Welcome to episode 279 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your guide through the Cloud. We’re talking about everything from BigQuery to Google Nuclear power plans, and everything in between! Welcome to episode 279!
Titles we almost went with this week:
- 🤖AWS SKYNET (Q) now controls the supply chain
- ⛓️AWS Supply Chain: Where skynet meets your shopping list
- 🌊Digital Ocean follows Azure with the Premium everything
- ⛰️EKS mounts S3
- 🪫GCP now a nuclear
- 🧊Big query don’t hit that iceberg
- 🚢Big Query Yells: “ICEBERG AHEAD”
- 🫠The Cloud Pod: Now with 50% more meltdown protection
- ☢️The Cloud Pod radiates excitement over Google’s nuclear deal
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Follow Up
00:46 OpenAI’s Newest Possible Threat: Ex-CTO Murati
- Apologies listeners – paywall article.
- Given the recent departure of Ex-CTO Mira Murati from OpenAI, we speculated that she might be starting something new…and the rumors are rumorin’.
- Rumors have been running wild since her last day on October 4th, with several people reporting that there has been a lot of churn.
- Speculation is that Murati may join former Open AI VP Bret Zoph at his new startup.
- It may be easy to steal some people, as the research organization at Open AI is reportedly in upheaval after Liam Fedus’s promotion to lead post-training – several researchers have asked to switch teams.
- In addition, Ilya Sutskever, an Open AI co-founder and former chief scientist, also has a new startup.
- We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this particular soap opera.
2:00 📢 Jonathan – “I kind wonder what will these other startups bring that’s different than what OpenAI are doing or Anthropic or anybody else. mean, they’re all going to be taking the same training data sets because that’s what’s available. It’s not like they’re going to invent some data from somewhere else and have an edge. I mean, I guess they could do different things like be mindful about licensing.”
General News
4:41 Introducing New 48vCPU and 60vCPU Optimized Premium Droplets on DigitalOcean
- Those raindrops are getting pretty heavy as Digital Ocean announces their new 48vCPU Memory and storage optimized premium droplets, and 60vcpu general purpose and CPU optimized premium droplets.
- Droplets are DO’s Linux-based virtual machines.
- Premium Optimized Droplets are dedicated CPU instances with access to the full hyperthread, as well as 10GBps of outbound data transfer.
- The 48vCPU boxes have 384GB of memory, and the 60vCPU boxes have 160gb.
6:02 📢 Justin – “I’ve been watching the CloudPod hosting bill slowly creep up over the years as we get more and more data into S3 and we have logs that we store and things like that for the website. And I have other websites that I host there too. it originally started on DigitalOcean and it was a very flat rate for that VM that I need. You start sort of thinking like, maybe Amazon is great for this use case.”
AWS
19:31 Cross-zone enabled Network Load Balancer now supports zonal shift and zonal autoshift
- AWS NLB now supports Amazon Application Recovery Controllers’ zonal shift and zonal auto-shift features on load balancers enabled across zones.
- Zonal shift allows you to quickly shift traffic away from an impaired availability zone and recover from events such as bad application deployment and gray failures.
- Zonal autoshift safely and automatically shifts your traffic away from an AZ when AWS identifies a potential impact to it.
19:57 📢 Justin – “I like just to do that off my health checks, not off AWS telling them, but I appreciate the effort because when you do run into these type of AZ specific issues, they can be a bit of a pain to identify quickly. If Amazon can identify they have a problem and route your traffic for you, that is a great upgrade.”
21:23 Announcing Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey
Announcing Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey
- Amazon MemoryDB and Elasticache have both announced support for Valkey with 30% and 33% lower costs than Memory DB and Elasticache for Redis OSS.
- Ironically, we saved you 50% by reducing these two stories into one. You’re welcome.
- In addition, they give you a nice free tier, where with MemoryDB, you are not charged for up to 10TB of data written per month. Any data over 10TB a month is billed at 0.04 GB, which is 80% lower than MemoryDB for Redis OSS.
- For Elasticache, serverless is 33% lower and Node based pricing is 20% lower than the supported engines.
