Episode Summary

iland Cloud Technologist Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Eric Lee, Ron Singler, and Kim Delgado for a conversation on how cloud platforms can be more accessible through simplification and automation. They discuss, among other things, why single-pane-of-glass ought to be spelled P-A-I-N and why APIs have come to the rescue. You can’t nerd-knob your way out of this one!

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[04:35] Developing a “single-pain-of-glass” for an infrastructure is particularly difficult to achieve. Why is it important for customers to be able to reduce the number of interfaces they have to deal with?

Topic 2

[13:10] Does simplifying an interface always require reducing the control customers have? Which is most important?

Topic 3

[20:05] How important should a solid API be to customers and what should they be looking for to evaluate a cloud provider’s APIs?

Cloud Bites

[04:08] “Right now what’s happening is all of the different clouds are becoming different silos of expertise.” – Kim Delgado

[05:24] “There are so many integration points now compared to what there was 25 years ago.” – Eric Lee

[06:24] “We’re customizing what that pane of glass looks like for each team instead of having a “single pane of glass”” – Eric Lee

[06:47] “Things have only become more complex with every layer of abstraction that we’ve added to our infrastructure.” – Ron Singler

[08:06] “It’s definitely P-A-I-N when you’re talking about a single-pane-of-glass.” – Kim Delgado

[09:57] “That’s putting the onus on you as a customer to then kind of create that single pane of glass, which at some levels is completely unavoidable.” – Brian Knudtson

[13:59] “For any vendor, they should always work to simplify the UI…but the end user should have access, whether it’s via CLI or API or something, to all of the features.” – Ron Singler

[20:40] “You need a well-structured, well-documented API, and it needs to be able to be versionable, backwards compatible.” – Kim Delgado

[22:15] “People’s lives may be at stake in a hospital/healthcare situation…so having vendors follow API standards is at most importance to us.” – Eric Lee

[22:49] “Since we’re simplifying the UI, they can still do all their complex nerd-knobbing in the APIs.” – Ron Singler