Chris: 0:00

Alright, we good to go. How did you play the ringtone?

Tim: 0:02

Or should.

Will: 0:03

I.

Chris: 0:13

What the f***? That's your ringtone.

Will: 0:15

That is my ringtone. It went off at a dinner like a month ago with some CIOs dude, nice. I didn't even know what it was because I just said it. I'm like what the heck is that? Is that a chicken? And they're like, oh crap, it's me. Jeez, that's pretty good, you live and you learn.

Tim: 0:32

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast, your one-stop shop for all things hybrid and multi-cloud networking. Now here are your hosts, tim Chris and Alex. Your hosts, tim Chris and.

Chris: 0:44

Alex, hello and welcome back to another episode of the Fortnightly Cables to Clouds news podcast and, as you can tell, probably, we are in a different environment. We are being hosted by none other than the Cloud Gambit, will Collins himself. Tim's always here. Tim's here. He didn't make the drive because he's a selfish, selfish man.

Tim: 1:06

Very selfish.

Chris: 1:07

Thanksgiving with his family instead of with us.

Will: 1:09

Who does that? Come on, who wants to spend that?

Chris: 1:13

Yeah, so I'm currently overseas. I'm here in Kentucky. Will was kind enough to host us and join us for the episode today, and I'm so happy. I'm here on much better terms. I don't know if I told you this, but last time I was here and we did this, I was chronically hung over. Uh, so if you go back and look at that episode, I probably look pretty sweaty and uncomfortable. I got to go back and watch it now.

Will: 1:38

Maybe reshare it.

Tim: 1:40

I never really noticed the difference?

Chris: 1:41

Yeah yeah, you can't tell. I'm just always like that when I talk to Tim. He drives me to drink sometimes. But all right, let's hop into the news for this week. So we keep saying it's a relatively slow news week and this is pretty much the same, but I think we have some good announcements coming in here. So, in form, just like they always do, aws has brought some announcements to the table prior to reInvent, which is taking place here in the next couple days. So by the time that you hear this, you will probably already have heard things that came out at reInvent. So bear with us on the next cycle to get those.

Chris: 2:20

But one article that came in from them that we've been waiting for for a little while is they have finally announced the availability for Direct Connect integration in with AWS Cloud WAN. So for those not familiar, there was a previous limitation where, you know, if you're an AWS Cloud WAN customer and you wanted to integrate your on-premises environment with Cloud WAN, you had to basically terminate that on. You know you had to build a transit virtual interface or a VIF into a Direct Connect gateway. That Direct Connect gateway could only be associated with a transit gateway. So if you ever needed physical connectivity into a data center from your CloudWin instance, you had to use Transit Gateway. There was no direct integration. So they've since announced that, so you now can associate a Direct Connect gateway with a CloudWay instance, which is great.

Chris: 3:09

And they have a blog post going into detail on this, co-written by one of our previous guests, alexandra Wiedes, and she always does a great job with this stuff, kind of going through the different scenarios about when and how to connect things in here. And one thing I really did like about this article was that it kind of shows a flash of real network engineering that we don't often get to see in the cloud. So it's really going into the kind of details about. You know, when you're advertising routes this way, you're setting local preference here, you're propagating here, you're using ASPath in this direction something we don't get to see that often. So nice to see this integration finally come in, and I'm sure there's already a lot of customers looking to migrate to this, to get off TGW for that purpose, to be fully on CloudWan. But yeah, how about you guys? How do you feel about this?

Will: 4:00

I think it's awesome, I mean really. So you're essentially being able to add, attach the DX gateway directly to an individual Cloud WAN segment, I guess, yeah, yeah. So I mean that basically eliminates I mean it doesn't eliminate probably a business's need to use Transit Gateway, but it eliminates how many of the transit gateways you have to manage. Fair enough, yeah, like the one in the middle Transit Gateway. So less things you have to manage, better it is for operations.

