C2C Fortnightly News: Suing OpenTofu? That's Not Vegan, Bro - NC2C007

Tim McConnaughy: 0:00

Okay, well, here's AI. What the hell do I do with it? How does that help my business, for example, if you're a car dealership and you start a chatbot for your customers?

Chris Miles: 0:12

Selling cars for $1.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:15

This is a legally binding contract.

Chris Miles: 0:18

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.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:47

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds Fortnightly News. I'll be your host this week, tim, and with me, of course, as always, are my co-hosts Alex Perkins and Chris Miles. All right, let's jump right into it. We got lots of stories to cover. Alex, I think you're going to kick us off right.

Alex Perkins: 1:05

Yep, let's jump right into it. We got lots of stories to cover. Alex, I think you're going to kick us off right. Yep, got a real interesting one. Hashicorp is suing OpenTofu. For those of you that don't know, hashicorp is the company that makes Terraform OpenTofu. When HashiCorp changed their licensing I think this was back in December of last year to a business I forget exactly what it's called it's like some kind of business license where, basically, you can't just use their product, their core product, to spin out like your own business. This angered a lot of people, and a bunch of companies kind of got together and made this fork of their code that they called OpenTofu. The issue, though, is HashiCorp is alleging that a feature that came after this license was changed I think it's the recover block or remove block.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:54

Yeah, I think so.

Alex Perkins: 1:55

It got added after OpenTofu did their fork and then now it's magically found its way into the OpenTofu code. I've heard a couple I've talked to a couple people about this like offline. It sounds like I don't. I'm not a lawyer, obviously, so I don't know how you prove something like this, but it's not an exact copy and paste and I don't. I don't know like how you know how similar it has to be for them to actually get in trouble for this.

Alex Perkins: 2:23

But at the same time, on OpenTofu's side it's like well, of course they're going to add functionality that people are going to want that Terraform is still adding to their products. So I'm sure this has just started, but I'm sure there's going to be all kinds of back and forth on this. I haven't seen really any responses. I think OpenTofu just said that they were looking into it and that they were sure that they didn't pull code directly from them. But in the article there's also a screenshot that it says basically that it came from HashiCorp's code, which does not look good for OpenTofu. Basically, you guys got anything to add on this one.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:58

Yeah, I'm curious to see what precedents get set from this, because there's a lot, especially with Git publishing and stuff. There should be a good record of this and I'm curious to see what amount of that is if this actually goes to some kind of court date or something and doesn't get settled, I expect it gets settled, but if it doesn't, I would love to see the case law that comes out of using Git history as evidence or something like that, for sure, yeah, yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat with you, tim.

Chris Miles: 3:28

I'm eager to see what, what, how this sets the scene for potential future impacts of, of things like this, like Git forks and things like that. One other thing I'm curious to see how it plays out is I don't know if we actually covered this last time. We did a news episode, but HashiCorp has also announced that they're looking for a potential buyer. So I wonder how this impacts that good or bad? And I wonder if this is just like the first dagger they can kind of stick an open tofu to hopefully kill it at the root before it gets to be too much of a problem for them. But yeah, I don't know. I'm curious to see where it goes, yeah yeah, All good points.

Alex Perkins: 4:16

So definitely, if we get any more news right, this will obviously be covered in future news episodes. So definitely tune in and keep listening.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:24

Yeah, we got to follow this one because there's so much precedent that's going to be set from this, based on how this whole thing plays out.

Alex Perkins: 4:30

Yeah, yeah, because the open source stuff is just a lot of stuff going on right now like this. All right. Next up, we got an article from the Register talking about Huawei's. The title is Huawei's cloud unit is its current growth vehicle. We were talking about this beforehand. I didn't even know. Huawei had a cloud, which is crazy because, if you read the article, they have almost as big of a footprint as AWS does, which is nuts. They have about a 10th of the revenue coming in from their cloud business. But, man, for me, not even knowing that they existed, they have a giant footprint. I was very surprised by that.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:12

I feel like an imposter. What the hell am I doing in cloud man? How did I not know that Huawei not only has a cloud, but that cloud footprint rivals AWS, and that they're citing hundreds of countries and regions and companies that are using this thing?

