Welcome to episode 282 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are happy to be joining you in the clouds versus watching election information. This week we’re talking nuclear energy, AI Search tools, and all things Pre:Invent. Welcome, and thanks for joining us!

• The Cloud Pod Would Much Rather Record This Show Than Watch the Election Results
• IBM Comes for Your AI Dollars
• AWS Goes Limitless with the PostgreSQL Possibilities
• It is Upon Us the Pre-Invent Period and AWS Does Not Disappoint
• Amazon Loses Its Nuclear Superhero

01:13 Energy regulators scrutinizing data center use reject Amazon bid

• Late Friday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a proposal that would have allowed an Amazon data center to co-locate with an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
• The commission voted it down 2-1
• FERC chairman Willie Phillips said that the commission should encourage the development of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing as national security and economic development priorities.
• Commissioners Mark Christie and Lindsay See (both R) voted to reject the proposal, while Davis Rosner and Judy Change (D) didn’t vote.
• Talen Energy, who signed the agreement, drew challenges from neighboring utilities AEP and Exelon – who challenged the novel arrangement, arguing it would unfairly shift costs of running the broader grid to other consumers.
• FERC’s order found the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, failed to show why the proposal was necessary and prove such a deal would be limited to the Susquehanna plant given the widespread interest in placing data centers next to power plants.
• Talen said the ruling would have a chilling effect on the region’s economic development and it is weighing its options.
• Will see what happens with Microsoft/Constellation energies plan to restart 3-Mile Island.

3:21 Justin – “It’s sort of sad because I kind like the idea of nuclear power to solve a bunch of problems, but it has to be done in the right way for sure.”

04:12 IT’S EARNINGS TIME!

04:22 IBM revenue misses, but execs say AI will drive future growth

• • This week, we have an additional company we don’t typically talk about… but IBM kicked off this quarter’s earning seasons which indicated that the AI dividend has yet to pay off for big infrastructure players.
  • Earnings were 2.30 a share, excluding non-recurring items, and were eight cents better than consensus estimates.
  • Although rev...

Welcome to episode 281 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are your hosts as we search the clouds for all the latest news and info. This week we’re talking about ECS turning 10 (yes, we were there when it was announced, and yes, we’re old,) some more drama from the CrowdStrike fiasco, lots of updates to GitHub, plus more. Join us!

• Github Universe full of ECS containers
• Github Universe lives up to the Universal expectations

01:09 Dr. Matt Woods ended up at PWC as chief innovation officer

• YAWN
• What exactly does a chief innovation officer at PWC do? Is this like a semi-retirement?

01:44 TSA silent on CrowdStrike’s claim Delta skipped required security update

• Delta isn’t backing down with CrowdStrike, and in a court filing said CrowdStrike should be on the hook for the entire $500M in losses, partly because CrowdStrike has admitted that it should have done more testing and staggered deployments to catch bugs.
• Delta further alleges that CrowdStrike postured as a certified best-in-class security provider who “never cuts corners,” while secretly designing its software to bypass Microsoft security certifications to make changes at the core of Delta’s computer systems without Delta’s knowledge.
• Delta says they would never have agreed to such a dangerous process if it had been disclosed.
• In its testimony to Congress, CrowdStrike said that they follow standard protocols, and that they are protecting against threats as they evolve.
• CrowdStrike is also accusing Delta of failing to follow laws, including best practices established by the TSA.
• According to CrowdStrike, most customers were up within a day of the issue – while Delta took 5 days.
• Crowdstrike alleges that this was caused by Delta’s negligence in following the TSA requirements designed to ensure that no major airline ever experiences prolonged system outages.
• CrowdStrike realized Delta failed to follow the requirements when its efforts to help remediate the issue revealed alleged technological shortcomings and failures to follow security best practices, including outdated IT systems, issues in Delta’s AD environment and thousands of compromised passwords.
• Delta threatened to sue Microsoft as well as CrowdStrike, but has only named CrowdStrike to date in the lawsuits.

