Screaming in the Cloud - Episode 42: SCREAMING WITH CHAOSSEARCH: A reInvent reTrospective

Episode Date: December 26, 2018

Would you like access to unlimited retention of your data within your Amazon S3, which costs far less than online storage on disc? Well, the next time you’re at re:Invent, visit CHAOSSEARCH’s booth. Today, we’re talking to Pete Cheslock, vice president of products at CHAOSSEARCH and former vice president of operations at Threat Stack. CHAOSSEARCH helps people get access to their login event data using Amazon S3. Some of the highlights of the show include: re:Invent - Year of the Pin: People go nuts for conference swag and were collecting pins as if they were gold Scan Your Badge and Drip Emails: Annoying and passive-aggressive marketing trends meant to be spontaneous and interesting Need a job? Corey’s looking to hire a “Quinntern” to use a tag email address to gather conference swag at the next re:invent; if interested, contact him    Corey and Pete’s Swag Rules: Something you want or can use, continues to be valuable, no sizes, no socks Densify Drama: Conference flyer to generate leads failed, created complaints Track and analyze data, but don’t use it to invade privacy or become creepy Las Vegas: Right place for conferences, such as re:Invent? Rather than focusing on going to conference sessions, make meeting and talking to people doing interesting things your priority Midnight Madness Event: Only place Corey could do stand-up Cloud comedy re:Invent 2019: Plan appropriately, identify what you want to get out of it, register ASAP to get a nearby hotel, and schedule meetings with AWS staff Links: Pete Cheslock on Twitter Pete Cheslock on LinkedIn CHAOSSEARCH Threat Stack AWS Amazon S3 Amazon Elasticsearch re:Invent Corey Quinn’s Newsletter Corey Quinn on Twitter Corey Quinn’s Email Sonian Acloud.guru Densify Oracle Apache Cassandra DigitalOcean AWS re:Invent 2018 - Keynote with Andy Jassy AWS re:Invent 2018 - Keynote with Werner Vogels AWS re:Inforce VMware Dreamforce Kubernetes Datadog .

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 week's episode is sponsored by Datadog. Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform that integrates with more than 250 different technologies, including AWS, Kubernetes, Lambda, and Slack. They do it all. Visualizations, APM, and distributed tracing.

Datadog unites metrics, traces, and logs all into one platform so that you and your team can get full visibility into your infrastructure and applications. With their rich dashboards, algorithmic alerts, and collaboration tools, Datadog can help your team learn to troubleshoot and optimize modern applications. If you give it a try, they'll send you a free t-shirt. I've got to say I love mine. It's comfortable and my toddler points at it and yells, dog, every time that I wear it. It's endearing when she does it and I've been told I need to leave their booth at reInvent when I do it. To get yours, go to screaminginthecloud.com slash datadog. That's screaminginthecloud.com slash d-a-t-a-d-o-g. Thanks to Datadog for their

support of this podcast. Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. For the first time in the course of this show, we have a guest returning. I'm joined today by Pete Cheslock. Welcome to the show, Pete. Hey, thanks for having me back. This is quite an honor. If it helps anything, you're a different person now than you were back then. The first time around, you were, I believe, a director of engineering at ThreatStack? I was. I was technically, I think the last title I held before I left was VP of operations. So I

was kind of focused on that side. And my apologies, I'm accidentally demoting you. I know. How dare you? I joke that I traded in my pager duty for my HubSpot account as I'm now in the product side of the house. Exactly. And you change companies that for some reason that you insist on spelling entirely in capital letters. And this is screaming in the cloud. So why not? What do you do now at Chaos Search? Chaos Search! Yes, Chaos Search. Yeah, so so chaos search we are a new company we actually just closed our series a about a month ago and what we're doing congratulations yeah thank you for anyone that's ever been through a fundraising event for years and years i always used to whenever i saw people get a fundraise and people would celebrate it i always thought to myself what's

the big deal raising money and then you actually go through the process of asking people to give you, you know, millions of dollars. And that's a very hard thing to do. So definitely, you should always celebrate anyone out there who raises money, I think, because it's, it's something that was it was a new experience for me being that close to the, as I say, watching the sausage getting made. But yeah, so Chaos Search, what we do is we are essentially helping people get access to the long tail of their log and event data, leveraging the power of Amazon S3. So we have a really innovative new way of storing data on Amazon S3, specifically actually the customer's S3 bucket, which I think is what's really cool. And that allows us to expose APIs like Elasticsearch API that you can now use to query your data, even though it's all sitting on S3. So we always like to say you get access to

unlimited retention of your log and event data, or really any kind of data, all within your own Amazon S3. And of course, S3 charges far, far, far less than online storage on disk, such as Elasticsearch. Yeah, I mean, Amazon Elasticsearch service is pretty expensive. Obviously, they pass a premium for the, I don't know, the management and the setup of those servers. Of course, you still have to size out a cluster and shard your indices and all that other stuff. But even compared to EBS, you know, obviously S3 is very cheap. But of course, a lot of people say, well, you know, S3 is really slow. But due to our technology, what we've built this, we call it the data edge technology, when you do 1000s of parallel, you know, gets on a query, S3 can actually be very fast. And that's some of the really interesting things that we've been doing. It's really a technology that's been in, you know, gets on a query, S3 can actually be very fast. And that's some of the really

interesting things that we've been doing. It's really a technology that's been in, you know, in process and being built for many years now. And we're now just coming to market and just starting to show kind of a lot of different companies what we've been doing. And I would like to say, you know, I've ran Elasticsearch for many years. I was a very early Elasticsearch user. And whenever I can help people run less Elasticsearch, I feel like I'm giving, you know, a nice warm hug to all these operators out there that, you know, just are getting paged every night because Elasticsearch is, you know, falling over yet again for them. For clarity, you folks aren't sponsoring this show at all. I never have the guest sponsor. That would be weird and send lead to strange messaging. But I

did take a look at what you're doing and I like it. It's something I intend to spend more time on in the coming year. Of course, I say that every year about all kinds of things, and then life happens instead. Exactly. I know. I feel like I have just the list of books on my Kindle that I've yet to read. It's like a list of blog posts to read, podcasts to listen to, and then, you know, just life gets in the way. So the real reason I wanted to have you on the show is I ran into you and 500,000 other people

