(upbeat symphonic orchestra) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, the Cube Headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media for a special Cube Conversation with Tami Zhu, who is the General Manager of Kika Tech Headquarters in San Jose. She's a friend of the Cube, I've known Tami since almost about 15 years ago from the Web 2.0 era. Dual degree in Computer Science, undergraduate and a Master's as well as an M.B.A. from M.I.T., Sloan. Great to see you. >> Thank you, John, for having me here. >> Great to see you. So we've kind of been through Web 2.0. I think you were at AOL Ventures then, and riding other careers. You've been in the trenches, certainly in the front lines in tech. You've seen a lot of waves. So where are you now? Give us an update on what you're doing now, lot of great things happening. >> Yes, since we last saw each other 15 years ago. Most recently, I joined the company called Kika Tech and we're headquartered in San Jose. As a matter of fact, the reason the company recruited me to join the company is for two things. One is to develop our A.I. effort and product, and secondly is to move the headquarters from China to San Jose because a large percentage of our consumers are U.S. based. >> We love the China connection. We've been covering China recently for SiliconANGLE and the Cube. We just did Hangzhao for Alibaba but this really speaks to- I don't want to say the Chinese invasion of North America, but that's certainly happening, but also the rest of the world is going to China. Tons of users out there. It's exploded with mobile usage, really setting the trends. So the globalization of the internet is happening. The software on mobile is just getting better and better. You're doing some A.I. work with Kika. What's going on with A.I. and Kika? You guys have spectacular performance. What, 400 million downloads? What is it all about? What is the big trend that you're riding? >> Yeah, so the mission of Kika is to revolutionize communication with A.I. If you were to look at the purposes of human communication, we categorize into three categories. Number one is by sharing information, and number two is about initiating requests and having your requests fulfilled. Number three is about sharing your emotion. A lot of companies out there are addressing one of the three challenges and purposes where at Kika, we're taking on the challenges, addressing all three purposes in communication. >> Well congratulations on all your successes as General Manager and expanding out in North America from the Chinese base company. You've got a big challenge ahead of you, but I've got to ask you on a personal level, I've always seen you in a male-dominated culture in the Web 2.0 era. You've been very successful as a woman in tech, and... what got you into technology? You've kind of a nerd like me and you love to get in there and look at the technology. You're not afraid to get your hands dirty in the tech. How did you get into the technology business? >> I'm probably nerdier than you. (laughs) As a starter. So I grew up in a very academic family. My parents are both engineering professors. They encouraged me to excel in academics at school. I was very competitive and I always wanted to be number one, I was always number one as a matter of fact throughout the entire school and academic career. When I was 12 years old, my dad was a visiting professor here in the United States, and he told me a lot about Stanford and the Silicon Valley. At that time, I decided I was going to come to the Silicon Valley when I grew up and participate in technological innovation. I just thought that was so cool. >> And you did? >> Tami: Yes, absolutely. This is something that I'm passionate about and that I love to do. >> You're certainly an inspiration. I've always enjoyed the work you've done and just the energy you bring to the table. This is something we need more of. You're out there... what do you say to people? "Hey, I've been around the block a few times." There's a lot of people trying to figure out the whole women in tech thing. There's been such negative things going on in the business. You're a positive light. What would you like to share for folks around just your thoughts on this whole... women in tech, should they be special? The pipelining issues, all these issues and conversations. What's your perspective? How would you take it perspectively? >> Right. I say we take advantage of our individual strengths and a number of things I continue to emphasize to my colleagues at work. Number one is every day you check in and ask yourself, "do I love this work? Is this something I'm passionate about?" If you are, it's more likely you're going to be successful in the business with some perseverance, right? The second thing that I emphasize is don't be afraid of experimenting and try to make mistakes, that's okay. Completely okay. Try to make mistakes early and frequent as long as you don't make the same mistakes again and learn from that. The third thing I continue to emphasize, a matter of fact, I lead by example, is never procrastinate. We have dreams and hopes and we talk about that, that's great. But we need to execute on that now. >> I love your competitive spirit. I think you're an inspiration. But also, you said you like to be number one, and you were in school. I think you might be a little bit nerdier than me, but we can talk about it after. When you're number one, you're going fast, you're moving fast and you're learning, you're not going to go without a few interactions that are unfavorable. So how do you talk to other women when you're out in the field? When you're hard-charging like that and you're smart, you've got to deal with a lot of bad actors. It could be men, it could be harassment, it could be sexual, whatever it is, you know you've got to