Welcome to episode 279 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your guide through the Cloud. We’re talking about everything from BigQuery to Google Nuclear pow, and everything in between! Welcome to episode 279!

• AWS SKYNET (Q) now controls the supply chain
• AWS Supply Chain: Where skynet meets your shopping list
• Digital Ocean follows Azure with the Premium everything
• EKS mounts S3
• GCP now a nuclear
• Big query don’t hit that iceberg
• Big Query Yells: “ICEBERG AHEAD”
• The Cloud Pod: Now with 50% more meltdown protection
• The Cloud Pod radiates excitement over Google’s nuclear deal

00:46 OpenAI’s Newest Possible Threat: Ex-CTO Murati

• Apologies listeners – paywall article.
• Given the recent departure of Ex-CTO Mira Murati from OpenAI, we speculated that she might be starting something new…and the rumors are rumorin’.
• Rumors have been running wild since her last day on October 4th, with several people reporting that there has been a lot of churn.
• Speculation is that Murati may join former Open AI VP Bret Zoph at his new startup.
• It may be easy to steal some people, as the research organization at Open AI is reportedly in upheaval after Liam Fedus’s promotion to lead post-training – several researchers have asked to switch teams.
• In addition, Ilya Sutskever, an Open AI co-founder and former chief scientist, also has a new startup.
• We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this particular soap opera.

2:00 Jonathan – “I kind wonder what will these other startups bring that’s different than what OpenAI are doing or Anthropic or anybody else. mean, they’re all going to be taking the same training data sets because that’s what’s available. It’s not like they’re going to invent some data from somewhere else and have an edge. I mean, I guess they could do different things like be mindful about licensing.”

4:41 Introducing New 48vCPU and 60vCPU Optimized Premium Droplets on DigitalOcean

• Those raindrops are getting pretty heavy as Digital Ocean announces their new 48vCPU Memory and storage optimized premium droplets, and 60vcpu general purpose and CPU optimized premium droplets.
• Droplets are DO’s Linux-based virtual machines.
• Premium Optimized Droplets are dedicated CPU instances with access to the full hyperthread, as well as 10GBps of outbound data transfer.
• The 48vCPU boxes have 384GB of memory, and the 60vCPU boxes have 160gb.

6:02 Justin – “I’ve been watching the CloudPod hosting bill slowly creep up over the years as we get more and more data into S3 and we have logs that we store and things like that for the website. And I have other websites that I host there too. it originally started on DigitalOcean and it was a very flat rate for that VM that I need. You start sort of thinking like, maybe Amazon is great for this use ca...

Welcome to episode 278 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! When Justin’s away, the guys will… maybe get a show recorded? This week, we’re talking OpenAI, another service scheduled for the grave over at AWS, saying goodbye to pesky IPv4 fees, Azure FXv2 VMs, Valkey 8.0 and so much more! Thanks for joining us, here in the cloud!

• Another One Bites the Dust
• Peak AI reached: OpenAI Now Puts Print Statements in Code to Help You Debug

There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there. But only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3 year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you don’t use all the cloud resources you’ve committed to, they will literally put money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “commitment insurance”, but remember to ask: will you actually give me my money back? Archera will. Click this link to check them out

00:59 Introducing vision to the fine-tuning API.

• OpenAI has announced the integration of vision capabilities into its fine-tuning API, allowing developers to enhance the GPT-4o model to analyze and interpret images alongside text and audio inputs.
• This update broadens the scope of applications for AI, enabling more multimodal interactions.
• The fine-tuning API now supports image inputs, which means developers can train models to understand and generate content based on visual data in conjunction with text and audio.
• After October 31, 2024, training for fine-tuning will cost $25 per 1 million tokens, with inference priced at $3.75 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.
• Images are tokenized based on size before pricing. The introduction of prompt caching and other efficiency measures could lower the operational costs for businesses deploying AI solutions.
• The API is also being enhanced to include features like epoch-based checkpoint creation, a comparative playground for model evaluation, and integration with third-party platforms like Weights and Biases for detailed fine-tuning data management.
• What does it mean? Admit it – you’re dying to know.
• Developers can now create applications that not only process text or voice but also interpret and generate responses based on visual cues, and importantly fine tuned for domain specific applications, and this update could lead to more intuitive user interfaces in applications, where users can interact with services using images as naturally as they do with text or speech, potentially expanding the user base to those less tech-savvy or in fields where visual data is crucial.

