Ep 22 - AWS re:Invent 2023 Recap

Chris Miles: 0:00

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast. Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach as individuals who have already started this journey. We would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap. Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds podcast. Today I am your host. My name is Chris Miles, joining me, as always, my elegant, beautiful co-host, alex Perkins and Tim McConaughey, and today we are bringing you an episode that is. This has been done before. You can probably get this content or the full rundown of AWS re-invent elsewhere, but we are going to give you a recap of AWS re-invent from the networking perspective, and we will definitely have to sprinkle in some of our takes on the AI extravaganza that was AWS re-invent 2023.

Alex Perkins: 1:08

That is on the rise right.

Chris Miles: 1:10

Yeah, pretty much. But before we get into that, let's try to include a little bit of non-AWS news here. So kicking us off will be Alex what else happened in the world of cloud outside of AWS?

Alex Perkins: 1:28

Yeah, so not a whole lot here. We got Google Gemini. This was announced actually today, the day we are recording, which is, what is to say, the 6th of December in the US. So Gemini is my understanding is it's like the new model underneath of Bard, and if you don't know, bard is basically Google's version of chat GPT. They did a bunch of independent benchmarks on this and it beat GPT-4, which is really.

Alex Perkins: 1:58

I guess why this was such noteworthy. But also some of the videos they showed of things it can do is actually really cool. They showed it just using a lot of context. One of the videos I watched is about helping your kid do homework and it literally showed a kid's homework assignment. They scanned it in and it analyzed the paper, told the kid where it messed up and then guided it through how to solve the homework assignment, which is just like the video is super cool. We'll have to link it somewhere, but it was really cool to see.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:31

Great, my kids can cheat on their homework too.

Alex Perkins: 2:35

Yeah, they didn't show it like giving them the answer, they showed it like actually working through it, but I'm sure it could be abuse, right, yeah?

Chris Miles: 2:44

As someone without kids, I just assumed many children around the world are using chat GPT to cheat on their homework currently. How is this any different? I guess it depends.

Alex Perkins: 2:57

You do have to be 13 to sign up for an account.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:00

But I don't know how much that actually matters. Real quick before we get into it. I just have to list because my daughter came home from school today. She does a D&D club every two weeks and apparently the normal Dungeon Master did not show up. So she told me that she was very proud of herself. She actually went to chat GPT and asked it for a prompt and stuff and actually built like a whole D&D like just one shot game out of a chat GPT prompt. So that was pretty cool, that's awesome.

Chris Miles: 3:30

Yeah. As someone that is currently involved in a D&D campaign, I can definitely say chat GPT helps a lot, especially once you're first time, so I can see the value there. Cool.

Alex Perkins: 3:43

All right, the other one. So the Meta and IBM kind of teamed up and announced the AI Alliance, as they call it, and it looks like this is very early stages. But it's a group of 50. I don't know if it was just 50 that was on the article or if there's maybe there's some more but it was 50 companies that are basically collaborating to what they call a safe, open AI Right. It's like a charter to govern some of the AI stuff that's coming out.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:13

Who's not on it though?

Alex Perkins: 4:14

Yeah, there's a lot of people not on it. Like open AI, Microsoft, Amazon.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:21

It is a lot of small companies. Google too, right yeah, Google Right.

Alex Perkins: 4:24

Google's not on there. It comes from Meta and IBM, who I don't think anyone is saying they're in the lead of any of this AI stuff right now, so it's just kind of interesting to watch.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:36

We need that governance. It just reminds me a little bit of who are the signatories at the Geneva Convention and stuff like that who's not the signatories. It's kind of one of those yeah right.

Chris Miles: 4:47

Well, nice, yeah. So that wraps up our typical news segment, since this is a very news-centric episode, so we're going to hop right in and get into AWS re-invent 2023. As anyone that's been following it whatsoever, there was a lot of AI sprinkled into just about every single thing. Whether or not you wanted it or not, whether it felt relevant or not, ai was very prominent and you can tell that's a major focal point for AWS right now, needing to defend their lead in the cloud space, potentially for their market share. So I don't know what were your general thoughts about the conference as a whole?

Alex Perkins: 5:36

Yeah, I will definitely agree, Chris. It seemed like generative AI was sprinkled into every single talk. I haven't watched a whole bunch of presentations yet like breakout sessions yet, but I'd probably like two or three of the ones I've watched. They all had a slide that was like well, it's 2023. It wouldn't be a complete talk without talking about generative AI and how it fits into this. So that will definitely be the theme of this recap, for sure, and I think a lot of the keynotes even we're talking about it a lot as well. What did you think, tim?

