The Cloud Pod

Welcome to episode 259 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan and Ryan (yes, all 4!) are covering A LOT of information – you’re going to want to sit down for this one. This week’s agenda includes unnecessary Magic Quadrants, SecOps, Dataflux updates, CNAME chain struggles, and an intro into Phi-3 – plus so much more!  Titles we almost went with this week: GKE Config Sync or the Auto Outage for K8 Feature If only all my disasters could be managed The Cloud Pod builds a Rag Doll Understanding Dataflux has given me reflux Oracle continuing the trend of adding AI to everything even databases A new way to burn your money on the cloud which isn’t even your fault Google Gets a Magic Quadrant Participation Trophy We’re All Winners to Magic Quadrant  Don’t be a giant DNAME  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  General News  00:33 Dropbox dropped the ball on security, hemorrhaging customer and third-party info  Dropbox has revealed a major attack on its systems that saw customers’ personal information accessed by unknown and unauthorized entities.  The attack, detailed in a regulatory filing, impacted Dropbox Sign, a service that supports e-signatures similar to Docusign.  The threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and usernames, in addition to general account settings.  For a subset of users, the threat actor accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication.   To make things *extra* worse – if you never had an account but received a signed document your email and name has also been exposed. Good times.  Want to read the official announcement? You can find it here.  03:06 Jonathan- “It’s unfortunate that it was compromised. It was their acquisition, wasn’t it – ‘HelloSign’ that actually had the defect, not their main product at least.” 05:44 VMware Cloud on AWS – here today, here tomorrow  Last week at recording time Matt mentioned the VMWare Cloud on AWS rumors on twitter that Broadcom was terminating.  Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom wrote a blog post letting you know that VMWare Cloud on AWS is Here today, and here tomorrow.  He says the reports have been false, and contends that the offering would be going away forcing unnecessary concern for their loyal customers who have used the se

This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus.     A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights The Pentagon has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy. Amazon has given developers the happy ending they’ve always wanted. Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt. JEDI: Play Nice Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project. Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn’t play nice together. Amazon Web Services: We’ve Made All the Money AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. That’s an awful lot of samples.   Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering. Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees!    AWS Organizations launches a new console experience. We’re excited to try this out! AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK. This is great.  AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster. This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market.  AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston. They’re continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages.  Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. A big hooray for people using Outposts.  Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview. Hopefully this is bette

Justin and Jonathan kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he’s been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can’t move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap.    A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us. Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product. Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up. Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare.  Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool! Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this.     Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn’t throwing up barriers.  AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement.   AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch.  Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on.   GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song.    Google has made the Doc AI

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Bart Castle, an AWS and cloud computing trainer and media personality. Bart works with IT training company CBT Nuggets and also does cloud-migration consulting projects.  Bart shares the patterns he seems based on training demand and also advises how to decide which certification to go for next. He discusses the importance of solving business problems that will help achieve the business’ goals while retooling and transforming systems. “At this point in my career, every technical conversation that I have is always paired up with a business value conversation,” he notes. But how should a data team shift focus to better solve business problems? He suggests looking for patterns. Uncovering patterns can help determine actionable steps to maximize efficiency and enable new business opportunities. Bart also discusses cloud computing trends, CloudFormation stacking, hybrid deployments, and containers. Featured Guest Name: Bart Castle What he does: Bart is a cloud computing and AWS expert and technical trainer, as well as a consultant.  Key quote: “In the end, we’re still looking for those tools that will bridge gaps. This is why, for me, being an integrations professional and getting what integration means is skill number one across all different arenas. Everywhere you look, it’s an integration problem.”  Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Key Takeaways When thinking about all the different training options, Bart suggests pursuing the certification that would help you land a specific job or role. If you’re not sure what your next job might be, look at SysOps administration first since it is closest to traditional network help desk operations support roles. Based on his training background, Bart sees a rising interest in network automation. Many teams are working with various vendors to address networking and connectivity and to make the transition from command line administration to Python automation.  “A lot of what I’m seeing here is the switch from real deep specialty to real broad generalization, and that can be an overwhelming bite to take when you look at how much information there is to consume,” says Bart.  Learning how the tools work is the easy part, but you have to dig deeper to make it work for your specific business use case. Bart recommends looking for white papers, as well as case studies and blog posts. Communities (like TCP!) can also point you in the right direction.   Bart says, “Once you get those examples of how a piece of input data with the right transformation with this pairing of reporting can solve this problem — now, you’re putting tools in your belt that are going beyond just using the tools, and how to actually solve business problems with them.” Here’s what was mentioned in the episode CBT Nuggets: provides in-demand training, primarily in IT, project management, and office productivity topics. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): a cloud object storage service.  “What is