at reInvent, but you and I go back a ways, back before I had my ridiculous newsletter, back before I ran my own company, back when I was one of the people who sat on the curb and clapped as you go by. Let's not kid ourselves, I still do. And it's fun talking to you and getting your perspective on these things. And I wanted to do a little bit of a re-invent wrap-up. Not the typical sort that you'll see in blog posts, think pieces scattered across the internet, and not the comprehensive roundup that I put on my newsletter. I'll throw a link to that in the show notes, where I wound up doing all of the releases to the tune of Yakko's Countries of the World from Animaniacs. But in this case, I wanted to talk to you more about how it felt. I don't know how many re-invents you've been to, but this was

my second, and it was a radically different experience than last year's. Yeah, so I've actually had the pleasure of going to almost every single reInvent. There was one year where I worked for an unnamed DNS company now owned by an unnamed database company where they didn't use any Amazon. So going to reInvent that year didn't seem to make a lot of sense. But a company that I worked at a very long time ago called Sonian, which was an email archiving company, for some reason we sponsored reInvent the very first year. Why, I have no idea. The attendees of reInvent don't traditionally have a need for email archiving.

But since we were a very early Amazon user, one of the largest at the time, we felt like it made sense to sponsor it. So we were there for that first one. And I just kept on going back, except for that one year I missed it. I kind of feel bad that I can't say I've been to them all. Well, with the release of Timestream, you might be able to go back and fix that in one of these days. But we'll get there. So I ran into you for the first time, several times over the course of the re-invent week on the expo floor where you were standing at your booth. And I, of course, immediately proceeded to, as I do, take a stupid open mouth selfie with you, which turned out reasonably well. I think there were 61 of those that I made over the course of the week,

which was fun. I think it's probably the gimmick has run its course. I'm not going to be doing that a lot, but it was fun. Effectively, the trick to a good selfie is happy and with your mouth open, and it seemed to work out. And then I immediately began insulting how you capitalize the name of your company because picking stupid linguistic nomenclature and spelling arguments is really how I get my kicks. Anyone who's heard my whole shtick on AMI has three syllables, knows exactly what I'm talking about. And I think I remember speaking of the AMI thing, I remember someone maybe had a pin of AMI rhymes with something. Butterfly. It was Ben Britz, and he gave me one of them. I cherish it.

It's the only way to live, is with an AMI. Absolutely. And you mentioned pins. It seemed like it was, as you mentioned in the pre-show when we were talking, it was like Disneyland, where you're collecting pins in left and right. Someone from A Cloud Guru posted a list of all the pins that they had, and there were well over 100 of them. Some were official, some were from vendors. I was giving out a few of my own for the newsletter with this logo. And unless you know what it is, it gives absolutely no clue to context. Yeah, pro tip, I'm not much at marketing. Who knew? But it's important to bear in mind in the context of this that people were collecting these things like they're gold. And when I was walking around the expo hall, it was bizarre to me. There were lines that were

easily 45 minutes long for some people's booths. And I don't know what they were giving away for swag. I can only assume it was $10,000 because that's the kind of line you had people queuing for. And I see people walking away with these small, cheap toys. And I get in the context of the conference, it sounds fun, but it's something I would throw away if someone gave it to me at home. What is it about conferences that makes people go nuts for swag? I still don't understand it. I mean, I definitely watch people walk around with large bags. Of course, the bags were swag in itself, but large bags just full of stuff. I really wonder if there's actually people out there, and I'm sure there is, of course,

there has to be, that actually bring multiple suitcases with them just to have a suitcase of swag that goes back home with them after the fact. Of course, obviously, you and I are outliers in the conference world because we often go to so many due to our work and our business and things of that nature. And so, of course, I'm sure just like you, I rarely take the swag. And the pins really blew me away. I mean, pins, I think, came out of nowhere as the new it swag, right? You had socks, kind of, if you rewind back to really, Monitorama, I think, was the first conference that I had ever seen socks at. They did the classic pun on words of monitoring socks instead of monitoring sucks, which was the kind of Twitter hashtag people would follow. But I started seeing pins, obviously, with your pin, which I thought was pretty cool. And then a friend of mine's startup, Cloud Zero, they had a pin. And I kept on thinking to myself, this is such a great swag idea. So as the product person for Chaos Search, I also wear my marketing hat. And what I hate more than anything else are t-shirts

because logistically, it's complicated. You need multiple sizes. You want to have men's cut, women's cut. And so it's just a lot of different boxes of shirts. And I thought to myself, you know what? Pins have no sizes, no anything. They're just pins. And so they're cheap. And who doesn't like pins? So I thought we were going to be this thought leader in the pin swag space. And lo and behold, everyone did pins. So my question here really, was there a memo that was sent out for reInvent? Because I don't think I've ever seen a swag idea like this just come out of nowhere, but be so pervasive at the same time. It was really mind blowing to see.

I had mine done eight or nine months ago, and I just had a limited run of 200 made as an experiment, mostly because I wanted to give them to people who guessed it on the podcast or I ran into and I knew, and I still have a pile of them. But it was something that I tweeted about when I did it. And so I'm going to just absolutely claim credit for the entire movement. That is how you thought, LeadBeat. Well, you know, it's, yeah, claim victory loudly enough. And it's also why chaos searches and bolding caps

were just claiming victory very loudly. So I think that's a good model to follow. I like that quite a bit. Did you manage to go to a lot of other vendor booths or were you too busy chained to your own? So I was definitely at my booth the majority of the time. We were in the back as a, at the time when we registered, we were a seed funded startup and a reInvent booth being a majority of our, you know, kind of cost of running a business. You know, we were basically one of the last people to

actually register. So we were way in the back, but I did get a chance to kind of walk around the booth area because I'm always curious just to see who's there and who's exhibiting. And are there products that I should be using or looking into? It was a spectacle as always. And I always get blown away as to just how much bigger it gets every year. One thing that I wanted to do this year, and I had some good results with it so far, is anytime you walk within 10 feet of some booths, you're basically besieged by people who, they don't walk up to you, they materialize in front of you with, hi, can I scan your badge? And the first time I was at a conference,

that was sort of a foreign concept. Scan my badge? Sure, why not? For those who don't spend their lives going to conferences, what happens is it winds up giving what information you've given the conference and giving a subset of that to people when they scan your badge. You're signing up for vendor emailing lists and further outreach and conversations about what they do. And in return, they give you a pair of socks or a pin or an ill-fitting t-shirt or something. And that's fun. The problem is people don't expect it and they wind up giving their actual email address and they wind up as a result, getting besieged by marketing stuff.

