The Cloudcast

Aaron (@aarondelp) and Brian (@bgracely) talk about all the major news stories in Cloud and AI from April 2024 SHOW: 817 TRANSCRIPT: Cloudcast #817 - CNOTM - April 2024 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: LINKS TO ALL ARTICLES FOR APRIL 2024 CLOUD NEWSSegments Covered in the Show: FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Every few years we have to be reminded that open source isn’t a business model. Let’s talk about the business dynamics that everyone seems to keep forgetting. SHOW: 816 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #816 SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: Adam Jacobs discusses open source and business“figure out how to play nice with competition”The will never be another Red Hat - Economics of OSSOPEN SOURCE IS A LICENSE, NOT A BUSINESS MODEL FREE, FREE TIERS, EXTENSIONS, CLONES FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

John Yue (CEO & Co-Founder @ inference.ai) discusses AI workload sizing, matching GPUs to workloads, availability of GPUs vs. costs, and more. SHOW: 815 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: Inference.ai (homepage)TechCrunch postSiliconAngle post on ChatGPUTopic 1 - Our topic for today is sizing and IaaS hosting for AI/ML. We’ve covered a lot of basics lately, today we’re going to dig deeper. There is a surprising amount of depth to AI sizing, and it isn’t just speeds and feeds of GPUs. We’d like to welcome John Yue (CEO & Co-Founder @ inference.ai) for this discussion. John, welcome to the show Topic 2 - Let’s start with sizing, I’ve talked to a lot of customers recently with my day job, and it is amazing how deep AI/ML sizing can go. First, you have to size for training/fine-tuning differently than you would for the inference stage. Second, some just think, pick the biggest GPUs you can afford and go. How should your customers approach this? (GPU’s, software dependencies, etc.) Topic 2a - Follow-up question what are the business side, what are the business parameters that need to be considered? (budget, cost efficiency, latency/response time, timeline, etc.) Topic 3 - The whole process can be overwhelming and as we mentioned, some organizations may not think of everything. You recently announced a chatbot to help with this exact process, ChatGPU. Tell everyone a bit about that and how it came to be. Topic 4 - This is almost like a match-making service, correct? Everyone wants an H100, but not everyone needs or can afford an H100. Topic 5 - How does GPU availability play into all of this? NVIDIA is sold out for something like 2 years at this point; how is that sustainable? Does everything need to run on a “Ferrari class” NVIDIA GPU? Topic 6 - What’s next in the IaaS for AI/ML space? What does a next-generation data center for AI/ML look like? Will the Industry move away from GPUs to reduce dependence on NVIDIA? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

For some strange reason, “maintenance” has been in the news quite a bit lately. Is there ever a time when maintenance is enjoyable, or appreciated? SHOW: 814 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #814 SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: AWS increased the price of longer-running EKS clusters by 6xBroadcom changes VMware licensing from perpetual to subscriptionBroadcom offers security patches to perpetual license customersIncreasing the Kubernetes support window to 1 yearDiscovering the XZ backdoor (Oxide and Friends, podcast)IS MAINTENANCE EVER APPRECIATED OR ENJOYABLE? TECHNICAL DEBT VS. MAINTENANCE FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Kalyan Veeramachaneni (@kveeramac, CEO/Founder @DataCebo) discusses the generation and value proposition of synthetic data for GenAI. SHOW: 813 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: DataCebo (homepage)Synthetic Data Vault - SDVTechCrunch ArticleMIT News ArticleTopic 1 - Our topic for today is synthetic data. While the concept and need for synthetic data has been around for a long time, it isn’t a topic that typically comes to the forefront and something we haven’t talked about until today. Today is a bit of crossing the streams between developers and testing data and using GenAI to achieve this goal. For this, we’re joined by Kalyan, CEO and Co-Founder of DataCebo. Welcome to the show Topic 2 - First, for those not familiar, what is synthetic data? What is the use case and need? What problem is it solving today? Topic 2a - Hopefully, listeners out there are making the connection to the advantages of GenAI for synthetic data, but take us through your original concept at MIT and the history of Synthetic Data Vault (SDV). Topic 3 - We recently did a show on the security and privacy of training LLMs where we covered the need to mask PII for the training of models for compliance. I can also see bias issues coming into play or maybe training data that doesn’t exist in the real world (weather models example). What are some of the use cases that you’ve seen require synthetic data sets. Are there certain industries (healthcare, financials, etc.) that benefit? Topic 4 - You were designing this based on GenAI before GenAI was “cool”. How has the rise of LLMs impacted this space? Topic 5 - If I understand this correctly, organizations would put generative AI on a problem to describe a need for a data set, the model would then evaluate the available data and create a quality synthetic or “fake” dataset. How would the organization verify the quality of the dataset? How would they validate that a synthetic data set is as good as the original data? Topic 6 - Let’s talk about resources for a bit. When I think of GenAI and training, I think of large amounts of hardware and in particular GPU’s that might have limited availability. Is that true here? Also, is this on-prem or in the cloud, or both? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

