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

GCP

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

Azure

Oracle

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

Show Notes

Titles we almost went with 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

GCP

Azure

@22:35 Continuing our Cloud Journey Series Talks

News That Didn’t Make the Main Show

AWS

GCP

Azure

Oracle

After Show

Other Episodes

Episode 250

250: The Cloud Pod Goes Nuclear Powered

Episode 258

258: To Q or Not to Q – That is the Question (But, Will We Get a Good Answer?)

Episode 264

264: AWS Audit Manager: Because even AI needs a Babysitter!