Screaming in the Cloud - ‘But in IT, oh, it's Tuesday. Everything's about to change again.’ with Leon Adato

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, cloud economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. This episode is sponsored by Influx Data. Influx is most well known for InfluxDB, which is a time series database that you use if you need a time series database.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Think Amazon Timestream, except actually available for sale and has paying customers. To check out what they're doing, both with their SaaS offering as well as their on-premise offerings that you can use yourself because they're open source, visit influxdata.com. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Leon Adato. Leon, welcome to the show. Hello there. So you're a lot of things. You're a head geek at SolarWinds. In some circles, that would be considered an insult. In your case, it's a job title. It is absolutely. I took the job almost sight unseen when I found out that

Starting point is 00:01:18 was the title. We all gravitate for different things. You're also the co-host of the Technically Religious podcast. Indeed. You do identify as an Orthodox Jew. Also indeed. Excellent. I myself am such a good Jew, I don't need to practice. But you're neither here nor there. But we met a long time ago, I want to say, at one of the DevOps Days events and got to talking and for some reason never really stopped talking about a variety of different things, despite the fact

Starting point is 00:01:49 that you tend to operate in a world that I don't spend a whole lot of time in, namely on-premises and in data centers. Yeah, I mean, the fact is that it's not just on-prem, but it is a style of IT work that I think is particularly unsexy or seen as being unsexy. But the fact is, is that plumbing is equal. Anyone who's ever done plumbing, and I do a lot of home repair, and that's my Achilles heel. Plumbing is not sexy. There's simply no way to look, despite what pornography movies might have you believe, plumbing is not fun nor sexy and yet routers and switches and the data must flow. And that's an area that I tend to focus on and I tend to work with people to improve. I think that the interesting part of this too is that we've set up a false dichotomy

Starting point is 00:02:53 where, oh, you're either in data centers with the ancient buffalo or you're entirely cloud native. In practice, almost no one is. I mean, as much as I want to start casting stones like that, I look at my NAS in the corner where I do local backups of things and realize, huh, okay, maybe there's some unfortunate truths I don't necessarily want to acknowledge here. That's absolutely true. And it's more true for most of your medium and especially the large businesses that simply can't, you know, get a catapult and fling everything into the stratosphere as it were. First of all, as I mentioned before, the data must flow. At a certain point, you have people sitting at desks with compute devices, and those bits have to get there somewhere,

Starting point is 00:03:38 so you still have an investment of your networking gear, if nothing else. And with the networking gear comes funny little things like firewalls, and you probably have a few proxy servers and some load balancers. And all of a sudden, you have a nice little stable of on-prem equipment that still has to be cared for. And then even when you're talking about stuff in the cloud, again, the techniques still matter. You still have to know how to subnet. You still have to know how to set up a VPN. You still have to know how servers and

Starting point is 00:04:10 applications and services and processes and events work, regardless of whether they are in the cloud or, as my fellow head geek Thomas LaRock likes to say, earthed. You know, regardless, the same techniques work. Sure, many applications are transitioning to full cloud stack. They're ephemeral, and they use containers, and they are microservices. Many things do that. Many things are also simply lifted and shifted into an AWS instance, and they just sit there. And they still have to be managed the way we always manage them. It's just they're not there. But here's the funny part. So I've been in IT for 30 years. In the last 20 of those 30 years, I have never been permitted, not just that I haven't had a

Starting point is 00:04:57 habit of it, but I've never been permitted into the room where the machinery that runs the stuff that I do was kept. It was remote. Remote in Amazon's data center was as remote, or perhaps in some ways closer to me than the data center, you know, down the hall. So I tend to work in that space of those same, I'll say it old, techniques, processes, standards, systems, etc. I would like to point out that those are your words, not mine. Yes, fair enough. So I periodically encounter you in your natural habitat, which is, of course, at a booth, at an expo hall, at a conference, purporting to talk about technology, the conference, not you. The you, in turn, talk about what SolarWinds does.

