One of my goals for 2019 was to launch a new podcast. That process has officially started. The podcast is going to be called Day Two Cloud. I sent a tweet last week about the podcast to see if anyone would be interested in being a guest. The reaction was overwhelming. I was hoping to get two or three people to be guests. Instead I now have 14 interviews booked, and more people who are interested. I thought I would take to time to lay out what the podcast is meant to be, along with answers to FAQs that I have received from potential guests and listeners.
The Day Two Podcast is intended to explore topics related to real world cloud deployments. We’ve all been told how magically delicious the cloud is. It is all bacon, rainbows, and unicorns. The buzzword salad is hyperbolic and overwrought:
The reality could not possibly live up to the marketing hype. And it doesn’t. Now bear in mind, I’m not crapping on the public cloud. It has brought some significant advances and helped me forge another chapter in my career. At the same time, it has given me more than my fair share of indigestion. [One cannot live on bacon and unicorns alone.] So I thought it would be great to sit down with some folks who have done real world deployments, who have felt the elation of success and the scourge of failure, and have a frank discussion of what worked, what didn’t, and what some lesson learned were. There are many topics I want to delve into including:
That’s just the first dozen I came up with. Each of those topics has the potential to be multiple shows, and broken out into more fine grained topics. There’s a lot of meat there, and I am starving!
Because the show is meant to reflect the reality of cloud deployments and not just the hype, I would like the guests primarily to be practitioners and not vendors. That’s not to say that vendors can’t tell a compelling story, it’s just that they are beholden to their employer. And while they won’t outright lie, they may sugarcoat or soften the edges on topics where their solution runs into some trouble.
I also want people to talk about their failures as well as successes. A story where you deployed a massively complex application across three different public cloud providers without a single hiccup is okay. But it isn’t really educational, it’s more like humble-bragging. I think listeners will learn a lot more from failure than success. It also makes for a better story telling arc. We all love the hero’s journey. A big part of that journey is the initial failure and learning, where our protagonist has a major setback that they now need to overcome. How they overcome and save the world is the truly interesting part.
I want to know how you saved the world despite insurmountable odds.
If there are no setbacks. If everything goes perfectly. If you never fail. You might just be living in a marketing slick. And those are NOT compelling stories.
The format of the podcast will be me interviewing one or more guests about a particular topic. Right now I am sticking with a single guest, but I am definitely considering multiple guests, or a round table format for special episodes. The run time will be around 30-40 minutes. That seems to be the ideal length, although I welcome feedback about that as well.
I plan to publish it on a fortnightly basis. That means every two weeks. I would say bi-weekly, but that term is ambiguous. The cadence may change to a weekly podcast over time, but I didn’t want to commit to such an aggressive schedule out of the gate. I already run a weekly podcast, so I know how much work is involved. On the other hand, based on the number of people who have already raised their hand to be a guest, I think I could easily fill 52 slots in a year. As you can see, I am still very much on the fence about this.
Right now? You can’t. I have only recorded one interview and I still need to edit it. I want to have at least five episodes ready before this thing goes live. Once publishing starts, I will make sure to update this post and publish it all over social media. If you’re really worried about missing out, send me a DM on Twitter. I will personally message you when the first episode drops.
I am always going to be looking for new guests and topics. If you think you’ve got a great story about Day Two Cloud, let me know! You can reach me on Twitter or hit me up on email. All my contact details are on the About Me page.
I am super excited to get this project moving. More details will follow in the next couple weeks. Until then, may the sun shine brightly on your cloud and may Day Two be merry and bright.
UPDATE: You can now get the episodes from the Packet Pushers Community Feed. If you are already subscribe to the Packet Pushers Full Feed, then you will see the episodes appear auto-magically. Eventually, the podcast will graduate from the Community Feed to its own separate feed, and I will join the ranks of an official Packet Pushers podcast.
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