3:48 Ryan – “It’s a tool that needs to evolve very quickly to emerging threats. And while the change that was pushed through shouldn’t have gone through that particular workflow, and that’s a mistake, I do think that that should exist as part of it. Yes, could they have done better with documentation and all that? Of course.”

04:51 Google is a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for...

Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.

• The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power
• I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood.
• I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power
• Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either
• We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power
• Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right
• Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL

00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

• Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).
• Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.
• Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.
• Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability.
• Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dragging or zooming.
• The idea is to make Claude complete individual tasks, without always needing to leverage an API, like clicking in a GUI, or uploading a file from a computer. These types of solutions are typically found in Build and Test like scenarios with tools such as Saucelabs or Browserstack.
• To do this, Claude was built to perceive and interact with computer interfaces. You can use data from my computer to fill out this online form or check a spreadsheet, move the cursor to a web browser, navigate to the relevant web pages, select the data for the spreadsheet and so on.

3:06 Jonathan – “If you can take pictures of the screen, then it can identify where buttons and things are without having to know the name of the objects in the DOM and stuff like that. So you could say, give me instructions, click on this, click on this, click on this, do this stuff. It would be really easy to automate tests that way instead of having to know the names of the divs and things on a page, especially for web testing. Because if a developer changes those, the...

Welcome to episode 279 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your guide through the Cloud. We’re talking about everything from BigQuery to Google Nuclear pow, and everything in between! Welcome to episode 279!

• AWS SKYNET (Q) now controls the supply chain
• AWS Supply Chain: Where skynet meets your shopping list
• Digital Ocean follows Azure with the Premium everything
• EKS mounts S3
• GCP now a nuclear
• Big query don’t hit that iceberg
• Big Query Yells: “ICEBERG AHEAD”
• The Cloud Pod: Now with 50% more meltdown protection
• The Cloud Pod radiates excitement over Google’s nuclear deal

00:46 OpenAI’s Newest Possible Threat: Ex-CTO Murati

• Apologies listeners – paywall article.
• Given the recent departure of Ex-CTO Mira Murati from OpenAI, we speculated that she might be starting something new…and the rumors are rumorin’.
• Rumors have been running wild since her last day on October 4th, with several people reporting that there has been a lot of churn.
• Speculation is that Murati may join former Open AI VP Bret Zoph at his new startup.
• It may be easy to steal some people, as the research organization at Open AI is reportedly in upheaval after Liam Fedus’s promotion to lead post-training – several researchers have asked to switch teams.
• In addition, Ilya Sutskever, an Open AI co-founder and former chief scientist, also has a new startup.
• We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this particular soap opera.

2:00 Jonathan – “I kind wonder what will these other startups bring that’s different than what OpenAI are doing or Anthropic or anybody else. mean, they’re all going to be taking the same training data sets because that’s what’s available. It’s not like they’re going to invent some data from somewhere else and have an edge. I mean, I guess they could do different things like be mindful about licensing.”

4:41 Introducing New 48vCPU and 60vCPU Optimized Premium Droplets on DigitalOcean

• Those raindrops are getting pretty heavy as Digital Ocean announces their new 48vCPU Memory and storage optimized premium droplets, and 60vcpu general purpose and CPU optimized premium droplets.
• Droplets are DO’s Linux-based virtual machines.
• Premium Optimized Droplets are dedicated CPU instances with access to the full hyperthread, as well as 10GBps of outbound data transfer.
• The 48vCPU boxes have 384GB of memory, and the 60vCPU boxes have 160gb.

6:02 Justin – “I’ve been watching the CloudPod hosting bill slowly creep up over the years as we get more and more data into S3 and we have logs that we store and things like that for the website. And I have other websites that I host there too. it originally started on DigitalOcean and it was a very flat rate for that VM that I need. You start sort of thinking like, maybe Amazon is great for this use ca...

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!