break through it. If you want to be number one, you've got to deal with this. >> Sure. >> I've talked to a lot of women who have said they've had their fair share of interactions that were unpleasant, but I moved past it. How do you deal with it? I'm sure you have stories and can share a perspective on how you deal with unwanted advances to just bad behavior. >> Right. I think I'm luckier, probably, than some of the... average population in that I've not really dealt with much bad behavior. Certain behaviors, I'd say, look way beyond that. Don't play the same game. Don't play the game at all. Don't entertain any of the bad behaviors. Believe in yourself and perseverance will get you far and apart. Never give up. >> Awesome. On the inspiration side, how do you inspire other women? I'm seeing some really good things happening. One thing is, I'm seeing a lot of conversations. A lot of people coming together. A lot of young women are looking up for leaders and looking to folks who have been through, climbing the mountain, close to the top or at the top. You have this new really cool vibe going on where the women are coming together at all ages for sharing. How do you do it? >> As a matter of fact, compared to 15 years ago when we met doing Web 2.0 I think there were a lot fewer women in tech. Nowadays with a new generation of technology and social media, we're actually seeing women in computer science taking the lead. Just taking the time, be patient, and I think one of the things as human being, we often worry about compensation and how much we're being paid now, how much we're worth, and what exactly the title is, right? I say don't even worry about that. Focus on what you're passionate about. It will take some time. Be patient and it will get there. >> We always say, "respect for the individual," but just be a good person. Don't deal with the nonsense, just move past it and don't play the games. Alright got to get back into the tech since we're going to geek out here. So A.I. I think is the hottest thing on the planet right now. Obviously I.O.T. is super important. We cover it heavily on the Cube. No one wakes up in the morning and says, "I can't wait to talk about I.O.T with my friend!" They all love A.I. because it's got a cooler vibe to it, but we're talking about software. We're talking about really cool software and a Renaissance of software development. So A.I. is super hot, you guys are doing a lot of A.I. at Kika. What is the coolness, for male and female, for anyone to get involved - What is the hot A.I. trend? Is it the machine learning, is it the deep learning? Is it the user experience, is it making it easier? What are some of the advances that you're excited about in A.I.? >> So depending on the timing and the year, say 15 years ago, or 20 years ago... Let's say 20 years ago, at the time, A.I. actually, there was a small boom that very quickly went into an ice age. A cold winter. Matter of fact, during that time, I was in undergrad and my undergrad thesis was natural language processing in Chinese languages. With that expert system at that time, the framework never got anywhere. They were really limited because of the knowledge from experts. So now fast-forward to two, three years ago when Amazon Echo first launched. I think there was a lot of doubt. In academia and the amount of people in the industry were thinking pretty cynically. Saying, "well that's just another boom. I doubt that." Echo really paved the way and brought artificial intelligence into the homes of consumers. Two, three years ago it was very cutting edge in terms of voice recognition. You hear a lot about far field, noise cancellation, but nowadays, the voice recognition is becoming far more mature, right? For someone who wants to work on the most cutting edge thing, from my point of view, voice may be a little bit to the point where it's mature and people understand the problems. So this year, only recently, Apple announced an emoji. So this is the starting point of computer vision in consumers' lives. Say if I were an engineer, I would want to get into computer vision, because there's so many more things you could potentially create with that. >> John: It's the next level U.I. in the interaction, I mean, I think NLP, National Language Processing, has always been kind of fun. I remember back when I was getting my C.S. degree, entologies were big. That kind of stalled, the nuclear winter, or the cold winter. But now with cloud computing, and mobile being so powerful, you now have so much at your disposal. With all these libraries and open source developing, it's a dream for a developer because now you can create new experiences. Not the old way, browser, or just typing on a phone. You guys have got a really cool app that you can download Kika Technologies. You got huge opportunities that reimagine the interface and the interactions. I think A.I. has put a picture in the mind of the user, the consumer, and the developer. Self-driving cars, Teslas. This is a new coolness. What are some other examples of this new coolness that you can share that are happening whether it's computer vision, Teslas, or voice interaction? What are some examples of the coolness? >> So I've been very limited in that. I've been so focused on work. We have something really cool coming up in 2018. Matter of fact, we're kicking off 2018 with launching a brand new product that's taking our existing input method keyboard to the whole next level. The whole I.O.T., you were just mentioning, "who cares about I.O.T.?" (laughs) >> Well it's one of the fastest growing areas, but I.O.T. is A.I will become an edge of the network. Now on this launch, is this going to happen at C.E.S? >> Yes, we're going to launch at C.E.S. >> So we'll look for the news at C.E.S. >> Yes. It'll be very exciting, matter of fact. >> I'll have