Episode: 1820
Title: HPR1820: Kansas Linux Fest 2015, March 21-22, Lawrence KS, Interview 1 of 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1820/hpr1820.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:43:10

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this in HBR episode 1,820 entitled Cannes Linux Fest 2015, March 21-22, Lawrence KS,
Intermew 102 and in part on the series Intermew. It is hosted by 5150 and is about 21 minutes long.
The summary is Intermew Alex Uerak's principal engineer.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Howdy folks, this is 5150 for Hacker Public Radio. This episode is going to be the audio
for my interview with Alex Uerak's principal engineer from Cannes Linux Fest 2015.
This is the first of two interviews I was able to get, but I think you really enjoyed this one.
Before we get into that, I've got a couple beers with me this evening for those of you with sweet
tooths. The first one is Krabby's original alchoholic ginger beer.
In Cannes Linux, this one is from Scotland, so you may be able to get it over on your side of the
pot. No, not my friend. I probably could research this but I didn't. I'm not sure if this is ginger-infused
beer or for some actual ginger beer. If you look that out, there is a way.
Some part of the ginger plant, as I understand, is to bottle it with water and other things in there.
It will over time ferment on its own into a very weak alchoholic drink. In fact,
so we get classified as a soft drink like an old duels or some other things, the mildly
alchoholic, but you don't need any kind of license or whatever to sell. In fact,
all about a year ago, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Al Roker, the
weatherman on NBC's Morning Show, the Today Show, and I miss this one, but apparently,
see, he's been having this for a while. Not technically eating on alchoholic,
but there's a little alchoholic in there, and he's got like this 64 ounce
cup of this, apparently he drinks during the show every single day.
I just saw his attack last year, you know, like they cut the ham when he was asleep.
If you drink enough of the heat, supposedly, not an alchoholic version, I guess it can help
you go an happy time. But this is definitely not like that, so I don't know if it's
ginger infused in a regular beer, or I do understand there's ways to make a stronger ginger beer.
It's 4.8% alcohol by volume, which surprised me it was that low, because you pour it to
very little head. It pours golden, and it's sparkling, at least at the beginning,
though it settles down pretty quick. Definitely a sweet smell, and taste very, very sweet.
I mean, if you don't really like sweet drink, you're not gonna like this. I particularly
have a sweet tooth, and I really do like this. It's got sort of a sort of a definitely
carbonated soda pop type feel to it beyond the sweetness. Maybe a little tart. I did look on
their website, and the Spain version, they suggest adding lime to it, and then they have two
other versions of lemon version and an orange version, which would be interesting to try probably.
But well, I like this just as it is. As long as it's sandy, I have to say that. It's not
probably not something you'd want to have every week, and probably something you'd probably
want to have to afford every week. So, okay, I will go into a little bit about the interview
before I start, and then we will, before I actually add in the recording, I'll tell you
about the second beer that I brought this evening. So, again, this is an interview with Alex
Wahes, who's a principal engineer with Rackspace, and he's finished his job. He's not so much
the guy you would pick up a phone call, and he'd be on the other end for tech support, but he trains
the people who do the tech support for Rackspace. And from their lamp stack,
bike fix competition, to the breakfast buffet they funded on Sunday, the Rackspace crew
presented their organization as the managed hosting company that puts the customer first.
By making sure no customer has to wait in a wrong queue before talking to a human,
and then to stay on the line as long as it takes to make sure all problems are solved,
and all questions are answered. This kind of commitment to service naturally requires
a large number of people working tech support, and by the end of the weekend, I think it was
clear to everyone that Rackspace was in Kansas to recruit. I was impressed when one of the Rackspace
representatives told me, we can teach people the tech, we can't teach people to what to help other
people. Rackspace died case a significant part of employee time to training and to improving
the skills of their help desk staff. The only drawback is that when one shift is training,
the other two are expected to pull extra hours to cover their shifts.
