The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, Jonathan, Ryan, and Justin are trying to keep cool in new WorkSpaces Pools, avoiding the Heatwave with Oracle’s new LLM,  taking a look at AWS Jamba (hold the straw) and taking a look at the ever elusive Cloud Maturity. 

All this news and more, this week on The Cloud Pod! 

01:03 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2024: Cloud Maturity is Elusive but Valuable

03:22 Jonathan – “The skill shortage thing really bugs me sometimes because there are plenty of skilled workers around and the reccs aren’t open for them. So I don’t think there aren’t qualified staff… yeah, it’s not a shortage because of the lack of people. It’s a shortage because we’re not prepared to spend the money on the people.”

08:24 Terraform AWS provider tops 3 billion downloads

08:40 Ryan – “To be fair, about a billion of those downloads are me trying to figure out which version I need. Do I switch between Brew Link or some other tool to trick my operating system into doing the right thing?”

09:13 Announcing the General Availability of Databricks Assistant and AI-Generated Comments

12:35 Amazon WorkSpaces Pools: Cost-effective, non-persistent virtual desktops

Each user gets the same applications and the same experience. When they login they always get a fresh workspace thats based on the latest configuration for the pool, centrally managed by their administrator. 

If you enable application setting persistence for the pool, users can configure certain applications settings such as browser favorites, plugins and UI customizations to persist. You can also access persistent files or object storage external to the desktop. 

Persistent: 2 VCPU, 8GB of memory, 45.00 per month 

Pool: $148 dollars for 720 hours.  

More reasonable: 20 days a month for 8 hours a day.  $36.19

Make sure you scale it, and make sure you do your maths. 

14:03 Jonathan – “There was a time when the API for workspaces was absolutely terrible or missing. So the fact that they’ve called it out in the blog post is good news.”

14:19 Amazon WorkSpaces introduces support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 

17:54 Introducing end-to-end data lineage (preview) visualization in Amazon DataZone

19:16 Jonathan – “It’s just a chain of custody for data instead of a physical object. So you kind of attach metadata to the data to say where it came from. And every time you do something to it, you record in a log that you did something to it, especially in data science, where we’re enriching things or transforming things or cleaning out some types of records or whatever. It’s just a way of keeping track of who’s changed what since it came from where it came from. If stuff goes wrong in the future, you know where it went wrong.”

20:35 Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports GitLab and Bitbucket repositories, with blueprints and Amazon Q feature development

22:16 Ryan – “Yeah, standardization in general is fantastic for this. And it’s so much easier to navigate lots of many, many separate little repos when you know how they’re organized, you know what’s supposed to be where. And it really removes a lot of the need for as much documentation because of that too. And what documentation you do need, you can include in the blueprint or at least the templates.”

23:22 AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct model now available in Amazon Bedrock

24:45 Jonathan – “You can get Jamba for free, I think, from Hugging Face. It’s a good model though, and it’s a lot more efficient. It’s significantly more efficient than other LLMs that are around. It uses a hybrid algorithm, hybrid model. So you’ve got the kind of traditional LLM generator, and then you’ve got this new thing called Mamba, which is like a selective attention thing.”

27:34 Optimizing Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for speed and scale

31:25 Justin – “I was thinking about the, you know, the fact that using 128 bit ID to check some, to rent the cross talk and to basically identify the multiplex streams going across the packet. And I was just thinking about how many, how many combinations there are in 64 bit IP space. And then like thinking about what that means at 128 bit ID, I was like, wow, that’s some processing.”

32:55  Making Vertex AI the most enterprise-ready generative AI platform

37:36 Justin – “I think about the coffee use case, right? So the retail point of sale gives you details like, hey, the coffee was sold to Ryan, but then when they gave it to him and it was made wrong and they had to then go remake it, like that’s not that the POS typically doesn’t capture where potentially the video stuff can do that. So you could, there’s all kinds of interesting use cases of how you can start to improve churn in your product margin. You can start helping for training baristas like Hey This barista made 12 coffees today that had to get remade. You know, there’s something wrong. Do we need to retrain them on something? So, it’s maybe a little nanny state -ish, but I also could see how some of these things could benefit some organizations that need to be very cost effective.”

39:58 New Cloud KMS Autokey can help encrypt your resources quickly and efficiently

41:16 Ryan – “Implementation will be key on this one, right? Cause it’s, it’s the difference between, they’ve created a wizard that creates KMS keys or they’ve really, you know, taken stuff, manual toil that, you know, this is probably not the biggest problem, right? But also it just reduces it. And, you know, and also it’s from my perspective, having worked with keys for a long time, I might be more familiar with these practices where someone who’s just learning about these, like it’s great way to kind of learn how to manage these things when it’s sort of automated as part of the backend.”

