This Week in Enterprise Tech 534 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Louis Maresca (00:00:00):
On This Week in Enterprise Tech, we have Mr. Brian Chee, Mr. Curtis Franklin. I'm back on the show. The FCC is a hard and complex job, and I'll tell you one thing, there's a bit of controversy surrounding the role, so we've definitely gonna talk about that. Databases are challenging to manage, wouldn't be great, not to have to worry about scaling and charting. Well, today we have Nick Van Wiggeren and he's VP of Engineering with Planet Scale. And we're gonna chat databases. And by the end of the show, he just might have convinced you to jump over to manage Database as a service. You definitely should miss it. Quiet on the set
Announcer (00:00:34):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT
Louis Maresca (00:00:47):
This is TWIT This week, enterprise Tech episode 5 34. We recorded on March 10th, 2023. Never cross the shards.
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This episode of This Week in Enterprise Tech is brought to you by aci. Learning Tech is one industry where opportunities outpace growth, especially in cybersecurity. One authority of information security jobs require a cyber security certification. Maintain your competitive edge across audit IT and cybersecurity readiness. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twit And by zip recruiter, one of the biggest 2023 hiring challenges is standing out the tops talent, break through the clutter and attract the most qualified candidates for your team with ZipRecruiter matching technology, try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/twice. And by Collide, Clyde is a device trusts solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust For Okta, visit collide.com/TWiT and book a demo today.
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Welcome to This Week in Enterprise Tech, the showed that is dedicated to you, the enterprise professional, the IT pro, and that geek who just wants to know how this wall's connected. I'm your host, Lewis Mossi, your guy did this big world of the enterprise. I kick got you by myself. I need to bring in the professionals and the X experts. It started their very own senior analyst, oh sorry, principal analyst about at mia. We have to make sure we get that right. The band who eats and sleeps the enterprise. We have our very own Mr. Curtis Franklin. Curtis how's the new role, new role treating you? How you doing there?
Curtis Franklin (00:02:28):
It is, it is fine. I'm enjoying it. It is, I wish I could say it was a dramatic change, but it's not. I'm still working on the same team doing the same stuff, but I get to order new business cards. So there's that. Looking forward to getting a couple of big reports off my desk. One on cybersecurity awareness training that has been forever in the birthing. And another coming up on fundamentals of risk quantification, which is a very popular and surprisingly complicated topic in the industry right now. It's one of those things where everyone wants to know just how much risk they have in the organ their organization, and they want some way to, to pin, you know, a number on it. The problem is finding two ways of doing that that agree with one another. And so, so it's, it's fun to research. It's giving me a chance to talk to a bunch of people. And speaking of talking to people, I am still working on finalizing my schedule for the RSA conference, which is coming up in San Francisco in April. Looking forward to being out there and meeting lots of people within the industry. Always a good time to be out amongst them.
Louis Maresca (00:03:51):
Indeed it is, indeed is. Welcome back, Curtis. Well, we also have to thank our very well welcome back, our very own Mr. Brian Chee. He's busy at the Orlando Fairgrounds down nowadays. How's it going over there? Cheaper. keeping busy over there.
Brian Chee (00:04:04):
So, so it's not bad, you know, but one thing that's really fun is one of the members at our makerspace had a bunch of older surveillance cameras, in this case, IP cameras that he was willing to donate, plus a couple of the high quality raspberry pie cameras that I'm gonna go and add. We seem to have a few problems with street gangs deciding they're gonna hop the fence. So we're gonna try and see if we can take some wind out of their sails. And, you know, the other thing that I'm having fun with is tinkering. Gotta tinker. We have all kinds of really cool things happening at the makerspace. That new fiber laser is spectacular. It's a rabbit and I'm planning on etching all kinds of stuff. And one of the most useful things I saw recently is someone etching larger numbers on their wrenches. So you could actually tell a 10 millimeter from a three eights.
Louis Maresca (00:05:09):
Very nice, very nice. I started dipping mine in in that plaster dip stuff, you know, that was my only way to tell the difference between the sizes sometimes by just grabbing them. But I love the etching idea. Very cool. Well thanks. Cheaper for, for being here. We, we should definitely get started. Lots to talk about today. Lots of busy stuff in here in the enterprise. The FCC is a very hard and complex job, so running it probably is just as hard, right? Well, we're gonna talk about a bit of controversy surviving surrounding the role and the organization. We'll get into that. Wouldn't you like to not worry about scaling your backend, your database? While today we have Nick Van Wiggeren, he's VP of engineering at Planet Scale and we're gonna chat, chat about databases. That's right. And by the end of the show, he just might have convinced you to jump over to manage databases as a service.
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So you definitely should stick around lots to talk about here. But before we do, we have to jump into this week's news blips. Security appliances are usually the number one thing you think about on your network to ensure that they have the latest patches and they're configured correctly for your network perimeter. However, that's the one thing that is also the most targeted to breach the network. According to this Aris technical article, threat actors with connections to the Chinese government are infecting sonic wall appliances with malware, which actually survives even after firmware updates. Now, the device they're targeting is a well-known in the IT world. It's a Sonic Wall's secure mobile Access 100. Now people use it to grant granular access controls to remote users, provide VPN connections to organization networks, and set unique profiles to each employee. It's so prevalent that back in 2021, the device had a sophisticated hack campaign against it, uncovering a zero day.
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It looks like this device is back in the crosshairs again because security firm manian has reported that Chinese hackers have maintained a long-term position of power by running malware on unpatched sonic walls. Smes, in order for them to achieve the ability to have the hack or the malware persist even after updates, the the malware actually checks for available firmware updates every 10 seconds. When an update becomes available, the malware actually copies the archived file for backup, unzips it mounts it, and then copies the entire package of mal malicious files to it. It actually redeploys itself. <Laugh>, that's pretty cool. Cool. In a bad sense I could use to say the malware also adds a backdoor root user to the mounted file. Then the malware re ZIPPs the file. So it's ready for installation. And the main purpose of the malware appears to be stealing cryptographically hashed passwords for all logged in users. It also provides a web shell that the threat actor can use to install new malware. Now, last week, Sonic Wall published an advisory that urged SMA 100 users to upgrade to a specific version that's 10.2, 0.1 0.7 or higher. Those versions include enhancements such as file integrity monitoring and anomalous process identification. Now that would mean you either find a way to flash this device to get rid of that malware or ensure you maintain visibility into traffic and logins for this foreseeable future.
