209: The Cloud Pod Whispers Sweet Nothings To Our Code (**why wont you work**)

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI – including Amazon’s new AI, Bedrock, as well as new AI tools from other developers. We also address the new updates to AWS’s CodeWhisperer, and return to our Cloud Journey Series where we discuss *insert dramatic music* – Kubernetes! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• ⭐I’m always Whispering to My Code as an Individual
• Azure gets an AI, Google gets an AI… and Amazon finally gets an AI
• ‍You can now creep out your copilot by whispering to your code
• ✍️AI fails to generate an interesting show title this week

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: 

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

AWS News

@01:36 – Codewhisperer is now generally available – and includes a free tier! 

• -Besides just the availability, this new real-time AI coding companion also includes a FREE individual tier open to all developers. This is a (good!) surprise to us. 
• -The free tier works with many popular IDEs, including VS Code and Intellij IDEA among others. 
• -Codewhisperer can assist in productivity by creating code for repetitive or routine tasks
• – Cost wise, Codewhisperer is pretty much in line with other products like GitHub Copilot. 
• – Python, Java, Javascript, Typescript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell Scripting, SQL and Scala 
• -The downside: security is fairly limited (Python and Java, for instance) 
• 02:50 Jonathan: “I’m super happy that they’ve launched with so many languages supported, and so much support for different IDE’s. It’s a great launch. It’s definitely a time saver, and I’d pay the $20 a month for the service even if there wasn’t a free tier.”
• (But maybe we don’t say that too loudly, or the free tier will disappear…)
• And speaking of that free tier –
• 04:49 Jonathan: “I expect the reason there’s a free tier is so that they get much more data from user experiences, and can retrain the model based on people’s feedback.”
• 05:24 Ryan: “It’s edging us closer to code writing code.”
• -One of the things that is important to point out from our discussion today is that you can get a bit more for your money from Copilot, which also has a free tier for individuals. 

@09:10 Amazon is excited to announce the Simple Database Archival Solution

• -SDAS is an open source solution, available under the Apache License, and can be deployed directly from your AWS account
• -Do you have a problem with being able to safely archive data from your databases? According to Amazon this is a wide ranging problem for many folks, and since storing data on-premises can be extremely costly, this may be a great alternative. 
• -It automates a lot of the logistics of archiving data and leverages Step Functions, Glue, S3 and Athena. 
• -What is supported, you may be asking? Fear not, dear reader; we have that information too! Oracle, Mysql or Microsoft SQL Server. 
• -SDAS, right out of the box, will also give you detailed information on the status of your data, so you always know what’s going on. Well, when it comes to archived data, anyway. 
• 12:00 Ryan – It’s clear from the write up that the purpose is not really to make that data useable, it’s to store it for compliance and regulatory reasons, right, so can you get it out when the lawsuit is filed is the success criteria.

@12:28 Amazon is getting into the AI business!

• AI is going to be completely reinvented! Wait, no not really. 3rd in market maybe? Sure.
• Amazon says that AI and machine learning have been a focus for Amazon for over 20 years, and that seems pretty obvious given the size of the company, and the complexities of things from their online services to robotics in their fulfillment centers. 
• The new tool, called Amazon Bedrock, aims to “democratize” ML and make it available for everyone to utilize and give users an easy way to build and scale generative AI. 
• Bedrock will give users access to multiple powerful Foundation Models for texts and images. The FMs are from AI21 labs, anthropic, stability AI, and Amazon’s Titan FMs and are accessible via an API.
• Utilizing a serverless experience, users will be able to figure out what model is right for them, get started customizing their FM with their own data, and then deploy them into their own applications. Neat! 
• 14:05Ryan – I remember just lamenting about how AI seemed to be a tagline of every security or operations software that was being pitched to me, and there’s no way it could possible get worse – but what a fool I was. Because it is – you can’t open a news article without it being related to AI these days, and I can’t even keep up.”
• 14:57Jonathan- I don’t think were in a position to  predict what this space is going to look like in 6 months or 12 from now; I think the rate of innovation in this area is going to be absolutely exponential.” 
• Quick poll: (1) Are you saying please and thank you to Echo, Alexa, etc? (2) Will that keep us from getting murdered by AI? Nevermind. Let’s stop thinking about it. 