Your hosts see a new cloud on the horizon and anticipate a flood on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights HashiCorp enters the ring with HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Microsoft offers free AI classes. Bayer Crop Sciences pushes cluster size to new heights. General News: A Challenger Approaches HashiCorp has launched the HashiCorp Cloud Platform featuring managed Consul as the single initial service. HashiCorp is currently soliciting feedback on the alpha version of HashiCorp Cloud Platform and is planning on releasing Vault next. AWS: Let it Snow The AWS Snow family of devices is now joined by AWS Snowcone, a four-and-a-half pound eight terabyte data storage and transfer device, both the most storage and least weight yet. Don’t lose it though — this little guy runs around $2,000. Aurora Global database now supports write request forwarding for low latency global data reads. This is fantastic news for lazy devs like us.  Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups now support the Instance Refresh feature, eliminating the need for custom scripts and systems. This is a long-anticipated feature for TCP. We can’t believe it’s taken until 2020! The new Lambda Powertools library within the Serverless Lens for the Well Architected Framework features Tracer, Logger and Metrics as its three core utilities. Using these tools to get yourself set up will save you a lot of strife down the line. Azure: An ‘Udacious’ Plan Azure and Udacity are partnering to launch a scholarship program and the free Azure Machine Learning course to address the growing demand for AI specialists. We’ve had good experiences with Udacity so this offering appeals directly to us. Azure is catering to users new to ARM templates with new features including a template Quickstart gallery and Azure Resource Manager Tools in Visual Studio Code. How did we ever get by without this? Google: Seeds and Node

Your hosts talk about AWS Lambda, Azure’s Cybersecurity of Things and Google’s loquacious AI on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.  This week’s highlights AWS Lambda sees savings and supports Dart. Your kitchen appliances are safer with developments in the Internet of Things. It’s the last week of our trial of the new Lightning Round format. Comedy’s hard. TCP News ICYMI, check out our second episode of TCP Talks: Finops in the cloud with Rob Martin. We learned some things about financial operations, and we’re sure you will too. AWS Lambda Updates AWS Compute Savings Plans now apply to your AWS Lambda workloads. That’s nice, but even a decent percentage of such a cheap service probably won’t impact your expenses all that much. In addition, those Lambda workloads now support Dart, an open-source programming language made by Google. If you’re making mobile apps, you’ll be happy to use this. If you’re not making mobile apps, you probably didn’t need to read this paragraph. AWS Identity and Access Management now allows you to control access for requests made on your behalf by AWS services. It’s a great security feature. We’re looking forward to AWS taking this a step further at this year’s re:Inforce conference. Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports previous Secrets Manager versions and can read keys directly from JSON objects. It’s going to be much more convenient now that you can use one key instead of, say, 10. AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr outlined a laundry list of updates to Amazon FSx for Lustre in this blog post. All these changes add up to SageMaker integration, to make SageMaker more attractive to customers. Spherical Things

