Oct 18, 2021
Episode 24: From Disney to AWS with Justin Garrison
Sponsored by Reblaze, creators of Curiefense
Panelists
Justin Dorfman
Guest
Justin Garrison
Show Notes
Hello and welcome to Committing to Cloud Native Podcast! It’s the podcast sponsored by Reblaze where we talk about the confluence of Cloud Native technology and Open Source. Today, our guest is Justin Garrison, who is a Developer Advocate at Amazon. He also worked at Disney Animation and Disney Streaming Services, and we found out what he did there before going to Amazon. Justin created bashScheduler, and he tells us why he said, “This is a really bad idea!” We learn more about his book, Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment, a blog post he wrote about “The Economics of Writing a Technical Book,” a talk he did for DevOpsDays Portland 2021 called TikTalk, and his cool “manpage” resume. Also, he shares some insight on how he sees recognition as something we could really bring into the software industry. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out so much more!
[00:01:18 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=78)] Before Amazon, our guest, Justin, worked at Disney and he fills us in on what he did there and what he does now.
[00:04:36 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=276)] Justin tells us more about his book, Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment.
[00:08:46 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=526)] What’s going on with remote conferences and talks?
[00:11:17 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=677)] Find out more about a talk Justin recorded for DevOpsDays Portland 2021 called TikTalk. He also tells us if there is an open source community on TikTok.
[00:14:27 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=867)] Justin created bashScheduler and we find out what it does and why he said, “This is a really bad idea!”
[00:20:50 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=1250)] How did Justin get a Linux.com email address?
[00:21:43 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=1303)] Justin Dorfman is impressed with Justin’s man-page resume and he fills us in on the details and some tips on doing a resume.
[00:24:26 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=1466)] Justin mentions a brag document that he used by Julia Evans and her website called Wizard Zines.
[00:26:25 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=1585)] Will Justin write a follow up book to the Cloud Native Infrastructure?
[00:29:12 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=1752)] Justin tells us about a blog post he wrote three years ago called, “The Economics of Writing a Technical Book.”
[00:30:43 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=1843)] When Justin was at Disney, he got a movie credit for working on Zootopia which won an Oscar, and he talks about recognition being something he could see bringing into the software industry. He also shares something interesting about movie credits and recognition.
[00:34:33 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=2073)] The guys chat about how CNCF has done a great job about having the “Chop Wood Carry Water” Awards at KubeCon and the people behind the scene that have such a huge impact in the foundation.
[00:36:46 (https://podcast.curiefense.io/24?t=2206)] All Things Open 2021 is coming up and Justin will be giving a talk called, “Internet Scale, Open Source with Kubernetes,” that you should check out.
Links
Curiefense (https://www.curiefense.io/)
Justin Garrison Twitter (https://twitter.com/rothgar)
Justin Garrison Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/justingarrison/)
Justin Garrison Website (https://www.justingarrison.com/)
Justin Garrison TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@justinleegarrison)
Infrastructure for Entertainment-Justin Garrison (YouTube) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtedIghTPzI)
DevOpsDays Portland 2021- Justin Garrison- Ignite- TikTalk (YouTube) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQJYlZUhBt8)
Cloud Native Infrastructure: Patterns for Scalable Infrastructure and Applications in a Dynamic Environment by Justin Garrison (https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Native-Infrastructure-Applications-Environment/dp/1491984309)
The Economics of Writing a Technical Book by Justin Garrison (Medium) (https://rothgar.medium.com/the-economics-of-writing-a-technical-book-689d0c12fe39)
bashScheduler-GitHub (https://github.com/rothgar/bashScheduler)
Committing to Cloud Native Podcast-Episode 22-Thoughts on Bash Becoming Interplanetary and More with Brian J. Fox (https://podcast.curiefense.io/22)
Justin Garrison - man-page resume (https://www.justingarrison.com/resume.html)
Wizard Zines (https://wizardzines.com/)
Get your work recognized: write a brag document by Julia Evans (https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/)
All Things Open 2021 (https://2021.allthingsopen.org/)
Credits
Executive Produced by Tzury Bar Yochay (https://twitter.com/tzury)
Produced by Justin Dorfman (https://www.justindorfman.com/)
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Transcript by Layten Pryce (https://www.fiverr.com/misstranscript)
Transcript
[00:02] Justin Garrison: It's slightly different than infrastructure is code environment where you have a repo of YAML files or something. Whenever you change them, it pushes out and it says, okay, now I'm going to make the world look like that. But this infrastructure of software has a tighter loop. It has more consistency to say, hey, if anything changes, right now, I'm going to revert that change, I'm going to make sure that the world concept looks like this with running software, and not just a repository full of code. That really was like the key thing that we came out of cloud native infrastructure. We saw that pattern over and over again, at successful companies. Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, like all these companies are focusing on how do we run our infrastructure, not by people, always reverting changes, but software doing that, and Kubernetes was, again, the controllers pattern was kind of the Northstar for us to say like, this is how it's done.
[00:52] Announcer: Hello, and welcome to committing to cloud native, the podcast where we talk about the interface between open source and cloud native. We're super excited about our guest today. I really hope you enjoy this conversation.
[01:07] Justin: Hey, everyone, I'm here with Justin Garrison. He's a developer advocate at Amazon. He lives in Los Angeles like me, we share a first name. Hey, Justin, how are you doing?
[01:16] Justin Garrison: I'm doing just fine, Justin.
[01:18] Justin: Awesome. Before Amazon, you were at Disney, what's under the hood there. You work on Disney plus talk about this.
[01:26] Justin Garrison: I was at Disney animation for four and a half years doing infrastructure for the future animated films, working on render farm artists, workstations, internal servers, which is a great eye opening experience. I learned a lot of deep Linux technology and kind of how to run things at scale, especially on prem. But we're also using multiple different services and that was really when containers were starting to come around. I started focusing more and more on how that can enable developers to deploy things on prem or in the cloud. It was really impressive for me just to be able to work in that environment.
[02:00] Then I moved over to Disney streaming services, which created Disney plus ESPN plus a lot of different smaller streaming services in there. I write infrastructure for them. Behind the scenes of Disney plus as Amazon. It's a lot of Amazon, I really started learning a lot more about how to run services in Amazon at scale, and how to do things with native services. My team was specifically in charge of the centralized container infrastructure we had. With the containers that we were running in Amazon, what does that look like? How did we enable developers to deploy in simple ways, so there's actually quite a few different…