GCP

@16:48 Google has announced a new AI model for healthcare 

• -There’s a new cloud automation toolkit and cloud based claims acceleration suite 
• -They also previewed the Med-PaLM 2, described as a neural network capable of answering all of your most pressing medical questions.
• -Our takeaway from this one – PLEASE someone convince WebMd to adopt this new tech. We’re tired of always being diagnosed with cancer. 

@ 17:25 – Google announced the public preview of BigQuery change data capture

• -Joins their existing datastream for Bigquery solution which helps you seamlessly replicate data from relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, AlloyDB, and Oracle, directly in Big Query. 
• -Thanks to BigQuery’s native CDC support, customers can directly replicate insert, update and/or delete changes from source systems into BigQuery without complex DML Merge-based ETL pipelines, cutting out the middleman. As Jonathan pointed out, it’s not *new* technology, so we’re a little surprised it wasn’t already a feature, although that may have been due to costs, and now it’s just a bit more cost effective. 
• 18:07 Ryan – This really feels like the BigQuery team is just challenging customer requests at this point; like, FINE. We’ll incorporate every database functionality into this.”

Azure

@20:08 – It’s Kubernetes news from Azure today! Announcing the general availability of Azure CNI Overlay in Azure Kubernetes Service

• -customers have been pushing the scales and boundaries of existing network solutions in Azure Kubernetes Services, so the new overlay will go a long way in addressing performance and scaling needs. 

@22:35 Continuing our Cloud Journey Series Talks

• Great segues mean great content, and boy do we have some of that for you all today. And just what is great content? Kubernetes, of course! 
• Episode 3 of the Cloud Journey discusses – 
• What is Kubernetes and how does it support cloud native architecture?
  • The first thing you do to build a cloud native app is to put it in Kubernetes. Right? RIGHT? 
  • The tech world revolves around Kubernetes these days. Maybe a lot of that is due to it being open source? 
• 24:17 Ryan – “I really think the Kubernetes wave has done a disservice to cloud native.”
• 24:26 Jonathan – “I m still not entirely sure why Kubernetes as won the hearts and minds the way it has…I think part of it has to do with the prestige of companies like Google, and everyone wants to do things the Google way.”
• What are the benefits of using Kubernetes for container orchestration?
  • There’s lots of great ways to orchestrate containers, and Kubernetes is one, but it’s really complex. 
  • Great if you’ve got a team / support infrastructure, but it’s not simple. You really do need a team. 
  • Did Kubernetes stifle some of the cloud native innovation in Serverless. Although, at least to Justin, Serverless is still the long term winner. 
  • Kubernetes can add a lot of value to legacy platforms. 
• 28:35 Justin – “I hope someday we get to the end of Kubernetes as this end all, be all tool and say look we need something, simpler and easier that just *works*.”
• What is a service mesh and how does it help with microservice communication and management?
  • How does mesh ultimately help with this cloud native architecture? 
  • Service mesh is a network infrastructure layer in the communication model.
  • It intercepts traffic leaving a service, applies rules, manages moving the request / data to an egress point and facilitates the flow. 
  • Can service mesh replace networking? 
• 30:42 Justin – “If regular networking is role based access control, service mesh is the attribute based access control…It’s a way to simplify communication, because then it allows access to allow communication in a safe, prescriptive way.”

What are some popular service mesh technologies?

• Are all of them based on Istio? 
• You definitely can do things in Console, but it’s more of a gateway proxy, but it’s not really a service mesh. 
• Jonathan would also like you to know about Console Connect, which Justin totally didn’t just mention. 

