You Can Quit If You Want To, You Can Leave AI Behind - NC2C010

Chris Miles: 0:00

I love you. Welcome to Costco, I love you. If anyone has not seen Idiocracy, please watch that movie. It's a great film.

Alex Perkins: 0:08

You won't be surprised, Chris, but I have not what you haven't seen. It I have not.

Chris Miles: 0:13

Alex is always like oh, I don't know what music or movies or anything you're talking about. I'm convinced Alex lived in a cave for his mid-20s. We should start a game show where we see what movies Alex has seen. I guarantee you everyone will be surprised at the lack of it. 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.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:01

we would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap. Hello and welcome back to the Cable to Clouds podcast, and this is our fortnightly news episode. We've got an awful lot to cover this time, so, yeah, let's just get right into it, because hopefully we have enough time.

Chris Miles: 1:18

Just so everyone knows. Every week we do this, we're like, oh, I don't know if there's going to be enough to cover this week. And then we get to the actual recording and we're like shaving shit off. So it's good to know there's a constant stream of news every two weeks.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:33

Yeah, exactly, which is why, when I look at the list of stuff we have to cover tonight, I'm like we better just roll right into it. Okay, so the top news story in this episode the AWS CEO, adam Slipsky, is now stepping down as CEO of AWS and the SVP of sales, marketing and global services at Amazon, matt Garman, is taking over. So this is an interesting development. Honestly, I don't think anybody knows yet what actual impact this is going to have on ADBS and this article is from the Verge, by the way. So in the article it just covers what's happening and then some kind of internal memos that were published about this happening.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:29

Not really a big reason, given AWS's latest quarter was profitable it was up 17%, not the absolutely insane growth that we saw over the last few years, but we've been talking about it for a while that the CSPs are kind of slowing down a little bit, especially AWS. But yeah, he wasn't kicked out. Looks like he's just stepping down and we'll have to see, kind of what happens now that Matt Garman has taken over. What do you guys think?

Alex Perkins: 2:56

Yeah, we'll see. I actually just listened to the Cloudcast did one of their now it's called the weekend perspective just about this whole topic and it's really interesting. Take it kind of seems like a lot of people I won't say a lot some people have an opinion that Adam Salipsky he wasn't really set up to fail, but it was hard to step into Andy Jassy's shoes and that maybe this was kind of always going to happen eventually at some point. And I think a big point is a lot of the AI stuff that's going nuts right now. He didn't really navigate them well through that and I don't think anyone would argue that AWS is not in first or second place when it comes to AI right now.

Alex Perkins: 3:40

So, I think that might have a lot to do with it, and I know it says he stepped down, but is that really true? Because another point is Matt Garman was his name, I think. Right, yeah, I guess a lot of people thought that he was actually going to take over when Jassy became the CEO of Amazon. I don't know how long Adam Selepski was CEO for, but it's kind of like this was always supposed to happen this way. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Chris Miles: 4:06

Yeah, tim, you made a point that you know. Obviously we don't know the impact of what this is going to have on Amazon, with Solipski stepping down. But I think the thing is this probably happened in the first place, because it's hard to measure the impact of Solipski in the first place, right, you know, with coming off the heels of COVID and things like that, you know, obviously things were skyrocketing for them and he was kind of he was set up to fail in a sense, but also set up to succeed, whereas, like, they were just on this like very high growth market. But you know, I mean the Cloudcast episode about this is it has a lot of great details.

Chris Miles: 4:42

I mean, you know, pointing out just this is kind of one of the first times we've seen aws go for an outside hire, for something like this, because I think he came over from tableau um, and he was not internal to aws, um, yes, um, which you know I mean I did. I mean I always look for the personalities in these people and like I didn't necessarily love Jassy either, but at the same time, like Slipski was just kind of a, you know, it's like he's just kind of whatever, not an engaging, not a very exciting person to have to be the forefront of, you know, the biggest profit center for AWS or, sorry, for Amazon. So yeah, I'm not overly surprised, but you know keen to see what happens. We'll see.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:28

