241: A Reflection on 2023: Clouded by the Fog of AI

Welcome to episode 241 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Can you believe we’ve reached the end of 2023? Neither can we! Join us today for a look back at 2023 and all of the announcements that excited, befuddled, and confused us – as well as a slew of predictions for 2024. Make sure to share your own predictions (after listening, of course) with us on socials. 

Titles we almost went with this week: 

• Wait, How is it 2024? 
• Thank God 2023 is Over
• Thank God 2020 is Over… Finally?
• The Cloud Pod Breaks the Crystal Ball when Trying to Predict 2024
• 2023: A Snarky Saga of Disappointment
• 2023: A Snarky Saga of AI 
• 2023… Was Anything Announced Besides AI
• How Cloudy Was It? A Whimsical Look Back at 2023 and Forecasting the Fluff in 2024 The 2023 Cloud Recap and 2024 Foggy Forecasts
• 2023’s Cloudiest Moments and 2024’s Forecasted Fun
• Cache & Carry: Storing Up 2023’s Memories and Downloading 2024’s Dreams 
• Even AI can’t help us find the best announcements of 2023
• Even AI can’t help us predict the announcements of 2024

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.

General Podcast News

00:23 Lot’s of changes around these here parts! 

• • As we reflect on 2023, we would love to hear your general thoughts on the podcast. 2023 was a big year of changes for us. 
    • Peter left as host, and we replaced him with Matt.
    • We dropped the lightning round, and reduced the number of stories we covered; going for more depth and discussion. (I think we could still improve here.)
    • We added the Cloud Journeys and did a segment on CCOE, Containers, Kubernetes, Cloud Platform, etc.
    • We added the aftershow to talk about tech adjacent things that interest us as hosts.
• Absolutely do get on our Slack channel and let us know what you all would like to hear or your general thoughts on the show. 

2023 Predictions

Also known as “things we’re always wrong about.”

• Jonathan: Microsoft will release in preview of an Azure branded Chat GPT
• Justin: Data Sovereignty will drive single panes of glass against multi-cloud
  • Totally missed on this on panes of glass, but OUT OF THE PARK when it comes to data sovereignty. That was a big deal this year. 
• Ryan: An influx of all of the AI and No-Code solution convergence. 
  • We’re closer…but not quite there yet. Maybe another year or two. 
• Peter: Recession will drive significant developer layoffs, and drive automation solutions for ops and deployment..
  • So, layoffs were a thing. But not because of recession, but because of corporate greed. So that’s fun. 

06:50 Ryan – “I also think Microsoft will get there’s no matter which way it goes, right? Because they’re either gonna sell it directly, or their investment in Open AI will pay off through shareholder price of stocks.”

11:26 Matthew – “I mean, I feel like it’s helping more around like SQL. Like you can there I know Microsoft has some models where you can kind of just talk to it and it will like read your data model on SQL and then like output like the SQL statements select what you want it. Once I feel like it’s a little bit more focused on like developers type stuff less than like a general person that says, hey, I want to build an application that does a AB & C and magically here’s your app that does it.”

16:59 Ryan – “You’re seeing the rise of platform engineering, but I don’t think that’s a result of staffing levels or layoffs. I think that’s more just due to the complexity of which we have to operate, and trying to get uniform standards across build pipelines and management of developer environments.”

*The moral of the story kids is, don’t base your own predictions on ours. We’re bad at this.*

Favorite Announcements 2023

Justin

AWS joins the FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member 

​​Google Domains shutting down, assets sold and being migrated to Squarespace  

Introducing Microsoft Security Copilot: Empowering defenders at the speed of AI 

Ryan

Announcing the ability to enable AWS Systems Manager by default across all EC2 instances in an account

Using Google Cloud’s new Pricing API

Introducing Microsoft Security Copilot

Jonathan

TLS inspection through Network Firewall 

AlloyDB Omni, the downloadable edition of AlloyDB, is now generally available

Azure AI Chip

Matt

Fault Injection

Cloud Run services has regional and internal endpoints

Azure Private Subnets

Easy install Oracle Java on Oracle Java Linux on OCI. 