We follow continuing stories with the JEDI contract, GigaOM and our new Lightning Round format on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.  This week’s highlights Amazon makes progress contesting the JEDI contract. AWS and Azure introduce shared cloud block storage. Google shows signs of shifting priorities. Arrested Development United States judge Patricia Campbell-Smith has granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt work on the JEDI contract by Microsoft. She also ordered Amazon to post $42 million in the event the injunction was issued wrongfully.  AWS Not First to Share Blocks CloudFormation StackSets users can now manage multiple AWS accounts. We recommend you get your organizational units structured properly now so you’re ready for when that must-have feature for your organization is added. AWS customers running Linux on Ec2 can now attach provisioned IOPS (io1) EBS volumes to Multiple Ec2 instances. Be careful though: wielding fine control over your data means taking responsibility for your data losses, as well. This news comes a day after Azure announced their own Azure Shared Disks, which was, for those sweet brief hours before AWS’s announcement, the industry’s only shared cloud block storage. What’s in the Box? Azure released a new GigaOM study which backs up the findings from the GigaOM study we covered on episode 58. How incredible — Azure, which paid for the scientific (and unverifiable) study, was found to be the best at everything once again! The Azure Backup service now offers a preview of the

Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker kick off our new TCP Talks bonus episodes with a chat with Mike Kelly, CTO at Blue Medora. Monitoring can be hard on-premises or in the cloud. As a result, it can be downright scary with multi-cloud strategies, hybrid cloud, and legacy tools. Bring order chaos, by centralizing the management of metrics and logs. From solving out of disk space alerts to building observability techniques, Stackdriver and Bindplane can help.  Adopting these practices and principals will help your Observability and SRE teams in the cloud.

Peter is back after a few weeks away from the show. Azure launches new Event Grid features, Palo Alto Networks picks up Twistlock and Puresec and Google has a really bad day. Plus the amazing lightning round with Peter. Sponsors: Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod Topics: 25th Episode Blog Post Azure has simplified event-driven architectures with new updates to Event Grid Palo Alto Networks enters into definitive agreement to purchase Twistlock and Puresec Oracle Lays off hundreds from its Seattle office as its cloud strategy remains grounded Azure Adaptive network hardening in Azure Security Center is now GA Amazon EBS adds ability to take point-in-time, crash-consistent snapshots across multiple EBS volumes Announcing Tag-Based Access Control for AWS Cloudformation New Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) – Now Generally Available Google Cloud has Major Outage on 6/2 Google Cloud Outage resolved, but it reveals holes in cloud computing atmosphere An update on Sunday’s service disruption Lightning Round (Jonathan 6, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3): AWS is Announcing Windows Server version 1903 AMI’s for Amazon EC2 Amazon Chime now supports United States Toll-Free Numbers

Show Notes 1/8/18 Amazon reportedly buys cloud endure for $250 million Fargate Lowers prices by 50% Cloudera/Hortonworks merger closes, takes aim at Amazon Is this the worst S3 compromise? Google Purchases DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) Github goes Free AWS CLI Query JMES Path reference Lightning Round Windows Server 2019 AMI’s now available on AWS Parallel Cluster now available in Sweden Alexa announces Skill Builder Beta Example/Certification WAF now includes a monitoring dashboard MSFT Project Bali EMR announces 99.9% Service Level agreement Cool Tools AWS CLI Builder AWS Console Recorder Sponsors Foghorn Consulting – https://www.fogops.io/thecloudpod Last week in AWS – https://www.lastweekinaws.com Audible – http://www.audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Welcome to episode 257 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, Ryan, and Jonathan are in the barnyard bringing you the latest news, which this week is really just Meta’s release of Llama 3. Seriously. That’s every announcement this week. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.  Titles we almost went with this week: Meta Llama says no Drama No Meta Prob-llama Keep Calm and Llama on  Redis did not embrace the Llama MK The bedrock of good AI is built on Llamas The CloudPod announces support for Llama3 since everyone else was doing it Llama3, better know as Llama Llama Llama The Cloud Pod now known as the LLMPod Cloud Pod is considering changing its name to LlamaPod Unlike WinAMP nothing whips the llamas ass A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Check out Sonrai Securities‘ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod Follow Up  01:27 Valkey is Rapidly Overtaking Redis  Valkey has continued to rack up support from AWS, Ericsson, Google, Oracle and Verizon initially, to now being joined by Alibaba, Aiven, Heroku and Percona backing Valkey as well.   Numerous blog posts have come out touting Valkey adoption. I’m not sure this whole thing is working out as well as Redis CEO Rowan Trollope had hoped.  AI Is Going Great – Or How AI Makes All It’s Money  03:26 Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date  Meta has launched Llama 3, the next generation of their state-of-the-art open source large language model.  Llama 3 will be available on AWS, Databricks, GCP, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, Nvidia NIM, and Snowflake with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm Includes new trust and safety tools such as Llama Guard 2, Code Shield and Cybersec eval 2 They plan to introduce new capabilities, including longer context windows, additional model sizes and enhanced performance. The first two models from Meta Lama3 are the 8B and 70B parameter variants that can support a broad range of use cases.  Meta shared some benchmarks against Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B vs the Lama 3 8B models and showed improvements across all major benchmarks.  Including Math with Gemma 7b doing 12.2 vs 30 with Llama 3 It had highly comparable performance with the 70B model against Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Sonnet scoring within a few points of most of the other scores.  Jonathan recommends using LM Studio to get start playing around with LLMS, which you can find at https://lmstudio.ai/ 04:42 Jonathan – “Isn’t it funny how you go from an 8 billion parameter model to a 70 billion parameter model but nothing in between? Like you would have thought there would be some kind of like, some middle ground maybe? But, uh, but… No. But, um,

