Screaming in the Cloud - Hard Charging Software onto the AWS Marketplace with David Gatti
Episode Date: March 15, 2022About DavidDavid is an AWS expert who likes to design and build scalable solutions that are fully automated and take care of themselves. Now he is focusing on selling his own products on the ...AWS Marketplace.Links:0x4447: https://0x4447.com/Products page: https://products.0x4447.com
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Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud.
I'm Corey Quinn.
Today's promoted episode is brought to us by 0x4447.
And my guest today is David Gotti, their CEO.
David, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Thank you for getting me on the show.
One of the things that I find fascinating about what you do and where you come from is that for
the last five years, you've been running an independent company that I would classify,
based upon our conversations, as pretty close to a consultancy. However, you've gone down the path that I didn't
when I set up my own consultancy
and started actually selling software,
not just software, solutions as a packaged thing
that you can wind up doling out to various customers.
Whereas I just went with the very high touch approach of,
oh, let me come in and have a whole series
of conversations with people.
Yours scales a heck of a lot more.
So do you view yourself these days as a software company,
as a consultancy or as something else entirely?
So right now I did put aside the consultancy
because yeah, one thing that I realized it's possible,
but it's very hard to scale.
It's also hard to find people at the same
level. So yeah, the scalability of the business is quite hard. Whereas with software sold on the
AWS marketplace, that is much easier to scale than what I was doing before. And that's why I decided
to take a break from consulting and focusing 100% on the products that I sell on the AWS marketplace
to see how this goes and how it actually works and can a business be built around it.
The common wisdom that I've encountered is that consulting, especially when you're doing it
yourself, is one of those things that is terrific when you find yourself in the position that I
originally did of your employer showing up and knock, knock,
who's there? Not you anymore. Get out. And then there's a somewhat, in my case, limited runway as
far as how long I've got before I have to go find another job. With consulting, you can effectively
go out, start talking to people, and provided that you can land a project, it starts throwing
off revenue basically immediately. Whereas building softwares, building packages,
things that you wind up selling to people, it's almost like a real estate business on some level
where you have to take a lot of investment upfront to wind up building the thing where,
because no one is generally speaking, going to pay you spec work to go ahead and build something
for 18 months and come back and hope that it works. Right. I also buy us for the services
because I'm bad at writing code. You, on the other hand, write things that seem to
actually work, which is another refreshing difference. Yes. So I
did that. But now I have a guy that is just a Linux expert.
So you were saying that there is a high investment in the beginning.
But what actually in my case, what happened, I've been selling
these products for the past three
years as basically as a hobby so when i was doing aws consulting i was saying like a company has a
problem a repeating problem so i was just creating a product putting it on the marketplace and then
selling it to them so basically they had a situation where i can manage those projects
to updates when there's a need to do an update
and there was a standardization behind it right so if they had you know five SFTP servers and
there was a need to make an update I was making the update on my image I'm putting on the marketplace
and then updating all those servers in one go in a much quicker fashion than managing one by one, right? And so I had this thing for
three years. So now when I started doing this full time, I have a little bit of a lead on what's
going on. So I already had a bunch of clients that are using the products. And so that actually
helped me not to have to wait three years before I saw any revenue coming in. I always thought that
the challenge behind building something like this was that,
well, you needed to actually be conversant
in a programming language.
That was the thing that you needed
to package and build these things.
But I take a look at what you have on the AWS Marketplace,
and I will throw a link to this in the show notes,
but you offer right now four different offerings,
an rsyslog server, a Samba server,
a VPN server, and an SFTP server.
And every one of those four
things back in my DevOps days, I built and implemented on AWS generally either from scratch
or from something in the marketplace, and I'll get to that in a bit, that didn't really meet a
variety of needs. And every single time I built these things, it drove me up a wall because I had
to do this, but felt like solving a global problem locally myself to meet some pile of needs. Then I
had to worry about the maintenance of the thing, making sure that the care and feeding continued
to work. And it just wasn't, it didn't work for me in the way that I wanted it to. It never occurred
to me that I really could have just solved this whole thing once, wrote it on the marketplace, and then just gone and
grabbed the thing. Exactly. So that was my exact thinking here, especially when you work with the
clients. This thing was also crazy, because when you work with clients, they want to do
things as fast as possible, right? So, okay, they say, I need an SFTP server. Of course, it takes,
you know, half a day
to set up something but then they scream at you and say like hey do the next thing do the next
thing do the next thing and you never end up configuring the server that you're making in a
reliable way sometimes you misconfigure it because i forgot this option and now everybody on the
internet can access the server itself wait screw up screw up a server config? That doesn't sound like something I would do.
