Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.  

Titles we almost went with this week:

• ☢️The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power
• 💤I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood.
• 🌟I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power
• ⚛️Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either
• 🔋We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power
• ✅Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right
• 🪫Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL

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AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money  

00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

• Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku. 
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).  
• Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku. 
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.  
• Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.  
• Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability. 
• Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dragging or zooming.   
• The idea is to make Claude complete individual tasks, without always needing to leverage an API, like clicking in a GUI, or uploading a file from a computer.  These types of solutions are typically found in Build and Test like scenarios with tools such as Saucelabs or Browserstack. 
• To do this, Claude was built to perceive and interact with computer interfaces. You can use data from my computer to fill out this online form or check a spreadsheet, move the cursor to a web browser, navigate to the relevant web pages, select the data for the spreadsheet and so on. 

3:06 📢 Jonathan – “If you can take pictures of the screen, then it can identify where buttons and things are without having to know the name of the objects in the DOM and stuff like that. So you could say, give me instructions, click on this, click on this, click on this, do this stuff. It would be really easy to automate tests that way instead of having to know the names of the divs and things on a page, especially for web testing. Because if a developer changes those, then you’ve got to update the tests where if you say click on the button that says do this, then it can. Something I really appreciate about Clawboard, although it won’t generate images, it’s really good at analyzing images and describing exactly what’s on the screen or exactly what things are doing in the image that you give it. I think it’s kind of cool. Looking forward to playing with that. API only though.”

AWS

6:50 Amazon jumps on nuclear power bandwagon by investing in X-Energy and 

         promising small reactors

• Microsoft, then Google and Now AWS…and we’re positively glowing with all this nuclear energy!
• Amazon revealed three deals, including an investment in startup X-Energy and two development agreements (Energy Northwest & Dominion Energy)to add around 300 Megawatts of capacity in the PNW and Virginia. 
• The agreements include the constructions of several new Small Modular reactors (SMRs).  
• SMRs are an advanced kind of nuclear reactor with a small physical footprint, allowing them to be built closer to the grid. 
• This comes on top of their agreement to co-locate a data-center facility next to Talon Energy’s nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. 

7:37 📢 Ryan – “It’s so energy intensive to run AI workloads and you can’t really depend on you know like a cloudy day of ruining solar or non windy day like it’s can augment with that but it’s kind of interesting I’m really curious to see what they’ve done in terms of like nuclear waste and hopefully these smaller footprint reactors make that at least easier to manipulate versus like, you know, the giant amounts of nuclear waste that you have to track or train through towns.”

09:21 This Week in AI: AWS loses a top AI exec  

• Dr. Matt Wood, VP Of AI, announced that he would be leaving AWS after 15 years.  Matt had been long involved in the AI initiatives and was appointed VP in September 2022.
• Over the last two years there have been several missteps in AI, with Amazon missing out on investments in Cohere and Anthropic, and having to do a joint investment with Google in Anthropic. 
• AWS CEO Matt Garman is aggressively moving to right the ship, acqui-hiring AI startups such as Adept and investing in training systems like Olympus.  
• We’re not really sure if he resigned or was asked to leave. 
• The silver lining? No more boring keynotes! 

10:54 Support for Amazon CloudWatch Evidently ending soon

• Way Back in December 2021 after Re:invent where it was announced we covered the launch of Evidently.  Our show notes at the time were “🧪 AWS releases CloudWatch Evidently, a capability that helps developers introduce experiments and feature management in their application code. The team remains confused as to why this is a CloudWatch feature.”
• Evidently no one else knew what Cloudwatch Evidently did either, and it’s being deprecated.
• AWS will discontinue the service on 10/17/2025 (so you have a year), and that’s when support for the service will end. 
• They’ll still provide critical security patches, but they will no longer support any limit increase requests. 
• AWS recommends that you leverage AppConfig, a feature of AWS Systems Manager.  Which I think we said you should keep using back then. 

11:51 📢 Ryan – “I do love that there’s no way you can find evidently, you know, because it’s part of CloudWatch, but you also won’t be able to find AppConfig because it’s buried in nine layers of Smangr.”