- Nice move passing on some savings to customers to drive Valkey adoption, and probably improve their margin as well by not having to pay Redis.
22:54 📢 Matthew – “10 terabytes for a month on the free tier is a ton too. Like, I know a lot of apps that use Redis that honestly probably don’t even hit that in a production workload. So this is great. And I think I’m just more mad that when Redis forked or changed license, they were like, Azure stay with us. And now I’m just mad at everyone with all these improvements.”
24:16 Access organization-wide views of agreements and spend in AWS Marketplace
- AWS Marketplace announces the GA of a new procurement insights dashboard, helping you manage your organization’s renewals and optimize your AWS marketplace spend.
- The new dashboard gives you detailed visibility into your organization’s AWS marketplace agreements and associated spend across the AWS accounts in your organization.
24:40 📢 Justin – “…this is actually an interesting challenge, because if you’re buying your cloud solutions, you typically have a reseller or you’re going direct with AWS. And in the event that you’re doing marketplace, just it’s part of your cloud spend. And so you can commit a lot of money through marketplace without going through proper procurement cycles and without proper governance. And so by giving this now a consistent single dashboard, you can now hopefully start keeping track of where things are being spent.”
26:10 Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver introduces new access controls for individual Kubernetes pods
- Mountpoint for S3 Container Storage Interface now supports configuring distinct AWS identity and access management (IAM) roles for individual K8 pods.
- Built on top of Mountpoint for S3, the CSI driver presents an S3 bucket as volume accessible by containers in Amazon EKS and self-managed K8 clusters.
26:51 📢 Jonathan – “I thought pods had the ability to have their own roles that they can assume for a long time, so I was surprised that this wasn’t already inherited from that existing functionality.”
27:19 Amazon OpenSearch Serverless introduces a suite of new features and enhancements
- Amazon Open Search serverless has several new features this week.
- A new flat object type has been introduced, which allows for more efficient storage and searching of nested data.
- Support for enhanced geospatial features, providing users with the ability to uncover valuable insights from location data.
- Expanded field types, including support for unsigned long, and doc count mapper.
- The multi-term aggregation feature enables you to perform complex aggregations and gain deeper insights into your data.
- Furthermore, serverless Opensearch has seen a significant reduction in indexing latencies and faster ascending/descending search sorts, improving efficiency and performance overall.
29:09 📢 Justin – “new features are always a bit delayed. Like they would announce it with a blog post and the blog post all you get for like two or three weeks. I mean, if you look back next week, I bet there’s updated documentation. So there’s a disconnect between the announcement and the documentation team and when they publish things.”
29:34 Convert AWS console actions to reusable code with AWS Console-to-Code, now generally available
- AWS is announcing the General Availability of AWS Console-to-Code which makes it easy to convert AWS console actions to reusable code.
- You can use AWS Console-to-code to record your actions and workflows in the console, such as launching an EC2 instance, reviewing the AWS CLI for your console actions.
- With just a few clicks more, Q can generate code for you using IaC format of your change including Cloudformation YAML or JSON (does anyone still do Cloudformation in JSON?) and AWS CDK Typescript, Python or Java.
- This can be used as a starting point for infrastructure automation and further customized for your production workloads, included in pipelines and more.
- For GA it has several new features:
31:07 📢 Matthew – “Well, the problem with CDK was, especially – granted this was years ago – you tried to do anything too fancy with it and it just kind of tried to do too many things and then CloudFormation would barf…I’m sure it’s exponentially better now, like five years later, or might be more than that at this point. I don’t really want to do that math.’
GCP
31:58 New nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power
- Google sees MS restarting 3 Mile Island, and raises you by building new small modular reactors developed by Kairos Power.
- This is the first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMR) to be developed by Kairos Power.
- The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos powers first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035.
- The deal should enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to US electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
- Kairos power technology uses a molten-salt cooling system combined with ceramic, pebble-type fuel, to efficiently transport heat to a steam turbine to generate power. This passively safe system allows the reactors to operate at low pressure, enabling a simple, more affordable nuclear design.