Relatedly, there's a new marketing trend that I think is awful where people have these drip campaigns that keep replying and getting increasingly passive aggressive until you respond, which I don't love. Have you seen those? Oh, yeah. After maybe three or four emails, they'll be like, I haven't heard from you. Please respond with one of the following of this multiple choice question. And it's like, one, you were attacked by wolves and dragged into the forest. And two, here's an animated GIF that I found on Tumblr. What's funny is how they're all meant to be like, oh, so spontaneous and interesting, but they all follow the same ridiculous template and like, and have unsubscribe links.

And it's very clear. This is not a human sending this. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's like, there's the tracker inside of it. There's like all this other stuff.

It was kind of like, I don't know what they're trying to aim for here, but I pursued the same, you know, quirky email 10 times in the last week. So, you know, maybe it's time to move on.

Well, I'm looking to weaponize this personally, because it turns out that sponsoring a booth at reInvent is super expensive. I don't know if the actual prices are public, so I'm not going to state them. But regardless, it's a lot of money. What I wound up doing, because I do try to reach out for people. Sure, I'm a consultant by day where I fix AWS bills. But in the context of reInvent, what I generally like to sell are sponsorships for this podcast and for the last week in AWS newsletter. And those sponsorships cost orders of magnitude less money than a booth at reInvent. And they have a reach that is the same ballpark as that conference these days. So it's turning into

something that seems to be resonating with my target audience. So what I do at conferences is I give a tagged email address. And whenever someone emails that, hi, we met at the booth. Thank you for coming by to try to win a pony. Unfortunately, you didn't because it turns out we can't ship them. Cool. They get an auto response. Hey, thanks for emailing. I enjoyed your booth. Here's my sponsorship prospectus. So the goal I have is how to get scanned by the most number of people. And I didn't do that good of a job this year. So my plan for next year, and listeners of this podcast can get in early on this, I am going to be hiring a paid Quinturn to go around and use a tagged email

address and get all the swag at the conference. So if that sounds like something you might want to do next year at reInvent in Las Vegas, reach out and let me know. I'm Corey at screaminginthecloud.com. You know, on that idea, one of the most amazing things that we saw, so we scanned people as well. And the nice thing is, is that the prospectus for reInvent, it's online, you can just Google for, you know, reInvent 2018, you'll see how much it costs. And those are those booth prices are for some of the booths that it's just for the like, it's a they call them burner booths, or the booths that are kind of pre built for you. Some of the other booths are actually you, you're just buying the location, like the square footage, and then you still have to build a booth and spend, you know, $100,000 on that as well. But you're not wrong, right? In that you might spend, for example, let's say $100,000 for a booth location, maybe $120,000 for a booth location. And maybe your goal is to scan one or 2000 people. So for 100,000, well, of course, now you have to add in all your swag, travel, everything else, let's say you're all in is $150,000 for this event,

which in many cases is low, which is very low. I mean, if you saw those 20 by 20 booths, those are 200,000, I think, and up. Even the 10 by 10s are $50,000 and up. And that's just for being there. You still have to fly there. You still have to have swag. Yeah, I talked to one of the vendors there, and I asked them over drinks what the booth cost. And their answer was, it's irrelevant.

And I just stared at them. I said, how is it possibly irrelevant? They said, we have 200 employees here. Yeah, compared to that, the booth cost is who cares. Yeah. And if you think of it too, and your target market are Amazon users. I mean, for Chaos Search, we had to go. Why would we not go? It's a no brainer. We have a service that is designed for Amazon S3. Therefore, at least right now, until we build support for other clouds, our target market are Amazon S3 users. So it's a no brainer for us to go. And of course, we're not the only people that are like that. You know,

there's a lot of other people who are really focused on marketing to Amazon people solely. And so when you start doing the math in that perspective, it is pretty small. But the best thing that I was saying, the best thing I saw was we scanned a few hundred people as part of our outreach as well. We only scanned people that we actually wanted to follow up with individually because there's really no point in just scanning for the sake of lead count and goal and stuff like that. And me, because I forced my badge on you with scan this. Yeah, exactly. So you'll get a nice email from our biz dev folks over here. And you'll get a sponsorship prospectus.

Yeah. One of the phone numbers that we called was an automated message basically selling whatever service. So it was like kind of what you said. It's like a really interesting way of flipping around where it's like... I did that too. And thank you to Twilio

for their help getting that set up. You know, it's like weaponizing, you know, your lead that now turns into, you know, that selling game. So I thought that you know, that, that, that selling game. So I thought that was, I thought that was a good idea, but I love where you're going with this one. So, you know, if I'm not doing anything next re-invent, let me know. And I'll, I'll take on a honorary role as a quinter, mostly just so I can call myself a quinter because I think that's

pretty awesome. Oh, absolutely. And yeah, this is something I actually was hoping to give to someone relatively early in their career, not just for the exposure, which is horrifying, but I don't know, maybe I'll either pay them or cover their trip to reInvent or something like that. So there are a few ways that can unfold, but it's sort of a way of giving back and getting someone new to the industry out and in front of people. Because frankly, when I was new to the industry, people reached out and did me favors, including you. And that's one of those things that's super hard to pay back, you can only ever pay forward. I've hit on that theme in a few episodes so far, but it's one of the ways I live my life. I'm the same way. I mean, in Boston,

Boston's a small town. I mean, people send me messages on LinkedIn and say, you know, love to chat with you, love to do like grab a coffee. I mean, I'm happy to have any conversation. And I would like to say too, when it comes to even recruiting, it's like, I have friends of mine, they come to me and say, hey, I'm like, you know, no one is looking, are you looking to hire? And if I'm not hiring, I pass on, you know, friends of mine to, you know, local companies that are looking to hire and, you know, give them the back channel and say, oh, this is what this company is up to. And they're doing some pretty cool stuff. And you should check them out and stuff. I don't know.

