C2C Fortnightly News: Ansible and Terraform, Sitting in a Tree... - NC2C009

Tim McConnaughy: 0:00

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy claimed the lion's share of cost optimization is largely completed and enterprises are turning their attention once again to accelerating the pace of their cloud migration. So you heard it here Andy Jassy has let us know. The CEO of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has let us know that you guys are all done. So if you didn't get a chance to optimize, you're going to have to wait for the next round. I'm sorry, Go ahead and start cranking the migration dial again, please.

Chris Miles: 0:25

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.

Alex Perkins: 0:56

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are, and welcome back to the Cables to Clouds fortnightly news episode. My name is Alex Perkins. I will be your host for this week's episode. You can find me at Bumps in the Wire on socials I'm joined by Tim and Chris, as always. Tim is at Juan Golbez and Chris is at BGP Maine, so we are going to jump right in. There's not a whole lot of news, but there's some pretty important ones, so I think we're going to have a little bit to talk about here. So the elephant in the room this came out literally the day after we recorded our last news episode. So, of course, sorry for the delay, as much as we could help it, but it's IBM acquires HashiCorp. I personally, I was not expecting this at all. Um, I don't know if you guys had any inkling of that this was even coming. I know we had kind of hinted that I think it was HashiCorp was talking about. They were available maybe for for purchase, right? Chris? You pointed this out a couple of weeks ago.

Chris Miles: 1:59

Yeah, that was. That was something that I think like people were speculating. That that's why they made the change to the, the bsl licensing um right, just to like look more appealing in that, in that department. But, um, yeah, I mean like you said, but didn't see this coming. But at the same time, I don't know. I think I've just grown to expect the unexpected now, like I feel like I'm not going to be able to predict a single fucking thing that happens in this industry anymore. This last like year and a half has been insane.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:26

There's been so many big acquisitions since, like thanksgiving last year, a lot of consolidation happening, yeah, which is actually in line with the fact that vc's money is not not easy to get and the interest rates are high and actually I think it's probably right on time. But in terms of who's acquiring who, holy crap man. Yeah.

Alex Perkins: 2:49

There's so many angles to talk about this specific one and I don't want to spend the whole show talking about it, but I think one of the things I want to get you guys' thoughts on is the price. So I only bring this up because we talked about when Juniper got acquired, right, that was was it 14 billion? Yeah, that's right. I mean, is Juniper only worth a little over two times what HashiCorp is worth? It's so weird to me just the way that all the prices of these acquisitions have come about. You guys got any thoughts on that?

Tim McConnaughy: 3:18

Well, remember that one of the stories we did a few episodes back had to do with an investor suing Juniper saying, like you guys screwed with the price. The executives had screwed with the price because they were getting, you know, golden parachutes, or something that's true.

Alex Perkins: 3:33

That is true.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:34

So that one still has to be determined, honestly, because I think even we were like what the hell? Juniper worth $14 billion? That's all they're worth, right, yeah, yeah. But the valuation on hashy, 35 a share, now I I had, you know, obviously don't know what it should have been right because it wasn't available for that. So, um, that's a pretty good. I mean to put that in perspective, cisco stock is trading at like 50, 52, something like that somewhere around, or it was actually it was. I think it's lower now I have to go look at it. Um, but you know 40 something now I think it is. But, uh, I have to go look at it. But you know 40-something now I think it is. But, yeah, I mean that puts it right in line, which is crazy, right.

Alex Perkins: 4:10

Yeah, no, it is for sure. I don't know, man. It's just I don't know how these evaluations come about, I guess. So, chris, if you didn't have anything else, the other thing I want to call out is I think what a lot of people are missing about this is everyone's only talking about Terraform when it comes to this acquisition. Hashicorp has a lot of other products. They have Vault, they have Nomad, they have Console, they have Boundary Waypoint Packer. There's all these other products that they have and to me it makes so much sense. When this was first announced, I wasn't immediately like excited about it, but looking at it more, something like console, like IBM actually having this brings up a lot of opportunity in the like on-prem cloud space, right, especially when you get a thing like Nomad or a console or something like that. Like this really kind of could elevate the game, I think, for private cloud solutions. What do you guys think there?

Chris Miles: 5:09

Yeah, it's possible. I mean, I think if you've ever looked at the pricing for Vault, I think it's pretty apparent that that's how they make a good portion of what they make, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 5:21

Yeah.

