Screaming in the Cloud
by Corey Quinn
Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.
Episodes
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AI Should Solve the Problem, Not Deflect the Customer
Corey Quinn sits down with Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect Customer , to talk about how Agentic AI is reshaping customer service, and why replacing humans isn’t necessarily the goal. They dig into the evolution of Amazon Connect Customer from a cloud-based contact center into an AI-powered...
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Open Source and the Future of Databases with German Eichberger
What happens when open source, AI, and decades of database technology collide? Corey Quinn sits down with German Eichberger, Principal AI Engineering Manager at Microsoft, to dig into DocumentDB, why it’s built on PostgreSQL, and the realities of MongoDB compatibility. They explore how Kubernetes...
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The Invisible Network Powering AWS with Matt Rehder
AWS VP of Global Networking Matt Rehder joins Corey Quinn to pull back the curtain on the massive network infrastructure behind AWS. They explore resiliency at scale, AWS’s move toward flatter networks, the advantages of building custom hardware, and why AI is making networking exciting again.…
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AI Can Do the Work, But Should It? with Adam Larsen
On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Adam Larsen, Principal Developer at Aurora Educational Technologies, to explore what technology and AI should actually look like in K-12 education. They discuss using tech to empower teachers rather than replace them, the risks...
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When AI Starts Writing the Pull Requests with Madelyn Olson
AI-generated code is no longer just producing low-quality pull requests. According to AWS Principal Engineer and Valkey core maintainer Madelyn Olson, the quality of AI-assisted contributions has improved dramatically in just the last few months. In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey...
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The Appalachian Cloud Trail: Hiking, Cloud Economics, and Finding Perspective
What happens when two cloud economists leave AWS behind and spend six days hiking 60 miles on the Appalachian Trail? Corey Quinn sits down with Caleb Hurd to share stories from the trail, including exploding sleeping pads, heroic shuttle drivers, lost phones, and the unique community that makes...
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Coding Agents, Chaos, and the Future of Dev Work with Dexter Horthy
In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Dexter Horthy, CEO and Co-founder of Human Layer, to unpack what engineers are getting wrong about AI, especially when it comes to coding agents. From the obsession with “just throwing more tokens at the problem” to the reality of building scalable AI...
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The Rise of Autonomous Ops: Inside AWS’s DevOps Agent with David Yanacek
In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to explore the next evolution of DevOps. After two decades of building systems to reduce operational pain, David shares how AWS’s new DevOps Agent is pushing automation to a whole new level, autonomously...
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Building the Backbone of AI Agents: Telemetry, Open Source, and the Future of Developer Infrastructure with Brian Douglas
AI agents are moving fast, but the infrastructure behind them is still catching up. In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Paper Compute CEO Brian “B Dougie” Douglas to explore building telemetry for AI agents, open-source infrastructure, token economics, and what…
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The Power of Saying No: Growing by Narrowing Your Focus with Corey Quinn
What happens when you stop trying to serve everyone, and start focusing on the right customers? In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Corey Quinn (yes, really) to talk about specialization, scaling service businesses, and the power of saying no. From growing a digital agency from $20M to...
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Build vs Buy: The Hidden Costs of “Just Building It” with Ahmed Bebars
Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should. In this episode, Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer at The New York Times, joins Corey Quinn to talk about real-world cloud decisions, Kubernetes complexity, and the constant trade-off between building your own solutions and buying existing…
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FinOps, AI, and the Cost of Cloud Chaos with J.R. Storment
What happens when cloud economics meets the messy reality of business, AI, and human behavior? Corey and J.R. Storment unpack why cloud cost management is less about math and more about psychology, the real difference between FinOps for AI vs. AI for FinOps, and why automation still struggles…
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Everything Is a Graph (Even Your Dad Jokes) with Roi Lipman
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, host Corey Quinn sits down with Roi Lipman, CTO and co-founder of Falco DB, to unpack the evolving role of graph databases in a world overflowing with data stores. Roi shares his journey from building RedisGraph at Redis to spinning it out into Falco DB,...