I always think to myself that I didn't get to where I got in my career on my own. There was a great network of people who really helped me out along the way. And just like you said, the only way to really do this is to kind of pay it forward. You know, like you can't go back other than to say, hey, thanks for helping me out along the way. But, you know, if I can help out a dozen more people or more, I mean, that's a huge win for everyone. It absolutely is. One last observation on the expo hall before we move on conversationally

is I have a couple of rules for swag when I'm looking at buying something to put my logo on. And I wish more people thought this way. But my golden rules are, first, it has to be something that I would want and would use, even if it had another company's logo on it. If I just love it because it's my own logo, and I fall in love with that, and sure, it's an ill-fitting t-shirt that's in the wrong size, and it looks like it's made mostly of burlap mixed with straw, but it's my logo, so I'll wear it. Great. No one else on the planet will. And the second rule is that it has to continue to be

valuable once I pick it up for the third time from a different company. And those two together rule out most of what people do. Pins qualify, depending on what the pin looks like. T-shirts generally fail. Socks? Okay, great. I have 50 pairs of tech socks and only two feet. There's a problem here, as well as the whole marketing story of no one looks at it, at their socks, except when they put them on in the morning and then they're hidden for the most part. And even some of the best swag I've gotten, I got a speaker gift once from Usenix Lisa that was phenomenal. It was a portable travel power adapter. I use that thing

constantly, but I don't need three of them. Yeah. I mean, finding useful swag was a challenge that I had. My requirements for swag for Chaos Search for reInvent was it had to be something that didn't have sizes to it because logistically that's a challenge. It didn't want to use socks just for a lot of the reasons like you said, which is, I don't know, everyone does them. And I mean, no one really sees my socks. So like, what's the point there? But I wanted it to be actually useful by the person.

So we ended up doing battery packs. Again, the challenge there that you said, which is when you have one, do you need two, do you need three? What we did find was a lot of people really were digging the battery packs. It turns out not a lot of people at reInvent had battery packs. And of course really were digging the battery packs. It turns out not a lot of people at reInvent had battery packs.

And of course, everyone burns through their batteries there. But it was a cornucopia of swag at reInvent. I mean, I saw all kinds of stuff that I would never have expected. Yeah, not to criticize your swag or anything like that. But I've seen enough dodgy reports of crappy battery packs. Because let's not kid ourselves. When purchasing departments buy 5,000 of these things and get their logo slapped on it, they negotiate to get the best deal possible, which means cutting corners rather than the

best quality. And if I'm plugging a, what are they now, $1,500 in some cases for the latest top-of-the-line iPhone? If I'm plugging my $1,500 supercomputer into the cheapest thing that will hold a charge without probably starting a fire, it feels to me like that's just sort of an unacceptable risk. From my perspective, I always carry a battery pack with me because, again, I eat, sleep, and breathe in travel world. But for people who are not used to that, it absolutely has value. I'm just one of those nervous types where if I was looking to give away swag, I would be worried on some level about the liability story.

Yeah, and honestly, when it comes to swag, my next idea is, and this is because I'm in Boston and it's cold and I'm cold all the time, is like a scarf, like a really nice, you know, kind of knit scarf with chaos surge, obviously with bold screaming letters that you'll just see. But also the usefulness, right? It will keep my neck warm. And Boston is cold literally all the time. Oh, I grew up a bit north of there. Yeah. It's not the most useful thing if you're doing this at a conference in Los Angeles, because even if people are going home to something that's cold, they aren't thinking cold when they're there. But in Las Vegas, it feels almost like a non-starter, except the hotels are pretty cold. Yeah, the hotels are cold. I felt like I was cold. And then I'd go outside and it was cold. Although, I don't know, it was like 60. So I guess that's not, that's like

SF warm, I think, right? So not for me, too cold. One other thing that I've been thinking about this jogged my memory. Did you hear about the Densify drama? Densify? I did not. I love a good drama, though. Oh, yes. This went around on Twitter, and I'm sympathetic to all sides on this one. I was staying in the Venetian, and someone knocked on my door. And I said, come back later, please. They ignored that and opened the door, obviously a hotel employee, and dropped off a delivery for you. It was a flyer from Densify and a key to their booth that

there were 10 winning keys that would win a switch or something. Okay, great. And I was irked. And then I started seeing on Twitter, a lot of people had the same reaction. One woman had them walk in while she was in the bathroom and came out to this thing sitting on her desk and she had the Do Not Disturb sign up. So it was one of those, this is awful and an invasion of privacy. And they tried to do some damage control and DMs and whatnot. And on the one hand, it strikes me as incredible lapse in judgment on their part. But on the other, I can understand it because getting this to people through the hotel, because they have the master list, they won't necessarily tell the company where it's going. And at that point, it winds up getting it in front of people where they don't expect it. And that works for marketing right up until the first complaint comes through. And by then it's far too late.

It's one of those seems like a great idea until you see how it can fail. It sounds like something someone relatively junior would come up with as a creative marketing approach. And believe me, I'm sympathetic to that, but the execution on that was not terrific. Yeah, that definitely does not sound great. And that's the challenge too, I think, in a lot of these times where you'll have basically, they're like lead count goals, right? Hey, we're going to reinvent. Here's your budget. You got to get a thousand leads. And what's kind of funny in a lot of those things, and you'll see it too, where people just scan you for nothing, like come come by our booth, we were next to a

booth that had at one point, they were given out mixed drinks, it was like, great, people came by the booth. But like, what are the odds that any of those scans, any of those leads are of value at all, right? But for the people at the booth, they don't even care, because that's, they're like, separated from the quality of the leads, they don't even care because they're separated from the quality of the leads. They just were told, get 1,000 leads. If I had that kind of goal, then sure, I would do something probably equally stupid because it's like, get 1,000 leads or you're fired. Things are cutthroat in that game. It shouldn't have to be, but it's sad to hear that. That is a very questionable way of marketing your wares.