to dig some information out of Tami after this interview is over. Find out more. We'll be at C.E.S. Okay, final question. In general, just your thoughts on the tech cycle right now. You've ridden many waves, you've seen a lot, you know the tech under the covers. What's the big movement that young people should be jumping on? The new Renaissance in software development is happening. We see the cloud there. It's clear from Amazon success of the new models here, you're seeing some successes. How would you describe this new era, this new guard of technology providers and software? >> From a talent point of view, 10 or 15 years ago, if you got a P.H.D. in computer science, you could hardly find a job other than finding a professorship somewhere. Nowadays, if you're to look at Facebook or Google as a P.H.D. in computer science, then you are worth a lot more- >> Some say Google is turning into academia, but that's a whole other conversation. But okay, if you can get a P.H.D., neural nets are hot still. Neural networks, things of that nature. P.H.D., there's a lot of work there. Anything else? >> Yes. A.I. will continue to develop, and now A.I. is the real thing compared to 15 or 20 years ago, right? It was very limited to academia. That's going to continue to develop, and you'll look at other areas. For example, digital advertising. In the past four or five years, it was programmatic advertising. How do you accurately target the audience and then maximize the CPA or CPM per audience. Then the next level is about how to build an advertising network that's effective and targeting the audience, not only maximizing the revenue, but also how do you keep the audience and continue to grow the audience. So these are- >> In the role of data, just one final thought on the data, the role of data in all of this is the center of all this. Your thoughts on the role of data and how that's going to shape- because those experiences of targeting might shift around with the users who are now driving the data. >> Matter of fact, the data is key. At Kika, our number one differentiation is a large volume of training data, so with that data, we can train our deep learning algorithm. Make our algorithm, find patterns and predict contacts and text. That's the number one thing. The number two thing is because you have the data, there are a lot of privacy policies that you need to watch out and make sure there's no data leaking or security leak that could potentially create that press. Also it's not safe for the consumers. So we're talking about data. Data really is the competitive advantage. >> If you're a data geek out there, you have no problem getting a job. We're here with Tami Zhu who is the general manager of Kika Tech headquarters in San Jose here inside the Palo Alto Cube studios for Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat electro)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back covering AWS Storage Day 2022 with Ashish Palekar. Who's the general manager of AWS EBS Snapshot and Edge and Cami Tavares. Who's the head of product at Amazon EBS. Thanks for coming back in theCube guys. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Great to see you, Dave. Ashish, we've been hearing a lot today about companies all kinds of applications to the cloud and AWS and using their data in new ways. Resiliency is always top of mind for companies when they think about just generally their workloads and specifically the clouds. How should they think about customers think about data resiliency? >> Yeah, when we think about data resiliency it's all about making sure that your application data, the data that your application needs is available when it needs it. It's really the ability for your workload to mitigate disruptions or recover from them. And to build that resilient architecture you really need to understand what kinds of disruptions your applications can experience. How broad the impact of those disruptions is, and then how quickly you need to recover. And a lot of this is a function of what the application does, how critical it is. And the thing that we constantly tell customers is, this works differently in the cloud than it does in a traditional on-premises environment. >> What's different about the cloud versus on-prem? Can you explain how it's different? >> Yeah, let me start with a video on-premises one. And in the on-premises one, building resilient architectures is really the customer's responsibility, and it's very challenging. You'll start thinking about what your single points of failure are. To avoid those, you have to build in redundancy, you might build in replication as an example for storage and doing this now means you have to have provision more hardware. And depending on what your availability requirements are, you may even have to start looking for multiple data centers, some in the same regions, some in different geographical locations. And you have to ensure that you're fully automated, so that your recovery processes can take place. And as you can see that's a lot of owners being placed on the customer. One other thing that we hear about is really elasticity and how elasticity plays into the resiliency for applications. As an example, if you experience a sudden spike in workloads, in a on-premises environment, that can lead to resource saturation. And so really you have two choices. One is to sort of throttle the workload and experience resiliency, or your second option becomes buying additional hardware and securing more capacity and keeping it fair low in case of experiencing such a spike. And so your two propositions that are either experiencing resiliency, challenges or paying really to have infrastructure that's lying around. And both of those are different really when you start thinking about the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a