In episode #109 of Mobycast, we started our discussion on how to build a massively scalable image hosting service. We talked about the general architecture and then dove deep on how to handle image uploads. But uploading is only half the solution. We also need to allow downloads of the images. Turns out, downloading is a totally different game. In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris finish their two-part series on building an image hosting solution. We discuss in detail how to enable downloads of files with the help of CloudFront, a global network of edge locations that makes it easy to achieve massive scale.

If you are building software apps, at some point you will likely need to build an image hosting service (let's be honest, probably more than once!). Image hosting is a core feature of many apps, and it's important to get right. We all know the best practices for building image hosting in the cloud. Start with Amazon S3 for the uploads. Then serve them up with a CDN like CloudFront. Easy, right? Well, as usual, the devil's in the details. In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris kick off a two-part series detailing how to build a massively scalable image hosting service. We share hard-won tips and tricks so you can avoid common pitfalls when building your own solution.

This is the fifth and final episode that we’re re-releasing from back when we told Chris’s personal story of starting Viathan, which was a software startup built to create one of the first internet scale databases. In this episode, we compare Viathan’s pre-cloud architecture to that of DynamoDB. They’re less different than you might expect!

Welcome to Mobycast! This is the fourth episode that we’re re-releasing from back when we told Chris’s personal story of starting Viathan, which was a software startup built to create one of the first internet scale databases. In this episode we finish our deep dive into the technical details of how AWS’s Dynamo DB works. If you’re just joining us at Mobycast, thanks for sticking with us through this five part series. By the end, you’ll be ready to join us on any of our other technical deep dives.

Welcome to Mobycast! This is the third episode that we’re re-releasing from back when we told Chris’s personal story of starting Viathan, which was a software startup built to create one of the first internet scale databases. In this episode we start to dive into the technical details of how AWS’s Dynamo DB works. If you’re just joining us at Mobycast, this will be your first taste of getting technical with us as we ease you into our library of curated, important cloud-native development topics.

Welcome to Mobycast! This is the second episode that we’re re-releasing from back when we told Chris’s personal story of starting Viathan, which was a software startup built to create one of the first internet scale databases. You’ll get to see how his work in the early 2000’s/late 90’s was instrumental to what later became the databases that we count on today. Anyway, the reason that you should listen to this is not because it’s a fun story but because we’re asking you to trust us here at Mobycast when we tell you what we think is the best way to do distributed systems and cloud-native development, and what better way to learn to trust us than to listen to how Chris got started in this whole world…

We present to you a remastered and re-released version of one of our early shows from 2018. It was one of our most popular shows of all time, and in it, Chris Hickman recounts his story of being a Microsoft employee dealing with issues of internet scaling in the late 90s to becoming one of the pioneers of NoSQL. Listen to this series to get to know Chris. These are the formative years of the guy who made Mobycast possible with his incredible depth and breadth of development experience.

Cloud lock-in is always fun to talk about. Conversations abound on Twitter, at conferences, and by the water cooler. This week we replay an early episode from June 13, 2018 to see if our opinions on cloud lock-in have changed in the past two years.  Spoiler alert: they haven't.

You can learn how to be a great software developer by listening to this podcast. Get to know Chris and Jon by listening to our personal story, and continue from there into topics ranging from serverless to Docker to networking, encryption, and purpose built databases. We cover all the concepts great web application developers are expected to know.

Back in episode #94 of Mobycast, we showed how Amazon Elastic Container Service (or ECS) makes it easy to inject sensitive data into your containers. However, ECS only injects secrets at container startup. It's up to you to ensure that the container is restarted if secrets are updated. But who wants to manually restart containers? In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris are back to provide an automated solution to this problem. We show you step-by-step how to leverage CloudWatch Events and Lambda to automatically update your container secrets. After listening, you'll be able to "automate all things". Well... at least for updating container secrets :-).

This week on Mobycast, Jon and Chris conclude their multi-part series on "database soup", where we make sense of the jumbled acronyms of consistency models. In this episode, we learn about eventual consistency and the BASE properties. Eventual consistency may sound like a beer guy meme - "I am not always consistent, but when I am, I get there eventually.". But it's no joke - eventual consistency is a key technique for scaling systems, and it's important to know what it is and when to use it. We finish up by summarizing what we have learned about ACID and BASE and knowing the tradeoffs each makes. Afterwards, you'll no longer confuse consistency models with the pH scale of your high school chemistry class.

