Sunday, July 4, 2021

GitHub CoPilot, AWS Infinidash and the New Hotness

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Let’s explore if our audience can tell the difference. 

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SOMETIMES SOMETHING COMPLETELY NEW COMES ALONG...

It might be 5yrs, 10yrs or 100yrs, but eventually (sometimes) things change and they might be awesome! 

CAN WE EVER FIGURE OUT IF THE NEW STUFF IS REALLY NEW AND AWESOME?

GitHub CoPilot suggests lines of code or entire functions, within the context of your GitHub Codespace. It’s built on OpenAI Codex.

  • Real issues: Does it align licenses? Are the code suggestions secure? Do the suggestions write tests or docs? 
  • Maybe issues: Do we need good coders anymore? 
  • Maybe opportunities: Can you bootstrap an entire company on top of this? Enabling more people to code more easily is a good thing, right? 

AWS Infinidash is designed to address the one major issue that AWS hasn’t addressed yet - using their network is really expensive and it never gets cheaper. [NOTE: Pure Speculation, might not be 100% (or 1%) correct]

  •  Hybrid Cloud is a real thing, and IT networking is free, because you never see a bill for it.
  • AWS now loves Hybrid Cloud, and they also love the environment (it’s in the new Amazon Leadership Principles), so AWS Snowmobile isn’t a realistic options because it’s not 100% electric and self-driving, and because Amazon can now package your USB drives in the same packages they use with Amazon Prime, so they’ll be back daily to pick up data - Infinidash Prime.
  • Within AWS, all networking across AZs and Regions is now free, because people can’t follow the AWS best practices, and AWS doesn’t like people complaining when there is an outage that would be avoided by using Multi-AZ or Multi-Region. 
  • But how will AWS make money? Well, they invented Lambda with microsecond billing, so they really don’t even want you to use EC2 anymore. This has all been a long-game to get more people using Amazon Prime. 

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Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Low Code meets Professional Developers

Sanjiva Weerawarana (@sanjiva, CEO of @wso2) talks about the intersection of low-code and business applications, the Ballerina language, and the WSO2 iPaaS platform Choreo. 

SHOW: 527

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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your background as an inventor, prior to founding WSO2.

Topic 2 - We are at a stage where every business opportunity requires new applications, and every application requires integration with multiple systems. Let’s begin by talking about your philosophy behind the Choreo iPaaS platform. 

Topic 3 - How do you view the intersection between low-code visual coding and the needs to get under the hood of the code for professional developers? 

Topic 4 - What are some of the common application-types or usage-patterns you’re seeing with early users of Choreo? What are some of the patterns that have surprised you? 

Topic 5 - Organizationally, do you see the iPaaS platform as being operated by an integrated team, or did you design it to be flexible about which teams/groups are engaged with or around the platform?

Topic 6 - There is quite a bit of intelligence and self-service built into the platform. Where do AI-driven guidance and self-service marketplaces fit into the way developers do their day-to-day jobs? 

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Sunday, June 27, 2021

Listener Mailbag Questions

We get a lot of questions from our audience each week, so we thought that it would be useful to answer some listener questions that aren’t easily answered during one of the podcasts. 

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CLOUDCAST LISTENER QUESTIONS

Thank you for all the questions. Send them to show@thecloudcast.net


CLOUD GROWTH, PEOPLE MOVEMENT, OPEN SOURCE TRENDS

Question 1 - Do you expect to see any significant changes to the top public clouds over the next few years?  - Sam A.

  • New AWS leadership; AWS profit center needed to keep driving the stock price
  • Microsoft capturing more of developers “native tools”; more willing to acquire
  • GCP coming up on the 2023 “1st or 2nd place” goal
  • “Edge” computing is just starting to take shape.
  • Will be interesting to watch how aggressive they get with acquisitions given the antitrust concerns from the US Congress

Question 2 - How is the open source world keeping up with the public cloud? - Melissa L.

  • Cloudera was recently acquired by private equity
  • IBM acquired Red Hat, and IBM is doubling down on Red Hat technologies
  • MongoDB continues to grow their Atlas business
  • Confluent is scheduled to IPO soon
  • Snowflake is trying to focus more on open APIs and ecosystems
  • Several companies (Solo, Hashicorp, Buoyant) recently launched cloud versions of their software
  • The public cloud providers continue to ride both sides of the fence regarding open source

Question 3 - Any opinions on the better way to reduce technical debt - lift and shift apps to the cloud, or modernize existing apps? - Sanjay R.

Question 4 - Is the recent consolidation in the IT training market a good thing or a bad thing? - Thomas A.

Question 5 - Are you seeing any post-COVID trends accelerating or gaining more traction?  - Michelle T.

Question 6 - Does it seem like less people are making big money after working for a tech startup than in the past? - Nadir M.


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Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Mid-Year Cloud Hot Takes

Brandon Whichard (@@bwhichard) joins us to talk about the @awscloud leadership transition, the future of @VMware, developer preferences, the return of live events, and OSS licensing strategies.

SHOW: 525

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. How are things going over at Software Defined Talk? 