- Using an iterative development approach, Kairos power will complete multiple successive hardware demonstrations ahead of its first commercial plant. This will enable critical learnings and efficiency improvements that accelerate reactor deployments, as well as greater cost certainty for google and other customers.
- Kairos has been at this for a while, having received over the summer a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build their first power-producing reactor with the Hermes non-powered demonstration reactor in Tennessee.
35:04 📢 Matthew – “I’m waiting for these cloud providers to vertically aggregate now and become power companies for their own things and their own like little generators now they have five little nuclear sites on each data center and that’s their power. And they’re essentially off grid except for the internet.”
37:46 Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis & John Jumper awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Co-Founder and CEO of Google Deepmind and Isomorphic labs Sir Demis Hassabis and Google DeepMind Director Dr. John Jumper were co-awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for their work developing AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. David Baker was also co-awarded for his work on computational protein design.
- Before AlphaFold, predicting the structure of a protein was a complex and time-consuming process.
- AlphaFolds predictions are freely available through the AlphaFold protein structure database and have given more than 2 million scientists and researchers from 190 countries a powerful tool for making new discoveries.
- We’re just really excited to see AI being used for something other than cat memes.
40:02 The new Global Signal Exchange will help fight scams and fraud
- Scams have had a huge impact on people’s lives, with people losing their life savings in some instances. Keeping people safe from scammers is core to the work of many teams at Google. And they are excited to share information about a new partnership and how Cross-Account protection is actively protecting 3.2billion users.
- The partnership is with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), and DNS Research Federation (DNSRF) to launch the Global Signal Exchange (GSE). The GSE is a new project with the ambition to be a global clearinghouse for online scams and fraud bad actor signals with google becoming the first founding member.
- In May, they announced Cross-Account Protection, a tool which enables ongoing cooperation between platforms in the fight against abuse.
- Now they’re sharing that Cross-Account Protection is actively protecting 3.2 billion users across sites and apps where they sign in with their Google Account.
41:05 📢 Matthew – “This is great, you know, the amount of people I know that have been scammed from, you know, one thing or another, or, you know, one of my friends, friends, grandparent got scammed a few weeks ago. It was, you know, messaged me to help. when I’m like, there’s not much you can do, you know, we can solve this in the world, you know, hopefully the world becomes a better place.
Database Center — your AI-powered, unified fleet management solution
- Organizations are grappling with an explosion of operational data spread across an increasingly diverse and complex database landscape.
- This complexity often results in costly outages, performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and compliance gaps, hindering your ability to extract valuable insights and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
- To help address this google earlier announced the preview of Database Center, an AI-powered, unified fleet management solution.
- Database Center is now GA to all customers, empowering you to monitor and operate database fleets at scale with a single unified solution.
- They have also now added support for spanner, in addition to the previously supported CloudSQL and AlloyDB deployments, with support for more databases on the way.
- Database center has the key features available in a unified interface where you can:
- Gain a comprehensive view of our entire database fleet
- Proactively de-risk your fleet with intelligent performance and security recommendations
- Optimize your database fleet with AI-powered assistance.
43:51 BigQuery tables for Apache Iceberg: optimized storage for the open lakehouse
- Google is announcing in preview BigQuery Tables for Apache Iceberg, a fully managed, Apache Iceberg-compatible storage engine from BQ with features such as autonomous storage optimizations, clustering, and high-throughput streaming ingestion.
- BigQuery tables for Apache Iceberg uses the Iceberg format to store data in customer owned cloud storage buckets while providing a similar customer experience and feature set as BigQuery native tables.
45:17 📢 Justin – “So one of my secret tricks to figuring out AWS predictions is go look at all the Apache projects that have gotten popular in the last six months. So I’m giving away trade secrets here, that is, yeah, there’s a lot of Apache projects. There’s a lot of Open Cloud Foundation projects. There’s a bunch of things, and those are all definitely ripe for opportunities.”