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AI, Authenticity, and the Future of Podcasting with Chris Hill
This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey sits down with Chris Hill, CEO of Humble Pod, to talk about the messy, nuanced reality of AI in media. From secretly cloning Corey’s voice for an ad using ElevenLabs (and almost getting away with it) to the growing tension between polished production and...
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Coding Agents and the Inevitable AI Bubble with Eric Anderson
Eric Anderson, partner at VC firm Scale, talks about why coding agents changed software forever and why the AI bubble can't be avoided. Eric worked on Spot Instances at AWS and data products at Google before becoming a VC. He explains how companies can still compete against Anthropic and OpenAI…
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Fixing Shadow AI and Surviving re:Invent with Chase Douglas
Chase Douglas, CEO at Archodex, talks about AI security problems and why re:Invent has become a nightmare. Chase helps companies capture every AI interaction so they don't get in trouble with compliance. Corey and Chase discuss Shadow AI, why Corey runs Claude Code in an account called…
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Building Software While Keeping Humans in Charge
Alyss Noland, who works on Cloud Dev Ecosystem at Nvidia, is back on the show to talk about building software with AI when you're not a real developer. Alyss runs a program that gives AI startups access to Nvidia GPUs and uses AI tools herself to build production software at Nvidia. Corey and…
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How Homebrew Became Mac's Package Manager with Mike McQuaid
Mike McQuaid, Project Leader of Homebrew, joins Corey Quinn to share how a package manager conceived in a London pub became essential for 10 million Mac users. Homebrew lets you install software with one command instead of downloading files and clicking through installers, maintained by just 30...
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Is It Broken Everywhere or Just for Me with Omri Sass
When your website stops working at 3 AM, you need to answer one question fast: Is it my code or is a big cloud provider having problems? Omri Sass from Datadog explains updog.ai, a tool that monitors whether major services like AWS, CloudFlare, and others are actually working. Instead of asking...
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Solving the 20-Year S3 File System Problem with Hunter Leath
Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, spent 8 years building Amazon's EFS file storage system, learning exactly why making cloud storage act like a hard drive always fails. Old programs need hard drives, but cloud storage doesn't work like hard drives—a problem that's existed for 20 years. Now Hunter's...
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Building Systems That Work Even When Everything Breaks with Ben Hartshorne
When AWS has a major outage, what actually happens behind the scenes? Ben Hartshorne, a principal engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey Quinn to discuss a recent AWS outage and how they kept customer data safe even when their systems couldn't fully work. Ben explains why building services that…
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Engineering Around Extreme S3 Scale with R. Tyler Croy
R. Tyler Croy, a principal engineer at Scribd, joins Corey Quinn to explain what happens when simple tasks cost $100,000. Checking if files are damaged? $100K. Using newer S3 tools? Way too expensive. Normal solutions don't work anymore. Tyler shares how with this much data, you can't just throw...
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Avery Pennarun on Tailscale's Evolution: From Mesh VPN to AI Security Gateway
Corey Quinn sits down with Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, for a deep dive into how the company is reinventing networking for the modern era. From finally making VPNs behave the way they should to tackling AI security with zero-click authentication, Avery shares candid insights…
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How Grokability Built a Profitable Open Source Business with Jeremy Price
Most open source companies do the same thing. They take investor money, lock their best features behind paywalls, sell the company, and disappoint everyone. Grokability did something different. Jeremy Price, VP of Technology at Grokability talks with Corey Quinn about how they built a business…
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The AI Productivity Gap with Keith Townsend
Corey Quinn reconnects with Keith Townsend, founder of The CTO Advisor, for a candid conversation about the massive gap between AI hype and enterprise reality. Keith shares why a biopharma company gave Microsoft Copilot a hard no, and why AI has genuinely 10x’d his personal productivity while...
