Educating the Next Generation of Cloud Engineers | Google Cloud's Forrest Brazeal

**Forrest Brazeal** (0:00)
The whole point of this movement of the DevOps movement that we're sitting in this fishbowl in the middle of it right now, the abstraction and toolification and cloudification, you're telling me after a decade plus of that.
We can't onboard people. We still can't onboard people into this industry without requiring them to recapitulate the entire history of IT on their resumes. Oh no. You know, shame on us, right? What a sobering indictment of our industry.
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Forrest Brazeal is here with us live at DevOps Enterprise Summit from our Dev Interrupted Dome in the middle of the expo hall.
So if you're watching on YouTube right now, you're going to see some really interesting backgrounds. People walk around us, kind of stare at us.
And it's going to be a great episode because he's joining Dev Interrupted to talk about his incredible work as the Cloud Bard for Google or his other title, the Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud. Forrest, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Great to be here, Conor.
I am really excited to hear, first of all, how did you get the title Cloud Bard? You know what? It's made up, but then aren't all titles made up? All words are, technically. So like, yeah, I think you're doing great there. Yeah, yeah. So I've been doing things in the Cloud community for a long time to try to help developers understand concepts that may seem arcane. I come out of the kind of enterprise IT world. I've done most of the things I think you can do in enterprise IT. I've been a front-end and back-end developer. I was a SQL Server DBA for a while. Oh, wow. I've managed engineering teams at one point. I've been a consultant working with companies from startups all the way up to the Fortune 50, kind of helping them figure out how to do large Cloud migrations and build modern Cloud apps. And a lot of that was in the AWS ecosystem. I was one of the AWS, one of the original AWS serverless heroes. Oh, so they poached you. No, no, no. I was sort of an unpaid developer advocate. That's the best way I can describe their community hero program.
But that was great. Got to meet and work with a lot of people, especially in the serverless community. I spent a lot of time, used to help organize serverless conf, dearly departed back in pre-pandemic days.
And then at some point along the way, I started, I like to draw cartoons to help people understand technical concepts. I knew I needed to follow you on Twitter. Yeah, I like to sing songs. I'm actually singing a bunch of songs later today. In my talk, it does. We've got a big grand piano on stage. It's gonna be, I hope. That's so exciting. It's gonna be weird, but that's kind of the whole thing at this point.
Yeah, that's right. So that's where the cloud bard thing comes from. And then about a year ago, I went over to Google Cloud to kind of help them talk to developers and help our developer community, our operator community especially, understand what is this Google Cloud thing? Why might I want to give this a try?
And that's been fantastic. It's been a learning experience for me for sure.
Coming from one cloud over to the other side, there's a lot of things that translate, a lot of things that don't. So I'm learning right along with everybody else and just trying to share what I learn in ways that are maybe a little bit less boring to listen to. I think that's a wonderful lesson to take away for anyone who's listening here and saying, okay, how do I connect with developers and get them building in my ecosystem?
We just had Discord on in a recent episode where we talked about, okay, they're trying to get more developers to develop first party apps, which they now open a first party app store.
And I think to your point, one of the ways to connect with developers is not to just be too serious and to actually create media that speaks to them. And I'd love to hear from you what your perspective is on that, because I think that's a wonderful, actionable takeaway that engineering leaders here can take not only to their own teams, but also to building these products for developers. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you brought up Discord. They're a big Google Cloud user.