Starting point is 00:05:53 And this is not a sponsored episode. We're not going to go into the realm of everything your company does. But that's what I want to mention, though, is it seems like you folks do kind of a lot. It almost feels like a choose-your-own-adventure story where no matter what you're into, there's something that you folks have to demonstrate that aligns with who the customer is. And originally, this was, OK, great. So I see you at some of the, shall we say, legacy vendor shows. Fine, whatever.

Starting point is 00:06:22 But then I see you at the cloud native shows, and you've still got interesting things to talk about. What did your, I guess, progression look like? You have been doing this in data centers far longer than I ever did, but now you've migrated to be able to have reasonably intelligent sounding conversations about things that touch on cloud. What did that transition look like for you? Well, I think, you know, full disclosure, my degree is in theater. So, you know, I can act like I know what the hell I'm talking about most of the time and pull it off fairly well.

Starting point is 00:06:57 But as I said, I've been in IT for 30 years. So hopefully I've earned some credibility along the way. And I actually worked my way up the IT food chain. I started off in classroom training, teaching people how to use Multimate and WordStar and continuing for about five and a half, six years as technology progressed from there. And then started, you know, desktop support to server support to network support. And then I sort of dovetailed into this really cool, bizarre corner of the IT universe of monitoring and using a variety of the, you know, the usual suspects, you know, big blue and big red and, you know, all the other colors of the rainbow, I guess.

Starting point is 00:07:50 You know, doing monitoring, basically, you know, my shit would watch your shit and wait for it to break and tell the right person. That mindset has helped me transition because I really do believe that monitoring engineer, okay, go ahead and laugh. Monitoring engineer is a thing. In the same way that 10 years ago, InfoSec professional was not a thing. You just had people who really, really enjoyed ACLs or really loved to dumpster dive through log files on systems. And now you have InfoSec professionals in Red Team, Blue Team, Purple Team, et cetera. Right now, and for the last, say, five or six years,

Starting point is 00:08:25 people have been focusing on monitoring as a discipline, understanding the failure modes, not just, oh, I monitor storage or I know how to monitor virtual or I know how. No, no, no. It's how things fail overall and how they all fit together. And when you're focusing on that in the way that I have for, like I said, about 20 years, you start to care less about, you know, the platform. I'm a Windows admin, you know, now Linux forever, whatever. And you start to focus on, ah, this is an interesting system and this is the way it interacts with other systems, and this is, again, how it falls down, or how it gets wobbly, and here's how we can catch it at this point. So that, combined with the fact that, as Ecclesiastes says, there's nothing new under the sun. You know, you say containers, and I think LPARs running on AAX,

Starting point is 00:09:28 which are literally exactly the same thing. You know, you can talk about, you know, virtual storage, and I think DASD or shared drives or even timeshare on a mainframe. That's a little bit beyond my time. But the point is that a lot of the things that are being used new are really reinventions of old techniques or technologies. In fact, I was just reading this morning about how Sun was trying to invent basically cloud-based desktop compute, you know, a couple of decades ago. And it never took off because

Starting point is 00:10:05 people weren't ready for the concept. But, you know, these things keep coming around. And if you've been around long enough, you see those patterns. So with all that said, I don't care what it is that you have. I don't care whether it's, you know, physically sitting on the ground or it's hovering in the cloud or whatever it is, because I'm just interested in what it's doing and how I can get at it and into it and figure out if it's happy or sad or somewhere in between. The hard part, I think, is bridging the fundamental humanity of what this industry really is about with the technology bits. And for a long time, I think back in the early part of your 30-some-odd years doing this, that wasn't really as, I guess, front and center. It seemed to be at that point there was a serious jerk problem in our industry.

