It’s not a reach to say that we’re currently in a time of uncertainty, across technology, economic and political spectrums. But historically, times of uncertainty have often led to unexpected creativity. 

SHOW: 873

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #873 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:

STUFF THAT FEELS UNCERTAIN OR FRAGMENTED RIGHT NOW

• Transition of US political parties (regulation, leadership, reaction to the unknown, friend or foe of Silicon Valley)
• Stock market is somewhat bullish, but credit markets aren’t aligned
• Social media seems more fragmented (good & bad), so what does this do to information flows, learning, discussions, etc.
• Speculation is that AI LLM models are starting to plateau
• Cloud providers aren’t really talking about anything but AI
• VCs seem to be excited about the potential of acquisitions again, but who?
• Netflix can’t seem to figure out streaming live TV, at least at scale - but Amazon can?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Rosalind Whitley (Dir. Product @Kentikinc) and Ethan Smith (Staff SRE @ An Enterprise Security Company) talk about network observability, the evolution of SRE for networking, flow analysis, and the complexity and tradeoffs or network design and operations at scale.

SHOW: 872 

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #872 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:

• While data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation
• Follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts

SHOW NOTES:

• Kentik - The Network Observability Platform (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background and the areas you focus on today.

Topic 2 - I want to begin with the complexity of networking, and not just in the sense of routing, etc. Can you walk us through some of the things you have to consider, and potentially tradeoff, as you’re thinking about network design and operations (e.g. performance, security, costs, logging, troubleshooting, etc.)

Topic 3 - Usually there are many teams involved in making a large organization work. How do you collaborate across teams, and what types of technical hurdles get in the way of delivering the service? (maybe discuss logging challenges)

Topic 3a - How has the role of SRE and Network Engineer evolved as we’re now dealing with this new complexity? You have all the normal performance, high availability, observability stuff, but also things like egress costs, etc.

Topic 4 - We talked earlier about the challenge of cost management when running a large SaaS service. What are some of the ways that you explore or model costing behaviors and look to improve them?

Topic 5 - As you’re working in a single cloud (e.g. AWS), there’s often a belief that working only in that ecosystem is the best approach, as everything is integrated or billing is simpler. How did you go about exploring alternatives that worked in your cloud, but gave you more flexibility for your services?

Topic 6 - How do you tend to think about lines of demarcation between your team, the SaaS tooling provider and the cloud provider?

FEEDBACK?

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While there will be plenty of evaluation of how the 2024 US elections played out, we take a look at 13 tips that we can learn from the campaigns that can be used for tech communications.

SHOW: 871

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #871 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:

• Dithering - Trump Tech Policy
• Stratechery - Big Tech, Little Tech, Chips and Hardware
• Pivot - How Trump will Impact Tech, Economy
• Cube Podcast - https://www.thecube.net/cube-podcast

SHOW SPONSOR:

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

CAN THE TECH INDUSTRY LEARN ANYTHING FROM POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS?

1. It’s very difficult to disrupt the incumbent or most well-known name
2. It’s more difficult to prove “what if” (future) vs. something that already happened
3. Figure out messaging velocity and variability (change the story vs. stick to the story)
4. Plans tend to defeat a lack of plans (or vagueness)
5. Fear is as powerful a motivator as hope/joy/possibilities
6. Complex topics (eg. democracy, DevOps) are difficult for people to understand, if they aren’t well defined.
7. People tend to make decision with their wallet, based on their current situation
8. Are you speaking to a niche audience, or a large audience? 
9. If your competition defines you, you need to reframe it quickly
10. If your competition finds a liability, you need to address it quickly
11. Sometimes small things can be the center of the discussion
12. Know where your audience is getting their information from (traditional vs. modern channels)
13. Are you trying to get people to align on an issue, or a set of virtues (align to a group)?

FEEDBACK?

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Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard) discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from October 2024.

SHOW: 870

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #870 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:

• While data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation
• Follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts

SHOW NOTES:

• Link to October 2024 news and articles

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Keri Olson (@ksolson20, VP AI for Code at @IBM) talks about coding assistants across the software development lifecycle, the future of agents, and domain-specific assistants.

SHOW: 869

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #869 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:

• While data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation
• Follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts

SHOW NOTES:

• IBM Watsonx Code Assistant (homepage)
• IBM Watsonx Code Assistant for Ansible Lightspeed (homepage)
• IBM Watsonx Code Assistant for Z (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, and then give us a little bit of background on where you focus your time at IBM these days?

Topic 2 - Developer code assistants have become one of the most popular areas of GenAI usage. At a high level, how mature are the technologies that augment developers today?

Topic 3 - Software development has an entire lifecycle (Generate, Complete, Explain, Test, Transform, Document). It’s easy for developers to just plug in a service, but is that often the most effective way to start using GenAI in the software development lifecycle?

Topic 4 - Software developers are notoriously picky about what tools they use and how they use them. GenAI doesn’t “guarantee” outputs. Are there concerns that if different developers or groups use different coding assistants, that it could create more challenges than it helps?

Topic 5 - What is a holistic way to think about code assistants? How much should be actively engaged with developers, how much should be behind the scenes, how much will be automated or agentic in the future?

Topic 6 - In the past, we essentially had “real developers” (people who wrote code) and things like Low-Code for “citizen developers” on process tasks. Do you expect to see code assistants bringing more powerful skills to people that previously hadn’t identified as a real developer? (e.g. the great idea on a napkin that turns into a mobile app)

FEEDBACK?

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When you’re asking VCs for $6B+, you probably need to promise more than normal returns. So let’s just change all of humankind over the next 5-10 years. Seems simple enough. 

SHOW: 868

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #868 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:

• “Machines of Loving Grace” (Dario Amodei - Anthropic)
• Why AI companies are dropping the doomerism (Decoder from The Verge)
• “The Intelligence Age” (Sam Altman - OpenAI)

THINGS THAT AI COULD IMPROVE (according to Dario Amodei)

• Biology and Health
• Neuroscience and Mind
• Economic Development and Poverty
• Peace and Governance
• Work and meaning

FEEDBACK?

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Edward Hieatt (@edwardhieatt, Chief Customer Officer @mech_orchard) talks about the challenges of app modernization, leveraging AI, and the process to succeed from legacy to modern.

SHOW: 867

Want to go to All Things Open in Raleigh for FREE? (Oct 27th-29th)
We are offering 5 Free passes, first come, first serve for the Cloudcast Community
Registration Link - www.eventbrite.com/e/916649672847/?discount=Cloudcastfree 
Instructions:

1. Click reg link
2. Click “Get Tickets”
3. Choose ticket option
4. Proceed with registration (discount will automatically be applied, cost will be $0)

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #867 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:

• Mechanical Orchard (homepage)
• Startup led by ex-Pivotal CEO lands $50M to modernize apps (TechCrunch)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, and then give us a little bit of background on Mechanical Orchard.

Topic 2 - Many of the MO team come from Pivotal (especially Pivotal Labs), as well as being involved with the Agile Manifesto, Extreme Programming, etc. How did the mission of the company get focus on modernizing existing applications?

Topic 3 - Modernization projects have traditionally been really costly, with a low success rate. Why is now the right time to focus on this area?

Topic 4 - I’m really interested in how MO technology works. It seems like a variation of a digital twin, mixed with some AI capabilities. Give us the big picture of how this is a different approach to modernization.

Topic 5 - How much culture/process change is needed with MO to be successful?

Topic 6 - What do the stages of success look like with your approach to application modernization?

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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After several months of travel and giving keynote at multiple events, Brian gives some new tips for building keynotes, capturing audience attention, managing regional differences and avoiding mistakes.

SHOW: 866

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #866 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:

• Building a Keynote Presentation (Cloudcast Eps. 798)

THE CHALLENGES OF KEYNOTES ACROSS DIFFERENT LOCATIONS

• Different types of keynotes - Entertainment (celebrity), Vision (CEO), Informative (multiple)
• Different types of keynote audiences - Technical, Business, Mixed
• Different types of keynote context - New, Updates, 
• Different styles of keynote - Storytelling, Demonstrations, Multiple Speakers/Panels
• Other considerations - Audience language, Slides vs. Words, Size of the room, Length of presentation slot, Before/After sessions. 

FEEDBACK?

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Alex Merced (@AMdatalakehouse, Senior Tech Evangelist, @dremio) talks about everything data and we dig deep into Apache Iceberg and DataLakehouses.

SHOW: 865

Want to go to All Things Open in Raleigh for FREE? (Oct 27th-29th)

We are offering 5 Free passes, first come, first serve for the Cloudcast Community -> Registration Link

Instructions:

1. Click reg link
2. Click “Get Tickets”
3. Choose ticket option
4. Proceed with registration (discount will automatically be applied, cost will be $0)

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #865 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:

• Dremio (homepage)
• Hands-on with Apache Iceberg Tutorial
• Apache Iceberg Crash Course
• Data Lakehouses and Apache Hudi (Cloudcast Eps. 694)
• Apache Iceberg, the Definitive Guide (eBook)
• Apache Iceberg (homepage)
• Iceberg + Nessie Catalog (homepage)
• Iceberg + Polaris Catalog (homepage)
• AlexMerced.com
• DataLakehouseHub.com

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Topic 2 - It’s been a little while since we talked about Data Lakehouses, can you give us a little bit of background on this space, and what the most recent dynamics are around these technologies.

Topic 3 - What are the typical integrations with a Data Lakehouse? How are users/developers typically interacting with Data Lakehouse technologies? [The marketplace for Iceberg catalogs like Nessie and Polaris]

Topic 4 - How does an open data format like Apache Iceberg fit into the bigger picture of data lakehouses, or large scale stores of data?

Topic 5 - How does Dremio enable Iceberg? How does Dremio sit in the intersection of Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh and Data Virtualization trends all of which come from the same fundamental problem, the growing scale of data use cases.

