Screaming in the Cloud - Making Data Migration to the Cloud Easy with Ricardo Gonzalez
Episode Date: July 25, 2023Ricardo Gonzalez, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his approach to Product Management and cloud migration. Ricardo explains how a c...hance conversation landed him a role at Oracle, and why he feels it’s so important to always bring your A-game in any conversation. Corey and Ricardo discuss why being a good Product Manager involves empathy for your customers and being able to speak their language as well as the language of your product and development team. Ricardo also explains how he’s seen the Oracle product suite grow, and why he feels more and more companies are seeing the value of migrating their data to the cloud. About RicardoRicardo is a Product Manager at Oracle, in charge of Database Migration to the Cloud, and the ZDM and ACFS products.Ricardo is a native Costa Rican and has lived in Mexico, Italy and currently resides in the United States.He is passionate about technology, education, photography, music and cooking. He loves languages and connecting with people from all over the world. In a future life, Ricardo wants to own a taco truck, and share taco happiness with everybody.Links Referenced:Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardogonzaleza/Twitter: https://twitter.com/productmanaged
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the
Duckbill Group, 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.
Human Scale teams use Tailscale to build trusted networks.
Tailscale Funnel is a great way to share a local service with your team for collaboration,
testing and experimentation.
Funnel securely exposes your dev environment at a stable URL, complete with
auto-provisioned TLS certificates. Use it from the command line or the new VS Code extensions.
In a few keystrokes, you can securely expose a local port to the internet right from the IDE.
I did this in a talk I gave at Tailscale Up, their first inaugural developer conference.
I used it to present my slides and
only revealed that that's what I was doing at the end of it. It's awesome. It works. Check it out.
Their free plan now includes three users and 100 devices. Try it out at snark.cloud slash
tailscale scream. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Some wit once said that
90% of life was just showing up. And I'm not going
to suggest that today's guest has only the fact that he shows up going for him. But I do want to
say that when I first met him, it was at a drink up that I threw here in San Francisco. And he kept
turning up to a variety of community events, not just ones that I wound up hosting, but other people too. By day, Ricardo Gonzalez
is a senior principal product manager at Oracle, but in the community, he is also much more.
Ricardo, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me, Corey. It's a great
pleasure to be here with you today. So it is interesting watching you come to what I can
only describe as the other side of the tracks, because you work at Oracle.
I make fun of AWS all the time.
So, yes, I suppose our companies do have that in common, but I digress.
You also work in the database world, which is, I guess you could say I do, in that I misuse things as databases, mostly for laughs and occasionally for production. And you're over in the product manager side of the world, which
for me has always may as well be a language that I do not understand, let alone speak.
Yet you have consistently shown up and made great contributions to every conversation you've ever
been a part in. Where did you come from? How did you start doing this? Well, I'm originally from
Costa Rica, right?
Which is, I wouldn't say uncommon,
but then again, there's just a few of us.
And I was doing my master's degree in Mexico
when I showed up to a recruitment event,
dressed up like a business student,
and realized all of my peers were actually developers,
although I'm a computer scientist by trade,
looking for a job at Oracle's Development Center in Mexico, right?
And by showing up, something magical happened.
I stayed at the session.
They made a raffle with numbers.
I didn't win, but they asked us questions nobody answered.
And as you can see, I talk a lot.
I raised my hand and they said, okay, answer these questions.
And then it became like a competition and I won.
And back then I got like a tablet.
I think it was an iPad.
It was great.
I thought, okay, no job for me because I wasn't looking for a job in development.
And then this person, which is now an SVP in my company, which has been my mentor in
many ways, approached me and he said, I really like what you did.
It seems you do have some technical background.
We need somebody that can talk like that with customers, but at the same time understand
the requirements for a technical product and work with engineers.
Do you want to come to the office tomorrow? And a week later, I had an offer and my life changed
in ways I could have never foreseen. This is a hard thing to talk about because it's the way
the world works. But when you say it, people love to come back and tear you down. You just got lucky
or it was, well, yeah, that works for you,
but it doesn't work for other people. But I found invariably that the seminal moments that happened
in the course of my career have all come from conversations I had with people I didn't need
to be talking to at events I didn't need to be attending. But one thing leads to another. I,
instead of sitting at home and brooding, I was, I put myself in situations where I could,
for lack of a better term, make my own luck. Sure, if only one conversation and a thousand
winds up turning into a career opportunity, okay, but that means you need to have a thousand
conversations to get there. So time to get started. And you are probably one of the best
living embodiments of this that I've ever met. Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean,
the lucky part plays a factor, I guess.
