Welcome to episode 256 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin and Matthew are here this week to catch you up on all the news you may have missed while Google Next was going on. We’ve got all the latest news on the custom silicon hot war that’s developing, some secret sync, drama between HashiCorp and OpenTofu, and one more Google Next recap – plus much more in today’s episode. Welcome to the Cloud!

• I have a Google Next sized hangover
• Claude’s Magnificent Opus now on AWS
• US-EAST-1 Gets called Reliable; how insulting
• The cloud pod flies on a g6

Today, we get caught up on the other Clouds from last week, and other news (besides Google, that is.) Buckle up.

04:11 OpenTofu Project Denies HashiCorp’s Allegations of Code Theft

• After our news cutoff before Google Next, Hashicorp issued a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter to the OpenTofu project, accusing that the project has “repeatedly taken code Hashi provided under the BSL and used it in a manner that violates those license terms and Hashi’s intellectual properties.”
• It notes that in some instances, OpenTofu has incorrectly re-labeled Hashicorp’s code to make it appear as if it was made available by Hashi, originally under a different license.
• Hashi gave them until April 10th to remove any allegedly copied code from the OpenTofu repo, threatening litigation if the project failed to do so.
• OpenTofu struck back – and they came with receipts!
• They deny that any BSL licensed code was incorporated into the OpenTofu repo, and that any code they copied came from the MPL-Licensed version of terraform.
• “The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestions that it misappropriated, mis-sourced or misused Hashi’s BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts” — Open Tofu Team
• OpenTofu showed how the code they accused was lifted from the BSL code, was actually in the MPL version, and then copied into the BSL version from an older version by a Hashi Engineer.
• Anticipating third party contributions might submit BSL terraform code unwittingly or otherwise, OpenTofu instituted a “taint team” to compare Terraform and Open Tofu Pull requests.
• If the PR is found to be in breach of intellectual property rights, the pull request is closed and the contributor is closed from working on that area of the code in the future.
• Matt Asay, (from Mongo) writing for Infoworld, dropped a hit piece when the C&D was filed, but then issued a retraction on his opinion after reviewing the documents from the OpenTofu team.

06:32 Matthew – “It’s gonna be inte

Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day’s keynote and the major announcements.

How About Some AI?

“The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy)

Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI

Ok Google, did your phone go off?

For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week

From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next’s Descent into AI Madness

‘Next’ Up from Google – AI!

Have Some Conference with Your AI

We’re jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.

01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.

• Both Ryan and Justin agree that Vegas is much better than the Mosconoe center in San Francisco for Google Next
• The Sessions were well organized, but Ryan is a little tired from walking back and forth between them. Exercise is tiring! \
• Vegas infrastructure was well utilized, something Amazon didn’t do as well.
• Folks staying at area hotels that *weren’t* Mandalay Bay had some issues with trying to get onto / off property at the beginning and end of the day.
• Free coffee is still available. *If you can find it.
• Expo hall felt cramped

08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address

Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.

• Thomas Kurian kicked off the keynote, introduced their new tagline “The New Way to Cloud”
• Sundar: Months can feel like decades in the cloud… WORD.
• 36B revenue run rate
• Kurian did a rapid fire announcement of all the things coming – which required Justin to rewatch just to get them all.
  • A3 Mega Nvidia H100 GPUs
  • Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (in early 2025
  • TPU v5p GA
  • Hyperdisk ML for Inference
  • Cloud Storage Fuse Caching GA
  • Parallel Store Caching
  • AI Hypercomputer
  • Dynamic Workload Scheduler
  • Nvidia GPU Support for GDC Google Distributed Cloud
  • GKE Enterprise for GDC
  • AI Models on GDC
  • Vector Search on GDC
  • Vertex AI Solutions with GDC
  • Secret and Top Secret Accreditations

Welcome to episode 254 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re talking about trust issues with some security updates over at Azure, forking drama at Redis, and making all of our probably terrible predictions for Google Next. Going to be in Vegas? Find one of us and get a sticker for your favorite cloud podcast! Follow us on Slack and Twitter to get info on finding your favorite host IRL. (Unless Jonathan is your favorite. We won’t be giving directions to his hot tub.)

• The Cloud Pod Hosts Fail To Do Their Homework
• The Cloud Pod Now Has a Deadline
• This Is Why I Love Curl … EC2 Shop Endpoint is Awesome
• AI & Elasticsearch… AI – But Not Like That
• Preparing for Next Next Week

02:15 AWS, Google, Oracle back Redis fork “Valkey” under the Linux Foundation

• In no surprise, placeholderKV is now backed by AWS, Google and Oracle and has been rebranded to Valkey under the Linux Foundation.
• Interestingly, Ericsson and Snap Inc. also joined Valkey.

03:19 Redis vs. the trillion-dollar cabals

• Anytime an open source company changes their license, AWS and other cloud providers are blamed for not contributing enough upstream.
• Matt Asay, from Infoworld, weighs in this time.
• The fact that placeholder/Valkey was forked by several employees at AWS who were core contributors of Redis, does seem to imply that they’re doing more than nothing.
• I should point out that Matt Asay also happens to run Developer relations at MongoDB. Pot, meet kettle.

04:14 Ryan – “It’s funny because I always feel like the cloud contribution to these things is managed services around them, right? It’s not necessarily improvements to the core source code. It’s more management of that source code. Now there are definitely areas where they do make enhancements, but I’m not sure the vast majority makes sense to be included in an open source made for everyone product either.”

07:01 What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

• The Open Source community was a bit shocked when a Microsoft Developer revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and Other Unix-Like OS.
• The person – or people – behind this project likely spent years working on it.
• They were very close to seeing the backdoor merged into Debian and Redhat, when a software developer spotted something fishy.