12:41 Serverless Agentic Workflows with Amazon Bedrock

• AWS is launching a new short course developed in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Ng and Deep Learning AI.  
• This hands-on course taught by Mike Chambers, teaches how to build serverless agents that can handle complex tasks without the hassle of managing infrastructure.  
• You will learn everything you need to know about integrating tools, automating workflows, and deploying responsible agents with built-in guardrails with AWS and Bedrock.  

13:08 📢 Justin – “I’m very excited about the concept of serverless agentic or even agentic AI in general, but I’m not sure that I would do it on Bedrock.”

13:57 AWS Lambda console now surfaces key function insights via built-in Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights dashboard

14:13 AWS Lambda console now supports real-time log analytics via Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail 

• The AWS Lambda console now surfaces key metrics about Lambda Functions in your AWS account via a built-in Amazon CloudWatch Metric Insights Dashboard, enabling you to easily identify and troubleshoot the source of errors of performance issues. 
• Previously you would have to navigate to the Cloudwatch console and query custom metrics or build custom dashboards. 
• Thank you. We’re honestly shocked this feature took so long to come out. 
• Not only do they now put some metrics into the Lambda console, but you can also view real-time logs via Amazon Cloudwatch Logs Live Tail, an interactive log streaming and analytics capability that provides real-time visibility into logs, making it easier to develop and troubleshoot lambda functions. 

14:41 📢 Matthew – “I feel like the live tail is fairly recent and I used it a couple of weeks ago in Elastic Beanstalk. Don’t ask questions, but helping out somebody with Elastic Beanstalk, we’ll just move on. And it was a really nice feature of being able to go in there and see real time, hit the API, see the logs on the server, and kind of do it all in there. So I’m looking forward to actually having to be able to grab my lambdas and immediately be able to see the output versus.”

17:34 Options for AWS customers who use Entrust-issued certificates

• Google and Mozilla, as well as the JRE will no longer support Entrust Public TLS certificates after November 2024
• Any certificates issued after November 11 2024 will not be trusted by the browsers. 
• If you have imported Entrust certificates via ACM for ELB or Cloudfront, you will need to reissue these certs before November 12th 2024.
• The Chrome Security Team wrote in a blog post: “Over the past several years, publicly disclosed incident reports highlighted a pattern of concerning behaviors by Entrust that fall short of the above expectations, and has eroded confidence in their competence, reliability, and integrity as a publicly-trusted CA Owner.”

20:46 AWS announces a seamless link experience for the AWS Console Mobile App

• I mean… we’ve wanted this – but we’re also a bit afraid of this feature, as the mobile apps from the cloud providers are pretty limited.
• AWS is announcing a seamless link experience for the AWS console mobile app.  Link to AWS services and resources can now be opened in the AWS Console mobile app when customers have the app installed on their mobile device. 
• Now AWS customers who are on the go can open links to AWS services and resources from sources like email and chat. 
• Customers benefit from the mobile apps biometric authentication, and mobile optimized customer experience. 
• Links to AWS services or resources not available natively, are accessible via an in app browser where customers can deep link to the relevant pages without additional authentication. 

21:41 📢 Justin – “So this is a nice quality of life improvement. If you’re a heavy user of the mobile app, which as much as I would like to be, I am not because they’re Customers benefit from using the mobile app because it supports bioelectric authentication as well as mobile optimized customer experience. And in the few cases where they don’t have a service that supported, they will apparently now open that experience in a native browser inside of the Amazon console mobile app, which if that works, okay, I’ll accept it, but I’m worried it’s not going to work well, but we’ll see.”

23:47 Amazon S3 adds new Region and bucket name filtering for the ListBuckets API

• Stop me if you haven’t had this scenario before, someone needs access to an S3 bucket, you provision them an account, create the IAM policy, and then provide them access.  
• Next thing you know,  they call you and say they see a ton of buckets in addition to the one you gave them, and they would like to access more buckets… rinse and repeat.  
• This announcement fixes this problem, and allows you to keep access restricted.  
• Amazon S3 now supports AWS region and bucket name filters for the ListBuckets API.  
• In addition, paginated listbuckets requests now return your S3 general purpose buckets and their corresponding AWS regions in the response, helping you simplify apps that need to determine bucket locations across multiple regions. 
• To get started, you can specify the AWS region in the query parameter and the bucket name prefixes.  