Topic 6 -  We’ve seen companies start to rethink their data in the cloud strategies. Are you seeing on-premises making a comeback for large data applications

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Are we sure that the next big thing in AI is going to come from OpenAI, or even one of the big cloud providers with $Billions to spend? History tells us that it might come from someone smaller. 

SHOW: 864

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #864 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

WHERE DID THE CRITICAL “NEXT” INNOVATIONS COME FROM?

• Internet infrastructure (router) came from Cisco
• Web Browser / Web Server came from Netscape
• Mainstream Linux came from Red Hat
• Social Media came from Twitter, Facebook
• Cloud came from Amazon
• Smart Phone came from Apple
• AI came from ?? (OpenAI, NVIDIA) 
• What’s Similar? What’s Different?
• Funding, Founders, Market Competitors

FEEDBACK?

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Emily Freeman (@editingemily) and Forrest Brazeal (@forrestbrazeal), co-founders of Freeman and Forrest talk about the intersection of technical products and marketing and the evolution of marketing to reach an increasingly technical audience including the rise of influence marketing.
 
SHOW: 863

Want to go to All Things Open in Raleigh for FREE? (Oct 27th-29th)
We are offering 5 Free passes, first come, first serve for the Cloudcast Community

Registration Link - www.eventbrite.com/e/916649672847/?discount=Cloudcastfree 

Instructions:

1. Click reg link
2. Click “Get Tickets”
3. Choose ticket option
4. Proceed with registration (discount will automatically be applied, cost will be $0)

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #863 Transcript

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• Freeman and Forrest (homepage)
• DevOps for Dummies (book)
• 97 Things every Cloud Engineer should know (book)
• Forrest Brazeal (homepage)
• Developing Multi-Cloud Skills (Eps.602 Cloudcast)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show.

Topic 2 - Where does the line between technical and marketing stop and start

Topic 3 - Is there a new blueprint being created for how to have conversations about new technologies, or helping people find useful information? [new media | influencers]

Topic 4 - Give us a sense of how crowded the markets are today, and why it’s so important to be able to communicate about the value/impact of the technologies.

Topic 5 - Let’s talk about how projects get paid for - priorities, awareness, etc.

Topic 6 -  What does good and bad look like these days?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

The AI landscape is moving quickly. Here are 5 recent trends to keep an eye on for the last quarter of 2024. 

SHOW: 862

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #862 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:

• Western North Carolina Red Cross (DONATIONS)
• Eastern Tennessee Red Cross (DONATIONS)

5 (+1) AI ITEMS TO KEEP AN EYE ON

1. Do business leaders understand what LLMs do?
2. Small models vs. Large models vs. One-size fits all models
3. Does OpenAI funding unlock a new round of hype funding?
4. Does anything (company, technology) reduce the dependency on NVIDIA GPUs?
5. What are the Top 10 revenue generating AI apps, after ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot? 
6. What is the framework or “middleware” that unlocks the next breakthroughs in AI?

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Brian Gracely, Aaron Delp, and Brandon Whichard discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from September 2024.

SHOW: 861

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #861 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:

• Link to September 2024 news and articles

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 
• Trend 1 - AI Regulation is having mixed results (multiple products not released in EU now, California’s AI Act gets a veto)
• Trend 2 - OpenAI is making and burning through money at historic levels, only 3 of the original 13 are left. Anyone wanting AI for good has moved on 
• Trend 3 - Google finally releasing some AI tools and chips with potential (NotebookLM, AlphaChip). Also, Aaron no longer uses Google to search, feels last generation now and maybe these new tools are a way back for them?

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Do we put too much emphasis on the leaders of the tech industry and not enough on the millions that support it? 

SHOW: 860

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #860 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:

• Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.
• Secure your seat for Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 with our early bird savings of $400 off standard rates now.  

SHOW NOTES:

• Western North Carolina Red Cross (DONATIONS)
• Eastern Tennessee Red Cross (DONATIONS)
• OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity
• LinkedIn Profile Roaster
• Brian’s “roasted” LinkedIn profile

THE BIG NAMES GET A LOT OF ATTENTION

• We talk a lot about how much CEOs make
• We talk a lot about the CEOs creating/executing strategy (good or bad)
• We talk a lot about “rockstars” (see: Workday “rockstars” commercials)

BUT DO THE REST OF US ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING OF ANY VALUE?

• Do the rest of us live the Ricky Bobby life, “if you’re not first, you’re last!”
• Should we feel bad when we advocate for ourselves, since that’s how the merit/raise system works? 
• Should we be embarrassed 

FEEDBACK?

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Rick Song (@rickcsong, CEO @Persona_IDV) talks about the evolution of identity verification and threat detection.

SHOW: 859

Want to go to All Things Open in Raleigh for FREE? (Oct 27th-29th)
We are offering 5 Free passes, first come, first serve for the Cloudcast Community
Registration Link - www.eventbrite.com/e/916649672847/?discount=Cloudcastfree  
Instructions:

1. Click reg link
2. Click “Get Tickets”
3. Choose ticket option
4. Proceed with registration (discount will automatically be applied, cost will be $0)

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #859 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:

• Persona webpage
• Tech Crunch Article on Persona

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give everyone a little bit about your background with a quick introduction please.

Topic 2 - You cut your teeth at Square prior to Persona, what lessons did you learn there, and how did your experience there impact what you are doing at Persona?

Topic 3 - We are, of course, seeing an uptick in personal fraud in both our personal and professional lives through identity theft and personal information leaking into the world. If someone has all the proper information, how do you identify this as a false identity?

Topic 4 - How has AI impacted all of this? I would think with the power of GenAI tools, this industry has accelerated dramatically?

Topic 5 - Do we have another arms race on our hands to identify and protect both our personal and professional lives from fraud?

Topic 6 - Is Persona a 3rd party API similar in architecture to Stripe? If I’m an architect in an organization today and I want to get started, how would I do that?

Topic 7 - If there was one thing you wanted people to understand about this, what would it be?

Topic 8 - You have access to a lot of personal data, how is this data handled and secured?

FEEDBACK?

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This past week, Amazon announced a new RTO policy that required 5 days a week in the office. What types of impacts could this have on tech workers and the tech industry? 

SHOW: 858

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #858 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:

• Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.
• Secure your seat for Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 with our early bird savings of $400 off standard rates now.  

SHOW NOTES:

• Amazon announces new Manager/Employee Ratio and RTO policy for 2025

IT’S BEEN 4.5 YEARS SINCE PEOPLE WERE IN THE OFFICE - FULL TIME

• People have adapted their life to working from home
• People have adapted their families to working from home
• Daily commutes seem like a poor use of resources

IT’S BEEN 4.5 YEARS SINCE PEOPLE WERE IN THE OFFICE - FULL TIME

• Being around co-workers does tend to increase collaboration and idea sharing
• RTO is more difficult on certain employee (especially care-giving women)
• RTO is an effective way to reduce headcount without defined “layoffs”
• RTO may feel more impactful to mobility-able tech workers

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Jay Madheswaran (Founder & CEO @ Eve) talks about bringing AI to the legal vertical and the intersection of AI/ML of increased efficiency for legal firms.

SHOW: 857

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #857 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:

• Eve Homepage

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we jump into the legal industry and AI, let’s talk a little bit about your background. Give everyone a brief introduction.

Topic 2 - What made you focus on the legal industry? When I think of forward leaning industries that quickly adopt new technologies, I don’t think of legal. What are the most common use cases?

Topic 3 - Tell us a little bit about the tech behind the scenes. Do you use foundational models and then fine-tune them? Do you have your own custom models? What are your thoughts on the current state and future of models for specific industries or verticals?

Topic 4 - Legal is a highly regulated space; how do your customers (law firms) think about data security and compliance? Tell everyone a bit about how all of this works.

Topic 5 - Do your clients use RAG for custom information that needs to be brought into the models? How does all of that work for customer data?

Topic 6 - When I think about legal, I think about two big areas. We covered compliance and the financial side of this, but what about the billing and financial side? How is ROI on legal AI calculated? Where and how does a legal AI help? Is this measured in hours saved, which translates into dollars saved?

Topic 7 - Let’s close by discussing the people aspect. We keep hearing AI is going to take everyone’s jobs away. What are your thoughts on how this supplements vs. replace staff?

FEEDBACK?

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Back from some recent travel, we look at why it’s important to listen to people from around the world to understand the differences between how global regions adopt technology. 

SHOW: 856

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #856 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:

• Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.
• Secure your seat for Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 with our early bird savings of $400 off standard rates now.  

SHOW NOTES:

LARGER FACTORS PLAY A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN TECHNOLOGY OUTSIDE THE US

• Diffusion of information
• Currency exchange
• Government laws, embargoes, tariffs
• Language and timezone differences
• Local culture, norms, expectations

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Brian Gracely (@bgracely)and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard) discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from August 2024.

SHOW: 855

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #855 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:

• Link to August 2024 news and articles
• Subscribe to Cote's newsletter. 

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 
• Trend 1 - What will be the ripple effects of Intel’s struggles?
• Trend 2 - Is this a bump or a bubble for NVIDIA?
• Trend 3 - Why do companies have such a hard time with a 2nd act?
• Trend 4 - Why you should always take the big job if it’s offered to you.  

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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The future of search advertising, the future of chips, the future of open source, AI monetization and government regulation of tech are all uncertain. What does that mean for the future?

SHOW: 854

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #854 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:

• Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.
• Secure your seat for Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 with our early bird savings of $400 off standard rates now.  

SHOW NOTES:

ARE CORE PILLARS OF THE TECH INDUSTRY UNCERTAIN FOR THE FUTURE?

• Google and antitrust
• Intel and chips
• Open source and licensing
• AI and monetization
• Governments and regulation

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Paul Delory (@pacdelory, Research VP @Gartner_Inc for Technical Professionals) shares insights about cloud computing, cloud costs, VMware, Platform engineering and IaC.

SHOW: 853

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• On The CUBE discussing VMware in April: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wIClYI6bDQ
• Software Development Times discussion Platform Engineering: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/analyst-view-whats-new-whats-now-and-whats-next-in-platform-engineering/

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we jump into a broad set of topics today, give us a little bit about your background and what you focus on today.