But you have to chase your own luck.
And it's complicated to talk about that
because there's also privilege involved
and being part of like, I was in college.
I had the privilege to go to college.
Although, I mean, there's a whole like list of things
that made me get there
and the sacrifices from family, et cetera.
And not everybody has the same level field, right? But what I can say is that I heard somebody said something that really resonated with me,
which is for some of us, right? We won't be the main player in the game reading. So I imagine
you have a sports event or whatever sports you want, and there's a game playing, right?
The coach will not call you, but they might call you over the last five minutes. But when they do,
you have to be there and score a goal, touchdown, whatever you want to call you, but they might call you over the last five minutes. But when they do, you have to be
there and score a goal, touchdown, whatever you want to call it, be the best player because that's
the opportunity you have and you have to make the most out of it. Some people were born and they
have the opportunity to be in the starting lineup. Some of us will be just called at the last minute.
But when you do, your A game has to be there on top and you have have to be the best you can, because that's the moment you have to shine.
I think that you're right.
There's a tremendous amount of privilege baked into all of this.
And privilege is one of those things you can't just set aside.
It's something that we wind up all manifesting in different ways to different degrees.
But it's a, oh, just be like me is fundamentally what a lot of advice comes down to,
regardless of whoever it is that's the me in question
that's talking about it.
But there seems to be just certain things
that lend themselves to better possibilities of success.
One of the things that has always impressed me
is that you just show up and start great conversations
with people left and right.
That's a skill that I honestly wish I had.
I have to be noisy in public to get people to approach me, whereas you, ah, you didn't have the time for that. You just walk up and start
talking to them. I've never been good at that. I guess part of my upbringing, also, you know,
my home country has a whole history of horizontalness, but that's a different discussion.
And we, I guess, not shy to just talk to people, right? Which sometimes can bring interesting
conversations with management and like, because if I disagree, I will let you know, right? Which sometimes can bring interesting conversations with management and like, because
if I disagree, I will let you know, right? I would be completely candid about things. But I think
it's important, right? Because like we're all human beings trying to do the same thing, right? We all
wake up in the morning with the same sort of problems and then share, get to share moments
in between each other. Why don't make them as pleasant as possible and try to see how can we
actually grow together? It's important that you're not only getting things
and growing yourself,
but also see how can with that help others grow as well.
So that's, I think, part of why conversations can be,
I mean, starting conversations with anybody,
just it's really important to see,
okay, nice to meet you.
How can we make the most out of it for both of us?
And even if it's just like you have a great conversation
or help each other or just me help you, et cetera.
So I want to talk a little bit about your day job.
Given that you work in product management, I have to assume that having people skills is kind of a prerequisite for the role.
At least you would think.
I've worked in places where that was apparently not the case and not for nothing.
It kind of showed.
Yeah, I mean, it's really important.
I think product management is one of these positions in which you are in the middle of showed. Yeah, I mean, it's really important. I think product management is one of these positions
in which you are in the middle of things.
When people ask me, and these are people that don't work
in technology, what do you do?
I tell them I'm a translator.
And when they ask me, like, oh, so you do it between
languages? I said, well, yeah, I speak different languages, but that's
not the point. The point is, I am able
to talk with people that
have a less technical acumen or are actually
just users of a product and then highly skilled, and then go back to the engineers, which have a less technical acumen or are actually just users of our product,
and then highly skilled,
and then go back to the engineers,
which have a different point of view, right?
So I'm always back and forth.
But that people skills, as you mentioned,
is really important because otherwise
you cannot do your job.
The thing that is interesting for me
is that product management itself
is not really a thing that can be defined.
I mean, yes, of course, there's like books on it
and people that have done their careers and like setting how it works, but it changes from company to company.
And even within the same company, there are different product managers doing different
things. What I do, and I've been really fortunate to have a really good manager that I've worked for
the last seven years, I think, has a lot to do with the people skills that you mentioned, right?
And it allows me to be as good as I can with my job and try to do, I mean, just, you know, grow every day.
It's easier to sit here and reason about these things
in the context of specifics on some level.
And it's also easy for me, at least,
to look at a company and think, oh, they do one thing,
but I have it on good authority
that Oracle is a large-ish company
that might have more than one product
at any given point in time.
What product do you work with? Where do you start and where do you stop?