With the AI Era upon us, the challenge of trying to learn and make sense of the technologies, the business opportunities and the pitfalls is both exciting and equally terrifying. SHOW: 812 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #812 SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU REALLY LEARNED SOMETHING NEW IN TECH? PICK A TOPIC, READ, BE CONFUSED, LOOK FOR CONFIRMATION, RINSE, REPEAT FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Brad Winett (President/Co-founder @TrackItCloud) talks about platforms for entertainment and media. Topics include use cases, partnering with AWS, and creation and consulting services. We even dig into AR and VR a bit at the end. SHOW: 811 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: TrackIt (homepage)Topic 1 - Our topic for today is media and entertainment in the cloud. I don’t believe we have ever done a show specifically on this topic, and there are some considerations worth talking about. For today, we have Brad Winett, President and Co-founder at TrackIt. Brad, welcome to the show. Let’s jump right in. The media industry as a whole has undergone major change, just like many others. Most of us see it from the consumer end as a cord-cutter. What made you jump into this market and this industry specifically? Topic 2 - Platforms and content distribution in the early days of cloud was a differentiator. I think back to Netflix, they initially had a market advantage because they were able to scale better and to more devices than anyone and even open sourced a number of internally developed items and were the AWS poster child. Over time, these user experiences have become the norm. How should people out there think about media platforms? Are we past the days of build your own? Topic 3 - What about use cases? Media streaming is pretty broad. What does a normal customer look like? Is this big streaming services, smaller companies, etc? Topic 4 - How much of the tech stack is AWS products and how much of the stack is custom typically? Walk us through what a media streaming stack looks like. How is this different from a SaaS provider providing a turnkey service? Topic 5 - I know TrackIt is a big AWS partner. Give everyone an overview of the landscape of AWS Partnership these days. Do you provide mainly professional services and consulting? Topic 6 - Where does open-source software fit into this? Topic 7 - I feel the standard last question these days is how AI will potentially enhance or impact this is some way. FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

What will be the adoption patterns for AI within the Enterprise? Will it follow the early days of Cloud Computing, or will new and different patterns emerge? SHOW: 810 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: Cloudcast #810 SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: WHAT WERE THE PATTERNS FOR ENTERPRISE IT AND CLOUD? WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT AI vs. CLOUD? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Aaron (@aarondelp) and Brian (@bgracely) discuss the biggest tech stories, announcements, and trends from March 2024. SHOW: 809 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: https://bit.ly/cloudcast-809-transcript CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW NOTES: LINKS TO ALL THE ARTICLES FOR MARCH 2024 CLOUD NEWS Segments Covered in the Show: FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Let’s dig into the mindset behind the VMware price increases that have been happening since Broadcom acquired the company in 2023. SHOW: 808 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: Enter the WS02 Choreo Code ChallengeWSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers instead SHOW NOTES: What VMware might look like under BroadcomWhat to do about VMwareVMware 10X Price Increase Leaves Companies Looking for AlternativesVMware pricing in the Broadcom Era BROADCOM IS FITTING VMWARE INTO THEIR BUSINESS MODEL IT'S A BOLD STRATEGY BROADCOM, LET’S SEE IF IT PAYS OFF FOR THEM FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Sean Falconer (@seanfalconer, Head of Dev Relations @SkyflowAPI, Host @software_daily) talks about security and privacy of LLMs and how to prevent PII (personally identifiable information) from leaking out SHOW: 807 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: Enter the WS02 Choreo Code ChallengeWSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers insteadimmediate and ongoing savingsSHOW NOTES: SkyFlow (homepage)Partially Redacted PodcastSoftware Engineering DailyTopic 1 - Our topic for today is the security and privacy LLMs. What’s Sean’s origin story? Topic 2 - Let’s dig into LLM security and privacy. We see this concern a lot on the podcast and we’ve touched on it with various past shows, but we haven’t dug in deep. First, let’s frame the problem. What are we talking about when we talk about LLM security and privacy? Topic 3 - First, there is a fear that customer PII information might leak out. Second, company IP or confidential into might leak out related to products or offerings. We’ve seen examples of both to date. This could be exposed in the form of integration into a model (query it for the answer) or in the fine-tuning or RAG stage. Either one could lead to compliance issues, lost rev etc. But, that same data at risk is the potential differentiation of the models. How do you both mask the data but take advantage of the data? Topic 4 - One thing I’ve noticed is many orgs only think about privacy in relation to the fine-tuning stage where they are taking a broad model and making it company specific. It is about much more than that though. Just like standard software development, we have different stages. How is the data collected and stored, how is it used for training and fine-tuning, how is it used after deployment and during interaction stage, etc. How should security and privacy be handled across all phases? Topic 5 - Let’s talk beyond LLMs for a bit. What about Data Lakes and Data Warehousing? I see this as a problem across all big data, correct? Topic 6 - How does API security fit into this? Much of what we are talking about is at the storage and retrieval level. But, increasingly we see API issues exposing data. How does that fit in here? Topic 7 - Let’s talk podcasts, we had Jeff, the previous host of Software Engineering Daily on a few times. How are things over at Software Engineering Daily? Tell everyone a bit about the show. FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