• Another One Bites the Dust
• Peak AI reached: OpenAI Now Puts Print Statements in Code to Help You Debug

There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there. But only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3 year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you don’t use all the cloud resources you’ve committed to, they will literally put money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “commitment insurance”, but remember to ask: will you actually give me my money back? Archera will. Click this link to check them out

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

• OpenAI has announced the integration of vision capabilities into its fine-tuning API, allowing developers to enhance the GPT-4o model to analyze and interpret images alongside text and audio inputs.
• This update broadens the scope of applications for AI, enabling more multimodal interactions.
• The fine-tuning API now supports image inputs, which means developers can train models to understand and generate content based on visual data in conjunction with text and audio.
• After October 31, 2024, training for fine-tuning will cost $25 per 1 million tokens, with inference priced at $3.75 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.
• Images are tokenized based on size before pricing. The introduction of prompt caching and other efficiency measures could lower the operational costs for businesses deploying AI solutions.
• The API is also being enhanced to include features like epoch-based checkpoint creation, a comparative playground for model evaluation, and integration with third-party platforms like Weights and Biases for detailed fine-tuning data management.
• What does it mean? Admit it – you’re dying to know.
• Developers can now create applications that not only process text or voice but also interpret and generate responses based on visual cues, and importantly fine tuned for domain specific applications, and this update could lead to more intuitive user interfaces in applications, where users can interact with services using images as naturally as they do with text or speech, potentially expanding the user base to those less tech-savvy or in fields where visual data is crucial.

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

• OpenAI has launched its Realtime API in public beta, d...

​Welcome to episode 277 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts this week for a news packed show. This week we dive into the latest in cloud computing with announcements from Google’s new AI search tools, Meta’s open-sourced AI models, and Microsoft Copilot’s expanded capabilities. We’ve also got Oracle releases, and some non-liquid Java on the agenda (but also the liquid kind, too) and Class E IP addresses. Plus, be sure to stay tuned for the aftershow!

Which cloud provider does not have llama 3.2

Vmware says we will happily help you support your old Microsoft OS’s for $$$$

Class E is the best kind of IP Space

Microsoft says trust AI, and so does Skynet

3.2 Llama’s walked into an AI bar…

Google gets cranky about MS Licensing, join the club

Write Your Prompts, Optimize them with Vertex Prompts Analyzer, rinse repeat into a

vortex of optimization

Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod Uses Amazon Corretto 23 instead

Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod still says run! MK

01:06 OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, 2 other execs announce they’re leaving

• Listener Note: paywall article
• OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is leaving, and within hours, two more OpenAI executives joined the list of high-profile departures.
• Mira Murati spent 6.5 years at the company, and was named CEO temporarily when the board ousted co-founder Sam Altman.
• “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” Altman wrote. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but most of all, I feel personal gratitude towards her for her support and love during all the hard times. I am excited for what she’ll do next.”
• Mira oversaw the development of ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E. She was also a pretty public face for the company, appearing in its videos and interviewing journalists.
• The other two departures were Barret Zoph, who was the company’s Vice President of Research and Chief Research officer Bob McGrew.

02:26 Ryan – “Her reason for leaving is, you know, to take some time and space to explore and, you know, be more creative. I’m like, yeah, okay. they’re starting copy. Yeah. Yeah. Leaving for health reasons. You got fired.”

-Copywriter Note: this is 100% copywriter speak for you either got fired – or will be soon and decide to step down.

03:38

Welcome to episode 276 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, our hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan do a speedrun of OpenWorld news, talk about energy needs and the totally not controversial decision to reopen 3 Mile Island, a “managed” exodus from cloud, and Kubernetes news. As well as Amazon’s RTO we are calling “Elastic Commute”. All this and more, right now on The Cloud Pod.

