The Cloud Pod Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Peter Roosakos

Welcome to episode 262 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, and Ryan are your hosts this week, and there’s a ton of news to get through! We look at updates to .NET and Kubernetes, the future of email, new instances that promise to cause economic woes, and – hold onto your butts – a new deep sea cable! Let’s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

What is a vagrant when you move it into your cloud
I only Aspire not to use/support .NET
AI Is the Gateway drug to Cloudflare
Let me tell you about the future with MAIL ROUTING
AWS invents impressive ways to burn money with the U7i instances
Google Only wishes they could delete our podcast with an expiring subscription
AKS Automatic — impressive new attack weapon or an impressive way to make Ops Cry? 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod 
General News 
00:53 Vagrant Cloud is moving to HCP 


What sort of feels like a “if you care about it, get it moved into HCP before the IBM acquisition is done” Vagrant Cloud is being migrated to the Hashicorp Cloud Platform (HCP) under the new name of HCP Vagrant Registry.  
All existing users of Vagrant Cloud are now able to migrate their Vagrant Boxes to HCP. 
Vagrant isn’t changing; HCP provides a fully managed platform to make using Vagrant easier. 

An improved box search experience
A refreshed Vagrant Cloud UI
No Fee for private boxes


Users who migrate can register for free with the same email address as their existing Vagrant cloud account. 
Want to review the migration guide? You can find it here. 

01:53 Justin – “I really think Vagrant would be a key pillar of the IBM future strategy for HashiCorp? Nope, I sure did not. I mean, I figured they’d probably just keep it open source and people would keep developing on it, but I didn’t really expect much. So, you know, to at least get this and an improved search experience is kind of nice because the old Vagrant cloud website, it was definitely a little stale. So I can have improved search and a new UI is always nice.”

AI Is Going Great (Or How ML Makes All It’s Money)
02:43 Snowflake Announces Agreement to Acquire TruEra AI Observability Platform to Bring LLM and ML O

Welcome to episode 261 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew, and Ryan are your hosts this week, and there’s a ton of news to cover, including a slew of Azure and Oracle stories! This week the guys cover some new cost management strategies from FinOps, some Kubernetes updates, MS Build, and even fancy schmancy CoPilot PCs! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

Azure woke up and announced things
AWS stops taking your IPv4 Money
Well now everything has copilot

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod 
AWS 
00:57 AWS plans to invest €7.8B into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, set to launch by the end of 2025


Amazon is sharing more details about the AWS European Sovereign Cloud roadmap so that customers and partners can start planning. 
The first AWS European Sovereign Cloud is planning to launch its first AWS Region in the state of Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025.  
Available to all AWS customers, this effort is backed by a 7.8B Euro investment in infrastructure, jobs and skills development.
Customers will get the full power of the AWS architecture, expansive service portfolio and API’s that customers use today.  
Customers can start building applications in any existing Region and simply move them to AWS European Sovereign Cloud when the first region launches in 2025. 
And how exactly will they do that, you might be wondering? If you mean there will be an easy button that’s awesome… do it everywhere else. 
if you mean update Terraform and redeployed Screw you, Amazon. 

03:23 Ryan – “Yeah. It just seems so anti what they’re trying to set up with the sovereign region to begin with, right? Like, I guess copying data is fine in, but not out. Like it’s sort of, it’s like GovCloud, right? It’s completely separate. So strange.”

05:06 Application Load Balancer launches IPv6-only support for Internet clients 


ALB’s now allow you to provision load balancers without IPV4 for clients that can connect using just IPv6. Woot. 

05:25 Ryan – “So the trick is for internal, the reason why we’re starting to see this more and more is that because you can address these huge spaces in IPv6, they’re not doing the equivalent of RFC 1918 address space. So that’s why these things become super important because they’ll configure an internal sort of networking path that&#8

Summary – Finops X
In this conversation, Joe Daly and Rob Martin from the FinOps Foundation discuss the latest developments in the FinOps space and Finops-X. They talk about the evolution of FinOps practices, the growth of the FinOps community, and the importance of the Focus project, which aims to standardize billing data from different cloud providers. They also discuss the adoption of FinOps practices by SaaS companies and the future of the FinOps space. The conversation covers the updates and changes in the FinOps framework, including the addition of allied personas and the simplification of domains and capabilities. It also discusses the upcoming Finops-X conference and the value it provides for attendees, including deep and concrete content, networking opportunities, and career advancement. 
Keywords
FinOps, FinOps Foundation, FinOps X conference, podcast, cloud providers, Focus project, billing data, cloud-agnostic, tool agnostic, open source project, SaaS companies, FinOps framework, allied personas, domains and capabilities, Finops-X conference, deep content, networking, career advancement, Finops-X Europe
Takeaways


FinOps practices have evolved to focus on making processes more operational and improving decision-making in businesses.
The FinOps Foundation has seen significant growth, with over 100 members, including major cloud providers.
The Focus project, an open billing standard, aims to consolidate billing data from different cloud providers and enable more effective cost allocation.
The adoption of FinOps practices by SaaS companies is increasing, with a focus on consumption-based licensing management.
The future of the FinOps space includes expanding the Focus project to include sustainability data and additional usage-based data. The FinOps framework has been updated to include allied personas and simplified domains and capabilities.
Finops-X conference provides valuable content, networking opportunities, and career advancement for attendees.
Finops-X Europe conference in Barcelona offers a focused event for the European market.
The conversation also mentions the importance of small businesses attending the conference and the success stories of attendees.


