May 24, 2023

213: The Cloud Pod Sings a Duet About AI

1 hour 11 minutes

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week. Join us as we discuss all things cloud, AI, the upcoming Google AI Conference, AWS Console, and Duet AI for Google cloud.

Titles we almost went with this week:

You can finally lock yourself out of the AWS Console!

Google IO delivers the AI… hopefully soon to be renamed Google AI Conference

Azure announces major MySQL upgrade!

Azure can now update mysql without taking itself offline

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:10 – Terraform is in the news!

Terraform Cloud updates plans with an enhanced Free tier and more flexibility

A bunch of new updates are coming to Terraform Cloud

These update will provide access to **premium** features, up to 500 resources in the free tier

There are also new paid offerings for management capabilities, scaling currency, and enterprise support.

Consistent billing metrics based on managed resources, scaling concurrency, and enterprise support area available across all tiers. But let’s be honest – who needs consistent billing metrics? Half the fun is in the guessing!

New Features Include:

Premium security features such as SSO and Policy as Code on all tiers (yes, even the free ones for the poors like us.)

Make it “easy and frictionless” for smaller teams and organizations to get started with their first use cases.

And -finally- updated paid tiers provide easy upgrade paths for organizations as their usage scales, and they have more advanced use cases.

Consumer Advice Time! The updated pricing models include a “per resource” charge. That has the potential to get REAL messy over 500 devices.

Of course, it’s an option to stay on the legacy models, but the “carrots” – like SSO and Sentinel/OPA support – are pretty good, so you really just need to do a cost benefit analysis for your particular situation.

02:35 Ryan – “Yeah, I mean, the licensing for Terraform products for cloud and both enterprises always been rough, right? Like starting off per users for cloud makes sense. And at some point for enterprise, they had switched to per project, not users, because they figured out very quickly that what everyone did was just sort of link it together behind automation pane.”

04:48 ”Justin – the devil’s in the details of what they consider a resource, right? And it’s every single thing. I mean, 10 cents per EC2 instance, hmm. Like, yeah, I get 10 cents worth of value out of Terraform, not having to manually do that stuff. So, like, yeah, but then like you get into S3 buckets and like, I’m definitely not gonna get 10 cents of value out of an S3 bucket every month.”

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