Tim McConnaughy: 6:11

Yeah, 100%. I honestly. I watched Reinvent mostly through the eyes of Twitter, because there were so many people there that I follow and that I'm involved with there that had a lot to say, and oh my God, you're right AI and everything, even where it made no sense. I was waiting for AI lollipops and just like completely I was waiting for the merchandise push, and that, thankfully, didn't come. We didn't get spaceballs, the generative AI, but it was pretty crazy. What was interesting, though and we'll get to this right my main takeaway from it was there was a lot of stuff, but there wasn't a lot of network stuff, which makes me think that they are consolidating kind of their services offerings more than now that they have Lattice, now they have Cloudwin. I think they're really hitting their stride. They're really kind of consolidating and solidifying.

Chris Miles: 7:12

Yeah, for sure I will say if you were someone involved in networking, this was probably if you're looking for networking content from Reinvent you probably were left with a little bit to be desired. For sure there wasn't a lot of focus on new things, especially networking. There was a lot of reinforcement on existing things and adoption of existing things like CloudWan, vpc, lattice, etc. Which you know those are still relatively new technologies from the overall perspective. So I get it. But, yeah, let's get into some of these announcements that were at least networking focused and then maybe we can kind of pan back a little bit and look at the water scale. But right on course with the topic of AI.

Chris Miles: 8:00

Probably the biggest announcement was Amazon Q I shouldn't say biggest announcement, but we'll relate it to the networking piece here in a second. But Amazon Q? So they have launched an AI-powered assistant that is available through the AWS console to assist you with numerous tasks ranging from you know there's options in QuickSight for doing proper business analytics, and then they also have this option for network troubleshooting. So it's relying on AWS. Oh my gosh, I already forgot that.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:34

The Reachability Analyzer. The.

Chris Miles: 8:35

Reachability Analyzer, right? So it's a way to basically, you have this chatbot, for lack of a better term. You give it a plain problem in plain English, right? You know? Like, hey, my web server isn't talking to my database server. You know what's going on, and it automatically goes in, analyzes, looks at the instances, checks the knackles, checks the security groups, et cetera, and gives you a proposed solution to fix the problem. They have a blog post about this and it's very, you know, it's very to the point, very direct. I'm curious to see how this will expand upon in more complex troubleshooting scenarios, but I don't know what was your else take on this so far.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:20

Yeah, agreed. So to me it feels a little bit like a first, almost like a proof of concept, like minimum viable product, because it's almost exclusively using VPC Reachability Analyzer, which, to be fair, is a really cool tool. You know, I would love to see it. You know, pull in some of the other stuff. Like you know, wake me when it can go, look at CloudWatch alarms. Like you know, wake me when it can do. You know, do port, look at port mirroring or look at VPC flow logs. Right, where's that? Right? No, this is a good, don't get me wrong, this is a good first offer. Right, it's really cool. The blog post is cool, you check it out. But yeah, man, I can't wait to see. In fact, I can't see how it be usable unless they start bringing in these other points of data.

Alex Perkins: 10:05

Yeah, 100%. And you know we kind of talked about this a little bit offline before we recorded and some of the things. I know it's early and it's in preview, but we were kind of joking about how it's like you can only ask it 20 questions a day and it's if you hit new conversation it wipes everything, and after 24 hours it wipes everything. So obviously I think I agree, tim, it's more of like a proof of concept right now and, like you said, just the potential is definitely there. So it'll just be something cool to watch and see. And it's $25 a month per user. I think was the pricing we saw, which seems I don't know. I mean, I guess if you don't have that many people working on it, it's.

Chris Miles: 10:44

It seems steep to me. But we also don't know what defines a user at. Tim, like was a user, an account or an actual individual? Yeah, I didn't see it anywhere.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:55

No, this is a good point actually, because when you're reading and again we realize that this is in preview, right? So everything we're talking about could change, especially things like accounts, users, so on and so forth. It specifically said $25 per user per month and then, on the limitations, it said 20 questions per day per account. So I don't know that.

Alex Perkins: 11:16

Yeah, that's a weird wording. You know what I mean.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:18

So yeah, now that could just be that hey, two different people wrote this blog and they mean the same thing, but you never can assume that to be the case.

Alex Perkins: 11:26

You hope so, because can you imagine, you have 20 users in one account, right, they get one question a day.

Chris Miles: 11:32

They all hop in. All 20 users hop in and ask the same question at once and it just caps it out.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:38

We were joking about this earlier and I was like I can't wait for the first person to be working on a P1 and be like, ah shit, I'm out of questions.

Chris Miles: 11:46

I'll call me at 12.01 tomorrow.

Alex Perkins: 11:49

Let's see if.

Chris Miles: 11:50

I can continue this. Yeah, One thing that I thought was really interesting and I don't know how this works is when they say plain English, they meant plain English, Like the person in the blog post. If you look at the example, someone's in there just saying, hey, I can't reach my web server, I can't reach my app server. It didn't give any instance IDs, didn't give any IP addresses didn't give any VPC IDs.

