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! 

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

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

5:54 Matthew – “Just think about how much time you’ll have left in your life when you don’t actually have to attend the meetings. You train a model, you fine-tune it based on Ryan’s level of sassiness and how crabby he is that day. And you just put in the meeting so you can actually do work.”

09:58  Introducing Canvas 

11:18 Jonathan – “I got my Pixel 9 phone, which comes with Gemini Pro for the year. And I noticed a shift kind of in the way AI is kind of being integrated with things. used to be, do you me to write the message for you? They’ve moved away from that now, I think, there’s a little pushback against that. People want to feel like they’re still authentic. So now instead, once you’ve finished writing the message, it’s like, would you like us to refine this for you? Like, yes, please, make it sound more professional.”

13:01 AWS Announces AWS re:Post Agent, a Generative AI-powered virtual assistant

14:06 Maintain access and consider alternatives for Amazon Monitron

15:11 Jonathan – “That’s a weird one, because I think they talked about this on stage at re.Invent a few years ago. It was a whole big industrial IoT thing. We have these devices that monitor the unique vibrations from each machine, and we can tell weeks in advance if some part’s going to fail or not. So it’s kind of weird that they’re killing it, but I guess the functionality can be built with other primitives that they have, and it doesn’t need to be its own service.”

17:05 Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports BYOIP and BYOASN in all AWS Local Zones

18:19 Amazon EC2 now supports Optimize CPUs post instance launch

18:53 Ryan – “Yeah, this is one of those things where it’s a giant pain if you have to completely relaunch your instance. Or when you’re trying to upscale your instance to a new instance type to get more memory or what have you, and having that completely reset. so then not only are you trying to scale this, probably to avoid an outage, now it’s taking twice as long because you’re going to do a thing. So this is one of those really beneficial features that no one will ever mention again.”

21:36 Amazon WorkSpaces now supports file transfer between WorkSpaces sessions and local devices 

22:07 Jonathan – “So they re-implement RDP, they take out the feature, then they add it again, and then they give you a switch, which everyone’s going to switch on to stop you from using it. That’s fantastic.”

22:17 Matthew – “But they can check the box now saying it exists, which means they’ll pass some RFP. So now they’re more likely to be able to be considered.”

25:30 Introducing Valkey 8.0 on Memorystore: unmatched performance and fully open-source

26:53 Ryan – “ …when you see this type of change, but you know, especially right after a license kerfuffle, right? That, you know, because Valkey to come into existence. Like it’s kind of like, wow, the power of open search is really there. And now, why wasn’t this, you know, part of  the Redis thing, it’s because people weren’t going through it, you know, when it was that license. So it’s kind of a good thing in a lot of sense.”

29:56 Understand your Cloud Storage footprint with AI-powered queries and insights 

31:42 Ryan – “…it’s insights into your storage data. There’s performance tiers, the ability to migrate it to lower performance tier for cost savings. There’s the insights on the access model and insecure sort of attack vectors that you could have. Like if it’s a publicly exposed bucket and it has excessive permissions or it has sensitive content in it, it’ll sort of provide that level of insight.”

32:51 Announcing the General Availability of Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm 

35:33 Announcing the public preview of the new Azure FXv2-series Virtual Machines

37:00 Ryan – “…you can deploy these where you these VMs where you get a 21 to one ratio of memory to PCP. Yeah, it’s cool. So while they do go out, they tell their best suited for balance and compute intensive workloads. But if you read further down the post, they get to the real answer, which is this is purpose built to address several requirements for Microsoft SQL Server, which totally makes sense.”

38:42 General Availability: Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs

39:19 Jonathan – “How weird though. The point of a confidential VM is that it has one hole that you put something in. It does some magic work on it and then spits an answer out, but you don’t get to see the sausage being made inside. the fact that they’re selling this for training or inference is really interesting.”

42:08 What’s new in FinOps toolkit 0.5 – August 2024

47:11 GPT-4o-Realtime-Preview with audio and speech capabilities 

And that is the week in the cloud! Visit our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloudPod