Cloud & AI News Trends for February 2025

Brian Gracely and Brandon Whichard discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from February 2025 including NVIDIA’s earnings,  Hashicorp, Intel’s CEO trio, Developer Co-Pilots, and RIP Skype.

SHOW: 903

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #903 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:  http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Try Postman AI Agent Builder Today
• postman.com/podcast/cloudcast/

SHOW NOTES:

• Link to February 2025 news and articles

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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Drunk Agile
Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh drink whisk(e)y and discuss various facets of agile...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

2024 Year-End Review and 2025 Predictions

It’s that time of the year again. Brian and Aaron wrap of the year in Cloud and AI, and make predictions for 2025.

SHOW: 884

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #884 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• Cloud + AI News of the Year 2024 (shows, summaries, links)

LINK TO TOPIC DETAILS

Predictions, or 2025 areas of focus?

Aaron

• 2025 will be the year of AI ROI, and Agentic AI will make this worse
• There will be at least one “SkyNet scare” of Agentic AI
• 2025 will also be the year of inference (see ROI)

Brian:

• Gov’t vs. AI (US Trump, EU, China)
• Emergence of an AI Agent stack or standard?
• Useful or killer AI apps? (new focus of Weekend Perspective)
• AI pricing evolves based on usage patterns or just need for revenues?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Bluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.social
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
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Drunk Agile
Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh drink whisk(e)y and discuss various facets of agile...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Understanding and Advising CIOs

Tim Crawford (@tcrawford, CIO Advisor at @AVOAcom) talks about the challenges of the modern CIO, managing stability vs. innovation, and understanding the business value of tech.

SHOW: 825

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #825 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: The Cloudcast YouTube Channel

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS" 

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Neo4j explores knowledge graphs and vector search (graphstuff.fm podcast)
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SHOW NOTES:

• AVOA Website
• Tim’s article on HashiCorp

Topic 1 - Tim, welcome back to the show! We’ve been friends for years, and it’s great to get you on today! We will discuss everything at the top of CIOs' minds today. Why don’t you give everyone a quick background on how you became known as the CIO Advisor?

Topic 2 - Before we go into trends over the last few years. Put everyone in a CIO mindset. What do they care about? How do they think about the intersection of technology and business? What keeps them up at night?

Topic 3 - We’ve heard many times CIOs have to balance two things: keeping the lights on (the boring side of the business that is often undifferentiated, and the innovative side that often moves the needle. A CIO’s job is to minimize the former and maximize the latter. Do you agree? How accurate is that statement? 

Topic 4 - I’ll follow that up with a real-world example many organizations might be facing, one we’ve discussed on the show in the past. We’ll discuss VMware on one end of the stable, the keep the lights on model, and AI on the other end as an innovative technology that could differentiate. Let’s talk about VMware first… 

Topic 4b  - Now the other end of the spectrum, AI. Have we reached peak AI washing and craziness? Is the trough of disillusionment coming? How should a CIO think about it?

Topic 5 - Let’s talk about economics over the last few years. Zero-interest money has gone away for VCs and startups and we are seeing some big changes on the vendor side. How does this impact the people you talk to?

Topic 6 -  Last topic, you were there and talked about Hashicorp when they rang the bell last week and then were bought 24 hours later. What was that like as someone who was there?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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Drunk Agile
Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh drink whisk(e)y and discuss various facets of agile...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Cloud News of the Month - April 2024

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 NEWS

Segments Covered in the Show:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues - Speed Round
• Trend 1 - 2024 is going to be a year of big announcements
• Trend 2 - We’re starting to see some (early) reality set in with AI
• Trend 3 - Lots of things are being lost between Broadcom/VMware and AI discussions

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Drunk Agile
Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh drink whisk(e)y and discuss various facets of agile...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Building Cloud Services from Software

Preeti Somal (@psomal, EVP Engineering @Hashicorp) talks about the evolution of Hashicorp Cloud Platform, creating cloud services from software projects, and the evolution of cloud SREs and SLAs.

SHOW: 588

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Usage.ai (homepage)
• Start saving up to 57% of your AWS EC2 spend in under 5 minutes with Usage AI. No code change, no downtime, no engineering work required.
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• Services down? New Relic offers full stack visibility with 16 different monitoring products in a single platform.

