Welcome to episode 285 of the Explain it to me Like I’m 5 Podcast, formerly known as The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a lot of news this week, including the last of our coverage from re:Invent, ChatGTP Pro, FPGA, and even some major staffing turnovers.

• Throw $200 dollars in a fire with ChatGPT Pro
• Jeff Barr is wrapped up by Agentic AI
• The Tribble with Trilliums
• The Wind in the Quantum Willows
• Rise of the dead instances FPGA and PowerPC
• Jeff Barr is replaced by Nova
• The Cloud Pod: Return of the dead instances types
• After 6 year Jeff Barr hands over the reigns to the CloudPod
• For our 6th birthday Jeff barr Retires
• For our 6th birthday jeff barr delegates announcements to the cloud pod
• 6 years of meaningless PR drivel
• 6 years of cloud news and we still don’t know what Quantum computing is

HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY!

2:00 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Security Lifecycle Management with AWS

• Hashi is a big sponsor of re:Invent, so of course they had some news of their own to release.
• HCP Vault Secrets auto-rotation is now generally available.
• Dynamic secrets are generally available via HCP Vault Secrets.
• Secrets sync will help keep your secrets synced with AWS Secrets Manager. It still appears to be one direction, but you can now also view secrets in AWS Secrets Manager that are managed by vault.
• HCP Vault Radar, now in beta, automates the detection and identification of unmanaged secrets in your code, including AWS infrastructure configurations

03:10 Matthew – “This qualifies under the category of things that I feel like we talked about so long ago, I just already assumed was GA. I’m surprised that it wasn’t.”

03:34 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Infrastructure Lifecycle Management with AWS

• Terraform AWS provider is now at 3 billion downloads.
• The AWS Cloud Control Provider is also now generally available with the 1.0 release.
• This is the provider built around AWS Cloud Control API to bring new services to Hashicorp Terraform faster.
• In June, AWS and Hashi partnered to

Welcome to episode 284 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Everybody is in the house this week, and it’s a good thing because since we’ve last recorded re:Invent happened, and we have a LOT to talk about. So let’s jump right in!

• Amazon Steals from Azure…. We Are Doomed
• The Cloud Pod Can Now Throw Away a lot of Code
• The Cloud Pod Controls the Future
• The Cloud Pod Observes More Insights
• We Are Simplicity
• X None of the Above
• Stop Trying to Make Bedrock & Q Happen
• My Head Went SuperNova over all the Q Announcements
• These are Not the Gadgets Bond Needed, Q!

08:12 It’s the re:Invent recap!

Did you make any announcement predictions? Let’s see how our hosts’ predictions stacked up to reality.

Matt – 1

• Large Green Computing Reinvent
• LLM at the Edge
• Something new on S3

Ryan (AI) – 1

• Improved serverless observability tools
• Expansion of AI Driven workflows in datalakes
• Greater Focus on Multi-Account or Multi-region orchestration, centralized compliance management, or enhanced security services

Jonathan – 0

1. New Edge Computing Capabilities better global application deployment type features. (Cloudflare competitor maybe)
2. New automated cost optimization tools
3. Automated RAG/vector to S3

Justin – 2

1. 1. Managed Backstage or platform like service

• New LLM multi-modal replacement or upgrade to Titan

1. Competitor VM offering to Broadcom

Honorable Mentions:

Jonathan:

Deeper integration between serverless and container services

New region

Enhanced Observability with AI driven debugging tool

Justin:

Multicloud management – in a bigger way (Anthos competitor)

Agentic AI toolings

New ARM graviton chip

How many will AI or Artificial Intelligence be said: 45

Justin – 35

Jonathan – 72

Pre:Invent

There were over 180 announcements, and yes – we have them all listed here for you. You’re welcome.

17:12 Time-based snapshot copy for Amazon EBS

• Now you can specify a desired completion duration, from 15 minutes to 48 hours when you copy an Amazon EBS snapshot within or between Amazon regions or accounts.
• This will allow you to meet your time-based compliance and business requirements for critical workloads, mostly around DR capabilities.
• We’re just glad to see this one finally, because having it built in directly to the console to guarantee that EBS snapshots make it to the other region is a big quality of life enhancement.

Announcing future-dated Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations

Introducing a new experience for AWS Systems Manager

Intro...

Welcome to episode 283 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Break out your crystal balls and shuffle those tarot decks, because it’s Re:Invent prediction time! Sorry we missed you all last week – the plague has been strong with us. But Justin and Jonathan are BACK, and we’ve got a ton of news, so buckle in and let’s get started!

• Not My Snowcones!
• Lambda at 10: Still Better Than Windows Containers

01:27 The voice of America Online’s “You’ve got mail” has died at age 74

• Elwoods Edwards, the voice behind the online service AOL’s iconic “You’ve got mail” sound notification has died at the age of 74. He was just one day shy of his 75th birthday.
• The “you’ve got mail” soundbite started in 1989 when Steve Case, CEO of Quantum Computer Services (which will later become America Online or AOL,) wanted to add a human voice to their Quantum online service.
• Karen Edwards, who worked as a customer service representative, heard Case discussing the plan and suggested her husband Elwood, a professional broadcaster.
• Edwards recorded the famous phrase and others (“Welcome” “File’s done” and “Goodbye” among them) on a cassette recorder in his living room.
• He was paid $200 for the service.
• His voice is still used to greet users of the current AOL service.

03:04 It’s Time for RE:Invent Predictions!

Matt

1. Large Green Computing Reinvent
2. LLM at the Edge
3. Something new On S3

Ryan (AI)

1. Improved serverless observability tools
2. Expansion of AI Driven workflows in datalakes
3. Greater Focus on Multi-Account or Multi-region orchestration, centralized compliance management, or enhanced security services

Jonathan

1. New Edge Computing Capabilities better global application deployment type features. (Cloudflare competitor maybe)
2. New automated cost optimization tools
3. Automated RAG/vector to S3

Justin

1. Managed Backstage or platform like service
2. New LLM multi-modal replacement or upgrade to Titan
3. Competitor VM offering to Broadcom

Honorable Mentions

Jonathan:

Deeper integration between serverless and container services

New Region

Enhanced Observability with AI driven debugging tool

Justin:

Multi Cloud management – in a bigger way (Anthos competitor)

Agentic AI toolings

New ARM graviton chip

How many times will AI or Artificial Intelligence be said:

Justin – 35

Jonathan – 72

And now it’s time for Pre:Invent announcements:

20:09 Introducing Express brokers for Amazon MSK to deliver high throughput

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

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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...