03:53 Jonathan – “I mean, I think it’s useful for things like quality assurance in manufacturing, for example. You know, could, you could tune it on what your nuts and bolts are supposed to look like and what a good bolt looks like and what a bad bolt looks like coming out of the factory. You just stream the video directly to, to an AI, AI like this and have it kick out all the bad ones. It’s kind of, kind of neat.”

04:41 Introducing the Realtime API

• OpenAI has launched its Realtime API in public beta, d...

​Welcome to episode 277 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts this week for a news packed show. This week we dive into the latest in cloud computing with announcements from Google’s new AI search tools, Meta’s open-sourced AI models, and Microsoft Copilot’s expanded capabilities. We’ve also got Oracle releases, and some non-liquid Java on the agenda (but also the liquid kind, too) and Class E IP addresses. Plus, be sure to stay tuned for the aftershow!

Which cloud provider does not have llama 3.2

Vmware says we will happily help you support your old Microsoft OS’s for $$$$

Class E is the best kind of IP Space

Microsoft says trust AI, and so does Skynet

3.2 Llama’s walked into an AI bar…

Google gets cranky about MS Licensing, join the club

Write Your Prompts, Optimize them with Vertex Prompts Analyzer, rinse repeat into a

vortex of optimization

Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod Uses Amazon Corretto 23 instead

Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod still says run! MK

01:06 OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, 2 other execs announce they’re leaving

• Listener Note: paywall article
• OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is leaving, and within hours, two more OpenAI executives joined the list of high-profile departures.
• Mira Murati spent 6.5 years at the company, and was named CEO temporarily when the board ousted co-founder Sam Altman.
• “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” Altman wrote. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but most of all, I feel personal gratitude towards her for her support and love during all the hard times. I am excited for what she’ll do next.”
• Mira oversaw the development of ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E. She was also a pretty public face for the company, appearing in its videos and interviewing journalists.
• The other two departures were Barret Zoph, who was the company’s Vice President of Research and Chief Research officer Bob McGrew.

02:26 Ryan – “Her reason for leaving is, you know, to take some time and space to explore and, you know, be more creative. I’m like, yeah, okay. they’re starting copy. Yeah. Yeah. Leaving for health reasons. You got fired.”

-Copywriter Note: this is 100% copywriter speak for you either got fired – or will be soon and decide to step down.

03:38

Welcome to episode 276 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, our hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan do a speedrun of OpenWorld news, talk about energy needs and the totally not controversial decision to reopen 3 Mile Island, a “managed” exodus from cloud, and Kubernetes news. As well as Amazon’s RTO we are calling “Elastic Commute”. All this and more, right now on The Cloud Pod.

• The Cloud Pod Hosts don’t own enough pants for five days a week
• IBM thinks it can contain the cost of K8s
• Microsoft loves nuclear energy
• The Cloudpod tries to give Oracle some love and still does not care
• The cloud pod goes nuclear on k8s costs
• Can IBM contain the costs of Kubernetes and Nuclear Power?
• Google takes on take over while microsoft takes on nuclear
• AWS Launches ‘Managed Exodus’: Streamline Your Talent Drain
• Introducing Amazon WorkForce Alienation: Scale Your Employee Discontent to the Cloud
• Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: Now with Real-Time Resignation Prediction

01:08 IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost

• IBM is quickly becoming the place where cloud cost companies go to assimilate? Or Die? Rebirthed mabe? Either way, it’s not a great place to end up.
• On Tuesday they announced the acquisition of Kubecost, a FinOps startup that helps teams monitor and optimize their K8 clusters, with a focus on efficiency – and ultimately cost.
• This acquisition follows the acquisitions of Apptio, Turbonomic, and Instana over the years.
• Kubecost is the company behind OpenCost; a vendor-neutral open source project that forms part of the core Kubecost commercial offering.
  • OpenCost is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundations cohort of sandbox projects.
• Kubecost is expected to be integrated into IBM’s FinOps Suite, which combines Cloudability and Turbonomic.
  • There is also speculation that it might make its way to OpenShift, too.

02:26 Jsutin- “…so KubeCost lives inside of Kubernetes, and basically has the ability to see how much CPU, how much memory they’re using, then calculate basically the price of the EC2 broken down into the different pods and services.”