It is. And this is one of, I think, the problems that I tend to have with marketing is, and I made fun of Oracle for this a little bit too, where they slapped, cut your AWS bill in half guaranteed on a bunch of Teslas and drove them around the conference and giving people free rides. First, if you choose Oracle in order to save money, you are probably the dumbest person on the planet. Good for you. Secondly, in that scenario, it kills me because they have an incredible budget for this sort of stuff and absolutely no creativity whatsoever. My line at the time was, if I had a $20 million marketing budget, I don't know how I'd do it, if I had a $20 million marketing budget, I don't know how I'd do it, but I'd do my best to rename the conference Requinvent, and I wouldn't bet against me with that kind of capital to fall back on. Instead, I went out there

with a budget that more or less looked like a bus pass and was able to do some interesting business and get in front of some interesting people. It just seems that there's a lack of creativity and a lack of vision. I get that it's hard hard and I get that it's cutthroat, but there's a reason that the way I do sponsorships is very non-aggressive. I have no demographic information that I'm aware of on people who read my newsletter, listen to my podcast. So the answer is, yeah, I have roughly this number of subscribers or listeners. And based upon the content, I assume these are people who are actively involved with AWS, with cloud computing, with focusing on this sort of problem. And if that's your market, great,

let's give it a shot. But it isn't something that I start offering in-depth insight into, because that's where you run into trouble. People say that, oh, it's not marketing that bothers people. It's marketing that isn't relevant. We know that's not true. Because when you buy something or look at something online and then ads for it follow you around the internet for a week, you don't feel, oh, thank goodness, that's relevant. You feel that's creepy. Yeah, I get constant ads, usually after I buy a thing. It's like I bought a thing on Amazon. And then like you said, a few days later, it's like, bought a thing on amazon and then like you said a few days later it's like hey would you like 10 more of the exact same thing you just bought it's like if this is the future of ai and ml marketing like i i don't worry about the robots taking over at any point soon

oh yeah my link tracker for the newsletter spits out aggregate information for me it shows percentages of people that open the newsletter, which has been relatively steady at about 50% since inception, because a lot of people block trackers. And it shows me, it ranks the list of links I include by popularity, and that helps me inform future issues. But I have a friend who also runs a newsletter, and I will not name them on this podcast, but they reached out to me at one point and said, yeah, I saw that you clicked this link in this newsletter. What do you think about it? And this is just someone I'm friends with. And my response was, that is profoundly creepy.

Even if you have that information, one, don't look at it. And two, don't tell someone you have it, because then it makes them question everything they do. And I understand that I probably have a very 1920s naive view of how marketing could be. But my business is relatively small in the context of I only have a handful of clients or need or want a handful of clients. I'm not trying to sell something as we talked about early in the show, was technical operations. I run applications and I help other people run applications specifically in the last 10 years in the cloud. Flipping over to the product side, I also wear the marketer hat quite a bit more now. And I see, much like you see, which is, what's the actual value of some of these marketing campaigns? But more so when I think about doing something or some sort of campaign, this is my operator side coming out in that I want to see metrics.

If I did a Twitter ad for a thing, then I want to see, did people actually click on it? Because if they didn't, why would I keep spending money on that? Or even like a reinvent. I mean, reinvent is tricky for us because we really need to be there and have a good relationship with Amazon and get in front of that community. But I've worked at places where they didn't need to sell specifically to Amazon customers. And so if you go to a reinvent or one of those Amazon summits, you're going to have to spend tens of thousands of dollars. Are you actually making that money back? Is there a return on that investment? And if there's not, then why waste your time if there's no value to it, right? And so I often

wonder if people are actually tracking some of that stuff or if it really is just like, get visible, get out there, get noticed. It's an interesting state we're in today. Something I try and tell my sponsors is that it helps to view this as brand advertising, not a direct call to action. Very few people, for example, are going to be listening to this podcast while driving, immediately pull over and whip out their phone and go buy something because it's advertised here. But if it takes 15 to 20 impressions before someone does business with something, there's a, with some company, there's a distinct sense that the first 15 are useless, but number 16 gets all

of the credit. So that's the only one we're going to buy. I mean, look at airport enterprise software ads. There's no call to action. There's no buy here. But by seeing that when you're traveling, you subtly become accustomed to seeing that company's name. And when a salesperson shows up to talk to you, you don't ask who they are. And that is the sole purpose of it. And being able to look at it in that light makes us look a lot more sensible from some perspectives. But I've had some sponsors in the past months who have always wanted to know exactly how many signups are directly attributable to this podcast or this issue or whatever it was that came out. And others are, okay, we're tracking that, but we want to see it more of an aggregate sense and see what happens. And I'm always surprised on some level when a sponsor

comes back and renews for more. And credit where due, almost all of my sponsors do. So it tells me it is working. I just don't think like a marketer. And that's something that I find to be relatively interesting and something that I need to improve. So before I sit here telling marketing people how they should do their jobs, I need to spend more time practicing this. Well, you know, it's funny. I remember at a previous company, we went to reinvent and we spent a lot of money for a big booth. And it was we were like right in the center. So we had a ton of people coming by and it was absolutely mobbed. And we were I think I lost my voice because I had so many conversations, but it was so busy that there were the people that stopped. We talked to, we did a demo and we scanned them because we wanted to follow up. But then there's a whole class of people who walked by, looked at the messaging, the logo, the whatever, and just said, Oh, yeah, remember, we stopped by so and so we should give them a call because they're doing stuff that we need, right? We closed one of our biggest deals. They never stopped at the booth. They walked by, they saw it. And they said, Oh, cool. I'll follow up later. Right. And so I think much like what you're saying is that, you know, operators, especially if you're selling

to operators, they're busy DevOps operators, you know, technical folks, they're busy, they have an outage, someone leaves, they have to. They have an outage. Someone leaves. They have to hire someone. I mean, there's not enough people. There's too much to do. And so if you can always just be kind of out there, out and about, generating content that actually people want to consume. I mean, I really give a lot of credit to a lot of the companies out there. Companies like Datadog, right? I've been to Datadog's website a ton. And I'm not saying this as a sponsor. I'm just someone who's seen the content that Datadog, right? I've been to Datadog's website a ton. And I'm not saying this as a sponsor. I'm just someone who's seen the content that Datadog creates in that it's like, hey, how do you monitor Cassandra? I went to the Datadog website to figure out how to monitor

