Wednesday, January 17, 2024

AWS vs. Azure

Brian and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, @SoftwareDefinedTalk) talk about comparing AWS vs Azure, evaluating alternatives and what changes over the next 3-5 years.

SHOW: 787

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Topic 1 - Depending on what metric we use (revenue, Gartner MQ, CAPEX spending, headlines), it’s starting to seem like AWS and Azure are pretty neck and neck. Do you see much difference between those two clouds?

Topic 2 - Gartner’s summary boils down to “AWS is better at infrastructure” and “Azure is better at developer services”. If you’re a customer, how do you choose between those ends of the spectrum, or are you mostly choosing both services?

Topic 3 - AWS claims to be the more secure cloud. Aside from some stability issues in various regions (or either AWS or Azure), are there really any indications that one cloud is “more secure” than the other? Don’t they mostly put the burden on the customer and their applications?

Topic 4 - Did you see any distinct usage trends for companies choosing AWS vs. Azure? We’ve seen somewhere between 10-15% of apps move to the cloud (lift & shift?) over the last 10+ years and growth rates are slowing. Can either significantly move that number without some big changes, or is it just a slow, gradual growth?

Topic 5 - We’ve talked a lot about AI recently. How much do you think the AI strategies of AWS vs Azure will impact bigger usage decisions?

Topic 6 - AWS is still #1 and Azure is #2. Is there anything over the next 3-4 years that could shakeup that order?

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Sunday, January 14, 2024

Is 2024 the Year of Accountability?

Return to Office, Layoffs, Acquisitions,and Shareholder Accountability are dominating the worker-level discussions in early 2024. Let’s dig into what’s really happening. 

SHOW: 786

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SHOW NOTES:


WHY IS ALL OF THIS HAPPENING NOW?

  • This is similar to the 2022-2023 transition (unexpected + fast)
  • Companies are quick to cut and slow to restart/accelerate
  • Companies often overestimate needs and under-estimate fixes
  • There are new competitive dynamics happening all over tech
  • There will be lots of bankruptcy and acquisitions in 2024

2024 WILL BE A YEAR OF ACCOUNTABILITY

  • The pendulum of workers vs management is swinging back to management
  • 15 minutes of “blame management” fame might be short lived
  • Business doesn’t necessarily work like Reddit trends
  • Focus on alignment to revenues, customer success
  • Focus on results, not excuses
  • Actively look for efficiencies and inefficiencies

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Wednesday, January 10, 2024

2024 Look Ahead - Surviving the Q1 Kickoff

Brian and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, @SoftwareDefinedTalk) talk about surviving the annual planning process and Q1 goals, KPIs, politics, priorities, etc

SHOW: 785

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Topic 1 - The new year is upon us. What sorts of strategies do you use (or have you used) to deal with the onslaught of 2024 planning, Q1 goals/KPIs, etc.? Are you a fast-starter or trying to lay low?

Topic 2 - What are some of the ways that you’ve seen people deal with the annual goals that seem overwhelming (or hard to project) in January? 

Topic 3 - What are the biggest pitfalls for being too aggressive too early in 2024? What are the biggest upsides for being aggressive?

Topic 4 - Even though the calendar flips in December, it doesn’t mean everything starts over (or starts new). How do you deal with the projects that have completely different priorities on January 1st vs. December 31st?

Topic 5 - Who are the key people you’re trying to align with in Q1? Is it managers, or finance, or strategy people….or someone else? 

Topic 6 - Any big disasters to avoid in Q1 that can ruin the rest of the year? 

Topic 7 - Final thoughts on winning at the beginning of the year?


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Sunday, January 7, 2024

Is Cloud just a feature now?

More than a decade into cloud, is cloud just a feature of the systems we build these days? What else might become features in the near future? 

SHOW: 784

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SHOW NOTES:

IS THE CLOUD JUST A FEATURE NOW?

  • On-demand pricing
  • On-demand resources
  • Someone else manages it for you
  • API access to systems
  • A wide breadth of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services

WHAT MIGHT BECOME A FEATURE OF MODERN SYSTEMS?