Yeah for sure. Yeah, this one's definitely just a wait and see. My expectation is that the, the arc of a lot of their solutions and kind of their, their plans, if you will, are already forecast or the die are already cast on a lot of this. So I think it's going to be a while before we see, you know, if there's any real impact or if the wheels turn or if the you know things change over there. So all right, let's move on to the next article.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:58

So okay, so a multi-cloud network vendor, alkira, just raised a hundred million in a series C funding round with plans to boost their channel motion. This article is from CRN and it's interesting. So Alkira I mean Alkira has been around for a good bit of time now and it's weird to think that they're only on Series C of funding. So there's a couple things there right. One is that, for better or for worse, they obviously have been making do with that money for quite a bit of time. Also, it's interesting to me to see funding rounds. I mean, I guess VC still happens, right, even with the interest rates as dogshit as they are. But I am curious to see how many strings are, know how much, how many strings are attached or how much interest rate, and all of that is attached to this newest funding room. What do you guys, what do you guys think?

Alex Perkins: 6:51

Yeah, I was trying to pull this up real quick and I can't find it, but I'm pretty sure their series B was back in 2020.

Tim McConnaughy: 6:59

Yeah, I mean that's a huge big gap and I.

Alex Perkins: 7:03

what stands out to me is just this is a lot of money, not just for a Series C, but just in this economy. Yeah that's what I mean it's a lot, it's a big round. So I mean good for them, it's good to see all of us. Obviously, you guys work for Alkira, but Aviatrix, my bad.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:25

Yep, the names are too similar. My boss just had a heart attack.

Alex Perkins: 7:28

But it's good to see just the industry as a whole do this right Competition is a good thing, so it's good to see that it's still growing. And, of course, we have a podcast talking about hybrid and multi-cloud networking, so I think this is just a net positive all around.

Chris Miles: 7:45

Yeah, I mean just echoing what you said. I think this is good for the category overall of cloud networking. The more people we have playing in the space, the more that we know that it's here to stay. Yeah, like you said, I think it's kind of pretty admirable what Alkira has done with the funding that they've had over just the last what is it, like you said, four years? Because, well, yeah, they haven't been taking any more funding.

Chris Miles: 8:17

Obviously, taking more funding is more pressure to pressure to perform and to, um, uh, you know, show outcomes and things like that. They've been doing a hell of a job. Uh, our good friend, will collins, friend of the pod, uh, 11 motherfuckers everywhere he's, he's speaking at everything, he's talking to everybody. He's doing a great job. He's a phenomenal guy. Um, so they're they're definitely still making the rounds and making their product known. So very good to see this, which I think is probably going to take some of the pressure off some of the shoulders some very broad shoulders of some people over there that have been carrying loads for quite a long time. So hopefully it works out well for them.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:00

Yeah, something else that's interesting about the article and I didn't know this about Alkira. But the VP of Global Sales specifically points out that every deal that Alkira puts out is through a channel partner, so they're completely bought in on the partner ecosystem. They don't sell direct, which I did not know personally. So that's a really interesting way to conduct the business. I don't know if the two are related to how they've made it this far, with only on Series B or whatnot, but it's definitely an interesting way to transact business in the multi-cloud networking space. So very cool article. Definitely recommend you guys read it.

Alex Perkins: 9:38

Yeah, real quick. The patience to go four years on one fund as a startup like that's good on them. Yep 100%.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:46

Okay, Chris, I think you're taking the next section, right.

Chris Miles: 9:50

Sure. So next up, we have a new player emerges situation with cloud networking yet again, which I think we've seen a few of these over the last few months. So we have an article here from the Linux Foundation, so they've launched a new. I don't know if they're calling it an initiative or a product. Necessarily I think there's an initiative word in there somewhere. It's called Paraglider, Basically a new kind of answer to multi-cloud networking, so to say. It seems that it's very intent-based. You want to define how you want multi-cloud networks to be built with your intent and push that through an orchestrator.