Curtis Franklin (00:08:12):
Hey, remember all those folks who love to brag that they enjoyed Linux? Because you never see any malware on the platform, you know them, they tend to hang out with all the Mac OS people. Well now they may be set to join the rest of the IT industry because hackers have begun deploying the ice fire ransomware against Lennox Enterprise Networks. In a noted shift for what was once Windows only malware, a story over at dark reading reports that ransomware actors have been targeting Linux systems in increasing numbers in recent weeks and months. This is notable not least because in comparison to Windows, Linux is more difficult to deploy ransomware particularly at scale. According to Alex Delmont, a security researcher at Sentinel One Ice Fire, which was first discovered last March, is your basic vanilla ransomware that happens to be aligned with big game hunting or bgh H ransomware families.
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What makes ransomware bgh h Well it's characterized by double extortion, targeting large enterprises using numerous persistence mechanisms and invading analysis by deleting log files. Ice fires attack flow is pretty straightforward. Once the target network is breached, the ice fire attackers steal copies of any valuable or otherwise interesting data on their targeted machines. Then comes the encryption where ice fire was once primarily used in campaigns against the healthcare education and technology sectors. Recent, recent attacks have focused around entertainment and media organizations primarily in Middle Eastern countries, say Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. And since most business Linux systems or servers, fishing isn't the most effective infe infection vector. Instead, recent ice fire attacks have exploited A C V E C V E 2022 47,986, which is a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the IBM Aspera data transfer service. This one's bad with the CVSs rating of 9.8. So why Linux in the first place since it's harder to attack? Three big reasons have popped up in conversations with analysts. First, since Lennox tends to be a server os it's a high value target. Second Lennox cine is unex exploited and highly vulnerable market. So sort of fresh for exploitation. Finally, containerization does many good things, but it also vastly expands the attack surface for exploits. The targets may have changed, but the lessons for protection remain the same. Update. Make sure your deployments aren't stupid and make sure your network-based protection is up to the task.
Brian Chee (00:11:12):
Well, this ours technical story is in the category of this is why we can't have nice things. Well, what's happening is this thousands are being scammed by AI voices mimicking loved ones in emergencies now in 2022 was stolen through thousands of imposter phone scams. AI models designed to closely simulate a person's voice are making it easier for bad actors to make loved ones and scam vulnerable people out of thousands of dollars. According to a story from the Washington Post. While quickly evolving in sophistication, some AI generated software requires just a few sentences of audio to convincingly produce speech that conveys the sound and emotional tone of the speaker's voice. While others need as little as three seconds for those targeted, which is often the elderly according to the post, it can be increasingly difficult to detect when a voice is inauthentic, even when the emergency circumstances described by scammers.
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Scammers seem implausible. Well, I for 1:00 AM looking forward to having AI tools to make my personal assistance more like Jarvis and less like Robbie the robot. But like anything nowadays, some one has to spoil it by trying to cheat us, which really fulfills that old saw. This is why we can't have nice things. Well, the really scary part is that someone could feed a monologue from twit into the system and deep fake achiever. I guess I'm just going to have to very my voice on a regular basis during the show, just like I vary my signature in middle initials to avoid Ford's signatures.
Louis Maresca (00:12:59):
<Laugh>, I think after almost 20 years of this show, I think you're outta luck there cheaper, but in a it wouldn't be an enterprise week, a leak this week, according to the Washington Posts, it was a members of the house that and their staff that were impacted. That's right, their personal information was exposed after a data breach of the Washington DC health insurance marketplace. And senators and their staff were also affected by the breach, but did not appear that data beyond their names and those of their family were exposed. Now the f b is investigating and found that they could buy sensitive personal information for the DC Health link on the dark web. According to the letter sent by house leadership to the marketplace, including names of spouses dependent children, their social security numbers and home addresses not good. Now, broker on the online crime form claimed to have records of on hundred and 70,000 DC HealthLink customers and was offering to sell the data.
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Now, if nothing else, it proves that no system is too small for hackers to target and siphon important related information, Al and in this case about our lawmakers and government representatives. And I'm truly interested to see what happens next. Seeing the recent cybersecurity agenda by this White House has just come out, I hope it's just not another slap in the wrist. Well, folks that does it for the blips. Next up we have the bites, but before we get to the bites, we do have to thank a really great sponsor of this week, enterprise Tech, and that's ACI learning now for the last decade. Our partners at IT Pro have brought you engaging and entertaining IT training to level up your career or organization. Now IT PRO is part of ACI learning. Now with IT Pro ACI learning is expanding its reach and production capabilities and it's offering you the content and learning mode you need at any stage in your development.
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One third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity certification to maintain your competitive edge across Audit IT and cybersecurity readiness is go dot aci learning.com/TWiT. That's go dot ACI learning.com/TWiT. Don't forget to use our special code TWIT 30 to get 30% off standard or premium individual IT pro membership. And we thank ACI learning for their support of this week and enterprise tech. Well folks, it's time for the bite. Now, leading the s e C is a tough, challenging job and it's open to a level of scrutiny that's not for the faint of heart. Well, according to this Aris technical role and article, the president's nominee son for the FCC open seat withdrew her nomination. Man, her reason governing this sector is so far underwater that it may be unreachable. That's right. Here's her quote. When I accepted this nomination over 16 months ago, I could not have imagined the legions of cable and media industry lobbyists.
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Their bottom page for surrogates and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets would distort my over 30 year history as a consumer advocate and to an absurd caricature of blatant lies. Yikes. The truth is, what happened next was kind of worse in my eyes. She and her family were actually exposed to attacks and threats due to this withdrawal. Now, lots of controversy and disagreement going around here, especially regarding her original nomination. In fact, she had some interesting views that weren't so popular with parties or even telecom giants out there. As she noted the telecom industry would prefer a commissioner that doesn't want to expand regulation of internet providers. Now, Comcast originally, you know, apparently lobbied against her behind the scenes, despite not publicly opposing the nomination. After two years with a 50 50 split in the Senate, Democrats now had a 51 to 49 majority, including three independents who caucus us with Democratics. Now, without matching support, someone would actually still have been approved in a 50 50 vote with the vice president providing a tiebreaker. It's unfortunate that she had to withdraw here and she would. I wanna, I wanna bring you in and I wanna bring Kurt back in here. I wanna go go to you first though, because does this mean that Comcast is now celebrating behind closed doors?