Topic 2 - The hyperscalers have grown quite large over the last decade, but as we came out of COVID, many of their customers were concerned about the cost of cloud. Are we seeing a new rationalization coming around cloud costs and accountability of costs? 

Topic 3 - We’ve all read the headlines regarding changes to VMware by Broadcom. Alternatives to VMware would be big decisions for many companies. As a neutral independent, how are you framing your thinking about the VMware ecosystem and the decisions being made about the future of virtualization? 

Topic 4 - Over the last decade, we’ve seen so many new technologies. To get value from them, they require more cross-functional collaboration. These days we tend to call that Platform Engineering. How well do you see the evolution of people and processes being adopted, and how much more needs to happen?

Topic 5 - Behind the scenes of every transition over the past decade (Cloud, AI, Cloud-native) is the adoption of automation. This seems like a no-brainer, but actual adoption is lumpy across companies. What are some of the hard parts of automation that aren’t discussed enough? 

FEEDBACK?

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With so much rapid change happening around AI models, is there a framework for when to build models, train models, fine-tune models, use RAG or something else? Let’s explore…

SHOW: 852

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #852 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:

• Access Gartner cloud research come to life with the “The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity,” webinar.
• Secure your seat for Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 with our early bird savings of $400 off standard rates now.  
• Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

SHOW NOTES:

• What is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)?
• Fine-Tuning vs. RAG
• Predictive AI vs. Generative AI
• Andrew Ng (always worth a watch IMO) https://youtu.be/sal78ACtGTc?si=dCoKXb5o4KB2XSer
• Harrison Chase (LangChain) https://youtu.be/pBBe1pk8hf4?si=lAit69_pDeRKcBGq
• https://blog.langchain.dev/what-is-a-cognitive-architecture/
• https://thenewstack.io/lets-get-agentic-langchain-and-llamaindex-talk-ai-agents/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-IYzyi86yY
• https://blog.langchain.dev/what-is-an-agent/
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/autogen/
• https://www.crewai.com/ 

HOW SHOULD WE DECIDE WHICH AI MODEL TO USE FOR OUR APPLICATION?

• Build, buy, use open source, augment with your own data - so many decisions
• How often do you update models with new data? 

HOW DO WE BRING OUR COMPANY DATA / KNOWLEDGE TO OUR AI MODELS?

• Large Static Models - Predictive AI
• LLMs + Slow-Changing Data - Align the Model
• LLMs + Fast-Changing Data - RAG
• LLMs + Agent-Learned Data - Agentic AI

FEEDBACK?

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Emrul Islam (Head of Platform Innovation @TwingateHQ) talks about the evolution of remote access, application security, and enabling DevOps teams to drive security transformation.  

SHOW: 851

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #851 Transcript

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• How Twingate Works
• Twingate vs. VPNs
• Architecting Network Connectivity for a Zero Trust Future
• Solving the usability problem to unlock Zero Trust adoption
• Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/twingate/ 
• Signup for Twingate for free

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. 

Topic 2 - To properly solve cloud access & security pain points, companies need a tool that works for IT, DevOps, & Security teams

• What are the challenges when trying to secure cloud access today?
• What role do each of the stakeholders play in addressing these?
• How much can technology really help address these challenges?

Topic 3 - How is Twingate architected differently to address these new challenges?

• How do existing systems work?
• What sort of architecture is required?

Topic 4 - Why is it a struggle to get these teams aligned on the right solution

• Is there a disconnect between competing requirements and security?

Topic 5 - What is the opportunity for Devops teams to influence remote access and security architecture?

• Why automate security?
• How much can be automated?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Is the market shifting from evaluating software as an economic driver to re-evaluating the cost of software in the context of how AI can improve, augment or replace developers? 

SHOW: 850

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #850 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:

• AWS CEO says developers might stop coding soon (Business Insider)
• Amazon CEO highlights the impacts of co-pilots on code (Andy Jassy)
• I’m tired of fixing customer’s AI-generated code
• The New Kingmakers (Stephen O’Grady)
• Exploring Generative AI (Martin Fowler)
• The Death of the Junior Developer
• Salary Pressures, Not AI, Vex Developers (The New Stack)

THE CLOUD WAS BUILT UPON ENABLING DEVELOPERS (“BUILDERS”)

• The value of the developer exploded over the last decade
• Software has reshaped most industries over the last decade

WE’RE MOVING FROM THE ECONOMICS OF SOFTWARE TO THE ECONOMICS OF DEVELOPERS

• Code assistants for AI are the early leader in driving AI revenue
• Do we have developer “productivity” or “creativity”?
• Does AI have more impact on legacy code or new code?
• How does the role of Junior vs. Senior developer change?
• What happens to System Integrators? 

FEEDBACK?

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Vinay Tripathi (Senior Member of IEEE,  Production Network Engineer @Google) talks about the evolution of backbone networks for the Cloud and Internet, future technologies and career opportunities. 

SHOW: 849

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #849 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:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we jump into cloud networking, let’s talk a little bit about your background and some of the areas you focus on today.

Topic 2 - Let’s start with something big - the anatomy of cloud backbone networks. What is the makeup of a typical cloud backbone network?

Topic 3 - What are some of the unique challenges and solutions that you need to think about in terms of scaling, reliability, securing, and maintaining these massive networks, along with the innovative solutions being implemented

Topic 4 - Looking forward, what are some of the emerging trends like intent driven networks, software defined global WAN, and the impact of AI/ML on cloud backbone infrastructure.

Topic 5 - Some people in the networking industry are concerned about the future of network engineers. Career Paths in Cloud Networking: skills and knowledge required for a successful career in this field, along with potential career paths.

FEEDBACK?

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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. 

FEEDBACK?

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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

FEEDBACK?

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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?

FEEDBACK?

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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?  

FEEDBACK?

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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?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Since the GenAI era took off, most of the discussion has been about AI in the public cloud. But is there a market for AI in the Private Cloud as well? 

SHOW: 838

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #838 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:

DATA GRAVITY AND BUSINESS CONCERNS ABOUT GEN AI

• Most large companies keep their data on-premises
• Companies are concerned about mixing their data with public LLMs
• Companies are unsure about hallucinations and their quality of their offerings

WHAT WILL THE ENTERPRISE MEASURE FOR GEN AI SUCCESS?

• Some GenAI projects will measure replacement activities (e.g. chatbots for call centers)
• The enterprise hasn’t established a baseline for acceptable incorrect information yet
• Enterprises may use the public cloud GPUs to train or tune private models
• Enterprises will large the consumer market in usage of GenAI - need to identify use-cases

FEEDBACK?

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Chris Chapman (CTO at @MacStadium) talks about Mac-centric backend development, DevOps tools chains, and the best ways to take advantage of MacStadium.

SHOW: 837

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #837 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://www.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:

• Panoptica, Cisco’s Cloud Application Security solution

SHOW NOTES:

• MacStadium (homepage)
• Mac Virtualization, using Orka 3.0

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into all things MacStadium, give us a little bit of your background, as well as some of your focus areas as CTO of MacStadium

Topic 2 - Everybody I know has an iPhone, and so many people use a Mac (or iPad) as their daily computing device. Help us understand the breadth of companies that use Macs for the backend of their application environments? 

Topic 3 - We spend a lot of time focusing on DevOps and the things people do to run cloud environments. Honestly, it’s a mess of all sorts of tools. Apple has always made the complex seem simple. What does Mac-centric DevOps look like? 

Topic 4 - We know (mostly) where cloud-provider responsibilities stop and customer-responsibilities start in places like AWS. Does that change much in MacStadium?

Topic 5 - You are/were the creator of Orka, virtualization for Macs. Walk us through the basics of how that works, and it seems like it would be extremely powerful when looking at CI pipelines.

Topic 6 - What are some of the best ways that companies take advantage of MacStadium?

FEEDBACK?

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In technology, we’re afforded many freedoms that enable us to work, live and play in new ways. But it’s important to reflect on technology freedoms and how they might change in the future.  

SHOW: 836

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #836 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:

TECHNOLOGY PROVIDES US WITH A LOT OF FREEDOMS

• Freedom of jobs, of location, or company or group to work with
• Freedom of technology choices
• Freedom to choose when to use technology vs. human skills

BUT THE FREEDOMS DON’T ALWAYS COME WITHOUT A PRICE

• Companies get acquired and technologies go away/discontinued
• Technologies stop being supported
• Technologies might get too expensive to continue to use
• Laws might change how/what technologies can be used
• Some services are free, in exchange for your data

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Brandon Whichard (@bwhicard) discuss stories in Cloud and AI from June 2024, and then get into spirited discussions about RTO and Tech Exec poaching. 

SHOW: 835

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #835 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 JUNE 2024 CLOUD NEWS

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 
• Trend 1 - Will the AI boom take a summer vacation?
• Trend 2 - Have AI expectations set up Enterprise CIOs for a rude awakening?
• Trend 3 - We’re at the mid-year point. All the cloud providers are focusing on AI. Do you expect that we’ll see a long period of stalled cloud innovation, or do you expect any interesting moves in the 2nd half of the year? 
• Trend 4 - The big tech companies are now all sitting on record-setting market capitalizations. Do you expect any of them to go on an acquisition spree? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

As open source companies and projects enter a transition phase of funding, licensing, community participation, let’s look at the characteristics of successful open source projects. 

SHOW: 834

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #834 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:

• 10 Years of Kubernetes
• 30 Years of Linux
• 10 Years of OpenStack
• 25 Years of Java

WHAT DOES SUCCESS MEAN IN OPEN SOURCE?

• There are 1000s of widely used open source projects, from Linux to Java to MySQL to Docker to Kubernetes to MongoDB
• Less projects are successful from a monetization perspective, but that’s about individual business models
• Plenty of companies during the 2010s-2020s treated open source as “marketing” and not really a development model

WHAT DOES COMMERCIAL SUCCESS LOOK LIKE IN OPEN SOURCE?