Chris Miles: 5:24

It's a relatively I mean it's a robust solution. It's good People that use it are very satisfied with it, from what I can tell at least. But yeah, I will admit I'm not as versed on their product suite outside of Terraform and Vault. I know a bit about console as well, but yeah, I mean you might be right. I mean, that's the game that Red Hat is playing right now, right, with things like OpenShift and things like that, which we'll probably talk about a little later. But yeah, you could be right.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:55

Wouldn't it be so weird and, honestly, almost poetic if because we've been talking about, like you know who's going to be the company that's going to actually come through and create that cloud-like experience on-prem, wouldn't it be insane if it was like ibm, who's been essentially dead? Right exactly it's for 20 years now to come in over the top and and and do it yeah, I mean that's the thing, though.

Alex Perkins: 6:19

Have they been dead man? They've. They've just been a mainstay for so long, and it's like this. This is why right Decisions like this.

Chris Miles: 6:25

Yeah, it seems like they are shifting things around a bit. I read something somewhere that they have actually either outsourced or kind of pushed away some of the consulting business. I think they have Kindrel that does a lot of that now. So I think they've sectioned off a lot of that and they're growing the software side of the house a little bit. I think it's really. I'm really interested to see what happens with all the infrastructure as code tooling now being under the same umbrella, with, you know, ansible and Terraform living under the same roof, which I can think of plenty good, plenty bad. With that regard, I can think of plenty good, plenty bad. With that regard, I'll be honest, as a person that has done infrastructure as code for a little bit, I don't love Ansible, to be fair.

Chris Miles: 7:12

I dealt with it in the early days and I'm sure it's grown quite a bit since then, but I wasn't over the moon about it, and I'm wondering how the two are going to mesh together, because I think it's inevitable that they're going to be collapsed into something in some way.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:29

I mean it would make some sense. But when you look at how Ansible is written and not actually forget about how it's written, just how Ansible works as a product with the playbooks, and just the workflow of Ansible, if you will right, and just the workflow of Ansible, if you will right Technically, I have a hard time seeing those two working hand-in-hand in any other way than having support in playbooks to do Terraform deployments or something weird like that. I struggle to find another way for those two to really work together.

Alex Perkins: 8:01

An Ansible playbook provider.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:04

Yeah, or who knows right, there will be some, probably some kind of weird integration. I don't know if IBM's going to come through with it or kind of look to the market to see what makes sense. But I mean, IBM also has things that nobody ever thinks about. Like IBM has a multi-cloud, they have a multi-cloud solution of I forget what it's called. We did a story on it, several episodes probably last year. Now, actually, I'm trying to remember what it's called. Do you remember what it's called? That's the problem. I can't remember. This is my point. Nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about this freaking thing, but it exists, right. So again, you kind of see all right, well, does IBM have any plans to, you know, create a Terraform provider for, or use Terraform with that platform that they have? So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot up in the air here.

Alex Perkins: 8:55

Yeah, and yeah, I'm definitely not any kind of a developer, but it is interesting. I didn't think of this before. But Ansible is written in Python and Terraform is written in Go. I don't know, how many issues that causes in terms of reconciling that somehow.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:11

Well, I think that's what I mean when I'm saying it's not going to be a full integration. It's going to be one doing the other, because of exactly that you can't bring the two code bases together, it's just going to be chained together in some way.

Chris Miles: 9:24

There's going to be some interoperability. I think selfishly. I'm just worried that I'm going to have to learn more about Ansible than I want to. So we'll see. I hated Ansible so much.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:35

Because it updated all the time and your playbooks were useless and I was learning at the time as soon as I figured out anything it was worthless because they had updated Ansible and I hated updating Ansible. Oh my God, don't get me started. Anyway, yeah, totally Agreed.

Alex Perkins: 9:49

Yeah, the only other thing again. I don't want to make the whole episode about this, but the only other thing is I wonder what this does for the rest of the ecosystem, for infrastructure as code. Opentofu can take pretty big advantage of this. Pulumi is still out there. Crossplane is another company that I mean. Really, besides those three, I really don't. I'm really very curious to see what happens to the whole infrastructure as code Like. That'll be very interesting to watch.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:20

We don't know if they're going to pull it in yet and start charging for it. I mean they might pull a Red Hat or not, a Red Hat like a CentOS slash Red Hat thing, even though they already killed sen os, but you know what I mean. Like that kind of we don't know yet what they're actually going to do, because I'm sure they're going to look to monetize it, but they're not broadcom. I don't think we're going to come in and be like fuck everybody, pay your leave. I don't know, I can't say for sure, but yeah, we don't know yet I mean that in that vein.

