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 coul

Welcome to episode 274 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we explore the world of SnapShots, Maia, Open Source, and VMware – just to name a few of the topics. And stay tuned for an installment of our continuing Cloud Journey Series to explore ways to decrease tech debt, all this week on The Cloud Pod.

• The Cloud Pod in Parallel Cluster
• The Cloud Pod cringes at managing 1000 aws accounts
• The Cloud Pod welcomes Imagen 3 with less Wokeness
• The Cloud Pod wants to be instantly snapshotted
• The Cloud pod hates tech debt

00:32 Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

• • Shay Banon is pleased to call ElasticSearch and Kibana “open source” again. He says everyone at Elastic is ecstatic to be open source again, it’s part of his and “Elastics DNA.”
  • They’re doing this by adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks.
  • They never stopped believing or behaving like an OSS company after they changed the license, but by being able to use the term open source and by using AGPL – an OSI approved license – removes any questions or fud people might have.
  • Shay says the change 3 years ago was because they had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing.
    • So, after trying all the other options, changing the license – all while knowing it would result in a fork with a different name – was the path they took.
  • While it was painful, they said it worked.
    • 3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their OpenSearch fork, the market confusion has mostly gone, and their partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.
    • They are even being named partner of the year with AWS.
  • They want to “make life of our users as simple as possible,” so if you’re ok with the ELv2 or the SSPL, then you can keep using that license. They aren’t removing anything, just giving you another option with AGPL.
  • He calls out trolls and people who will pick at this announcement, so they are attempting to address the trolls in advance.

• “Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”. We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.

• “AGPL is not true open source, license X is”: AGPL is an OSI approved license, and it’s a widely adopted one. For example, MongoDB used to be AGPL and Grafana is

Welcome to episode 273 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Hold onto your butts – this week your hosts Justin, Ryan, Matthew and (eventually) Jonathan are bringing you two weeks worth of cloud and AI news. We’ve got Karpenter, Kubernetes, and Secrets, plus news from OpenAI, MFA changes that are going to be super fun for Matthew, and Azure Phi. Get comfy – it’s going to be a doozy!

• The Cloud Pod Teaches Azure-normalized Camel Casing
• The Cloud Pod Travels to Malaysia
• Azure Detaches Itself From its Own Scale Sets
• The Cloud Pod Conditionally Writes Show Notes
• You got MFA!
• The Cloud Pod Delays Deleting Itself
• The Cloud Pod is Now the Cloud Pod Podcast!

01:37 Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0 adds provider-defined functions

• Terraform is announcing the GA of Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0. The new version improves the extensibility and flexibility in the provider.
• Since the Providers’ Last major release in March 2022, Hashi has added support for some 340 resources and 120 data sources, bringing the total Azure resources to 1,101 resources and almost 360 data sources.
• The provider has topped 660M downloads, MS and Hashi continue to develop new, innovative integrations that further ease the cloud adoption journey to enterprise organizations.
• With Terraform 1.8, providers can implement custom functions that you can call from the Terraform configuration. The new provider adds two Azure-specific provider functions to let users correct the casing of their resource IDs or access the individual components of it.
• Previously, the Azure RM provider took an all-or-nothing approach to Azure resource provider registration, where the Terraform provider would either attempt to register a fixed set of 68 providers upon initialization or registration or be skipped.
• This didn’t match Microsoft’s recommendations, which are to register resource providers only as needed, and to enable the services you’re actively using.
• With adding two new feature flags, resource_provider_registrations and resource_providers_to_register, users now have more control over which providers to register automatically or whether to continue managing a subscription resources provider.
• AzureRM has removed a number of deprecated items, and it is recommended that you look at the removed resources/data sources and the 4.0 upgrade guide.

03:50 Justin – “Okay, so it

Welcome to episode 272 of The Cloud Pod! This week, Matthew and Justin are bringing you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including new updates to the ongoing Crowdstrike drama, JSON schemas, AWS vaults, and IPv6 addresses – even some hacking opportunities! All this and more, this week in the cloud.

• The cloud pod is now logically air-gapped
• The Cloud Pod has continuous snark
• The Cloud Pod points the finger at delta
• AI now with JSON SCHEMAS!!!

00:35 Crowdstrike RCA

• The final RCA is out from Crowdstrike, and as we talked during the preliminary report, this was an issue with a channel file that had 21 input parameters. No update previously had more than 20, and it was not caught in earlier testing.
• Crowdstrike has several findings, and mitigating actions that they are taking. They go into detail on each of them, and you can read through all of them at the linked document.

02:31 Justin – “…the one thing I would say is this would be a perfect RCA if it included a timeline, but it lacks, it lacks a timeline view.”

12:06 Justin – “…their mitigations don’t have any dates on them of when they’re going to be done or implemented, which, in addition to a timeline, it would be nice to see in this process.”