05:03 Introducing OpenAI o1-preview

• Reasoning LLM’s have arrived this week. Dun Dun Dun…
• The idea behind reasoning models is to take more time to “think” before they respond to you.
• This allows them to reason through complex tasks. and solve harder problems than previous mod...

Welcome to episode 275 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are awake and ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud news, including SQream, a new partnership between OCI and AWS (yes, really) Azure Linux, and a lot of updates over at AWS. Get comfy and we’ll see you all in the cloud!

• I SQream, You SQream, The CloudPod SQreams for AI Ice Cream
• AWS East gets Stability, but only for AI.
• AWS has some Lofty Goals
• Claude Learns BigQuery
• Azure now Securely Checks the Prompts from the cloud pod
• Azure find out about Linux

00:28 Stability AI’s best image generating models now in Amazon Bedrock

• If you are like The CloudPod hosts, the part you care most about AI is the rapid ability to create graphics for any meme-worthy moment or funny pictures for that group chat.
• Luckily AWS has access to the latest image generation capability with 3 models from Stability AI.
  • Stable Image Ultra – Produces the highest quality, photorealistic outputs perfect for professional print media and large format applications. Stable image Ultra excels at rendering exceptional detail and realism.
  • Stable diffusion 3 large – strikes a balance between generation speed and output quality. Ideal for creating high-volume, high-quality digital assets for websites, newsletters and marketing materials.
  • Stable Image Core – Optimized for fast and affordable image generation, great for rapidly iterating on concepts during ideation.

• One of the key improvements of Stable Image Ultra and Stable Diffusion 3 large compared to Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) is text quality in generated images, with fewer errors in spelling and typography thanks to innovation diffusion transformer architecture, which implements two separate sets of weights for image and text but enables information flow between the two modalities.

02:46 Justin – “I do notice more and more that, you get it, you get the typical product shot on Amazon, but then like they’ll insert the product into different backgrounds and scenes. Like, it’s a, it’s a lamp and all of a sudden it’s on a thing and they’re like, Hmm, that doesn’t look like a real photo though. It looks like AI. So you do notice it more and more.”

04:13 AWS Network Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout AWS Gateway Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout

• We see you Amazon – trying to get two press releases for basically the same thing, not today sir!
  • Both the AWS Network Load Balancer and Gateway Load Balancer have received a configurable TCP Idle timeout.
• AWS Network load balancer had a fixed value of 350 seconds, which could cause TCP handshake retries for long-lived traffic flows of some apps and add latency.
• Now you can configure it between 60 seconds and 6000 seconds, with the default remain...

Welcome to episode 274 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we explore the world of SnapShots, Maia, Open Source, and VMware – just to name a few of the topics. And stay tuned for an installment of our continuing Cloud Journey Series to explore ways to decrease tech debt, all this week on The Cloud Pod.

• The Cloud Pod in Parallel Cluster
• The Cloud Pod cringes at managing 1000 aws accounts
• The Cloud Pod welcomes Imagen 3 with less Wokeness
• The Cloud Pod wants to be instantly snapshotted
• The Cloud pod hates tech debt

00:32 Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

• • Shay Banon is pleased to call ElasticSearch and Kibana “open source” again. He says everyone at Elastic is ecstatic to be open source again, it’s part of his and “Elastics DNA.”
  • They’re doing this by adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks.
  • They never stopped believing or behaving like an OSS company after they changed the license, but by being able to use the term open source and by using AGPL – an OSI approved license – removes any questions or fud people might have.
  • Shay says the change 3 years ago was because they had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing.
    • So, after trying all the other options, changing the license – all while knowing it would result in a fork with a different name – was the path they took.
  • While it was painful, they said it worked.
    • 3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their OpenSearch fork, the market confusion has mostly gone, and their partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.
    • They are even being named partner of the year with AWS.
  • They want to “make life of our users as simple as possible,” so if you’re ok with the ELv2 or the SSPL, then you can keep using that license. They aren’t removing anything, just giving you another option with AGPL.
  • He calls out trolls and people who will pick at this announcement, so they are attempting to address the trolls in advance.

• “Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”. We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.

• “AGPL is not true open source, license X is”: AGPL is an OSI approved license, and it’s a widely adopted one. For example, MongoDB used to be AGPL and Grafana is AGPL. It shows that AGPL doesn’t affect usage or popularity. We chose AGPL because we believe it’s the best way to start to pave a path, with OSI, towards more Open Source in the world, not less.”
• “Elastic change...