third option too, which is lose data, which is not an option. Go ahead- >> Which is not, yeah, I pretty much as a storage person, that is not an option. The reason about that that we think is reasonable for customers to take. The big contrast in the cloud really comes with how we think about capacity. And fundamentally the the cloud gives you that access to capacity so you are not managing that capacity. The infrastructure complexity and the cost associated with that are also just a function of how infrastructure is built really in the cloud. But all of that really starts with the bedrock of how we design for avoiding single points of failure. The best way to explain this is really to start thinking about our availability zones. Typically these availability zones consist of multiple data centers, located in the same regional area to enable high throughput and low latency for applications. But the availability zones themselves are physically independent. They have independent connections to utility power, standalone backup power resources, independent mechanical services and independent network connectivity. We take availability zone independence extremely seriously, so that when customers are building the availability of their workload, they can architect using these multiple zones. And that is something that when I'm talking to customers or Tami is talking to customers, we highly encourage customers to keep in mind as they're building resiliency for their applications. >> Right, so you can have within an availability zone, you can have, you know, instantaneous, you know when you're doing it right. You've got, you've captured that data and you can asynchronously move to outside of that in case there's, the very low probability, but it does happen, you get some disasters. You're minimizing that RPO. And I don't have to worry about that as a customer and figuring out how to do three site data centers. >> That's right. Like that even further, now imagine if you're expanding globally. All those things that we described about like creating new footprint and creating a new region and finding new data centers. As a customer in an on-premises environment, you take that on yourself. Whereas with AWS, because of our global presence, you can expand to a region and bring those same operational characteristics to those environments. And so again, bringing resiliency as you're thinking about expanding your workload, that's another benefit that you get from using the availability zone region architecture that AWS has. >> And as Charles Phillips, former CEO of Infor said, "Friends, don't let friends build data center," so I don't have to worry about building the data center. Let's bring Cami into the discussion here. Cami, think about elastic block storage, it gives, you know customers, you get persistent block storage for EC2 instances. So it's foundational for any mission critical or business critical application that you're building on AWS. How do you think about data resiliency in EBS specifically? I always ask the question, what happens if something goes wrong? So how should we think about data resiliency in EBS specifically? >> Yeah, you're right Dave, block storage is a really foundational piece. When we talk to customers about building in the cloud or moving an application to the cloud, and data resiliency is something that comes up all the time. And with EBS, you know EBS is a very large distributed system with many components. And we put a lot of thought and effort to build resiliency into EBS. So we design those components to operate and fail independently. So when customers create an EBS volume for example, we'll automatically choose the best storage nodes to address the failure domain and the data protection strategy for each of our different volume types. And part of our resiliency strategy also includes separating what we call a volume life cycle control plane. Which are things like creating a volume, or attaching a volume to an EC2 instance. So we separate that control plane, from the storage data plane, which includes all the components that are responsible for serving IO to your instance, and then persisting it to durable media. So what that means is once a volume is created and attached to the instance, the operations on that volume they're independent from the control point function. So even in the case of an infrastructure event, like a power issue, for example, you can recreate an EBS volume from a snapshot. And speaking of snapshots, that's the other core pillar of resiliency in EBS. Snapshots are point in time copies of EBS volumes that would store in S3. And snapshots are actually a regional service. And that means internally we use multiple of the availability zones that Ashish was talking about to replicate your data so that the snapshots can withstand the failure of an availability zone. And so thanks to that availability zone independence, and then this builtin component independence, customers can use that snapshot and recreate an EBS following another AZO or even in another region if they need to. >> Great so, okay, so you touched on some of the things EBS does to build resiliency into the service. Now thinking about over your right shoulders, you know, Joan Deviva, so what can organizations do to build more resilience into their applications on EBS so they can enjoy life without anxiety? >> (laughs) That is a great question. Also something that we love to talk to customers about. And the core thing to think about here is that we don't believe in a one size fits all approach. And so what we are doing in EBS is we give customers different tools so that they can design a resiliency strategy that is custom tailored for their data. And so to do this, this resiliency assessment, you have to think about the context of this specific workload and