Welcome to episode 257 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, Ryan, and Jonathan are in the barnyard bringing you the latest news, which this week is really just Meta’s release of Llama 3. Seriously. That’s every announcement this week. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

• Meta Llama says no Drama
• No Meta Prob-llama
• Keep Calm and Llama on
• Redis did not embrace the Llama MK
• The bedrock of good AI is built on Llamas
• The CloudPod announces support for Llama3 since everyone else was doing it
• Llama3, better know as Llama Llama Llama
• The Cloud Pod now known as the LLMPod
• Cloud Pod is considering changing its name to LlamaPod
• Unlike WinAMP nothing whips the llamas ass

01:27 Valkey is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

• Valkey has continued to rack up support from AWS, Ericsson, Google, Oracle and Verizon initially, to now being joined by Alibaba, Aiven, Heroku and Percona backing Valkey as well.
• Numerous blog posts have come out touting Valkey adoption.
• I’m not sure this whole thing is working out as well as Redis CEO Rowan Trollope had hoped.

03:26 Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date

• Meta has launched Llama 3, the next generation of their state-of-the-art open source large language model.
• Llama 3 will be available on AWS, Databricks, GCP, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, Nvidia NIM, and Snowflake with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm
• Includes new trust and safety tools such as Llama Guard 2, Code Shield and Cybersec eval 2
• They plan to introduce new capabilities, including longer context windows, additional model sizes and enhanced performance.
• The first two models from Meta Lama3 are the 8B and 70B parameter variants that can support a broad range of use cases.
• Meta shared some benchmarks against Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B vs the Lama 3 8B models and showed improvements across all major benchmarks. Including Math with Gemma 7b doing 12.2 vs 30 with Llama 3
• It had highly comparable performance with the 70B model against Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Sonnet scoring within a few points of most of the other scores.
• Jonathan recommends using LM Studio to get start playing around with LLMS, which you can find at https://lmstudio.ai/

04:42 Jonathan – “Isn’t it funny how you go from an 8 billion parameter model to a 70 billion parameter model but nothing in between? Like you would have thought there would be some kind of like, some middle ground maybe? But, uh, but… No. But, um, I’ve been playing with the, um, 8 billion parameter model at home and it’s absolutely amazing. It blows everything else out of the water that IR

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.

Welcome to episode 253 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss data centers, OCI coming in hot (and potentially underwater?) in Kenya, stateful containers, and Oracle’s new globally distributed database (Oracle Autonomous Database) of many dollars. Sit back and enjoy the show!

• The Cloud Pod: Transitioning to SSPL – Sharply Satirical Podcast Laughs!
• The Data Centers of Loudoun County
• The Forks of Redis were Speedb
• AWS, I’d Like to Make a Return, Please
• See…Stateful Containers Are a Thing
• Azure Whispers Sweet Nothings to You
• I’m a Hip OG-DAD
• Legacy Vendor plus Legacy Vendor = Profit $$
• Wine Vendors >Legacy Vendors
• I’m Not a Regular Dad, I’m an OG Dad

02:25 Microsoft Agreed to Pay Inflection $650 Million While Hiring Its Staff

• Listener Note: Payway article
• Last week, we talked about Microsoft hiring the Inflection Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman and their Chief scientist, as well as most of the 70-person staff.
• Inflection had previously raised 1.5B, and so this all seemed strange as part of their shift to an AI Studio or a company that helps others train AI models.
• Now, it has been revealed that Microsoft has agreed to pay a 620M dollar licensing fee, as well as 30M to waive any legal rights related to the mass hiring. As well as it renegotiated a $140M line of credit that aimed to help inflection finance its operations and pay for the MS services.

03:22 Justin – “…that explains the mystery that we talked about last week for those who were paying attention.”

05:17 Redis switches licenses, acquires Speedb to go beyond its core in-memory database

• Redis, one of the popular in-memory data stores, is switching away from its Open Source Three-Clause BSD license.
• Instead it is adopting a dual licensing model called the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public Licensing (SSPLv1).
  • Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis will need to enter into a commercial agreement with Redis. The first company to do so was Microsoft.
• Redis also announced the acquisition of Speedb (speedy-bee) to take it beyond the in memory space.
• This isn’t the first time that Redis has changed the licensing model.
  • In 2018 and 2019, it changed the way it licensed Redis Models under the Redis Source Available License v1.
• Redis CEO Rowan Trollope said they switched for the same reasons; he thinks that everyone has switched to the SSLP, particularly when they are making an acquisition like

Welcome to episode 252 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are talking about InfluxDB, collabs between AWS and NVIDIA, some personnel changes over at Microsoft, Amazon Timestream, and so much more! Sit back and enjoy – and make sure to hang around for the aftershow, where Linux and DBOS are on the docket. You won’t want to miss it.

• Light a fire under your Big Queries with Spark procedures
• All your NVIDIA GPU belong to AWS
• Thanks, EU for Free Data Transfer for all*
• Microsoft, Inflection, Mufasta, Scar… this is not the Lion King Sequel I expected
• The Cloud Pod sees Inflections in the Timestream
• The Cloud Pod is a palindrome
• The Cloudpod loves SQL so much we made a OS out of it
• Lets run SQL on Kubernetes on Top of DBOS. What could go wrong?
• The Cloud Pod is 5 7 5 long

1:00 PSYCH! We’re giving this segment a break this week. YOU’RE WELCOME.

01:08 Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model is now available on Amazon Bedrock

• Last week Claude 3 Sonnet was available on Bedrock, this week Claude 3 Haiku is available on Bedrock.
• The Haiku model is the fastest and most compact mode of the Claude 3 family, designed for near-instant responsiveness and seamless generative AI experiences that mimic human interaction.
• We assume, thanks to how much Amazon is stretching this out, that next week we’ll get Opus.
• Want to check it out for yourself? Head over to the Bedrock console.