Chris Miles: 12:20

I don't know how it pulled in that information. Like I don't know, maybe you're running yeah, I can't be Like maybe you're running Amazon Q within the realm of a VPC and it looks at it from that perspective. But, like hell, like I don't know if anyone's seen naming conventions for shit nowadays. Like there's a very small chance that web server is named web server, so I don't know where they're getting that particular data.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:42

They do reference in the blog post. They do mention that if you say web server, that your chat box will go look for tags that might be relevant. And now that's still a pretty wide net.

Chris Miles: 12:54

That's another assumption, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:57

So the fact that it worked in the blog post is pretty cool, definitely worth putting through its paces. I mean, I think, with all AI and this is also don't forget that this is also a facet of Q right Like this wasn't, like they didn't create this as its own tool.

Alex Perkins: 13:12

This is a facet of Q Like the inside, yeah, q is a much broader thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:17

So with all chatbots, I think you're going to get what you give Like. You can use plain English and be like hey, chatbot, I can't reach my web server, but you'll probably get better results ultimately, you know, the more info you can give it, I would assume.

Alex Perkins: 13:30

Well, and they also. You know, like you said, this isn't its only thing, right, we're just talking about the network troubleshooting. But I think there was another demo I saw where it showed it kind of like co-pilot, like GitHub co-pilot, where it was. They were using it in Code Whisper, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:45

I think this was called Code Whisper.

Alex Perkins: 13:46

Yeah, it was built in with that. Yeah so, and they were using it in their Cloud9 IDE, so there's a lot of other stuff going on with it as well.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:54

Yeah, let's Okay. So, yeah, the point is put that through its paces. I'm interested to see what they do with it. I'm interested, very interested in seeing them pull in things like flow logs, cloudwatch, alarms, metrics. The wider net of networking troubleshooting in AWS has got to be in there for it to be useful in the long term. So, but I am very excited about what they've started with.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:17

Okay, so let's move on to another one. So this is kind of a weird one. There's a. They just announced a Zonal AutoShift for AWS. So they already had a thing called Zonal Shift, which is to say that if an availability zone goes down, you can tell Amazon essentially like, hey, change the DNS records and move things between zones. This is, by the way, restricted to load balancers, so think about DNS records being changed here.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:49

Right, this is a Route 53 offer. So the ALB, and now the NLB, now has the ability to do it automatically. So, almost like you could set up ASGs to do autoscaling, you can got to do this with Zonal AutoShifting, but you have to specifically Well, first of all, you can't. This is interesting thing, that Interesting limit, which is you cannot have cross-zone load balancing enabled for this to work. It kind of makes sense. Right, that one kind of makes sense. That is the default for NLBs at least. But yeah, but you also have to very specifically specify the resources that are back end of the load balancer to opt in to the Zonal AutoShift. So both those are kind of interesting.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:33

Again, the offer already existed as like a manual feature, so there is some price. I was looking at the blog post, it was a little unclear. But there is a cost associated with it and that's why they want you to opt in with the resources you want to be using Zonal AutoShift. But it's just another way to make your Increase the resiliency without having to do it yourself. Right To log in, and the same way we would in the old days in networking land when some bump in the wire has a problem and we'd have to go move routes, remove paths right. So with BGP it isn't like that. So Auto is good, you do pay for it, but it's an interesting resiliency play by Amazon.

Chris Miles: 16:16

Yeah, one of the things I thought was cool about this was that they I guess by default it sounds like they quote unquote practice this 30 minutes per week, which is adjustable, so they'll automatically do this kind of like AZ failover thing. And you can implement two separate CloudWatch alarms to kind of act as like a circuit breaker for whether or not you want this to happen. So a certain alarm can be triggered where you say like you can obviously schedule them to be practiced outside business hours, right, but you can also have that kind of functionality to, when this alarm comes in, to say like actually I don't want to test it at all tonight, you know, like we have something going on, don't do it tonight. But one thing that I thought was really weird about this was the implication that you should be, your capacity should be oversubscribed to account for this right.

Chris Miles: 17:11

And you shouldn't rely on auto scaling to kind of trigger this, because auto scaling can take longer with this particular capability built in. So you know, I think the example they gave is, if you needed, you know, a total of six instances spread across three availability zones. That's two in each AZ.

Chris Miles: 17:29

Well, you should increase it to nine so that if that one AZ goes down, you're still at the six instances, right, and I was like, well, that just seems like it seems a little, yeah, like defeats the purpose a little bit. I mean, I guess you know functionality is the real winner there, right in that regard. But you know, I'm curious who's all going to be using it to that capacity.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:50

Alex, did you have any thoughts on this one?

Alex Perkins: 17:52

Not really. I, you know, echo a lot of what you guys say. I didn't really read about this one too much. It sounds interesting. But yeah, chris, some of the things you just mentioned are kind of I don't know, just kind of weird.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:05

It's absolutely true. I mean the whole thing of, and everybody else will tell you and thankfully, like you know, in that keynote the frugal architect keynote they talk about how cost is just another piece of it. We'll get to that in a little bit, but this feeds right into it, right, like where AWS is basically saying, hey, if your app needs six, if your app needs six instances, and it's kind of on you to decide which wins out. Is it a cost play that's going to win out here, or you know, a continuity?

Chris Miles: 18:35

planning. Yeah, so that was Zonal Auto Shift, I think, For I mean, that's the thing. This was not a heavy networking-centered conference with many releases that relate to networking, but I think there are a few that we can kind of pan over here a little bit. Alex, there are a couple other things you wanted to touch on.

Alex Perkins: 18:58

Yeah, I got one. I have been trying to follow Project Kuiper pretty closely and it's not something that you hear a lot talked about, so I like to always bring it into these conversations, because this wasn't really a reinvent thing. This was kind of just during the same time, so I guess it's not like a status update.

Alex Perkins: 19:17

Yeah, but because, if you don't know, project Kuiper is actually an Amazon product, not an AWS product, and I think they you know that's on purpose, obviously, but the trick is they just announced, like their the plan is to allow private connectivity to AWS. So I just think that's really cool, it makes sense and it's like that's probably the strategy before they even like started building this thing anyway. But it's really cool to think that one day, like you could have a whole earth covering like constellation of satellites with private access to AWS. Right, like, talk about like local zones and just bringing the cloud out further, like this is a perfect way to do it.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:57

The thing is, I think about it and I think about like the same use cases, like Starlink and whatnot. So Starlink is user focused, right, it's not actually like app or lower clode or whatever you focus. Starlink makes sense to me and I hate to say it because I'm not a huge fan of Elon anyway, but anyway. But Starlink as a provider makes sense to like end users right To like you're in the deserts of Africa or if you're in Ukraine, for example, like you know, these are places that Starlink make perfect sense. Kuiper, I think, is a cool idea. I'm very curious knowing how satellite connectivity is very one sided, how you can run like applications using Kuiper, like you know, or what that's going to look like. Or end users, you know, connecting from a branch to the cloud over Kuiper. I mean, obviously they're doing it. So somebody smarter than me has already figured that out. That's going to work. But I am curious what the use case and what the use case will be.

Chris Miles: 20:54

Just wait, man. There's going to be, but there's going to be AWS outposts on Kuiper.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:58

Literally outposts.

Chris Miles: 20:59

Yeah, there'll be racks of gear on these satellites. Just extend the edge to space.

Alex Perkins: 21:07

Yeah, I mean, hey, you're joke, but I really think that eventually you will see like Kuiper outposts, like on the moon, right?

Chris Miles: 21:15

As, like the moon bases are built out. So don't be surprised. I can't wait to see the AWS local zone moon.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:22

It will absolutely outpost, a literal AWS outpost on the moon.

Alex Perkins: 21:29

And, to be fair, tim, like of course Kuiper, in their messaging they do say a lot of the same things as Starlink, where you know they want to bring it to like underserved communities and enable connectivity for everything, but they also have this side thing where it's like, hey, you can connect to AWS, so it's yeah, the focus is definitely not AWS.

Chris Miles: 21:49

It's kind of a you know a side thing. But yeah, that's probably makes sense.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:55

Slightly unrelated, but sort of related is did you see? There was a news article that came out today that says that Amazon's actually paying SpaceX to put these in orbit, the Kuiper satellites in orbit rather than, rather than Blue.

Alex Perkins: 22:10

Origin.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:11

Well, I mean you got Bezos right there with Blue Origin, so that's got to be a little weird, right? A little awkward at the family dinner.

Alex Perkins: 22:17

Yeah, yeah, probably temporarily right, until they can really scale out like I think it's probably against SpaceX right now, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:25

I think that's what it is is that Blue Origin probably just doesn't have the capacity to put a bunch of satellites in orbit for other right now. So that's.

Chris Miles: 22:32

I bet. I bet Starlink cut them a deal. They probably didn't overcharge them or anything like that. You know they're probably really nice. Yeah. So, Tim, I think you had one more quick just quick fire thing to talk about with related to networking, didn't you?

