Tim: 0:01

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast, your one-stop shop for all things hybrid and multi-cloud networking.

Chris: 0:08

Now here are your hosts Tim, chris and Alex.

Tim: 0:12

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds fortnightly news. As always, I'll be your host this week, rather Tim at Juan Golbez on X, but not for long maybe, and with me, as always, is my lovely co-host, chris, who is at BGP Main on Twitter for the moment. For the moment Exactly, I guess we'll just launch right into the news this week. It's pretty interesting. We have a little bit of a roundup. We got a little bit different for every little something for everybody Speaking of.

Tim: 0:49

So our first story is that Twitter is seeing a mass exodus of tech people actually. So our X, or as Alex would call it, there is. There's a large number of people who are actually deleting their accounts, deleting all their tweets, getting rid of X or Twitter completely and migrating over to blue sky. So we have a article here from tech crunch called how to use blue sky and you know, as part of the stats or others part of the article, it mentions some pretty impressive stats actually from blue sky here. Now, blue sky is not brand new. It's actually been around for, oh man, like almost a year now, I think. I think I messed with it when it first started, uh as about a year.

Chris: 1:32

I think it's more than that it might be.

Tim: 1:34

Yeah all right, but it's not, it hasn't been well, probably like very well adopted, because up until now, you, the gravity of social media, people have been on Twitter. But yeah, so after the election and given, you know, elon's involvement and just honestly, really just kind of, it's just been kind of a slope that's been going down for a while, blue Sky is absolutely exploding. So here the article mentions that they've now surpassed 16 million users and many of them. They've now surpassed 16 million users and many of them, many of them, within the last two, three weeks, you know, since the election, which is pretty crazy actually, and it's actually on track and every day, you know, keeps, keeps growing. So this is interesting because blue sky is not actually crashing and burning like you would expect with the rapid, huge influx of people and um, and I can actually attest to this myself.

Tim: 2:29

I don't know if chris has noticed the same and check with him in a second, but you know, I've actually lost a decent number of followers on twitter and I was checking and it's not like everybody just decided that they hate me all of a sudden. Get rid of it. There's a actually a large amount of people who followed me at the tech sphere that deleted their accounts. They're gone, they're moved and yeah, I'm seeing a lot of people show up in Blue Sky and gaining a lot of followers and it's been interesting. I don't know, chris, are you seeing any of this? Have you made the move yet?

Chris: 2:59

Well, I mean, yeah, tim, I was kind of like you. I started up a Blue Sky account back when it kind of was popping off, which was you know a year and some change ago I think. But you know, I thought it was really cool at the time and it seemed like it was, it was gaining traction and it just never really took off and people were just kind of kind of, you know, regressed back to Twitter or something like that, regressed back to Twitter or something like that. But now I think, with you know, uh, recent events being the election and Elon's obviously uh, there's no, there's no hiding which side of the, which side of the fence he's on with, with a lot of this stuff, and it's becoming quite obnoxious and he's uh running this in a very certain way now. And I think, like I know a lot of people that were the day that he pretty much announced there's no more block button, that's game over.

Tim: 3:45

That's a good point.

Chris: 3:47

You can no longer block people. Now it's like what you can only hide their interactions from yourself, but they can still see your stuff or something like that.

Tim: 3:55

That's right, they can see your stuff.

Chris: 3:56

Right. He claims it's on the bounds of freedom of speech, but that's bullshit. But wasn't there threats that if there's no proper block function, that it won't be able to be hosted in the App Store anymore?

Tim: 4:13

I do remember reading about that. Yeah, like Apple, one of the terms of service for Apple was for a social media app to require the ability to essentially block or otherwise, you know, protect yourself from harassment. So I wonder if that's been challenged or if apple's gonna go to bat on that, or yeah, I'm very curious too yeah, nonetheless.

Chris: 4:35

I mean, blue sky was one of these things and keep me honest here, tim but I'm pretty sure it's one of these kind of like decentralized, uh social media platforms kind of like. Kind of like mastodon was, uh, mastodon just kind of never got the traction either. But like they're using this specific like at protocol, I think is what it's called um for, like the. You know the like you have a domain name tied to your actual um handle on there. So if you didn't, you have to. I'm sure people signing up for, uh, these accounts on blue sky are, you know, if they're not familiar with DNS, they're probably learning about DNS because that requires some of the authorization to get a specific domain on your handle.