Starting point is 00:11:08 Whether there still is or not is a subject for a different episode and an entirely separate debate but right now I think that there's a certain empathy required to get in the front door that at least any place we'd want to work back then that was far from true if you knew how to write code and offend everyone around you well well, I stopped listening after the right code. Come on in. And what's strange is that you're one of the most empathetic people that I've had the privilege of speaking to about a number of things over the years. And I guess I'm wondering, how did you become that person? Or have you always been that person and you just learned to walk amongst the jerks um first of all i think that that you're

Starting point is 00:11:49 right in in the 90s which is when i started getting into into it um the lone genius was still very much the the model it was also the lone owner. Remember that in the 90s was when the single guy who invented PKZip, you know, created his utility and, you know, share-weared it until somebody bought it and he got his, you know, forgive the euphemism, but his fuck you money, and he's out. And lots and lots of people did that with lots and lots of software. So the idea of the brilliant loaner who could do it all himself, except run the business or hire people or even talk to people. But it wasn't necessary because it was, again, that loaner mentality was very much in vogue. In corporations, you had the Crystal Tower,

Starting point is 00:12:47 you had the mainframe operators or the data center or the data processing center. And again, this was a cobble of arcane wizards who could speak their own language but couldn't really relate to anybody else in the cafeteria. But also remember that the flip side of it, that at that time, people who worked in IT were pretty heavily mocked and kept at arm's length as outsiders. Nowadays, you know, for the last, let's say, you know, 15, 20 years, it's become eminently evident that the business can't run without IT

Starting point is 00:13:28 and IT has no purpose without business. The second piece is taking a little while for IT people to grok, but you know, we're, we're getting it. But businesses have realized that they really live and die based on how well they technology. And that's brought the jerk problem to the fore. And I think it is getting better. I don't think it's perfect everywhere. And to your point, the places where we want to work are the ones that have solved it. Sometimes companies don't advertise, we employ jerks here. So yeah, sometimes it's

Starting point is 00:14:08 trial and error. As far as how I got there, like I said, my degree is in theater and I got into tech because at the time, the definition of a trainer was the person in the room who knew what was on the next page of the manual. They didn't have to know much else. I give a really funny DOS Basics class, like really thigh-slapping funny, and Windows Basics and all that stuff, and I did a lot of that. So when you're in a room with five to ten people who used to be part of the typing pool

Starting point is 00:14:45 on their IBM Selectrics, and they now know that if they cannot learn what they need to know in the next six hours, they will no longer have a job. And that's what comes in at nine o'clock in the morning when class begins, and it's on you. You do need to develop a bit of empathy. You do need to make sure that they know that you know what's on the line for them. And that, that continues, you know, again, desktop support, you're walking desk to desk, or you're working a

Starting point is 00:15:20 help desk. You really do have to know what this person is going through, what they need, or else you're going to hate them and you're going to hate your job pretty quickly. So I like to think that I'm sort of a naturally empathetic person, but it hasn't hurt me. Also, being an extrovert has made me sort of a flying pink unicorn of IT, especially back 30 years ago when it was populated by a lot of what I call green sock, blue sock people. You know, the ones who didn't match their clothes and really didn't relate to other people particularly well. And as you can tell role I'm in now which is really a storyteller and a story listener listening to people and finding out

Starting point is 00:16:16 what their challenges are and how they overcame them or they haven't yet overcome them and putting them in touch with the right people or helping to develop the right solutions that will get them on their way to, you know, fame, fortune and success, or at least, you know, getting home on time. I frequently said that multi-cloud is a stupid best practice, and I stand by that. However, if your customers are in multiple clouds and you're a platform, you probably want to be where your customers are unless you enjoy turning down money. An example of that is Influx Data. Influx Data are the manufacturers of InfluxDB, a time-series database that you'll use if you need a time-series database. Check them out at influxdb.com.