Okay, so the middle will be the actual interview that I recorded with the Zoom H1,
and for contrast, I'm back on the boom mic, rather than using the Zoom as a microphone
this evening. After listening to the recording, using the Zoom had both some good features and
some drawbacks now. One thing that, and for those who completely lost at this point, let
look for the last episode that I posted, review of the Hacker Public Radio Zoom H1
in an interview recording device. As I'm recording right now, the bass track, when I'm not saying
anything, just looks like a big fuzzy caterpillar, that's the noise track. When I used the Zoom,
that was just, you know, the bass track where I'm not talking, it's almost just complete like
straight line. Just like you were actually keying the mic on and off. Every time you talk,
that's what we see when we edit a recording done through mumble because when nobody's talking,
nobody's holding their mic key down, and so there's no input going in. Now what I found was,
and if you've heard that last show, I'm sure you noticed it. It seemed to be more booming,
you know, out of the clouds, sort of voice, sort of vibration, and I think a lot of that is,
I am recording here from the center of a practically square room. It's like 12 feet by 11 feet,
I would say. I wanted to measure it. And only one ball, which has left open, so before I
send the Zoom mic forward, I'm going to try to take my laptop and move into the one of the larger
rooms and record with it there. And see if that doesn't get rid of that booming voice from the clouds,
a fact that we had on the last show. Okay, so, okay, yeah, the second gear. It doesn't allow for
people to sleep too long. Oh, here it is. It's China 106, but they beer chocolate stopped.
I think it's it's celebrating 106 years of the Shiner brewery down to Shiner, Texas.
I'm a big, big fan of Shiner because they make a makes a really good and fairly inexpensive
offerings. Now, you know, you may remember the last episode I posted here. I talked about
beers with chocolate molts in them. So they get a sort of a chocolatey taste because they're
actually brewed with in part with chocolate for the molts. So I mean, while cocoa beans, I guess,
and instead of a grade. Now, there's not a bunch like that that you can taste a little chocolate,
and then there's beers that are brewed straight up. We want them to taste, you know, have a chocolatey
taste. Again, this is probably for people with a sweet tooth and completely matter of taste,
but I do like those chocolatey beers when they're done well. This is one done reasonably well.
My favorite one, they don't sell it over here in this country anymore, though. I think it's still
available in England, it is Macasin, and it was brewed here under a license. In other words,
they won't find it across the ocean. It was brewed by another brewery with the, you know,
with the same ingredients than the recipe of Macasin. Apparently, it didn't do very well over here,
so we were for about three years, and then you couldn't find it again. So,
supposedly, chocolatey beers that I've seen, this is, like, I couldn't get the Macasin,
this is one of the better ones that I found. Brewed chocolate molts in real cocoa, delicious
start with a soft creamy head, and then from the back of the bottle here. Chocolate will
remain taste and slightly sweet finish. So, in some of these beers, they do taste like, you know,
they get some from tasting like, you know, dry cocoa, I think I described one like that to one,
tastes like a Hershey Bosch, that way I wouldn't say that, but, you know, there's, there's
different levels of sweetness from these chocolate beers. But, fortunately, this was a seasonal,
and I'm not sure whether it would be, since it's one or six, next year it'll be one or seven.
So, the birthday beer may be something completely different. Yeah, so, so, you may, by this time,
I've had this around for a while, so by this time, you may not be able to get this particular beer
anymore. So, not all that sweet, kind of a tartar I guess, that might not might be the, uh,
rest of you from the ginger beer. Definitely, you know, the aroma, definitely very, very,
very chocolatey. Maybe not so much as the taste of the beer, but certainly very enjoyable.
I hope they bring it back or do it in the chocolate beer sometime as a mainstay.
Okay, well, the rest of what you're going to hear today is going to be the actual
interview with Alex Suarez from Rackspace.
This is 5150 for Hacker Public Radio, and I'm interviewing Alex Suarez from Rackspace,
and we're here at Kansas Linux Fest, uh, www.andishandsuslinicfest.us. And I wish
one here a little bit more about your job. Of course, everybody knows Rackspace. I was looking
up the details. Would you describe Rackspace as a managed, uh, server company? I was
wondering, do you do larger customers? So it seems like you have various levels of support from,
setting up supported virtual servers to complete the turnkey virtual cloud. Would that be fair?
That's correct. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes around being, being at support, being helpful.
If our customers were there, their case may be larger, small, one server, two hundred servers.
I think a lot of them around it is wrapping back of support around that product.
It makes it like I would say it being helpful. It's kind of what we do. We try to be helpful
with it for you, where things go right or wrong. Without having to get your side out of
running your business, making it easier for you to run your business.
I don't want to thank Rackspace for, um, funding the brunch tomorrow morning. Uh,
your particular job, are you called so is principle engineer? Can you describe what you
knew? Sure. Um, principle engineer role, uh, is the role itself is different based on
company organization. Um, my particular role, I work a lot with our, our techs, our Linux tech,
our Linux and media at Rackspace and allow it to either coaching, mentoring and growing those
techs through web technology. So whether it begin the train they need, uh, helping them with
their career path, uh, beach to be in general mentor and their, uh, generalization point for
our Linux and media Rackspace. So having influence into how we launch our products,
or which OS we launch, how we launch them, things like that. So kind of just a general Linux mentor.