Chris Miles: 10:40

I will say out on socials and things like that, I've seen a lot of HashiCorp ambassador members that are not happy about this, not excited at all. Their outlook looks pretty grim. Given. If you're a HashiCorp ambassador, you're pretty bought in on that ecosystem, so it probably is easy to be more cynical than most people. But yeah, their outlook doesn't look great in that regard, so I hope for the best. I love Terraform. I'd hate to see it fall into something that is you know, I'll leave it there.

Alex Perkins: 11:22

You going to renew your cert now, Chris?

Chris Miles: 11:25

I just did recently. So I have enough time between the next one to determine how I want to move forward.

Alex Perkins: 11:34

All right, let's get off this topic. So next one is so this is called Microsoft versus AWS versus Google Cloud Earnings of Q1 2024. Right, it's like a face off. It's a whole article. This, actually, I think it's from CRN, yeah, if I remember right. Yeah, so this goes into the details of right, the big three cloud providers, kind of what their, their earnings have been compared to a year ago. Right, like Q1 2023. Some interesting, there's a lot of interesting numbers in here. They break it down like really well as far as like the data. That's actually interesting. Some quick things to call out is Google is at I think it was 900 million, so they're they're getting very close. They were not profitable until Q1 of 23. And that was like a hundred something million. So they've gone up to almost a billion. That's like a 800 million increase in a year.

Alex Perkins: 12:35

So they're growing right. And then the other thing to talk about is Azure edges out AWS, but the way that they kind of present their data is weird, and I don't know if one of you guys have this pulled up. But the way that they kind of present their data is weird and I don't know if any of you guys have this pulled up. But they call out how Azure lumps so many things into what they call their intelligent cloud platform or something like that.

Alex Perkins: 12:56

Yeah, anything that runs on Azure, yeah there's so much lumped into it so there's no way to tell specifically. If that's it.

Chris Miles: 13:03

I think Azure SQL Server, windows Server, visual Studio, nu. No way to tell specifically if. If that's yeah, so I think azure sql server, windows server, visual studio, nuance, github, microsoft partner network, etc.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:11

So there's a lot that goes into that so their own products running on azure they count as azure money as, or count as you know. It's basically it's yeah it's a little tongue-in-cheek, honestly it.

Alex Perkins: 13:22

It'd be like AWS counting Amazon as a customer right.

Chris Miles: 13:26

Maybe they do, maybe they do they probably do you guys got any comments?

Tim McConnaughy: 13:30

on this one. I mean it's kind of expected All the numbers, I think. I mean the numbers are good. They still show cloud growth. I don't understand, because I was told that everybody was pulling everything back to their data center. I don't know why we're still growing here, but we'll have to ask DHH next time we have them on.

Chris Miles: 13:50

Yeah, I mean, all the numbers are relative, but I think it's good to see Google growing. What was it?

Alex Perkins: 13:59

28% sales growth, at least I think something like that.

Chris Miles: 14:03

Yeah, I mean, it's good to see more than just the top two having that much I mean Google Right blowing away. Yeah, right, I mean. But, like I said, all the numbers are relative, right, so I mean they're only going to get so big, but yeah it was good, I think it was pretty par for the course, what we expected. I don't know where the repatriation numbers are going to hit, but they should be coming any moment now, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 14:27

Well, if you think about it AWS, google Cloud and Azure it's really kind of a battle royale.

Chris Miles: 14:33

It is yeah, who's going to be number one Victory royale.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:39

Oh man, okay With that one, tim, I'm going to let you take the next one All right, tim, I'm going to let you take the next one, All right, so on our fortnightly news, we are now talking about.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:52

Fortinet yeah. So Fortinet, no relation. Fortinet is now. They basically did a press release, a newsroom, whatever you want to call it really saying that the new version of 40OS hang on, I've got to bring up the article. I forget what they call it. I think it's 40OS. Yeah, is including Gen AI in it, because of course it is right Amazing.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:12