ask questions like what other critical services depend on this data and what will break if this data's not available and how long can can those systems withstand that, for example. And so the most important step I'll mention it again, snapshots, that is a very important step in a recovery plan. Make sure you have a backup of your data. And so we actually recommend that customers take the snapshots at least daily. And we have features that make that easier for you. For example, Data Lifecycle Manager which is a feature that is entirely free. It allows you to create backup policies, and then you can automate the process of creating the snapshot, so it's very low effort. And then when you want to use that backup to recreate a volume, we have a feature called Fast Snapshot Restore, that can expedite the creation of the volume. So if you have a more, you know a shorter recovery time objective you can use that feature to expedite the recovery process. So that's backup. And then the other pillar we talked to customers about is data replication. Just another very important step when you're thinking about your resiliency and your recovery plans. So with EBS, you can use replication tools that work at the level of the operating system. So that's something like DRBD for example. Or you can use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, and that will replicate your data across availability zones or nearby regions too. So we talked about backup and replication, and then the last topic that we recommend customers think about is having a workload monitoring solution in place. And you can do that in EBS, using cloud watch metrics. So you can monitor the health of your EBS volume using those metrics. We have a lot of tips in our documentation on how to measure that performance. And then you can use those performance metrics as triggers for automated recovery workflows that you can build using tools like auto scaling groups for example. >> Great, thank you for that advice. Just quick follow up. So you mentioned your recommendation, at least daily, what kind of granularity, if I want to compress my RPO can I go at a more granular level? >> Yes, you can go more granular and you can use again the daily lifecycle manager to define those policies. >> Great, thank you. Before we go, I want to just quickly cover what's new with EBS. Ashish, maybe you could talk about, I understand you've got something new today. You've got an announcement, take us through that. >> Yeah, thanks for checking in and I'm so glad you asked. We talked about how snapshots help resilience and are a critical part of building resilient architectures. So customers like the simplicity of backing up their EC2 instances, using multi volume snapshots. And what they're looking for is the ability to back up only to exclude specific volumes from the backup, especially those that don't need backup. So think of applications that have cash data, or applications that have temporary data that really doesn't need backup. So today we are adding a new parameter to the create snapshots API, which creates a crash consistent set of snapshots for volumes attached to an EC2 instance. Where customers can now exclude specific volumes from an instance backup. So customers using data life cycle manager that can be touched on, can automate their backups. And again they also get to exclude these specific volumes. So really the feature is not just about convenience, but it's also to help customers save on cost. As many of these customers are managing tens of thousands of snapshots. And so we want to make sure they can take it at the granularity that they need it. So super happy to bring that into the hands of customers as well. >> Yeah, that's a nice option. Okay, Ashish, Cami thank you so much for coming back in theCube, helping us learn about what's new and what's cool and EBS, appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having us Dave. >> Thank you for having us Dave. >> You're very welcome now, if you want to learn more about EBS resilience, stay right here because coming up, we've got a session which is a deep dive on protecting mission critical workloads with Amazon EBS. Stay right there, you're watching theCube's coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. (calm music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hello everyone welcome to the cube conversation here in Palo Alto our studios of the cube I'm showing for your host we're here during the crisis of Cove in nineteen doing remote interviews I come into the studio we've got a quarantine crew or here getting the interviews getting the stories out there and of course the story we continue to talk about is the impact of Kovan 19 and how we're all getting back to work either working at home or working remotely and virtually certainly but as things start to change we can start to see events mostly digital events and we're here to talk about an event that's coming up called the failover conference from gremlin which is now gone digital because it's April 21st but I think what's important about this conversation that I want to get into is not only talk about the event that's coming up but talk about these scale problems that are being highlighted by this change in work environment working at home we've been talking about the at scale problems that we're seeing whether it's a flood of surge of traffic and the chaos that's ensuing across the world with this pandemic so I'm excited have two great guests Alberto Ferran auto senior vice president marketing gremlin and Tammy Bhutto principal site reliability engineer or SRE guys thanks for coming on appreciate it thank you Thank You Alberto I want to get to you first you know we've known each other before you've been in this industry we all we've been all been talking about the cloud native cloud