Topic 2 - Following a legendary leader has historically been very difficult. Do you foresee any issues with the transition from Besos to Jassy, and Jassy to Selipsky at Amazon/AWS? 

Topic 3 - Has any tech company been more influential, and yet not completely controlled their own destiny than VMware?  

Topic 3a - How do we bring gambling to the tech industry? The stock market moves too slow and too many interesting companies are private. For example, can we bet on the next ransomware target, or the next acquisition, or the next company to claim to be Observability?

Topic 4 - Is there a market segment more fragmented than “tools for developers”? There’s the “everyone is recreating Heroku” crowd; the “Serverless or die!” crowd, the “VSCode + GitHub” crowd, the Jamstack crowd, the iOS vs. Android crowd, Data Scientists crowd, etc...

Topic 5 - Between Clubhouse collapsing and all virtual events being snoozefests, has the last year essentially killed our desire in tech to get together in anything resembling “in person”? 

Topic 5a - What are the lasting and fading changes from the pandemic?

Topic 6 - Does it make complete tech-karma sense that the only two uses of Blockchain have turned out to be cryptocurrencies and NFTs? 

Topic 7 - We’ve seen a number of “OSS companies” try and change their licensing model to deal with competitive challenges from the public cloud. What do you predict will be their next move? Did that previous move do anything? 

Topic 8 - How disappointed are you that (seemingly) no big tech company took advantage of their growing stock price to take over their market via acquisitions?

FEEDBACK?

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Sunday, June 20, 2021

Improving the Adoption Rate of New Tech

A common question we often hear is, “How to improve our adoption rate of new technology?” 

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WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THESE IN-THE-MIDDLE JOBS?

DevRel, Advocates, Evangelists, Strategists. We’ve all heard about these job titles, but what do people in those roles actually do? And are they necessary?  

WHAT DO DEVREL, ADVOCATES, EVANGELISTS, TECHNICAL MARKETERS, STRATEGISTS DO, AND DO WE ACTUALLY NEED THEM?

  1. Every project, every market, every new technology has both short-term and long-term goals. Companies need to find a way to balance both goals.
  2. Successful teams, in every industry, have excellent in-between people. 
  3. In-between roles are a great way to learn the business, and build varied career paths. They usually aren’t career paths on their own. Many people don’t understand this. 
  4. DevRel / Advocate / Evangelist
  5. Technical Marketing
  6. Strategy

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Automated Data Labeling for AI Apps

Alex Ratner (@ajratner, Co-Founder/CEO @SnorkelAI) talks about Snorkel’s evolution from Stanford AI Labs, the challenges of labeling data for AI modeling, and simplifying how AI applications can be built. 

SHOW: 523

SHOW SPONSOR LINKS:

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, the origins of the company, and a little bit about the founding team. 

Topic 2 - Let’s start by framing the day in the life of a data scientist. There’s raw data, there’s a data sorting/organizing process, there’s model building, there’s results and analysis, and the cycle continues, etc. What parts are solved problems, what parts are commoditized, and where is there still room for improvement?

Topic 3 - Now that we understand today’s AI/ML/DataScience landscape, let’s talk about how Snorkel Flow and automated data labeling is able to evolve those environments

Topic 4 - Application Studio seems like the intersection of Low-Code and Industry-specific templates and the Python toolkit that data scientists understand. Walk us through the mindset of today’s data scientists in how they think about the “developer” part of their jobs.

Topic 5 - What are some of the frequent use-cases or business problem areas that you’ve seen drive early adoption of the Snorkel platform? 

Topic 6 - Where do you see Snorkel fitting into the broader ecosystem of AI capabilities that companies may already have in place? 

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Sunday, June 13, 2021

Tips for Identifying Tech Trends

For more than 10 years we’re interviewed the people that changed the tech world. What are some tips and tricks to identify which trends emerge, survive and fail? 

SHOW: 522

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IDENTIFYING TRENDS TO HIGHLIGHT ON THE PODCAST

  1. 522 shows, 57 companies acquired, $4.9B in VC funding, $58B in Acquisitions/IPOs
  2. Track Record of Founding Team, Macro Trends, Societal Trends

VC TRENDS vs. TECHNOLOGY TRENDS vs. CUSTOMER BUYING TRENDS

  1. There is a very long lifecycle between university research vs. early VC investments vs. early technology trends vs. customer buying trends. Often 10-20 years.
  2. Gracely’s Theorem: “There are very few truly new ideas, rather there are mostly advancements because of improved CPUs and Networking speeds.”
  3. The Platform vs. Feature test: A baseline platform or higher-level platform? 
  4. The Bed, Bath & Beyond test: Is it more than 50% cheaper than previous generations?
  5. The Friction test: Does it remove significant barriers to previous generations?
  6. The Don’t Fight a Land War in Asia test: Is it trying to be too many things to too many people?
  7. The Follow-the-Money test: How do companies around this technology make money? Does the ecosystem make money? Are there adjacent paths to monetization?
  8. The Culture Change test: People don’t like change, especially for change’s sake. Changing culture is one of the hardest things to do at most companies. 
  9. The Re-Education test: How much of a learning curve is required to make this technology successful? 

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