02:02 Jonathan – “I haven’t tried Haiku, but I’ve played with Sonnet a lot for pre over the past week. It’s very good. It’s much better conversationally. I mean, I’m not talking about technical things. It’s like I ask all kinds of random philosophical questions or whatever, just to kind of explore what it can do, what it knows…If I was going to spend money on OpenAI or Anthropic, it would be on Anthropic right now.”

04:03 AWS Pi Day 2024: Use your data to power generative AI

• 3.14 just passed us by last week, and Amazon was back with a live steam on Twitch where they explored AWS storage from data lakes to High Performance Storage, and how to transform your data strategy to become the starting point for Generative AI.
• As always they announced several new storage features in honor of pi day, including S3 connectors for Pytorch,

Welcome to episode 251 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re looking at the potential end of low impact code thanks to generative AI, how and why Kubernetes is still hanging on, and Cloudflare’s new defensive AI project. Plus we take on the death of Project Titan in our aftershow.

• The Cloud Pod is Magic
• Why is the Cloud Pod Not on the Board of the Director for OpenAI
• The Cloud Pod wants Gen AI Money
• The Cloud Pod Thinks Magic Networks Are Less Fun Than Magic Mushrooms
• The Cloud Pod is Mission Critical so Give Us Your Money and Sponsor Us

00:50 Kubernetes Predictions Were Wrong — Redux

• Last week Ryan and Justin talked about why Kubernetes hasn’t disappeared into the background during our after show, and now with Matt and Jonathan here I wanted to see if they had any additional thoughts.
• If you missed this two weeks ago, it’s probably because you don’t know that there are regular after shows after the final bumper of the show… typically about non-cloud things or things that generally interest our hosts. There is one today about the death of the Apple Car.
• To summarize the conversation, ChatGPT has provided us with a sort of CliffsNotes version.
  • Ryan and Justin speculated on the reasons why Kubernetes (K8) persisted despite predictions of its decline:

• Global Pandemic Impact: They acknowledged the global pandemic that unfolded since 2020 and considered its potential influence on Kubernetes. The pandemic might have shifted priorities and accelerated digital transformation efforts, leading to increased reliance on Kubernetes for managing cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Organizations might have intensified their focus on scalable and resilient technologies like Kubernetes to adapt to remote work environments and changing market dynamics.
• Unforeseen Complexity: Despite expectations for a simpler alternative to emerge, Kubernetes has grown more complex over time. The ecosystem around Kubernetes has expanded significantly, with various platforms, services, and tools built on top of it. This complexity may have made it challenging for organizations to migrate away from Kubernetes, as they have heavily invested in its ecosystem and expertise.
• Critical Role in Scalability: Kubernetes remains a fundamental technology for platform engineering teams seeking to achieve scalability and standardization in their operations. Creating a standardized, opinionated path for Kubernetes within organizations enables them to streamline deployment processes, manage resources efficiently, and support the growing demands of modern applications. This critical role in scaling infrastructure and applications might have contributed to Kubernetes’ enduring relevance.
• Absence of Clear Alternatives: Despite predictions, no single service or platform has emerged as a clear, universally adopted alternative to Kubernetes. While other solutions exist, such as Tanzu, OpenShift, and others mentioned, none have achieved the same level of adoption or provided a compelling reason for organizations to migrate away from Kubernete

Welcome to episode 250 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Well, we’re not launching rockets this week, but we ARE discussing the AI arms race, AWS going nuclear, and all the latest drama between Elon and OpenAI. You won’t want to miss a minute of it!

• The Paradox of AI choice
• Amazon just comes across super desperate on RACING to AI foundation model
• support
• Your new JR developer Test-LLM
• If you can’t beat OpenAI, sue them

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

01:12 IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Cloud Strategies: Chicago (Rosemont/O’Hare), Illinois

• Want to meet cloud superstar Matthew Kohn in person? He’s going to be giving a talk in Chicago, if you’re going to be in the neighborhood. *Maybe* he’ll have some stickers.
• 11:30am – 12:30pm: Using Data and AI to Shine a Light on Your Dark IT Estate

03:42 Anthropic claims its new models beat GPT-4

• AI Startup Anthropics, has announced their latest version of Claude.
• The company claims that it rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4 in terms of performance.
• Claude 3, and its family of models, includes Claude 3 Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, with Opus being the most powerful.
• All show “increased capabilities” in analysis and forecasting, Anthropic claims, as well enhanced performance on specific benchmarks versus models like GPT-4 (but not GPT-4 Turbo) and Googles Gemini 1.0 Ultra (but not Gemini 1.5 Pro)
• Claude 3 is Anthropics first multi-modal model.
• In a step better than rivals, Claude can analyze multiple images in a single request (up to 20). This allows it to do compare and contrast operations
• However, there are limits to its image capabilities. It’s not allowed to identify people.
• They admit it is also prone to mistakes on low-quality images under 200 pixels, and struggles with tasks involving spatial reasoning and object counting.

05:42 Justin – “Overall, this looks like not a bad model. I do see a little bit of chatter today actually. Some people say it’s not quite as good in some areas, but it’s pretty good in others. And it is not connected to the internet, this model. So it is dated only through August of 2023. So anything that happened after that, like the Israeli Hamas conflicts, it doesn’t know anything about those. So just be aware.”

06:08 Matthew – “You know, it’s actually interesting now. There’s so many models out there. You know, you have to start to look at what makes sense for your data and what you need, along with also price. You know, I look too closely at what the price is, but you might be able to get away with running this over GPT-4 turbo, and you might not need the latest and greatest, and you’re leveraging this in