Brian Chee (00:19:39):
I would say probably every large I s P in the United States is celebrating because I don't know if anyone know, I don't know if it was just coincidence or not, but just yesterday or was it the day before Spectrum raised their rates? This is going to be a very, very common headline in, in my opinion your broadband's going to be more expensive when choice is taken away and competition is no longer present, you're going to start having people setting the rates at whatever they feel like. Now, keep in mind just yesterday I started doing a few comparisons using tools like Nextdoor and Facebook and other social media and started trolling for how much people are paying for their broadband. And just interesting enough, one person literally one mile away from me is paying almost $50 a month more for their one gig at and t Fiber than I am. And I think the big reason is the neighborhood that I'm in actually has three different choices, not one, like where he lives. So I got this bad feeling that with an f FCC forever deadlocked because of partisan politics we're probably gonna start seeing rates rise. We're going to start seeing wireless internet service providers having a much, much harder time getting started. And I think this might be the first or second nail in the coffin of community broadband, which in my mind is really, really sad.
Louis Maresca (00:21:35):
I agree. What do you think, Curtis? Is this something that just proves that this entire FCC board is, is bought and paid for by the industry?
Curtis Franklin (00:21:44):
I don't know about the whole board. You know, perhaps just part of it, but now let me give some full disclosure here. One of the slams made against this candidate was that she had worked with far left radical groups and one of the far left radical groups that was listed was the E F F Electronic Frontier Foundation. I am a member of the E F F I support what they do. In the same way that I pay dues to the A C L U, I'm a big fan of free speech. To me, the big issue in front of the fcc, the one that that gets a lot of people really unhappy, has less to do with rates and more to do with regulated behavior because how different entities are treated, whether they are treated as a common carrier, are treated as a publisher or treated as a broadcaster, matters greatly when it comes to how they can be held accountable for the content that they carry.
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And what a lot of entities right now want very much is to be able to carry lots of material and be responsible for none of it. So we're seeing this in conversations about whether, and, and it's coming from both sides of the political spectrum because on the one hand you have people saying that everyone from Meta to Google to Twitter should be responsible for the political material, the the January 6th content that was on there for the misinformation about the Covid crisis. And on the other hand, you have conservatives saying that they should not be allowed to stop any particular information going on. So you have both sides saying that they have trouble with the way it's going now. And I think that what the carriers and the services and the ISPs and everyone else really wants is certainty. But each of them wants certainty that leaves them with as little exposure to regulation and lawsuits as possible.
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And what everyone is gonna be doing is jockeying to have that fifth, that key fifth member who will keep them in the middle of whatever road we appear to be on right now. So I suspect that will there be a fifth member? Yes. will it likely be someone who has been less visible with their advocacy over the past decade? Yes. So we'll just have to see who the current administration can come up with that tries to thread the long row of needles that must be threaded in order to get this next nominee over the line.
Louis Maresca (00:25:14):
You bring up a good point. I mean, you just said obviously that the Yeah, it's a long set of needles you have to thread to get this going. I mean, talked about a two year thing going on here. You know, and again, there was a split for a long time until they finally had some majority, but then there was some votes against us, and so that in fact we needed some, the vice president to president to break the vote here. Does this just mean that even the next person, no matter who it is that they bring in, is gonna be in that same same vote that we're not gonna be able to bring them in until the end of this to the end of this president's regime? Basically?
Curtis Franklin (00:25:46):
Well, the, the math in the Senate doesn't change. The, the math in the Senate is 51 49 for the next two years. So what they have to do is come up with a nominee that they can have all of the Democrats support because the likelihood is great that they could nominate Newt Gingrich and the Republicans would vote against him just on principle of not approving a Biden nominee. But what they're going to need to do is, is have someone who can get at least 50 and probably 51 solid Democratic supporters. That's, that's going to be a non-trivial issue.
Louis Maresca (00:26:34):
So what do you think? You said cheaper, you said something interesting that I'm actually wanna dig into a little bit. You said it's the end of wisps as we know it. Why, why is that? Why, why do you feel like it's the end
Brian Chee (00:26:42):
Of that? Okay, so WIS have one thing that works against them and makes it harder. They have to cross boundaries. A wisp doesn't necessarily have the ability to be able to afford to be home to multiple upstream ISPs. Most of the time they'll have to take a fiber feed or something from, you know, a lot a big player, you know, like the at and ts or the Comcast and so forth. So the wireless internet service providers themselves tend to be much, much smaller and they for the most part don't have the ability for having things at scale. So one of the big things that we had that I heard over and over and over again at Wispa, PZA and Wisp America was how do we cooperate? How, how do we figure out a way to get upstream feeds at scale by combining our efforts?
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And it, I personally, I think it's gonna come down to how much support the smaller ISPs like WS and community broadband folks have within the fcc. So that fifth member of the board is supposed to be the person that is the tiebreaker. Personally, I think if, if I could have my wish as a lo as a lobbyist for the communications industry, is that the fifth seat? Or maybe there should be a sixth seat. I don't know. One or the other should be specifically for a consumer advocate. Gigi son was so much a consumer advocate that she managed to tee off all the big boys person. I think a permanent seat should be established that is specifically the voice for the consumer. So Gigi, I'm sorry that you got hit by all that. I can, you know, sympathize with you when I was working on trying to break the Hawaiian telephone monopoly in Hawaii for intra Lata communications a full year before the Feds did it. There were, shall we say, a few personal attacks in my direction. Heck, I was I was barred from the Hawaiian telephone building as persona non grata for almost four years. I would very much like to see consumer advocacy be a permanent part of the FCC board. And consumers definitely need a voice. And sadly, it's the voices of the big ISPs that have an almost unlimited budget. And isn't that supposed to be illegal?
