Welcome to episode 282 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are happy to be joining you in the clouds versus watching election information. This week we’re talking nuclear energy, AI Search tools, and all things Pre:Invent. Welcome, and thanks for joining us!

• The Cloud Pod Would Much Rather Record This Show Than Watch the Election Results
• IBM Comes for Your AI Dollars
• AWS Goes Limitless with the PostgreSQL Possibilities
• It is Upon Us the Pre-Invent Period and AWS Does Not Disappoint
• Amazon Loses Its Nuclear Superhero

01:13 Energy regulators scrutinizing data center use reject Amazon bid

• Late Friday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a proposal that would have allowed an Amazon data center to co-locate with an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
• The commission voted it down 2-1
• FERC chairman Willie Phillips said that the commission should encourage the development of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing as national security and economic development priorities.
• Commissioners Mark Christie and Lindsay See (both R) voted to reject the proposal, while Davis Rosner and Judy Change (D) didn’t vote.
• Talen Energy, who signed the agreement, drew challenges from neighboring utilities AEP and Exelon – who challenged the novel arrangement, arguing it would unfairly shift costs of running the broader grid to other consumers.
• FERC’s order found the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, failed to show why the proposal was necessary and prove such a deal would be limited to the Susquehanna plant given the widespread interest in placing data centers next to power plants.
• Talen said the ruling would have a chilling effect on the region’s economic development and it is weighing its options.
• Will see what happens with Microsoft/Constellation energies plan to restart 3-Mile Island.

3:21 Justin – “It’s sort of sad because I kind like the idea of nuclear power to solve a bunch of problems, but it has to be done in the right way for sure.”

04:12 IT’S EARNINGS TIME!

04:22 IBM revenue misses, but execs say AI will drive future growth

• • This week, we have an additional company we don’t typically talk about… but IBM kicked off this quarter’s earning seasons which indicated that the AI dividend has yet to pay off for big infrastructure players.
  • Earnings were 2.30 a share, excluding non-recurring items, and were eight cents better than consensus estimates.
  • Although rev...

Welcome to episode 281 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are your hosts as we search the clouds for all the latest news and info. This week we’re talking about ECS turning 10 (yes, we were there when it was announced, and yes, we’re old,) some more drama from the CrowdStrike fiasco, lots of updates to GitHub, plus more. Join us!

• Github Universe full of ECS containers
• Github Universe lives up to the Universal expectations

01:09 Dr. Matt Woods ended up at PWC as chief innovation officer

• YAWN
• What exactly does a chief innovation officer at PWC do? Is this like a semi-retirement?

01:44 TSA silent on CrowdStrike’s claim Delta skipped required security update

• Delta isn’t backing down with CrowdStrike, and in a court filing said CrowdStrike should be on the hook for the entire $500M in losses, partly because CrowdStrike has admitted that it should have done more testing and staggered deployments to catch bugs.
• Delta further alleges that CrowdStrike postured as a certified best-in-class security provider who “never cuts corners,” while secretly designing its software to bypass Microsoft security certifications to make changes at the core of Delta’s computer systems without Delta’s knowledge.
• Delta says they would never have agreed to such a dangerous process if it had been disclosed.
• In its testimony to Congress, CrowdStrike said that they follow standard protocols, and that they are protecting against threats as they evolve.
• CrowdStrike is also accusing Delta of failing to follow laws, including best practices established by the TSA.
• According to CrowdStrike, most customers were up within a day of the issue – while Delta took 5 days.
• Crowdstrike alleges that this was caused by Delta’s negligence in following the TSA requirements designed to ensure that no major airline ever experiences prolonged system outages.
• CrowdStrike realized Delta failed to follow the requirements when its efforts to help remediate the issue revealed alleged technological shortcomings and failures to follow security best practices, including outdated IT systems, issues in Delta’s AD environment and thousands of compromised passwords.
• Delta threatened to sue Microsoft as well as CrowdStrike, but has only named CrowdStrike to date in the lawsuits.

3:48 Ryan – “It’s a tool that needs to evolve very quickly to emerging threats. And while the change that was pushed through shouldn’t have gone through that particular workflow, and that’s a mistake, I do think that that should exist as part of it. Yes, could they have done better with documentation and all that? Of course.”

04:51 Google is a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for...

Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.

• The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power
• I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood.
• I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power
• Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either
• We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power
• Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right
• Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL

00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

• Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).
• Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.
• Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.
• Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability.
• Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dragging or zooming.
• The idea is to make Claude complete individual tasks, without always needing to leverage an API, like clicking in a GUI, or uploading a file from a computer. These types of solutions are typically found in Build and Test like scenarios with tools such as Saucelabs or Browserstack.
• To do this, Claude was built to perceive and interact with computer interfaces. You can use data from my computer to fill out this online form or check a spreadsheet, move the cursor to a web browser, navigate to the relevant web pages, select the data for the spreadsheet and so on.

3:06 Jonathan – “If you can take pictures of the screen, then it can identify where buttons and things are without having to know the name of the objects in the DOM and stuff like that. So you could say, give me instructions, click on this, click on this, click on this, do this stuff. It would be really easy to automate tests that way instead of having to know the names of the divs and things on a page, especially for web testing. Because if a developer changes those, the...