Alex Perkins: 5:30

Yeah, and I mean, and just to add to that, so I just pulled it up AWS has 33 regions, huawei cloud has 30. That's just nuts they have. Aws has 105 AZs, huawei has 84. Aws is in 245 countries and territories, huawei is in 170. So this is not a small footprint. They're very far along.

Chris Miles: 5:53

Yeah, but the important question is how many service offerings does Huawei have that have very different names across their entire landscape? That's the true tale.

Alex Perkins: 6:06

How many AI tools do they have?

Tim McConnaughy: 6:08

Is the real question. I'm actually very curious to see what the slate of services that Huawei's cloud provides Do they have? I mean there's gotta be some table stakes stuff, right. They'll have IAM of some kind, some kind of identity access management. They'll have some kind of storage offering, right. They've got you know, like there's just like some table stakes stuff that they have to have. But you kind of wonder, like I kind of want to go look at their service catalog now.

Alex Perkins: 6:36

Do they call it VPC or is it, you know, another new interest?

Tim McConnaughy: 6:40

Yeah, that's nuts man. I got some research to do.

Alex Perkins: 6:45

All right Well, speaking's nuts man, I got some research to do. All right well. Speaking of AWS. Tim, you want to take us away?

Tim McConnaughy: 6:48

with the next one. Yeah, I feel like every news episode we have to cover this and it's always different. Right, it's not the same shit, it's always a different one. So AWS just performed another layoff. This time they targeted their training and certifications. They targeted other parts of of the organization but, yeah, training and certifications was the biggest hit and my LinkedIn just absolutely lit up that. You know, that morning with people.

Alex Perkins: 7:17

Yeah, I was seeing it everywhere, yep.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:18

Yeah, Like all and everybody's title was like certification program manager or trainer Names that I knew actually had seen training from. You know, AWS is really digging in and I've been looking into this broadly because this keeps happening, not just from AWS but across the industry. And you know, without getting too far into it, I think what we're seeing is a big wage reset, which is during COVID, a lot of people did better, Tech grew really big. I mean, you remember the salaries were huge, the jobs were huge, and I think this is companies attempting to reset the wages for positions. Right, They'll lay people off at high pay and now that the market is flooding, they'll rehire people at a lower wage rate and they'll have to accept it.

Alex Perkins: 8:11

And resetting to pay all the new AI talent that they're hiring.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:14

Yeah, that's the other thing.

Chris Miles: 8:16

Yeah it's crazy. There's a new floor.

Alex Perkins: 8:21

Real quick on this one. What I thought was very interesting is in the article they kind of mentioned that AWS put out a statement something along the lines of they want to focus on their external training providers. And I just thought that was a bit ironic because we just did an episode. We just did an episode with Andrew Brown and he the whole thing was about how they don't reach out to these external training providers. Um so, and how they?

Tim McConnaughy: 8:46

were pulling it all internally right, right exactly and not answering questions for external people. So I mean the timing, of course, is completely not related, right? It's not like nobody watched our episode and decided this was going to happen.

Chris Miles: 9:01

Yeah, I mean, it's not. We might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Don't go to shore.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:07

The last dagger.

Alex Perkins: 9:08

The clouds guys. They were talking. I hope not. Yes, man.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:12

That would be something terrible to throw at our feet.

Chris Miles: 9:14

That's true. It wasn't us. It absolutely was not us.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:19

No, you're right. The timing though right, Because we had just talked to Andrew about this, about how AWS was pushing its own training programs and cutting off external trainers.

Alex Perkins: 9:30

I'll link a card to Andrew's episode.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:33

Yeah, the right and left hands clearly did not know what the other was doing, or something. The messaging is messed up.