Chris: 5:14

But I definitely encourage people to check it out. It's pretty cool.

Tim: 5:17

Yeah, I snagged mine. I used to add Carpe DMVPN for mine back when I signed up, just at CarpeDNBPN for mine back when I signed up. And yeah, you have to create a record in whatever your DNS host is if you own a domain, and then the record is what gets queried by BlueSky. Basically, it's like that authentication thing. Right? Are you from this domain? Here's your authentication. If you don't have that, though, of course their normal one is like bskysocial, which you'll just get if you don't feel like creating a DNS record. So there's a lot of that, but it is pretty cool actually, and from a decentralization perspective, it's not like Mastodon where there's all these different servers. You join a server. I think it's right. That's the big thing about Mastodon. Right is that you would join a specific server or run your own, and so it was truly decentralized.

Tim: 6:04

It was just kind of running their own instances, or or you could join an instance as a males is running Right and then somehow they I don't know how they federate, they federate or something like that, so I never really got too far into it. I blue sky is decentralized in a different way. I think it's based on the product. It's more about the protocol, like you, like you, like you said. But uh, this is pretty interesting stuff, guys. The the from a social media perspective. Um, I mean, twitter's been around for 20 years now, almost right, like it's, yeah, and to see, and the gravity is, any social media platform is only as good as the gravity of the people that are using it. Right, so right, it's right in the name social media, right? So you know, this article mentions that on just on Wednesday, x saw more than 115,000 visitors or users deactivating their Twitter accounts. This is not a small amount of this is not just sour grapes or something like that. Right, there's a very real exodus going on.

Chris: 7:03

Yeah, I remember I think it was only a few weeks, maybe, like late October, kelsey Hightower pretty much announced he's like I'm done with Twitter, he's like I'm leaving, I'm going to blue sky, no plans to come back, and I think he just posted yesterday. He was like yeah, this is one of the best decisions I've ever made. It's you know, and so it's. It's definitely thriving and I think if kelsey hightower is saying that, that probably means something. You see, one of the most active guys on social media in that space right, so yeah, you know what.

Tim: 7:30

I don't want to spend too much more time on this, but one thing that I feel is very interesting is I've seen from multiple people on Blue Sky that I know, that I followed on Twitter, that I interact with regularly. These are people I know as well as you can know. Anyone in social media have basically said that since just blowing away their Twitter account and not going to it and not reading it, their mental health is better, like they're not raging all the time, like I mean, let's be fair, like we know, the X is a, is rage bait right, like all social media thrives on rage bait. So I mean, and who knows, maybe someday, you know, blue sky will become the thing we hate, but right now at least, they said a lot of people, more than people that I thought are like you know, this is the best decision I made for my mental health. I'm just getting much more done. I'm, you know I'm. I've had a better day. So interesting stuff.

Chris: 8:19

Yeah, I was one of those people that purely kept things separate. Like I had two separate Twitter accounts, like one for like personal stuff and then one for like industry, technical stuff. So, like I, I was able to navigate that pretty well and like having like my one feed that was pure like dog shit, just like entertainment, like like not, not stuff that betters my life in any way.

Chris: 8:42

And then you know, I had the tech side of it where I was like I kept the feed pretty, pretty clean and it was just folks like you know, like minded folks and talking about tech.

Tim: 8:49

But it is, it has completely jumped the shark man.

Chris: 8:52

It's like I just get absolute bullshit on both feeds now. So it it's like I'm I'm heavily considering just wiping, wiping one or both of them, and and and you know, like, like you said, I think blue sky is benefiting from the fact that it's a certain ilk of people that have gone over to blue sky. Um, so, the the content is good, the the you know people are nice, people haven't gotten very mean and and very mean and stuff like that. I encourage everyone to check it out. It's worth going there, at least for right now, so do it.

Tim: 9:23

I guess we should probably go ahead and do a Cables to Clouds account on BlueSky.