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AI Agents, Enterprise Risk, and the Future of Recovery: Rubrik’s Vision with Dev Rishi
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Rubrik’s GM of AI, Dev Rishi, to unpack the real story behind enterprise AI adoption, the rise of agentic systems, and why most organizations are still stuck in read-only mode. Dev breaks down how Rubrik’s Agent Rewind brings...
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From Code to Cash: How André Arko Builds Better Tools and Gets Paid for Open Source
André Arko, CEO of Spinel Cooperative and longtime Bundler maintainer, joins Corey Quinn to introduce RV, a new Ruby tool that installs Ruby in one second instead of 10-40 minutes by using precompiled binaries. Inspired by Python's UV, RV aims to simplify Ruby dependency management without the...
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Cyber Resilience Beyond Prevention with Anneka Gupta
When attackers are smart enough to hit your backups, recovery becomes your best defense. Rubrik’s Chief Product Officer, Anneka Gupta, joins host Corey Quinn to break down what true cyber resilience looks like in today’s multi-cloud world. From AI-driven recovery to surviving ransomware with your...
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Cloud Repatriation: Because Conspiracy Theories Are Cheaper with Deana Solis
Deana Solis, 2022 FinOps Foundation Evangelist of the Year, joins Corey Quinn to discuss her winding career path from electrical engineering to healthcare IT to FinOps. She shares why certifications are "largely performative," warns that AI can turn your AWS bill into "a telephone number," and...
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Five Slot Machines at Once: Chris Weichel on the Future of Software Development
On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey welcomes back Chris Weichel, CTO of Ona (formerly Gitpod). Chris explains the rebrand and why Ona is building for a future where coding agents, not just humans, write software. They discuss what changes when agents spin up environments, why...
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From Aurora to PlanetScale: Intercom’s Database Evolution with Brian Scanlan
Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, the company building Fin.ai, joins Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Intercom’s move from AWS Aurora to PlanetScale’s managed Vitess after years of scaling challenges with their Ruby on Rails monolith. He explains how 13 Aurora...
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Conversations at the Intersection of AI and Code with Harjot Gill
AI is rewriting the rules of code review and CodeRabbit is leading the charge. In this featured episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Harjot Gill shares with Corey Quinn how his team built the most-installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab, nailed positive unit economics, and turned code review into a...
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The Transformation Trap: Why Software Modernization Is Harder Than It Looks
In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Jonathan Schneider, CEO of Moderne and author on Java microservices and automated code remediation. They explore why upgrading legacy systems is so hard, Schneider’s journey from Netflix to building large-scale code transformation...
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AI's Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You
On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and creator of LLM CLI about AI’s realities versus the hype. They dive into Simon’s “lethal trifecta” of AI security risks, his prediction of a major breach within six months, and real-world use...
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Betting on AI: The Delusion Driving Big Tech
In this deep-dive episode, Corey Quinn and Ed Zitron break down the complex and often murky world of AI and the tech giants fueling today’s rapid innovation. From Nvidia’s soaring valuations to OpenAI’s shaky finances and Microsoft’s high-stakes gambles, they reveal the cracks hidden beneath all...
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Reliable Software by Default with Jeremy Edberg
Reliable software shouldn't be an accident, but for most developers it is. Jeremy Edberg, CEO of DBOS and the guy who scaled Reddit and Netflix, joins Corey Quinn to talk about his wild idea of saving your entire app into a database so it can never really break. They chat about Jeremy's "build…
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See Why GenAI Workloads Are Breaking Observability with Wayne Segar
What happens when you try to monitor something fundamentally unpredictable? In this featured guest episode, Wayne Segar from Dynatrace joins Corey Quinn to tackle the messy reality of observing AI workloads in enterprise environments. They explore why traditional monitoring breaks down with...