If you’re planning to deploy AI for your business, here’s 5 important capabilities your business needs from the cloud era in order to be successful. SHOW: 806 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: Enter the WS02 Choreo Code ChallengeWSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers insteadSHOW NOTES: The Year Ahead in Cloud and Expectations for AI in 2024 IF YOU WANT TO DO AI WELL, YOU NEED TO HAVE DONE CLOUD WELL 5 IMPORTANT CLOUD CAPABILITIES NEEDED TO SUCCEED WITH AI FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Krish Ramineni (@krishramineni, CEO/Founder of @Firefliesai) talks about what it is like to build an AI product company in both the pre-LLM era as well as post-LLMs. We also discuss privacy and security concerns and AI behind the scenes. SHOW: 805 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: Enter the WS02 Choreo Code ChallengeWSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers insteadSHOW NOTES: Fireflies.ai (homepage)Fireflies MIT ArticleTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background. Topic 2 - Our show and listeners tend to be interested and employed in the Enterprise infrastructure and AI/ML space. Some may find it surprising that we are talking today, but we wanted to really dig into how an up-and-coming AI company provides value at scale from individuals all the way to large enterprises. What goes into both building the product as well as taking that product to market? So, let’s start there. You recently posted about “Free AI” on LinkedIn. What was the problem you were trying to solve, and how did that influence the product you built? Topic 3 - As the foundational models in the industry keep improving and are going multi-modal, do you worry that the LLMs of the world might push out specialized models? How do you think about staying ahead of the curve? How does something like GPU shortages or big companies like Meta purchasing thousands at a time impact your decisions? Topic 4 - Fireflies.ai is all about the abstraction of the technology away from the user. They have no idea (and shouldn’t) about the back end and everything “behind the curtain”. How do you think about this abstraction layer from a product standpoint? Topic 5 - Now, let’s talk about PLG vs. traditional Enterprise software sales models. You did another post about that recently. We’ve worked in environments selling both (sometimes at the same time), and they are very different motions. Do you feel both are needed to build an AI company? Topic 6 - How does Security and compliance with IT departments fit into all of this? I’ve spoken to customers that have a policy of no AI tools at the personal level for instance or maybe client, company and private data might be at risk and only certain tools are vetted and approved. I’ve seen other companies only allow tools licensed by their corp IT. How do you navigate this issue? How does something like GDPR play here? Topic 7 - Last question, another AI specific concern we hear about is companies training models on user data. What is your thoughts here? How does a company fine tune and train new models and products but keep customer and company privacy from leaking out? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