scale for some time it's kind of inside the ropes it's inside baseball Tami your site reliability engineer everyone knows Google knows how well cloud works this is large-scale stuff now with The Cove in 19 we're starting to see the average person my brother my sister our family members and people around the world go oh my god this is really a high impact this change of behavior the surge of you know whether whether it's traffic on the internet or work at home tools that are inadequate you start to see these statistical things that were planned for not working well and this actually Maps the things that we've been talking about it in our industry Alberto you've been on this how you guys doing and what's your what's your take on this situation we're in right now yeah yeah we're we're doing pretty well as a company we were born as a distributed organization to begin with so for us working in a distributed environment from all over the world is is common practice day-to-day personally you know I'm originally from Italy my parents my family is Milan and Bergen audible places so I have to follow the news with extra care and so much in me it becomes so much clearer nowadays that technology is not just a powerful tool to enable our businesses but it also is so critical for our day-to-day life and thanks to you know video calls I can easily talk to my family back there every day Wow so that's that's really important so yes we've been talking for a long time as you mentioned about complex systems at scale and reliability often in the context of mission-critical applications but more and more these systems need to be reliable also when it comes to back office systems that enable people to continue to work on a daily basis yeah well our hearts go out to your family and your friends in Italy and hope everyone's stay safe there no that was a tough situation continues to be a challenge Tammy I want to get your thoughts how is life going for you you're a sight reliable engineer what you deal with on the tech side is now happening in the real world it's it's almost it's mind-blowing and to me that we're seeing these these things happen it's it's a paradigm that needs attention and whew look at it as a sre dealing a most from a tech side now seeing it play out in real life it's such an interesting situation really terrible so one of the things that I specialize in as a site reliability engineer is incident management and so for example I previously worked at Dropbox where I was you know the incident manager on call for 500 million customers you know it's like 24/7 and these large-scale incidents you really need to be able to act fast there are two very important metrics that we track and care about as a site reliability engineer the first one is mean time to detection how fast can you detect what something is happening obviously if you detect an issue faster and you've got a better chance of making the impact lower so you can contain the blast radius I like to explain it to people like if you have a fire in your sauce bin in your kitchen and you put it out that's way better than waiting until your entire house is on fire and the other metric is mean time to resolution so how long does it take you to recover from the situation so yeah this is a large-scale global incident right now that we're in yeah I know you guys do a lot of talk about chaos theory and that applies a lot of math involved we all know that but I think when you go look at the real world this is gonna be table stakes and you know there's now a line in the sand here you know pre-pandemic post pandemic and i think you guys have an interesting company gremlin in the sense that this is this is a complex system and if you think about the world we're going to be living in whether it's digital events that you guys are have one coming up or how to work at home or tools that humans are going to be using it's going to be working with systems right so you have this new paradigm gonna be upon us pretty quickly and it's not just buying software mechanisms or software it's a complex system it's distributed computing and operating so I mean this is kind of the world can you guys talk about the gremlin situation of how you guys are attacking these new problems and these new opportunities that are emerging one of the things that I've always specialized in over the last 10 years is chaos engineering and so the idea of chaos engineering is that you're injecting failure on purpose to uncover weaknesses so that's really important in distributed systems with distributed you know cloud computing all these different services that you're kind of putting together but the idea is if you can inject failure you can actually figure out what happens when I inject that small failure and then you can actually go ahead and fix it one of the things I like to say to people is you know focus on what your top 5 critical systems are let's fix those first don't go for low-hanging fruit fix the biggest problems first get rid of the biggest amount of pain that you have as a company and then you can go ahead and like actually if you think about Pareto principle the 80/20 rule if you fix 20% of your biggest problems you actually solve 80% of your issues that always works something that I've done while working at National Australia Bank doing chaos engineering also what gremlin at Dropbox and I help a lot of our customers do that to albariño talk about the mindset involved it's almost counterintuitive whoa-oh-oh risk the biggest system and I don't want to touch those there working fine right now and then these problems just gestate they kind of hang around to the bin in the kitchen fire you know mist okay I don't want to touch it the house is still working so this is kind of a new mindset could you talk about what your take is on that is the industry there I mean