What Huge shocker, specifically around threat detection, threat mitigation, all that good stuff. Fortinet has an interesting angle because they have multiple products and their big thing is how all of their products run the same OS, which is good. I mean, cumulus has the same story. Lots of you know there are some good vendors that have that same story, arista right, which is valid, and they call it their Fortinet security fabric. I believe is what they call it right, and it's basically this idea of you get visibility across all the Fortinet deployments, all the things, and it feeds back to the I hate this name the FortiManager, and gives you that full visibility across the security, visibility across the network.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:58

But yeah, I mean there's not a lot necessarily in this article. It does talk about like, hey, we're including, you're going to see more Gen AI, you're going to see more threat detection, you're going to see stuff. We'll have it in the show notes, of course. But yeah, just another vendor, security vendor saying, hey, we're now including Gen AI in the product. I mean, the more we see this, all the vendors saying that they're getting Gen AI in the product, I mean it just seems like the storm is growing and the ring of safety just keeps getting smaller and smaller.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:33

So this one was good. I actually need to bring the window closed. I actually need to bring up this article because this article is kind of infinitely quotable. One second we have an article from Computer Weekly saying Andy Jassy, ceo of abs, is basically saying you know, hey, the results that we've seen from the q1 earnings reports show us that you know, and gen ai has huge demand, and that everybody oh, let me find the actual uh quote here uh, everybody, basically has done optimize, yeah, yeah, everybody yeah, everybody's, it's some hold on.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:07

Oh yeah, yeah, that's it. Amazon CEO. Sorry guys. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy claimed the lion's share of cost optimization is largely completed and enterprises are turning their attention once again to accelerating the pace of their cloud migration. So you heard it here. Andy Jassy has let us know. The CEO of Amazon CEO, andy Jassy has let us know that you guys are all done. So if you didn't get a chance to optimize, you're going to have to wait for the next round. I'm sorry, go ahead and start cranking the migration dial again, please.

Chris Miles: 17:37

Yeah, so we were just at reInvent in November and there was this large focus on being frugal and cloud optimization. It seems that in short of five, six, months.

Alex Perkins: 17:50

It's a may. It's all done. Generous.

Chris Miles: 17:55

The messaging worked. Everyone did it. Everyone hit the button all at one time. This probably has nothing to do with their earnings being less than what they anticipated, but they have refocused on migrations to the cloud. It's all back to business as usual, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:10

Sure, I'm glad to hear this. I mean, if I went into Amazon stock, this would be really important for me to hear.

Alex Perkins: 18:14

Oh, man, I just can't. I mean, what's interesting, I think something I just caught as you were reading this, Tim, is this isn't wasn't Adam Salipsky saying this, who is the actual CEO of AWS?

Tim McConnaughy: 18:28

This is.

Alex Perkins: 18:29

Andy Jassy, who used to be, and is now, the CEO of Amazon. That's already weird on its own right. Why isn't Adam the one saying this? But, yeah, really happy to know that they're done that quickly. Everybody just decided we're done, we're caught up, let's just push forward and everything's good to go.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:45

Mostly. What I'm most excited about is the fact that they all got together and sent Andy Jassy an email or something saying, hey, we're actually all done, we're just going to start accelerating again. But I do feel really bad for the companies that didn't get a chance to do this, because now they're going to have to wait for next time they have to pay more, they get penalized.

Chris Miles: 19:04

actually, their prices go up.

Alex Perkins: 19:08

Yeah, right, because they didn't do it on time.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:10

Oh, my god, what a silly, silly, silly article. But yeah, that's the focus of this article. It sounds as ridiculous as it is. It's focusing on Amazon's financial earnings and specifically focusing also on the fact that the earnings have missed numbers, and you know this. I guess this Q1 earnings shows that they're, you know, doing a little bit better than they were for the last few quarters. So that's the he's attributing to that, to the optimization being completely completed. Nice, Awesome, Yep, and Chris, I think you're up with the next one.

Chris Miles: 19:45

Yeah. So next up we have a real short one from executivebizcom about Nutanix. They basically have run a survey. So their sixth annual global this is the biggest tongue twister I can try to say Nutanix sixth annual global public sector enterprise cloud index survey and research report. Try saying that two times fast, three times fast, but anyways. So 85 percent of the respondents from the public sector say their organizations have embraced cloud smart IT deployment strategies. However, only 8 percent were saying that they were actually using a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, which I think this comes as no surprise to anyone that the public sector is moving slower than the rest of the industry. It's just funny that it was called out like this. But Nutanix, obviously I think we all agree. Nutanix has their addressable market has grown substantially with the outings by.