Welcome to episode 258 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan dig into all the latest earnings reports, talk about the 57 announcements made by AWS about Q, and discuss the IBM purchase of HashiCorp – plus even more news.  Make sure to stay for the aftershow, where the guys break down an article warning about the loss of training data for LLM’s. Titles we almost went with this week: Terraform hugs to Big Blue (Bear) The CloudPod hosts again forgets to lower their headphone volume AWS fixes an issue that has made Matt swear many times Google gets mad at open-source Azure has crickets HashiCorp’s Nomadic Journey to the IBM Oasis It’s Gonna be Maaay! A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  General News  01:48 It’s Earnings TIme! Alphabet (Google) Alphabet beat on earnings and revenue in the first quarter, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier, one of the fastest growth rates since 2022.   They also announced its first dividend and a $70 billion dollar stock buyback. Using layoff money for something other than a buyback? IN THIS ECONOMY?  Revenue was 80.54 Billion vs 78.59 expected, resulting in earnings per share of 1.89.  Google Cloud Revenue was 9.57B vs 9.35 B expected.  Net income jumped 57% to 23.66 B up from 15.05B a year ago.  Operating income of the cloud business quadruped to 900M, showing that the company is finally generating substantial profits after pouring money into the business for years to keep up with AWS and Azure.  03:54 Justin – “Yeah, I mean, they’re doing pretty well… I think AI is helping them out tremendously in this regard.  I believe it includes G Suite as well. But I mean, like I don’t know how much revenue that is comparatively, but your Google cloud is definitely the majority of it, I think at this point..” 04:20 Microsoft MSFT fiscal third quarter results exceeded on the top and bottom line, but revenue guidance came in weaker than expected.  Consensus estimate said Q4 should be 64.5B but Microsoft CFO called for 64B. Revenue grew 17% year over year in the quarter, net coming was 21.94B up from 18.30 billion.  Micosoft said that currently near term AI demand is higher than their available capacity, and is focusing on buying more Nvidia GPU