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Presenting at re:Invent with Matt Berk and Bowen Wang
How do you wrangle the chaos of AWS cost tools and live presentations? In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by AWS’s Bowen Wang and Matt Berk to break down their re:Invent talk and everything that almost went off the rails. From surprise tsunami alerts to last-minute...
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The Latest State of IaC with Ido Neeman
What’s going on with Infrastructure as Code? On this episode, Corey is joined by Firefly CEO and Co-Founder Ido Neeman to discuss the findings of the State of IaC 2025 report. Throughout their chat, Corey and Ido discuss the evolution of IaC adoption in enterprises, the challenges of managing...
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Opening the Managed NAT Gateway with Malith Rajapakse
How does one manage to simplify the complexities of the NAT Gateway? In this episode of "Screaming in the Cloud," Corey Quinn interviews Malith Rajapakse, a DevOps engineer who has recently received acclaim for his blog post discussing the Managed NAT Gateway. Where AWS lacks in its…
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The Latest on Microsoft Security with Ann Johnson
Microsoft has its fingers in a lot of pots, but just how secure are said pots? On this episode, Corey is joined by Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President and Deputy CISO of Microsoft's Customer Security Management Office. Ann talks about her 40-year professional journey and how it's culminated in...
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Finding Engineers with Empathy with Lili Rogowsky
If you believed, they put a data center on the moon. No, for real, they did, and it’s partially thanks to Lili Rogowsky, partner at Atypical Ventures. Lili joins Corey to discuss her unconventional leap from law to venture capital. Although she made a sharp turn career-wise, Lili remains grounded...
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Making Dropping and Sharing Easy with Timo Josten
Dropping and sharing files should be easy. What a novel idea. On this episode, Corey speaks with Timo Josten, the sole developer behind Dropshare. We bring up the fact that he’s the only guy working on it because the tool is quite impressive! Corey loves it and so does an entire community of…
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“Just in Case” vs. “Just in Time” with Aditya Bhargava
How you learn is important. Corey Quinn is joined by Aditya Bhargava, a Staff Software Engineer at Etsy and the author of Grokking Algorithms. They talk about the nuances of technical learning and the contrasting philosophies of "just in time" versus "just in case" learning. In this episode…
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The Current State of Cloud Security with Crystal Morin
Sysdig’s 2025 Cloud-Native and Security Usage Report is hot off the presses, and Corey has questions. On this episode, he’s joined by Crystal Morin, a Cybersecurity Strategist at Sysdig, to break down the trends of the past year. They discuss Sysdig’s approach to detecting and responding to...
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The Difference Between Marketing and BS with Jonathan Cowperthwait
What’s the difference between marketing and BS? On this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Jonathan Cowperthwait, Duckbill’s brand-new Head of Marketing. Jonathan's career path is a bit unconventional. After all, not everyone can say their professional journey was influenced by The West Wing. Even...
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Kicking Off a Tech Career as a Preteen with Alex Zenla
What were you doing at the age of 12? We’d wager to bet you weren’t getting invited to Google I/O. On this episode, Corey chats with Alex Zenla, the founder and CTO of Edera. Only in her mid-20s, Alex already has more than a decade’s worth of professional experience working in the tech industry....
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S3 and the Evolution of Storage with Andy Warfield
Andy Warfield joins Corey in this episode to discuss the evolution of storage technology at Amazon. This includes the evolution of S3 from archival storage to supporting modern AI and analytics. As Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, Andy is able to explain performance-enhancing...
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Evolving, Adapting, and Staying Prepared with Brian Weber
Ever wondered how Corey got to where he is today? You have Brian Weber to partially thank for that. On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey catches up with his old friend and mentor to talk about the ever-evolving world of tech. Brian’s been around the block a time or two having done...
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Replay- A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette
On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we look back at our conversation with Amy Negrette. Before she joined DigitalOcean Senior Development Advocate, she was a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. Prior to that, Amy worked as a cloud architect at Trek10, Inc., a cloud software engineer lead at...
About this show
Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.
Hosted by
Corey Quinn
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