15:46 Microsoft joins CrowdStrike in pushing IT outage recovery responsibility

back to Delta

• Microsoft has joined Crowdstrike in throwing Delta under the bus.
• Delta Airlines has been blaming Crowdstrike and MS for their recent IT woes, which the company claims cost them over $500 million.
• Microsoft says “Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or for its pilots and flight attendants” Mark Cheffo from law firm Dechert representing MS.
• Gonna get ugly before this all gets settled. *Insert Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif here*

16:43 Justin – “The struggle with, you know, offering to send someone on site to help you is, you know, you, you can’t vet them that quickly. And so you also have an obligation to your shareholders. You have obligations to your security controls and your SOC and ISO and all the things that you’re doing, you know, to, to allow some strangers into your network and then give them access required to fix this issue, which in some cases required you to provide local encryption keys, and local administrator passwords, like you’re, you’re basically saying, you know, here’s the keys. Cause we’re in a, you know, everything’s in crisis and we’re going to th

Welcome to episode 271 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your hosts today as we discuss the latest news in cloud and AI, including earnings reports, Google’s legal trouble, and SQL updates. We even take a minute to give some side eye to AWS’s deprioritization techniques. Spoiler alert: 0 out of 5 stars for keeping customers informed.

• No Google, you can’t own Park Place, Boardwalk, the railroads and the utilities
• Amazons Titan Image Generator is no titan of photography
• BigTable graduates to SQL support
• TikTok/Instagram, Azure Reliability and Temu bring down the big three clouds’ earnings
• Span your Mind to Graphs & Vectors
• DOJ rules The Cloud Pod should be your default news source
• The CloudPod – now with SQL support
• AWS Deprioritizes 7 Services, Cloud Pod Hosts Prioritize Therapy

00:45 Amazon decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services caught customers and

even some salespeople by surprise

• Jeff Barr confirmed on Twitter (Yes will always call it Twitter) after recording last week’s episode that they had made the tough decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services.
• There is still no official blog post announcing this, beyond the confirmation from Jeff Barr.
• Amazon is discontinuing new access to a small number of services in the tweet – but would continue to run them in a secure environment.
• Jeff Bar confirmed the list of services to be S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline and CodeCommit.
• An AWS Spokesperson claimed to Business Insider that the changes were communicated through multiple channels within and outside the company.
  • But were they REALLY though?

01:33 Justin – “Yeah, they kind of took a leap out of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book and put the planning commission in the filing cabinet downstairs with the broken light.”

It’s Earnings Time!

07:35 Alphabet meets earnings expectations but misses on YouTube ad revenue

• Alphabet revenue was up 14% YOY, driven by search and cloud, GCP surpassed $10B in quarterly revenues and $1 Billion in operating profit for the first time.
• GCP Cloud Revenue was 10.35 B vs the expected 10.20 billion.
• Alphabet shares were down on the news due to a miss on YouTube adv

Welcome to episode 269 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are your hosts this week as we talk about – you guessed it – the Crowdstrike update that broke, well, everything! We’re also looking at Databricks, Google potentially buying Wiz, NY Summit news, and more!

• You can’t take Justin down; but a 23-hour flight to India (or Crowdstrike updates) can
• Google wants Wiz, and Crowdstrike Strikes all
• Crowdstrike, does anyone know the Graviton of this situation?
• We are called to this summit to talk AWS AI Supremacy
• Crowdstrike, Wiz and Chat GPT 4o Mini… oh my
• An Impatient Wiz builds his own data centers not impacted by Crowdstrike

00:58 You Guessed It – Crowdstrike

Microsoft, CrowdStrike outage disrupts travel and business worldwide

Our Statement on Today’s Outage (listener note: paywall article)

• It’s not every day you get to experience one of the largest IT Outages in history, and it even impacted our recording of the show last week.
• Crowdstrike, a popular EDR solution caused major disruption to the worlds IT systems with an errant update to their software that caused servers to BSOD, disrupting travel (airplanes, trains, etc), governments, news organizations and more.
• Crowdstrike removed the errant file quickly, but still the damage was done with tons of systems requiring manual intervention to be recovered.
  • The fix required booting into safe mode, and removing a file from the crowdstrike directory.
    • This was all complicated by bitlocker and lack of local admin rights for many end user devices.
  • Sometimes doing up to 15 reboots would bring the server back to life.
  • Swinging the hard drives from one broken server to a working server manually removes the files and puts them back.
• The issue also caused a large-scale outage in the Azure Central region.
  • In addition to services on AWS being impacted that run Windows (Amazon is a well-known large Crowdstrike customer)
• Crowdstrike CEO Goerge Kurtz (who happened to be the CTO at Mcafee during the 2010 Update Fiasco that impacted Mcafee clients globally) stated that he was deeply sorry and vowed to make sure every customer is fully recovered.
• By the time of this recording, most clients should be mostly fixed and recovered, and we are all anxiously waiting to hear how this could have happened.