• Wide usage infrastructure - Linux, Kubernetes, OpenStack
• Complex projects vs. “it just works”
• Critical security - Vault
• Complex data services - MongoDB, Kafka
• Many companies contributing (share the costs) - Linux, Kubernetes
• Management / Observability Engines - Crossplane, Prometheus
• Programming Languages - Java, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, etc.
• Cloud services hiding complexity
• Cloud services stretching across clouds
• Single vendor projects - often move to non-OSS licensing
• Single vendor projects - difficult to maintain at scale

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Matt Butcher (@technosophos, CEO at @FermyonTech) talks about the evolution of WASM, the relationship with Kubernetes, and managing Developer Experiences with platforms.

SHOW: 833

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #832 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:

• Fermyon (homepage)
• Fermyon Open Source
• Building Apps with WebAssembly (Cloudcast Eps. 633)
• Kubernetes is (not) a cost optimization problem (InfoWeek)

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. It’s been a couple of years since the last time you were on. Great to have you back. For anyone that didn’t listen to that show, or doesn’t know you, give us a quick update on your background.

Topic 2 - Let’s begin by talking about the Web Assembly community and the work around the open source project. Where does it stand today, what are the main focus areas?

Topic 3 - Fermyon delivers WASM as a PaaS platform and is focused on “serverless” delivery for applications. You’ve got a background in PaaS; what lessons have we learned about PaaS and what’s changed over the years?

Topic 4 - A couple years ago, Web Assembly (WASM) was on the short-list of “Hot” topics at KubeCon, even though it just launched. Fast forward to 2024, and it feels like it’s hard to get visibility on anything that isn’t called AI. How is WASM navigating the CNCF communities these days?

Topic 5 - WASM has an interesting relationship with Kubernetes. How do you think about the relationship? What do people get right, and what do they keep getting wrong?

Topic 6 - What are some of the interesting use-cases people are using WASM for thess days?

FEEDBACK?

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As we look at the continued expansion of the CNCF Landscape and the end of Cloud 1.0 era, are there any trends or patterns that identify which technology or categories will succeed vs fail? 

SHOW: 832

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #832 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:

• What’s Stranger than AI? These new Job Titles (ZDNet)
• “Outliers” book and the “10,000 Hours Rule” (Malcom Gladwell)

CAN TECHNOLOGY OVERCOME OUR DESIRE TO NOT COLLABORATE?

• Should technology cross functional areas? 
• Can technology be successful when crossing functional areas? 

CAN CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TECHNOLOGIES SUCCEED? 

• Service Mesh
• PaaS / Developer Portals
• GitOps
• FinOps
• XX as code

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Reid Robinson (@Reidoutloud_, Lead AI Product Manager @Zapier)  talks about automation, application integrations and how to integrate AI in projects with Zapier

SHOW: 831

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #831 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:

• Zapier AI homepage
• Zapier integration with OpenAI
• Zapier Central - AI Workspace to Teach AI Bots to work with Apps
• Zapier Chatbots - Build AI Chatbots
• Zapier Canvas - Diagram AI Workflows

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show, Reid. Before we get started, tell us a little bit about your background, and what you focus on now at Zapier.

Topic 2 - Lots of individuals and companies use Zapier for a wide variety of automated tasks and application integrations. Recently, the company has added a number of ways to integrate AI into those workflows. At a high-level, how did you go about thinking about adding AI into the platform?

Topic 3 - What are some of the most common AI usage-patterns and integrations that you’re seeing companies build around?

Topic 4 - As Zapier began to integrate with OpenAI (or any 3rd-party LLM), how did you think about it as a source of integration? What did you have to think about regarding filtering, security and hallucinations with ChatGPT?

Topic 5 - We often hear discussions about AI agents interacting with other AI agents to complete tasks, or evolve the outputs of multi-step, complex tasks. Is that an area where we might expect to see things like the new Zapier AI tools playing a role?

Topic 6 - What are some of the best ways to get started building AI apps around these new integrations and tools?

FEEDBACK?

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Let’s explore how today’s early AI era is like the unicorn-filled, heavily VC-funded early 2020s. (Part 3 of 3)

SHOW: 830

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #830 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:

• Part 1: How Today's AI is like the Early 2000s (Cloudcast Eps:826)
• Part 2: How Today’s AI is like the Early 2020s (Cloudcast Eps.828)

THE EARLY 2020s were SHAPED by COVID and FREE CASH

• VCs were pouring money into startups; “unicorns” were a daily occurrence
• Many assumed that “today’s normal” would be the “forever normal”
• Business models were drowned out by technology fascination

DO CURRENT AI ECONOMICS AND FUNDING LEVELS MAKE SENSE?

• VCs and cloud providers are funding infrastructure like it’s 1997-2000
• Business models around AI are still being sought out
• Funding valuations have no basis in anything real, at least not yet
• Are we near an AI (economic) crash, or at least deflation of the bubble?

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre, Co-Founder @Dagger_io) talks about the evolution of the container industry, fixing broken CI/CD systems, and modern DevOps.

SHOW: 829

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #829 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:

• Neo4j explores knowledge graphs and vector search (graphstuff.fm podcast)
• See what graphs can do for you at Neo4j.com/developer

SHOW NOTES:

• https://dagger.io/
• InfoQ Article on Dagger
• Daggar and GPTScript for AI (video)
• Tech Crunch Article
• Solomon’s first time on The Cloudcast - Episode #66

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. We’ve spoken a number of times over the years and we’ve been overdue to catch up. For the few listeners out there who might not be familiar, give everyone a quick intro and your background with Docker and containers prior to Dagger.

Topic 2 - Dagger has been around for a few years, coming out of stealth in 2022. If I understand Dagger correctly, it is a declarative model to abstract away CI/CD pipelines. What problem are you trying to solve?

Topic 2a - Anytime you add an abstraction layer, you potentially add overhead and complexity. What are your thoughts on this?

Topic 3 - Let’s go back to containers quickly. How has Containers as an “industry” changed over the years? How does that relate to what you are trying to do with Dagger?

Topic 3a - What lessons learned from Docker and even back to dotCloud days do you want to bring forward with Dagger?

Topic 4 - What metrics are organizations using to measure the performance and success of Dagger implementations? Is it velocity (number of deployments)? Reduction in friction?

Topic 4a - I get the advantage on the Dev side of DevOps, what’s in it for Ops?

Topic 5 - Dagger has three components, Dagger Engine, Dagger Cloud and Dagger SDK. Walk everyone through the offerings at a high level.

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

The introduction of cloud computing brought about a significant change on how we use technology with our businesses. Let’s look at the historical parallels to today’s AI for the Enterprise. (Part 2 of 3)

SHOW: 828

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #828

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:

• Part 1: How Today's AI is like the Early 2000s (Cloudcast Eps:826)
• Part 2: How Today’s AI is like the Early 2020s (Cloudcast Eps.828)

WHAT SHAPED THE EARLY 2010s?

• 2008 financial crash and less money available for technology (uncertainty)
• Increased frustration with corporate IT organizations (too much “no”)
• The possibilities of mobile computing and socially connected societies (abundance)

EARLY CLOUD WAS ALL ABOUT BREAKING AWAY FROM CORPORATE IT

• It’s a new generation of computing, so the future winner is unknown.
• Many companies are trying to have centralized IT policies - one size fits all
• Data governance and legal liability is driving corporate policies (education needed)
• Consumer AI is widely available and applicable to some job functions
• Executives are starting to talk about “AI First” policies
• Cloud-native and Cloud-migrated were very different things, with different results

FEEDBACK?

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• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, from @SoftwareDefTalk) talk about all the major news stories in Cloud and AI from May 2024

SHOW: 827

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #827 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: The Cloudcast YouTube Channel

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

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

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Neo4j explores knowledge graphs and vector search (graphstuff.fm podcast)
• See what graphs can do for you at Neo4j.com/developer

SHOW NOTES: 

• LINKS TO ALL ARTICLES FOR MAY 2024 CLOUD NEWS

Segments Covered in the Show:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 
• Trend 1 - Is anyone going to talk about Cloud anymore? 
• Trend 2 - Is AI a real conversation with Enterprise yet, or does AI need to go through a consumer period first? 
• Trend 3 - Every large acquisition was deemed a “terrible mistake” within a few months, according to the press - (e.g. Hashicorp, VMware)
• Trend 4 - Is April to June the new “trade show season”, or will it just be “always on” in the new AI world?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Let’s put today’s AI era into some historic context by looking at the similarities and parallels to the explosion of the 1st wave of the consumer Internet. (Part 1 of 3)

SHOW: 826

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:

• Building the Information Super Highway (pre-2000)
• Executives discuss the Information Super Highway
• 2001 - A DotCom Bubble Odyssey (Cloudcast Eps.772)
• Part 1: How Today's AI is like the Early 2000s (Cloudcast Eps:826)
• Part 2: How Today’s AI is like the Early 2020s (Cloudcast Eps.828)

WE’RE FASCINATED BY THE IDEA OF TECHNOLOGY CHANGING EVERYTHING

• 2000s era Internet was going to change everything
• GenAI is predicted to change everything

MOST TECHNOLOGY’S SHIFT HAPPEN WITH CONSUMERS FIRST

• GenAI still can’t validate accuracy (e.g. hallucinations)
• GenAI is still extremely expensive to create, maintain
• GenAI still doesn’t have a widely-adopted business model
• Shadow GenAI groups will emerge in the Enterprise
• People are still mostly thinking about GenAI as a way to offload things they don’t want to do vs. improving their existing skills

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Tim Crawford (@tcrawford, CIO Advisor at @AVOAcom) talks about the challenges of the modern CIO, managing stability vs. innovation, and understanding the business value of tech.