Honorable Mentions:

AWS

AWS will invest $35B to expand its Virginia data center presence 

Retiring the AWS Documentation on GitHub 

Temporary elevated access management with IAM Identity Center  RL Also

New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights

AWS Announces Amazon DataZone

Metadata v2 by default enabled

EC2 Instance Connect without public IP

Lambda scaling 12x faster

AWS Notifications in one place

GCP

Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard  

Passwordless by default: Make the switch to passkeys

Rapidly expand the reach of Spanner databases with read-only replicas and zero-downtime moves

Azure

Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer is now generally available

Stack Overflow for Azure

Secure your cloud environment with Cloud Next-Generation Firewall by Palo Alto Networks

Other

New Relic launches Grok, its AI observability assistant

RIP Twitter, Hello X  

2024 Predictions

Matt

1. Simpler and Easier to access LLM with new services
2. Kubernetes will become simpler for smaller companies to operate that doesn’t require Highly Paid Devops/Scientists
3. Low Employee Churn Rates and increased Tenure (Quiet Quitting)

Jonathan

1. There will be mass layoffs in tech directly attributed to AI in Q1 2024 (10k or more)
2. Someone will start a cult that follows an AI / LLM God – believing in sentience, a higher power. Jonathan will be sending out invites to a completely unrelated “retreat” later this year. 
3. AI will find a new home in education. Lesson Plans, Personalized Learning plans by students, etc. 

Ryan

1. Start seeing the financial impact of AI to better profitability by using AI.
2. AI Solution tied towards new employee onboarding (essentially replacing wiki technology.) 
3. Removal of stateful firewalls as traffic ruleset (next-gen next-gen firewall)

Justin

1. LLM will hit the trough of disillusionment either on Cost, Environmental impact or people realizing how limited these models are. Dun Dun DUN. 
2. Another AI model other than Transformer based. 
3. We will see another large defector from Public Cloud (not 37 Signals or X/Twitter)

1:06:05 Oreilly: Questions That are Going to Get Answered in 2024

• Year of tech regulation
• Organized Labor
• The backlash against the backlash against open source (like OpenTofu)
• Simpler Kubernetes (Good company with Matthew)
• Microservices to Monoliths (already starting to happen) 
• AI Systems are not secure
• The Metaverse
• NFTs (say it isn’t so!) 

1:07:46 Jonathan – “I think they just scraped the top five news articles of the last three months and just went with that.”

1:07:58 Ryan – “I’m still trying to figure out when OpenTF became OpenTofu! I somehow missed that.”

AI is Going Great!

AWS

1:11:35  Tech predictions for 2023 and beyond 

• How did Werner Vogels do in 2023? Spoiler alert: not any better than us. 
• Prediction 1: Cloud technologies will redefine sports as we know them. 
  • Added some capabilities maybe? But not redefined. 
• Prediction 2: Simulated worlds will reinvent the way we experiment. 
  • Wrong. 
• Prediction 3: A surge of innovation in smart energy. 
  • Seems like the same amount as in 2022 to us. 
• Prediction 4: The upcoming supply chain transformation. 
  • It’s calmed down since the pandemic; definitely changes but not necessarily transformation. 
• Prediction 5: Custom silicon goes mainstream
  • Definitely a large increase in usage; but that was all happening before he made the prediction so it was already trending that way. 

1:14:00 Tech predictions for 2024 and beyond

• What does he think for 2024… I assume he mentions AI right? 
• Generative AI becomes culturally aware. 
  • Startups in India are using languages that don’t have large speaker populations and are being used to train language models. So this one makes sense to us. 
• FemTech finally takes off
  • Women’s health care tech solutions, like Tia. 
  • Maybe this has something to do with the health company that *he* owns. 
• AI assistants redefine developer productivity
  • Definitely seeing this coming down the path throughout the year. 
• Education evolves to match the speed of tech innovation
  • How colleges will adjust for a world with AI 

Closing

And that is the YEAR 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 theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloud Pod