So in other words, you're, you're not the person dealing with customers, you're the person
training the people who are dealing with customers. I think that the, my customers are the
records, right? And I've learned growing this role is that I can help more customers by helping
the record, right? Me helping one customer, uh, will be good, but at this point, now I think for
me, it's, I get to help more customers by helping the records help them better. And how long have
you been at Rackspace? Uh, they're Rackspace just on the right years. They'll be eight years in
April. Just few weeks. And what was your career before that? Uh, before that was a freelance
developer. And kind of did, did you know, maybe I live in that way? So I'll be a basic
ram stack, PHP, MySQL, design websites, and WordPress things essentially.
Well, I mean, uh, what else could you tell us about, uh, the company philosophy? How,
yeah, I think you pretty much explained. Um, what, uh, what would be your most interesting case
as far as, uh, dealing with what you call the Rackers and, uh, you know, living, uh,
one story that stands out. And there's so many, um, hmm. Of course, if I wasn't being
here right now, I wouldn't really like to think about that. Um, uh, I think for a second,
when it stands out, I think my favorite ones comes from probably my earlier days of support.
All my favorite ones was that I got a call from one of our customers who, who just need
help adding users. Okay, that's simple as that. But they called up and said, hey, can you help
us add this user, but not only can you help us add it, can you show us, can you teach us how to add it?
Oh, sure. Well, it might have been a two-minute call, right? Really, you came up 45-minute call,
there was an hour call, but it kind of embodies that just being helpful, right? We get the easy
add the user through. Although instead, we hop in the box, we've potted a new screen and both
hopped in the same screen session, like a share, and as it was typing, I was talking about what's
going on, what we're doing, and why we're doing it, and why it's the best practice you do this
way, or do it that way, and really make sure you understood how bad the user is. We're
often see happening at the users, right, called them directories, if you want to change the
shell, so that, and we're welcome to a process. And at the other call, he was happy, right?
Not because he got the test done, but because he was able to learn, he learned something.
And it's really, really interesting that that call could take two minutes, and if it did,
nobody would have been the same thing, right? We would have been the same outcome,
but because we took the time and did the teaching and being helpful, it really created that,
for me, that fanatical support, right? That the extra mile to say, let me teach you,
let me show you, let me, let me just work together on this, and really think it's what I'd
support for, or actually it's really, it's about working together with customer, for
what the outcome is. So I think everybody stands out, small tasks, small call, but that one
still stands out to this day. So that's kind of like the old story of teaching them,
giving them a fish, or teaching them to fish. Absolutely. So by that, I would say you probably
deal with a lot of customers who aren't that familiar with this. We have both. We have customers
where we are the support team, we are the complete ID house, and they come to us for everything.
We have customers who we are extension of their in-house iPod, so we have all different levels,
from pretty small size, so some customers were actually working together on what next step is
for their change management, or what next step is for their infrastructure, and we have a much
higher level talk, and then some customers would be getting there, and we do things like
hop and mad users, right? Hop and install services. It's all around what they need.
Okay, and I'm sure a lot of HPR users, and HPR listeners, HPR contributors,
fellow podcasters, when they listen to this, I mean, I'm sure a lot of them are your customers,
and I'm sure that they'll be screaming into their headsets where, why didn't you ask
him this question? Why didn't you ask him that question? Can you think of anything since I'm not,
you know, I don't deal with those levels, or anything you could think of that might be a likely
customer question from out there in the ether that you might be able to answer. I know that's
kind of put you on spot. Yeah, I think the thing with number one question is, do you support
XYZ? What are they about? Do you support this? Do you support that? And that's kind of a touchy subject
at all over the place, right on both sides. I really think it comes back to IWF1 so steadfast
on what that being helpful, right? Because it's a lot of things we don't support. There are certain
applications we just don't support, but in that case, we'll still look at and say, we think you
can do these things, we think you can look at it this way, and be helpful in that way,
can't get you in the right direction. I could just acknowledge it's not about knowing all the
answers that are here today, they're the part of it, but it's also about knowing the answer that
come up tomorrow, right? How can we help you find approach to your problems coming up, or
that you're not sure about yet, so. Do you guys have the capability of, you know, riding code,
if there's something that just isn't working out for the customers that are part of your
view? In our job support, we don't go that far into the occasion stack, right? In the past,
we've written small one-liners, small shell scripts to get simple jobs done. We've also advised
on how you smartmation tools to say, hey, you might want to look at this, and here's how you might
want to get that kind of implement automation or new name, right? Chef Papa Ganswell,
picked one of those, here's how you might want that, but our support really is on
infrastructure in the OS level, really to be yet that far deep into the code level. We do have
workspace practice areas that also are digging a little deeper and a little higher up in the
application stack. For example, we have one that looks at things like the
agendas, so as a team built around support agendas, which are much of the overalls, right?