Cassandra in 2014 when I was running Cassandra and I had no idea what I was doing. At some point, if I ever use Datadog, is it because I went to their site earlier? Maybe. But it's that kind of marketing, which is about that. And this is kind of a classic inbound marketing. dog, like, is it because I went to their site earlier? Maybe, but you know, it's that, that kind of marketing, which is about that. And this is kind of a classic, like, you know, inbound marketing, you know, but there, where there is no specific call to action. It's just like, Hey, we're going to generate some content. Digital ocean did a great job of that too, which was like, Hey, here's how you set up WordPress. Sure. You can run WordPress on our digital ocean droplet, but you don't have to, and we're not forcing you to, but we just want to teach you how to do something, right? I kind of like that model of marketing

that we've seen more recently, where it's just, let me just teach you how to do a thing. And if it just so happens that I can solve your problem, maybe we can exchange money for goods and services in the future. Oh, absolutely. Most of my initial outreach from people trying to get me to consult in their AWS bill is me explaining to them exactly why that's not the thing to focus on or I'm not the right fit for it. I have a relatively narrow customer profile that I target. And outside of that, I'm thrilled to have a conversation with someone and point them in another direction. But the vast majority of people reaching out are told very politely, I am not able to help you with the problem that you have as it stands today, and here's why. And I'm polite about it, but by being able to say no, it lets me focus on the things I'm good at.

I found that when I became a consultant, being able to be very focused on a single expensive problem let me get very good at that one thing very rapidly. Because people don't hire consultants to be generalists. They hire them for a specialty problem. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you hire them to solve the biggest pain that you have right now, because clearly you don't have that expertise, right? You've got the general expertise that maybe could execute on a vision. But if you don't have that person that's been in that problem before, you may never solve it yourself. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about, I guess, a tiny retrospective on reInvent 2018 for any Amazonians who happen to be listening and planning for reInvent 2019.

What do you think went well this year? What do you think needs to be improved? I absolutely love the fact that they really put all of the, I would say, quote, big events in the Venetian, keeping those in one place. Last year, Verner Vogel's keynote was at the MGM. And then the earlier keynote, I think it was Wednesday, Andy Jassy's keynote was in the Venetian. So you had these like split locations for anyone who has not been to Vegas, even though it might only be a mile away, it would take you an hour to get there. It's just too big of a city and everything is just too far away. So I think that was fantastic that they kind of standardized that.

That was probably the biggest thing that I noticed and that kept people from having to move all over the city. I agree. I still think one of the problems you have is that it's in Las Vegas and it's spread out across seven or eight properties. So no matter what you're into, you're missing more stuff than you're seeing. That feels like a very difficult problem to solve for, but I've never been a big fan. One thing that I started noticing this year, as I guess I become more aware of these things, is Las Vegas as a city is incredibly off-putting to, for example, women. You have a city that isn't built around exploiting people, full stop. There

are billboards everywhere that are advertising for a variety of, let's just say, nothing that would ever wind up passing any remote form of code of conduct. And the entire city just sort of has this air of desperation to it. It isn't welcoming for a diverse audience. And I think that this is a problem that we're going to continue to see manifest itself as society shifts. I don't feel comfortable in this city. I've never been a big Las Vegas fan, even when I was young, stupid, and in my 20s and thought I knew everything. But now I just find myself that my skin crawls every time I'm there. You have casinos that are built specifically to keep people from getting out. It takes time I'm there. You have casinos that are built specifically to

keep people from getting out. It takes forever to get anywhere. You wind up in a scenario where there are entire companies there built around separating you from your money in return for no gain other than a brief endorphin rush. And you see people throwing their life savings into slot machines. And it's a sad place in many respects. And I get that it is compelling to host conventions there, but I have to believe that there's a better place for it than there. And I don't expect to convince anyone on that, but that is something that I've seen enough of, and I can't be silent about that anymore. No, I totally agree. I mean, it is a sad place. And even as someone who definitely enjoys parts of what Las Vegas can offer, there's

lots of parts of it that are just tiresome and draining and send the wrong message in a lot of ways for a professional level conference. And I understand the complexity, much like you said, which is how do you find location that can house 60-some thousand people for this kind of event? You know, I remember VMware for years used to be in Las Vegas, and then they had moved to San Francisco. I mean, I know Dreamforce is much larger than than reInvent and kind of takes over San Francisco. So I don't think that reInvent should go to San Francisco. Because, you know, if you thought Las Vegas was expensive to be in, San Francisco changes that dramatically. But, you know, like you, I do wonder, is there a better place that could kind of support this type of venue?

You know, it'll be interesting to see if that changes at all in the future. Yeah, I'm curious to see what happens. I'll be the first to say I don't have a good answer to this. But I just know that I think that we can do better. And I think for a large swath of their customers, Amazon has to do better than that. I just don't know what that looks like. Luckily, they have a lot of people and a lot of money that they could probably try to solve that problem or solve that problem.

They could at least give it the old college try, I suppose. Yeah, and credit where due. I didn't really notice that until someone reached out and pointed that out to me. And it's one of those, once you see it, you can't unsee it. So if you were at reInvent and you're listening to this show and didn't notice any of that, that's not necessarily your fault. I was exactly where you are until someone said it to me, and then it sort of flipped the switch that I can't turn off. So this is one of those, I guess, ongoing awareness type of things that might be worth evaluating. Other things that you would wind up changing for reInvent if you had a magic wand?