Yeah, no one seems to think they're going to until oops.
Yes, you're amazing and you're perfect, of course,
but I'm not.
And yeah, I was seeing like, oh, you know,
in the middle of the night, oh, I forgot this option.
I forgot this, I forgot that.
And so there was never a, basically one place
when the configuration is just correct, right?
And that was something that sparked my idea when I realized the marketplace exists.
It's like, oh, wait a moment, I can spend a few weeks to do it right, put it there and
never worry about it again.
And so if when a client says like, hey, I need this, I can deploy it with literally
in less than one minute, you have any of those products that actually i'm selling up and
running right and of course the vpn is going to be a little bit slower because it needs to generate
all the certificates at the beginning but for example this ftp one is just poof you deploy it
with a cloud formation file provide username and password and you're up and running and i see for
example this thing with clients which sometimes is funny when there's two clients that they use the SFTP server only once a day for one hour. So every day it's like one new instance
created and one instance removed and one instance created and one instance removed. And so it keeps
on going like that. The thing that always drove me nuts about building these things out was first,
I had to go and find something on those rare occasions where I used the marketplace.
Again, I wasn't really working in the same modern marketplace that we think of today when we talk
about the AWS marketplace. It was very early on. The only way that it would deliver software was
via here's an AMI, grab the thing and go ahead and deploy it. And it's going to have an additional
hourly cost on it at the end. And more or less the whole Henry Ford approach of, oh, you can get in any color you want as long as
it's black. So back in those days, I would spin up an open VPN server. And I did this at several
companies. I would go and find the thing on the marketplace from, I think it was the open VPN
company behind the project. Great. I grabbed the thing. It had no additional cost through the
marketplace. I then had to go and get a custom license file from the vendor themselves, load the thing in, then start
provisioning users. And this had no integration that I could discern with anything else we had
going on. So all of this stuff was built through the web config on this thing. There was no facility
for backing the thing up, certificate material, et cetera, et cetera. So if something happened to that instance or that image, or we had to go through a DR exercise, well, time to
reprovision everyone by hand again. And it was annoying because the money didn't matter at a
company scale. It really doesn't for something like this, unless you're into the usurious ranges,
it does not matter. It's the, I want to manage this simply and effectively in a way that makes sense. And in many cases, in a way that is congruent with our on-prem environment. So,
oh, there's a custom AWS service that offers something kind of like this. Use that instead.
It's, yeah, I don't like the idea personally of having to use a higher level managed service that
I'm very often going to need the most right when things are getting wonky during an outage scenario. I want something that I understand and can work with. And I've always
liked, even if I have all of the latest whiz-bang accesses into an environment, in production
environments, I spin up something like this anyway, just to give myself a backdoor in the event that
everything else breaks. And I really like how you've structured your VPN
server as far as backing up its config, sharing its configs. You can scale it to more than one
instance. What a ridiculous concept that is. And so on and so forth. So it's not more than one. I
mean, yes, you can deploy it more than one time. But the thing that because, again, when you were
saying like companies don't care about cost, right, it's more about how annoying it is to use and set
up right and so i'm one of those people that when i for example see things like i've been playing
with servers since the 90s right and i was keeping rebuilding recreating everything every single time
from scratch and yeah it was always painful it took always a lot of time. For example, our server took six months to set up the right way. And also the pricing that it's online,
the competition has is quite aggravating. I will say like, it's very hard to scale above
a certain point, especially from the midsize companies. And the goal with the marketplace
is also like, make it as simple as possible. because AWS itself doesn't make it easy to be on the
marketplace and and it's also almost like crazy how hard it is so for anybody who will like to
who might think like oh I would like to try this AWS marketplace thing I would say sure do it but
be super patient you cannot rush it because it's going to take you on average six months
to understand how even the process
of uploading anything
and updating it and managing it
is going to take you
because the website that they've built
has nothing to do with the console
and it's a completely custom solution
that is very clunky
and still very old-fashioned
how you have to manage it.