Chris Miles: 9:40

That's the thing I guess. If they do start going down this track of reaching out to external training providers, I guess they're. They went ahead and did the burn back now, um, before people saw the writing on the wall, but potentially happening later on, I don't know. Um, there's not a beautiful way to do layoffs, ever Right, and so, uh, you know, people are always going to get affected and and, uh, there's there's malice at times, it it seems like. So it's hard to read this one, necessarily in that capacity. But, yeah, I mean, hopefully they do start reaching out to third parties because then, you know, I think those, potentially those people that were in the training BU at AWS, potentially have bigger opportunities Somewhere to go. Some of those places.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:22

Yeah, Okay, let's go ahead and move on to the next story. Uh, this, this one was a kind of breath of fresh air actually. Uh, we have covered, uh, we've covered nile before now being the network as a service company on the news episode. Um, we've also covered, uh, I've been quite vocal in my uh, anger, furious anger, at press releases coming out, especially ones that involve AI, that completely lack any information whatsoever about how AI will be used inside the product. Sorry, I had something in my throat there, but this was really good to read actually.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:01

So Niall just put out a press release talking about how they're going to be building AI into the product and they actually gave a lot of really cool examples um, about, like, the day, the day zero they call it day negative, one day, day zero operations. About some of the planning stuff that the ai is going to be leveraged to help. Um, also, of course, the ai op stuff, which of course, makes perfect sense for for a product like this. Right, aiops, that one you know easy. But yeah, so take a look at the press release. It's in the notes, but they actually they go down, link you know, item by item and say like here's the new feature, here's what it's called and here's where AI is going to figure into it. And that's amazing these days especially.

Alex Perkins: 11:44

AI is going to figure into it, and that's amazing these days especially yeah, agreed, agreed for sure, I mean it is. It is just really cool to see they make a claim and then they actually say exactly what they're going to do with it. Like they say it's built from the ground up to use AI and then they actually say this is how it's built from the ground up and what it'll actually be be doing, and in in exact reference to the product, not like oh well, you have the potential as a customer to use our stuff for whatever you imagine it's like. No, it's built into the Nile product and here's how. So I agree, I like it a lot that they did this.

Chris Miles: 12:16

Yeah, obviously, nile, I would say, is not necessarily cloud networking in that capacity, but it's definitely adjacent to what we try to talk about on this podcast and I'm not a user of their services. But I will say a lot of what they're putting out there into the public space is very appealing. I really do like what they're doing. So you know they're hitting they're at least hitting the marketing points right. So that's something to be accounted for. But yeah, I'm curious If you're a Nile user at your company, let us know. We're eager to hear about it. I want to know how it's going for you.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:55

Yeah, for sure. I think, Chris, you got the next story that we're going to cover, right.

Chris Miles: 13:00

Yes, I do so. I have a couple articles here. These are just things that have come out in the past couple weeks. I will say that's not necessarily news, more kind of opinion pieces or things like that. This one is very topical so we'll throw it in the news category.

Chris Miles: 13:20

We have an article here from InfoWorld that is talking about how AI advancements are fueling cloud infrastructure spending.

Chris Miles: 13:30

So obviously there's been a growth in infrastructure spending on the cloud side.

Chris Miles: 13:36

I think the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker Report that was a mouthful saw a year-over-year increase of about 18.5% on storage and compute for cloud deployments.

Chris Miles: 13:49

And now since this AI has kind of come in as a central driver for cloud spending, that's obviously increased as well. Right, but the hard focus on AI and GPUs and things like that and this article does a good job at talking about how that's actually affecting cloud infrastructure spending and you know, like traditional cloud projects are probably taking a back seat and there's probably a lot of infrastructure teams out there that are struggling to keep up because they're having to put budget into these AI spending projects and that's it doesn't exactly say how that's taking a toll, but it potentially could also a potential opportunity for other things that are not gpu ai related to fall in price, so there could be some overall benefit, but, as we've talked about on this podcast, we've we're waiting to see the economies of scale take, take effect, right. So I don't know if that's a wishful thinking, but yeah, that I thought this was really good article, so I'm curious to hear how you guys feel about it.

Alex Perkins: 14:52

I mean, I agree with you, chris. I really like about. What is this about? It's a little more. It's probably like three quarters of the way down the page there's. It doesn't say who it's from, but it looks like this is a quote, kind of, from people that they've talked to in enterprise IT and it's basically like they're saying AI is on their radar screen but they don't have the budgets to fund it and how this basically is going to negatively impact them.