For years, the CNCF has been the central governance body for cloud-native projects. But are there too many projects now? What if the CNCF was less governance and more like private equity? SHOW: 804 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: Enter the WS02 Choreo Code ChallengeWSO2 Choreo - Why build a platform? Just add developers insteadSHOW NOTES: CNCF LandscapeCNCF Trail MapWHY DOESN’T THE CNCF RECOMMEND A CLOUD-NATIVE STACK? HOW MANY PROJECTS WOULD GET “CNCF APPROVED” IF THEY TOOK A PRIVATE EQUITY APPROACH? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Eyal Solomon (@EyalSolomo44643, CEO/Founder of @lunardevapi) talks about integrating, controlling, and observability into 3rd party APIs and services. We discuss the trade-offs of integrating a 3rd party API and how it impacts simplicity and potential loss of insight. SHOW: 803 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: immediate and ongoing savingsSHOW NOTES: Lunar.dev (homepage)Lunar.dev blogLunar.dev on TechCrunchTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background. Topic 2 - Controlling 3rd party APIs is increasingly becoming an issue for many organizations. As the world gets built on APIs, consumption of another company's APIs to ingest services is critical. But, this leads to all sorts of control and potentially cost issues. Please give everyone an introduction to the problem. Topic 3 - Does this mean 3rd Party APIs are a tradeoff? Yes, you might be able to integrate APIs for a payment system for instance quickly, or maybe the latest AI SaaS service, but in doing so won’t an organization potentially lose oversight? Where do most organizations run into problems first? This reminds me of the early days of cloud and people leaving instances running and then getting huge bills and not knowing until it was too late. Is this similar? Topic 4 - We’ve seen a lot of products and companies tackling the issue of internal company APIs, but not 3rd party APIs. Once an organization determines they have a problem, maybe an observability problem, perhaps a cost problem, maybe a compliance issue, etc. how would they get started gaining API observability and control in their org? Topic 5 - Is this a solution that sits in traffic flow? Does this potentially introduce latency? Is this almost like a WAF for 3rd party APIs? What kinds of policies or restrictions can be put in place? Topic 6 - What are some of the most common use cases you’ve seen and how do you solve them? What business decisions have to be made if they decide to restrict access in some way? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

2024 is the year of business accountability across all aspects of the software industry. This means that all variations of the free tier are going away in one way or another. SHOW: 802 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: immediate and ongoing savingsSHOW NOTES: Linkerd changes publishing model of imagesPlanetScale discontinues Free Tier (“Hobby”) of serviceWHY DID THE FREE TIER(S) EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE? WHAT ARE THE TRADE-OFFS WHEN THE FREE TIER GOES AWAY? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Welcome to the "second monthly" Cloud News of the Month. Aaron and Brian discuss the biggest tech stories and five trends from February 2024. SHOW: 801 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: immediate and ongoing savingsSHOW NOTES: LINKS TO ALL THE ARTICLES FOR FEB 2024 CLOUD NEWS HERESegments Covered in the Show: FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Lots of people want to turn their hobby or passion into a money-making activity, or as the kids call it “a side hustle”. Let’s explore how to do it, and some mistakes to avoid. SHOW: 800 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: immediate and ongoing savingsSHOW NOTES: SO YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE MONEY? HOW MUCH MORE ARE YOU WILLING TO WORK? FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

Ronald McCollum (@RonaldMcCollam, Solutions Engineering @GrafanaLabs) talks about updates in the observability space and learning more about Grafana and data visualization. SHOW: 799 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: AppleGoogleSpotifytheCUBELearn More About Azure OfferingsAzure Free Cloud Resource KitSHOW NOTES: Grafana (homepage)Getting Started with Grafana Book by RonaldTopic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background. Topic 2 - We last talked about Grafana back in 2019 and 2020. Observability continues to be a hot topic, how are you seeing the open-source community and open-source tools evolve in this space? Topic 3 - We always hear about Grafana as a visualization tool. Grafana AND something (Grafana and Prometheus, Grafana and (insert logging/observability tool here). Is that still a fair assessment? Where does Grafana fit in a modern cloud-native observability stack these days? Topic 4 - When you are speaking to folks out there, where does the data visualization story resonate the most in the organization, and does it become at times political and cultural (meaning cultural changes need to happen)? There can be an ROI/Business case to be made; developers integrations that will need to happen, SRE operations changes, etc. How do you get something that likely spans many different parts of the organization on board? Topic 5 - Anytime I think about observability I think in two stages. Identification of the problem and resolution of the problem. Some tools address one or the other, and some attempt to do both. Where does Grafana fit on this continuum? Topic 6 - I have to ask the AI question. How has AI changed or in your opinion will change observability and visualization in the near future? Topic 7 - You’ve literally written the book on Grafana so this is a softball question. For those who are interested, how would you recommend they get started with Grafana FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod

If you have to build a keynote presentation, or any presentation for a large audience, what are the key areas to focus on? Here’s some tips on story-telling and audience engagement. SHOW: 798 CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: immediate and ongoing savings SHOW NOTES: BUILDING THE OVERALL STORY THE KEY AREAS TO FOCUS ON FEEDBACK? @cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod@cloudcastpod