Louis Maresca (00:29:56):
Right? Well said, Jibo. Well, hopefully things will clear up soon. We'll have to, we'll have to put a little magic on that. Thank you guys. Well, next up we have our guests, really exciting guests. We're gonna talk a lot about database, managed databases, a service, really fun stuff. But before we do, we do have to thank another great sponsor of this week at Enterprise Tech and Nats Zip Recruiter. Now are you hiring for your team? You know, a lot of people are hiring still, right? Despite current headlines, several industries like Hospitality, healthcare, or Heading for Hiring. Boom. No matter what your industry you're in, if you're hi, you need to hire, go to ziprecruiter.com/TWiT and try it for free cloud services that run smoothly, including deployments, availability and scale, and someone to manage it and keep things healthy. It's hard to find someone to do that well, especially at scale.
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Nick Van Wiggeren (00:31:56):
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Louis Maresca (00:31:59):
Yeah, we're excited to have you here. Now, our audience, again, she would probably told you before this show, our audience is a wide spectrum of experience. They're all chapters of their career. They love to hear people's origin stories. Can you take us through a journey through Tech and what brought you to Plan Scale?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:32:12):
Yeah, that's a great question. So my journey through Tech started in internet Relay Chat, you know, over 20 years ago at this point. Getting on the internet and first writing my first lines of code and figuring out how to put all of the pieces of the internet together with just the resources I had available online. Over time I got really interested in infrastructure and in kind of figuring out what powers the internet. So my first couple jobs, I you know, went in and just kind of, hey, I, I'd like to work at the pieces that build the cloud and I'd like to work at the pieces that build the modern infrastructure. So I've wound my way through VMs, I've wound my way through building clouds, networking, all of these kinds of things and ended at Planet Scale, which is a, you know, serverless database provider kind of backing some of the world's biggest websites. And that's just a such a great spot for me cuz it's, it's exactly what I wanted to do when I was, you know, 12 figuring out the first couple lines of code that I could write.
Louis Maresca (00:33:06):
Now you there, there's a number of, I like to, I like to talk about managed databases right up front because I think it's a really interesting databases a service. It's really interesting because I use, I use a lot of these types of things in in, in my normal work Workday, and of course a lot of my services. Now there are some manage, there's a lot, there's quite a bit of managed service databases out there, but there's some technology that Planet Scale is using that really impacts multiple facets when you're using a database. Can you tell us a little bit about the vites technology and like what makes it unique?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:33:35):
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So vites was invented at YouTube kind of before it was acquired by Google. And they were just running into some of those really common scaling issues that internet businesses did at the time. They had too much data, too many queries, and just too much to do and they couldn't scale their, you know, single MySQL instances to a certain point. So they invented the test as kind of a, a proxy layer, I call it a jet pack on top of my sql. So still built on some of that tried and true technology, but they were then able to scale their databases to hundreds of instances, thousands of instances in larger and kind of achieve the scale that was novel at the time for companies like YouTube and ended up producing this open source project that were built on top of that allows businesses to kind of reach scale that a, a normal database just, just couldn't even sniff out.
Louis Maresca (00:34:23):
You know, some of the interesting things I was reading a little about by VI test is like, obviously charting is a hard thing to do. Like in fact, some organizations they don't even know how to do it. Like, I've talked to them and said, hey, like what's the, how have you thought about sharding this and splitting the data? So yeah, have faster queries on these datas and then when you have to join it, you can, you know, eventually do that in different shards and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And they really just don't understand what I'm talking about. Like what, how does vi vites actually create shards? Does it do it automatically? Does it do it does it do it on demand? How, how does it manage that?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:34:52):
Yeah, that's a great, great question. I like to say it's a collaborative exercise. So vites kind of gives you all of the tools, the data modeling utilities, the mapping utilities for you to take your schema and your queries and figure out how to divvy them up. So it's not kind of an automatic, you know, everything just shards and splits instantly. It kind of gives you a brand new toolbox and lets you go, how do I access my data? How do I want my, how do I want my data distributed? And you can kind of then, you know, when you get your head in that world, you can go and say, all right, now I understand how this works. Now I understand how to divvy my data up and then we're good to go from there. So it's not instant, it's not automatic. And you know, we find, especially in the enterprise and with large customers, automatic generally means it doesn't work and you're gonna need to drop down to doing it yourself anyway. So we kind of cut to the chase and give you the tools to, to distribute your data.
Louis Maresca (00:35:42):
Now one thing interesting I've seen with obviously the sharding concept is the fact that sometimes it impacts performance and sometimes cross shard transactions are really hard and in fact there's, there's several protocols used to do it nowadays, but some of them impact performance due to it. What, what, what does VI test use, how does it, how does it manage all that?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:36:00):
Yeah, that's a great question. When I give people advice on how to use VI test, you know, one of the first things I tell them is try not to do cross guard transactions. You know, vi test promises. This what we say I call near linear scalability. So you go from 16 to to 32 instances, you get twice the throughput, you go, you know, kind of scale beyond there. As soon as you start to do cross guard transactions, as soon as your querys start to touch multiple machines, you lose that linear scalability, right? If you've got 32 queries sent to one machine or one query sent to 32 machines, it's kind of the same thing. And so while, you know, we support a lot of this and kind of attest is able to, to kind of make some of this work at the end of the day, this is where that collaboration or that push comes from to get that perfect balance and to get that perfect scalability. Vis gives you the tools to understand when you're kind of breaking the, the code and hitting multiple shards and things like that. And it gives you tools to kind of cobble together what you need, but the end result and the end goal is really give you the tools to separate that so you don't need to worry about kind of coordinating across yards and things like that.
Louis Maresca (00:37:03):
That's amazing. So one thing about ads a service scenarios, I mean, know you use functions as a service, applications of service, they always seem to minimize cost quite a bit. And I'm, I'm really curious, so I'm gonna give you the obligatory scenario that we usually give is a small business, 10,000 employees, they have a ton of customer data you know, inventory data, product data, that kind of thing, and they wanna move to planet scale. What's, what's kind of the initial cost obviously to migrate to them and what is, what is the cost thereafter? How do they, what's the kind of the pricing structure? Is it like ingress egress data? Is it quarrying, is it storage? How do you guys manage that?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:37:38):
Yeah, it's a great question. So we really have two pricing dimensions and much like a lot of serverless products, like you said, right? We try to charge on usage, we want you to use the product more, we want you to get your money's worth as you're using it. So we charge on data storage just like, you know, pretty much any database you put data in us, we've gotta store it, but then we charge for query read and write throughput. So instead of charging on the size of the machine, instead of charging on just, you know, the, the size box you're getting where you've gotta pick from a big dropdown, the more you use it, the more we scale it and the more you pay for it. So if you're a small business just getting started, you get the smallest instant size, you know, $29 a month, and over time you can grow all the way to $29,000 a month with the same database. Eventually you have to shard and eventually you have to kind of scale and pieces there. But the goal is just to be able to hit every step along the way and get you to where you need to be.