Okay, well, I've been part of three different teams, if you could call it that way. Although
over the last seven years, I've been focusing mostly for, I mean, always within the database
organization. So like database development. And then over the last six or seven years,
I've been on the high availability team, which focuses on a thing called maximum availability architecture, which is basically helping customers to achieve all their requirements.
And we're talking about heavy usage of regular Oracle database with high availability, scalability requirements for 24-7 grade uptime.
And I started working with them with a cluster file system,
which I still do.
But my main job over the last, let's say,
four, almost five years,
I've been working towards helping customers come to the cloud, to Oracle Cloud.
My product, I'm a product manager for a product called ZDM,
Zero Downtime Migration.
And it's been in the market for the last three and a half years.
So I was there since it all started.
There's a whole interesting story about cross-work
with different teams in Oracle getting together
to get this product out.
So that's my day-to-day job, just enabling customers
on maximizing the usage of the Oracle database
and the high availability realm,
and also helping them move to the Oracle Cloud
if that's what they want and the mission they have right now
in their organizations.
I know that people are going to have opinions about Oracle cloud, and I'm just going to say something that I think is relatively uncontroversial in that the technology is freaking
solid. I have used it in a bunch of different ways. I've talked to folks who have, and there
is remarkably little argument that when you use it as directed, but stuff works. And there's a lot
to be said for that. So you focus a lot on the migration story, specifically to my understanding
databases inward from a variety of other places. Do they tend to find themselves living in on-prem
environments? Are they in other cloud providers? Are they God forbid? Well, we have this filing
cabinet full of paperwork and we're hoping you can help us digitize Are they, God forbid, well, we have this filing cabinet full of paperwork,
and we're hoping you can help us digitize it all.
Which, yes, those projects exist.
And no, I don't want to be within 6,000 miles of them.
Well, mostly we're talking about on-premises customers, right?
That have large fleets of Oracle databases.
And we're trying to help these customers, either small businesses,
it could be public or enterprises, move to the Oracle Cloud when they deem that's the strategy they're doing, right?
So my product, what it does is it actually orchestrates,
it automates that process for them so that when they're actually doing the migration,
it's as seamless as possible for them because there's a lot of caveats
and a lot of things to consider when we're talking about database migration into the cloud.
When you take a look at what is going on in the larger ecosystem, it's easy for me to sit here
and say, well, I don't see Oracle databases very often. And yeah, in the context of companies that
I work with that are very often founded in the last few years and are born in a particular cloud
provider, in my case, AWS, yeah, there doesn't seem to be a lot of those
things. But at the same time, Oracle rose to its current position by having database technology
that was second to none. There's a reason that all of these quote-unquote legacy companies,
by which, of course, we mean companies that made money and had the temerity to be founded more than
three years ago, have wound up standardizing across Oracle to a large extent.
As a result, then, we're seeing a stupendous amount of those companies now looking and weighing
what does moving into the cloud actually look like
because we have an increasingly dire raccoon problem
in our data center.
Yeah, I mean, we have evolved the latest technology
over the last 40 years.
Like Oracle, as you mentioned, right, it has impressive technology and it's quite solid.
Now you're asking me about companies that you know that might not be using Oracle or that you're not aware of using Oracle.
The interesting thing is when people ask me about this, right, is that it's really easy.
Both me and you, without knowing, use Oracle products today, right?
Because you checked your bank account, you used certain financial
services, you made phone calls, et cetera, right? And a lot of the underlying technology and
infrastructure that runs the world today, either you took a plane, et cetera, is running on Oracle,
right? There's a lot of deployments there, right? It's just that it's not that maybe we're not doing,
you know, again, we're talking about the whole ecosystem that runs a lot of infrastructure that
normal people would do on a daily basis, but it's right on the back end.
So you might not hear about it or it's not as known, but it is there in the top companies all over the world.
So what we're doing now is helping these companies migrate to the cloud when their needs really adapt to exactly that goal.
And sometimes it's actually more, okay, how can we actually modernize your data center?
So Oracle actually has cloud at customer, and we also help them with that migration as well.
So we have a whole set of products and deployments that would work within the customer data center,
but within a cloud managed by Oracle.
I think that that's an interesting question in its own right, which is, you have these companies
that are doing incredibly important things. Like, Oracle databases run hospitals.
They run DMVs at various states.
They run basically everything big and infrastructure-y that you can imagine in a lot of places.
They run banks, for example.
And now these companies are looking at transforming into a cloud approach on some level.
How on earth do you convince them to move something as critical as a workload on an Oracle database, which in many cases is a bedrock layer upon which aspects
of society depend, to, oh yeah, just go ahead and move it to this cloud thing. That'll be fine.
