Welcome to episode 290 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – and a good thing too, since there’s a lot of news! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are all in the house to bring you news on DeepSeek, OpenVox, CloudWatch, and more.

• The cloud pod wonders if azure is still hung over from new years
• Stratoshark sends the Cloud pod to the stratosphere
• Cutting-Edge Chinese “Reasoning” Model Rivals OpenAI… and it’s FREE?!
• Wireshark turns 27, Cloud Pod Hosts feel old
• Operator: DeepSeek is here to kill OpenAI
• Time for a deepthink on buying all that Nvidia stock
• AWS Token Service finally goes cloud native
• The CloudPod wonders if OpenAI’s Operator can order its own $200 subscription

01:29 Introducing the GenAI Platform: Simplifying AI Development for All

• If you’re struggling to find that AI GPU capacity, Digital Ocean is pleased to announce their DigitalOcean GenAI Platform is now available to everyone.
• The platform aims to democratize AI development, empowering everyone – from solo developers to large teams – to leverage the transformative potential of generative AI.
• On the Gen AI platform you can:
  • Build Scalable AI Agents
  • Seamlessly integrate with workflows
  • Leverage guardrails
  • Optimize Efficiency.
• Some of the use cases they are highlighting are chatbots, e-commerce assistance, support automation, business insights, AI-Driven CRMs, Personalized Learning and interactive tools.

02:23 Jonathan – “Inference cost is really the big driver there. So once you once you build something that’s that’s done, but it’s nice to see somebody focusing on delivering it as a service rather than, you know, a $50 an hour compute for training models. This is right where they need to be.”

04:21 OpenAI: Introducing Operator

• We have thoughts about the name of this service…
• OpenAI is releasing the preview version of their agent that can use a web browser to perform tasks for you.
• The new version is available to OpenAI pro users.
• OpenAI says it’s currently a research preview, meaning it has limitations and will evolve based on your feedback.
• Operator can handle various browser tasks such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, and even creating memes.
• The ability to use the same interfaces and tools that humans interact with on a daily basis broadens the utility of AI, helping people save time on everyday tasks while opening up a new engagement opportunity for business
• Operator is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA). Combining GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning, CUA is trained to in...

Welcome to episode 289 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are here this week to bring you a riveting podcast on EU regulations! Are you asleep yet? No? Ok great. We promise it will be a good show – despite the title.

• Stargate: We’re not saying its Aliens, but its $500 Billion
• AWS: Now with extra sessions
• EC2 Flex: Bigger, Badder and Probably still expensive
• SNS FIFO: So fast, it’ll give you whiplash
• Azure: Now with added Legalese (Thanks, EU)
• OpenAI’s Stargate: From Chatbots to Interdimensional Travel (maybe)
• GCP’s Biochar Initiative: Turning Waste into… Well, Less Waste (hopefully)
• AWS Console Multiple Sessions: So you can prove you dropped those databases from multiple accounts
• Amazon still adds new features to SNS and the cloud pod is impressed
• AWS tries to kill chrome profiles

01:47 Announcing The Stargate Project

• Open AI announced a joint investment of $500 billion dollars over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US, with the intent to deploy $100B immediately.
• This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefits for the entire world.
• The initial equity funders in stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX.
• Softbank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with Softbank having financial responsibility, and OpenAI having operational responsibility.
• Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners.
• The buildout is currently underway starting in Texas, and they are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as they finalize definitive agreements.
• As part of Stargate, Oracle, Nvidia and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016, and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.
• This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional computer to train leading models and deliver great products and services.
• “All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI—for the benefit of all of humanity.” This quote TOTALLY didn’t terrify us…
• Our conversations back in December about OpenAI trying to figure out their ownership model makes a lot more sense now.

07:22 Justin – “…it’s interesting that SoftBank is investing so much money into it considering, you know, the trade issues with China and SoftBank, you know, being mostly Chinese owned and invested in. Yeah. It’s one of the things abo...

Welcome to episode 288 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts as we make our way through this week’s cloud and AI news, including back to Vertex AI, Project Digits, Notebook LM, and some major improvements to AI image generation.

• Digits… I’ll show you 5 digits…
• The only digit the AWS local zone in New York shows me is the middle one
• Keep one eye open near Mercedes with Agentic AI

01:59 Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits

• If you don’t want to hand over all your money to the cloud providers, you will be able to hand over $3,000 dollars to Nvidia… for a computer that is probably going to be obsolete in <12 months. That’s fun!
• The new personal AI supercomputer, called Project Digits, will launch in May.
• The heart of Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which packs enough processing power to run sophisticated AI models, while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power outlet.
• Digits can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters, and looks very similar to a Mac Mini.
• “AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry. With Project Digits, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release. “Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher, and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.”
• The Digits system comes with 128gb of unified coherent memory and up to 4tb of NVME storage. For even more demanding apps, two digit systems can be linked together to handle models with 405b parameters.
• The GB10 chip delivers up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, meaning it can perform 1 quadrillion AI calculations per second.
• Suppose you plunk down the money for Digits. In that case, you will also get access to Nvidia’s AI software library, including development kits, orchestration tools and pre-trained models available through the Nvidia NGC catalog.
• The system runs on a Linux-based NVidia NGC catalog, and supports popular frameworks like PyTorch, Python and Jupyter notebooks.