News That Didn’t Make the Main Show

AWS

• Amazon EC2 Inf2 Instances for Low-Cost, High-Performance Generative AI Inference are Now 
• Generally Available             
• Introducing AWS Libcrypto for Rust, an Open Source Cryptographic Library for Rust           
• Supabase Makes Extensions Easier for Developers with Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL
• Investigate security events by using AWS CloudTrail Lake advanced queries
• Scale your authorization needs for Secrets Manager using ABAC with IAM Identity Center          
• Amazon EMR Serverless adds job-level billed resources for efficient cost management
• AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.10
• AWS Backup announces support for SAP HANA databases on Amazon EC2
• Amazon RDS events now include tags for filtering and routing
• Prepare data easily with Amazon Personalize and Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler integration
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) provides ODBC driver to connect from BI tools
• Amazon EFS now supports up to 10 GiB/s of throughput
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 50 concurrent table restores
• Introducing the AWS CloudFormation Template Sync Controller for Flux
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now simplifies launch settings management      
• AWS Glue launches new capability to monitor usage of Glue resources
• Amazon SageMaker Collections is a new capability to organize models in the Model Registry
• AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager now supports Microsoft Teams for Collaboration
• Announcing availability of AL2023 and gMSA support on Amazon ECS Linux containers
• Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate supports extensible ephemeral storage for Windows Tasks
• Announcing updated video background blur and replacement in Amazon Chime SDK
• Amazon Redshift enhances string query performance by up to 63x
• Announcing AWS Elemental MediaConnect Gateway
• AWS Service Management Connector introduces AWS Support and Automation integrations in Jira Cloud
• Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances, optimized for network-intensive generative AI models, are now generally available
•  Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances, optimized for generative AI, are now generally available
• AWS launches Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS and AWS Batch
• EC2 Image Builder supports vulnerability detection with Amazon Inspector for custom images
• AWS Ground Station now supports Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency       
• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.26

GCP

• New to Chronicle: Building Rules with Your Own Threat Intel Part 2 

Azure

• Generally Available: Kubernetes 1.26 support in AKS
• Public preview: AKS service mesh addon for Istio
• Generally Available: Long term support version in AKS
• Public preview: Fail Fast Upgrade on API Breaking change detection
• Generally Available: Azure CNI Overlay for Linux
• OpenCost for AKS cost visibility
• GA: Azure Active Directory workload identity with AKS
• Azure Service Operator stable release version 2.0 now available
• Hotpatch is now available on preview images of Windows Server VMs on Azure with the Desktop Experience installation mode
• Generally Available: Azure App Service – New Premium v3 Offerings
• Public Preview: Isovalent Cilium Enterprise through Azure Marketplace
• Regional expansion: Azure Elastic SAN Public Preview is now available in more regions.
• Azure Storage Mover is now Generally Available
• General Availability: Azure CNI Overlay
• Use Stream Analytics to process exported data from Application Insights
• Connect Azure Stream Analytics to Azure Data Explorer using managed private endpoint.
• Generally available: Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL REST APIs
• Azure SQL—General availability updates for mid-April 2023
• Generally available: Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL cluster compute start and stop
• Public preview: Node Resource Group (NRG) lockdown
• Azure Machine Learning – General Availability for April
• General Availability: Azure App Health Extension – Rich Health States
• General availability: Azure DevOps 2023 Q1
• General availability: Improved scaling model for Azure Functions with Target Based Scaling
• Azure SQL—Public preview updates for mid-April 2023
• General availability: Read replicas for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
• Generally Available: New burstable SKUs for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server in the Australia Central region.
• Public preview: Azure Container Apps offers new plan and pricing structure
• Generally available: Static Web Apps support for Python 3.10
• Public preview: Azure Container Apps supports user defined routes (UDR) and smaller subnets
• Public preview: Azure Functions V4 programming model for Node.js
• General Availability: App Configuration geo-replication                           
• Manage your APIs with Azure API Management’s self-hosted gateway v2                 

Oracle 

• Achieve up to 50% better price-performance for big data workloads on OCI Ampere A1 Compute
• Introducing the user tutorial for Cloud Shell
• FastConnect integration with Megaport Cloud Router
• Oracle unveils record breaking genomic analysis benchmark
• New Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Database capabilities, ready for CloudWorld Tour 2023     

After Show

Mass Layoffs and Absentee Bosses Create a Morale Crisis at Meta

• The year of efficiency has some side effects
• Employees are joking about being fired on internal slack teams and a rampant gallows humor exists
• Employees are complaining though where Meta’s top executives have moved away from Silicon valley resulting in IC’s and now no middle managers as they’ve been laid off wandering around. And Zuckerberg is on Paternity leave. 
• Overall between the layoffs, absentee leadership and concerns about the future strategic direction by Zuckerberg has just hurt employee morale. 

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud, we would like to thank our sponsors Foghorn Consulting. Check out our website, the home of the cloud pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at thecloudpod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #thecloudpod