It feels like an almost impossible goal, but it's clearly not. What drives it?
Well, it's happening all over the industry, right? People are realizing that cloud,
I wouldn't dare to say the future because it's been all over the industry, right? People are realizing that cloud, I wouldn't dare to say the future
because it's been happening over the last years,
but clearly for cost management, security, administration,
resource scaling, you name it, it's the way to go, right?
So it takes time, and depending on who you're working with,
the projects could span three years, et cetera,
but that's the way the whole ecosystem is going, right?
So what we're doing is,
and we didn't reinvent the wheel here,
at least with my product, right,
was to take technology that has been used
for over 40 years as a standard
for backup, export, data transfer,
synchronization, security, database management,
and integrate it into a single product that would be
automated and helping the customers.
And what we wanted to do, and it was really
important for me, is we want you to
be in our cloud, we want to help you,
so let's make this free. Even if we're using
other products that Oracle already has
that have a cost, if you're using the
migration suite that we offer, it will not cost you money.
There's a lot of value to being able
to make assurances like that. But on some level, it feels like whenever someone migrates anything,
anywhere, a few things are certain. One is that there's going to be technical challenges with it.
There always are. That is the nature of large systems, particularly systems built upon systems
built upon systems. And two, as humans, as much as we love talking
about the idea of blamelessness, everyone's going to be looking for a scapegoat when
something inherently goes wrong. The database is always an easy thing to blame and the cloud,
aha, that's stuff that's non-deterministic and we can't go and put our meaty hands on it in
the data center the way we used to when things start breaking. How do you avoid becoming the
blame center in a scenario like that?
That's a great question.
And it's interesting because it could happen, right?
That somebody says, well, because of the migration,
things are not working as expected, et cetera.
So we do help customers.
There's a lot of implications
when you're talking about migration, right?
Do the proper planning, sizing.
Are there any architectural implications?
Are you doing any cross-endiness?
Then, you know, database-wise, Oracle has different architectures.
So we have the previous model of non-containerized
or no-container databases.
Now we're going to a tenant-based way of working.
Are you doing an upgrade as well?
Are you doing, you're coming from an older version
to a newer version?
Are there security implications?
Because a lot of the databases on-premises
might not have encryption, and we, by default,
encrypt at the target level
because it's a requirement in the cloud, right?
So what we work with the customers is two things.
First of all, do all the planning and testing as possible
before the migration so that you know
what you're doing is correct.
Is the app certified with the newer version
and the environment you're going into, right?
And we can work with you to do all these tests.
And then one thing that we realized
was really important in the product
is to have a way to have knobs or control of what you're doing. And you could actually do testing before
the actual switchover into the cloud. So you'll have like a standby database, like a copy of
database running in the cloud, being in synchronization with your on-prem, your database,
right, and your application. But you can use that to just do all the testing you want and then be
sure. And only when you're ready, then you'll do a switchover and then things would work as expected.
But again, there's a lot of process. And we've worked with customers that
they knew what they're doing, they were super happy and they did it quite fast.
There's others that said, you know what, I'm going to do a nine-month testing process because my week
that I'm going to be migrating and then the weekend that I'm going to do the switchover is crucial.
And then we work with them over those nine months.
But then when it happened, it went perfectly, right?
So it really depends on the project,
but we do ensure that everything is taken care of
because as you mentioned, it's a big change.
It's a big shift.
Tired of wrestling with Apache Kafka's complexity and cost?
Feel like you're stuck in a Kafka novel,
but with more latency spikes
and less existential dread by at least 10%?
You're not alone.
What if there was a way to 10x your streaming data performance without having to rob a bank?
Enter Red Panda.
It's not just another Kafka wannabe.
Red Panda powers mission-critical workloads without making your AWS bill look like a phone number.
And with full Kafka API compatibility, migration is smoother than a fresh jar of peanut butter.
Imagine cutting as much as 50% off your AWS bills. With Red Panda, it's not a pipe dream,
it's reality. Visit go.redpanda.com slash duckbill today. Red Panda.
Because your data infrastructure shouldn't give you Kafkaesque nightmares.
I think that there's a very true story about how, oh, we just try to close our eyes and cross our fingers and hope for the best
and press the migrate button that everything will work out flawlessly.
It doesn't work that way.
The way that we always wound up handling migrations in
places that weren't riddled with dysfunction up, down, and sideways, at least not in this
particular way, because everyone's environment's terrible, is that we would test these things out.