Chris Miles: 10:39

I will say there's not a lot of meat in there just yet about how the solution is going to work, but they have buy-in from Microsoft, Google I think this was in collaboration with Arna Networks, which I'm not very familiar with them, but I think they were kind of helping spearhead some of this. But yeah, it's an interesting play. One thing that I thought was very outstanding here and I don't know if it was called out specifically anywhere in the article or in their product documentation If you can go to Paraglide, I think it's paraglideprojectio no AWS plug-in here, it's all Azure, GCP and IBM, which I thought was very interesting. But yeah, how about you guys? How do you feel about this?

Alex Perkins: 11:31

Yeah, this is such a common thing to see. I mean, it's surprising every time for some reason, but it shouldn't be, because it's so weird that every time there's some kind of collaboration thing or any multi-cloud anything, it's like everyone is there except AWS. I'm not surprised at all to see Microsoft and Google teaming up, but it's become almost just a constant that AWS is just not going to be there. I don't know, it's just weird. Maybe that'll change with the new leadership that we were talking about.

Chris Miles: 12:02

Did that happen with the Nefeli thing as well? I can't remember if they were there for that or not.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:07

Nefeli was the Cloudflare acquisition yeah, cloudflare, that's right, they were bought by Cloudflare. I don't remember that they have a. I actually have to look it up. I don't think they have a specific thing where they don't work with AWS. Don't work with AWS, but I think AWS has the 800-pound gorilla syndrome where everybody just kind of like it's like de facto or ubiquitous, if you will, where everybody's focused on other integrations because AWS is already kit and caboodle maybe I'm not sure.

Alex Perkins: 12:34

Yeah, but I mean the product sounds interesting, right Like it's basically just another. I mean it's another abstraction on top of everything else, but it's it's. It's different just in that it's. You know it's supposed to be more like intent-based is how a lot of this reads. You're supposed to be able to just kind of define your tenant and it will abstract away the different ways that GCP and Azure and IBM I think is what you said. Tim was the other one. It'll just abstract away all of that, so you can kind of just define how you want your application to be set up and it will orchestrate that stuff for you underneath. So it'll be another one that's interesting to watch and keep an eye on for sure, especially since it's coming from the Linux Foundation and there's a lot of movement in that area lately.

Chris Miles: 13:18

Yeah, it's obviously a very API-driven workflow, defining things in JSON built into your infrastructure as code pipelines and that's all a beautiful thing, which I'll bet. I have not sat here and combed through every single page on their docs page just yet, but some of the examples that I see to an infrastructure person could seem kind of daunting because it looks like they're purely building things and examples as far as, like, hey, here's a workload and then here's a workload in a different cloud. You define how you want them to talk to each other, but it doesn't actually come out and tell me what actually you're building under the hood to do that. And, as an infrastructure person that wants to manage infrastructure, that sounds terrifying. Like, unless, unless you're, um, kind of your backend for doing this is is purely focused on development and maybe you're a developer and this is like the perfect thing for you, Um, but yeah, from an infrastructure perspective, I don't know. It leaves me feeling like I'd want to be very cautious. We'll wait to see what the next iteration looks like.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:30

Yeah, honestly, this idea of intent-based, controller-based multi-cloud networking, it seems a little familiar, but the way that they're taking their take on it is more like application-driven. I think An app developer doesn't care about the network, they just want it to work. So this is definitely aimed at that and it's very cool. But I'm with you, I think that they're abstracting an awful lot. Even in explaining how it works, there's obviously like hey, do this, do this, do this. And here's the example, here's how you set it up. But, like you said, it doesn't actually explain what the hell's happening, cause we know. No matter how much you abstract this stuff, at the end of the day you still have to talk to the CSP and the CSP still has to build whatever's exposed, whatever it has available for you to build Right, whatever it has available for you to build right. So what's actually getting spun up and done under the hood, I guess, is what I'd be curious about.

Alex Perkins: 15:26

Well, yeah, like where's the visibility?

Tim McConnaughy: 15:29

and the tooling, yeah, visibility, tooling Stuff like that.