For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin and Jonathan are joined by Travis Runty, CTO of Public Cloud with Rackspace Technology. In today’s interview, they discuss being accidentally multi cloud, public vs private cloud, and cloud migration, and best practices when assisting clients with their cloud journeys.  Background Rackspace Technology, commonly known as Rackspace, is a leading multi-cloud solutions provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, United States. Founded in 1998, Rackspace has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses seeking expertise in managing and optimizing their cloud environments. The company offers a wide range of services aimed at helping organizations navigate the complexities of cloud computing, including cloud migration, managed hosting, security, data analytics, and application modernization. Rackspace supports various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, among others.  Rackspace prides itself on its “Fanatical Experience” approach, which emphasizes delivering exceptional customer support and service. This commitment to customer satisfaction has contributed to Rackspace’s reputation as a reliable and customer-centric provider in the cloud computing industry.  Meet Travis Runty, CTO of Public Cloud for Rackspace Technology Beginning his career with Rackspace as a Linux engineer, Travis has spent the last 15 years working his way through multiple divisions of the company, including 10 years in senior and director level positions. Most recently, Travis served as VP of Technical Support of Global Cloud Operations from 2020-2022.  Travis is extremely passionate about building and leading high performance engineering teams and delivering innovative solutions. Most recently, as a member of their technology council, Travis wrote an article for Forbes – Building a Cloud-Savvy Workforce: Empowering Your Team for Success – where he discussed best practices for prioritizing workforce enablement, especially when it comes to training and transformation initiatives.  Interview Notes: In the main show, TCP has been talking a lot about Cloud / hybrid cloud / multi-cloud and repatriating data back to on prem, and today’s guest knows all about those topics.  Rackspace has had quite a few phases in their journey to public cloud – including building a data center in an unused mall, introducing managed services, creating partnerships with VMware, an attempt to go head to head with the hyperscalers, and then ultimately focusing on public cloud and instead partnering with the hyperscalers.  Rackspace has both a focus on private and public cloud; when it comes to private cloud they focus mainly on VMware and OpenStack, whereas in the public cloud side, Rackspace partners with the hyperscalers to assist clients with their cloud journey.  Quotes from today’s show  Travis: “We want to make sure that when a customer goes on their public cloud journey, that they actually have a robust strategy that is going to be effective. From there, we’re able to leverage our professional services teams to make sure that they can realize that transformation, and hopefully there *is* a transformation, and it’s not just a lift and shift.” Travis: “A conflict that we continuously have to strike the balance of is when do we apply a cloud native solution, and where do we apply the Rackspace elements on top. The hyperscalers techno

Welcome to episode 256 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin and Matthew are here this week to catch you up on all the news you may have missed while Google Next was going on. We’ve got all the latest news on the custom silicon hot war that’s developing, some secret sync, drama between HashiCorp and OpenTofu, and one more Google Next recap – plus much more in today’s episode. Welcome to the Cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: I have a Google Next sized hangover Claude’s Magnificent Opus now on AWS US-EAST-1 Gets called Reliable; how insulting The cloud pod flies on a g6  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod General News  Today, we get caught up on the other Clouds from last week, and other news (besides Google, that is.) Buckle up.  04:11 OpenTofu Project Denies HashiCorp’s Allegations of Code Theft  After our news cutoff before Google Next, Hashicorp issued a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter to the OpenTofu project, accusing that the project has “repeatedly taken code Hashi provided under the BSL and used it in a manner that violates those license terms and Hashi’s intellectual properties.” It notes that in some instances, OpenTofu has incorrectly re-labeled Hashicorp’s code to make it appear as if it was made available by Hashi, originally under a different license.  Hashi gave them until April 10th to remove any allegedly copied code from the OpenTofu repo, threatening litigation if the project failed to do so.  OpenTofu struck back – and they came with receipts!  They deny that any BSL licensed code was incorporated into the OpenTofu repo, and that any code they copied came from the MPL-Licensed version of terraform. “The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestions that it misappropriated, mis-sourced or misused Hashi’s BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts” — Open Tofu Team OpenTofu showed how the code they accused was lifted from the BSL code, was actually in the MPL version, and then copied into the BSL version from an older version by a Hashi Engineer.  Anticipating third party contributions might submit BSL terraform code unwittingly or otherwise, OpenTofu instituted a “taint team” to compare Terraform and Open Tofu Pull requests. If the PR is found to be in breach of intellectual property rights, the pull request is closed and the contributor is closed from working on that area of the code in the future.  Matt Asay, (from Mongo) writing for Infoworld, dropped a hit piece when the C&D was filed, but then

Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day’s keynote and the major announcements.  Titles we almost went with this week: How About Some AI? “The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy) Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI  Ok Google, did your phone go off? For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week  From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next’s Descent into AI Madness ‘Next’ Up from Google – AI!   Have Some Conference with Your AI  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at sonrai.co/cloudpod GCP – Google Next 2024 We’re jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.  01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.  Both Ryan and Justin agree that Vegas is much better than the Mosconoe center in San Francisco for Google Next The Sessions were well organized, but Ryan is a little tired from walking back and forth between them. Exercise is tiring! \ Vegas infrastructure was well utilized, something Amazon didn’t do as well.  Folks staying at area hotels that *weren’t* Mandalay Bay had some issues with trying to get onto / off  property at the beginning and end of the day.  Free coffee is still available. *If you can find it.  Expo hall felt cramped 08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address  Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.  Thomas Kurian kicked off the keynote, introduced their new tagline “The New Way to Cloud” Sundar: Months can feel like decades in the cloud… WORD. 36B revenue run rate Kurian did a rapid fire announcement of all the things coming – which required Justin to rewatch just to get them all.  A3 Mega Nvidia H100 GPUs Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (in early 2025 TPU v5p GA Hyperdisk ML for Inference Cloud Storage Fuse Caching GA Parallel Store Caching AI Hypercomputer Dynamic Workload Scheduler Nvidia GPU Support for GDC Google Distributed Cloud GKE Enterprise for GDC AI Models on GDC Vector Search on GDC Vertex AI Solutions with GDC Secret and Top Secret

A bonus episode of The Cloud Pod may be just what the doctor ordered, and this week Justin and Jonathan are here to bring you an interview with Sandy Bird of Sonrai Security. There’s so much going on in the IAM space, and we’re really happy to have an expert in the studio with us this week to talk about some of the security least privilege specifics.  Background Sonrai (pronounced Son-ree, which means data in Gaelic) was founded in 2017. Sonrai provides Cloud Data Control, and seeks to deliver a complete risk model of all identity and data relationships, which includes activity and movement across cloud accounts, providers, and third party data stores. Try it free for 14 days Start your free trial today Meet Sandy Bird, Co founder of Sonrai Security Sandy is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai, and has a long career in the tech industry. He was the CTO and co-founder of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011, and helped to drive IBM security growth as CTO for global business security there.  Interview Notes: One of the big questions we start the interview with is just how has IAM evolved – and what kind of effect have those changes had on the identity models?  Enterprise wants things to be least privilege, but it’s hard to find the logs. In cloud, however *most* things are logged – and so least privilege became an option.  Sonrai offers the first cloud permissions firewall, which enables one click least privilege management, which is important in the current environment where the platforms operate so differently from each other. With this solution, you have better control of your cloud access, limit your permissions, attack surface, and automate least privilege – all without slowing down DevOps2.  Is the perfect policy achievable? Sandy breaks it between human identities and workload identities; they’re definitely separate. He claims, in workload identities the perfect policy is probably possible. Human identity is hugely sporadic, however, it’s important to at least try to get to that perfect policy, especially when dealing with sensitive information. One of the more interesting data pieces they found was that less than 10% of identities with sensitive permissions actually used them – and you can use the information to balance out actually handing out permissions versus a one time use case.  Sonrai spent a lot of time looking at new solutions to problems with permissions; part of this includes purpose-built integration, offering a flexible open GraphQL API with prebuilt integrations.  Sonrai also offers continuous monitoring; providing ongoing intelligence on all the permission usage – including excess permissions – and enables the removal of unused permissions without any sort of disruptions. Policy automation automatically writes IAM policies tailored to access needs, and simplifies processes for teams.  On demand access is another tool that gives on demand requests for permissions that are restricted with a quick and efficient process.  Quotes from today’s show  Sandy: “The unbelievably powerful model in AWS can do amazing things, especially when you get into some of the advanced conditions – but man, for a human to understand what all this stuff is, is super hard. Then you go to the Azure model, which is very different. It’s an allow first model. If you have an allow anywhere in the tree, you can do whatever is asked, but there’s this hierarchy to the whole thing, and so when you think you want to remove something you may not even be removing it., because something above may have that permission anyway. It’s a whole different model to learn there.”  Sandy: “Only like 8% of those identities

