels to the banana crisis of the 1950s. The monoculture of the Gros Michel banana left the industry vulnerable to Panama disease. The lesson? Diversity in dependencies matters—whether in tech or agriculture.
Remember: HA/BCDR and diversity are key to resilience.
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Links:
- CrowdStrike IT Outage Explained by a Windows Developer | Dave’s Garage on YouTube
- CrowdStrike Update: Latest News, Lessons Learned from a Retired Microsoft Engineer | Dave’s Garage on YouTube
- Remediation and Guidance Hub: Falcon Content Update For Windows Hosts | CrowdStrike
- Build high availability into your BCDR strategy | Microsoft Docs, Azure Architecture Center
- Protect and recover in cloud management | Microsoft Docs, Cloud Adoption Framework
- Imperial Scaling Banana by smc | Printables
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