Alex Perkins: 15:32

I don't know. Maybe that's something that will come later, but it's definitely not a focus up front.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:37

I mean you look at the. I read through this Now. To be fair, it's been almost two weeks now since I was in San Francisco. I barely remember any of it now, but I do remember going through it and thinking, hey, yeah, you can do this and build this and make this connect to this. But I don't remember reading at all about any kind of visibility tooling. There's no reporting From what I could see. You can't even use this to like set up vpc flow logs or some you know equivalent. To even do it you'd still have to go manually set up your own tooling to to figure out what the hell's going on under the hood. So I think that's the part, that's the long pole in the tent still to be added. Um, but the idea is pretty cool. Like that you can. You know, hey, with a few commands you can spin this up. So for sure, agreed um.

Chris Miles: 16:25

Next up, we have a quick one from oracle, um, a quick blog from them that their latest uh ebs cloud manager um, which is uh I actually had to look this up the e-business suite, um cloud manager, um. So basically, they've just disclosed that you that there's an update to this new kind of business tool that they allowed multiple customers to use. The focal point here not really being that there's an update to the software. One thing they specifically called out was that on the back end, I believe they have switched, using their infrastructure as code tool, from Terraform to being OpenTofu Now, while this in particular doesn't have any kind of effect on how a customer would interact with this product, it's kind of funny to see Oracle doing this and disclosing it kind of first, before we've seen anybody else do it.

Chris Miles: 17:23

Oracle, I will say man, oracle and IBM did not expect them to be full of surprises over the last year or two, but they've made a lot of headway. This one, yeah, we don't even know if OpenTofu is going to last the next year and a half, etc. And then they've already done switches on the backend for Oracle. So very cool to see. We'll see where it goes. Any comments from you guys?

Alex Perkins: 17:52

I don't really have anything to add here. I saw a couple comments in various places about this, talking about the irony of how Oracle always changes their licensing and it's like now you're it's like you're trying to point out that IBM might be IBM or HashiCorp might be changing some of their licensing. I just thought that was funny, that it seems like a just a weird way of a backhanded conversation about this licensing change.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:23

I'm curious to see. Actually, obviously, you don't do this for no reason, right? So this is in response to IBM acquiring Hashi. I kind of wonder is Oracle just betting, basically, that IBM will either jack the rates or introduce some licensing model that's bad essentially for OCI? Are they just betting on that? Are they basically saying, actually we believe in open tofu just as much and so we're just going to cut it off at the pass and not have to worry about it? But it seems like a risky change. Also, this is just EBS and I don't know how impressive EBS is in terms of OCI's total footprint, like how many people are using it and whatnot. Maybe this is a test, the waters thing. So I'm curious.

Chris Miles: 19:14

Yeah, but I think this was the specific use case that people were calling out why the change in licensing was problematic from HashiCorp's side. Right, because if you had tools built on Terraform, I think you know Hashi was basically saying they were entitled to, you know a piece of that in some capacity, right, if you're using that as part of that. So I think they're probably just alleviating any kind of impression from the customer base that this could become a problem later. I mean, I've seen several indications on how easy it is, at least right now. I don't know how true this will be in eight months, but how easy it is right now to port from Terraform to OpenTofu and potentially back. So maybe they're just doing it as a fail-safe for now and if the shift goes down on OpenTofu, they're just going to pop it right back. Right, we'll see. I don't know.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:10

That's a good point, though the divergence will only increase, right, the longer OpenTofu and Hashi are not the same product. The divergence is going to get bigger and portability is probably going to suffer. So, yeah, that's a very good point.

Chris Miles: 20:29

All right, and then another quick one from me. So we have some very surprising news, I would say. So we have a blog here from VMware, by Broadcom, by Carl's Jr, by whoever. I love you, welcome to Costco. I love you. If anyone has not seen Idiocracy, please watch that movie. It's a great film. I don't know how PC it is in terms of today's standards, but it will be an interesting watch for you. Anyways, you won't be surprised, chris, but I have not.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:05

You haven't seen it. I have not oh dude.