04:50 Justin – “It’s really an Achilles heel of the cloud. I mean, to fix this, you need to be able to boot a server into safe mode or into recovery mode and then remove this file manually, which requires that you have console access, which, you know, Amazon just added a couple of years ago.”

07:45 Matthew – “It’s always fun when you’re like, okay, everyone sit down, no stupid ideas. Like these crazy ideas that you have, like end up being

Welcome to episode 268 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin says he’s in India, but we know he’s really been replaced by Skynet. Jonathan, Matthew, and Ryan are here in his stead to bring all the latest cloud news, including PGO for optimization, a Linux vulnerability, CloudFront’s new managed policies, and even a frank discussion about whether or not the AI Hype train has officially left the station. Sit back and enjoy!

• OpenSSH sings “Oops I did it again”
• All aboard, the AI hype train is leaving the station
• Caching In on CloudFront’s New Managed Policies
• Get your Go Apps a personal trainer this summer with PGO
• Was Japan actually using floppy disks or were they 3.5
• Azure is on summer break
• Singapore will soon just be datacenters

00:56 Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks

• Here’s a bit of tech nostalgia meets modernization for you!
• Japan’s government has finally phased out the use of floppy disks in all its systems.
• The Digital Agency has scrapped over 1,000 regulations related to their use, marking a significant step in their efforts to update government technology.
• Digital Minister Taro Kono, who’s been on a mission to modernize Japan’s government tech, announced this victory last week. It’s part of a larger push to digitize Japan’s notoriously paper-heavy bureaucracy, which became glaringly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Japan’s digitization efforts have hit some bumps along the way, including issues with a contact-tracing app and slow adoption of their digital ID system.
• It’s a reminder that modernizing legacy systems isn’t just about replacing old hardware – it’s a complex process that involves changing long-standing processes and especially mindsets.

02:36 Jonathan – “Yeah, I remember a couple of years ago they started talking about this modernization they were doing and people started to panic because Japan’s the largest purchaser of floppy disks anymore, or three and a half inch disks anyway. And so I ended up buying some because I’ve still got a USB floppy drive and some machines that have floppy disks. And I wanted just to stock up on some for the future, just in case the price went through the roof if Japan finally cut them and they have.”

05:16 regreSSHion: Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability in OpenSSH server

• The Qualys Threat Research Unit just dropped a bombshell – they’ve discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in OpenSSH that affects millions of Linux systems.
• The vulnerability, dubbed “regreSSHion,” allows unauthenticated attackers to execute code as root on vulnerable systems.
  • Root access is the ultimate prize for hackers.

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – Matthew, Jonathan, Ryan and Justin are all here to bring you the latest in cloud news – including FOCUS features in AWS Billing, Magic Quadrants, and AWS Metis. Plus, we have an Andoid vs. Apple showdown in the Aftershow, so be sure to stay tuned for that!

• Tech reports show Gartner leads in the BS quadrant
• Oracle adds cloud and legal expenses to their FinOps hub
• AWS Metis: Great chatbot, or Greek tragedy waiting to happen?
• The cloud pod rocks Cargo Pants
• A sonnet is written for FOCUSing on spend

01:40 Finops X

• Recently Justin attended FinOps in beautiful and sunny San Diego – and if you weren’t there, you really should plan on attending next year. This year’s topics included:
  • Focus 1.0
  • State of Vendors
• Conference size – they will most likely outgrow this particular conference center, seeing as how they’re either selling out or pretty close to it.
• Coolest thing about the conference – on stage all the biggies – TOGETHER.
  • It’s great to see them all together talking about how they’re making Finops better, and introducing new things for Finops and not just saving them for their own conferences.
• Next Year – Is Oracle going to be on stage next year?

08:22 Justin – “The shift left of FinOps was a big topic. You know, how do we get visibility? How do we show people what things are going to cost? How do we make sure that, you know, people are aware of what they’re doing? And so I think, you know, it’s just a recognition that is important and just as important as security is your cost. And in some ways security is part of your cost story. Because if you bankrupt your company, that’s a pretty bad security situation.”

10:17 Introducing Managed OpenSearch: Gain Control of Your Cloud with Powerful Log Analysis

• Listen. We don’t really *care* about OpenSearch – but the reality is it’s taking over the world. Nobody is doing ElasticSearch anymore.
• Digital Ocean is launching Managed OpenSearch offering, a comprehensive solution designed for in depth log analysis, simplifying troubleshooting, and optimizing application performance.
• With Digital ocean you can Pinpoint and analyze log data with ease, customize log retention, enhance security and can scale with your business and receive forwarded logs from multiple sources including Digital Ocean droplets, managed databases, etc.
• Interested in pricing? You can find that here. Or, if you’d like to take a product tour, you can do that here.

12:11 Ryan – “It’s the important ones where everything revolves around it and so no on