The summer lull has us reflecting on how the evolution of cloud computing has shaped the existing era that’s trying to figure out AI. With a special guest introduction. 

SHOW: 848

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #848 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

WE HAVE A SPECIAL GUEST LEADING OFF THE SHOW - AFTER 13 YEARS

WHAT PARTS OF THE CLOUD EVOLUTION HAVE LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR TODAY?

1. [BAD] Shadow IT set Enterprise IT back 5-10 years, with the same responsibilities
2. [GOOD] Technology experimentation has become the norm, from technologists to business leaders. 
3. [BAD] We still don’t really know how to measure the cost or return (ROI) of technology spending.
4. [GOOD] We have a new appreciation for the power of software and software development to change businesses and markets.
5. [BAD] But we still haven’t figured how to normalize great software development
6. [GOOD] Open source communities (e.g. CNCF, etc.) provided a blueprint for bringing new innovation to the marketplace
7. [BAD] We saw how long it took for Cloud to be disruptive, but now that valuations are so high, we haven’t learned patience for new disruptions.
8. [GOOD] The “cloud” way of doing things has laid the foundation for what might/will come next. 

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Scott Jarnagin (Founder/CEO of Caddis Cloud Solutions (Caddis Cloud Solutions)) talks about the challenges of building modern data centers to handle the growing demands of AI.

SHOW: 847

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #847 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:  http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS" 

SHOW NOTES:

• Caddis Cloud Solutions (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we jump into Caddis Cloud, let’s talk a little bit about your background and then what led you to start  the company.

Topic 2 - Let’s begin by looking at the bigger picture intersection of today’s data centers and the growing demand for AI capabilities. How much of a change will current data centers have to go through to be able to support AI at any sort of scale?

Topic 3 - How are cloud providers, hosting companies and enterprises evolving to meet the increased demands driven by AI and other high-intensity computing processes?

Topic 4 - How would you typically advise an enterprise to think about matching the AI needs to the current and future capabilities of the market? How do they make sure their AI plans aren’t going to get sidetracked with the wrong datacenter/cloud choice?

Topic 5 - Are there elements of government development/involvement for datacenter expansion that companies should be aware of as they make future plans around AI?

Topic 6 - How frameworks does Caddis Cloud typically use to help guide companies that are looking at near-term and long-term data center plans

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They may not be major stories, but these 5 headlines will play an important role in how AI and the Cloud evolve in the 2H of 2024. 

SHOW: 846

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #846 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• VCs are looking to get out (Business Insider)
• Microsoft earnings (31%), Google earnings (29%), Amazon earnings (19%) - QtoQ earnings for the hyperscalers

THE ECONOMY WILL BE THE STORY OF 2H 2024 DUE TO THE US ELECTIONS

BUT WILL ANY OF THESE OTHER STORIES GET THE ATTENTION THEY DESERVE?

1. Are VCs going to be out on AI startups?
2. Will tech antitrust discussions become prominent in the US elections? 
3. When will we start seeing all the early-2024 AI demos turn into reality?
4. How much are the hyperscale cloud earnings boosted by AI spend vs. usage?
5. Will any alternatives to VMware start to show progress in displacing the virtualization leader?

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Brian Gracely (@bgracely), Aaron Delp (@aarondelp)  and Brandon Whichard (@bwhicard) discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from July 2024.

SHOW: 845

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #845 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES: 

• LINKS TO ALL ARTICLES FOR JULY  2024 CLOUD NEWS

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 
• Trend 1 - What do you tend to do (at work, or outside work) when things seem overly bad in lots of areas? 
• Trend 2 - Are people starting to feel like AI is more sizzle (hype) than steak (reality)?
• Trend 3 - As you’re looking at 2HCY24 now, with all the things that happened in July, are you expecting anything new/different than you thought a couple months ago? 
• Trend 4 - Are we likely to be in “wait and see” mode for the rest of the year, with all the political uncertainty?  

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For many years, Silicon Valley was considered to be somewhat apolitical. But the last decade has changed the relationship with governments. What’s causing the changes? 

SHOW: 844

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #844 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

SHOW NOTES:

• It’s Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Valley (NY Times)
• VCs for Kamala
• The Little Tech Agenda: Why We Support Trump (a16z)
• BG2 Podcast - Silicon Valley’s Political 180

SHOW NOTES:

TECHNOLOGY IS A CRITICAL DRIVER OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

• VCs are becoming more visible and vocal in their political agendas
• Billionaires have the wealth, power and influence of nation states
• European and APAC tech policy are more defined than US

DOES GROWTH ALLOW YOU TO AVOID RESPONSIBILITY OR ACCOUNTABILITY?

• Has there been an “unwritten” agreement between WashDC and Silicon Valley?
• Crypto is not just another technology
• Issues: Antitrust, Taxes, Future of AI, etc.

FEEDBACK?

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Jeff Denworth, (@JeffDenworth, Co-Founder of @VAST_Data) talks about building data platforms for new AI application demands.

SHOW: 843

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #843 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:  http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

SHOW NOTES:

• VAST Data (homepage)
• Understanding AI IO performance (whitepaper)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we jump into VAST Data, let’s talk a little bit about your background and then what led you to start  the company.

Topic 2 - As we talk about datacenter or cloud architectures, right now GPUs are king. This is causing a complete rethinking of data center architectures. But what is this doing to the storage side of the equation?