Sound Bites


“How do I make these processes much more operational? How do I affect the broader decision-making going on in my business?”
“The Focus project… will consolidate or specify how billing data should come from the different cloud providers.”
“The Focus project… essentially handles the data ingestion problem that has plagued a lot of organizations early on.”
“The two big changes that happened this year were the addition of a lot of allied personas.”
“We’ve simplified those down into four key domains.”
“What other things are you guys excited about for Finops-X?”

About Joe Daily & Rob Martin
Joe Daly is a Director of Community for the FinOps Foundation, which is kind of like sitting at the largest lunch table in Middle School, but with less vaping.  He’s had illustrious careers as a CPA (the Statute of Limitations has past for all tax returns he prepared and he has let his CPA expire), Corporate Taxation, IT Finance & Accounting, IT Portfolio Management, a regrettable stint as

Welcome to episode 259 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan and Ryan (yes, all 4!) are covering A LOT of information – you’re going to want to sit down for this one. This week’s agenda includes unnecessary Magic Quadrants, SecOps, Dataflux updates, CNAME chain struggles, and an intro into Phi-3 – plus so much more! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

GKE Config Sync or the Auto Outage for K8 Feature
If only all my disasters could be managed
The Cloud Pod builds a Rag Doll
Understanding Dataflux has given me reflux
Oracle continuing the trend of adding AI to everything even databases
A new way to burn your money on the cloud which isn’t even your fault
Google Gets a Magic Quadrant Participation Trophy
We’re All Winners to Magic Quadrant 
Don’t be a giant DNAME 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast
Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod 
General News 
00:33 Dropbox dropped the ball on security, hemorrhaging customer and third-party info 


Dropbox has revealed a major attack on its systems that saw customers’ personal information accessed by unknown and unauthorized entities. 
The attack, detailed in a regulatory filing, impacted Dropbox Sign, a service that supports e-signatures similar to Docusign. 
The threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and usernames, in addition to general account settings. 
For a subset of users, the threat actor accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication.  
To make things *extra* worse – if you never had an account but received a signed document your email and name has also been exposed. Good times. 
Want to read the official announcement? You can find it here. 

03:06 Jonathan- “It’s unfortunate that it was compromised. It was their acquisition, wasn’t it – ‘HelloSign’ that actually had the defect, not their main product at least.”

05:44 VMware Cloud on AWS – here today, here tomorrow 


Last week at recording time Matt mentioned the VMWare Cloud on AWS rumors on twitter that Broadcom was terminating. 
Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom wrote a blog post letting you know that VMWare Cloud on AWS is Here today, and here tomorrow. 
He says the reports have been false, and contends that the offering would be going away forcing unnecessary concern for their loyal customers who have used the se

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. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

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

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Check out Sonrai Securities‘ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod
Follow Up 
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. 

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

Welcome to episode 258 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan dig into all the latest earnings reports, talk about the 57 announcements made by AWS about Q, and discuss the IBM purchase of HashiCorp – plus even more news. 

Make sure to stay for the aftershow, where the guys break down an article warning about the loss of training data for LLM’s.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Terraform hugs to Big Blue (Bear)
The CloudPod hosts again forgets to lower their headphone volume
AWS fixes an issue that has made Matt swear many times
Google gets mad at open-source
Azure has crickets
HashiCorp’s Nomadic Journey to the IBM Oasis
It’s Gonna be Maaay!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:  
Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod 
General News 
01:48 It’s Earnings TIme!

Alphabet (Google)


Alphabet beat on earnings and revenue in the first quarter, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier, one of the fastest growth rates since 2022.  
They also announced its first dividend and a $70 billion dollar stock buyback. Using layoff money for something other than a buyback? IN THIS ECONOMY? 
Revenue was 80.54 Billion vs 78.59 expected, resulting in earnings per share of 1.89.  Google Cloud Revenue was 9.57B vs 9.35 B expected. 
Net income jumped 57% to 23.66 B up from 15.05B a year ago. 
Operating income of the cloud business quadruped to 900M, showing that the company is finally generating substantial profits after pouring money into the business for years to keep up with AWS and Azure. 

03:54 Justin – “Yeah, I mean, they’re doing pretty well… I think AI is helping them out tremendously in this regard.  I believe it includes G Suite as well. But I mean, like I don’t know how much revenue that is comparatively, but your Google cloud is definitely the majority of it, I think at this point..”

04:20 Microsoft


MSFT fiscal third quarter results exceeded on the top and bottom line, but revenue guidance came in weaker than expected. 
Consensus estimate said Q4 should be 64.5B but Microsoft CFO called for 64B.
Revenue grew 17% year over year in the quarter, net coming was 21.94B up from 18.30 billion. 
Micosoft said that currently near term AI demand is higher than their available capacity, and is focusing on buying more Nvidia GPU