If I had a magic wand, you know, last year was probably the first year that I had a chance to go to a lot of the sessions. And I this year, unfortunately, I didn't get to go to any I was, you know, kind of booth duty the whole time. But I would be curious to hear how, you know, the session selection and things of that nature went this year, it did seem like there were a lot of repeat sessions and things of that nature so that people could still go. But I often say to that, like, if your ultimate goal of reinvent is to just go to sessions, honestly, you should just stay home and watch the videos online or listen to the videos online. It seems a bit overkill to go all the way there just to go to some sessions, you know, where the value I think really is far more in the conversations. If you're trying to find vendors for a specific problem, you know,

and you want to be able to do it without having to spend a month looking up stuff online, or if you're like meeting with Amazon folks, I mean obviously, they're all there. So it's a good one too. I confess, I didn't go to a single session this year other than, well, I watched a live stream the keynotes and then gave two talks in the expo hall two hours after them to do a basically snarky takedown of everything that was announced. It was a question of how quickly can I turn around a slide deck and sarcasm? It turns out quickly, but I'm right there with you. I average 15 meetings a day for eight straight days. Pro tip, don't do that. I've just got back from a 10-day vacation to detox from that. But my goal was to meet people who are doing interesting things. In six months,

when I have a problem using a particular service, if the talk would have answered the question, well, those talks are going to be on YouTube, far more valuable is the conversation I have with one of the people on those teams that I can reach out and say, I don't understand how this thing works. And they can, because they're Amazon and they're extremely customer focused, politely tell me to read page two of the documentation where it's very clearly answered. And then I'm embarrassed and have to buy them a cup of coffee for wasting their time. Those relationships tend to be what drives how I operate. And I get that not everyone works that way. I also, to be honest, have attention span issues. I can't sit there and focus on a talk for 45 minutes without getting itchy. I want to move around. I want to have a different conversation. I want to focus on something else. And given how hard it is to get into some of the sessions, I think there are people who would benefit from those talks more than I would. So me taking someone a spot doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I most only, even last year when I went to predominantly talks, I still could only really make it to maybe two talks a day, just given time constraints and the sessions that I even wanted to see, you know, minus the keynote, which, you know, you definitely would want to watch if your only aim is to go to sessions, getting to more than two sessions. I mean, you have to be a machine to do that. It's, it's, it's hard to get to, to get, you can get into in a lot of ways. And yeah, for, for something that's online later, I think it's probably a little overkill, but there's definitely a lot of value. I mean, the biggest value I get

from the event is, you know, checking out what other people are doing. Pretty much every venture capitalist is out there. Those are all conversations that I want to have. Of course, I work at startups. So that's, that's important. But also, like I have friends who work at Amazon that I really only get to see once a year out there. And so it's kind of fun to, to be in the same city as friends of mine and just catch up and hear about, you know, cool stuff that they're, that they're doing. And, you know, some of the, some of the, you know, chat about some of the announcements after they happen. And, you know, they're like, you know, even some of the announcements this year, you know, when I chat with people and just say, Oh, yeah, like the last one, Oh, what'd you think of this announcement?

I'm like, it's pretty interesting, or it's totally crazy. And I'm not sure why you would spend money on building that. But you know, you're also Amazon. So you can just build whatever you want. Exactly. It's, it's an interesting sort of of weird dynamic where because it doesn't really know what it wants to be yet, it ends up being a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And that's fantastic. I do have one more item that I would change if it were up to me. Midnight Madness is the first event. It kicks off on Sunday night at 10 o'clock, and then they do the first launch at midnight. And they usually have a celebrity DJ or a stand-up comedian or something like that headline that event. And those have been hit or miss over the years. I want to headline

Midnight Madness at reInvent. Because if you think about it, there is nowhere else on the planet that I can go and do cloud stand-up comedy. It just doesn't work. You can't go to the Laugh Factory and do a bit on the Amazon followership principles or talk about how it's a two-pizza team. That means you can't be on the team unless you can eat two entire pizzas yourself in a single sitting. And those jokes don't work in the general population.

The only place that they work is a conference like reInvent, where everyone is at least borderline familiar with what's going on. If I start screaming in public that AMI has three syllables and it's not pronounced AMI, they're going to have the police do a welfare check on me because I sound deranged. In a cloud context, it makes sense. I don't know who I have to talk to to make that happen, but I'd love to see that. If you talk about bucket list items, that's one of mine. I think we need to start one of those online little voting things, of which I can't remember the word for right now, to try to convince Amazon for that.

A petition? That's what they're called, right? Petitions. Interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I think we should do something like that. The one thing that I'd be very curious, though, is let's say this dream scenario happens, and I'm all for it. I think this would be hilarious. And I would actually go to Midnight Madness if that was the case, because I've gone in previous years and find myself underwhelmed continually. But I would be curious, would you have to write up all the jokes in advance for Amazon Legal to review? My guess is, yeah. And then I almost actually would rather be in the room as you are sitting there with an Amazon Legal representative, I think,

as they are reviewing these jokes. I think actually that is the performance piece I want to see more than anything else. Funny you say that. First, I don't know what that would look like. I would absolutely be amenable to doing it. But I already send a lot of what I write through a legal review process. My wife is a corporate attorney. And I've run things by her to ask about my risk exposure, about whether something is going to land correctly, about whether I'm inadvertently punching down in ways I don't see. There's more care and diligence another perspective. And it turns out attorneys are great at that. So I'm well accustomed to the legal review process, but it's always interesting watching other lawyers look through what I do and just have a boatload of questions that a normal human being might have. So you write a newsletter that makes fun of them, and you're here to what? Have me

defend you when they sue you? Oh, they like you? What? And it becomes a very surreal conversation as we go through that process. It's fun. I mean, credit where due. I do feel the need to say here that I have never had anything but pleasant interactions with AWS. I've never received a communication from one of their attorneys, with the exception of a couple of friends of mine who are in their legal group, who have reached out with various comments about things I'm working on with a, I like that, or that was funny. Thanks. They've never sent me a cease and desist. They've never asked me to write a retraction for something I've published. And I think that Amazon, in some ways, has an unfair reputation. They're very brand sensitive as far as potential reputational risk goes, but they've also been extremely human when I've worked with them. I've had guests from AWS on this podcast before. I hope to have more in the new year. And that's always difficult and challenging, but it's never been on a basis of, well, we don't know. Corey might say something unfortunate, and then we're screwed. They've been a pleasure and a joy to work with. The challenge, of course, is that,

like so many other people at Amazon, they're busy. And it turns out that if you're trying to deal with different groups and different podcasts, my ridiculous nonsense generally takes a priority slot somewhere behind the New York Times. So it tends to wind up being handled that way. And I don't fault them for that at all. I just want to call out that they are extremely pleasant to deal with in the interactions I've had with them. I've never sat down with someone from Amazon and not come away impressed by them at the end of that conversation. I mean, that's awesome to hear. You know, you always...