Topic 3 - To a certain extent (in the context of AI), GPUs are this massive change from CPUs in that cost almost isn’t considered because of the great fear of falling behind in AI model building/usage. But storage has always been a performance+price discussion. Does that discussion still exist when companies must choose all-flash storage to keep up with GPU IO demands?

Topic 4 - We’ve obviously seen a lot of new innovation around GenAI models over the last couple years, but what have you seen from Enterprise companies in terms of real adoption, AI use-cases, etc?

Topic 5 - How are you finding Enterprise companies balancing the current requirements around infrastructure modernization (maybe driven by new VMware licensing, etc.) with AI demands?

Topic 6 - Do you find that data platform teams are having to make many adjustments to their environments or skills, especially since all-flash technology has been around for at least a decade?

FEEDBACK?

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If this past week’s Crowdstrike outage taught us anything, it’s that we seem to have forgotten the basics of how to run highly available environments. But what other critical skills are deteriorating? 

SHOW: 842

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #842 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• The Crowdstrike outage and market-driven brittleness
• Network Engineering is a Dying Profession
• Vista Equity writes off Pluralsight after $3.5B buyout

SHOW NOTES:

WE’RE ALWAYS LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

• Systems are more interconnected and more critical
• Companies under-staff critical operations
• Developers are the new kingmakers, but where are all the kings?

PEOPLE DON’T IGNORE STABLE FOUNDATIONS, THEY FORGET ABOUT THEM

• Not enough people have home labs, or go after certifications
• The industry highlights the content creators, instead of the builders/fixers
• There might be an opportunity to restart a focus on foundational skills

FEEDBACK?

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Scott Stephenson (@deepgramscott, CEO of @deepgram) talks about building Voice AI into your applications.

SHOW: 841

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #841 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:  http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SPONSOR NOTES:

• Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

SHOW NOTES:

• Deepgram (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we jump into Deepgram and Voice AI, let’s talk a little bit about your background and then what led you to start the company.

Topic 2 - Let’s start by stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. Many of us have interacted with voice technologies, from Siri to Alexa to various call-center “agents”. From a maturity perspective, where are we in terms of voice-centric interactions with computing systems?

Topic 3 - When businesses think about including computer-aided voice-centric interactions to their applications, what’s the typical thought process for where it makes sense to the business, how it represents their brand, etc.?

Topic 4 - How does Deepgram bring Voice AI to applications? What do developers have to think about when adding Voice AI to an existing application, or to think about building a voice-centric application from the start?

Topic 5 - What are some of the most common use-cases when Voice AI adds new value to the application? What areas are starting to push the edges of possible?

Topic 6 - How do companies usually go about collecting user-feedback about the voice-centric interactions?

Topic 7 - If you look forward a year or two, where do you see Voice AI types of technologies evolving?

 FEEDBACK?

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Modern applications require modern platforms and team collaboration to deliver velocity, stability and security. So how do we overcome the hurdles to making platform adoption work? 

SHOW: 840

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #840 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Panoptica, Cisco’s Cloud Application Security solution

SHOW NOTES:

WHY DO PLATFORMS MAKE SENSE FOR MODERN APPLICATIONS?

• Reduce the cognitive load on application teams
• Deliver self-service capabilities where it makes sense
• Deliver consistent services across teams, with efficient operations
• Reduce costs, reduce snowflakes, etc.

WHAT ARE THE PLATFORM HURDLES, AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM?

• The jump from initial projects to scalable delivery across apps and teams
• Application teams wanting snowflake environments
• Buying and budgeting centers not aligning to platform delivery
• Getting application team buy-in to platform services
• Getting cross-functional team alignment and coordination
• Balancing stability and pace of innovation

FEEDBACK?

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2024 has been evolving very quickly for Cloud and AI. So as we get to the mid-year point, we stop and answer many of your mailbag questions. 

SHOW: 839

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #839 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• Amazon acqui-hiring - Adept.io
• Inflection
• Amazon building ChatGPT Competitor
• https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-wooed-wall-street-overhauled-bloated-tech-giant-2024-7
• The InfraRed Report

MAILBAG QUESTIONS:

Topic 1 - At this stage of the GenAI era, obviously the “picks and shovels” are winning (e.g. NVIDIA). But beyond that, are there obvious winners and losers, or areas that look more promising?

Topic 2 - In the near-term or long-term, do you think there will be big differentiation in the LLM models, or do they eventually commoditized?

Topic 3 - There is some talk that Amazon (&/or) AWS are behind in GenAI, but obviously they are ahead with cloud. Do you think GenAI offerings will be enough to get companies to move clouds, or will it just be another cloud workload and companies already use multiple clouds?

Topic 4 - Do you have any thoughts about how GenAI (or any AI) will impact IT architectural thinking over the next couple of years?

Topic 5 - Do you think the recent rounds of layoffs, or slow downs in hiring, will have a big impact on IT organizations?

Topic 6 - What happens if GenAI doesn’t turn out to be as successful as so many people are forecasting? What happens to all the other potential technology innovations while that plays out?

Topic 7 - If you were advising someone on a tech career choice in 2024, what type of guidance would you give someone?

Topic 8 - DevOps had a long run as “the IT cultural change” for a while. Do you see any of the other tech/culture trends starting to get more popular (FinOps, Platform Engineering, MLOps, etc.)?

FEEDBACK?

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