The workspace practice area called them, and really those look at specific
technologies and going up the stack for them. Do you support any other operating systems other than
Linux, do you do BSD with those, anything like that? So we do a window support game, our dedicated
side, on our cloud side, we have a ton of different flavors that are available for staying up,
so I believe, I don't move those via BSE, why not, I forget, but there's a Boone 2, there's
Fedora, Sento S, Red Hat, Arch, Core OS, so all types of different ones, and usually our
quest comes in for either on a Boone 2 box or a Stent box, usually users that are using Arch
or Core OS, they know they kind of know where to go and have their approach to it,
but a lot of questions come from Boone 2 or from a Boone 2 or for Sento S Red Hat, so
there's also, you can also move from your image, but actually it's cloud offers you an opportunity
to say, here's my iPhone, update it, and Boone 2 is there as well, so if there was a
bigger flavor of BSE, you'd want it, you move from your image, so. Can you tell me anything about
the hardware that you use on the bare metal side, are you guys looking at moving some of these
new farm servers, or is that little bit in the future? That's out of my preview, can we answer
the answer? It's like going to comment on that. Okay. Well, that's good mini interview,
if there's anything else you can take left to add. Oh, that would be one thing, you were talking
about your wrappers, if someone wanted to come to work for a rack space, what kind of credentials
would you be looking for? So obviously there's the Linux on, right? A lot of customers still
to use the basic lamp stack, standard lamp, and then it's actually my fault, now there's certain
versions of that, and usually I'm looking at it is a good base on Linux, I'm really big on
doing a standalone VM, you understand fault missions in and out, right? You have managed
to start just one server, but multiple, how would you scale something from one server to
TensorFlow? How would you, how would you, how would you, how would you do that? How would you
kind of put that to the pop-up? From there, it's about, the versions of the ones you know
to solve problems, because sometimes like I said, you may know Apache really well, but because
one runs into NX, how do you use your current information to look at a problem and approach it for
a solve, right? That's what I look for is the basic problem solving capabilities, really is the
biggest thing. So you look at work history or certifications, or if a guy just comes in off the
street with nothing to show what he knows, would you give him some tests? Yeah, so we did
a bit of various questions to ask, and a lot of questions were set up to see what their
thought process is, and what experience they've had in the past, and it's not as simple as asking
where have you done with Apache, where you done with my SQL, and usually from there we can
question an offshoot of certain technology, a certain aspect of that, and from there I can
be in the tell the process on whether they're thought proper, how do they think about the problem,
even when they don't know, right? Well, when they do know it, the answer comes straight out,
and it's good on the next question. Now I saw you have offices in what Texas, in Australia,
and what one other wasn't there? We have offices all over the world, we have support offices
in San Antonio, Texas, Austin, Texas, we have a support office in Australia, and a support office
in London as well. We also have data centers around the world, various locations, Dallas,
Chicago, few in London, few in New Zealand, I don't know, few in Australia, a few in Hong Kong,
and so, offices all over the world, we just opened up Rackspace, Mexico City, so our Latin American
office just opened up right by the last office that we opened up recently, so offices around
the world support 24-7, 365. Do you have any opportunities for people who work remotely? I'm
thinking of one friend in particular, he gets tired of living in one place. Absolutely, absolutely,
right? There are things about remote, right? We do ask, did you spend a few months with us,
get to our culture, get to our people, get to know your resolution, that's right, but for the right
candidate, absolutely remote is an opportunity, right? And that's a talk with individual candidate
on what that's like for them. Thanks, well, I'll ask you again, if there's anything you can add,
but I think we've covered quite a bit. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it. Well, thank you, Alex,
and I said to anyone how many. I would expect there was a whole bunch of stuff hits the feed,
this might air as early as week after next, so. Awesome. And the website's hacker-public
radio battle work. Thank you. Thanks.
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