Tell me more about that.
I've never gone through the process of putting something up on the marketplace.
To my understanding, you need to be an AWS partner in order to use the marketplace, correct?
No, you don't have to.
No, thankfully not.
I hope this thing is not going to change.
I want to manifest into existence by saying that.
If you're on the marketplace team listening to this, don't do that, please.
I really don't want to get yelled at
and have made things worse for people.
Don't give them my ideas, okay?
Exactly.
No, it's anybody can do it.
But yeah, how to add a new product.
So the process is you have to build an AMI first.
Then you have to submit the AMI to AWS
by first creating a special AMI role.
Sorry, always get confused.
AMI, YAM, I never.
YAM is users.
Okay.
I think we need a few more acronyms that use most of the same letters.
I think that's the right answer here.
So either YAM or AMI, whichever is responsible for roles, you have to create a special role
to give AWS access to your AMI.
Then you submit the image to AWS providing the role that they have to use.
They scan it and they do simple checks to make sure that you don't, for example, have
SSH enabled with the regular users.
There's some regular scanning to make sure that you're not using an image from 10 years
ago, right?
Of Linux.
And once you pass that, you're able to actually create your first product where you have to
write your title, description, provide, for example, the ports that needs to be open,
URLs to separate resources, the pricing page, which takes on average one hour to fill up. Because let's say that you have 20 instances that you support.
For every instance, you have to write the price for that instance per one hour.
Then if you want to have a discount of, let's say, 20%,
because you can sell it by the hour or someone can pay you for the full year.
And so for the full year, you might have a discount.
So you have to have also the price per hour discounted by the amount of percentage that you want.
And then you have to repeat it 40 times
because there's no way to upload it.
It feels like the internal AWS billing system
on some respects, like, well, if it's good enough for us,
it's good enough for our customers.
And I have empathy for the folks
in the billing system internally.
Their job is very hard,
but that doesn't mean that it's okay to wind up exposing those sharp
edges to folks who are paying customers of these things.
Right.
And it'd be a simple thing like being able to import the CSV file with just two columns,
and that would be perfect.
But no, you have to do it by hand.
There's no other way.
So hopefully...
Or someone has to.
Welcome to the crappiest internship of your life.
It feels like bringing people into data entry for stuff like that is cheating.
Exactly.
So you do that.
And then I don't remember exactly what the other steps are to when you're creating a
completely new product, because I did that three years ago.
And so now I've been just updating those products.
But yeah, then they have to review your submission.
And once everything is OK, then your product is on the marketplace and you can be ready to accept everything.
If you, for example, want to have the image also available in some specific regions that are not the default ones, you have to enable this by hand.
I don't remember anymore how, but it's not obvious.
And you have to keep redoing this every time they launch a new
region as well, I would imagine.
So they say that you can have enabled the option to automatically add it,
but it still won't work, but it will work, but let's say, so in my case,
I'm using CloudFormation.
I gave a complimentary CloudFormation file where if you want to deploy my
product, you go to the documentation documentation page you click the orange button and you basically provide the
parameters and you click next next next and the product is deployed within a few
minutes and in that CloudFormation file I have a map of every AMI in every
region okay so if they add a new region and they automatically add the AMI there, then if you don't
get notified that there is a new region, you don't know that you have to update the CloudFormation
file. And then someone might say like, Hey, David, why this product is not deploying in this region?
It's like, oops, I didn't know that they have to update the CloudFormation file with the new
region, right? Yeah. I'm a big believer in click ops, the idea of doing things in the console.
But everything you're talking about sounds like a fraught enough process that I'm guessing
you have some form of automation that helps you with a lot of this.
Yeah, so I hate repeating anything more than once.
So everything in my book is automated as much as possible.
The documentation, for example, how I structure it, there is a section that tells you how to deploy it by just using a CloudFormation file and clicking next, next, next, until you have it.
And then there's also the option if you want to deploy it manually because you don't trust what the CloudFormation file is doing.
Of course, you can see the source file if you wanted to, but sometimes people are a little bit wary about big CloudFormation files.
In any case, I have this option,
but I have this option as a separate thing.