43:20 Google Cloud expands grounding capabilities on Vertex AI

44:12 Justin – “Wouldn’t it be nice to talk about like a new storage thing or anything but AI?”

45:12 Google Cloud Marketplace now lets customers buy ISV solutions from channel partners

46:07 Ryan – “So it’s like, I still want to pay you, but I also want that to count against my cloud commit.

47:25 Gemma 2 is now available to researchers and developers

49:39 Announcing expanded Sensitive Data Protection for Cloud Storage

50:15 Ryan – “Wow! I just, yeah, I’ve always just assumed that this was available. In fact, like, you know, it’s recently been in talks trying to use this. And so glad they announced this. Yeah, this would have been terrible.”

50:37 Capacity Planner now displays GPU usage and forecasts of the GPU’s in your Google Cloud project or organization. 

51:19 How hollow core fiber is accelerating AI

54:46 Oracle Announces Industry First In-Database LLMs and an Automated In-Database Vector Store with HeatWave GenAI

56:43 Jonathan – “It’s like copilot. It’s our copilot, isn’t it?”

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 #theCloud Pod

Welcome to episode 248 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s the return of our Cloud Journey Series! Plus, today we’re talking shared VPCs and why you should avoid them, Amazon’s new data centers ( we think they forgot about the sustainability pledge,) new threats to and from AI, and a quick preview of Next ‘24 programs – plus much more! 

01:24 Disrupting malicious uses of AI by state-affiliated threat actors

03:59  Ryan – “I do like that all these state-sponsored actors, they’re just like us, asking basic scripting questions.”

06:46 Announcing the Data Solutions Framework on AWS

17:43   Ryan – “…none of the things in this are new, but it’s the packaging of it all together, where you just sort of – with a few simple lines of SDK code – really have the full infrastructure for a full DataLake. And so, it’s super cool, because this is always what, as a customer, you’re sort of wanting, like give me the easy button.”

10:25 API Gateway now supports TLS 1.3 

10:45   Justin- “I assume this is also a prerequisite for them to be able to support mutual TLS on API Gateway, which would be probably the last big feature I think they’re missing on the API Gateway.”

11:36   Matthew – “…the one piece of it I don’t like is that they didn’t do it, which makes sense across the board on all the different flavors of API gateway, but that’s because CloudFront would need to actually handle 1.3 also. So I get why they’re slowly rolling it out, but you know, just doing a regional means someone’s going to go in there and try to do it on global and not understand why. And then you’re going to go bang your head on the wall until you really sit down and figure out, oh yeah, this is actually a CloudFront API gateway under the hood.”

12:40 Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring protects clusters running in shared VPC

13:57   Ryan – “I mean, even I’m glad they’re fixing this with GuardDuty. I hope that they’re not implementing too much complexity on the backend, making it either very complicated to run or changing the results. But like, today I learned that previously you couldn’t run GuardDuty and inspect those workloads, right? And so I’m sure that GuardDuty is one of many.”

18:18 One of Oregon’s smallest utilities is suddenly among the state’s biggest polluters. Why? Amazon data centers 

22:13   Matthew – “There was a podcast I listened to at one point where saying there’s a lot of these green initiatives. Everybody wants to do it. The problem comes down to the way all this works is like it has to come down to like transmission lines. And like, if you say, I’m going to build a wind farm over here, you got to pay for all the infrastructure after that to trans to do it. So you end up like, Hey, this 50,000, this hundred thousand dollar project now, it costs you a million dollars. You got to redo it. So like, it almost feels like we have to look at the way we kind of handle our electrical grid to support these. So a simple wind farm over here doesn’t end up costing billions of dollars.”

23:43  Google Cloud expands access to Gemini models for Vertex AI customers

25:29   Ryan – “This is moving way too fast for me. Like, Gemini 1.0 Pro used something like 32,000 tokens, right? Or maxed out at that? I can’t. I think that’s it. And now they’re scaling up to a million, like a week later, like it feels like. Like it’s crazy. You’re going to be able to run this against so many things.”

27:13 Feel the Next ‘24 love: Full session library is now live

33:21 Introducing vector search in BigQuery       

35:15   Justin- “I definitely see the advantage of it. Like, you know, I, my trick is I just like, I select SQL server row one. And if that’s the data I want, then I assume that row two is also similar to it. That’s how I do it. It’s not really the right way to do it. Yeah. There’s a wildcard. I just, yeah. Select all put it in an elastic search cluster, do a search, see what I come up with. All kinds of, all kinds of ways to solve this problem.”