Tim McConnaughy: 22:49

Yeah, well, kind of there was. There was two. There were actually two little things for for CloudWatch. So one is and I know CloudWatch is not a network thing but like we as network architects and operators we probably spend a lot of time in CloudWatch doing troubleshooting and stuff. So two things one is that they just announced that we could do kind of like pattern recognition, anomaly detection and stuff like that. It's all just baked into CloudWatch now so you can actually bring up from an anomaly detection perspective, you can, you know, set your baseline for your, say, your network performance, and then you can actually, you know, target certain areas and certain times and say, like you know, is this off the baseline? And it'll, it'll tell you via graphing and all of that.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:33

And there's another one about you know pattern recognition. So you can, you can say like all right, well, you know, from 6pm to 6am every night, you know I run this huge batch job and then you can start seeing. You know it'll actually surface up those, those patterns in CloudWatch for you, so you don't have to go, you know run a bunch of really complicated queries and stuff. So if you think from a network troubleshooting perspective, certainly like pattern, the ability to show pattern recognition anomalies right off the bat without having to build complex queries and stuff is is pretty cool, very valuable.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:04

And then one more for CloudWatch is they now have the ability, or announce the ability, to pull in and consolidate logs from hybrid, multi-cloud, extra cloud, like other sources, and rather than, you know, do what we always do, which is just send logs to CloudWatch. How this one works is it utilizes AWS Lambda and you actually build a what they call a connector that will go and actually, you know, depending on what the source is that you're trying to pull from, will go real time and grab these logs and pull them in and and to give you that kind of, you know, single pane of glass type of of looking. And you can also, you know, build CloudWatch alarms, do that same pattern recognition and do all of that with logs from basically anywhere else. Right, and I know Azure's had something similar with oh crap, what is the I just said it and then I just it just blanked out on my head the agent, the Azure agent that you can put on servers and stuff. I just got to bug me until I remember.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:03

Oh well, anyway, azure has had some, has had something similar for a while. So this is but this. They do it with an agent, these guys, so Amazon's doing it with an agent. They're using, like Lambda, essentially to go grab the data, which is which is pretty interesting.

Chris Miles: 25:18

Yeah, cool stuff. Not much commentary on on that one for me, but, yeah, obviously you see the value with that one. I think you know the, like I said, the not a lot of the major announcements here. I think there was one additional one that I thought was interesting was the MTLS authentication can be offloaded to ALB now. So if you have, like it's, using the S2N, which is the open source, I guess, tls implementation that that AWS has started to use, I'm sure that will be baked into many more products than just this. But you have the option through AWS private certificate authority to implement a trust store. So if you have, you know, certificate based client identities, you can now offload that functionality to ALB now, which is which is pretty cool. And then I think you know they increased some quotas here and there for certain default limits on certain things.

Alex Perkins: 26:17

I think, alex, you got some of those numbers on you Maybe yeah, I have a couple so I know they did the prefix limit. It used to be like stuck at 100. A lot of these are for hybrid connectivity. So, like you know, on-prem to cloud Prefixes limit was increased from 100 to 200, which I know everybody has probably run into that issue at some point. There was another one, I think. There's like more transit gateways that can be connected to direct connect gateway. Now there's like more VGWs. It used to be 10 and now it's like up to 20. So there was like a lot of just quick little quota increases, like Chris said, but still no direct connect to cloud way and attachment.

Tim McConnaughy: 27:01

That's surprising.

Alex Perkins: 27:02

I've been waiting for that. It's been coming soon for like a year and a half. It feels like yeah for sure.

Tim McConnaughy: 27:08

I think it's. No, I was going to say it's such a like, almost like a no brainer. It's like such obvious functionality because anything at your TGW you might want a TGW to do, you want a CNE to be able to do right.

Chris Miles: 27:21

Yeah, absolutely yeah. I just have to assume something under the hood is far more complex than it sounds to us on the surface. But yeah, it totally makes sense, I think. Yeah, but you good point there, alex he talked about you know there was. We didn't get an announcement around. You know, direct connect to cloud way and integration Still got to use TGW for that. One thing that I also predicted that we would see, that we didn't see, was some some further utilization or a kind of a significant announcement around the use of the multi VPC. You know, I think, that they announced just a few weeks back. I think we all thought that, right, yeah, I figured that announcement was kind of prepping something for reinvent, so they'd be like, oh, and when in turn, we're launching this, it's cool new thing. But that just didn't happen. So yeah, it was. It was a little disappointing, but I don't know if you guys expected the same or not.

Alex Perkins: 28:12

It was a 10 second clip. Like I watched the Alexandra Wiedes and Matt Lewis talk, it was like a 10 second clip in one of their their many diagram PowerPoint slides that they were going through and it was that was it. It was like a quick mention, just showed it on the screen and then kept talking. So it was pretty surprising for me as well.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:31

Yeah, of all the things they didn't talk about, they didn't talk about that the most Like it's the strangest thing, right? Because anybody who understands cloud networking looks at that and they're like holy crap, like this is a huge deal and this enables so much, and yet we got this tiny little blog post which was barely a blog post, so really it was like five sentences long right Before reinvent and, like you, you know, chris, I think we all thought like okay, well, this is, this is like burying the lead and they're going to come out with something really cool at reinvent. And then, like you said, 10 seconds, like it's, it's almost like I don't know how to say it. It's almost like you know, the lack of saying something about it speaks more loudly than if they had spoken about it. You know, yeah, absolutely yeah, I don't know.