So AWS has an option where you could add
a CloudFormation file that goes with your product.
The problem is to be able to submit
a CloudFormation file natively,
so they will take care of it,
requires you to get Microsoft Office 365,
because they give you an Excel file that has, I think, a few thousand columns.
And for example, numbers under MacOS, when you export, you save the file, no, sorry,
you export it, it will cut around 500 columns.
So you miss like two thirds of what AWS would like you to send you.
And why they do that, I have no idea.
I don't know if they still do it after three years, but when I was doing it,
they told me like, hey, this is the file, fill it by hand.
About that time period, that was exactly how they did large scale corporate discounts
on custom contracts is that they would edit the AWS bill in Excel.
Or if not, the next closest thing to it, because there were periodically errors,
it looked an awful lot like someone typoing something by hand.
Computers are generally bad at doing that.
And it took an extra couple of weeks to get those bills, which is right around the speed of human.
I see none of those problems anymore, which tells me that that's right. Someone finally upgraded off of Microsoft Excel to the new level, probably Airtable.
Maybe. So I don't know if that process is still there, but what I did back then, I realized,
oh, wait a moment, I can just have a CloudFormation file in S3 bucket publicly available
and just use that instead of going through that process because
I didn't want to pay on a yearly basis for a product that I'm going to use literally
once a year.
That didn't make any sense to me and so I decided I'm going to do it this way.
That's why, yeah, if they add a new region, I have to go out and update my own CloudFormation
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The way that I see all of the nuts and bolts of the engineering parts of getting all these things up and running on the marketplace, it feels like it is finicky. It is sharp edges that AWS is basically known for in many respects,
but without the impetus of making that meaningfully better, just because there's
such an overriding business reason that it's not like there's a good competitor for something like
this. So if you want to sell things to AWS people in the most frictionless way
possible, where it reflects on the AWS bill, causes discounting accounts to where there's
spend commitments and the rest, it's really the AWS marketplace is the only game in town for a
lot of that. Right. So I don't know yet if they don't do it because they don't have enough
competition or pressure. Because to me, when I first started doing this AWS marketplace, it felt to me
like more Amazon than AWS.
Right?
It felt more like an Amazon team was behind it and not people from AWS itself.
It felt like completely something different.
Not to mention, yeah, the console that they provide is something completely custom that
has nothing to do with the typical AWS console.
I've heard stories about the Underpants Store Division's
seller tools as well,
very similar to the experience you're describing.
And also the support is different.
So it's not connected to the AWS console one.
The good thing about it, it's free,
but it's also only by email.
And so, yeah, it's a very weird, clunky situation where,
I mean, I'm someone that I guess loves the pain of AWS. I don't know if
that's a good thing or a bad thing, but when I started, I decided, you know what, I'm going to
figure it out. And once I do, I'm going to feel happy that I was able to, maybe that's their goal.
It's to give us purpose in life. So maybe that's the goal of AWS. I don't know.
There are times I really
wonder about that, where it just, it feels like it could be so much more than it is, but it's not.
And again, my experience with it is very similar to what you've described, where it's buying an AMI
the end. But now they're talking about selling SaaS subscriptions on it. They're talking about
selling professional services in some cases on it. And effectively, it almost feels like it's trying to become the marketplace through which all
IT transacting starts to happen. And the tailwind that sort of is giving energy to a lot of those
efforts is if you have a multi-million dollar spend commitment with AWS in return for discounting,
you have to make sure you spend enough within the timeframe. 50% of all spend on the AWS marketplace counts toward that.
Now on other cloud providers, it's 100% of spend, but you know, AWS is nothing if not very tight
with the dollar. So, okay, fine, whatever. There's a reason for companies to go down that path.
Talking a little bit about the business aspect of it, because for me, it seems like the clear win
in the absence of anything else is, especially at larger companies, they already have a business relationship with AWS.
The value to someone selling software on the marketplace feels like it would be first and foremost an end run around companies' procurement departments.
It's just, oh, someone has to click a button and they're up and running as opposed to going through the entire onboarding and contracting and all the rest manual way. Other than the technical
challenges of getting things up and running on it, how have you found that it works as far as
getting in front of additional customers, as far as driving adoption? You could theoretically have,
I imagine, have not gone down the marketplace road at all and just sold this directly on your
website. Click here to buy a license file the way that a lot of stuff I used to do as well,
and it would have cut out a lot of the painful building an AMI
and putting it into the marketplace story.