Starting point is 00:17:15 And that's really the trick is it seems that finding a way to meet people where they are is critically important. People sometimes ask how I wound up becoming the monster that I am now. And the piece that I think that I guess I get some of the most credit to has been, I started off giving a bunch of terrible freaking conference talks in 2012, 2013, talking about SaltStack, which was a fantastic technology that soundly lost the configuration management wars. And that was fun for a while while and it turns out that putting your documentation on a slide and reading it to people is a terrible freaking way of building a reputation and learning how to give a fun talk so in time i asked people so how did it go and their response was well that was great now here's how you make it even better it Yeah, people had the grace to approach me in that way. And a year later,

Starting point is 00:18:07 I wound up getting a traveling trainer job under contract for Puppet, which lost the configuration management wars in a radically different way. And that was a fantastic learning experience, for lack of a better term. Because again, I knew what I was doing, but I also wasn't so confident about it that I felt like I could teach it. That changed rapidly because it turns out when you teach the same thing week after week, you learn how things break. And because of some of the dynamics we've already touched on, I was in many cases dealing with people who thought that I was the representative of the company that was coming to take their job away. And that was a interesting story. Then the demos would break periodically because, hey, computers. And good luck.

Starting point is 00:18:51 And oh, if they hate you enough, you don't have this job anymore. So it was a really interesting story as far as learning to A, think on my feet, B, present to a potentially hostile audience, and C, amuse myself. And there was a weird progression there as the first one i was freaking terrified the second one third one was okay i got it the fourth one no i don't got it and but over time i got better at it it went from exciting and terrifying to rote to routine and then it was a matter of finding something new. But that was the training perspective. What was interesting to me was talking to a lot of the students and seeing their transformation,

Starting point is 00:19:30 their progression, as they started wrapping their head around how a lot of this works. Now that was Puppet, which was interesting and had its own DSL style of approach. But okay, fundamentally all it was doing under the hood was managing some baseline primitives, some files, users, permissions, run random executions there and install packages, and you're more or less done. I can't imagine what it would look like today to be a trainer to now I'm here to teach you a pick a cloud provider a choice, how to use that in the world that you're operating with, and everyone just stares like how do you begin how do you even start with something like that i think it comes back to empathy i think that

Starting point is 00:20:11 trying to put yourself in that situation even if you're not is critical i think the best teachers are great at walking that journey with their students you're a lovable fuzzy cuddly monster whom no one should ever cross because you will eviscerate them on Twitter, if nowhere else. Those are your words, not mine. I understand. And you had a lot of what I think a lot of us call character building experiences. So that's, you know, those are always good. But I think you're right. I think, first of all, you never understand something quite as well until you've had to teach it to somebody else. And the process of teaching not only forces you to build what I call technical empathy, you know, the ability to see something that is familiar to you from a completely foreign perspective, but also it gives you a chance to hear how others are using something with which you are somewhat familiar. Again, you know, once you get past that first

Starting point is 00:21:14 class you taught that was terrifying, you know, you were still familiar with it. You just weren't, didn't know how they were, what was going to happen, but you're taking something that you are familiar with and seeing it through their experience. And sometimes it's like, oh, wow, I've been using this completely differently than anybody else, which can either be, you know, wow, I'm a genius. I've found this new use for dragon's blood. Or, you know, it can be, wow wow nobody understands what this product is supposed to do so then you become sort of an evangelist of of showing people the one true way to to puppet or to whatever um but at the same time one of the best parts about training isn't hey i know this let me show you the best part about training is,

Starting point is 00:22:07 wow, that's a really interesting question. No one's ever asked that before. Let's find out. Those were the best moments. The fun thing, too, is at some point when you're teaching the same curriculum pretty consistently again and again and again, you can find the common failure modes so frequently that you don't even need

Starting point is 00:22:21 to walk around and look at their screen. You can tell them they dropped a comma and they look at you like you can read their minds. And you can't. You just see the exact same thing manifest itself enough times that by the time it comes around there, it's old hat. The first time you see something, it's new and revolutionary. The sixth time you see something, oh, well, that's just how it works.

Starting point is 00:22:44 I've seen it. There's no magic how it works. I've seen it. There's no magic to it anymore. I've seen how the sausage gets made. Right. So, again, talking about that experience both from your side of the teacher's desk and the other side of the teacher's desk, one of the things I love about the Jewish, the Orthodox Jewish educational system called yeshiva, is that the highest compliment you can be given by a teacher is not, that's a really good answer. That's not the highest compliment.