We'd stage them. We would have rollbacks that were tested and known to work. In some cases,
we'd begin with the rollback before we started the migration plan, just because we absolutely
cannot have this system down outside of a maintenance window or
outside of certain constraints. And it feels like a lot of that planning is wasted when things go
well, but it's not. It's the reason that important things don't crumble underneath us. Like at some
level, it's, do I feel like I wasted money on my airbags and seatbelts because I've never used them?
Not really, no. Well, I mean, this is like the classic ops thing
and support thing, right?
People always complain when things don't work,
but when they do work, they don't realize
it's because of all the work that all the people
that in infrastructure and planning and support
and ops were doing, right?
So it's, yeah, there's a lot of time
that can be spent in planning
and people would think that it's actually wasted time,
but actually it's super important and crucial for this.
The other thing I think is important is that you always should have a fallback plan.
There's different configurations in which this might be more cumbersome or complex,
but we do have the possibility to keep replicating back to on-premises
so that if anything happens, people do have that option.
And we do have customers that like the idea of having a disaster recovery configuration
in which they have something in the cloud
and then another thing on-premises.
So there's always options for you,
but planning is crucial, right?
So we even have a thing called evaluation mode
in which we could dry run a migration
without actually doing it,
just to tell you what could happen.
Of course, when you do things live,
there's always things, right,
that could be related to many other
factors. But we really, really try to dial in and be sure that when you're doing the migration
and you properly plan, things will be automated and work for you. And so we've grown over the
last three and a half years. And I was doing some research, right, and we've had like, you know,
thousands of databases migrated, great customers that have been using us. And surprises, sometimes
we don't know, right? And we find out, oh, somebody is doing a course
in one of these learning platforms based on a product
which is really new, but it's, oh, it's cool.
Like, we're not creating, like,
even your partner economies, et cetera, right?
And I'm really glad that what you're doing
has an impact and helps people.
That's all you want.
You want to help people achieve their goals.
So I have to ask, on some level,
building something that migrates a database
from one location to another naively would seem to folks to be a, okay, at some point this gets
declared feature complete, and then we go work on other interesting problems. But yet the fact that
you remain employed in the role that you're in, where you continue to work on the problem, would
strongly suggest that this is not in fact true. How does the product continue to evolve once you are, let's be clear,
shipping this to paying customers?
Well, I mean, the product will evolve, as you mentioned.
And I want to be clear, that's not just a rephrasing of,
hey, quick, justify your job.
Obviously, this stuff has to evolve.
This is not one of those, so what is it you'd say it is you do here?
Crappy questions.
It isn't really a question so much as an accusation. Those come in a slightly different tone of voice.
That's, you know, it's a super valid question. And I actually appreciate it a lot because
it also makes me reflect on how much we've grown, right? I mean, I think the magic of ZDM and the
team behind it is that it's kind of like a startup within Oracle, right? It all started because
different team without an Oracle, right?
You're banded together, a team,
propose a prototype based on existing technology, right?
So again, as I mentioned, like Oracle technology for database
has been over 40 years in the making.
And, you know, a team said, okay, what are the standard tools
to actually do a backup or an export of data,
transfer it, you know, to a location, in this case, a cloud,
do the whole synchronization, encryption, etc., and then
switch over, right? So the thing is that databases come in many flavors.
There are different options, different ways for databases to work. There's also different targets
in the Oracle Cloud, and those then change how you would be migrating
into. You'll have different workflows, physical, logical. You could use different
backup locations. So of course, in Oracle Cloud, the standard is the
object storage, right? You can do a direct data transfer. You have that technology as well.
If you're going migration to cloud customer, you definitely will require
external storage like NFS. If you're doing a conversion from AIX or Solaris
into the cloud target, which is Linux, then again, there's other
implications. If you're doing an in-flight upgrade,
if you're changing architectures
from non-multitenancy to multitenancy,
if you're coming from other clouds,
there are also certain considerations.
So now that I've mentioned all of this,
you can see how a product from the get-go
can't have all those, right?
So we started with a subset of features
and we've grown up to six releases now
over the last three and a half years that have incorporated everything that I've just mentioned.
And we can do all those things, but keep getting better.
And then there's always things that we realize that customers are using us in ways that maybe were not expected, which is great.
Because, oh, OK, cool.
Then this is something that we can actually make better or enhance.
And there's always requests for customers of what they want to do or see change in the product.