Chris Miles: 20:56

Broadcom right. So this is probably a huge benefit for them. They also have a multi-cloud product, as far as I know, similar to what VMware had. But yeah, any comments guys?

Alex Perkins: 21:11

Just even so. I work for a VAR that does work in the public sector, so I'm even surprised, like I know it's low, but I'm surprised that it's only 8%, and that's I guess that's why I added this one right, because it's just. There's a lot of talk going on about moving stuff to a hybrid, multi-cloud kind of layout, but I'm just shocked that it's that low. I mean, it's definitely under 50%, but I just didn't think 8%, that's crazy. That's such a low number.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:42

So do you think that it's 8%? Because the question was hybrid, multi-cloud meaning both, or maybe it's multi-cloud probably is the bigger problem for these places.

Chris Miles: 21:56

Are you trying to imply the public sector didn't understand the question. No, no, no. What I'm saying is the number is low, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 22:03

8%? Do you think it's that low? Because very few in the public sector are multi-cloud or hybrid multi-cloud? That's what I would like to know. What was the definition that they were given to answer the question, right?

Alex Perkins: 22:19

I don't think so. A lot of places do use multiple clouds right, even more so than I think. Private sector companies You've got GovCloud use multiple clouds right, because there's I mean, even more so than I think.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:27

Private sector companies, yeah, like GovClouds and stuff, right.

Alex Perkins: 22:30

Well, GovClouds, exactly. That's why. Right, Because a lot of places are using either the Azure and the AWS GovClouds as well as like the public versions as well so. I don't know. And then, of course, it's almost good luck ever seeing anyone from the public sector shut down a physical data center. I just don't think that will ever happen 100% It'll never happen. So I mean I don't know. I feel like they should understand what that means, but who knows?

Tim McConnaughy: 23:00

Well, it's not necessarily what I'm saying. They don't understand the question, so they answer it wrong. But it does matter, right? If I say hybrid multi-cloud, there's definitely a definition. That is needed for anybody answering the question, not just the public sector. And what I mean then is if they had said hybrid single cloud, would the number be substantially larger? Or if they had said just multi-cloud and not said hybrid, would the number be substantially larger, right?

Alex Perkins: 23:28

That's a good point.

Chris Miles: 23:29

I think it kind of goes both ways, though, because I almost think that the definition of multi-cloud sometimes is way too loose. It is very loose. I mean, obviously, this article goes in the opposite direction of what I'm about to say, but I talk to prospects and new customers all the time. The time they're like, yeah, we're multi-clouds, like we're uh, like 99 in apps and we use office 365, I'm just like, well, that's not that.

Chris Miles: 23:56

Yes, I guess it's not multi-cloud, yeah like I guess it kind of is, but like you know um so like technically it is if the only if the only thing you have another cloud cloud is a SaaS service.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:06

You're not multi-cloud. That's not how that works.

Chris Miles: 24:08

Hey, if you're going by Microsoft's earnings, that falls into the umbrella.

Alex Perkins: 24:12

That's a good point.

Chris Miles: 24:15

That's a very good point. All right, let's move on. So next one, a quick one, that really is close to Alex's heart. He's really excited about this, so I wanted to bring it up. So his heart, he's really excited about this, so I wanted to bring it up.

Chris Miles: 24:30

So we have an article from Network World talking about new integrations in networking and big surprise, ai from Cisco and Red Hat that I guess they'll be talking about a lot of this at the new Red Hat Summit that's coming up. I think it's just in a few weeks or something like that. I can't remember the exact date. But basically, this article is really focused on the combining, or, sorry, integration, between ACI and Red Hat's OpenShift, which is their container platform for developing AI workloads and things like that. So if you look through this list, you'd see there's a lot of vendors involved in this suite here, or I guess can be.

Chris Miles: 25:11

I guess it's probably a modular thing, but we see, obviously, talks of NVIDIA for the GPUs. We see talks of VMware, of course, openshift, netapp even, and it looks like they're working on developing NetApp even, and it looks like they're working on developing CVDs, which I don't know if anyone out there who hasn't lived by CVDs for quite a while, which is, you know, interesting to see. I don't know how many customers are building their on-prem environments to run Gen AI workloads, but I could very much be wrong. I think the biggest thing that I wanted to call out, there's a Cisco ACI CNI plugin that is involved here, which is which is I think it's just funny that that they even exist. But yeah, let's. Alex, how do you feel? Is your heart so warm? Your heart is so full.