Chris Miles: 21:08

Oh yeah, alex. Alex is always like oh, I don't know what music, your movies or anything you're talking about. I'm convinced Alex lived in a cave for his mid 20s. So if we should start, we should start a game show where we see what movies Alex has seen. I guarantee you everyone will be surprised at the lack of it, at the lack of it, anyways. So VMware by Broadcom, has announced that VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion are now free for personal use.

Chris Miles: 21:41

I do remember, back in the day, acquiring licenses for this product via various means, so this is one or two times. I probably did pay for it, admittedly, but it's very surprising to see VMware actually come out and say something is free, albeit this is probably a very, very small piece of their market, but for those that were you know labbing and things like that and needed access to things like you know Windows workstations and you're running a Mac, et cetera, this was always a great product. So very, very cool to see this. I'm glad we're talking about it. I'm actually going to go download it shortly after this call, because I do miss having that.

Alex Perkins: 22:23

Yeah, it's good to see At least you know they're doing something. It's a great move Like it. Actually it looks good for them and it will alleviate. Something I brought up like when we first started talking about this is how are you going to funnel people into learning how to use the product if there's no free version or version people can use like at home, right, yeah?

Tim McConnaughy: 22:43

that's what we talked about.

Alex Perkins: 22:48

Yeah, and I mean this isn't like you're not, you can't. It's a type I always get these mixed up. It's a type two hypervisor right compared to type one. So you won't exactly be able to run your home server like you used to be able to on this, but it's still a way to get familiar with the software and stay familiar with it. So it's a step in the right direction. Better than nothing.

Chris Miles: 23:08

I love that we're at the point where it's like, oh, vmware did something great, it's better than nothing.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:17

Beats a kick in the pants.

Alex Perkins: 23:19

All right, Alex what do you got? All right, I got one that's pretty substantial. I don't think this will take us too much time to talk about, and then three quick ones so we can wrap this up. I know we're running a bit long. So OpenAI is back in the news again, right, big surprise there, and of course, it's more drama. Well, I guess we should say that they also just released the new model, right? The new, what is it? Gpt-404? 404,? Yeah, but pretty quickly after that release, probably within a week. Ilya Sutskever and I'm messing these names up, but Jan Leakey.

Chris Miles: 23:58

Don't worry, they're definitely going to hear this. Who had a team focused?

Alex Perkins: 24:00

on AI safety.

Chris Miles: 24:01

They're definitely going to hear this and they're going to be upset that you mispronounced their names.

Alex Perkins: 24:05

For sure, for sure. But both of these people have resigned and the reason this is so alarming. I mean, you know, obviously it's one of them led the team focused on AI safety, but Ilya is one of, like, the most well-known AI researchers in the world and I'm pretty sure he was one of the original founders of OpenAI. So this is like a huge, like high profile departure. And also, when Sam Altman got booted and then brought back in and all that drama, ilya was on the board and one of the people who decided to remove Sam. It's a whole mess. I'm sure you know I keep hearing the joke like in 15 years, when everyone writes their memoirs will know the true story of what, of what really happened, uh, but of course, the opening is not saying anything, so you can't even find out what's going on. Nobody's going to tell the truth about anything, so we're all just left to speculate and who knows? This is just crazy. This is going to be in the news all the time. I feel like what do you guys?

Tim McConnaughy: 25:06

think. I think it think, I think it's terrifying, it's a little scary that one of the founders of OpenAI, most world-famous researcher of AI and the head of a safety team are all like fuck this, I'm out because, well, we don't know. And that's the part that really terrifies everyone, right, or should? That's a little. I mean, because we know that, sam Altman, you know, is all about the profit market, you know, profit engine that is OpenAI. I don't know, I don't trust it. It's a little. It's concerning to me that these people left and more or less implied why they left. Uh, yeah, what do you? What do you think, chris?

Chris Miles: 25:52

yeah, I think um. To avoid thinking about the daunting um implications of this, I think we should all just kind of sit here and think about who do we think is going to play sam altman in the upcoming netflix documentary?

Alex Perkins: 26:06

seriously sure that's coming.