Welcome to episode 254 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re talking about trust issues with some security updates over at Azure, forking drama at Redis, and making all of our probably terrible predictions for Google Next. Going to be in Vegas? Find one of us and get a sticker for your favorite cloud podcast! Follow us on Slack and Twitter to get info on finding your favorite host IRL. (Unless Jonathan is your favorite. We won’t be giving directions to his hot tub.) Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Hosts Fail To Do Their Homework The Cloud Pod Now Has a Deadline  This Is Why I Love Curl … EC2 Shop Endpoint is Awesome AI & Elasticsearch… AI – But Not Like That  Preparing for Next Next Week A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod Follow Up 02:15  AWS, Google, Oracle back Redis fork “Valkey” under the Linux Foundation In no surprise, placeholderKV is now backed by AWS, Google and Oracle and has been rebranded to Valkey under the Linux Foundation. Interestingly, Ericsson and Snap Inc. also joined Valkey.  03:19 Redis vs. the trillion-dollar cabals Anytime an open source company changes their license, AWS and other cloud providers are blamed for not contributing enough upstream.  Matt Asay, from Infoworld, weighs in this time. The fact that placeholder/Valkey was forked by several employees at AWS who were core contributors of Redis, does seem to imply that they’re doing more than nothing.  I should point out that Matt Asay also happens to run Developer relations at MongoDB. Pot, meet kettle.  04:14 Ryan – “It’s funny because I always feel like the cloud contribution to these things is managed services around them, right? It’s not necessarily improvements to the core source code. It’s more management of that source code. Now there are definitely areas where they do make enhancements, but I’m not sure the vast majority makes sense to be included in an open source made for everyone product either.” General News  07:01 What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world  The Open Source community was a bit shocked when a Microsoft Developer revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and Other Unix-Like OS.   The person – or people – behind this project like

Welcome to episode 253 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss data centers, OCI coming in hot (and potentially underwater?) in Kenya, stateful containers, and Oracle’s new globally distributed database (Oracle Autonomous Database) of many dollars. Sit back and enjoy the show! Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod: Transitioning to SSPL – Sharply Satirical Podcast Laughs! The Data Centers of Loudoun County The Forks of Redis were Speedb AWS, I’d Like to Make a Return, Please See…Stateful Containers Are a Thing Azure Whispers Sweet Nothings to You I’m a Hip OG-DAD  Legacy Vendor plus Legacy Vendor = Profit $$ Wine Vendors >Legacy Vendors  I’m Not a Regular Dad, I’m an OG Dad A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  Follow Up 02:25  Microsoft Agreed to Pay Inflection $650 Million While Hiring Its Staff  Listener Note: Payway article  Last week, we talked about Microsoft hiring the Inflection Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman and their Chief scientist, as well as most of the 70-person staff.  Inflection had previously raised 1.5B, and so this all seemed strange as part of their shift to an AI Studio or a company that helps others train AI models.  Now, it has been revealed that Microsoft has agreed to pay a 620M dollar licensing fee, as well as 30M to waive any legal rights related to the mass hiring. As well as it renegotiated a $140M line of credit that aimed to help inflection finance its operations and pay for the MS services.  03:22 Justin – “…that explains the mystery that we talked about last week for those who were paying attention.” General News  05:17 Redis switches licenses, acquires Speedb to go beyond its core in-memory database  Redis, one of the popular in-memory data stores, is switching away from its Open Source Three-Clause BSD license.  Instead it is adopting a dual licensing model called the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public Licensing (SSPLv1).   Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis will need to enter into a commercial agreement with Redis. The first company to do so was Microsoft.  Redis also announced the acquisition of Speedb (speedy-bee) to take it beyond the in memory space.  This isn’t the first time that Redis has changed the licensing model.  In 2018 and 2019, it changed the way it licensed Redis Models under the Redis Source Available License v1. 