Chris: 9:28

I'm glad you said it. We've got the domain already, so it'll be easy. Right, we've got the domain and everything.

Tim: 9:34

Maybe we should do a walkthrough of how to do uh domain um. Update your domain. Uh for blue sky.

Tim: 9:39

That'd be interesting so all right on our tiktok account maybe? Yeah, exactly, all right. So moving on, uh, the next one is a uh press release from aviatrix, as always, of course. Uh, you know, chris and I work for aviatrix, so take we're, we're not here to chill, but at the same time, this is a pretty big announcement and it does affect cloud networking, so we're sharing it in that spirit.

Tim: 10:02

So Aviatrix just released a new cloud network security platform as a service. So Aviatrix obviously has been around for quite a while as a platform, meaning a full networking platform. We have security and all of that stuff is baked in. This is a new offer, a new package for the same technology with a bunch of new stuff rolled in right? So what we're calling Aviatrix PAS for short, but you know, cloud Network Security Platform as a Service that's quite the descriptive name is a managed service.

Tim: 10:37

So if you're familiar at all with, like Viptela SD-WAN or Cisco SD-WAN, rather, how the controller is managed by Cisco and then you as a user, you utilize the platform to deploy your networks and to manage your lifecycle infrastructure and all that, that's basically what this is from a pure technology perspective. You know, aviatrix hosts the control plane, the controller, the co-pilot, all of the control services does all the lifecycle management. So you, as the customer, focus entirely on how are you going to use your cloud network. Now, in the first iteration, the use case that we're supporting is called cloud perimeter security, which is deploying Aviatrix security policy and gateways into VPCs and VNets and eventually VCNs. I'm sure as well Actually, I don't remember, chris do we support OCI in the very first version of this or not Not day one? I well, actually, I don't remember, chris Do we support OCI in the very first?

Chris: 11:39

version of this or not, not day one. I think Google Cloud and OCI are roadmap for early next year, that's right, that's right.

Tim: 11:47

So this is a first iteration of the platform as a service, but it's been asked for by customers for a long time, because managing infrastructure can be managing infrastructure can be kind of painful and, of course, lifecycle management and all of that. So Aviatrix listened and we packaged up an entirely new offer. Also built into this is going to be some very interesting Gen AI stuff. Speaking, I don't know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to get some too much into it, because a lot of this stuff is going to come out a closer to reinvent. But just so, we're doing some stuff with AI that goes far beyond you know, talk to your network type level stuff. It's going to be a lot more interesting. There's going to be real insight, real recommendation stuff. So stay tuned on that. Anything to add to that, chris?

Chris: 12:34

No, I think you pretty much covered it how many services that people consume from a network perspective that are SaaSified, so to say, right when you know there's a completely hosted even sometimes control and data plane, whereas in this instance we're really just focusing on the control plane. So there's obviously a lot of trust that goes into that with a specific vendor and things like that, and we fully understand that. So it's you know, I'm really happy to see this come out. Like you said, it's been something that we've been asked for for quite some time. You know, one thing that's pretty cool is, like I feel like we do a good job at, you know, being able to discover things and, you know, host it all in one pane of glass type thing. But it's the long pole in the tent, is always like you got to get the control plane deployed in your own environment.

Chris: 13:20

In order to do that, you have to manage the life cycle of it, you have to make sure it's highly available, you have to put load balancers in front of it and you know, for some customers that is that is easy, that is like totally fine, they want things in house. But a lot of customers don't want to deal with that. So, um, you know, we'll put that burden on us and take that over.

Chris: 13:37

So yeah really excited to see this come out. We've been talking about it internally for months and months and months now, so I'm glad to see it finally hitting light of day.

Tim: 13:47

Yeah, I want to talk so badly about all the new Gen AI stuff we've built into this platform, but I can't, so all I can say is stay tuned. There is some and I don't use this word lightly right Like we have put some really useful JNI stuff in there. That's not just a chat box. So, yeah, I can't wait to show everybody what we're working on.