Alex Perkins: 26:19

Just so much to say. I mean, it's one thing to talk about, like our companies building their own on-prem setups for Gen AI, but to do it with ACI and OpenShift just seems like I don't know that that's the answer. I'll be nice and just say that my whole thing is, when we first started the show I was, you know I always talked about ACI. I think ACI helped me understand so much the benefits of the cloud and just kind of taking a step back and looking at applications. Cisco is so confusing with their messaging about data center and what they're doing with ACI and what they're doing with Nexus. There's no cohesive message. So I have no idea. Like an ACI, cni where did this come from? Who's actually using it? What use cases do you actually have for this? Like there's so much that's missing and not marketed and there's no blog posts and you really have to dig, I'm sure, to find out information on this ACI, cni. So stuff like that I just don't get it. I don't get it.

Tim McConnaughy: 27:30

I mean, the only reason to have an ACci cni is to do exactly this. Right, here's a container, it's connected to aci, that's like, that's the. That's the entire use case and that's the only use case that it makes any sense. Right, you wouldn't use this anywhere else, um, so yeah, I mean, and I hadn't I? This was all news to us as well. We all read this article and we were like holy shit, aci has a CNI. Okay, today I learned right.

Alex Perkins: 27:53

Yeah, I mean, I get it Like. I guess they are bringing it in because of, like, micro segmentation purposes.

Tim McConnaughy: 27:59

I assume so yeah.

Alex Perkins: 27:59

It kind of allows them to extend to that right. But okay, where are the CVDs for that, Because I've never seen any.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:07

Dude, what happens to the ACI CNI now that HyperShield is here?

Alex Perkins: 28:11

Yeah, that's an even better question, because, yeah, now they're just competing directly with themselves.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:16

Which is not unusual for Cisco in any way, shape or form.

Chris Miles: 28:20

to be fair, Maybe, it's probably just too difficult to make it work in ACI. So they're just like, yeah, we'll have this separate thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:27

Honestly, I mean if I had a choice between isovalent building my CNI and then build and then you know an aci, you're picking aci, I would go.

Alex Perkins: 28:34

You're picking aci, yep, every time, every time just remove all the segmentation and integrate hyper shield into aci, like that yeah exactly.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:44

So yeah, this one's, the open shift thing, is so weird, right, because you don't how many, how many cvds involving cisco plus I mean some other random competitor, not competitor, competitors, not, right? Um, just company that has a product, do you see? Like there actually aren't that many cvds that involve other other companies. Truthfully, this one is like six of them in there and they're, you know, like that.

Tim McConnaughy: 29:09

They're talking about jai man, it's a money grab, I mean, and cisco sees it, and they're, you know, like that they're talking about it's a money grab, I mean, and Cisco sees it. And they're like you know what We'll? We'll produce a CBD where we are the center of the universe and all these other people can use us like to connect to shit, Right, so it's a. It's a smart move.

Alex Perkins: 29:26

Let's. So we got the last one. This is from SDX central. It's called. Is the AWS Network Firewall Safe Cyber Ratings Test Reveals Concerns? Chris, I'm going to let you go ahead and take a stab at this one, because you brought this to our attention.

Chris Miles: 29:45

Yeah, I found this earlier today and just thought it was so funny because it's just an absolute like at least an absolute attempt of a dunk on AWS network firewall, which is just so funny. So there's this company, cyberratings, which where they were doing a test of multiple cloud network firewalls technologies just to kind of give them all a rating out of 100%. So we saw them looking at not just AWS but things like Barracuda, checkpoint, cisco, fortinet, palo a lot of the big names in here, right. So, as gone through, you know they scored pretty high for other cloud firewalls. So we had Palo coming in. They gave Palo 100%. Versa got like a 99%, checkpoint, 99% Rounding out the bottom AWS Network Firewall out of 100%, they gave it a rating of 5.39%.

Chris Miles: 30:43

So you know, jesus, just absolute saying it's. They're basically like, yeah, aws Network Firewall is absolute dog water, like not worth even looking at. Um, aws kind of clapped back and you know they refuted the claim saying that you know this is um, this is not rooted in truth and you know our customers should refer to the best practice documents, et cetera. And then the CEO of cyber ratings documents, et cetera. And then the CEO of Cyber Ratings, vikram Fatek.