What's the value to you of being in the marketplace?
Yeah, so in the beginning,
the value was basically that it's on the marketplace.
As I was saying, I was using it with pre-existing clients.
So it was easy for me because I knew AWS,
the images were there.
So it was easy to just click my
own CloudFormation file and tell the client after one minute, hey, it's up and running,
you have a bunch of profiles for your VPN, enjoy and have fun, right?
That experience, once you have it on the marketplace, it's nice because it just works and you don't
have to do much work.
Then I realized that AWS in the search bar in the console when you were typing for example
you know you type EC2 S3 CloudFormation to find the service what they were doing originally is
when you were typing in the search bar you were getting the services of AWS and then when there
was nothing left they were showing the results of the marketplace, which was basically amazing because you have
prime time in the console with your product, you had to do zero marketing and you get every week
took new clients that are using your product. And the trend was growing pretty, pretty well.
And that was a proposition that is just amazing. Like nobody has that because you can have fortune
500 companies using your product
without doing anything. It's just, is it simple to deploy? Yes. Does it provide value? Is the price
right? And people were just using them. Fast forward now, what happened is AWS changed the
console and instead of showing after the services, the marketplace, now they show the sub section of the services.
They show the results from the blog,
articles, videos, whatever.
I don't even know what they've put there.
Originally, you could search my name in that search bar
and it would pop up a profile of me they did
before reinforcing the security blog.
There you go.
Meet Corey Quinn, a cloud economist,
square quotes and all, who does not work here.
And it was glorious.
Now they've changed the algorithm. So it pops up, Oh, you want Corey Quinn? You must mean IoT core.
So that blog post is still there, but it's below the fold because of course they give precedence
to a service that they have that nobody uses or understands because Amazon. Yeah, of course. And
so that was awful because suddenly I realized that, oh, I'm getting less and less new clients
because, you know, after six months, one year, people were shutting off their things because they
finished using them and I was not getting new ones.
But at that time I was doing AWS consulting.
So it's like, oh, maybe it was a glitch in the matrix, whatever.
I got lucky.
But then after a few months, I realized, wait a moment, when I was working in AWS, I realized
that the console results changed and I went like,
oh, that's what happened. And that's why I'm getting less clients. So in the beginning,
that was a great thing. And that's why I'm actually paying you to promote my business
and my products, because now there's no way to put the products in front of customers
because AWS took it away. And so that's why I decided to actually go full force on this
to make sure that they promoted as much as possible,
because that one cool feature that AWS was providing,
they took it away for whatever reason,
because blog posts are more important than their partners, I guess.
Well, it depends on the partner and the tier of partner.
And it feels like it's a matter, to be clear, full disclosure,
I am not an AWS
partner. I'm not partnering with any vendor in the space for either real or perceived conflict
of interest issues. So I don't have a particular horse in the race. But back when there were a
small number of partners, the network really worked. Now there are tens of thousands of
partners. And well, what winds up being surfaced? Customers, as a result, seem to be caring less
about various partner statuses unless
they're trying to check a box on some contractual requirement.
Instead, they just want the problem solved.
And it's becoming increasingly challenging to differentiate just by the nature of how
this works.
I don't believe in 2022 that you could build almost anything and put it on the AWS marketplace
in isolation and expect that to
suddenly drive adoption by the fact that you're there. It feels to me, at least on the other side
of the fence, that the marketplace experience is all about you go there and you look for the name
of the thing that you already know that you want because you've heard about it from other means,
and then you just click it and you go and that's the end of it. It's a
procurement story. It's not a discoverability story. Right. And yeah, so that's a little bit
disappointing. And I even made a post on Reddit about it to just bring this up to AWS itself to
say like, hey, UI change is pretty severe because I mean, they get a percentage of every hour the
products are running. So basically they shoot themselves in the foot by making less money because now they're getting less products are being shown to potential customers.
So that's a disappointing thing.
When it comes to also you ask what other way there is to show the products to potential customers.