Louis Maresca (00:38:27):
That's a great model. I, I do wanna compare this a bit to a lot of the, the bigger companies out there, like for instance, MongoDB in their Atlas service. Like obviously it seems that planet scale abstracts away, you know, charting the compute power, how to run quarries, all that resource dedication like MongoDB obviously makes you pay for different scales and that kind of thing. How does that mean things you're optimizing the foot hood, like for instance, you know, companies like to know that things are gonna be performing all the time no matter how much data they're gonna have. And with Mongo, you technically pay for performance, you kind of pay for different tiers of suc of resources and that kind of thing. Machines, dedicated tiers, that kind of thing. How does that stand up with something like Planet Scale? Do you guys guarantee a certain level of query performance or data scale, that kind of thing?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:39:13):
Yeah, that's a great question. So we go in and on our base tiers, you know, you get a pretty small instant size, you get some dedicated resources, but not a lot. And as you scale up, eventually you reach a certain size where you probably don't want to autoscale, you probably don't want to be kind of part of the whims of what a computer thinks your query performance has to be in the last five, 10 minute period. And so as you get to a certain spot, we actually transition over to a more resource-based pricing. And those are generally businesses that are mature enough and kind of know enough about their demand and know enough about their cost to be able to say, look, Nick, at this point we're gonna need this many resources in six months we're projected to grow, you know, up to this level.
(00:39:52):
So it's not all auto scaling and it's not all perfect, you know, at a certain point what we've found is businesses want the predictability and costs, the predictability in performance and the predictability in understanding what growth looks like. So we work with them kind of as part of that whole journey. And that includes getting off of the serverless pricing similar to how a lot of businesses start on something like Lambda and then end up deploying on something where again, it's much more predictable. Maybe that comes with scale getting a little bit harder, but on the flip side, it's very predictable.
Louis Maresca (00:40:22):
Right, right. I wanna shift a little bit because I obviously one of the top of minds a lot of the things that we cover on this show. Although enterprise seems to sometimes focus on security and I know one of the biggest things that, you know, companies have a problem was when they shard and manage the access to those shards and making sure that they have the correct service principles that do it and, and then how you join that data, who has access to that data. It's like, how does, how does, how does how does Planet Scale actually manage all of this and the secure to kind of secure the backend and secure access to it? It's cuz it's a service you have to access as a service.
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:40:56):
That's a fantastic question. And you know, we spend a lot of our time making sure that we build customer trust. So it's everything from the little things. You can't connect to the database unless you're using modern tls. You don't get to generate your own passwords. We generate all of your passwords for you. So we make sure there's nothing insecure all the way over to kind of how we segregate the systems and encrypt your data and build the whole platform. It's designed from the ground up and we've taken pieces of, you know, open source projects we use like pots, but we've taken pieces of that and we've actually rewritten them ourselves to make sure that we're kind of enforcing the right boundaries and able to meet any compliance that's needed, able to meet kind of any requirement that a customer has while making sure as well that the system's flexible. So this is just woven into our dna, which is really the only way to build products. I think in 2023 and beyond. You've gotta make sure that you think of security as first and not something that someone kind of, you know, hits you with over the head six months into a a product life cycle. But you know, you, you take it, you take it into account from day one.
Louis Maresca (00:41:57):
I do wanna bring my co-host back in cuz they're chomping at the bit here. But before we do, we do have to thank another great sponsor of this week and Enterprise Tech and Matt is Collide. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures unsecured devices can't access your apps. Now Collide has some big news. If you're an Okta user, collide can get your entire fleet to a hundred percent compliance. Collide Patch is one of the major holes in zero trust architecture's device compliance. Now think about it, your identity provider only lets known devices log into apps. But just because a device is known doesn't mean it's in a secure state. In fact, plenty of the devices in your fleet plow probably shouldn't be trusted. <Laugh>, maybe they're running on out of eight OS versions or maybe they're unencrypted credentials lying around. If a device isn't compliant or isn't running the Collide agent, it can't access the organization's SaaS apps or other resources to the device.
(00:42:54):
User can't log into your company's cloud apps until they fix the problem on their end. It's that simple. Now, for example, a device will be blocked if an employee doesn't have an up-to-date browser. Now, using end user remediation helps drive your fleet to a hundred percent compliance without overwhelming your IT team. That's a key key result there. Now, without Collide IT teams have no way to solve these compliance issues or stop insecure devices from logging in. Now with Collide, you can set and enforce compliance across your entire fleet, including Mac, windows, and Linux. Collide is unique in that it makes device compliance part of the authentication process. When a user logs in with Okta collide alerts them to compliance issues and prevents unsecured devices from logging in, it's security you can feel good about because Collide puts transparency and respect for users at the center of the product. To sum it up, collide method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and most importantly a hundred percent fleet compliance. That's collide.com/twit to learn more or book a demo. That's k O L I D e.com/twit and we thank collide for their support of This Week in Enterprise Tech. Oh folks, we'll bet talking with Nick Van Wiggeren and he's VP of engineering at Planet Scale about managed databases as a service. I wanna bring my co-host back in sheer, you wanna go first?
Brian Chee (00:44:24):
Sure. So I'm big on instrumentation and one of the cute things, you know, when we start getting into, oh, we've got no code, low code, we've got this, that and the other thing, we got this widget and this as a service and so forth. But one of the things that I don't hear a lot about is how am I going to instrument this? How do I know when something's wrong? What kinds of tools, what kinds of instrumentation does planet scale provide? So I can know how my data's doing.