Tim McConnaughy: 31:17

I think is his name.

Chris Miles: 31:20

Yeah, he kind of was like no, we've. You know, this is like buying a car where the airbag doesn't work is basically his representation of AWS Network Firewall, which like one. It's funny to just see someone just absolutely shitting all over a product from AWS that's used by so many customers for for security. But but I think the biggest thing is like that's the rating they gave it. And if you I don't know if you've ever priced AWS network firewall, um, yeah, that is. It's just. It's so comical to me that the like this is this is the outcome of that. But, um, but yeah, what are your thoughts on this?

Tim McConnaughy: 31:54

What I appreciate about this article is that the CEO of Cyber Ratings which, by the way, is a non-profit cybersecurity research firm, so there's no money in this for them said that they were able to work directly with AWS engineers to try to get their AWS firewall working and they had to mess around with the firewall rules in a way that's completely different than the documentation success. They also even said they hired a consultant, like an AWS consultant, to help them with the AWS firewall. So basically they did everything except go buy AWS and then force their own engineers to do it. Basically, um, and just said, like look, it just doesn't work, like it's broke. And uh, five percent, that means it's 95 ineffective. I don't even know how you create a rating like that. What does that mean? Like I turned it on and the power works and that's about it. Like I Like I don't know what that means. Yeah.

Alex Perkins: 32:51

I mean, I don't have much to add, it's just a hilarious article. The ratings right. The ratings is the biggest focus. That is 5.39 out of 100. That is just hilarious. It is weird, though, that they give Palo 100% Like I want to see what they're kind of grading this against, because yeah, you should like never, have a hundred percent, ever, no matter what. Right um same with versa networks.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:16

I didn't even know that they had a firewall to be honest 9.9, 99.9, not just, not just 99, right 99.9. So a point 10 ineffective and versa has sd-wan and yeah, I thought they were just an sd-WAN company. They must have security as part of the SD-WAN thing, I assume, but yeah, I don't know either. Maybe, but yeah. What this means, though, is that, whatever criteria they used, the bar was low enough that Pan got 100%, 100% like completely impregnable Pan's good.

Alex Perkins: 33:49

I like Pan, but 100? That's a bold claim.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:54

That's a bold claim, is all I'm saying. There's enough CVEs out there. Looking at Pan or any other vendor that 100% is not, but that even that actually sounds worse for AWS, because here the bar is low enough that like three different cybersecurity vendors get damn nigh 100% and they can't muster 6%. They can't get quite to 6%. Where does the 0.37 come from? Anyway, I kind of wonder where the 0.37%.

Alex Perkins: 34:20

Yeah, that's what I mean. I feel like I'm going to dive into this more and try to see exactly what the criteria was. I almost want to go back to the history books and see.

Chris Miles: 34:29

This almost screams like who hurt you type situation.

Tim McConnaughy: 34:34

Maybe there's a grudge, a jilted lover.

Chris Miles: 34:41

But, yeah, that one's great, but, as always, we'll put all these notes in the Cloud News of the Week document, so if anyone wants to read any of these, have a look, um, and go through it yourself. Um, there's some extra stuff in there that I think we didn't get to today. Actually, no, this might be it. I think we covered everything which is slow news week.

Alex Perkins: 35:00

Yeah, um, that is everything we had. So, um, let's, let's go ahead and wrap this up. Thank you guys for listening. Um, you know, continue to subscribe, share this around, like all of our stuff. Uh, make fun of tim on twitter and x and everywhere else yeah, please you get.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:18

You're not gonna find me on x, so don't bother there, but I am.

Alex Perkins: 35:21

I am on twitter uh, you might find him in a fortnight battle royale. Yeah, maybe one day I'm farming skins.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:29

Find him on, on.

Chris Miles: 35:29

TikTok actually.

Alex Perkins: 35:31

Yeah, there you go, that's true I am on TikTok. What's your handle on TikTok?

Tim McConnaughy: 35:35

Oh, CarpeDMVPN. But don't forget also that Cables to Clouds has a TikTok as well, which I encourage everyone to take a look at.

Alex Perkins: 35:44

Yes, absolutely All right. Thanks everyone for tuning in and we will talk to you guys next week. Bye-bye, hi everyone, it's Alex and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us and your favorite podcatcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all of our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at CablesToCloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.