Starting point is 00:23:13 The highest compliment, and it's always given in Yiddish, du flext a gut kashe, you asked a really good question. Now, the funny part about it is that it may not be an original question. Remember that Jewish thought and Jewish conversations have been going on for, you know, at least 3,000 years. Jewish arguments, but only in holidays. The dialogue, the debate has been going on for quite some time. But so the odds of you asking an original question are fairly low. Like, that's not going to happen. But the fact that you asked a question that somebody from 1100 or whatever also asked means, wow, you are thinking along the same lines as these great minds. That's a really good question.

Starting point is 00:24:02 Now let's go into the answer. Now let's dig into where answer. Now let's dig into where that line of thinking takes you. And again, I think that's a very, you know, IT practitioner way of thinking. You know, we don't get into this business because we want to stay in a steady state of, I already knew that. You know, none of us, because if that's what you need, please, accounting or, I don't know, you know, like almost anything else. And you can say, yeah, I know that things have changed very little, but in IT, like, oh, it's Tuesday. Everything's about to change again. So we revel in the idea of let me find out. I think that's our sweet spot as folks who build our careers in IT.

Starting point is 00:24:49 So yeah, when you're teaching, what else is there? You've seen all the common failure modes. You can read their faces, if not their minds. Occasionally they ask an interesting question. That's the part that you're looking for, for that spark. I think that that is the single biggest divergence that I've seen from engineers and IT folk and the rest from the start of my career to the present day, where I'll use myself as an example. I started off my career as a subject matter expert in large-scale email systems. I considered myself an expert in post-fix of all

Starting point is 00:25:31 things because, not to toot my own horn, I was. Because it's a sad thing that not many people had to care about, but I did and it was fun. But I looked around the ecosystem and saw that things like managed email services were very clearly on the rise. And given at the time, I was 23 years old, give or take, and I didn't have the confidence that this was going to be something that I could build an entire 40 some odd year career out of, I felt the world changing out from under me. And my answer to it, for better or worse, was, okay, well, if this isn't going to work, then what can I do instead? What do I pivot into? As we've already covered, my pivot was into configuration management. And then that changed. And now I claim to know a lot

Starting point is 00:26:16 of things about cloud, and I don't, but no one calls me on it because, you know, I'm confident and I'm loud on the internet, as you've observed. The fun part, though, is that you have to reinvent yourself. If, let's say that AWS crashes itself into the sea through its own terrible naming of services that drive it out of business, I have two choices. I can either continue to shake my fist at a platform that is eroding out from under me, or I can pivot what i know into something that has more business relevance and i say this now and it sounds ridiculous oh how would amazon ever go away yeah go back in time how would solaris ever go away and you start to see that

Starting point is 00:26:57 these shifts happen all the time i don't think there is anything safe in the world of technology that you could start working on today as a new graduate and still be doing something even remotely related to it 40 some odd years later. And that's going to be a fascinating evolution point. The question is, is how will you reinvent yourself? Now, it's scary. Don't get me wrong. But it's also not what people think it is because I don't think you're coming back at this from a perspective of starting over at entry level. No, you take the things you know and parlay that laterally into

Starting point is 00:27:31 something else that's tangentially related to the thing that you were working on and bring the baseline fundamentals with you. And it doesn't take long to develop some semblance of mastery in this new arena, given a baseline level of experience and exposure where you started. Yeah, it's amazing how many things dovetail. And it's also amazing how many things that are tangential to the work you do today become front and center later, but you realize that that tangential experience really gave you everything you need. And here's a simple but powerful example. As I said, one of the things that I taught early on in my career was word processors and WordPerfect for DOS was a thing, right? And WordPerfect had a function called reveal codes. Bolding wasn't just a matter of highlighting because there was no mouse,

Starting point is 00:28:26 and therefore you had to go in front of the word and you had to say make it bold, and you had to go to the end of the word and make it turn off the bold. And there were these little brackets, the greater than, less than symbol. And it would say, sorry, no, they were square brackets. Let me go back there. And there were these little brackets, you know, just the square brackets and it would say bold at the beginning and then you'd move to the end and say bold at the end and, you know, those kinds of things. And to see, to make sure that you hadn't accidentally bolded an extra space or something

Starting point is 00:28:59 like that, you would turn on reveal codes. And so you'd see in reveal codes, you know, words and these brackets, bold, paragraph, heading, underline. Sounds kind of like HTML, right? Because it kind of is. And when HTML came around six, seven years later for me, it took me zero time to get up to speed and start doing web, you know, nascent web development because it's like, oh, it's just like Reveal Codes and WordPerfect. Now, Reveal Codes wasn't the be-all and end-all of WordPerfect. There was plenty of other things that that word processor did. And I am proud to say that I was a WordPerfect certified resource, and I fought really, really hard to get that certification. And I'm never giving it up.

Starting point is 00:29:51 But, you know, Reveal Codes was not the most important piece of it. It was tangential. And yet, five, six years later, there was something where I was pivoting from doing desktop support to building, you know, a web design company on the side, part of my side hustle. And that one experience allowed me to really pivot quickly and smoothly into that new area. So the mindset for those people who are listening and they're thinking, I just, you know, I don't have it in me. I can't do it. The mindset is not, I'm going to reinvent myself. I have to completely transform myself.

Starting point is 00:30:28 The mindset is to just remember that as IT practitioners, we have committed to being lifelong learners, you know, and we learn things, whether it's to paraphrase an XKCD cartoon, you know, that one weekend I spent screwing around with Pearl, you know, or that one YouTube video I listened to, or that week I really dug deep into XML, or what have you, those are the things that feed the next thing you're going to do. You will be amazed at where those tangential experiences crop up,

Starting point is 00:31:03 and they end up becoming like a secret superpower that you didn't know you had. If people want to hear more about the wise things you have to say, whatever they might be, where can they find you? So you can find me, my blog is adatosystems.com. And there I list out all the things I've written and all the videos I've done. But the other thing is I run a podcast also because I am a middle-aged white man and we all have our podcasts.

Starting point is 00:31:32 A group of middle-aged white men is collectively known as a podcast. Right, exactly. That's the grouping, right? You know, fish are in schools. Developers emerge conflicts, et cetera, et cetera. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, head geeks, by the way, move in chaos. There's right exactly yeah head geeks by the way there's a

Starting point is 00:31:45 move in chaos there's a chaos of head geeks so anyway um so uh i have a podcast and myself and josh bigley who is mormon and uh let's see uh keith townsend uh who is baptist and al rashid who is muslim and you're starting to get the theme here. We've all been in IT for decades each, and there's a few more of us, and we've been in IT for decades each. We all have a very strong religious, moral, ethical point of view. We've got evangelical folks, we've got Bapt, we've got atheists, and the podcast is called Technically Religious. And we talk about the intersection between our strongly held religious and moral ethical views and our work in IT. And how we make those two things, in fact, not conflict, but become synergistic between the two.

Starting point is 00:32:44 And so you can find that at technicallyreligious.com or anywhere that fine podcasts are peddled to the masses. Excellent. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it, as always. Thank you for having me. This was amazing. I can't wait to hear future episodes of your stuff and to see you at another conference with, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:06 old fogies with, you know, retired technology. I don't believe we'd be able to recognize each other if we weren't wearing conference badges at the time. Exactly. Leon Adato, head geek at solar winds and all around decent human being.

Starting point is 00:33:21 I'm Corey Quinn. This is screaming in the Cloud. This has been a humble pod production stay humble

Screaming in the Cloud - ‘But in IT, oh, it's Tuesday. Everything's about to change again.’ with Leon Adato

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