• The Cloud Pod Hosts don’t own enough pants for five days a week
• IBM thinks it can contain the cost of K8s
• Microsoft loves nuclear energy
• The Cloudpod tries to give Oracle some love and still does not care
• The cloud pod goes nuclear on k8s costs
• Can IBM contain the costs of Kubernetes and Nuclear Power?
• Google takes on take over while microsoft takes on nuclear
• AWS Launches ‘Managed Exodus’: Streamline Your Talent Drain
• Introducing Amazon WorkForce Alienation: Scale Your Employee Discontent to the Cloud
• Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: Now with Real-Time Resignation Prediction

01:08 IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost

• IBM is quickly becoming the place where cloud cost companies go to assimilate? Or Die? Rebirthed mabe? Either way, it’s not a great place to end up.
• On Tuesday they announced the acquisition of Kubecost, a FinOps startup that helps teams monitor and optimize their K8 clusters, with a focus on efficiency – and ultimately cost.
• This acquisition follows the acquisitions of Apptio, Turbonomic, and Instana over the years.
• Kubecost is the company behind OpenCost; a vendor-neutral open source project that forms part of the core Kubecost commercial offering.
  • OpenCost is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundations cohort of sandbox projects.
• Kubecost is expected to be integrated into IBM’s FinOps Suite, which combines Cloudability and Turbonomic.
  • There is also speculation that it might make its way to OpenShift, too.

02:26 Jsutin- “…so KubeCost lives inside of Kubernetes, and basically has the ability to see how much CPU, how much memory they’re using, then calculate basically the price of the EC2 broken down into the different pods and services.”

05:03 Introducing OpenAI o1-preview

• Reasoning LLM’s have arrived this week. Dun Dun Dun…
• The idea behind reasoning models is to take more time to “think” before they respond to you.
• This allows them to reason through complex tasks. and solve harder problems than previous mod...

Welcome to episode 275 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are awake and ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud news, including SQream, a new partnership between OCI and AWS (yes, really) Azure Linux, and a lot of updates over at AWS. Get comfy and we’ll see you all in the cloud!

• I SQream, You SQream, The CloudPod SQreams for AI Ice Cream
• AWS East gets Stability, but only for AI.
• AWS has some Lofty Goals
• Claude Learns BigQuery
• Azure now Securely Checks the Prompts from the cloud pod
• Azure find out about Linux

00:28 Stability AI’s best image generating models now in Amazon Bedrock

• If you are like The CloudPod hosts, the part you care most about AI is the rapid ability to create graphics for any meme-worthy moment or funny pictures for that group chat.
• Luckily AWS has access to the latest image generation capability with 3 models from Stability AI.
  • Stable Image Ultra – Produces the highest quality, photorealistic outputs perfect for professional print media and large format applications. Stable image Ultra excels at rendering exceptional detail and realism.
  • Stable diffusion 3 large – strikes a balance between generation speed and output quality. Ideal for creating high-volume, high-quality digital assets for websites, newsletters and marketing materials.
  • Stable Image Core – Optimized for fast and affordable image generation, great for rapidly iterating on concepts during ideation.

• One of the key improvements of Stable Image Ultra and Stable Diffusion 3 large compared to Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) is text quality in generated images, with fewer errors in spelling and typography thanks to innovation diffusion transformer architecture, which implements two separate sets of weights for image and text but enables information flow between the two modalities.

02:46 Justin – “I do notice more and more that, you get it, you get the typical product shot on Amazon, but then like they’ll insert the product into different backgrounds and scenes. Like, it’s a, it’s a lamp and all of a sudden it’s on a thing and they’re like, Hmm, that doesn’t look like a real photo though. It looks like AI. So you do notice it more and more.”

04:13 AWS Network Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout AWS Gateway Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout

• We see you Amazon – trying to get two press releases for basically the same thing, not today sir!
  • Both the AWS Network Load Balancer and Gateway Load Balancer have received a configurable TCP Idle timeout.
• AWS Network load balancer had a fixed value of 350 seconds, which could cause TCP handshake retries for long-lived traffic flows of some apps and add latency.
• Now you can configure it between 60 seconds and 6000 seconds, with the default remain...