35:40 Introducing Managed Instance Groups standby pool: Stop and suspend idle VMs

36:23   Matthew – “So this is the AWS auto scaling cold or whatever they called it, which is like a server that you can have on the side that like you can just boot up. And the only reason I ever saw to use this feature, was if you were auto scaling or MIG scaling in this case, I guess, Windows servers, just because they take so long to boot up. Because Windows…It was a nice feature. We set this up for one person at one point and it did dramatically help it, you know, Windows by default, I think it takes like 15 minutes to boot up. So just having the server there and essentially stopping it off hours; kind of lets you do fake auto scaling without actually doing auto scaling. So you’re stopping/starting servers. It’s a significant savings.”

37:54 Microsoft to invest $2.1B in Spain to expand AI and cloud infrastructure 

38:31   Justin – “I mean, if I were to be a betting man, they’re all trying to get ahead of the EU data center moratorium because they can only build for so long before they hit the moratorium limit. Because they also have power transmission problems in Europe, if you didn’t know.”

40:00 General Availability: Azure NetApp Files Standard Network Features – Edit Volumes

42:22   Matthew – “I just feel like it’s kind of also the way Azure is, is security and reliability. You always have to go to the higher tiers, which just drives me a little bit crazy. Like it’s not built in day one whereas with AWS, I feel like, you know, their motto is designed for failure. So like most of the managed services are by default and you don’t have an option. Like you can’t launch a load balancer without two subnets. You can’t launch, you know, your database without multiple subnets; they’re just there where Azure feels like you always have to think about it. I’m like, I don’t want to think about it. This is why I’m paying for a service – do it for me.”

50:35 Five key things to consider when building a cloud FinOps team 

52:17   Matthew – “…make sure you have executive buy in probably you’re starting this whole fin op started because your CFO is freaking out about the bill, but you know, making sure that not just the CFO, you know, your CTO and other organization members all agreed. This is something you’re going to do so you don’t have one side of the house fighting the other and you’re sitting there in the middle just going cool. We’re here.”

57:35   Ryan – “…it’s super fun to watch that transformation happen, from taking a dev team who hasn’t had any visibility into their costs to the initial stages of bewilderment of why is everything expensive, to actually making architecture choices based off of cost-driven data. And it’s not always comfortable, but almost every team that I’ve seen do that transformation, they’re excited by the end, right? It’s not like, oh, I had to do this and they’re jaded about it. And so like, it is one of those things where it allows some really cool decisions and it’s, you know, when you have the visibility, when you have that insight and, you know, like I said, access is clear and transparency is part of your culture.

And that is the week in the cloud! Just a reminder – if you’re interested in joining us as a sponsor, let us know! Check out 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 #theCloud Pod

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all here this week to discuss the latest news and announcements in the world of cloud and AI – including New Relic Grok, Athena Provisioned Capacity from AWS, and updates to the Azure Virtual Desktop.

None! This week’s title was SO GOOD we didn’t bother with any alternates. Sometimes it’s just like that, you know? 

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.

01:27 – Quick reminder – Finops X Foundation Conference is almost here! 

02:47 New Relic is back on the pod – and they’ve got something new 

04:28 Jonathan – “It’s funny they called out specifically the DevSecOps, though, as a team that needed this kind of assistance.”

04:40 Justin – “Well, I mean, I think DevSecOps as a practice is really still pretty immature. I think the DevOps movement was a little bit more active because it was also the time we were doing web scale. We were doing a bunch of things. And so there was a lot more momentum behind DevOps.”

8:10 Introducing Athena Provisioned Capacity

10:30 Jonathan – “$100 is pretty easy to reach with Athena…I think I’d kind of like to find a middle ground where you can just literally set a maximum maximum concurrency for Athena without paying for provision capacity upfront to say, okay, don’t let me spend more than this, but I still want to use it from the serverless pool.”

12:28 Justin – “I can see how this makes a lot of sense in a SaaS app, especially one that’s potentially querying different data sources that aren’t owned by a company, because what would prevent you from embedding a thing into your product? Customer goes and points it at their S3 bucket has 25 petabytes of data in it and runs this tool and gets data out of it, but now all of a sudden you have a bill that’s very large based on all that data consumption that could be probably problematic.”

14:25 – AWS Compute Optimizer identifies and filters Microsoft SQL Server workloads

14:52Justin – “When they say ML here, I assume they mean we had a regex that basically said, oh, hey, your EC2 instance is using a Microsoft with SQL Server license included, **or** that it’s an EC2 instance that potentially has an inbound port on port 1433, which would be Microsoft SQL Server. So I’m not really sure how much ML is actually there. But it’s a nice idea.”

16:09 Ryan – “I really did just read this as optimizers just no longer going to target Microsoft SQL workloads. It’s just going to exclude them from any optimization.”

