Day Two Cloud 099: Can Cloud Computing Get Simpler?

In some industries, the longer a product is on the market, the simpler it gets to use. (Or to put it another way, the industry finds clever new ways to hide the complexity from the consumer). Cars are a great example. Over the decades they’ve generally gotten more reliable and easier to operate. Now take public cloud. We’re a good ten years into the industry, but the complexity trend line seems to be going the other way, particularly as cloud giants such as AWS pummel customers with new features and capabilities. Automation software, orchestration platforms, and service meshes are supposed to help, but these tools can also be very difficult to use, let alone master. On today’s Day Two Cloud podcast, guest Brian Gracely explores the idea of whether we can expect clouds to get simpler to operate and manage. Brian is Sr. Director Product Strategy, Red Hat OpenShift. He also hosts The Cloudcast podcast. We discuss: * Nuances of, and tradeoffs between, complexity and simplicity * Is PaaS the solution? * The persistence of edge use cases and snowflake designs * How much blame to apportion between providers and customers for the current situation * Simplicity, pricing, and predictability * What happens to simplicity when you want to interconnect things? * More Show Links: Simpler Clouds on the Horizon – The Cloudcast The Cloudcast.net @bgracely – Brian Gracely on Twitter Brian Gracely on LinkedIn Transcript: [00:00:05.240] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud, and today’s show is all about simplicity, we should make things less complicated, or at least that’s the core premise of what we’re getting into with Mr. Brian Gracely of Red Hat and Cloudcast fame, a podcast he did recently, sort of made me want to talk more about this topic. And so we got to dig deep in with Brian. What stuck out to you, Ethan? [00:00:30.320] – Ethan Well, you hit on a topic that I am passionate about and have been for some time Ned coming from the networking world where things seem endlessly complex. It’s difficult to automate in the networking world, for example, because of all the nerd knobs that are out there. And I felt for a long time, if we could just simplify and make things more predictable and put more guardrails in place, that that life would be better in the networking world. And that’s really the what we come from on this show, talking about it not just from a networking, of course, but really from that cloudy angle. [00:01:01.370] – Ethan And and all of us, all three of us seem to have thoughts, feelings, opinions, Ned. [00:01:07.280] – Ned It all comes down to the tradeoffs you have to make of features and complexity versus constraints and simplicity. And that’s what we’re going to talk about. So enjoy the show. [00:01:17.360] – Ned Brian Gracely. Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Why don’t you first start off by just telling the folks a little bit about you and who you are. [00:01:24.650] – Brian Yeah. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here, my name’s Brian Gracely. My day job. I run product strategy over at Red Hat, mostly in the kubernetes space. And then, like you guys, I do a fair bit of podcasting sort of on the side. I run a podcast called The Cloud Cast, which is a sort of twice weekly show that focuses on a lot of different aspects of cloud computing. [00:01:48.