F0r 1nstance Podcast

Sarbjeet and Sarah host the podcast live and in person for the first time!

AWS re:Invent packed a punch in the hyperscaler prize fight over GenerativeAI and the hearts and minds of customers. With a swath of announcements from enhancements to Bedrock to the HuggingFace partnership for Sagemaker to the unexpected and controversially named Q, AWS clearly meant to erase any doubt that they are a front-runner in AI. Were they successful? Sarah and Sarbjeet discuss.

In this special episode of F0r 1nstance, Sarbjeet and Sarah pour over the announcements at Microsoft Ignite, including new chips for AI and general purpose, the inescapable narrative around Copilot, reflections back to Google NEXT, and what it means for Microsoft's competitive position.

Sarah and Sarbjeet get witty in this eighth episode of the For Instance podcast in which they discuss the successful PR efforts of Microsoft, Google's disappointing quarter and if it has longer term implications, and AWS' modest growth. Also, get ready to hear about semiconductor earnings and the companies that supply silicon to the cloud providers with a vacuum analogy for good measure.

Sarbjeet and Sarah pay tribute to the unfolding situation in Israel. Musings about news coming from Microsoft about the Activision acquisition and potential alternative energy sources for the datacenter, also the Biden administration's position on exports of AI chips to China. Updates on Hashicorp and what it means for the enterprise. Sarbjeet rants about Congress, sparking a lively exchange, and Sarah reaches back into American history for context. Reflections on the Israeli tech community.

Sarah and Sarbjeet pack it in on this episode of F0r 1nstance with a very lively news cycle— from Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk and what it means for Cisco’s networking narrative, to AWS and Google’s courting of Anthropic, Microsoft’s AI chip with AMD and their hedging on OpenAI, Nvidia’s audacious Huang’s Law, and per usual… much more.

Somehow, the narrative in cloud computing is getting pulled back to semiconductors-- whether it's Oracle Exadata going to Azure with its hardware, Arm's IPO and its future, Intel's bid for relevance, Qualcomm's extended deal with Apple, or where and how you do ML inferencing. Sarah and Sarbjeet pack it in for this episode of F0r 1nstance!

Rolling into Episode 4, Sarah and Sarbjeet reflect on the Azure outage in Australia East, the EU's "gatekeeper" law and what that means for companies who do business on the app stores, BMW's big announcement with AWS, GPU performance and competition, and new earnings releases including jockeying in cloud security.

In this special episode of F0r 1nstance, Sarah and Sarbjeet delve through the major announcements from Google Cloud Next 2023 in San Francisco. Is Google Cloud on the right track, was their laser focus on AI too much or just right, and are they driving the right kind of attention for growth? Listen to find out.

Sarbjeet covers his experience at VMware Explore and VMware's positioning post-acquisition, Sarah highlights more news in the continuing slug fest in semiconductors, conjecture about the many suitors courting Hugging Face, and thoughts about the value and value[s] of Generative AI-- landing the third episode of F0r 1nstance.

Show notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tuflncafK03KB0XJ38tlv9FpzdxrJraq8z4o5vTsmuY/edit?pli=1

On this second episode of F0r 1nstance podcast, Sarbjeet and Sarah unpack further earnings releases (expected, unexpected, intriguing, and concerning), philosophize about what truly makes a hybrid cloud and what drives repatriation, and speculate about how AWS is pursuing revenue growth with Generative AI.