Chris Miles: 26:09

I don't know It'd have to be a Gen Zer because, like you said, it's going to take probably 10, 15 years before we see something. I wonder who it's going to be. I don't know if you've seen Iron Claw, but Zac Efron got snubbed, so maybe you should come back and do that. We'll see where that goes. Alex has not seen iron claw. We don't have to worry about that, I know he's not seeing iron claw, come on that's a new one, though, but have you seen it? But have you seen it?

Tim McConnaughy: 26:36

no, I have not seen it he just doesn't watch movies, like it doesn't matter what decade, it just doesn't watch movies I don't.

Alex Perkins: 26:46

I'll have to write a a list of my movies that I actually like someday.

Tim McConnaughy: 26:53

A short list.

Chris Miles: 26:53

Three movies Star Wars 1, 2, and 3.

Alex Perkins: 26:58

All right, let's get these last three knocked out. So we got one from Arnett. This is about a OVH cloud opensens New Sydney Data Center. Really, this article is mostly it kind of is talking about their ability to do like water cooling and how that enables them to basically, you know, have cheaper prices, be more efficient with like high performance computing, which, of course, everyone is going to relate to AI. It's just it's interesting, Chris, like you brought this up right. It's really more interesting that we're starting to see these kind of more purpose-built, like different company data centers, like third-party data centers for things like HPC or AI workloads. That's really all the article is about. Do you got anything to add to this one?

Chris Miles: 27:46

No, that was pretty much it. I just wanted to kind of call out that we are seeing a lot more of these, like you said, purpose-built data centers for specific things, and obviously the hot topic right now is going to be AI. So I think it's hard to say where this is going to go, how fruitful it's going to be for a lot of these vendors that are doing this. I imagine it's going to be good. But you know, I mean you have a lot of people that are either not necessarily satisfied or not overly keen on the idea of putting all their you know proprietary data into a cloud vendor that could potentially use that for competitiveness, you know, either against them or, you know, to get more money out of them, et cetera.

Chris Miles: 28:30

I don't know exactly what lens people are looking at it. I'm not an executive, I don't. I don't understand necessarily these risks at that level, but I just know that people are being wary about it. So I think this could be, you know, quite a big or a very profitable market at some point. I don't know how. About you? How do you feel, tim?

Tim McConnaughy: 28:54

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. It's like you know you've built it. Will they come? You know, in terms of the AI workloads and everything? Because any third party running an AI data center is going to have to contend with the fact that a lot of the customers are going to want to keep their data private and not trust, essentially, the provider. So I'm curious what security functions, what certification type of stuff, compliance, governance type stuff will pop up to try to certify or whatever these third parties that want to build these AI data centers and run it for organizations?

Alex Perkins: 29:34

Well, that's a good point too. And will that cause the prices to go higher? Right, Because it seems like really the niche is hey, we're cheaper, right, it's not really focused on your own.

Alex Perkins: 29:44

Yeah. So it's more like they're kind of in a weird in-between where, hey, we're cheaper than the big cloud providers, but if somebody comes along and says, well, how secure are you? That's yet to be seen, I think All right. So the next one we got is from Computer Weekly. This is about Akamai's. It's called Akamai's Cloud Computing Play Gains Momentum.

Alex Perkins: 30:04

Really, this is more of like an interview with the CEO, more of like an interview with the CEO, and it's kind of him talking about how Akamai is already like primed and ready to like expand to the edge. Right, because they're already there. A lot of it. He talks about how they acquired Linode recently and how their customers are really liking their compute platform, but it's I'm trying to be nice when I say this because I want to see everyone succeed, but it seems more like it's he's trying to be nice when I say this because I want to see everyone succeed, but it seems more like he's trying to convince people our offering is great, like we just bought Linode and now we have a compute platform, but it's like I don't know that that's enough In this industry right now. You kind of need to innovate or bring new things. And just saying we have a compute platform and we're close to the edge. I don't know if that's really a main selling point to go with. So what do?