Chris: 14:07

So very excited, okay next up we have an article from ComputerWorldcom. The title of this is FTCI's Microsoft's Cloud Practices Amid Antitrust Scrutiny. So if you've been in touch with the news, probably in the last, you know, six to 12 months, you would know that Microsoft is they've had a lot of concerns coming around antitrust and their, you know practices towards competitiveness and things like that. So this is kind of another one. I'm talking about the FTC, which is the US Federal Trade Commission. The FTC, which is the US Federal Trade Commission, preparing to investigate Microsoft. For you know, the article points out that they were doing things like sharply raising subscription fees for customers, looking to switch providers, imposing high exit charges and reportedly making Office 365 less compatible with competitor cloud services.

Chris: 14:56

So you know I can't say I'm surprised, but you know I mean I think they got in trouble recently for something like something about the packaging of Microsoft teams and, uh, all this stuff by default, and then it became like a, you know, default chat platform or something and uh, yeah, so you know that basically just another, uh, another edition of of this dog and pony show with Microsoft. So you know the and it also talks quite a bit about the previous FTZ interventions with the within the cloud sector, like with their acquisition of Blizzard and things like that. So, yeah, there's I mean there's not a ton in here as far as data wise, but you know, it's almost like they're preparing to launch an investigation, so I'd be very curious to see what they find. I don't think I'll be that surprised, but I don't know how. About you?

Tim: 15:48

Tim, this isn't news, right? This goes back to like the early 2000s, like when they were packaging Internet Explorer with Windows and there was a big antitrust lawsuit in Europe about that. Like this is classic Microsoft. This is their strength and their weakness, right? We've talked about on the show multiple times where Microsoft's strength is being able to commoditize their offer and bundle all their shit together so that, of course, I'm going to use Azure. I've already got my Office 365. I already have Microsoft Teams. I already have, you know, whatever, I'm already using all this shit already. Why wouldn't I use azure, right? It's one ecosystem, um, and that's always been microsoft's go-to right for better or worse, right. And so how many times have they stuck their, you know, hands on the, the burner, so to speak, seeing how far they can go with it, and then you know, before they get slapped back by a, uh, some kind, some kind of antitrust body Uh, I think it was your.

Tim: 16:45

I think the internet explorer thing was, was, it was Europe. They paid a huge fine, right? But you know, I guess, if, ultimately, if you pay the fine and keep on doing the thing like is it, it's not an effective fine. I mean, we've talked about that too, a fine is really just a. It only puts things out of the range of companies that can't afford to pay it. Basically. So, yeah, no, that's very, very normal for Microsoft. I am a little dismayed that to go that far as to build it into the licensing and all of that. But allegedly right, this is all allegedly, but yeah, we'll see what the FTC Actually, I have very little faith that the FTC will do anything useful for the next four years.

Chris: 17:28

Oh yeah, good point, good point, it's just occurred to me now. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, that's.

Tim: 17:36

Yeah, I mentioned this isn't going to go very far.

Chris: 17:38

They might just be like oh you know what, actually we're all good, everything you're doing is fine, all right. Last one for today we have an article from Forbes talking about Google Cloud. Title is Google Cloud Goes Transparent with New Critical Security Announcement. So if you're familiar with, you know kind of a CVE system or a common vulnerabilities and exposure system. So it's a common way to just report, you know, crucial vulnerabilities and exploits and things like that in digital systems and you know involves kind of a system of you know there's people out there that can submit these known vulnerabilities to the vendor, to the operator, in terms of like a bug bounty type thing. This one's kind of interesting. So the Google Cloud head of security, head of security response, I think is actually the title Sri Telastrium Sorry, I probably butchered that name, but I've never heard it out loud. But so they announced a major expansion of their CVE program. So they're going to be publishing all of their kind of CVEs for the systems that are running on Google Cloud.

Chris: 18:50

And you know there's this kind of weird thing is like I actually had to look this up to see you know whether or not Microsoft and AWS do this on a regular basis as well, because the thing is about. You know, the cloud's like everything, every one of their services. Even if there was a known CVE, there's no customer interaction in order to patch that. Typically, you know, when a CVE is launched, you have to have some type of response to it. Right, you know I need to go in and patch the server, do something like that. I have to have, you know, a triage response for that. But this is all owned purely by the vendor in this case. So Google Cloud, or if it was AWS or Azure, they do it and the customer is kind of none the wiser.

