Roaring Elephant

This episode, we go deep into everything data related in the public cloud, specifically the Microsoft Azure cloud. Fortunately we don't have to do this on our own since we're joined by Richard Nuckolls, author of the book "Azure Data Engineering", published by Manning publications under their MEAP program. Free eBook raffle Manning Publication has been kind enough to give us a couple of download codes for a free eBook version of "Azure Data Engineering" As always, our Patreons get a first chance to get their hands on one of the codes. If you are a Roaring V.I.P. (or higher), you can head over to our Patreon Page now where you will find a  posts containing all the information required. If you become a Patreon now, you immediately get access tot that post!

This week we tackle some "software is used by the military" controversy, we have a light discussion on Quantum Computing and marvel in the apparent absence of common sense when it comes to putting information on public services. As the final comment on LinkedIn says:"SkyNet is pleased with your progress." When something is open source, even though everybody hopes it will only be used for "good", these moral and ethical questions are very deep and complicated... Let's kill it before it spreads! Here's me thinking the world is trying their utmost to make quantum computing "a thing" and these people are already trying to break it! Who needs a password manager if you have GitHub? A good process and good governance of what you put on GitHub, or any other public service for that matter, are not a luxury, they're a necessity! Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you would like us to cover

We're joined by Kyle Davis, head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs to discuss the ins and outs of Redis. It's the the in-memory data store that everybody probably uses, whether you know it or not and Kyle does a great job on discussing the pros and cons of deploying Redis in the many use cases it can add tremendous value. This is the final part of our interview with Kyle. Redis Microservices for Dummies Make sure to check out the free "Redis Microservices for Dummies" e-book by Kyle Davis with Loris Cro on the Redis Labs website! Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you would like us to cover.

Today we discuss the needs of keeping your software up to date and how A.I. was able to recreate the game of Pac-Man. We finish off with the a look at the new enterprise GPU announcement from NVidia. Who needs enemies with friends like these? And we do not mean the good folks behind HaveIBeenPwned here but rather the people that install good software and then never look at upgrading it when vulnerabilities are patched! Now the A.I. is also making them? A bit of fun looking at how an A.I. recreated the game of Pac-Man, courtesy of NVidia. We also mentioned another YouTube video demonstrating how an adversarial A.I.teaches itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-8nXKmJMmI The more things change, the more they stay the same... It looks like we're on the next cycle of the distribute->consolidate-> distribute->consolidate merry-go-round where NVidia is going back to it's Silicon Graphics roots and decided to base their new Ampere product on the principle of combining many "s

We're joined by Kyle Davis, head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs to discuss the ins and outs of Redis. It's the the in-memory data store that everybody probably uses, whether you know it or not and Kyle does a great job on discussing the pros and cons of deploying Redis in the many use cases it can add tremendous value. This is the first part of the interview with Kyle. Redis Microservices for Dummies Make sure to check out the free "Redis Microservices for Dummies" e-book by Kyle Davis with Loris Cro on the Redis Labs website! Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you would like us to cover.

This week we first discus the importance of good documentation using an article that actually did not follow it's own good advice. Next up is a discussion around "Big Irons" IBM and HPE having seen the cloud-first light. Documentation! Documentation! Documentation! Just use your imagination to add the sweaty overweight bald gentleman, will you? Cloud: the miracle cure! For years, we've been telling everyone willing to listen that cloud is not a "solution". It is a tool you can use for good, or for bad, but in and of itself it does not have any inherent 'miracle juice'. Big Iron organizations IBM and HPE however seem to think that cloud will save them from failing business practices... Maybe they should start listening to the Roaring Elephant... Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you would like us to cover.

We are joined by John T. Wolohan, writer of the Large Datasets with Python book published by Manning Publications to talk about the business impact of living the Big Data life and how Python has become the programming language darling of Big data programmers and Data Scientist alike. Free eBook raffle Manning Publication has been kind enough to give us a couple of download codes for a free eBook version of “Mastering Large Datasets with Python“. As always, our Patreons get a first chance to get their hands on one of the codes. If you are a Roaring V.I.P. (or higher), you can head over to our Patreon Page now where you will find a  posts containing all the information required. If you become a Patreon now, you immediately get access tot that post!