46:58 Gain control of your Google Cloud costs: Introducing the Cost Attribution Solution
- As you drive FinOps adoption in your organization (which we’re hoping you all are) identifying which teams, projects and services are driving your expenses is essential.
- To help ease this Google is introducing the Google Cloud Cost Attribution Solution.
- This is a comprehensive set of tools and best practices designed to improve your cost metadata and labeling governance processes, enabling data-driven decisions so you can ultimately optimize your cloud spending.
- Cost Attribution Solution leverages a fundamental google cloud feature that often goes underutilized: labels.
- These simply yet powerful key-value pairs act as metadata tags that you can attach to your google cloud resources.
- By applying the labels you can get:
- Granular Cost Breakdowns
- Data-Driven Decisions
- Customizable Reporting
- Google understands that your environment is unique and that you may have different levels of maturity, which is why they are giving you proactive and reactive governance approaches for labels;
- Proactive Governance (enforcement); Start on the right foot by enforcing consistent and accurate labeling from when you provision resources. Terraform Policy Validation integrates into your IAC workflow, helping ensure that every new resource is tagged correctly per the organization’s labeling policies. This prevents cost tracking gaps and improves accuracy from data 1.
- Reactive governance (reporting, alerting and reconciliation) for existing resources they offer a dual approach
- Reporting: the tool identifies unlabeled resources, providing a clear picture of where you may have gaps in cost visibility down to individual projects and resources
- Alerting: Receive near real-time alerts when resources are created or modified without the proper labels, enabling you to quickly rectify any issues and maintain control over your cloud costs
- Reconciliation: go beyond just reporting by actively enforcing your labeling policies on existing projects. This empowers you to automate the application of correct labels to unlable or mislabeled resources, for comprehensive cost visibility and data accuracy across your entire Google Cloud landscape.
49:46 📢 Justin – “Your pipeline has to be using the G cloud beta Terraform provider to do this. And so basically you, you know, it’s a G cloud beta Terraform vet command you run basically to do your policy validation. And so there are some pretty easy ways to bypass that for the Terraform code. So I would like the other option as well to basically post creation, which they kind of say they have in the reactive side with the alerting. But yeah, it’s still better. And if you are doing a lot of Terraform work on Google, you’re probably looking at this Terraform feature anyways, because it’s pretty powerful. But they’re providing basically a Terraform cloud implementation for Google that you don’t have to pay for, which is a plus.”
Azure
51:31 Code referencing now generally available in GitHub Copilot and with Microsoft Azure AI
- What’s being announced: GitHub is announcing the general availability of code referencing in GitHub Copilot Chat and GitHub Copilot code completions. This feature allows developers to see information about code suggestions that match existing public code.
- Key features:
- Option to block or allow suggestions containing matching code
- For allowed suggestions, information is provided about the matches
- Notifications in the editor showing:
- The matching code
- The file where the code appears
- Licensing information (if detected) for the relevant repository
- Available in VS Code, with wider availability coming soon
- Partnership with Microsoft Azure to make the code referencing API available on Azure AI Content Safety
- How it’s different from previous methods: Previously, GitHub Copilot had a filter to prevent suggestions matching public code, but lacked transparency about the origins of suggested code. The new code referencing feature:
- Provides transparency about code origins within Copilot suggestions
- Allows developers to make more informed decisions about using suggested code
- Extends GitHub’s indemnification commitment to include the use of code referencing for Copilot Business and Enterprise customers who comply with cited licenses
- Balances the benefits of AI-assisted coding with the values of the open source community, such as transparency and knowledge sharing
- Makes code referencing capabilities available to other AI development tools through the Azure AI Content Safety API
- This new feature aims to address concerns about the use of public code in AI-generated suggestions while maintaining the efficiency benefits of using GitHub Copilot. It provides developers and businesses with more control and information about the code they’re using, aligning with open source values of transparency and community knowledge sharing.
49:46 📢 Jonathan – “Well, AI generated content still isn’t copyrightable, so I’d be surprised if anyone actually admits that something was written by AI.”
Closing
And that is the week in the cloud! Visit our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloudPod
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