SHOW NOTES:

• Hashicorp Cloud Platform (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. We’re always excited to have women leaders on the show. Tell us a little bit about your background and your focus areas at Hashicorp. Congrats on the UGA National Championship.

Topic 2 - Let’s talk about the Hashicorp Cloud Platform. We’ve covered Hashicorp software for years. How did HCP come about, and how has it changed how Hashicorp thinks about what you’re building (software vs. cloud services)?

Topic 3 - To create a cloud service out of an existing Hashicorp product (e.g. Terraform or Vault), does it just require creating an SRE team to run it, or do you have to rethink how the technologies are built and operated?

Topic 4 - How have Hashicorp customers adapted to consuming cloud services vs. running the software themselves? Sometimes the cloud services have to be more restrictive to deliver SLAs.

Topic 5 - Are you able to do anything unique in the cloud(s) that you couldn’t do as software products? Does multi-cloud provide any unique opportunities?

Topic 6 - Are you finding any new ways to interact with your communities now that Hashicorp is offering cloud services? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet

Discussing Service Mesh Architectures

Show: 387

Description: Aaron and Brian talk with Armon Dadgar (@armon, Founder/CTO @HashiCorp) about the problems service mesh can solve, the underlying technologies, control plane vs. data plane considerations, and who is making decisions about service meshes within an IT organization.

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Cloud News of the Week

• JFrog acquires Shippable, adding continuous integration and delivery to its DevOps platform
• Amazon launches third Alexa Accelerator for conversational startups
• Azure Kinect DK - Build computer vision and speech models using a developer kit with advanced AI sensors
• Follow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2018 Edition (Charles Fitzgerald - Platformnomics)

Show Interview Links:

• Hashicorp - http://hashicorp.com
• What is a Service Mesh - https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/what-is-a-service-mesh
• Consul - https://www.consul.io/

Show Notes:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. It’s been a couple years since HashiCorp has been on the show, so give us an update on the company - big round of funding ($100M) in November.

Topic 2 - A couple months ago we saw you in a video called “What is a Service Mesh?”. It was intended to be a “let’s make this simple” and you realize that a Service Mesh could be a lot of things - L4-L7 routing, Proxy, Encryption, Authentication, Application patterns. Is a Service Mesh solving a new problem, or is it pulling together lots of things that have existed at L4-L7 and application stacks in the past? 

Topic 3 - “Service Mesh” has become a pretty crowded and fragmented market over the last couple years. HashiCorp Consul has been around since 2014 (was originally “Service Discovery”) and now there’s Linkerd, Istio, Envoy and a bunch of variations. As you talk to people in the market, how are they evaluating the options out there?  

Topic 4 - Consul has evolved from Service Discovery to Service Mesh, and seems to have come from more of an authentication and security perspective (some others tends to be more routing-centric). Are there use-cases when one Service Mesh is a better fit than others, or should we expect that all/most of them will more or less converged on features over the next 12-24 months? 

Topic 5 - Can you give us some examples of how companies are using Service Meshes today (parts or all of the capabilities) and what teams are usually driving the adoption (infra/ops, security, app-dev, etc.)?

Feedback?

• Email: show at thecloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet and @ServerlessCast

The Cloudcast #309 - Secrets Management for Microservices

Brian talks with Seth Vargo (@sethvargo, Director of Technical Advocacy @HashiCorp) about the evolving security footprint of modern applications, the increasing needs for secrets management with microservices, the challenges of managing encryption, how to maintain highly available environments, and the evolution of Pittsburgh as a tech city.

Show Links:

• [Donations for Hurricane Harvey, Houston Flood Victims] Red Cross
• Buy Necessary Items, via Amazon, for Hurricane Harvey Victims
• Use code “PCCLOUD” for 20% of Gold, Silver, Bronze passes at VelocityConf
• Seth’s projects on GitHub
• Seth’s book from O’Reilly
• HashiCorp Vault [website] and GitHub project
• [O’Reilly Velocity Conference, NYC] Microservices Secrets Management with Vault

• Interested in ServerlessConf in NYC (Oct 8-11)? 20% Discount on all passes
• Start Serverless Skills Bundle (4 courses) - (only $49 instead of $79)
• FREE Alexa Development for Absolute Beginners

Show Notes

• Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background as a technologist and author.
• Topic 1a - And since we’re going to talk about Vault, give us the basics of the Vault platform.
• Topic 2 - Let’s start with the basics. Why are we seeing so many more discussions about secrets management with microservices vs. legacy applications?
• Topic 3 - What are the core challenges that microservices applications face with regard to secrets? Is it key management, or key rotation or encryption of secrets, or something else?
• Topic 4 - Since secrets are so central to microservices, and critical to normal operations, how do you make sure that a platform like Vault is highly available? Or what happens if it goes out of service?
• Topic 5 - If we’re talking about microservices, the conversation typically evolves to deploying them, which leads to discussions about container schedulers. Can you talk about the challenges that schedulers have with secrets and how Vaults helps to manage those challenges?