In this news inspired news episode, we talk about A.I's filing for patents, Framework SDKs causing major software to crash on mobiles and how the army is teaching the world how not to overspend! Enjoy! And so the revolution starts... Of course it's rather obvious that today, having patents filled in an A.I.'s name would not be logical, practical or simply sane. However, a couple of inventors decided to take international patent law to the test and tried to do just that. It took a while, but courts, quite rightly so, rejected the applications. It does however open up an interesting discussion on who own what whn we, mere mortals, don't really understand how an A.I. neural network comes to it's conclusions... What did I tell you about accepting candy from strangers? Using frameworks and templates are the way most software is written today but in that lies the danger of dependency on unknown and therefore unchecked sources of code. Where in theory, one would expect all softw

Following on from episode 189 where we looked at all things pronounced "dead", we now go in search of all things that will make sure the future is bright and cheerful. Most confusingly, most things pronounced dead also seem to be the future? Along the way, we discuss the Open Source mentality and all things Machine Learning & A.I. Privacy and something called "converged security" round out the episode. Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you would like us to cover.

Today we talk about the dangers of relying on clod services, how technology is failing us in these items of crisis and how the new world of social distancing is shaping the future for tech conferences. Cloud/SaaS for the win! :s The world creates more and more data and simultaneously relies more and more on rather ephemeral cloud based storage and services. One of the consequences that is becoming more and more apparent is that we are no longer in control of our data and while sometimes, there is no material investment, sometimes there is and it can be significant... How can we change and adapt to cope with this brave new reality? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/10/yahoo-deleted-all-my-emails-and-theres-nothing-i-can-do-about-it In the words of Boy George: Popularity breeds contempt! We've tried to steer clear of the pandemic that is affecting everybody's life but alas, as we turn towards technology to make the new reality work for us, it would seem that

Maybe it's the dark days we live in, maybe it's just us being us... But everywhere we looked, we found somebody telling us somethings as dead or dying... Speaking about technology, of course! We are a tech podcast after all! Anyway, we decided to dive deep into the gloom and doom on the internet and see what has been pronounced deceased and how we felt about that. Don't let this epoisode get you down though! The title is definitely a hint for things to come! :D We found a lot (and we do mean a lot) of content on the internet about hings "being dead" so we decided to group things into topics and we ended up with about four of them. To start with, we tackle the end or privacy, Followed by the demise of the internet and open source. next we discuss the obituary for the startup and we end with a fond farewell and remembrance of boredom: we knew it well... Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you wou

Artificial Intelligence will save us from all that ails us! The Big Cloud Providers should pay all the bills! Old stuff is old so you really have to buy news stuff now! Really! Really? When preparing for this weeks episode, we felt a real dissatisfaction with the quality of "the news" so we've selected a handful of articles and try to elevate them to a semblance of serviceability. A good Title, a good article does not make... We take our first shot at his article which does posit a valid point in the title, but then immediately devolves into a bunch of hype words and wishful thinking. In our commentary, we try to add a semblance of intelligence tot he article. Well... at least as far as we are able to, obviously. But in all seriousness, AI, ML, Cloud or whatever buzzword that is on today's page of the "learn a new word a day" calendar, will NOT save you: tools can help, but people always make the real difference! https://www.techradar.com/news/becoming-technology-led-not-just-techn

Agile Development is quite popular in the world of software development, but the concepts are applicable to a much broader business environment. Very often, however, the actual implementation of these rather excellent concepts are plagued with faulty expectations and simply not knowing what you are trying to do. Find out how you can benefit, both as an organization and personally, when doing Agile "right" in this two part interview with Caroline from Estelia. Estelia Find out more about Agile Coaching and reach out to Caroline at http://estelia.uk The Agile Manifesto Find more information about the Agile Manifesto at https://agilemanifesto.org/ The Agile Onion During the interview, Caroline mentioned the Agile Onion. There are a number of places on the internet where you can find more information and here is one: https://www.adventureswithagile.com/2016/08/10/what-is-agile/ Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions,

To counter the current horrible news around the world, we turned to The Register as today's Guest Publication and tried to find a couple of articles that have a more positive tone. Sadly, even at The Register, things are looking bad for NASA, GitHub and even the British military are looking for help... from Facebook? Weird that the concept of gravity would be a stranger at NASA... large amounts of data come with a lot of gravity. Data gravity, that is. At NASA, this was apparently overlooked for a new project where hundreds of petabytes of data are stored on AWS and made available for download by the public. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/19/nasa_cloud_data_migration_mess/ This is why the overentitled humans cannot have anything nice... Open source is good. Open source is great. Everything should be open source! Unfortunately, due to everyday economics, people still want to get paid. So even companies like GitHub that work within the open source environment need to b