So there is an option where AWS can help you out. And when I talked to them, I think last year, they said
that if you reach $2 million in sales a year, then they will basically show you around other
potential customers, right? Which is a little bit disappointing, because especially if you're like
a small company like mine, it's pretty hard to get to the $2 million in a meaningful time.
And if once you reach that point, you might go like, how is this going to help me if you
now show me in front of other people? So yeah, and of course, I understand them in a sense that
if they show a product from the marketplace to a big company, and the product turns out to be
of poor quality, then of course, the client is going to tell AWS,
why are you showing us something that just doesn't do its job, right? But it'd be nice to have a
tire when you say, okay, you're starting out after a few years, we can show you to this mid-sized
client. So you don't have to go to immediately Fortune 500 companies. That doesn't make any
sense, right? And I still, even the companies that are at that level, I've talked to them about how
they've grown their business and not a single one has ever credited anything
AWS did to help them grow other than, well, they threw a reinvent. So we spent extortionate piles
of money and set up a booth there. And the fact that we were allowed in the building to talk to
people was helpful, I guess, but it's all through their own, their own works on this. I'm not
convinced to be very direct with you that aws knows how to effectively drive sales and adoption of things on their own marketplace that is an
increasing source of concern right and then there's no plan of what to do with a company that is
starting in the on the marketplace once it's a few it's already a few years and established in
the marketplace and a big one there yeah they don't have any way to go about it, which is a bit disappointing.
But again, I like a challenge. I like the misery of AWS, so I'm just doing it.
Now I hear you. Would you recommend other people in your position explore selling on the marketplace,
given the challenges and advantages both that you've experienced?
So if you were to start from scratch, it would take you like three years, maybe not three years,
but it's not something that should be the primary revenue source of the business. If you want to go
into the AWS marketplace situation, because you have to have enough capital to do enough marketing
to see if you can get in front of people if you already do some consulting like me where i did
some stuff on the side and then realize oh people are using it people like it they get some feedback
they want new features like oh maybe i can start growing this bigger and bigger right it's not
something that's going to happen immediately and especially the updating process that happens it
can get quite stressful because when you make an update,
so you have a version of a product that's working and running, right? Now you make an update and you
have to spend at least a week or even sometimes two weeks to test that out, to make sure that
you didn't miss anything because you don't want people to update something and it stops working,
right? You can't break customer experiences on these things. It becomes a nightmare.
Because especially you don't know
if literally a Fortune 500 company is using your product
or like a tiny company that has only 10 employees, right?
Your update broke the file server or the VPN
means it's unlikely that they're going to come back
anytime soon too.
Right.
You're also depending on AWS in some respects
to steward the relationship
because you don't have direct contact with your buyers.
No.
So that's the important thing.
They don't give you access to the contacts.
They give you access to the company information.
So I actually do have Fortune 500 companies using my products.
But yeah, there's no way to get in touch with them.
The only thing that you get is the company name, the address, the domain that they use to create an email.
So at least you can get a sense of like who this company is.
But yeah, there's no way to get in touch if there is a problem.
So that's the only way that you can notify the customer that there's a new update is
when you make an update, there is a text area that you can say what's new.
What did you change?
Right.
And that's the only communication that you get with the client so if for example
you do a big mistake you basically have that just little text box and hopefully someone reads it but
you know aws is known for sending 20 emails a week for every account that you open good luck
getting through that noise hopefully you don't miss the important ones as you go through no i
hear you these are problems that i think think are on AWS's plate to solve.
Hopefully someone over there is listening to this and will at least reach out with a
bit of a better story.
I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
We'll include links, of course, to this in the show notes.
Where else can people find you?
They can find us basically on the product page of FortressStyle.
So we have products.0x447.com.
That's where basically we keep all our products.
We keep updating the page
to provide more information about those products,
how to get in touch with us.
We provide training, demos, anything that you want.
It's very easy to get in touch with us
instead of when sometimes it comes to AWS.
So yeah, we are out there. Pretty easy to find us.
The domain, the company name is so unique that you either get our website.
Easy to find on Google.
Yeah.
So we're basically a hex editor and that's basically it.
Excellent.
Well, we'll definitely throw links to that in the show notes.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
David Gatti, CEO of 0x4447. I'm cloud economist,
Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a
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