Chris Miles: 30:54

you guys think. I mean some could probably argue that Linode was, you know, somewhat innovative in their particular market when they were a standalone company. So maybe he's just kind of leveraging that piece of it for comms reasons. I don't know. Yeah, don't know how much else I have to add. You know, it's Akamai, it's Linode. I don't know how much more excited I can get about it necessarily.

Tim McConnaughy: 31:22

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's classic acquisition to shore up the, you know the product line or whatnot, shore up your portfolio. There's not much to say here beyond hey, we bought a cloud, we bought a small public, a smaller public cloud that has a kind of a. I mean Linode's been around for a while, though for a long time, I think. So, yeah, there's not anything really exciting here. Just acquired the company and now we've got a compute platform for Akamai to run stuff on.

Alex Perkins: 31:56

Right, and I'm not trying to, like you know, poo-poo all over this, but it's just like tell me a story about what you're going to do with it. Don't just say we bought this and it's great.

Tim McConnaughy: 32:05

Right. How are you going to integrate it with the rest of Akamai's platform? How are you going to go to market with all of it together? Yeah, that's what I want to hear.

Alex Perkins: 32:12

Yeah, all right. Last article is from JSAnet. This is a company called Zenlayer and it says Zenlayer Cloud Networking launches port-based purchasing model. Tim and I were just talking about this right before we hit record, but to me their wording of port-based is so confusing here because they relate it to ports, you know, like ports that we know in networking, and to them, ports is a way to connect to their service that allows you to interconnect to an MSP or a CSP or other enterprises. It's really. It's kind of like like they're like Megaport, like.

Alex Perkins: 32:51

Tim is saying yeah, I don't know anything here, guys.

Tim McConnaughy: 32:57

Yeah, I mean Megaport. Like you read it, you read the document. I hadn't heard of them before but it really just seems I'm not seeing anything specifically. I won't say innovative, but like it just. But if you logo swap that and it said Megaport, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Which is not bad, I guess. I am curious what their thing is. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Miles: 33:21

I think it's good to see someone else in this space. I mean, if you ask me who provides this type of service or this type of service in a global perspective, it's probably going to be Megaport, it's going to be Equinix those are going to be the top two that I really think of. And you know, I would say 90% of the customers I talk to that are adopting things like multi-cloud networking and things like that, are using one or the other, sometimes even both. So I think it's good, I mean, if I put my technical marketing hat on, I guess using the term port is simple, for, you know, the, the, the neanderthals such as ourselves, who are network engineers, we, we are cavemen.

Chris Miles: 34:02

We think of ports plugging things in. You know, um, so maybe that's, maybe that's how it worked out, I don't know, but um, ultimately it's interesting. Uh, they have much larger footprint than I have, than I anticipated, but I guess that's how it worked out. I don't know, but ultimately it's interesting. They have a much larger footprint than I anticipated, but I guess that's kind of the benefit that you get with leveraging third-party racks and power and cooling and things like that. So, yeah, we'll see. I'll definitely keep an eye on Zen layer after this and see if the growth turns out to be what we want it to be. So we'll see.

Alex Perkins: 34:37

Yeah, absolutely All right. That is all the articles, tim, you want to carry us out.

Tim McConnaughy: 34:43

I don't know, I don't know if I can carry all of us out, but I'll carry a tune all the way out, that's right.

Chris Miles: 34:47

Carry a tune all the way out, that's right. Sing us a song.

Tim McConnaughy: 34:50

Carry a tune, exactly no, I'm not going to sing a song, I'm not the piano man, but yeah. So that wraps up this week's fortnightly news, again with zero mentions of the video game Fortnite. Oh wait, no One. We have one, one mention of the video.

Alex Perkins: 35:09

Almost made it.

Chris Miles: 35:12

I'm glad you remembered because I forgot actually.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:16

Yeah, so if you like what you heard, please subscribe to us on Fortnite or your favorite podcatcher, youtube. I don't know Wherever you listen to or watch things, I'm sure we're there. You can just find us. You can hang out with Chris.

Chris Miles: 35:36

He'd like to have a conversation with you.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:37

But yeah, exactly Okay. So that wraps it up this week and we'll see you next week. 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 Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all the show notes at cables2cloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.