Tim McConnaughy: 29:18

Maybe, maybe they think it'll compete if NVA, if we start using like NVA's and stuff, like you know, it'll compete with some of the other products and services. I just I'm struggling because why, why offer the? Why offer that and then say nothing about it? It's, it's just weird.

Chris Miles: 29:33

Yeah, I think it's interesting. So so well, before we transition to that, so that that's pretty much everything networking centric that we could, that we could think of, that we could cover in this in this, in this episode. Right, there was some really good talks, though, like I said at the beginning of the episode there was. There was things about reinforcing the current state of networking and AWS. You know there was a. There was a talk from DeWon Lightfoot. That was. That was great. It was like basically networking for the developers and it really walked through the VPC kind of 101, networking 101 and AWS and that was a great talk. Alec Dandro-Wiedes and Matt Lewis talk on the more kind of advanced VPC setups and new capabilities. That one was good as well. There was even one I can't remember the gentleman's name that's presenting that was kind of going over the underlying networking components, talking about, you know, like how they're building the networking and the data centers and how they're building their own routing protocols with the. Was it SDR, sidr?

Alex Perkins: 30:30

yeah, sidr, yeah, sidr, yeah, sidr yeah.

Chris Miles: 30:34

Which was all really cool, but that was really the, the gist of what we could get through. So we'll, we'll link to those in the in the notes and things like that, so you guys can review as well, I guess. So let's, let's, let's kind of pull back a little bit and let's look at just the the conference as a whole. One thing that you know really stood out to me that I think I heard this on software to find talk as well, which was was funny is Jensen Wang, the CEO of NVIDIA. It seems like he's just like he's just. He's on like a, a, a world tour. He just went to all of these conferences. I didn't notice this until they pointed it out. He was wearing the exact same outfit at every conference, like Google Cloud Next.

Chris Miles: 31:17

Google.

Alex Perkins: 31:18

Cloud Next.

Chris Miles: 31:19

He was off reign, reignite or not reignite, ignite and then reinvent it just to the team. Man like leather jacket, black shirt, jeans and these like same shoes. That's what he packs it.

Tim McConnaughy: 31:29

That's his talk. That's his talk. That's what gives him his power. Yeah, fair enough.

Alex Perkins: 31:33

I got an idea.

Chris Miles: 31:35

I don't. I don't follow him closely enough to know if that's something he does on a regular basis, but I was just like that's that's pretty funny. But yeah, you know, he was just like shown up talking about you know the, the partnership and you know them using Nvidia for all this AI powered enhancement and things like that.

Alex Perkins: 31:50

Yeah, so it made sense, but that was funny funny thing for me. This is. This is the last one, because he's come on and made announcements about their partnership with all the clouds, and I think this was the last one, even though it's probably been a partnership for a while, but they, of course, had to wait to announce it until this, this conference, happened. But yeah, world tour is is definitely right. He's been everywhere, yeah right.

Chris Miles: 32:15

Yeah, the other major keynotes. Like we had Adam Slipsky come on kind of give the opening keynote a few little announcements in there that I think we kind of expected, like Graviton four, so the next iteration of Graviton I think we all probably saw that coming. It did announce this thing called S3 Express 1, which is kind of cool. So you have the capability of now deploying S3 buckets within a specific AZ and it really enables these single digit latency connectivity to S3, for you know, these high networking required workloads in AWS to have that kind of single digit latency to S3. So that was kind of a cool announcement. I don't know, was there anything else from Solipski's keynote that you guys thought was not just AI washed speak, so to say?

Tim McConnaughy: 33:13

He definitely took swipes. He took a lot of swipes at speaking of AI right, he took some serious swipes at the competition right, he had something to say.

Chris Miles: 33:22

Yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:22

And that was very noticeable.

Alex Perkins: 33:24

I think I don't know if it was Solipski, it might have been the one the day before or something but you know, when they announced the S3 Express 1, they also announced Aurora limitless. There was some RDS cool announcements. They were all under the same kind of vein, but I thought the really cool thing that wasn't a focus of it was this new Caspian hypervisor, and it's essentially I'm probably not going to do a good job of explaining it, but it's essentially like a multi-host hypervisor and it allows them to do just things that I don't think anybody has come out with, Like this Aurora limitless thing allows them to shard horizontally instead of just vertically. It's a really cool thing, and if I was making a hypervisor, if I was a company that was making one that maybe had just been acquired, I might be a little scared right now yeah.

Alex Perkins: 34:21

Because it's pretty groundbreaking stuff.