Welcome to episode 252 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are talking about InfluxDB, collabs between AWS and NVIDIA, some personnel changes over at Microsoft, Amazon Timestream, and so much more! Sit back and enjoy – and make sure to hang around for the aftershow, where Linux and DBOS are on the docket. You won’t want to miss it.  Titles we almost went with this week: Light a fire under your Big Queries with Spark procedures All your NVIDIA GPU belong to AWS Thanks, EU for Free Data Transfer for all* Microsoft, Inflection, Mufasta, Scar… this is not the Lion King Sequel I expected The Cloud Pod sees Inflections in the Timestream The Cloud Pod is a palindrome The Cloudpod loves SQL so much we made a OS out of it Lets run SQL on Kubernetes on Top of DBOS. What could go wrong? The Cloud Pod is 5 7 5 long A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. Please. We’re not above begging. Ok. Maybe Ryan is. But the rest of us? Absolutely not.  AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All Its Money) 1:00 PSYCH! We’re giving this segment a break this week. YOU’RE WELCOME.  AWS 01:08 Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model is now available on Amazon Bedrock  Last week Claude 3 Sonnet was available on Bedrock, this week Claude 3 Haiku is available on Bedrock.   The Haiku model is the fastest and most compact mode of the Claude 3 family, designed for near-instant responsiveness and seamless generative AI experiences that mimic human interaction.  We assume, thanks to how much Amazon is stretching this out, that next week we’ll get Opus.  Want to check it out for yourself? Head over to the Bedrock console.  02:02 Jonathan – “I haven’t tried Haiku, but I’ve played with Sonnet a lot for pre over the past week. It’s very good. It’s much better conversationally. I mean, I’m not talking about technical things. It’s like I ask all kinds of random philosophical questions or whatever, just to kind of explore what it can do, what it knows…If I was going to spend money on OpenAI or Anthropic, it would be on Anthropic right now.” 04:03 AWS Pi Day 2024: Use your data to power generative AI 3.14 just passed us by last week, and Amazon was back with a live steam on Twitch where they explored AWS storage from data lakes to High Performance Storage, and how to transform your data strategy to become the starting point for Generative AI.  As always they announced several new storage features in honor of

Welcome to episode 251 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re looking at the potential end of low impact code thanks to generative AI, how and why Kubernetes is still hanging on, and Cloudflare’s new defensive AI project. Plus we take on the death of Project Titan in our aftershow.  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod is Magic Why is the Cloud Pod Not on the Board of the Director for OpenAI The Cloud Pod wants Gen AI Money The Cloud Pod Thinks Magic Networks Are Less Fun Than Magic Mushrooms The Cloud Pod is Mission Critical so Give Us Your Money and Sponsor Us A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  Follow-Up 00:50  Kubernetes Predictions Were Wrong — Redux Last week Ryan and Justin talked about why Kubernetes hasn’t disappeared into the background during our after show, and now with Matt and Jonathan here I wanted to see if they had any additional thoughts.   If you missed this two weeks ago, it’s probably because you don’t know that there are regular after shows after the final bumper of the show… typically about non-cloud things or things that generally interest our hosts. There is one today about the death of the Apple Car.  To summarize the conversation, ChatGPT has provided us with a sort of CliffsNotes version.  Ryan and Justin speculated on the reasons why Kubernetes (K8) persisted despite predictions of its decline: Global Pandemic Impact: They acknowledged the global pandemic that unfolded since 2020 and considered its potential influence on Kubernetes. The pandemic might have shifted priorities and accelerated digital transformation efforts, leading to increased reliance on Kubernetes for managing cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Organizations might have intensified their focus on scalable and resilient technologies like Kubernetes to adapt to remote work environments and changing market dynamics. Unforeseen Complexity: Despite expectations for a simpler alternative to emerge, Kubernetes has grown more complex over time. The ecosystem around Kubernetes has expanded significantly, with various platforms, services, and tools built on top of it. This complexity may have made it challenging for organizations to migrate away from Kubernetes, as they have heavily invested in its ecosystem and expertise. Critical Role in Scalability: Kubernetes remains a fundamental technology for platform engineering teams seeking to achieve scalability and standardization in their operations. Creating a standardized, opinionated path for Kubernetes within organizations enables them to streamline deployment processes, manage resources efficiently, and support the growing demands of modern applications. This critical role in scaling infrastructure and applications might have contributed to Kubernetes’ enduring relevance. Absence of Clear Alternatives: Despite predictions, no single service or platform has emerged as a clear, universally adopted alternative to Kubernetes. While other solutions exist, such as Tanzu, OpenShift, and others mentioned, none have achieved the same level of adoption or provided a compelling reason for orga