SHOW: 825

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #825 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: The Cloudcast YouTube Channel

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

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

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Neo4j explores knowledge graphs and vector search (graphstuff.fm podcast)
• See what graphs can do for you at Neo4j.com/developer

SHOW NOTES:

• AVOA Website
• Tim’s article on HashiCorp

Topic 1 - Tim, welcome back to the show! We’ve been friends for years, and it’s great to get you on today! We will discuss everything at the top of CIOs' minds today. Why don’t you give everyone a quick background on how you became known as the CIO Advisor?

Topic 2 - Before we go into trends over the last few years. Put everyone in a CIO mindset. What do they care about? How do they think about the intersection of technology and business? What keeps them up at night?

Topic 3 - We’ve heard many times CIOs have to balance two things: keeping the lights on (the boring side of the business that is often undifferentiated, and the innovative side that often moves the needle. A CIO’s job is to minimize the former and maximize the latter. Do you agree? How accurate is that statement? 

Topic 4 - I’ll follow that up with a real-world example many organizations might be facing, one we’ve discussed on the show in the past. We’ll discuss VMware on one end of the stable, the keep the lights on model, and AI on the other end as an innovative technology that could differentiate. Let’s talk about VMware first… 

Topic 4b  - Now the other end of the spectrum, AI. Have we reached peak AI washing and craziness? Is the trough of disillusionment coming? How should a CIO think about it?

Topic 5 - Let’s talk about economics over the last few years. Zero-interest money has gone away for VCs and startups and we are seeing some big changes on the vendor side. How does this impact the people you talk to?

Topic 6 -  Last topic, you were there and talked about Hashicorp when they rang the bell last week and then were bought 24 hours later. What was that like as someone who was there?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

When you see the headline “<ex-employee> says <company> AI strategy is in chaos”, what does it really mean? Is any company’s AI strategy NOT in chaos at this point? 

SHOW: 824

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:

• Ex-Google says Google's AI strategy is in chaos (Decoder)
• The Transformer Paper from Google (foundation of GenAI)
• NVIDIA coverage on Stratechery (Ben Thompson)
• DBRX LLM from Databricks
• Artic LLM from Snowflake
• OpenElm LLM from Apple
• OpenAI and Apple sign deal, Apple still wants a Google option
• IBM and Red Hat bring Open Source to AI with InstructLab

WE OVERESTIMATE IN 1YR, AND UNDERESTIMATE IN 10YRS

• “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” - Bill Gates

DOES ANYONE REALLY HAVE THEIR AI STRATEGY FIGURED OUT? 

• NVIDIA
• Google
• OpenAI
• Microsoft / Azure / GitHub
• Amazon / AWS
• Meta
• Apple
• IBM / Red Hat
• Oracle
• Snowflake
• Databricks
• VCs
• Startups

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Jonas Rosland (@jonasrosland, Head of Open Source Community @CIQ) talks about using AI tools to accelerate building and communications in Open Source Software (OSS) communities. We also discuss the differences between Community Roles and Dev Rel.

SHOW: 823

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #823

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

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

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Neo4j explores knowledge graphs and vector search (graphstuff.fm podcast)
• See what graphs can do for you at Neo4j.com/developer

SHOW NOTES:

• Jonas’ session abstract from All Things Open (ATO) 2023
• Session slides and description of the talk
• Hit Save! - Video Game Preservation Organization
• CIQ Enterprise Linux Platform

Topic 1 - Good Afternoon Jonas! Give everyone a quick background on your time building open-source communities and a bit about your foundation. We’ll dig into both areas today.

Topic 2 - We caught up at All Things Open last fall. You gave a fascinating talk on using AI tools to accelerate the building of OSS communities. Give everyone the backstory on how that topic and presentation came to be.

Topic 3 - This may be a dumb question, but DevRel is (still) all the rage. What is the difference between the approach to building OSS communities and the straight-up DevRel teams? How is success tracked in each? Are there solid metrics, or is it “fuzzy”?

Topic 4 - Sadly, as far as I can tell, the session wasn’t recorded. But, for me, the big takeaway was how much dabbling you were doing with the tools and your good and bad experiences. I learned a lot from a practical aspect. But, the AI industry and tools are moving so fast. What’s in your toolbox today and why?

Topic 5 - What are some of the gaps in the tools today? What’s missing?

Topic 6 -  Let’s talk about your side gig. You were part of the founding team and are exec director of a video game preservation society, Hit Save! How did that come to be? What does that entail?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

After just three years, AWS is making another change at the top of the leadership org-chart. What lessons can we learn from leadership transitions and what might come next?

SHOW: 822

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #822

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:

• Andy Jassy makes AWS leadership announcement
• “There’s no AI without the cloud”, says AWS CEO (Decoder podcast)
• Six things to know about the new AWS CEO, Matt Garmin

AWS HAS NEW LEADERSHIP. WHY NOW? 

• Adam Selipsky is out, Matt Garmin is in. What does it mean?
• Why is AWS making the change now?

WHAT LESSONS CAN WE LEARN FROM SELIPSKY’S 3 YEARS AS AWS CEO

• Probably don’t take the job immediately after someone is the Nick Saban of tech
• Don’t be the complete opposite of the previous boss (wings guy vs. wine guy)

[Andy on X] Lead Amazon, married and father of two kids, big sports/music/film fan, experienced buffalo wings eater. Go Kraken!

[Adam on X] Husband & dad. Water skier/tennis player. Fan of Seahawks & Sounders. CEO at #AWS.

• [Andy Jassy] I’ve always had a lot of respect for Adam, and we met several times to discuss the possibility of coming back to lead AWS. In those conversations, we agreed that if he accepted the role, he’d likely do it for a few years, and that one of the things he’d focus on during that time was helping prepare the next generation of leadership.
• [Andy Jassy] Matt has an unusually strong set of skills and experiences for his new role. He’s very customer focused, a terrific product leader, inventive, a clever problem-solver, right a lot, has high standards and a meaningful bias for action. 
• Realize when your job is to lead and inspire vs. producing the weekly report
• The post-ZIRP CEO of AWS
• 2021 - $62B, , 2022 - $80B, 2023 - $90B, 2024 - $100+B
• Lost key people
• Behind on GenAI vs. other clouds
• “Wartime CEO” vs. “Peacetime CEO”

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Mark Collier (@sparkycollier, COO @openInfradev) talks about the advantages of open source AI and the intersection of OSS and AI transparency, safety, and potential regulations.

SHOW: 821

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #821

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

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

SPONSOR:

• See what graphs can do for you at Neo4j.com/developer

SHOW NOTES:

• Mark’s Talk at ATO
• EU AI Act Passes
• How Tech Giants Cut Corners Harvest Data
• The EU Guide Act - A Guide for Developers
• OpenInfra Foundation

Topic 1 - Our topic for today is AI Safety and Regulation. I saw our guest speak at All Things Open here in Raleigh late last year and he is also a Cloudcast alumnus having been on the show previously talking about OpenStack and the OpenInfra Foundation. We’d like to welcome Mark Collier (Chief Operating Officer @ OpenInfra Foundation) for this discussion. Mark, welcome to the show.

Topic 2 - There’s a lot of news today about AI safety and regulation. The industry also seems to be caught up in an AI arms race of who has the bigger model, faster model, etc. OpenAI have become the early category leader but they might have started with good intentions, but, contrary to their name, they aren’t open… at all.  One message in your talk is how open-source software will prevent the coming of the “AI overlords”. Tell everyone a bit of what you mean by this. What is the problem we are facing and many may not even realize it.

Topic 3 - I don’t want to call you old (I think we are about the same age), but you’ve seen some things. You’ve also been around OSS and foundations for a bit now. How can open source solve the problem?

Topic 4 - We hear a lot about AI regulation, but this seems to be a moving target. What is both the current and future state of AI regulation? In my opinion, we haven’t seen a lot of successful regulations to date. We saw recently the EU pass an AI Act. Is this the first of many? The start of a trend?

Topic 5 - Let’s talk about the “day job”. What’s new with OpenInfra Foundation these days?

Topic 6 -  OpenStack releases are still going strong and you’ve even run out of letters on OpenStack releases and have rolled around on the alphabet and are back to C. This is the 29th release of OpenStack. What’s the news for the Caracal release?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Happy Mothers Day! And let’s explore some new happenings at the intersection of open source and AI. 

SHOW: 820

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #820

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:

• InstructLab Project (github homepage)
• LAB: Large-Scale Alignment for ChatBots (research paper)
• Granite LLMs (IBM research - Hugging Face)
  • 7b-base model
  • 7b-lab model
• InstructLab: What is contributing to AI LLM models was easy? (Redmonk)

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO ALL THE MOMS

• Call you mom, be good to your wife, and be a role model for the young girls in your life

OPEN SOURCE MEETS AI

• The big AI question: 1 model, or many models?
• 2023 was the year of model diversity, and the beginnings of “open” models (Llama 2, Mistral, etc.)
• Can we make it easier to contribute to an open model?
• Can we create communities around models?
• Can we reduce the costs of expensive parts of AI? 
• How can businesses bring their knowledge to a model, without security concerns about their data? (options like RAG (retrieval augmented generation) exist)

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Malte Ubl (@cramforce, CTO @Vercel) talks about Front-End web development and clouds, how AI impacts front-end infrastructure, and impacts to the business.

SHOW: 819

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• Vercel (homepage)
• Elevate your frontend with AI
• V0.dev

Topic 1 - Our topic for today is front-end development and front-end clouds, and we’ll also explore AI-generated front ends. Our guest is Malte Ubl, CTO at Vercel. Malte, welcome to the show. Give everyone a quick background on your time at Vercel and Google Search.

Topic 2 - Let’s start at the start. We hear all the time about front-end developers and back-end developers. What is your definition of a front-end and, more specifically, a front-end cloud?

Topic 3 - What are the most common use cases you see today? What problem are you solving when you talk to organizations?

Topic 4 - How much of a front-end is typically integrated with 3rd party services, and how much is build your own?

Topic 5 - Where does AI fit into this from a developer's perspective? Are we to the point where we can develop a front-end from a prompt?