Chris Miles: 34:24

So yeah, I didn't see too much on the Caspian, but to me it sounds like they've just like virtualized the hypervisor.

Tim McConnaughy: 34:29

It's just one of one. Yeah, hypervisor, hypervisor, yeah right.

Chris Miles: 34:33

Just one more layer of abstraction, I guess. Is that kind of the gist you got, Alex?

Alex Perkins: 34:39

Yeah, basically it was necessary. Like I think I want to say, it was the second day keynote. I don't remember the name of the guy who did it.

Chris Miles: 34:48

You should definitely watch it. I think it was Monday night. I think it was like, because it was like the state of serverless was like the big focal point yeah.

Alex Perkins: 34:55

Yeah, but all these things, all these new products, they are only enabled because of this. So I thought it was really cool that not only did they make this new hypervisor, they didn't just say hey, we made a new hypervisor, figure out what to do with it. It was like we made this and we've also already like come out with all these crazy new products that will show you exactly what it can be used for.

Chris Miles: 35:15

Yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:16

So it just was really cool. They probably had all those use cases to solve and then solved it and they were like yeah, actually here's how we like, here's the product called Caspian that we use to solve this product, and now you can do it too.

Chris Miles: 35:29

Basically, yeah, the other keynote, like the one towards the end of the week from Werner Vogels, was good as well. It was kind of it was very funny the way it opened up, had this like matrix, the intro that they shot. But it was all centered around this idea of the frugal architect and it seems like the primary message was that costs need to be considered as much of part of the functional design as any of the technical pieces. Right, cost needs to be essentially a pillar in that design, which sounds like it'd be common sense. But it was kind of like reemphasizing that a lot. I think we've talked about that on the pod quite a bit, that how much cost needs to be factored in. It was still a great talk. It was actually. I mean, I always love listening to his keynotes.

Chris Miles: 36:22

They're always fun for me, yeah, I don't know what else. I remember he also like brought back some PTSD for me. He was talking about you know, like you know there's messages in early days online to be like, oh, amazon is putting up, you know, a couple thousand Nintendo Wii's for sale at 11am tomorrow. And I remember like yeah, it's just like right before that time. I remember going online to buy my girlfriend a Wii at the time and I'm just like refresh, refresh, refresh. Like I was the exact person that he was talking about and I was like shit man, I forgot all about that. You know, I don't feel like. I feel like some of that happened with PS5s, but you don't see that as common anymore. Graphics cards.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:00

Remember when all the just a couple of years ago, when all the Nvidia graphics cards were announced.

Alex Perkins: 37:04

Man, it was crazy.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:05

Yeah, Scalpers everywhere, man, and PS5 was at. I've heard that there's still PS5 scammers not scammers, but they'll always be PS5 scammers, but scalpers out there still and I'm like cause, I still don't know that the demand is caught up or that the supply is caught up to the demand on that one.

Chris Miles: 37:21

I don't think. So I got one. Let's shout out Manny from the A1 Discord. He actually got me one.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:26

Oh, you got me one too, yeah. He's, he's any, manny was awesome, dude. Manny was awesome, dude. He's a big officer, man. He's a big officer man.

Chris Miles: 37:34

Yeah, one thing I do want to call back to what you said to him about Salipski taking shots, which was very out of character, I feel like.

Alex Perkins: 37:42

Not necessarily.

Chris Miles: 37:44

I mean, I guess, for Salipski, but also just kind of for AWS in general. There's a TechCrunch article that we'll put into the show notes as well and the news article that we publish. Whereas it was kind of like noting that Salipski, you know, when we say he's taking shots, it kind of was like the article points out that it was kind of like seen as like punching down right, you know, aws has been the significant leader in this space for quite some time, right, and it's obvious now that they're trying to defend that and making sure that no one comes for the king, necessarily with this AI race. Called out this example like oh, you may have thought that your availability zones are redundant in France, but a flood and a fire can take it down. For, oh, I was like damn dude, like just go and Google out directly.

Alex Perkins: 38:33

Just might as well just say it on stage.

Chris Miles: 38:35

Yeah, and then also pointing out that, like, oh, with Graviton, like you know, we've, this is our you know fifth iteration. Or what is the number of chips? Four chips. This is our fourth chip that we've released, and other cloud providers haven't even been able to release their first one yet, and it was like you never hear them call that out. You always say like, oh, this is our next one, this is our most amazing thing, that's the next one we've done, but it's never like the other guys aren't doing shit, you know.

Chris Miles: 39:03

So I felt like that was that was a little strange and kind of implying that Microsoft is so closely paired with open AI that like they're limiting themselves but like, at the same time, like Microsoft is using all the open source and other models as well. It's just obviously they do have a large partnership with open AI, but I don't know that was. I thought that was a really strange thing. I don't know how you guys feel about it.