Agile Development is quite popular in the world of software development, but the concepts are applicable to a much broader business environment. Very often, however, the actual implementation of these rather excellent concepts are plagued with faulty expectations and simply not knowing what you are trying to do. Find out how you can benefit, both as an organization and personally, when doing Agile "right" in this two part interview with Caroline from Estelia. Estelia Find out more about Agile Coaching and reach out to Caroline at http://estelia.uk The Agile Manifesto Find more information about the Agile Manifesto at https://agilemanifesto.org/ The Agile Onion During the interview, Caroline mentioned the Agile Onion. There are a number of places on the internet where you can find more information and here is one: https://www.adventureswithagile.com/2016/08/10/what-is-agile/ Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions,

A Law&Order themed news episode this week where we look at a collection of articles about the many legal implications that come with the ever increasing usage of machine learning and neural networks in the worlds courts. We start with the first traces of "Minority Report" PreCrime, follow on to privacy rights of convicted people and finish with the realities of A.I. based facial recognition. "We can't risk peoples' lives on automated apps that save money." Driven by a shortage of human resources, machine learning and artificial intelligence are slowly infiltrating the court system. From our doubts about speech-to-text systems causing problem with future decision reversals to our reservation regarding the accuracy of Neural Network "Recommendation systems" playing a role in deciding the measures of penalty for convicted wrong-doers.. We're definitely not convinced that this is the ideal way forward. On the other hand, us humans also do not have a squeaky clean track record when it come

In this episode we have an in depth discussion on Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin, VP Developer Relations at DataStax. We had a great conversation with Patrick about topics ranging from basic NoSql topics to more in depth applicability of Apache Cassandra. Apache Cassandra really is one of the most used NoSql solutions out there and this information should really be useful for anybody working in Big Technology! Apache Cassandra More information on Apache Cassandra can be found on the Apache Cassandra website and on the website of DataStax. DataStax Accelerate Meet the creators of Apache Cassandra at a DataStax Accelerate event near you. They will be in Dan Diego starting May 11th and in London from June 2nd. We do have discount codes for our listeners that are want to atend these events. Use the promo code ELEPHANT20 for a 20% discount on the ticket price! Unfortunately, we've been informed that these DataStax Accelerate events have been cancelled due to Covid-19.

It has been a little while, but here is a regular Roaring News episode where we discuss three articles. First off is an Ozone benchmark followed by an A.I. directed dungeon crawl and we end with a bit of an ethical discussion about some things that scientists get up to these days.... Size matters, but we expected more... This Cloudera blog with benchmark information about the still in pre-beta Apache Ozone felt rather underwhelming. No big speed increase, quite a bit of slowdown on not so large data-sets. Having only limited details on the resuolts also does not inspire a lot of trust nor engender much enthusiasms. Of course, being pre-beta, there is still a way to go, but this projhect has been in development a for quite a while now... Does it still make sese in an age of cloud computing? The monster in the corner uses it's tensorflow model to confuse you... Text based adventure games are nothing new or that interesting, except when the story itself is "live generated" by an A.I.

Verizon has published their "Data Breach Investigations Report" for some time now and with the news of data leaks, ransomware attacks and more of that kind of horror dominating much of the technology conversation, we gratefully borrow this report to dedicate a full episode on this subject. As ever, we never shy away from deviating form the subject a little (or a lot) but this time we did try to keep close to the subject matter. If you're in any way connected to cyber security, and honestly, everybody in the tech world should be, you owe it to yourself to download the DBIR or, even better, listen to this episode! You can download the full report, or an executive summary directly from the Verizon website. Here direct links to the DBIR pdf and executive summary. And kudos to Verizon for not putting this document behind a "leave you email here" or other form of "paywall"! Just click the "view only" button if you prefer not to share your details! Please use the Contact Form on

Not a regular news episode this time. Instead, we are starting our KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Amsterdam coverage and have co-chairs Vicki Cheung and Constance Caramanolis on as guest to tell us all about these conferences. If you've never attended one of these, this discussion will give a good idea on what to expect and for seasoned attendees, there is a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how these events take form. Get Your Ticket here! What is definitely news worthy though is that the Roaring Elephant is giving a way a free ticket to the upcoming conference in Amsterdam next month. make sure to listen to the episode to find out how to get a chance at winning this ticket! Please use the Contact Form on this blog or our twitter feed to send us your questions, or to suggest future episode topics you would like us to cover.