Topic 6 - Let’s talk about the business side of this. Do companies typically have a “front-end problem”? If so, what does it look like, and how do they know?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

What are the key characteristics and red flags with today’s leaders in the tech industry? How to identify the leadership skills, the team building skills, and the execution skills.

SHOW: 818

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #818

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:

WHERE ARE THE LEADERS IN THEIR CAREERS? 

• Are they a 1st time manager?
• Have they managed distributed teams? Managed multiple teams?
• Have they managed a P&L? 
• Have they had significant success in the past? What was their role?

LEADERSHIP SKILLS, TEAM BUILDING, EXECUTION AND RED FLAGS

• Are you joining an established “team” or group that’s worked together before?
• Is the leader repeating a previous success, in a similar or different domain?
• What motivates the leader? What is their view on competition?
• What are the leader’s best skills? Do they recognize this? 
• Does the leader augment their skills with the team around them? Do they recognize this?
• Does your personality mesh with the team you’re joining, or are you expecting to be a change agent?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Aaron (@aarondelp) and Brian (@bgracely) talk about all the major news stories in Cloud and AI from April 2024

SHOW: 817

TRANSCRIPT: Cloudcast #817 - CNOTM - April 2024

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 APRIL 2024 CLOUD NEWS

Segments Covered in the Show:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues - Speed Round
• Trend 1 - 2024 is going to be a year of big announcements
• Trend 2 - We’re starting to see some (early) reality set in with AI
• Trend 3 - Lots of things are being lost between Broadcom/VMware and AI discussions

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Every few years we have to be reminded that open source isn’t a business model. Let’s talk about the business dynamics that everyone seems to keep forgetting.  

SHOW: 816

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:  The Cloudcast #816

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:

• Adam Jacobs discusses open source and business (The Changelog)
• “figure out how to play nice with competition” (Twitter)
• The will never be another Red Hat - Economics of OSS (a16z)

OPEN SOURCE IS A LICENSE, NOT A BUSINESS MODEL

• There are rules around software licenses (e.g. Apache, GPL, etc.)
• There are no rules about how people feel about software, creators or maintainers

FREE, FREE TIERS, EXTENSIONS, CLONES

• Red Flags: Writes most of the code, took VC funding (multiple rounds)
• Green flags: Lots of diverse (companies) contributors
• Yellow flags:  Foundation owns copyright
• “There’s the business side and there’s the hippie side of OSS”
• “I have endless ambitions”
• “I didn’t build a forever entity”
• “When is the rug pull going to happen?”
• If a company takes VC funding, is open source anything more than a marketing vehicle?
• “Docker figured it out and now they are doing like $100M”. Did they? 
• When is OSS personal, and when is it a company?
• Will there never be another Red Hat, or just not another Linux?
• How much is too much when determining if a company should give things away for free?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

John Yue (CEO & Co-Founder @ inference.ai) discusses AI workload sizing, matching GPUs to workloads, availability of GPUs vs. costs, and more.

SHOW: 815

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• Inference.ai (homepage)
• TechCrunch post
• SiliconAngle post on ChatGPU

Topic 1 - Our topic for today is sizing and IaaS hosting for AI/ML. We’ve covered a lot of basics lately, today we’re going to dig deeper. There is a surprising amount of depth to AI sizing, and it isn’t just speeds and feeds of GPUs. We’d like to welcome John Yue (CEO & Co-Founder @ inference.ai) for this discussion. John, welcome to the show

Topic 2 - Let’s start with sizing, I’ve talked to a lot of customers recently with my day job, and it is amazing how deep AI/ML sizing can go. First, you have to size for training/fine-tuning differently than you would for the inference stage. Second, some just think, pick the biggest GPUs you can afford and go. How should your customers approach this? (GPU’s, software dependencies, etc.)

Topic 2a - Follow-up question what are the business side, what are the business parameters that need to be considered? (budget, cost efficiency, latency/response time, timeline, etc.)

Topic 3 - The whole process can be overwhelming and as we mentioned, some organizations may not think of everything. You recently announced a chatbot to help with this exact process, ChatGPU. Tell everyone a bit about that and how it came to be.

Topic 4 - This is almost like a match-making service, correct? Everyone wants an H100, but not everyone needs or can afford an H100.

Topic 5 - How does GPU availability play into all of this? NVIDIA is sold out for something like 2 years at this point; how is that sustainable? Does everything need to run on a “Ferrari class” NVIDIA GPU?

Topic 6 -  What’s next in the IaaS for AI/ML space? What does a next-generation data center for AI/ML look like? Will the Industry move away from GPUs to reduce dependence on NVIDIA?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

For some strange reason, “maintenance” has been in the news quite a bit lately. Is there ever a time when maintenance is enjoyable, or appreciated? 

SHOW: 814

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #814

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:

• AWS increased the price of longer-running EKS clusters by 6x
• Broadcom changes VMware licensing from perpetual to subscription
• Broadcom offers security patches to perpetual license customers
• Increasing the Kubernetes support window to 1 year
• Discovering the XZ backdoor (Oxide and Friends, podcast)

IS MAINTENANCE EVER APPRECIATED OR ENJOYABLE?

• Spent the day surrounded by maintenance activities (oil, AC, power-wash)
• The costs of maintenance are real and opportunity
• Maintenance often goes unappreciated and unseen
• Naming: Release Notes, Technical Debt, Chaos Engineering

TECHNICAL DEBT VS. MAINTENANCE

• Should we encourage a lack of maintenance vs. innovation as a priority?
• Should we encourage active maintenance with lower hard costs?
• Is there a way to put respect on maintenance? (e.g. OSS maintainers)
• Do we undervalue maintenance (e.g. Backup/Recovery, DisasterRecovery, etc.)?
• What maintenance best practices do you use? What are the good and bad of them?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Kalyan Veeramachaneni (@kveeramac, CEO/Founder @DataCebo) discusses the generation and value proposition of synthetic data for GenAI.

SHOW: 813

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• DataCebo (homepage)
• Synthetic Data Vault - SDV
• TechCrunch Article
• MIT News Article

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

With the AI Era upon us, the challenge of trying to learn and make sense of the technologies, the business opportunities and the pitfalls is both exciting and equally terrifying.  

SHOW: 812

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #812

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:

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU REALLY LEARNED SOMETHING NEW IN TECH?

• Cloud was all new, but not completely
• The pace of cloud innovation seemed fast, but not in comparison to AI
• The focus was around one cloud vs. a new source every week

PICK A TOPIC, READ, BE CONFUSED, LOOK FOR CONFIRMATION, RINSE, REPEAT

• Where to start the learning process? 
• Where to pick a source of learning?(Coursera, MIT online, blogs/videos/search, etc.)
• How to determine legitimacy of the sources? 
• How far to learn before stopping to make sense? 
• Trying to relate it to something you already know? 
• How and when to ask questions? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Brad Winett (President/Co-founder @TrackItCloud) talks about platforms for entertainment and media. Topics include use cases, partnering with AWS, and creation and consulting services. We even dig into AR and VR a bit at the end.

SHOW: 811

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

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

SHOW NOTES:

• TrackIt (homepage)

Topic 1 - Our topic for today is media and entertainment in the cloud. I don’t believe we have ever done a show specifically on this topic, and there are some considerations worth talking about. For today, we have Brad Winett, President and Co-founder at TrackIt. Brad, welcome to the show. Let’s jump right in. The media industry as a whole has undergone major change, just like many others. Most of us see it from the consumer end as a cord-cutter. What made you jump into this market and this industry specifically?

Topic 2 - Platforms and content distribution in the early days of cloud was a differentiator. I think back to Netflix, they initially had a market advantage because they were able to scale better and to more devices than anyone and even open sourced a number of internally developed items and were the AWS poster child. Over time, these user experiences have become the norm. How should people out there think about media platforms? Are we past the days of build your own?

Topic 3 - What about use cases? Media streaming is pretty broad. What does a normal customer look like? Is this big streaming services, smaller companies, etc?

Topic 4 - How much of the tech stack is AWS products and how much of the stack is custom typically? Walk us through what a media streaming stack looks like. How is this different from a SaaS provider providing a turnkey service?

Topic 5 - I know TrackIt is a big AWS partner. Give everyone an overview of the landscape of AWS Partnership these days. Do you provide mainly professional services and consulting?

Topic 6 - Where does open-source software fit into this?

Topic 7 - I feel the standard last question these days is how AI will potentially enhance or impact this is some way.

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

What will be the adoption patterns for AI within the Enterprise? Will it follow the early days of Cloud Computing, or will new and different patterns emerge? 

SHOW: 810

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: Cloudcast #810 

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:

WHAT WERE THE PATTERNS FOR ENTERPRISE IT AND CLOUD?

• Shadow IT
• High-scalability or Short-term Projects (and experimentation)
• Migration via “Cloud First” initiatives
• Difficult stuff came last

WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT AI vs. CLOUD?

• CPU to CPU was easier to calculate vs. CPU + GPU
• Have we learned any lessons about how to value people's productivity?
• Does Enterprise AI need a Crawl, Walk, Run scenario? Do they need to be sequential and linked? 
• Are Enterprise AI use-cases well defined? 
• How long is the Enterprise willing to fail at experiments? 
• What’s the Enterprise tolerance for GenAI “flaws” (e.g. hallucinations, lack of citations, etc.)
• Will GenAI rejuvenate Predictive AI projects in the Enterprise? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Aaron (@aarondelp) and Brian (@bgracely) discuss the biggest tech stories, announcements, and trends from March 2024.

SHOW: 809
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: https://bit.ly/cloudcast-809-transcript

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 THE ARTICLES FOR MARCH 2024 CLOUD NEWS 

Segments Covered in the Show:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues - Speed Round
• Trend 1 - KubeCon EU 2024
• Trend 2 - Microsoft continues to branch out from OpenAI as a partner
• Trend 3 - NVIDIA held a pretty massive GTC event

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Let’s dig into the mindset behind the VMware price increases that have been happening since Broadcom acquired the company in 2023. 