Welcome to episode 273 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Hold onto your butts – this week your hosts Justin, Ryan, Matthew and (eventually) Jonathan are bringing you two weeks worth of cloud and AI news. We’ve got Karpenter, Kubernetes, and Secrets, plus news from OpenAI, MFA changes that are going to be super fun for Matthew, and Azure Phi. Get comfy – it’s going to be a doozy!

• The Cloud Pod Teaches Azure-normalized Camel Casing
• The Cloud Pod Travels to Malaysia
• Azure Detaches Itself From its Own Scale Sets
• The Cloud Pod Conditionally Writes Show Notes
• You got MFA!
• The Cloud Pod Delays Deleting Itself
• The Cloud Pod is Now the Cloud Pod Podcast!

01:37 Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0 adds provider-defined functions

• Terraform is announcing the GA of Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0. The new version improves the extensibility and flexibility in the provider.
• Since the Providers’ Last major release in March 2022, Hashi has added support for some 340 resources and 120 data sources, bringing the total Azure resources to 1,101 resources and almost 360 data sources.
• The provider has topped 660M downloads, MS and Hashi continue to develop new, innovative integrations that further ease the cloud adoption journey to enterprise organizations.
• With Terraform 1.8, providers can implement custom functions that you can call from the Terraform configuration. The new provider adds two Azure-specific provider functions to let users correct the casing of their resource IDs or access the individual components of it.
• Previously, the Azure RM provider took an all-or-nothing approach to Azure resource provider registration, where the Terraform provider would either attempt to register a fixed set of 68 providers upon initialization or registration or be skipped.
• This didn’t match Microsoft’s recommendations, which are to register resource providers only as needed, and to enable the services you’re actively using.
• With adding two new feature flags, resource_provider_registrations and resource_providers_to_register, users now have more control over which providers to register automatically or whether to continue managing a subscription resources provider.
• AzureRM has removed a number of deprecated items, and it is recommended that you look at the removed resources/data sources and the 4.0 upgrade guide.

03:50 Justin – “Okay, so it doesn’t have anything really to do with Terraform. It has to do with Azure and enabling and disabling resource types that they can monkey with, basically, wi...

Welcome to episode 272 of The Cloud Pod! This week, Matthew and Justin are bringing you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including new updates to the ongoing Crowdstrike drama, JSON schemas, AWS vaults, and IPv6 addresses – even some hacking opportunities! All this and more, this week in the cloud.

• The cloud pod is now logically air-gapped
• The Cloud Pod has continuous snark
• The Cloud Pod points the finger at delta
• AI now with JSON SCHEMAS!!!

00:35 Crowdstrike RCA

• The final RCA is out from Crowdstrike, and as we talked during the preliminary report, this was an issue with a channel file that had 21 input parameters. No update previously had more than 20, and it was not caught in earlier testing.
• Crowdstrike has several findings, and mitigating actions that they are taking. They go into detail on each of them, and you can read through all of them at the linked document.

02:31 Justin – “…the one thing I would say is this would be a perfect RCA if it included a timeline, but it lacks, it lacks a timeline view.”

12:06 Justin – “…their mitigations don’t have any dates on them of when they’re going to be done or implemented, which, in addition to a timeline, it would be nice to see in this process.”

15:46 Microsoft joins CrowdStrike in pushing IT outage recovery responsibility

back to Delta

• Microsoft has joined Crowdstrike in throwing Delta under the bus.
• Delta Airlines has been blaming Crowdstrike and MS for their recent IT woes, which the company claims cost them over $500 million.
• Microsoft says “Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or for its pilots and flight attendants” Mark Cheffo from law firm Dechert representing MS.
• Gonna get ugly before this all gets settled. *Insert Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif here*

16:43 Justin – “The struggle with, you know, offering to send someone on site to help you is, you know, you, you can’t vet them that quickly. And so you also have an obligation to your shareholders. You have obligations to your security controls and your SOC and ISO and all the things that you’re doing, you know, to, to allow some strangers into your network and then give them access required to fix this issue, which in some cases required you to provide local encryption keys, and local administrator passwords, like you’re, you’re basically saying, you know, here’s the keys. Cause we’re in a, you know, everything’s in crisis and we’re going to throw security out the window to allow these people to come in and touch my environment to get us back up and running. I could see, I can see the argument both ways.”