oh it was a kind of a corner case you know you had Netflix you had the chaos monkey those days and then now it's the DevOps practice for a lot of folks you guys are involved in that what's the what's the appetite what's the progress of chaos engineering and mainstream yeah it's interesting that you mentioned DevOps and you know recently Gartner came up with a new revisited devil scream work that has chaos engineering in the middle of the lifecycle of your application and the reality is that systems have become so complex in infrastructure so many layers of abstractions you have hundreds of services if you're doing micro services but even if you're not doing micro services you have so many applications connected to each other build really complex workflows and automation flows it's impossible for traditional QA to really understand well the vulnerability are in terms of resiliency in terms of quality too often the production environment is also too different from the staging environment and so you need a fundamentally different approach to go and find where your weaknesses are and find them before they happen before you end up finding yourself in a situation like the one we're in today and you're not prepared and so much of what we talk about is giving it >> and the methodology for people to go and find these vulnerabilities not so much about creating cause chaos but it's about managing sales that is built into our current system and exposing those vulnerabilities before they create problem and so that's a very scientific methodology and and and tooling that we would bring to market and we help customers with Tammy I want to get your thoughts on so you know we used to riff a lot of to our 10th you know cube we've had a lot of conversation we've ripped over the over the years but you know when the surge of Amazon Web Services came out as pretty obvious the clouds amazing and look at the startups that were born you mentioned Dropbox you work there these comings and all these born in the cloud these hyper scale comes built from scratch great way to scale up and we used to joke about Google people say I would like a cloud like Google but no one has Google's use cases and Google really pioneered the sre concept and you gotta give them a lot of props for that but now we're kind of getting to a world where it's becoming Google like there's more scale now than ever before it's not a corner case it's becoming more popular and more of a preferred architecture this large scale what's your assessment of the of the mainstream enterprises how far are they did in your mind our way are they there with Castle they clothed how they doing it how does someone take how does someone develop an SRE practice to get the Google like scale because Google has an amazing network they got large-scale cloud they have sres they've been doing it for years how does a company that's transforming their IT have expertise it's a great question I get asked this a lot as well one of our goals at Bremen is to help make Internet more reliable for everybody everyone using the Internet all of the engineers who are trying to build reliable services and so I'm often asked by you know companies all over the world how do we create an SRE practice and how do we practice chaos engineering and so actually how you can get started actually rolling out your sre program based on my experiences I've done it so when I worked at Dropbox I worked with a lot of people who had been at Google they've been at YouTube they were there when was rolled out across those companies and then they brought those learnings to Dropbox and I learned from them but also the interesting thing is if you look at enterprise companies so large banks say for example I worked at a National Australia Bank for six years we actually did a lot of work that I would consider chaos engineering and sre practices so for example we would do large-scale disaster recovery and that's where you fail over an entire data center to a secret data center in an unknown location and the reason is because you're checking to make sure that everything operates okay if there's a nuclear blast that's actually what you have to do and you have to do that practice every quarter so but but if you think about it it's not very good to only do it once a quarter you really want to be practicing chaos engineering and injecting failure on this I think actually my I prefer to do it three times a week do I do it a lot but I'm also someone who likes to work out a lot and be fit all the time so I know that do something regularly you get great results so that's what I always tell us yeah I get the reps in as we say you know get get stronger at the muscle memory guys talk about the event that's coming up you got an event that was schedules physical event and then you were right in the planning mode and then the crisis hits you going digital going virtual it's really digital but it's digital that's on the internet so how are you guys thinking about this I know I it's out there it's April 21st can you share some specifics around the event well who should be attending and how they get involved online yeah yeah they vent really came about about together about a month ago when we started to see all the cancellations happening across the industry because of code 19 and we are extremely engaged with in the community and we have a lot of talks and we are seeing a lot of conferences just dropping and so speakers losing their opportunity to share their knowledge with respect to how you do reliability and topics that we focus on and so we quickly people it as a company and created a new online event to give everyone in the community the opportunity to you know they'll over to a new event as the president as a as the conference name says and and have those speakers will have lost their speaking slots