This is part 2 of our three-part series where we make sense of the alphabet soup of acronyms for database consistency models. In this episode of Mobycast, we learn how the explosion of the Internet created new challenges for strongly consistent systems, leading to the "discovery" of the CAP theorem. The CAP theorem reminds us that as systems scale, errors will become more likely, forcing us to choose our priorities. We also learn what Chris shares in common with Eric Brewer, the creator of the CAP theorem. It's a roller coaster ride that comes to a crashing halt.

Databases are one of the fundamental building blocks for cloud-native apps. And with so many types of databases to choose from, it's important to understand their consistency models so that we can make smart choices. But with acronyms such as ACID and BASE, making sense of them can feel like swimming in a big bowl of database soup. Spoiler alert, they have nothing to do with high school chemistry class. In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris kick off a three-part series where we dive deep on this database soup. In part 1, we learn about transaction processing, the ACID acronym and say hello to strong consistency.

Technology is changing rapidly and it is a major investment to learn a new skill, technique or technology. Our knowledge gained is so hard fought that it is only natural to rely on it dearly. But it's a mistake to hold on to this knowledge for too long - you must be open to new ideas. In this episode of Mobycast, Chris shares with Jon a personal story about learning and growth. After being blindsided by relying on a familiar pattern, a valuable lesson is learned, one summed up well by author Stephen King when he implores us to "kill your darlings".

What is the future of containers? In this three-part series, we are exploring the promising technologies aiming to make our cloud-native apps more secure without giving up performance. Previously, we learned all about microVMs, taking a deep dive on the most talked about microVM - AWS Firecracker. This week on Mobycast, we finish looking at microVMs with a discussion of Kata Containers. Then we explore the world of unikernels, which promise the same benefits as microVMs but with a dramatically different approach. Oh... and somewhere along the way, Chris accidentally invents a new technology - "conternels".

Maybe you've heard some of the buzzwords everyone seems to be talking about when discussing the future of containers. Strange words like "microVMs"... "unikernels"... "sandboxes". Have you wondered what these things are and how you can use them? Or, for that matter, should you use them? In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris continue their three-part series on the future of containers. We go deep on the most talked about microVM - AWS Firecracker. We learn how Amazon uses Firecracker and its tremendous benefits. We then discuss how to use Firecracker for your own containers and get the same great results.

With cloud computing, we started with virtual machines. They allow us to virtualize an entire server, while providing strong isolation and security. Then containers came along. They allow us to virtualize just our applications, making containers faster and less resource intensive than VMs. But with these gains we lose strong isolation. What if we could have the speed and resource efficiency of containers coupled with the enhanced security and isolation of VMs? In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris kick off a three-part series on the future of containers. We dive deep on microVMs, unikernels and container sandboxes, understanding what they are, how they work, and how well they combine the best of both VM and container worlds.

In episode #93 of Mobycast, we discussed secrets management for our cloud-native applications. We learned why we need secrets management and some of the possible solutions available to us. Now that we know the "theory", it's time to put that knowledge into practice. In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris finish their two-part series on handling secrets with cloud-native apps. We show you how to easily implement secrets management for a containerized application running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (or ECS). After this episode, you'll be a pro at keeping a secret!

Applications frequently need access to sensitive data, such as database credentials, API keys, passwords and tokens. Of course, we can't just store these secrets in plain text or hard-coded into our applications. Rather, we need to securely protect this sensitive information to ensure that only those with a "need to know" basis can access it. In this episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris kick off a two-part series on handling secrets for your cloud-native applications. We discuss various approaches to secrets management, ranging from basic roll-your-own techniques to fully managed solutions. We explore some of the most popular options out there and help you decide which one is best for you.

In the first two episodes of this series, we learned how to build a VPC with public and private subnets. We did a deep dive on NAT, or network address translation, and then setup a software-only VPN for secure access to the private subnets. Now, it's time to put everything together and earn our cloud networking black belt. This week on Mobycast, Jon and Chris conclude their three-part series on how to incorporate private subnets for your cloud network. We finish by explaining step-by-step how to move an existing ECS application onto our new private subnets. Now... go build, ninja!