We also integrate with our team. So there's an advisor that does a pre-check for
the database and checks, okay, what are the recommendations and what you should do. So
those integrations and working with our teams across Oracle, again, take time and hence why
the products keep growing and evolving. And you're right, maybe at some point we would be able to
cover everything that there is to do, right? What we're doing now, and we've been working again in partnership with our teams at
Oracle, right, is like be the engine of other Oracle migration strategies. So there is a native
service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure called DMS that has a subset of our features and uses ZDM
under the hood, right? So again, there's always work to do. And a lot of it sometimes is go to communication
and working with customers.
But there's also a lot of like going back to a drawing board
and see how can the product be improved.
I think that there's a certain lack of attention
also given to the fact that
every time you think you've seen it all,
all it takes is talking to one more customer
where they have a use case
that you potentially hadn't considered.
And maybe it sounds ridiculous to you,
but it's ridiculous in load-bearing ways in an awful lot of these other places. Empathy becomes
such a key aspect of this that I'm somewhat surprised that more folks don't spend more time
than they do thinking about these things. Well, I think as a product manager, and this is really
important, right? You need to put yourself in the customer's shoes and you also need to use the product.
Sometimes using the product,
like so I use it like to create my own workshop
that we have, there's a platform called Live Labs
in Oracle that has like, I don't know,
like 6,000 labs that are free for you to use
and learn about our technology, right?
So in order to better the product,
I understand and then, you know,
when we're doing a new release, et cetera,
then see the key features,
like we create materials like that and we use it,
but that doesn't give us the whole scope
of how a product customer would be using it.
So for all internal migrations that we have
within Oracle products into the Oracle Cloud,
we use that and then that gives us a lot of insights.
But then going to a customer and spending time with them,
sometimes developing relationships that go more than a year
because we're talking about like big fleet migrations,
thousands of databases, you realize, oh, the scope is broader than we expect.
But it's actually really, there's a lot of satisfaction in learning from them and then
getting back to the development team or even including.
I think that's really important as well.
I think a good PM would include development sometimes in the conversation with customers
because then there's a better understanding from both sides of the aisle, and even bring them to conferences, etc., so that the actual empathy of the customer
requests and what they need, it's created.
Yeah, I think that there's also a presupposition that you can look at a company and say,
oh, you're using X technology, you must be crappy, or whatnot.
Something I've learned is that every company of a size that is remarkably
small compared to what people often think is using basically everything already. Like I'm at this
point at a company that has less than 10 employees and we already have five different clouds that we
have accounts with doing different things in different ways. This explosion of different
tools and different utilities is like it is for a reason. And it's very tricky to really, I think, appreciate that until you've walked a mile in the shoes of someone who's building things like that.
Yeah, it's interesting.
There's a whole view of product management, right?
And having this idea of building and building and building products.
But what you're doing is actually helping people with their needs.
And their needs can be really broad.
So maybe the solution is not your broad. So maybe the solution is not
your product, and maybe the solution is not your
technology. But I think a good
PM, and I think anyone in technology,
be a good person, would actually
help these users or customers
to get where they need to, even if it's
not using your technology, right?
I would agree wholeheartedly.
I really want to thank you for taking the
time to go through what it is you're up to and how you view the world. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you other than, you know, local community the R and a D instead, because of course, Twitter handles
or handles overall in social media
are hard to get.
Although I'm not as active lately on Twitter.
And I, you know, I opened an account on Blue Sky,
which is product manager.
I did get that one,
but I'm only starting now to use it, right?
So, you know, I guess those three
would be the places to.
Awesome.
And we'll of course put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Anytime. And one thing, if anyone is ever in San Francisco, just, you know, I'm more than happy to meet up. I love this city. It has changed my life tremendously. And I'm happy to show you around.
I consider myself now somebody that really, really, really, you know, cares for this place.
And I'm happy to just, you know, have a good time, stop technology or not. I also love to show you around. I consider myself now somebody that really, really, really, you know, cares for this place. I'm happy to just, you know, have a good time,
stop technology or not.
I also love to cook.
So anytime, I'm here.
I highly recommend it.
He's not just fun to hang out with.
He is an excellent cook as well.
But I don't know if there's a good way to put that in show notes.
So you'll have to take my word for it instead.
Ricardo Gonzalez, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle.
I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice.
Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice,
along with an angry, insulting comment that one day I will find a tool to migrate into a central database. I know not where.
If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same,
then you need the Duck Bill Group.
We help companies fix their AWS bill
by making it smaller and less horrifying.
The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS.
We tailor recommendations to your business,
and we get to the point.
Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.