  • DevOps becomes integrated Co-Pilots via LLMs
  • FinOps gets built into the systems, like vMotion from VMware
  • Pre-Testing, Pre-Planning gets built in (like System Initiative)
  • Chaos engineering gets built-in
  • Collaboration gets built-in
  • The OS becomes like containers and gets deterministic
  • Upgrades are built-in
  • Training, Docs, Examples are built-in

LESSONS LEARNED

  • The cross the chasm adoption isn’t just for a specific technology, it’s for bigger systems too
  • Rarely does the new thing completely replace the old thing (mobile excluded)
  • Innovation will need to continue to be creative (e.g. open source, pricing, etc.)
  • “Failures” are usually just incremental steps

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Wednesday, January 3, 2024

2024 Look Ahead - Using AI to Enable Personal Productivity

Aaron and Brian talk to Mark Hinkle (@mrhinkle, Founder @peripety_labs) about enabling AI to drive personal productivity, AI experimentation and AIOps soft skills.

SHOW: 783

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SHOW NOTES:


Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. Give our audience a little bit of your background and what you focus on now with Peripety Labs?

Topic 2 - If you’re a business leader today, where are you focusing your priorities in terms of taking advantage of AI to improve the business?

Topic 3 - If you’re a knowledge worker today, where are you focusing your priorities in terms of taking advantage of AI to improve your job?

Topic 4 - What’s a good way to think about experimentation with AI vs. trying to start measuring results now? Any tips to help companies or workers accelerate their learning curves?

Topic 5 - What are some of the biggest misconceptions you’re seeing across the industry right now around AI? Concerns, fears, anti-patterns, etc. 

Topic 6 - We’re learned over many years (and technology trends) that the most successful ones align technology and people/culture/organization. What are the AI alignments of people and technology that are most needed? 


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Sunday, December 24, 2023

2023 Year in Review and 2024 Predictions

@AaronDelp and @BGracely talk about the biggest stories, trends and events of cloud in 2023, and some predictions for 2024.

SHOW: 782

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SHOW NOTES:

THE BASICS:

  • Our second 2M listens show 
  • Thank you to all our sponsors throughout the year (Datadog, CloudZero, Cisco Panoptica, Section, Fix the Internet, Sysdig, DoIT, Eaton, theCUBE, CNCF, Upland Software, Equinix, Red Hat, Cloudfix, GCore, Kosli)

2023 PREDICTIONS: 

AARON’S PREDICTIONS:

  • A Hyperscaler that isn’t 1 or 2 throws in the towel - We start to see consolidation in the category
  • Platform Engineering hits its Trough of Disillusionment
  • Compact, OSS, specialized AI models will become the standard for anything not in the cloud (on device, datacenter, edge)
  • A new category emerges - AI Customization for the masses (Data Science as a Service) - intersection of ITOps and AI

BRIAN’S PREDICTIONS:

  • We’ll see the 1st 500M-user AI service
  • AI economics start to change (smaller models, non-GPU chips)
  • 40-50 former unicorns ($1B valuations from 2020-22) get acquired 
  • Every product adds an AI / LLM capability to simplify usage

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Wednesday, December 20, 2023

The Industry Fallout from OpenAI 2023

Aaron, Brian and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, Software Defined Talk) talk about the November OpenAI drama and how it potentially impacts the entire AI industry in 2024.

SHOW: 781

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

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SHOW SPONSORS:

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Post-mortem - what do we know about what happened with the almost coup at OpenAI? What speculation (rumors) have been the loudest? 

Topic 2 - What are the biggest unknowns?

  • How is it possible that Sam Altman didn’t/doesn’t have a significant amount of equity in OpenAI and still remain so powerful? 
  • How is it possible that Microsoft invested this much in OpenAI without having more understanding?
  • How much of a mistake did the board make in assuming their concerns about Sam would be removed with a single firing? 
  • How much does Microsoft get diluted by the latest round of funding (if it happens)?


Topic 2a - What are going to be the biggest concerns and enticements for customers looking at different models to use? Is it ease of use? A single model? Privacy and security?

Topic 2b - Who cracks the code on simplification and personalization? OpenAI with customer GPT’s? OSS models with fine-tuning/RAG?

Topic 3 - Is it possible that the OpenAI model (e.g. GPT-4, or Q*) will continue to be considerably better than all the other existing and emerging models? Do small language models take over? Do specialized models trained on private licensed data become a differentiator?

Topic 4 - Who is driving AI at Google? Is it within GCP, or is there now a commercial side of Google Brain / Deepmind?

Topic 5 - Who is driving AI at Amazon/AWS? How did AWS get into a position where it seems to have so little control over its models?

Topic 6 - Where will the control over AI reside (in the technology stack)? 

Topic 7 - Will the AI “wars” be more chaotic that the Cloud “wars” of the last decade? Will we see war-time CEOs? Will we see more irrational decisions?

Topic 8 - Will AI-specific clouds emerge? Will data-specific clouds emerge? Will model-specific clouds emerge? 

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