Except Ted. Kidding, kidding. Yeah, I know. You always wonder, right? Big company and the scope and the power they have. So it's definitely good to hear in that perspective. Absolutely. So last question for you, and then we'll probably call it a show. If listeners are debating going to reInvent in 2019 or reInforce, their security conference in Boston that I think runs in June, what tips or tricks would you have for them for next year?

Well, if you're coming to, what is it? Reinforce? That's a pretty good name. Reinforce. Reinforce. I like that. Well, if you're coming to Boston, you should absolutely let me know because I would love to hang out and whatever, grab a coffee or a beer or whatever. Because I always like meeting new people that come and visit Boston because I feel like no one ever comes to Boston. But as for reInvent next year, if you do go, plan appropriately. Think about what you want to get out of reInvent before you go out there. But the best tips I can give you are to, if you're going to go, try to register as early as you can because you want

your hotel room to be as close as possible to limit the amount of walking you'll do, whether that's in the Venetian, the Palazzo, or even across the street in the Mirage. It's not too terrible. But outside of there, it's a lot of walking. I think I was averaging 25,000 steps per day out there. So it was quite painful. On that note, obviously leave your dress shoes at home. No one's going to judge you for wearing sneakers because they're going to be wearing sneakers unless they're totally crazy and they're about to just cause damage to their entire lower body. But, you know, also I would say, you know, if you have a decent amount of Amazon usage, you should try to reach out to Amazon folks and scheduled meetings with either like product owners

of specific products that you're using or product managers of that. Because honestly, they, in my experience at least, they like to get feedback of people that are using it. Amazon is extremely good about building solutions to customer problems. And they don't know what your problems are unless you tell them. So reach out to your account manager, reach out and say, hey, you're going to be there. You'd love to talk with someone from Aurora team or someone on Lambda team to share your concerns. Because that's really the power of reInvent is being able to be in the same room as some of these folks and share your candid thoughts on how you use Amazon. I think that's probably some of the best advice you can give. I mean, there's a bunch of logistic

stuff, but there are 500 blog posts about that, and I'm not interested in rehashing some of that. I think you're right. Have a plan for what you want to get out of it. One thing I've toyed with doing that I thought would be interesting is, as a service, writing trip reports for people, customized to what it is they care about so that they can just take that and go. I don't know if that would be entertaining, but there's always an interesting approach as far as how to think about what success at a conference looks like. And the first time you go, expect all your expectations to be dashed. One thing that I try and encourage listeners to do is if you're curious about any of this stuff, please reach out to me. I'm not hard to find. I'm on Twitter. The link to that is always at the bottom of the webpage, Quinny Pig. Feel free to email me,

Corey, at screaminginthecloud.com. And I am thrilled to talk with you about career stuff, about conference attendance, about what to think about if you're a company, how to consider, how to evaluate the, is buying a sponsor booth worth it? Anything in that context, I am thrilled to opine on. It's not just something I do when I have guests on the show. I talk to people about a wide variety of different things. And again, people help me. I am thrilled to pay it forward. But also caveat that with I'm just one person.

My opinions are simply that. That may not map to your use case or your constraints. So take it with a grain of salt, but I'm thrilled to provide advice. Yeah, I echo that extremely. My Twitter DMs are open. So I'm just at Pete Cheslock on Twitter. My DMs are open and I'm always happy to answer questions about really anything. Find me on LinkedIn, send me a message, get connected. I mean, if you have a question about really whatever, like what my experience

was as a sponsor, I mean, this was the first time that I, you know, with a lot of help from some consulting and marketing folks really kind of ran a company's visit trip to reInvent. And so there's a lot of learning that I did as part of that, that I'm more than happy to share with other startups out there. So if I can help out anyone, I am definitely more than happy to. Absolutely. The few times I reach out to people and ask their advice or their help with something, and they say no, I'm always taken aback by it. It's how do you live and not wind up irritating everyone you engage with? People who treat introductions as this diminishing reserve of they can only give out so many, so they hoard them. I've never understood. Helping people means

other people help you. It really does generate some form of return effect. It's almost never from the people you've helped directly. It just turns into an entire way of launching a career. It's the only way I ever found to build business success for myself. So I will, believe me, if you have any questions, please reach out. If I can help you, I will. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm the same way. I've seen that as well, where people, like you said, they hoard their intros of like, I can't intro you. I mean, I make intros to local people in the VC community. When someone's like a friend of mine who was doing a startup, they had revenue coming in, no VCs would follow up with them because they were these kind of nobodies.

No one knew who they were. Of course, I do that soft intro, which is how so many VCs operate. And a bunch of VCs respond back. I'm always happy to open up my network and connect people because I've spent so long to meet people in the area and I still have so many more people I want to meet with. It takes a village, right?

I mean, we don't get where we're at by ourselves. So being able to work with other people. And of course, on the recruiting side, I always like to say, there's always the people that I meet with. I feel like I'm always recruiting. Maybe not today, but maybe 10 years from now. But at some point, the timing will work out perfectly and we'll be able to work together. And I even say that for you, Corey, in that

someday, the timing will align and it will create the mega company of Snark, basically. I think it's probably what it will be. I don't know. We'll still work on that. But it could be tomorrow. It could be 10 years from now. If we learn anything from Kubernetes, it's to name it after a Greek word. So sarcastically as it is. Sold.

Pete, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thanks so much for having me back. Like I said, I feel very honored that you would, A, invite me back after the last one we did. I will only assume that this will be the last podcast for

this one. You should definitely get back other more smarter people than myself in the future. You do yourself too little credit, sir. Thank you, though. I definitely appreciate it. Pete Cheslock, VP of Product at Chaos Search. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at screaminginthecloud.com or wherever Fine Snark is sold.