Welcome to episode 286 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the final show of 2024! We thank you for joining us on our cloud journey over the past year. During this last show of the year, we look back on all the tech that changed our jobs and lives, and make predictions for an AI filled 2025. Join Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew as they look forward to even more discussions about undersea cables. Happy New Year!

• We thought 2024 would never end
• I can sum up 2024 – AI AI AI AI and uhh AI
• AI has taken over the Cloud Pod – we are not really here
• 2024 the year we hoped AI would replace us… close but not yet

Matt

• Simpler and Easier to access LLM with new services
• Kubernetes will become simpler for smaller companies to operate that doesn’t require Highly Paid Devops/Scientists
• Low Employee Churn Rates and increased Tenure (Quiet Quitting)

02:07 Matthew – “How is it simpler and easier? I think that there are more ways to run it. The general public has an easier way to access it. And they are simpler as Justin said that they are becoming easier and more efficient and better to use for the average user. So I know that I talked to many people that I work with now and just in general and people that are not in tech, which I feel like a year ago.”

Jonathan

• There will be mass layoffs in tech directly attributed to AI in Q1 2024 (10k or more)
• Someone will start a cult that follows an AI LLM God believing in sentience, a higher power.
• AI will find a new home in education. Lesson Plans, Personalized Learning plans by students, etc.

02:07 Jonathan – “Well, there is a religion called the First Church of Artificial Intelligence, but it’s been around for longer than this year. I think it’s like five, six years old at this point. So that’s kind of cheating.

Ryan

• Start seeing the financial impact of AI to better profitability by using AI.
• AI Solution tied towards new employee onboarding (replace wiki technology)
• Removal of stateful firewalls as traffic ruleset (next-gen next-gen firewall)

02:07 Ryan – “I mean, agentic AI is something that’s been rolled out in a lot of companies. I know in my day job, it’s been rolled out. I hope to see this get even stronger and more obvious just because I think that, you know, the days of searching through thousands of documents or the one, you know, unmaintained team page that someone built three years ago when they were new are over. And so I’d like to see this continue.

Justin

1. LLM will hit the trough of disillusionment either on Cost, Environmental impact or people realizing how limited these models are
2. Another AI model other than Transformer based
3. We will see another large defector from Public Cloud (not 37 Signals or X/Twitter)

13:26 Justin – “I feel partially vindicated that I was sort of right, just I thought we didn’t be in the trough a little faster, but maybe it’s coming still. I don’t know. they’re innovating pretty quickly. I don’t think they’ll get there, but definitely environmental is going to become a big, big conversation around AI.”

Did you remember that Gemini wasn’t a thing in 2023? It feels like it’s been around forever. 2024 saw some serious jumps forward in tech and innovation, as well as a lot o...

Welcome to episode 285 of the Explain it to me Like I’m 5 Podcast, formerly known as The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a lot of news this week, including the last of our coverage from re:Invent, ChatGTP Pro, FPGA, and even some major staffing turnovers.

• Throw $200 dollars in a fire with ChatGPT Pro
• Jeff Barr is wrapped up by Agentic AI
• The Tribble with Trilliums
• The Wind in the Quantum Willows
• Rise of the dead instances FPGA and PowerPC
• Jeff Barr is replaced by Nova
• The Cloud Pod: Return of the dead instances types
• After 6 year Jeff Barr hands over the reigns to the CloudPod
• For our 6th birthday Jeff barr Retires
• For our 6th birthday jeff barr delegates announcements to the cloud pod
• 6 years of meaningless PR drivel
• 6 years of cloud news and we still don’t know what Quantum computing is

HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY!

2:00 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Security Lifecycle Management with AWS

• Hashi is a big sponsor of re:Invent, so of course they had some news of their own to release.
• HCP Vault Secrets auto-rotation is now generally available.
• Dynamic secrets are generally available via HCP Vault Secrets.
• Secrets sync will help keep your secrets synced with AWS Secrets Manager. It still appears to be one direction, but you can now also view secrets in AWS Secrets Manager that are managed by vault.
• HCP Vault Radar, now in beta, automates the detection and identification of unmanaged secrets in your code, including AWS infrastructure configurations

03:10 Matthew – “This qualifies under the category of things that I feel like we talked about so long ago, I just already assumed was GA. I’m surprised that it wasn’t.”

03:34 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Infrastructure Lifecycle Management with AWS

• Terraform AWS provider is now at 3 billion downloads.
• The AWS Cloud Control Provider is also now generally available with the 1.0 release.
• This is the provider built around AWS Cloud Control API to bring new services to Hashicorp Terraform faster.
• In June, AWS and Hashi partnered to

Welcome to episode 284 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Everybody is in the house this week, and it’s a good thing because since we’ve last recorded re:Invent happened, and we have a LOT to talk about. So let’s jump right in!

• Amazon Steals from Azure…. We Are Doomed
• The Cloud Pod Can Now Throw Away a lot of Code
• The Cloud Pod Controls the Future
• The Cloud Pod Observes More Insights
• We Are Simplicity
• X None of the Above
• Stop Trying to Make Bedrock & Q Happen
• My Head Went SuperNova over all the Q Announcements
• These are Not the Gadgets Bond Needed, Q!

08:12 It’s the re:Invent recap!

Did you make any announcement predictions? Let’s see how our hosts’ predictions stacked up to reality.

Matt – 1

• Large Green Computing Reinvent
• LLM at the Edge
• Something new on S3

Ryan (AI) – 1

• Improved serverless observability tools
• Expansion of AI Driven workflows in datalakes
• Greater Focus on Multi-Account or Multi-region orchestration, centralized compliance management, or enhanced security services

Jonathan – 0

1. New Edge Computing Capabilities better global application deployment type features. (Cloudflare competitor maybe)
2. New automated cost optimization tools
3. Automated RAG/vector to S3

Justin – 2

1. 1. Managed Backstage or platform like service

• New LLM multi-modal replacement or upgrade to Titan

1. Competitor VM offering to Broadcom

Honorable Mentions:

Jonathan:

Deeper integration between serverless and container services

New region

Enhanced Observability with AI driven debugging tool

Justin:

Multicloud management – in a bigger way (Anthos competitor)

Agentic AI toolings

New ARM graviton chip

How many will AI or Artificial Intelligence be said: 45

Justin – 35

Jonathan – 72

Pre:Invent

There were over 180 announcements, and yes – we have them all listed here for you. You’re welcome.

17:12 Time-based snapshot copy for Amazon EBS

• Now you can specify a desired completion duration, from 15 minutes to 48 hours when you copy an Amazon EBS snapshot within or between Amazon regions or accounts.
• This will allow you to meet your time-based compliance and business requirements for critical workloads, mostly around DR capabilities.
• We’re just glad to see this one finally, because having it built in directly to the console to guarantee that EBS snapshots make it to the other region is a big quality of life enhancement.

Announcing future-dated Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations

Introducing a new experience for AWS Systems Manager

Intro...