Feedback?

• Email: show at thecloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @thecloudcastnet and @ServerlessCast

The Cloudcast #287 -Venture Capital and the Cloud Native Landscape

Aaron and Brian talk with RedPoint Ventures (Scott Raney (@sraney) General Partner at RedPoint Venture Capital (@redpointvc)) about the evolving role of Venture Capital, the Cloud Native Landscape, open source business models, how to many rapid change, and competing / partnering with AWS.

Show Links:

• Get a free eBook from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos
• RedPoint Ventures website
• RedPoint “Memory Leak” Blog
• The Cloud Native Landscape (Project) (with CNCF)

Show Notes:

• Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. We always love to get a Venture Capital perspective on the show from time to time. Tell us about yourself and maybe a little bit about your current areas of focus.

• Topic 2 - At the recent CNCF event (KubeCon, etc.), Dan Kohn introduced the Cloud Native Landscape, which was built in partnership with RedPoint Ventures. Help us understand the framework and how people are using it today.

• Topic 3 - Many of the things on that landscape are either open source projects or companies that are commercializing some aspect of those projects. We’ve heard various theories on what those business models look like, but I’m curious about how you advise your companies in this space.

• Topic 4 - Let’s talk for a second about the pace of change. Things are moving faster than ever. How do you advise companies to build their business, whether it’s long-term or IPO or M&A, or just survival techniques?

• Topic 5 - Twilio is one of your portfolio companies, and they were highlighted at AWS re:Invent last week. AWS often creates services that overlap companies that run on the platform. How much does someone like Twilio worry that there will be something like “AWS Telephone” being announced in 2017?

• Topic 6 - We just had an election here in the US and a certain amount of uncertainty and change is inevitable with any new administration. How does RedPoint think about this transition and how it impacts existing portfolio companies and your investment thesis for the future?

Feedback?

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• Twitter:@thecloudcastnet or @serverlesscast
• YouTube:Cloudcast Channel

The Cloudcast #246 - The Quest for 1M Containers

Aaron and Brian talk to Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh, Founder of @HashiCorp) about the lack of VC funding for an open source Death Star, customer interest in Microsoft Azure, the need for bigger/faster schedulers, developer patterns and Zero-Trust Datacenter.

Show Links:

• This show is sponsored by Intel Cloud For All
• Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount on all books
• Hashicorp Homepage
• Hashicorp Adds Microsoft Azure Support
• Nomad 1,000,000 Container Challenge

Topic 1 - It’s been a little over a year since you were last on the show. Things are changing really fast in the market. What are you seeing in the market?

Topic 2 - Hashicorp recently made all of their tools Microsoft Azure compatible. Where are you seeing interest from your customers in Azure?

Topic 3 - A few months ago, Docker showed that Swarm could support 30,000 containers. Cloud Foundry supposedly supports 25,000 containers. And then Nomad came out with 1M containers. Why does anyone need that many containers?

Topic 4 - There is a lot of dogma in the market about “platforms”. Are we getting close to a big market shakeout or consolidation, or will the confusion continue for a while?

Topic 5 - You always give us some perspective on a broader way to view application management. We don’t talk much about security on the show because we’re clueless, so give us some insight.

The Cloudcast #173 - Hashicorp Atlas - Framework for Cloud Automation

Aaron and Brian talk to Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh, Founder of @HashiCorp) about their new DevOps framework Atlas, commercial product support, a new round of funding, and the “Hashicorp” way of thinking about DevOps and automation. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)

The Cloudcast #157 - Automating Data Center Scale Infrastructure

Brian talks to Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh, Founder of @HashiCorp. Creator of Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, and Terraform) about their new tool Terraform and the evolution of DevOps. They discuss how their tools compliment each other and existing tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible. They highlight how Hashicorp hides complexity for DevOps teams. Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com)