Cloud Out Loud Podcast

Send a text The dream of open source is freedom, speed, and shared progress—but the reality gets messy when it meets cloud-scale business and security. We explore how Docker kickstarted containers while Google’s Kubernetes turned them into an operational standard, and why that split shaped everything from engineering culture to company strategy. From there, we compare the cloud giants’ philosophie...

Send a text Ever wonder how free software ended up running the world’s biggest clouds? We pull on a thread that starts with the hacker ethos—access, transparency, community—and follows it through OSCON memories, Docker’s breakout moment, and the quiet power shift that came with Kubernetes. From early research culture to the realities of running production systems, we map how open source moved from...

Send a text In this episode, Jon and Logan  explore whether generative AI fundamentally changes the build versus buy decision for businesses considering software solutions. They analyze recent claims about AI-powered cost savings and examine the underlying principles that should guide technology decisions. How Logan is using  AI in his common tasks  Looking at recent claims from companies like Kla...

Send a text When identical prompts yield different outputs and a request for "a cat running across the screen" generates four cylinders and a bobbing balloon, the non-deterministic nature of generative AI becomes impossible to ignore. Despite the power of these sophisticated models, we discovered that creating consistent, high-quality results demanded substantial human intervention – not...

Send a text In this episode we try out what we've speculated AI, particularly GenAI is good for: expanding the capabilities of engineers as they create new applications. This application uses Google's Cloud Run   and Google Cloud Storage to get user's specification of an animation, create the animation, then store and play the animation. This the link to the Github repo for the appl...

Send a text Courtesy of Corey Quinn's "Last Week in AWS" Newsletter # 389 Logan and Jon discovered a presentation from Sec-T   by Chris Farris that does a great job describing the tension between the Cloud Providers and Customers when it comes to security. The presentation does a great job of highlighting the fact that, though the cloud can be made secure, for many people the defaul...

Send a text This episode reviews a manifesto written by Leopold Aschenbrenner , formerly of OpenAI, now a founder of an investment firm that is focused on AGI, Advanced General Intelligence. The manifesto is titled SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, The Decade Ahead. This episode's discussion sets up who Leopold is, where he's been, and what his focus is. From there the focus is on one aspect of the...

Send a text As with all the discussions of AI, and particularly LLM's and Generative AI, this is a discussion of the challenges of getting it right, making it useful, and using these tools successfully in a business. Major Points: There are a large number of commercial and open-source models available. Tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars were spent, and equal amounts of person years...

Send a text Summary We start off discussing the recent developments and timeline of generative AI models, particularly ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Llama2, Gemini, and Claude. We covered the release of these models by companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic, their performance benchmarks, and the emerging ecosystem of models. The discussion highlighted the commoditization of these models, the n...

Send a text Unveiling the Future of Cloud and AI at Google Cloud Next  Episode 28: Show Notes In this episode, we delve into the most recent big cloud conference, Google Cloud Next. We discuss what we saw, felt, and heard at this year's iconic Google Cloud Next and provide listeners with our biggest takeaways from the event. We discuss the cutting-edge tools in generative AI and machine learn...

Send a text Episode 27: Show Notes Welcome back to Cloud Out Loud as we continue our discussion on generative AI and machine learning. Today is all about exploring the risks of modern machine learning and how we can properly navigate them as a society. Jon and Logan walk us through the benefits of AI tools for software companies, the dangers of poorly-trained generative AI models, why good code ma...

Send a text Generative AI and ChatGPT with Logan and Jon Episode 26: Show Notes Machine learning and AI are fast becoming integrated into our everyday lives. However, despite its rising popularity, there is still a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around the subject. In this episode, we unravel the fundamental principles of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We start by setting the...

Send a text Best Environment for Machine Learning Episode 25: Show Notes Lately, there’s been a lot of hype about AI. In today’s podcast, we too are going to chat about AI, and specifically the subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning. Instead of talking about the political, social, and moral aspects of this subject, however, we’re going to speak about some of the more mundane asp...