SHOW: 808

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Want to win a Tesla Cybertruck or $100,000? Enter the WS02 Choreo Code Challenge (before April 30th)
• WSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers instead

SHOW NOTES:

• What VMware might look like under Broadcom (Eps.629, June 2022)
• What to do about VMware (Day Two Cloud, Feb 2024)
• VMware 10X Price Increase Leaves Companies Looking for Alternatives
• VMware pricing in the Broadcom Era

BROADCOM IS FITTING VMWARE INTO THEIR BUSINESS MODEL

• At least with acquisitions, Broadcom has a well-defined set of business metrics they expect from their companies
• Broadcom acts somewhere like private equity in terms of investment, innovation, revenue generation

IT'S A BOLD STRATEGY BROADCOM, LET’S SEE IF IT PAYS OFF FOR THEM

• In essence, the bet is that there is no replacement for VMware in the Enterprise
• The timing is interesting with the shifting of budgets for AI projects
• It puts customers in a position to pay more for limited upside, but having to distinctly cut other areas of their technology budget (risk the business)
• Customers have some options, but again they risk the business (e.g. hold off on security patches)
• Once a company accepts the new pricing, what guarantees are there about no additional big increases in the future? 
• How much will this impact the longer-term vendor-customer relationship?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Sean Falconer (@seanfalconer, Head of Dev Relations @SkyflowAPI, Host @software_daily) talks about security and privacy of LLMs and how to prevent PII (personally identifiable information) from leaking out

SHOW: 807

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

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

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Want to win a Tesla Cybertruck or $100,000? Enter the WS02 Choreo Code Challenge (before August 30th)
• WSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers instead
• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• SkyFlow (homepage)
• Partially Redacted Podcast
• Software Engineering Daily

Topic 1 - Our topic for today is the security and privacy LLMs. What’s Sean’s origin story?

Topic 2 - Let’s dig into LLM security and privacy. We see this concern a lot on the podcast and we’ve touched on it with various past shows, but we haven’t dug in deep. First, let’s frame the problem. What are we talking about when we talk about LLM security and privacy?

Topic 3 - First, there is a fear that customer PII information might leak out. Second, company IP or confidential into might leak out related to products or offerings. We’ve seen examples of both to date. This could be exposed in the form of integration into a model (query it for the answer) or in the fine-tuning or RAG stage. Either one could lead to compliance issues, lost rev etc. But, that same data at risk is the potential differentiation of the models. How do you both mask the data but take advantage of the data?

Topic 4 - One thing I’ve noticed is many orgs only think about privacy in relation to the fine-tuning stage where they are taking a broad model and making it company specific. It is about much more than that though. Just like standard software development, we have different stages. How is the data collected and stored, how is it used for training and fine-tuning, how is it used after deployment and during interaction stage, etc. How should security and privacy be handled across all phases?

Topic 5 - Let’s talk beyond LLMs for a bit. What about Data Lakes and Data Warehousing? I see this as a problem across all big data, correct?

Topic 6 - How does API security fit into this? Much of what we are talking about is at the storage and retrieval level. But, increasingly we see API issues exposing data. How does that fit in here?

Topic 7 - Let’s talk podcasts, we had Jeff, the previous host of Software Engineering Daily on a few times. How are things over at Software Engineering Daily? Tell everyone a bit about the show.

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

If you’re planning to deploy AI for your business, here’s 5 important capabilities your business needs from the cloud era in order to be successful. 

SHOW: 806

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Want to win a Tesla Cybertruck or $100,000? Enter the WS02 Choreo Code Challenge (before April 30th)
• WSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers instead

SHOW NOTES:

• The Year Ahead in Cloud and Expectations for AI in 2024 (Altitude podcast)

IF YOU WANT TO DO AI WELL, YOU NEED TO HAVE DONE CLOUD WELL

• When we first started doing cloud, the smart people would say, “If you don’t do IT well today, you won’t do cloud well in the future”.
• The same pattern will repeat itself with AI

5 IMPORTANT CLOUD CAPABILITIES NEEDED TO SUCCEED WITH AI

1. Automate everything - Make automation mission-critical
2. Build the right abstractions and flexibilities (e.g. sharing GPUs, Devtools, etc.)
3. Leverage platforms to bring together Data Science, MLOps and AppDev
4. Know how much things cost (e.g. FinOps)
5. Socialize success, and socialize learnings across teams

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Krish Ramineni (@krishramineni, CEO/Founder of @Firefliesai) talks about what it is like to build an AI product company in both the pre-LLM era as well as post-LLMs. We also discuss privacy and security concerns and AI behind the scenes.

SHOW: 805

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

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

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Want to win a Tesla Cybertruck or $100,000? Enter the WS02 Choreo Code Challenge (before April 30th)
• WSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers instead

SHOW NOTES:

• Fireflies.ai (homepage)
• Fireflies MIT Article

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background.

Topic 2 - Our show and listeners tend to be interested and employed in the Enterprise infrastructure and AI/ML space. Some may find it surprising that we are talking today, but we wanted to really dig into how an up-and-coming AI company provides value at scale from individuals all the way to large enterprises. What goes into both building the product as well as taking that product to market? So, let’s start there. You recently posted about “Free AI” on LinkedIn. What was the problem you were trying to solve, and how did that influence the product you built?

Topic 3 - As the foundational models in the industry keep improving and are going multi-modal, do you worry that the LLMs of the world might push out specialized models? How do you think about staying ahead of the curve? How does something like GPU shortages or big companies like Meta purchasing thousands at a time impact your decisions?

Topic 4 - Fireflies.ai is all about the abstraction of the technology away from the user. They have no idea (and shouldn’t) about the back end and everything “behind the curtain”. How do you think about this abstraction layer from a product standpoint?

Topic 5 - Now, let’s talk about PLG vs. traditional Enterprise software sales models. You did another post about that recently. We’ve worked in environments selling both (sometimes at the same time), and they are very different motions. Do you feel both are needed to build an AI company?

Topic 6 - How does Security and compliance with IT departments fit into all of this? I’ve spoken to customers that have a policy of no AI tools at the personal level for instance or maybe client, company and private data might be at risk and only certain tools are vetted and approved. I’ve seen other companies only allow tools licensed by their corp IT. How do you navigate this issue? How does something like GDPR play here?

Topic 7 - Last question, another AI specific concern we hear about is companies training models on user data. What is your thoughts here? How does a company fine tune and train new models and products but keep customer and company privacy from leaking out?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

For years, the CNCF has been the central governance body for cloud-native projects. But are there too many projects now? What if the CNCF was less governance and more like private equity?

SHOW: 804

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Want to win a Tesla Cybertruck or $100,000? Enter the WS02 Choreo Code Challenge (before April 30th)
• WSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers instead

SHOW NOTES:

• CNCF Landscape
• CNCF Trail Map

WHY DOESN’T THE CNCF RECOMMEND A CLOUD-NATIVE STACK? 

• Originally the CNCF was just trying to get projects to use them for governance. 
• Many people wanted them to “define” a cloud-native stack. 
• Defining a stack would have held back their business model - accepting projects and adding sponsors

HOW MANY PROJECTS WOULD GET “CNCF APPROVED” IF THEY TOOK A PRIVATE EQUITY APPROACH?

• CNCF currently has 184 projects, up 4x over the last 4 years. 
• 14% graduates, 20% incubating, 62% sandbox 
• Does the CNCF suffer from the “Big Tent” problem that caused so many issues with OpenStack? 
• KubeCon keynotes are just a list of projects giving status updates - they could be an email. 
• How many projects should the CNCF sponsor? How many categories should remain?
• How would a private equity group apply metrics to CNCF projects? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Eyal Solomon (@EyalSolomo44643, CEO/Founder of @lunardevapi) talks about integrating, controlling, and observability into 3rd party APIs and services. We discuss the trade-offs of integrating a 3rd party API and how it impacts simplicity and potential loss of insight.

SHOW: 803

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

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

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• Lunar.dev (homepage)
• Lunar.dev blog
• Lunar.dev on TechCrunch

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background.

Topic 2 - Controlling 3rd party APIs is increasingly becoming an issue for many organizations. As the world gets built on APIs, consumption of another company's APIs to ingest services is critical. But, this leads to all sorts of control and potentially cost issues. Please give everyone an introduction to the problem.

Topic 3 - Does this mean 3rd Party APIs are a tradeoff? Yes, you might be able to integrate APIs for a payment system for instance quickly, or maybe the latest AI SaaS service, but in doing so won’t an organization potentially lose oversight? Where do most organizations run into problems first? This reminds me of the early days of cloud and people leaving instances running and then getting huge bills and not knowing until it was too late. Is this similar?

Topic 4 - We’ve seen a lot of products and companies tackling the issue of internal company APIs, but not 3rd party APIs. Once an organization determines they have a problem, maybe an observability problem, perhaps a cost problem, maybe a compliance issue, etc. how would they get started gaining API observability and control in their org? 

Topic 5 - Is this a solution that sits in traffic flow? Does this potentially introduce latency? Is this almost like a WAF for 3rd party APIs? What kinds of policies or restrictions can be put in place?

Topic 6 - What are some of the most common use cases you’ve seen and how do you solve them? What business decisions have to be made if they decide to restrict access in some way?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

2024 is the year of business accountability across all aspects of the software industry. This means that all variations of the free tier are going away in one way or another. 

SHOW: 802

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• Linkerd changes publishing model of images
• PlanetScale discontinues Free Tier (“Hobby”) of service

WHY DID THE FREE TIER(S) EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE?

• Why do free tiers exist? Marketing awareness, experimentation, 
• Why is talking about making money, or profitability considered taboo?
• Why do we reconcile the love of employees and the hatred of paying for software?

WHAT ARE THE TRADE-OFFS WHEN THE FREE TIER GOES AWAY?

