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

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

For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin and Jonathan are joined by Travis Runty, CTO of Public Cloud with Rackspace Technology. In today’s interview, they discuss being accidentally multi cloud, public vs private cloud, and cloud migration, and best practices when assisting clients with their cloud journeys. 

Background

Rackspace Technology, commonly known as Rackspace, is a leading multi-cloud solutions provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, United States. Founded in 1998, Rackspace has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses seeking expertise in managing and optimizing their cloud environments.

The company offers a wide range of services aimed at helping organizations navigate the complexities of cloud computing, including cloud migration, managed hosting, security, data analytics, and application modernization. Rackspace supports various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, among others. 

Rackspace prides itself on its “Fanatical Experience” approach, which emphasizes delivering exceptional customer support and service. This commitment to customer satisfaction has contributed to Rackspace’s reputation as a reliable and customer-centric provider in the cloud computing industry. 

Meet Travis Runty, CTO of Public Cloud for Rackspace Technology

Beginning his career with Rackspace as a Linux engineer, Travis has spent the last 15 years working his way through multiple divisions of the company, including 10 years in senior and director level positions. Most recently, Travis served as VP of Technical Support of Global Cloud Operations from 2020-2022. 

Travis is extremely passionate about building and leading high performance engineering teams and delivering innovative solutions. Most recently, as a member of their technology council, Travis wrote an article for Forbes – Building a Cloud-Savvy Workforce: Empowering Your Team for Success – where he discussed best practices for prioritizing workforce enablement, especially when it comes to training and transformation initiatives. 

Interview Notes:

In the main show, TCP has been talking a lot about Cloud / hybrid cloud / multi-cloud and repatriating data back to on prem, and today’s guest knows all about those topics. 

Rackspace has had quite a few phases in their journey to public cloud – including building a data center in an unused mall, introducing managed services, creating partnerships with VMware, an attempt to go head to head with the hyperscalers, and then ultimately focusing on public cloud and instead partnering with the hyperscalers. 

Rackspace has both a focus on private and public cloud; when it comes to private cloud they focus mainly on VMware and OpenStack, whereas in the public cloud side, Rackspace partners with the hyperscalers to assist clients with their cloud journey. 

Quotes from today’s show 

Travis: “We want to make sure that when a customer goes on their public cloud journey, that they actually have a robust strategy that is going to be effective. From there, we’re able to leverage our professional services teams to make sure that they can realize that transformation, and hopefully there *is* a transformation, and it’s not just a lift and shift.”

Travis: “A conflict that we continuously have to strike the balance of is when do we apply a cloud native solution, and where do we apply the Rackspace elements on top. The hyperscalers techno

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! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

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 

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
General News 
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 thena href="https://twit

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. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

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 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security  
Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at sonrai.co/cloudpod
GCP – Google Next 2024
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