Send a text Leaving the Cloud Episode 24: Show Notes While our preference is always to use the cloud to address IT problems, today we look at a company that is doing the opposite. 37signals, the company behind the project management software Basecamp and the email system Hey, has decided to bring their workloads off the cloud and back into a data center. DHH, the Co-owner and CTO of 37signals, rec...

Send a text Demystifying the Security Career Path with Marsha Wilson Episode 23: Show Notes Today we welcome back popular guest Marsha Wilson from ScaleSec, as we unpack some of the particulars about what a career in security requires and can look like. Marsha's wealth of experience and insight are so helpful in answering some of the fundamental questions that aspiring security professionals...

Send a text Episode 22: Show Notes ‌ ‌The past week in tech has been eventful, to say the least. FTX declared bankruptcy, Elon Musk is sowing chaos with his latest decisions at Twitter, and David Heinemeier Hansson published a post on his decision to move 37signals off of the cloud. In today’s episode, we take a closer look at the high cost of cloud services and what can be done to make these serv...

Send a text Women in IT, Cloud Security, and InfoSec with Marsha Wilson Episode 21: Show Notes Welcome back to another episode of Cloud Out Loud! Today we are joined, once again, by Marsha Wilson to discuss the presence of women in IT, cloud security, and InfoSec. Marsha is the CEO of ScaleSec and has had a fascinating career that spans the military and the private sector. Tuning in you’ll hear Ma...

Send a text Diminishing Risk, Increasing Profit, and Reducing Costs Through Security with Marsha Wilson of ScaleSec Episode 20: Show Notes Today we continue with Part 2 in our conversation with Marsha Wilson, CEO of ScaleSec. While the first episode covered Martha's advice to startups on how to create a foundation of security, this episode delves into how to deal with security issues a few ye...

Send a text Startup Security Tips from ScaleSec Episode 19: Show Notes If you’re starting up a business in this day and age, cloud security should be your first priority from day one. Having basic security systems in place from the get-go can only have long-term benefits. Joining us today to talk about the importance of good security hygiene in the early stages of starting a business is Marsha Wil...

Send a text Episode 18: Show Notes Recently we’ve seen some big dollar commitments from companies to facilitate their move towards cloud. While we are big fans of cloud and going serverless, there are some key issues with these types of public commitments (with huge sums of money behind them) that bear interrogation. In today’s episode, we consult a Twitter thread by Simon Wardley, a British resea...

Send a text Disaster  Episode 17: Show Notes We here in the Pacific Northwest have been experiencing a slow-moving disaster of enormous proportions. Namely, the heatwave that much of Europe has also recently been confronted with. Similarly, in the context of the cloud, there has also been a pretty significant disaster. On 19 July 2022, there was a well-documented outage, where the London data cent...

Send a text Cost Control in the Cloud Episode 15: Show Notes Welcome back to Cloud Out Loud! As we record this at the start of July, there are lots of interesting doldrums occuring in all sectors of life. Particularly, the tech industry is being challenged. We are in the middle of a lot of lay-offs, and we are seeing a plummet in the success of startups that were thriving at the start of last year...

Send a text Armoring Yourself Against Marketing Episode 16: Show Notes Welcome back to another episode of Cloud Out Loud! We are proud public cloud advocates and believe that the public cloud is going to be the ultimate platform for IT, computing, and AI for the foreseeable future. However, there is often confusion about two areas regarding cloud computing, namely multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud. The...

Send a text Cloud in Sports Episode 14: Show Notes We often hear about various ways the Cloud is applied, but what about sport? In this episode, we focus on sports and the public Cloud, a subject that Logan has investigated in detail. More specifically, we chat about how the various sports leagues leverage the Cloud for their data analytics platforms. We dive deep into the topic and learn how the...

Send a text Episode 13: Show Notes While we may have been negative about WEB3 on many occasions, today we are talking about a company implementing WEB3 technology in a way that truly seems to be a good idea. Hivemapper is a crowdsourced open source mapping platform. As the world’s first crypto-enabled dashcam, Hivemapper mines HONEY Tokens and grows a map while you drive. Tuning in you’ll hear how...