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:44:58):
Jen and I completely agree, you know, with managed services and, and pretty much any service you've gotta think, you know, it's still a server, even if it's serverless, there's still a process running, there's code running. And so pretty early into the product life cycle, we created something called Planet Scale Insights. And what that is is kind of a one-stop shop dashboard where you can figure out here's how my queries are performing, here's how my latency is on my queries, and things like that. And it's actually one of the areas that we're investing the most in over this whole year because the fact of the matter is that as much as we wish we could make everything magically just perform perfectly, you have to be able to give that kind of back pressure to developers and to system administrators or they're never gonna be able to get the information they know to how to make their stuff better. So this is actually, I think one of the hardest parts of running a managed service in general is figuring out what's your responsibility and what responsibility you have to give to users so that they can use your service better.
Brian Chee (00:45:52):
Okay, the world is changing, hybrid clouds are now a reality, or at least we, we hope they are. So the day of, gee, I might have a portion in a w s but another portion in Google and maybe a third portion on prem. Does plan scale provide ways of securing those InterCloud links and still reflect how it's doing in the instrumentation?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:46:24):
Absolutely. So we see a lot of people at various different stages in their cloud journey. And this is again, something that's been really fun in my role is to take really big companies and figure out what they're running on prem, what they're evaluating doing in different clouds. Are they, you know, a lot of them are using, like you said, both Amazon and Google and Azure and maybe other setups as well. And so a lot of what we end up doing is figuring out, okay, here's how we can deploy our resources into any of the cloud accounts that you want. So we actually have this deployment topology we call Planet Scale managed. We've come up with a term cloud prem for it, and the idea is that you actually bring your own cloud account and we come and we actually build a whole planet scale infrastructure in that cloud account.
(00:47:05):
Then we can do secure links between clouds, we can do secure links to your on-prem and we can actually help both lift and shift you out of the cloud, but also get a steady state kind of hybrid model running. If your application servers are still on premises or a different database is still on premises, we actually can kind of make a secure containment area, shuffle data back and forth and shuffle application information back and forth and give you the tools to either go to the cloud or continue to run partially in the cloud. And these kinds of little math operations that we do are just so much fun. It's take a piece here, take a piece here, take a piece here, and then you've got someone's production environment and, and you get to help design it with them. And that's really part of the fun of I think selling and managed services, getting to do that with customers.
Curtis Franklin (00:47:53):
Well, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, I was reading the material that that was sent over and it talked about you being a transactional database and now I have been doing this long enough. I can remember back in the day when you had the, the O L T P databases and you had the database analysis and never the twain shall meet. So tell me a little bit about what makes you a transactional database rather than just a database.
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:48:33):
Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, we do see people doing some hybrid, a little bit of both, a little bit of that. Computers have gotten faster and databases have gotten better, but realistically what we stick to is scaling out the transactional throughput of your system, right? So our job is to maximize scaling out as many rights and reads as possible, as many of those really important and consistent pieces of your, your infrastructure. We want to be that bedrock and then we want to give you the tools to get, get that to a snowflake or get that to a redshift or get that to a big query. But ultimately what we view our job as not speeding up those analytical queries. And yes, you know, people will run them ad hoc on the database and we wanna make sure they work, but what we optimize for is really that transactional throughput that someone's logging in, someone's sending money, someone's buying a product.
(00:49:21):
And that's what we think our kind of core competency is. What we set out to do is to make sure you can scale that as far as possible. And that comes with trade-offs, right? No long running queries, no long running transactions and things like that. So we're trying to really be the best in one thing and make sure that we can help you bring in whatever it is, you know, your data team is using or your other teams are using, but we wanna make sure that you know, what we're good at, we're really good at, and then we can help bring in folks who are really good at the analytics, really good at kind of some of that other things and make, again, make an ecosystem out of it so it's not just us doing everything.
Curtis Franklin (00:49:56):
Okay. So let, let's, let's ask the important question here, four years. The re one of the big reasons that mainframes hung on was because they are known to be transaction monsters. You know, if, if you just need to blast transactions mainframe's a really good way to do it. Yep. Is cloud in general and are you specifically scalable enough, fast enough so that you can legitimately compete against mainframes if a company is looking at that level of transaction requirement?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:50:39):
Yeah, fantastic question. So I'll say I'm a big fan of the mainframe. I think what's old is new in a lot of different ways and people look past a lot of that because it's not fun and, you know, it's boring. The cloud is more fun. I'm a big fan of the cloud, I'm a big fan of whatever works, but we recently benchmarked our system. We wanted to show off some fun, some fun kind of vanity metrics and you know, you can't trust a benchmark until you've independently verified that, of course. But we recently scaled our system up to a million million Q P s and many of that being transactions per second using a benchmark and we hit it at about 40 shards. But we can go to 80, we can go to one 60, we can go to three 20, we can go to six 40.
(00:51:18):
And so the beauty of the cloud really is being able to say, you don't have to buy the biggest machine. You can buy a lot of the smaller machines and you can just keep adding on and adding on and adding on. And that's really the strength I think, above mainframes is you're not buying something for a nameplate capacity rating of this many transactions. You can buy the thing at a 10th the size of that, and if your business happens to grow 10 x, you can grow into that on the cloud with incremental spend the whole way.
Curtis Franklin (00:51:44):
All right, well last question because, because we all have heard the horror stories about people who went into a mainframe lease with a certain level of, of transaction. Somebody got a little happy, went 2% over that, and suddenly they were in the next tier for the next year and got a bill for a bazillion dollars. So with the way that you do things, are you able to, to let a customer dynamically flex, that's been one of the classic strengths of the cloud. And can someone do that with you? If, if someone does have say bursty Yep. Transaction levels is is that a good situation for, for considering a solution like yours?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:52:34):
Absolutely. And like you said, huge strength of the cloud. So a great example is black Friday comes around and that's a really stressful time for a lot of our customers, right? They're scaling their systems out 10 x but for 72 hours or for 96 hours to the point where they can't keep that amount of resources. They can't buy a mainframe for just that one week of time. And so they come to us and they say, look, here's our Black Friday plan. Our traffic climbs up on this day, it lasts about this long, we expect this to be peak. And with the click of a button, they can go ahead and 10 x their resources, increase the size of each of their shards, increase their shard count, they can go through a Black Friday and ride through a black Friday, no problem. And then when that's over, they can go ahead and click the button and shut all of that infrastructure off.