• Are free tiers and free open source software the same thing?
• Are “wants” and “value” the same thing? 
• What should be free in the software world? 
• Should end-users want the backers of a project or company to be successful?
• Will VCs continue to back companies that have free tiers, or companies that spend on marketing, or is the game needing new (undefined) rules? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Welcome to the "second monthly" Cloud News of the Month. Aaron and Brian discuss the biggest tech stories and five trends from February 2024.

SHOW: 801

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

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

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• LINKS TO ALL THE ARTICLES FOR FEB 2024 CLOUD NEWS HERE

Segments Covered in the Show:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues - Speed Round
• Trend 1 - Microsoft is branching out from just OpenAI as a partner, as they should
• Trend 2 - Selling Customer Data for AI training is Suddenly a Revenue Stream (and a source for lawsuits if it isn’t)
• Trend 3 - Chips are cool again - Everyone wants to go after NVIDIA, including NVIDIA
• Trend 4 - Google has more downs than ups - Will AI eat the search business?
• Trend 5 - Hugging Face leads OSS alternative AI but also has bad actors

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Lots of people want to turn their hobby or passion into a money-making activity, or as the kids call it “a side hustle”. Let’s explore how to do it, and some mistakes to avoid. 

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SHOW NOTES:

SO YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE MONEY?

• When do you decide to make more money? 
• Is anyone willing to give you money? Is it profitable money?

HOW MUCH MORE ARE YOU WILLING TO WORK?

• Why are you doing this? What’s the goal? Is there a goal? 
• Are you doing this with anyone else? Are you aligned? Always aligned? 
• Are you willing to put in the hours? Does anyone else care about your hours?
• How much are you willing to invest in order to learn?
• Are you OK with failing?
• Do you understand how people make money in your niche?
• How will you address conflicts of interest? Where do those come from? Do they matter?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Ronald McCollum (@RonaldMcCollam, Solutions Engineering @GrafanaLabs) talks about updates in the observability space and learning more about Grafana and data visualization.

SHOW: 799

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• Find "Breaking Analysis Podcast with Dave Vellante" on Apple, Google and Spotify
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• Azure Free Cloud Resource Kit : Step-by-step guidance, resources and expert advice, from 

SHOW NOTES:

• Grafana (homepage)
• Getting Started with Grafana Book by Ronald

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background.

Topic 2 - We last talked about Grafana back in 2019 and 2020. Observability continues to be a hot topic, how are you seeing the open-source community and open-source tools evolve in this space?

Topic 3 - We always hear about Grafana as a visualization tool. Grafana AND something (Grafana and Prometheus, Grafana and (insert logging/observability tool here). Is that still a fair assessment? Where does Grafana fit in a modern cloud-native observability stack these days?

Topic 4 - When you are speaking to folks out there, where does the data visualization story resonate the most in the organization, and does it become at times political and cultural (meaning cultural changes need to happen)? There can be an ROI/Business case to be made; developers integrations that will need to happen, SRE operations changes, etc. How do you get something that likely spans many different parts of the organization on board?

Topic 5 - Anytime I think about observability I think in two stages. Identification of the problem and resolution of the problem. Some tools address one or the other, and some attempt to do both. Where does Grafana fit on this continuum?

Topic 6 - I have to ask the AI question. How has AI changed or in your opinion will change observability and visualization in the near future?

Topic 7 - You’ve literally written the book on Grafana so this is a softball question. For those who are interested, how would you recommend they get started with Grafana

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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If you have to build a keynote presentation, or any presentation for a large audience, what are the key areas to focus on? Here’s some tips on story-telling and audience engagement.

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BUILDING THE OVERALL STORY

• Think of your presentation as a story. It can be hero/villian, preacher approach (tell, tell, tell), an analogy, partially educational. Lots of different approaches work. 
• Put yourself in the audience’s shoes. Who are they? Would they want to hear your story?
• What does the audience get out of your talk? 

THE KEY AREAS TO FOCUS ON

• Are you bringing the right level of energy for the room? Are you educating, or motivating, or introducing new ideas?
• Are you bringing empathy for your audience, or are you trying to portray confidence/leadership?
• Are you at the right level for the audience? Technical vs. Business. Prior knowledge required? What about a mixed audience?
• How are you interacting with the audience? Do they provide any feedback (raising hands, laughing at jokes, applause, etc.)?
• Plan for 2-3 minutes per slide. Try not to waste any slides. 
• If you’re introducing new ideas, don’t make people listen AND read at the same time. Keep the visual simple and easy to view. 
• “Sell” the important parts. Emphasize them. Alter the pace to ensure people get it. 
• Use data (stats, graphs, charts) that make concepts easier to understand, or better emphasized.
• Use comparisons - especially with new ideas. 
• Demonstrations can be valuable, but make sure it’s at the right level for the audience - and that it works (pre-recorded is an option)

FEEDBACK?

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Shreya Rajpal (@ShreyaR, CEO @guardrails_ai ) talks about the need to provide guardrails and validation of LLM’s, along with common use cases and Guardrail AI’s new Hub.

SHOW: 797

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SHOW SPONSORS:

• Learn More About Azure Offerings : Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate!
• Azure Free Cloud Resource Kit : Step-by-step guidance, resources and expert advice, from migration to innovation.CloudZero – Cloud Cost Visibility and Savings
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• Keep up to date with Enterprise Tech with theCUBE

SHOW NOTES:

• Guardrails AI (homepage)
• Guardrails AI Hub
• Guardrails AI GitHub
• Guardrails AI Discord
• Shreya on TWIML podcast
• Guardrails AI on TechCrunch

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into today’s discussion, tell us a little bit about your background.

Topic 2 - Our topic today is the validation and accuracy of AI with guardrails. Let’s start with the why… Why do we need guardrails for LLMs today?

Topic 3 - Where and how do you control (maybe validate is a better word) outputs from LLM’s today? What are your thoughts on the best way to validate outputs?

Topic 4 - Will this workflow work with both closed-source (ChatGPT) and opensource (Llama2) models? Would this process apply to training/fine-tuning or more for inference? Would this potentially replace humans in the loop that we see today or is this completely different?

Topic 5 - What are some of the most common early use cases and practical examples? PII detection comes to mind, violation of ethics or laws, off-topic/out of scope, or simply just something the model isn’t designed to provide?

Topic 6 - What happens if it fails? Does this create a loop scenario to try again?

Topic 7 - Let’s talk about Guardrails AI specifically. Today you offer an open-source marketplace of Validators in the Guardrails Hub, correct? As we mentioned earlier, almost everyone’s implementation and guardrails they want to implement will be different. Is the best way to think about this as building blocks using validators that are pieced together?  Tell everyone a little bit about the offering

FEEDBACK?

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Stu Miniman (@stu, Senior Director of Market Insights @RedHat) talks about the experience of The Sphere (@SphereVegas) in Las Vegas

SHOW: 796

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SHOW NOTES:

• The Sphere (Las Vegas)
• What’s inside of The Sphere (video overview)
• Postcard from Earth (trailer)
• Stu’s “In the Clouds” interview series

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. I think it’s fair to say that you’re a veteran of Las Vegas. How many times do you think you’ve been out there for tech-event related things? 

Topic 2 - With tech events coming back, and even non-tech events going live again, Las Vegas is going to be a destination for a lot of people around our community. What did you know about The Sphere prior to visiting this past week? 

Topic 3 - Tell us about the basics of The Sphere. How do you get there? Where is it in Las Vegas? What’s the entrance like?

Topic 4 - Beyond the movies or concerts in the stadium, what else is going on in the building? 

Topic 5 - Let’s talk about the actual stadium experience. What’s the seating like, what are you seeing, how’s the sound? 

Topic 6 - Any tips or tricks for anyone considering a visit to The Sphere? 

FEEDBACK?

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Marco Palladino (@subnetmarco, CTO/Co-Founder @thekonginc) talks about the evolution of APIs, the need for consolidation and integration of AI APIs, and introduces the AI Gateway.

SHOW: 795

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SHOW SPONSORS:

• Find "Breaking Analysis Podcast with Dave Vellante" on Apple, Google and Spotify
• Keep up to date with Enterprise Tech with theCUBE

SHOW NOTES:

• Kong (homepage)
• What is an AI Gateway?
• Kong launches AI Gateway (Marco's blog on Kong homepage)
• Kong introduces AI Gateway (Silicon Angle)
• Hugging Face (AI model community)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into today’s discussion, tell us a little bit about your background at Kong and prior to Kong.

Topic 2 - Now that the world is obsessed with AI and AI Models, what roles do APIs continue to play for applications?

Topic 3 - You’ve lived through the API marketplace days. Do you see a lot of differences between API marketplaces and model marketplaces (e.g. like HuggingFace)?

Topic 4 - You’ve talked recently about the concept of an AI Gateway, somewhat as an evolution of an API Gateway. Walk us through this new concept.

Topic 5 - API Gateways can provide a lot of protection for known things by looking into various headers, security keys, and packet data. Can you imagine AI Gateways being able to have insights into model data to do things like Prompt Control, Hallucination Control, etc.?

Topic 6 - We’ve seen the merging of API Gateways (North/South) and Service Mesh (East/West) traffic as new application patterns emerged. Do you think we’ll see new traffic patterns again with AI traffic and AI model interactions? 

FEEDBACK?

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Big 3 cloud providers investing in AI with cloud credits. $7 trillion dollar big plans. VCs concerned about AI valuations. It feels like a new set of rules are being created. 

SHOW: 794

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SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend
• Learn More About Azure Offerings : Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate!
• Azure Free Cloud Resource Kit : Step-by-step guidance, resources and expert advice, from migration to innovation.CloudZero – Cloud Cost Visibility and Savings

SHOW NOTES:

• Microsoft invests $10B into OpenAI
• Amazon invests $b in Anthropic
• Google invests $2B in Anthropic
• Cloud GPUs
• Can you trust AI valuations, MANG investments (BG2 Podcast)  
• Big Cloud deploys 1000s of GPU for AI - but revenues should be higher (El Reg) 
• Tracking CAPEX by the big 3 cloud providers
• Sam Altman seeks (up to) $7 trillion for new chip building (and comps)