Alex Perkins: 15:15

Well, and it's like it's how it's going to negatively impact them, because these like execs, you know, like CIOs, CTOs, that are still trying to keep the regular systems going and maybe even still doing migrations to the cloud. Right, like we know, not everybody's even fully migrated. How does this impact, like if everything goes up in price and they're still even trying to get into the cloud in the first place?

Alex Perkins: 15:37

the budget's not there right, Like there's so many. Like Chris said, this is just an awesome article that kind of goes into the nuances of every different angle and just gives you insight of you know you can kind of draw your own conclusions for some of these.

Chris Miles: 15:49

But yeah, that's, I mean, the good point. If you're anyone that's out there in enterprise it that is migrating to the cloud, you probably know your, your migration strategy, your, your upcoming cloud projects are probably spaced out over the next what? Two to three years probably. You probably have an angle that's still, yeah, that far away. And then AI came along which was like, hey, you got to change everything you're doing because we can't miss this. That's the kind of the mentality that a lot of these companies have. It's either get on the boat or you're going to miss it, type thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:20

So, yeah, the biggest thing is enterprises, enterprises and not every enterprise right, is ready, willing, able, has a use case, necessarily for AI, like you know, I'm sure lots of people out there are still trying to figure out. Okay, well, here's AI, what the hell do I do with it? Right, how does that help my business? For example, if you're a car dealership and you start a chatbot for your customers, you know, like you, mean, I'm selling cars for $1.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:52

This is a legally binding contract. Oh my God, yeah. So you know, case in point, though, right, like putting that out there, that's actually a very good point. Here is a company that clearly wanted to leverage AI to, you know, help it and, you know, stubbed its big, stubbed its toe, pretty badly, I would say Right, and there are a lot of customers doing that right now, or not customers, enterprises, doing that right now. And so, yeah, everything you guys said is right. The budgets are usually done in six months, a year cycles, you know, and so that money is that money is allocated. That money, it could have been already spent when this started taking off and you know it was capital for capital, funds released for this, who knows? So, yeah, I mean, this is really messing people's day up, so it's really cool to see this article kind of lean into that and talk about that absolutely um.

Chris Miles: 17:45

next one is, uh, another kind of uh, just kind of an opinion piece or a reflection piece, I'll say from I believe it is from SC Magazine, about the effects of cloud migration on modern network security. So I think this one kind of just does a really good job at analyzing, you know, migration to cloud and what that means as far as network security and how it's made it more difficult, how things are slower to adapt, right, because the you know, once you move into a hybrid cloud environment. It kind of talks about the complex security challenges due to the you know kind of distributed assets that you have across the board right there, expanding your security perimeter, things like that and then also talks about the slow adoption of these kind of cloud native security tools, things like zero trust network access and cloud native application protection platforms or CNAP. So these things exist in the world today, but they are relatively have a low adoption rate as of right now. So the CRA did a report from April 2024 that indicates that even less than half of the surveyed organizations are using those cloud native monitoring tools. So that's obviously a significant gap there, right, I think.

Chris Miles: 19:12

I think this kind of breaks it down in a pretty good. In a pretty good way, I feel like we on this podcast we probably do kind of speak. You know, tim Alex and I are people that have been in the industry for quite a while now and we probably do talk from our points of experience because we've been in it for so long. But I think this is a good kind of reset, kind of just talk about the basic components of it from our network security piece.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:38

I appreciate that this article explained the problem statement it didn't go into it's not a vendor article, right? So it's not saying here's the problem statement and here's how we solve it, but it does very well lay out like point by point. Like you know, this is the problem statement of doing cloud hybrid, hybrid, specifically network security, and it really just kind of bullet points all thing in a way that makes it easy to digest. So definitely give it a read, even for practitioners that you know, think they already know it. This was a really good read.