24:56 📢 Matthew – “It’s amazing how many times they’ve had to, somebody’s been like, okay, they just need access to this bucket. And like, someone gave them just access to the bucket and then they’re like, if they can’t, it doesn’t work. And I’d be like, did you do list? And then literally your scenario would come up and it’s amazing. It’s taken 15 years for this to get fixed. Like I understand S3 is in its own world in IAM, cause it pre-exists IAM, but like this feels like it should have been something.”

27:02 Upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic (available now), computer use (public beta), and Claude 3.5 Haiku (coming soon) in Amazon Bedrock

• AWS supports the new Claude libraries.  
• This is what happens when you don’t have a copywriter monitoring your releases and writing your posts. You come in second place. 

GCP

27:29 New in NotebookLM: Customizing your Audio Overviews and introducing NotebookLM Business

• Justin did a thing!
• Notebook LM is a newish tool built with Gemini 1.5. 
• You can upload a set of sources on a topic, and the notebook becomes an expert by grounding its responses in your material and giving you powerful ways to transform information. 
• You can use this to create study guides, quizzes or even an audio overview of the material. 
• Now, with this announcement you can guide the conversation by providing instructions like focusing on a specific topic or adjusting the expertise level to suit your audience. 
• And it makes impressive podcasts (Demo)
• They are also announcing NotebookLM Business, an upcoming version that will be offered via Google Workspace with enhanced features for businesses, universities and organizations. 
• Note: The Cloud Pod’s female eye candy is the copywriter, not a host. Just FYI. 

32:05 📢 Justin – “You can definitely tell at different levels of how technical you want it to be. I chose a medium technical ability for it. That’s what I gave in the guidance for this new feature. But it gave me an idea. It’s funny because it has some of the inflections that you would have in a podcast when you’re thinking. We’re not out of a job yet, but maybe someday.”

34:51 Compare Mode in Google AI Studio: Your Companion for Choosing the Right Gemini Model

• Compare Mode is a new feature designed to help you make informed decisions about which Gemini model best suits your needs. 
• Compare Mode simplifies the process of assessing cost, latency, token limits and response quality, allowing you to evaluate responses across the various Gemini and Gemma models available in AI studio, side by side. 
• With this capability you can provide a prompt, and optional system instructions and compare mode will display the outputs from various models, allowing you to quickly assess the strengths of each of your specific use cases.

35:32 📢 Ryan – “I also wonder how much this is going to like, you know, the, the, the, more expensive models are going to perform better in most cases. And so like it’s going to be, it’s going to lean you in that direction, or at least it seems like that’s going to be the case, but it’d be interesting.”

40:06 Announcing Anthropic’s upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet on Vertex AI

• With the launch of Claude 3.5 partner Google is here to tell you that they have added it to the Vertex AI Model Garden.  
• Including the computer use capability in the public beta.   

40:20 Highlights from the 10th DORA report

• The 2024 Accelerated State of DevOps reporting has been published. 
• One of the highlights of widespread AI adoption is reshaping software development practices with over 75% of respondents saying they rely on AI for at least one daily professional responsibility. 
• More than 1/3rd of the respondents said AI experienced moderate to extreme productivity increases from AI. 
• However, AI adoption may negatively impact software delivery performance and a reduction in delivery stability. 
• Despite the productivity gains, respondents reported little to no trust in AI-generated code. 
• Platform engineering is another area of increased adoption, per the report.  4 key findings were found
  • Increased developer productivity
  • Prevalence in larger firms
  • Potential performance dip
  • Need for user-centeredness and developer independence
• Developer experience is the cornerstone of success
• I need to read the full report, but I’m not surprised by any of these findings. 

Azure

42:48 New: Secure Sandboxes at Scale with Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions

• Azure is announcing in preview Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions.  
• Azure Container apps is a serverless platform that enables you to run containerized workloads without managing the underlying infrastructure. Dynamic sessions add the ability to execute untrusted code in secure, sandboxes environments at scale. 
• Dynamics sessions provide secure, ephemeral sandboxes called “sessions” for running potentially malicious code.  
• Dynamic sessions are ideal for running untrusted code in hostile multi-tenant scenarios:
  • Running code generated by a LLM
  • Running code or commands submitted by cloud app users
  • Running cloud based development environments, terminals and more. 

