Prasanna and Curtis wax philisophical at the end of 2020, and try to predict what they think will happen next year. We look forward to the end of 2020 (don’t we all?) and look with a positive outlook to 2021. We talk about the vaccine, and what it’s going to be like getting back to work, and whether or not there will be a new normal there that’s not like what it was. We talk about SaaS products and their prevalence, as well as the emergence of a number of backup products based on Kubernetes. 2020 has been quite the year; let’s hope 2021 is better.

Here is the FTC page I referenced in one of the editor’s notes: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/predatory-or-below-cost

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

Fathom Analytics (https://www.usefathom.com) is a privacy-first analytics engine, and they were attacked in November 2020 via a very big DDOS attack that threatened their core business. Jack Ellis, co-founder of Fathom Analytics, is a developer and first used the developer mindset to address this threat. He quickly realized he was out of his depth and decided to call for help. The AWS Shield Advanced team came to the rescue and helped them shut down the attack, and helped to stop additional attacks that were still on the horizon.

Jack wrote about his experiences in the blog post “Someone attacked our company,” and its URL is below. Now he shares his experience with us. What’s it like to be attacke by an unknown assailant bent on doing your company harm – and to not be sure how to stop it? Join us on this episode to find out!

Someone Attacked Our Company: https://usefathom.com/blog/ddos-attack

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

We get a closer look at the eye of the storm. A few episodes ago, we had an anonymous guest we called Harry Potter, who told us what it was like to manage a DR remotely. This week we hear from the man on the ground, recovering two datacenters after a hurricane wiped out the island where they resided. We learn all sorts of lessons, especially about how so much of a disaster recovery has very little to do with what backup people think of when they think about a “recovery.” In fact, we spend almost this entire episode NOT talking about backup! We talk about network connections, places to sleep, how to eat, and how to recover your datacenter when the neighborhood power won’t even stay on. This guest is also remaining anonymous, and since he is Harry Potter’s friend, we called him Ron Weasley. (My apologies to the Potterheads out there.)

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

Cornelia Davis, 30-year industry veteran and CTO of Weaveworks, explains what cloud-native design is and why it matters. She explains that you do not have to go fully cloud-native on day one if you are moving an app to the cloud, but everything you do “refactor” to a cloud-native architecture will be more resilient, scalable, and cost you less to operate. We talk about Kubernetes and how that figures into everything, but how it is not the only way to be cloud-native.

Listeners to the podcast can get a 40% discount on Cornelia’s book by using our code “podrestore20”

https://www.manning.com/books/cloud-native-patterns?query=Cloud%20Native%20Patterns

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.