Alex Perkins: 20:12

Yeah, and also, I mean it kind of goes to show we talk about this every now and then. We should probably focus on it a little more. But really the integration of networking and security, the cloud, has done a lot of things, and one of those things that I think is not noticed much is how much networking and security kind of came together as people kind of shifted to the cloud. So from that angle too, if you read this article thinking about it from that angle, I think you'll get a lot out of it for sure. Agreed.

Chris Miles: 20:41

All right. And last article that we'll throw in today, this one is groundbreaking news. I will say it's funny because I just kind of did a. You know, when we do the show, I prep and usually do like a Google News search for cloud networking, just to see what pops up, see if there's anything that we may have missed. And I saw this article on the importance of harnessing multi-cloud networking and I was like, oh, that's cool, let's open that one up. And I was like trying to determine exactly what it was it was. It was posted by a vendor, um, and I was trying to determine exactly what this vendor does. And they, they do cloud printing services. So it's all based on um, you know, managing print queues and print services and things like that, and they're putting out articles on the importance of MCN. So I thought that was just funny, we had to cover it here. My take is, if anything that validates the MCN market right there, if a cloud printing company is talking about it.

Chris Miles: 21:45

Hey, we're here to stay baby, we're not going nowhere, Tim's a flyer guest.

Alex Perkins: 21:50

I know it's speechless. I love it, man. Like you said, Chris, I mean, if a cloud printing company is talking about multi-cloud networking like yeah, we've made it, we're on the right track, Everyone will come along and understand what we're talking about at some point. It's awesome.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:09

I'm not so much flabbergasted Okay, I'm slightly flabbergasted about the idea that a cloud printing company has an article about multi-cloud networking. Yeah, like you said, I guess we've made it if cloud printing is now talking about multi-cloud. I'm actually. What surprises me the most about this article is that it's actually pretty well written. The people that wrote it actually know what the hell they're talking about, and I'm just like that's the part that screws with my head the most.

Chris Miles: 22:35

Yeah, I guess I should have noticed or paid note to that. The company that posted this is called Papercut, so we want to give them their creds. They posted this article. It's pretty well-written. We don't know exactly what motivated them to post a blog about multi-cloud networking, but hey, we're here for it, baby, it's all good.

Alex Perkins: 22:58

I want to talk to this guy because his name is Alistair and it says Alistair didn't choose the print management life, the print management life chose him. That's like his bio, his author bio.

Chris Miles: 23:10

As host of a niche podcast. That's a niche, that's a niche calling to have in your life.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:15

I'll tell you that it gives me the, it gives me that vibe of like the CPA that was that listens to gangster rap or something or something like that. But yeah, no, it was great, great, great article, great article.

Chris Miles: 23:27

All right, and with that I guess we will. We will wrap up. I'll tell you the uh. For those that want more news um, there, there were actually quite a few articles that we had today um that we that we chose not to cover on the podcast. So if you want to read all these articles we talked about today and even more, check the show notes. We do have a um fortnightly news cloud uh document that we post. It's just a Google doc out there with all the links that we talk about plus all the ones that we don't talk about. Um, so there's good stuff in there about Google apparently acquiring HubSpot, um a lot of AI stuff. You know there's that's always uh sprinkled in there.

Alex Perkins: 24:03

But yeah, there's, there's definitely definitely good.

Chris Miles: 24:05

um, uh, more stuff to read in there, so have a look at it.

Alex Perkins: 24:10

You said Fortnite. Right, you did say Fortnite.

Chris Miles: 24:12

I didn't say it. Yeah, you said it, it's always going to be. We have one guy on Twitter that's always reaching out to us like, hey, I've missed the Fortnite note.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:22

Don't worry, man, we got you this time it's on One of these days we're going to just troll everybody and we're going to do 25 to 30 minutes of Fortnite on the news episode.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:33

Okay, well, there we go. That's it for the week. If you liked what you heard, please listen to us on your favorite podcatcher, subscribe to us on YouTube, join our Fortnite Discord and buy our skins. And yeah, we'll see you guys in two weeks. Hi everyone, it's Tim 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 podcast 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 Cables2Clouds. You can also visit our website for all the show notes at Cables2Cloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.