09:25 Jonathan – ““The Blackwell is pretty recent, it’s the one that had a lot of problems with yield. And I kind of suspect that they’re sort of packaging this up and selling some of the chips which didn’t pass all the tests for the commercial products. And so they’re enabling whatever cores they can in these things to sell to consumers… Having all the memories is really great for the big models. It’s not going to be particularly performant now. I think the spec I saw was like one teraflop at quite low precision – like fb4 precision – which is quite low, an...

Welcome to episode 287 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! 2025 is already shaping up to be another year of “unprecedented” times, but have no fear, Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all in the house and (mostly) recovered from the holidays – and just in time to bring you all the latest new year news in the cloud world.

• Everyone is investing in AI… but you could invest in the cloud pod
• Oracle Exadata X11M: Burn a big pile of money
• The cloud pod has better security than Microsoft – mk
• The new and improved Cloud Pod 4.0
• Cloud Nine… Figures (or $80 billion)
• $60 Billion and Counting: The Ai Arms Race
• Oracle Exadata X11M: For When You Absolutely, Positively, Have to Burn Money
• The Cloud Pod rebrands to The Cloud AI so we can get 11B in funding

2:42 Oracle’s rampant cloud growth wasn’t enough for Wall Street, and its stock slides after-hours

• We missed talking about Oracle’s earnings call on December 9th, since we were in the middle of our re:Invent shows. Apparently, their rapid cloud growth was not sufficient to appease the Wall Street gods., but honestly – what is ever good enough for them?
• They reported earnings of 1.47 a share, just shy of the 1.48 expected by the analysts. Revenue was up 9% from a year before, at $14.06B below the street’s target of $14.1 Billion.
• Income was up 26% from prior year, to 3.15B.
• Revenue from cloud services and license support was up 12% to 10.8 billion.
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz said growth in the AI segment was nothing short of extraordinary, with 336% growth in GPU unit consumption from the prior year.
• Despite positive signs, Oracle guidance was soft and this also angered the Wall Street gods.

04:09 Justin – “…now in January, their stock is, up a dollar 11 today, but, looking at the month, they haven’t really recovered from earnings quite yet. So we’ll see how they do as they continue through the year. But, yeah, I mean, tech in general is down. I mean, everything’s down. Everyone’s waiting for the election to, election, the, the soaring in and the new administration to come in as we’re past that.”

04:34 HashiCorp 2024 year in review

• 2024 was a busy year for Hashicorp, and they wrote up a blog post to point out the highlights.
  • IBM + Hashicorp signed an agreement to be acquired by Big Blue. With IBM, they believe they can bring modern infrastructure and security practices to an even greater number of organizations around the world, and they are excited for the possibilities.
  • Terraform got numerous updates including:
    • Terraform Stacks

Welcome to episode 286 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the final show of 2024! We thank you for joining us on our cloud journey over the past year. During this last show of the year, we look back on all the tech that changed our jobs and lives, and make predictions for an AI filled 2025. Join Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew as they look forward to even more discussions about undersea cables. Happy New Year!

• We thought 2024 would never end
• I can sum up 2024 – AI AI AI AI and uhh AI
• AI has taken over the Cloud Pod – we are not really here
• 2024 the year we hoped AI would replace us… close but not yet

Matt

• Simpler and Easier to access LLM with new services
• Kubernetes will become simpler for smaller companies to operate that doesn’t require Highly Paid Devops/Scientists
• Low Employee Churn Rates and increased Tenure (Quiet Quitting)

02:07 Matthew – “How is it simpler and easier? I think that there are more ways to run it. The general public has an easier way to access it. And they are simpler as Justin said that they are becoming easier and more efficient and better to use for the average user. So I know that I talked to many people that I work with now and just in general and people that are not in tech, which I feel like a year ago.”

Jonathan

• There will be mass layoffs in tech directly attributed to AI in Q1 2024 (10k or more)
• Someone will start a cult that follows an AI LLM God believing in sentience, a higher power.
• AI will find a new home in education. Lesson Plans, Personalized Learning plans by students, etc.

02:07 Jonathan – “Well, there is a religion called the First Church of Artificial Intelligence, but it’s been around for longer than this year. I think it’s like five, six years old at this point. So that’s kind of cheating.

Ryan

• Start seeing the financial impact of AI to better profitability by using AI.
• AI Solution tied towards new employee onboarding (replace wiki technology)
• Removal of stateful firewalls as traffic ruleset (next-gen next-gen firewall)

02:07 Ryan – “I mean, agentic AI is something that’s been rolled out in a lot of companies. I know in my day job, it’s been rolled out. I hope to see this get even stronger and more obvious just because I think that, you know, the days of searching through thousands of documents or the one, you know, unmaintained team page that someone built three years ago when they were new are over. And so I’d like to see this continue.

Justin

1. LLM will hit the trough of disillusionment either on Cost, Environmental impact or people realizing how limited these models are
2. Another AI model other than Transformer based
3. We will see another large defector from Public Cloud (not 37 Signals or X/Twitter)

13:26 Justin – “I feel partially vindicated that I was sort of right, just I thought we didn’t be in the trough a little faster, but maybe it’s coming still. I don’t know. they’re innovating pretty quickly. I don’t think they’ll get there, but definitely environmental is going to become a big, big conversation around AI.”

Did you remember that Gemini wasn’t a thing in 2023? It feels like it’s been around forever. 2024 saw some serious jumps forward in tech and innovation, as well as a lot o...

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