17:06 It’s EXTREMELY important for all of you to know that Google’s #1 priority is optimizing your costs. Let’s just get that out of the way first thing. 

18:49 Cloud Storage FUSE and CSI driver now available for GKE

20:36 Ryan “This is another thing that’s going to blow up in my face when you make me run SQL servers on Kubernetes.”

22:45 Justin – “So if any of our listeners have done SQL Server on Kubernetes at any level of scale and either failed horribly or were successful, I’d love to hear from you.”

(Jonathan would like to request that everyone only send their horror stories.)

24:17 – New Azure Virtual Desktop features to answer our customers’ top needs

26:10Justin – “Every screenshot you get has Microsoft Azure in the background, so everyone knows you’re using Azure.”

30:52 Next up, for those of you who like to burn money using firewalls on Azure, they now support the virtual WAN with their first SaaS offering

27:55Matt – “This is the opposite of cloud native.”

27:57Ryan – “Well, it’s at least not a virtual device, plugged into your network and just sort of duct taped to the outside saying ‘look, security!’ You know, so if you’re going to use Palo Alto for these services, and maybe you’ve already got a whole bunch of investment for an on-prem work site; like at least this is a path forward that I can do. It’s got some scalability. I’m hoping it’s got a deep integration that’s beyond the virtualization presentation layer.”

33:50 Ryan – “ These infrastructure focused teams are were becoming platform teams, whether they knew it or not, right? Cause that’s how complex the business has become, and how fast things need to move. That’s really the only answer. You’re gonna have too many customers to sort of just run infrastructure in a traditional way.”

34:27Jonathan – “I think those SLAs are the important thing for me because there’s always the assumption if you’re an infrastructure team or operations team that you’ll provide 100% uptime, you’ll always be on call, you’ll always jump on the current need of the day. And I think the move to the mindset that actually we’re building platforms and development teams are our customers sort of helps formalize the idea that actually this is a service and we do have an SLA and you are a customer and we have to take your needs into consideration, but also the needs of the rest of the business.”

38:09 Jonathan – “I think even having a product manager for the platform itself would be interesting because typically that’s a very customer-facing role in the business’s customers, rather than internal customer-facing role. I think the person who takes on that role would probably have to be somebody who’s very familiar with the platform itself.”

46:34 Justin – “Definitely check it out. If you’re looking to build a platform team or you’re running a cloud platform team that is trying to move to DevOps and DevSecOps, and make your team better, this is a great article for food for thought and to kind of get you thinking in the right direction about IT as a service.”

Next week on the Cloud Pod Podcast…

And that is the week in the cloud, we would like to thank our sponsors Foghorn Consulting. Check out our website, the home of The Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at thecloudpod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #thecloudpod

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the new AWS Melbourne Region in Australia, the layoff of employees by Microsoft and Google, the mutually beneficial expansion of the partnership between AWS and Stripe, as well as the role of security and GRC in the CCOE.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Top Quotes  

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team rediscovers who Ryan is after an eternity (a secret agent). Plus AWS Fargate now delivers faster scaling of applications; new features for Oracle Support Rewards; and Google Cloud Optimization AI: Cloud Fleet Routing API from GCP.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Top Quotes  

⚡ There’s not much of a move this week, with the scores standing at Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2), Peter (1)

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

Microsoft events – TBD Check for status

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is in the doghouse and he’s been suspended (with full pay). Plus, we’re comfortably numb with AWS Cloud NGFW, GCP suspends hosts for big savings, and Azure is once again shutting the Front Door on us. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Top Quotes  

⚡ Peter finally levels up, making the scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (1).

April 6th – Data Cloud Summit

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

April 12th – Paris

April 20th-21st – San Francisco 

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team heads down a Cisco business model rabbithole. Plus cloud status pages struggle with reality, AWS is tracking carbon footprints, and Microsoft sees serious security business growth with Defender. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Top Quotes  

“Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it’s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can’t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There’re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something’s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don’t think they’re trying to mislead anybody.”

“They’re so strong in other areas, I think it’s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you’re really good at and just keep doing it better.”

⚡ With Ryan absent this week, Justin jumps ahead, but Peter’s still flagging behind, rendering the scores Justin (3), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

On The Cloud Pod this week, we’re back to a full house (at least for one episode.) Plus, introducing AWS open-source Cloud Map, GCP announces new Bigtable autoscale feature, and Oracle gives us a retro tour of a data center.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Top Quotes  

⚡ Jonathan gets the point this week, equalizing with Ryan and Justin, and leaving poor Peter in the dust, with the scores standing at Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Justin and Jonathan kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he’s been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can’t move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap.   

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

⚡ Justin takes the win and this week’s point with an easy dig at information security, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (3), Jonathan (6). 

 Things Coming Up