About AustinAustin makes problems with computers, and sometimes solves them. He’s an open source maintainer, observability nerd, devops junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring HN threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing.Links:
Lightstep: https://lightstep.com/

Lightstep Sandbox: https://lightstep.com/sandbox

Desert Island DevOps: https://desertedislanddevops.com

lastweekinAWS.com Resources: https://lastweekinAWS.com/resources

Distributed Tracing in Practice: https://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Tracing-Practice-Instrumenting-Microservices/dp/1492056634

Twitter: https://twitter.com/austinlparker

Personal Blog: https://aparker.io

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn’t translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that’s not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I’m joined this week by Austin Parker, who’s a principal developer advocate at Lightstep. Austin, welcome to the show.Austin: Hey, it’s great to be here.Corey: It really is. I love coming here. It’s one of my favorite places to go. So, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. You’re a principal developer advocate at Lightstep. I know this because I said it a whole sentence ago, which is about the limit of my attention span. What is Lightstep? And what does your job mean?Austin: So, Lightstep is an observability platform. We take traces, and metrics, and logs, and all that good stuff, throw them together in a big old swamp of data, and then, kind of, give you some really cool workflows to help you make sense of it, figure out, h