(00:53:18):
And because the clouds billed by the hour, you know, yeah, it might've cost 10 times as much, but for for seven days they don't have worry about, you know, oh, we gotta get the second one in, or we gotta get that dusty mainframe plugged in. Or, you know, the, even the equivalent, right? Where you've got racks of servers that sit there for playing video games, you know nine tenths of the time, and then all of a sudden you turn 'em on for Black Friday. The cloud really enables the dynamism that I think businesses need in, in the 21st century.
Louis Maresca (00:53:46):
One thing I want to jump to really quick is the fact that obviously since it's the backend, you're storing data, like there are some restrictions, obviously, like in the eu for compliance where you store your data is very important. Yep. So like, let's say users who are accessing an application, but they are really from the eu or they are, you know, that kind of thing. How, how does planets scale help this type, handle this type of thing? Does it, is it rely on the application service to be able to tell what, what kind of instance they're accessing or how does that work?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:54:16):
Yeah, that's a lot of what it is. And that's a really good question. So this is where I think a lot of the serverless and next generation edge technologies are starting to help. I think there are double-edged sword, again, like a lot of other serverless technologies where, you know, you can scale really far, you can do a lot of things that you couldn't otherwise, but then you start to ask yourself why you're doing them. But you know, what the edge allows you to do is push your application code out to 27 60 hundreds of, of points of presence all around the world. At that point you can serve a user's request and say, great, I'm right here. I'm in this country. And with planet scale, you can also distribute that data, you know, over to different places. You can say, great, I'm gonna serve this request from just this geography. Now that's not all on planet scale, right? You've gotta code your application, you've gotta set everything up to be able to do that. But this is a great example I think, of where all of these new technologies fit together and kind of form a mesh that let you do some of these things that would've been you know, untamable 20 years ago.
Louis Maresca (00:55:14):
Well, as a related question, you mentioned obviously a lot of availability there at different regions. Now I, I've worked with, you know, lot global companies around the world, and some of them run into this issue where, you know, their data, their service might be within a, a, a I guess you could say gated region. Yep. that can't access a lot of things and they they have to go far off into several remote regions in order to access data. So things are very slow. How, how does this handle, how do you guys handle that type of thing from availability perspective?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:55:45):
Yeah. You know, that's super hard. And honestly that's the kind of thing where we're always working on getting better and better and better. We've got infrastructure deployed all around the world and you know, every continent pretty much, but Antarctica, and we're constantly having to kind of optimize and figure out how to battle the speed of light. But at the end of the day, you know, the speed of light is the speed of light. So if you've got a user or if you've got a service or a process on one side of the world, and it's gotta do something on the other side of the world, all you can do is optimize it and make sure that that light's traveling the closer, closest to the straightest path possible. So we've spent a lot of time building TLS termination at the edge and building services that can back haul traffic on the planet scale network, get them to where they need to be the fastest. But similar to what we're talking about with, you know, sharding and cross shard transactions. At the end of the day, the, the best thing you can do is distribute your data as close to the user as possible. And for us to give you the toolkit to be able to do that on the application side, on the database side, and then kind of help you build an architecture that's region aware, zone aware, or something like that.
Louis Maresca (00:56:47):
Unfortunately, time flies when you're having fun. We're running a little low on times. Thank you so much Nick, for being here. You know, we, I I do wanna maybe give you a chance to tell the folks at home where to learn more about planet Scale. I, I also want to ask what if a hobbyists wants to try it out? Is there some kind of free tier that they can try out?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:57:03):
Two really good questions. So, you know, my plug here, go to planet scale.com or just tweet at me on Twitter at Nick van Wigg while Twitter's still up. And we do have a free tier indeed. So just sign up on Planet Scale, pick out the free tier. There's, you know, no credit card required or anything like that. It's free, you know, for at least a year and just play around with it. Honestly, you get access to most of our features, some of the best in class schema management, some of the best in class kind of workflow tools, as well as a world-class database. Tell your friends, tell your coworkers about it. And honestly, all we hope is that people come see the technology and see what we're building and then go from there and and, and grow on the platform.
Louis Maresca (00:57:43):
You know, I, I'm a weakened warrior myself, so I'll definitely try that out. But I do want to ask one last question here before we close up. Obviously there's organizations they might want to, you know, start the migration process. Do they contact SP something, somebody specific at Planet Scale? Who do they, who do they reach out to?
Nick Van Wiggeren (00:57:59):
Yeah, so head to planet scale.com/contact. Actually we have a self-serve migration flow as well. That's great. So you plug your database information in wherever it is on prem or in the cloud, we can actually slurp that data right out and put it in planet scale. It's the super cool zero downtime migration. We spent a lot of time optimizing it. But if, if you've got a more complicated setup or if there's networking problems or something like that, we have a world class support team who'd be more than happy to kind of help you debug and get you onto the, the service
Louis Maresca (00:58:28):
Testing. Thanks again. Well folks, you've done it again. You've sat through another hour of the Besting Enterprise and IT podcast in the universe would definitely tune your podcast here to TWiT. I wanna thank everyone who makes this show possible, especially my fabulous co-host. Sorry there everyone. Mr. Brian Chee Sheer, what's going on for you in the coming week? Where could people find you?
Brian Chee (00:58:49):
I'm gonna catch up on my sleep.
Louis Maresca (00:58:51):
<Laugh>, you and me both buddy <laugh>
Brian Chee (00:58:54):
Actually one of the things I'm at trying to get ready for is Maker Fair Miami. Kathy and I are planning on driving down to Miami and helping out our cousins in southern Florida. That ought to be a lot of fun, especially since we haven't done a lot of exploring in Miami yet. But you know, I love hearing show ideas from our viewers. I drive the threads that I try to book based upon what the viewers are saying they want. We try sometimes I succeed, sometimes they don't. But, you know, I make a best effort to try and book the thread. So today was all about database cuz we had people say we wanna learn more about databases and what are the options. And I learned a new word today charts. Hmm, that's interesting. Of course I got started in back in the days when it was database and it was all hierarchical <laugh> and I did most of my work on card punches.