43:36 📢 Jonathan – “Imagine you have a service where you want people to be able to define something as code, like a dashboard or some kind of agent for AI or something like that. And you want to test it in a sandbox where it’s not going to have any production impact if it fails or goes into some infinite loop or something. It’s great. It’s really nice to an isolated place to go and test things.”

44:42 Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers’ cloud products

• I mean why does anyone trust Microsoft for anything related to security?  This week’s nonsense…
• Microsoft has notified customers that it’s missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions. 
• Per the note sent to customers “a bug in internal monitoring agents resulted in a malfunction in some of the agents when uploading log data to their internal logging platform.”
• The notification assures you that it was not caused by a security incident and only affected the collection of log events. 
• Products impacted included: Entra, Sentinel, Defender for Cloud and Purview. 
• This comes a year after Federal Investigators complained that Microsoft was withholding security logs from certain US federal government departments that house their emails on the company’s hardened, government-only cloud.  

45:54 📢 Matthew – “…there’s only so many hits before people really start. You know yelling at Microsoft being like guys, you can’t lose our security logs that feels like 101 Mike. These systems need to be tested through and through before we promote it, especially for things like your DLP, your AD, your, your SIEM software. Like you can’t be missing these things.”

47:54 Leverage Microsoft Azure tools to navigate NIS2 compliance 

• Robust cybersecurity measures are vital for organizations to address evolving cyberthreats and navigate regulatory requirements and their impact on compliance strategies.  
• NIS 2 is a European Union set of security measures to mitigate risk of cyberthreats and overall levels of cyber securities…
• But we can’t… how do you explain to the EU that your missing security logs for 2 weeks? 
• WHAT THE HECK. 
• Leverage tools to maintain compliance – sure Microsoft. Sure. 

50:34 Azure Cobalt 100-based Virtual Machines are now generally available

• • If you’ve been anxiously waiting for some ARM based virtual machines on Azure, they are pleased to announce the Azure Cobalt 100-based VM’s are now GA.  
  • These VM’s leverage Microsoft’s first 64 bit Arm-Based Azure Cobalt 100 CPU, which has been fully designed in-house. 
  • The new Cobalt 100 instances are in 2 varieties, a general purpose Dpsv6-series and a memory-optimized Epsv6-series VM Series. 
  • Dpsv6 and Dpdsv6 vms offer up to 96 vCPUs and 384gb of memory. 
  • The Dplsv6 series and dpldsv6 series up to 96 vcpus and 192gb of memory
  • Epsv6 and epdsv6 series offer up to 96 vcpus and 672 gib of Ram. 
•  “We are really excited about the new Cobalt 100 VMs. We are making them the primary platform for our Databricks SQL Serverless offering on Azure, as they offer outstanding efficiency and allow us to deliver significant price-performance improvements to our customers. Customers using our Azure Databricks classic Jobs offering will also greatly benefit from Cobalt VMs by selecting them for their Jobs cluster nodes, achieving noticeable performance improvements while keeping operating costs down.” —Michael Kiermaier, VP of Business Strategy and Operations, Databricks

52:05 📢 Matthew – “I remember playing with the the Gravitons when they first came out and they were pretty nice. And so it is something that I kind of will throw into some dev and other environments to see how well they are. And what’s nice is they’re actually pretty well available. Like I’m looking at it and it’s a good chunk of reasons that are available day one.”

53:23 New autonomous agents scale your team like never before

• Azure is announcing two new agentic capabilities that will accelerate the gains and bring AI-first business process to every organization
  • First the ability to create autonomous agents with CoPilot Studio will be in public preview next month
  • Second, they have introduced ten new autonomous agents in D365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.
• Earlier this year they announced the copilot studio in private beta, and it will be shifting to public preview, allowing more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI.  Agents draw on the context of your work data in M365 Graph, system of record, dataverse, and fabric. They can support everything from your IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as personal concierges for sales and service.   

54:48 📢 Jonathan – “…they’re not just agents, they’re AI workers for hire.”

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