have a new opportunity to go share their knowledge and so that came together really quickly we share the idea with a dozen of our partners and everyone liked it and all the sudden this thing took off like crazy in just a month where we are approaching you know four thousand registrations we have over 30 partners signed up and supporting the initiative a lot of a lot of past partners as well covering the event so it was impressive to see the amount of interest that that we were able to generate in such a short amount of time and really this is a conference for anybody who is interested in resilience and if you want to know from the best on how to build business continuity of persistence people and processes this is a great opportunity at no cost we need some free conference and the target persona and the audience you want to have a ten is what Sree Zoar folks doing architectural work and what's that that's the target yes and to attend our cadets s Ari's developers business leaders who care about the quality and reliability of their applications who need to help create a framework and a mindset for their organization that speaks to what Tammy was saying a minute ago having that constant crap is on a daily basis about who and finding how to improve things you know Tammy we've been doing going to physical events with the cube and extracting the signal of the noise and distributing it digitally for ten years and I got to ask you because now that those are those events have gone away you talk about chaos and injecting failure these doing these digital events is not as easy it's just live streaming it's it's hard to replicate the value of a physical event years of experience and standards roles and responsibilities to digital different consumption environments a synchronous you're trying to create a synchronous environment it's its own complex system so I think a lot of people are experimenting and learning from these events because it's pretty chaotic so I'd love to get your thoughts on how you look at these digital events as a chaos engineer how should people be looking at these events how are you I was looking at it you know I also want to get the program going get people out there get the content but you have to iterate on this how do you view this it is really different so I actually like to compare it to fire drills in SRA so often what you do there is you actually create a fake incident or a fake issue so you just you know you're saying let's have a fire drill similar to like you know when you're in a building and you have a fire drill that goes off you have wardens and everything and you all have to go outside so we can do that in this new world that we're all in all of a sudden you know a lot of people have never run an online event and now all of a sudden they have to so what I would say is like do a fire drill um run up you know a baked one before you do the actual on one to make sure that everything does work okay my other tip is make sure that you have backup plans backup plans on backup plans on backup plans like as in SRA I always have at least three to five backup plans like I'm not just saying plan a and Plan B but there's also a C D and E and I think that's very important and you know even when you're considering technology one of the things we say with chaos engineering is you know if you're using one service inject failure and make sure that you can fail over to a different alternative service in case something goes wrong yeah hence the failover conference which is the name of the conference yeah yeah well we certainly are gonna be sending a digital reporter there virtually if you need any backup plans obviously we have the remote interviews here if you need any help let us know really appreciate it I'll great to see you guys and thanks for sharing any final thoughts on the conference how what what happens when we get through the other side of this I'll give you guys a final word we'll start with Alberto with you first yeah I think one when we are on the other side of this will will understand even more the importance of effective resilience architecting and and and testing I think you know as a provider of tools and methodologies for that we we think we will be able to help customers do we do a significant leap forward on that side and the conference is just super exciting I think it's going to be a great I encourage everyone to participate we have tremendous lineup of speakers that have incredible reputation in their fields so I'm really happy and and excited about the work that the team has being able to do with our partners put together this type of event okay Tammy yes ma'am I'm actually going to be doing the opening keynote for the conference and the topic that I'm speaking about is that reliability matters more now than ever and I'll be sharing some you know bizarre weird incidents that I've worked on myself that I've experienced you know really critical strange issues that have come up but yeah I just I'm really looking forward to sharing that with everybody else so please come along it's free you can join from your own home and we can all be there together to support each other you got a great community support and there's a lot of partners press media and an ecosystem and customers so congratulations gremlin having a conference on April 21st called the failover conference the qubits look at angle we'll have a digital reporter there we covering the news thanks for coming on and sharing and appreciate the time I'm Jeff we're here in the Palo Alto series with remote interview with gremlin around there failover conference April 21st it's really demonstrating in my opinion the at scale problems that we've been working on the industry now more applicable than ever before as we get post pandemic with kovin 19 thanks for watching be back [Music]