(01:00:00):
So that's showing my age there. So we want to hear your opinions, we want to hear your show ideas. I'm still on Twitter and I agree with Nick while Twitter is still there. <Laugh>, I'm A D V N E T L A B advanced net lab, which happens to be what some of my students came up with. And yes, chatroom you would not believe the variations on sheer that has been done. Some are not safe for work. My students had a lot of creativity. But we'll pass on that from, you know, on, in a public form. But you are also more than welcome to throw email at me. And my email is Che Bird spelled C h e e b e r t Twit DO tv. You're also welcome to throw email at twit twit do TV and that'll hit all the hosts. We'd love to hear from you. And we are on, we have lists supposedly have viewers on every continent. I believe we still have a download viewer at McMurdo Sound Science Station in Antarctica. So love to hear from y'all.
Louis Maresca (01:01:12):
Amazing. Thanks Chiefer for being here. Well, we also have to thank Mr. Ks Franklin. Curtis, you're our busy, busy guy. What's coming up for you in the coming week? Where could people find you?
Curtis Franklin (01:01:22):
Well, tomorrow morning, really early people can find me on the landing strip. You know, that's the place where the shuttle landed over at Cape Canaveral. Well, I, where I'll be running a 5k one that I assume has very few hills and even fewer turns. So that's how I'll start the weekend. Aside from that, I'm rebuilding a 3D printer. I'm doing lots of fun stuff, helping on the final day of the fair. And then I am writing, writing, writing. Lots of research to do and I love it when I hear from members of the TWT Riot about what they've seen, what they're curious about, what they'd like me to tell them about. They can do that on Twitter. I'm at KG four GWA on Mastodon. I'm KG four GWA at mastodon dot sdf, that's sierra delta foxtrot.org. It can follow me on LinkedIn, Curtis Franklin and Facebook. Pretty much the same thing, no matter how you choose to do it, I'd love to hear from you. And if you're going to be at a conference like say Enterprise Connected Orlando or the RSA Con conference in San Francisco, let me know. Would love to meet you in person.
Louis Maresca (01:02:42):
Thanks Curtis. Well we also have to thank you as well. That's right. You're the person who drops in each every week to listen to our show to get your enterprise. Goodness. And why don't we wanna make it easy for you to listen and catch up on your enterprise in IT News. So go to our show page right now, TWiT.tv/TWiT. There it is. There you'll find all the amazing back episodes, the show notes, the cohost information, guest information links to that we do during the show. But more importantly there, you'll next to those videos, you'll get those helpful subscribe and download links. That's right. You'll get support the show by getting your audio version, your video version of your choice. Listen on any one of your devices on or any one of your podcast applications cuz we're on all of them. And the best way to support the show to subscribe.
(01:03:22):
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(01:05:29):
So thank you guys for all your support and all your, all your fun stuff that you do for every, each and every week. Why don't you also contact me, you know, hit me up, show, show ideas topics about enterprise, things you want to talk about, maybe design ideas, that kind of thing. Twitter.Com/Liam. I post all my enterprise tidbits there. Of course, you could always hit me up on mass design. I'm luma TWiT.social, of course, I'm also Lewis Mareka on LinkedIn. I got a lot of people reaching out to me on that platform nowadays as well, obviously. Plus I'm I love having great conversations so just hit me up any way, any way you can. I wanna hear from you. And if you wanna know what I do do during my normal work week at Microsoft head up developers.microsoft.com/office. There, we post all the latest and greatest ways for you to customize your office experience.
(01:06:14):
And if you're on Office 360 5:00 AM 365 right now, if you open up Excel, there's an automate tab that is the new tab you want to play with because that is where I live day in and day out and it's a good place to be because it's lots of fun. So definitely check that out and be part of that. I wanna thank everyone who makes this show possible, especially thank you to Leo and Lisa. They continue to support This Week in Enterprise Tech each and every week and we really couldn't do the show without them. So thank you Lee and Lisa for all your support and all your support over the years. I wanna thank everyone at all the engineers and staff at twit because again, they make it possible for us to do this show. I also wanna thank Mr. Brian Chee one more time because he's not only our co-host but he's also our tireless producer.
(01:06:53):
He does all the bookings and the plannings for the show and we couldn't do the show without him. So thank you Cheever, for all your support. Of course, before we send out, we have to thank our editor Mr. Anthony today because he makes us look good after the fact because we, you know, I make quite a bit of mistakes around this show so I want him to clean them up for me. So thank you Anthony for doing all that and making us look better and shiny. So thank you. Appreciate that Anthony. Of course, we also have to thank our technical director for today. He's Mr. Aunt Pruit and he's a talented guy because he does another show called Hands-on Photography. And I'll tell you each and every week I learn something on this show. I watch it religiously and in fact I try things out almost immediately and I've gotten better. In fact, all of the lighting in my room is due to the due to that show. So definitely check that out an what's going on this week in a hands-on photography.
Ant Pruitt (01:07:38):
Oh, Mr. Lou, thank you so much sir. This week we're talking about good old AI in photography. I'm about tired of talking about it, but I had to get something off of my chest about it. Shared my little three, four minutes of a ranch, shared some benefits and shared some interesting pictures there that were AI generated, you know, that's supposed to meet. Wow, be me right there. You notice it doesn't look like me at all. That's ai. So yeah it has its place, but just check out the show TWiT.tv/and all of the discussions there. The image of my head on the top of a Whiskey Tumblr. Why is that there
Louis Maresca (01:08:22):
<Laugh>? No, we had a great discussion about AI on Twit last week. Definitely check that episode out and I'll tell you one thing, this gives me an example. You know, I do a lot of filters in Photoshop and so on and some of the AI like driven ones, they're actually really amazing cuz they can edge, detect and find the edges. And so I'm all for those. But the stuff you just showed,
Ant Pruitt (01:08:40):
Yeah, yeah, there, it's all part. It's gonna be some some hit or miss here and there. But yeah, I get into that and I will talk about some other tools in the future.
Louis Maresca (01:08:49):
Awesome. Thanks aunt. Until next time, I'm Lewis Rescue. Just reminding you, if you wanna know what's going on in the enterprise, just keep quiet.
Jonathan Bennett (01:08:58):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, bunch of game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk. You already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning assistant man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Lennox skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club twit exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to TWiT.tv/club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.