Tim McConnaughy: 39:27

Yeah, I mean, usually I feel like AWS just kind of I wouldn't say pretends the other ones don't exist, but like you have indifference, like just complete indifference, right, and so to actually reach out and try to slap down if you will. You know that's out of character, a little bit out of character, and it kind of you kind of wonder like why waste the time on stage unless you have something approved?

Alex Perkins: 39:48

So I mean, I still remember just a couple of years ago when you'd watch presentations from reinvent and they would draw to be like a really messed up looking cloud. If you have other places you put stuff, you know it looks like this. They wouldn't ever even acknowledge almost that there are other clouds out there. So yeah, this is just. It's noticeable that they're actually talking about others now.

Chris Miles: 40:12

Yeah, so with that I think we can. We can wrap up, unless I don't know. Did you guys have anything else, anything else you wanted to throw in there with reinvent 2023?

Alex Perkins: 40:20

Yeah, the only other. This was a real small one, but I've been seeing some, some funny memes about this. So Amazon Workspaces, I guess they announced a thin client. It's less than $200. And it's like a computer. It's like a little box that looks like a fire. I don't know what all the fire things are, I've never, never, owned one, but it's like a lot of fire boxes yeah it's like the fire stick, but like the box.

Tim McConnaughy: 40:42

Oh yeah, I saw this and it's like you can.

Alex Perkins: 40:45

It's dual monitor. You can plug in keyboards and a mouse to it, and it's under $200. So it was just crazy that that's such a low price point. And it's like it allows you to access your developer workstations.

Chris Miles: 40:57

So that's like a VDI. Yeah, yeah, that's a.

Tim McConnaughy: 40:58

VDI terminal that they're diving into. Yeah, that's pretty cool, that's crazy, yeah, yeah. No, that's awesome. I hadn't thought about that and I'm starting to think like, okay, so VDI is making a comeback. Essentially, we're just you know, it's in the, it's in the cloud, now right, but yeah, I use a lot of VDI of my, my customers.

Alex Perkins: 41:15

So it makes sense Like instead of I think they even say in the video they're like you know, everybody uses VDI by buying a $2,000 computer and then they just connect to it, right, so it's kind of like a waste yeah.

Chris Miles: 41:27

Same thing. I see it a lot. I worked with a lot of government agencies here in Australia and I see that a lot too, but it's mostly. It's mostly Azure Virtual Desktop.

Tim McConnaughy: 41:36

I feel like they they obviously have it pretty, pretty good stronghold on that.

Chris Miles: 41:42

But yeah, it's good. I mean, that could change things for AWS, For sure. That's. That's a very competitive offering.

Tim McConnaughy: 41:49

Yeah, a lot of people are bought into the Microsoft you know ecosystem already, which was why something like Azure Virtual Desktop makes perfect sense, because, hey, you know Windows licensing and it's all packaged and all that right. But yeah, I mean, if you have the need for physical gear, right, Like if you have an office experience and you don't want to spend thousands of dollars per person to to to, to build all that out when you're just going to connect to a workspace, yeah, there's definitely value there. Let me see. Do I have any final thoughts on on reinvent 2020? I, I definitely think like half the people or more came out of that with COVID. I mean, like, dude, straight up, like you cannot seem to have any kind of conference these days without most of the you know, at least most of the presenters and most of the attendees going home with COVID. Is that just like this is the new normal, I guess?

Chris Miles: 42:41

I'm going to say that's it right, this is the new normal People. People can't act surprised that normal is normal, once they've been calling it the new normal for a year now. So it's, I mean, it's just a fact of life. So stock up on the vitamin C and you know, yeah, other shit that you need to take, that it's a writer, passage man.

Alex Perkins: 42:59

It's like every time there's a giant conference, you just see on on Twitter just like everyone showing their screenshots of it, yeah, or the pictures.

Tim McConnaughy: 43:08

Here's my COVID test.

Chris Miles: 43:09

Yeah, All right? Well, with that, I believe we will, we'll wrap up this episode, so yeah, so again, check the show notes. We also have a bi-weekly news document that we have posted. That's also in the show notes. We'll put all the links to this stuff that we thought was interesting in there so you can check that out, and it's hosted just on a Google Doc, so feel free to hop in and grab anything from there that you found interesting from the show.

Chris Miles: 43:37

If you enjoyed this episode, please, please, help us out. Get some exposure out there. So share with a friend Like us on your favorite pod catcher. So you know YouTube, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. We need as much exposure as we can get, so we really appreciate it from from you. All are are avid and dedicated listeners out there. So with that we'll wrap up and yeah, thanks, this has been Cables to Clouds and we'll talk to you next time. Hi everyone, it's Chris and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite pod catcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at Cables to Cloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.