Chris: 19:33

So I think it's more just about a goal of being transparent, and I guess they've talked about they can improve their bug bounty for the hunters out there that are trying to do these things as well. But yeah, I don't know. It seems like it's nice. I don't necessarily know that I understand the full benefit of it on the surface, like I said, with this being something that's not done by customers, but I don't know. How do you feel, tim?

Tim: 19:55

Yeah, so CVEs are interesting, right, in the case of a cloud, a cloud native service like AWS has. I was looking this up. Actually I was curious what kind of CVEs that Amazon is issuing. Actually, let me see if I can find it. I had it up here a second ago.

Tim: 20:10

Sorry I lost it, but like I seem to remember seeing like a CVE issued for like Transit Gateway or something like that, and like Chris was you were saying usually the point of a CVE is to obviously get it patched, but also for an incident response because, hey, you're a customer, you're running affected software, you know you are now exploitable. This makes you aware of it and also you know you should patch it or fix it or do whatever the c you know, whatever the mitigation is in the cve. Here, of course, with a native service, you don't have any interaction with the, with the native service like, or in terms of like being able to life cycle it, patch it, mitigate really in any way. So it's, it's interesting. I that's not to say that and I think that they, I think the the article mentions it as well. The guy whose name I probably can't pronounce either mentions it as well.

Tim: 21:01

Being transparent about vulnerabilities is about more than just letting customers know that there's mitigation that needs to take place. Sometimes it's just about making people aware of vulnerabilities that exist. So I kind of agree with that. I mean, it's better to know than not know, even though the ultimately, usually by the time of like, if Google's issuing a CVE, the odds are very high that by the time you see the CVE it's mitigated in some way. Right, so you know, but it is still good to have it out there for recording purposes, if, if, if, nothing else, perhaps, yeah, I don't know, I don't know. This is a kind of a weird one.

Chris: 21:43

Yeah, it feels like. To me it's probably just more about providing customers comfort and maybe stopping an inbound communication channel before it happens. Like you know, I'm sure there's people that are, you know, constantly having to, you know, discuss with the cloud providers like, hey, you know either I know about this CVE, or you know, are you guys, um, uh, are you guys affected by this?

Chris: 22:01

And you know? Yeah, I mean, transparency is good, but I wonder you know what? What is the overall benefit here? Uh, I don't necessarily know, but uh, I don't, I want to. I want to make sure that I don't come across like I think this is a bad thing or a useless thing or just like giving themselves a pat on the back type thing. But yeah, I'm, I'm curious if, if anyone out there knows what, what the major benefit of this is, please let us know. I would like to hear from you guys.

Tim: 22:24

Okay, and with that one, I think we're about ready to wrap up. I think we, as always, we, don't get to everything. There are some links in the show notes or, sorry, not show notes the news that we'll get out. So always, always, recommend taking a look at the news page.

Chris: 22:41

Well, the news doc is in the show notes, so if you need to find it, go there.

Tim: 22:45

Yeah, go to the show notes to find the news doc. They're technically two separate assets. But yeah, we always recommend because we always put interesting things in there. We just obviously don't. We can't get to everything right. So with that, thank you again for always, for listening or watching or both. Definitely make sure that you send Chris a Christmas card in Australia in about a month or so. It might get there around Christmas time.

Chris: 23:14

Send it now Like subscribe. Join us on Blue Sky when we get over there month or so it might get there around christmas time.

Tim: 23:16

Yeah, send it and uh, like, like, yeah, like, subscribe.

Chris: 23:17

Uh, you know, join us on blue sky when we get over there? Yeah, maybe, well, we gotta. We got what like three days to get this out. I might be I might be able to start an account by then. So, yeah, check us, find us on blue.

Tim: 23:27

Okay, well, look for us we might have it on there by then and uh, so yeah, if if not, well, I assure you it's coming. But yeah, anyway, all right, guys, have a good week.

Chris: 23:40

Hi everyone. It's Chris and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite podcatcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at CablesToCloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.