Tim: 4:25

On-premises is super happy in this uh scenario yeah, a big one, I think, is the also the uh. Oh, of course, not managing stuff is great. Um, also, the cost, uh implications, of not having to double your infrastructure is going to be huge, right. Not having to have a transit gateway, pay for the, the throughput, you know, because that's how it's charged, right, it's charged by the hour, also by the. The gigabyte is going to be huge, right. Not having to have a transit gateway, pay for the throughput, you know because that's how it's charged, right, it's charged by the hour also by the gigabyte of throughput you know to CloudWin, which is then again charging you.

Tim: 5:00

Do they double charge that, or is it one of those things I think? Hold on. So the Direct Connect gateway. Of course the ingress is free, but I'm fairly certain. But to your point.

Chris: 5:06

The attachment is typically charged per gigabyte processing. I didn't know if that counted on Cloud WAN or not.

Tim: 5:13

I'm not actually sure if that specific one, that leg, is charged. I think they do actually zero out that leg of it, but you're still paying for the transit gateway. Of course Correct Right, that leg of it. But you're still paying for the transit gateway. Of course Correct Right. And of course, to Will's point, you're paying to double because then you've got to manage the route tables for it. You've got to manage it as a totally different piece of infrastructure. My curiosity now is my understanding is that CloudWin has not had a huge amount of adoption comparatively. I'm wondering how many enterprises are going to now look at CloudWan as a viable option for global WAN now that this is available. So I think that's the question everybody's going to be asking.

Will: 5:59

So you brought up a really good point. I was just talking to somebody about this literally a few days ago. I remember when Transit gateway came out and it solved such a big problem. It's like before it's. You know. You read the announcement article and you're already like planning in the enterprise right get this going. We're in.

Will: 6:15

We're in vpn tunnel purgatory right now we gotta get out you know, transit gateway is our savior here and then, with you know, and it's easy to use, like transit gateway is like so yeah, and then you get in. I mean, I don't know if you all have set up cloud when it's not.

Tim: 6:29

It's not simple, trivial, it's not that you need no probably a network engineer on staff it's not your yeah so yeah, your devs are not doing that.

Chris: 6:38

Yeah, it's a very multi-layered service that's provided, um, to basically be I mean, at the end of the day, it's managed transit gateway.

Tim: 6:45

It's cool. Yeah, it's a managed transit gateway mesh, a global mesh of transit gateways, right.

Will: 6:50

And it's expensive to learn on too.

Chris: 6:52

Yes, yeah, it's, it's funny Cause I mean, obviously you know, obviously Tim and I will, we all work for a cloud networking vendor. They're not the same vendor, but we all work for a cloud networking vendor.

Will: 7:04

What are the chances we'd be here in the same room smiling. What do you?

Chris: 7:06

know, but at the end of the day, our conversations that we have day-to-day with AWS customers are about their networking solutions in AWS. I'll tell you right now the ones that I've come across that use CloudWay. I can count on one hand. Oh yeah, that's what I'm saying, and it's less than three fingers A lot of POCs out there.

Will: 7:26

I don't know how many of them have made their way into that production-ish arena.

Tim: 7:31

Well, because it's managed like all managed services. The other problem is, I think it's almost like an abstraction of abstraction, right, Because TGW was already fairly abstract, but it was abstract in a way that was easy to use, and then we put another layer of abstraction of management on top of it. Now we can only interact with our TGW in very, very obtuse ways, especially from a global policy, routing perspective, segmentation perspective. And then they just you know what was it? Six months ago, or I guess eight months ago now, they announced the ability to do like centralized inspection with the centralized inspection policy. You know so there's a lag there as well, and and this, this, of course, is also part of that lag. So I really am curious how many global enterprises are going to be like all right, well, that was our, that was our trigger, that's what we were waiting for to do this. And how many people are going to be like well, you know, we already got something that works. You know, I think the time is going to have to tell on this one I'm actually curious.

Chris: 8:24

Well, so you mentioned that obviously. Obviously this integration allows for the connectivity or the integration of a Direct Connect gateway into a CloudWinds segment, but you're not seeing this eliminate the need for Transit Gateway. What scenarios are you seeing where customers would still need Transit Gateway?

Will: 8:40

Well. So it's like everything in networking. So you said you would count on like one hand. I know of one, I'd say, fairly sizable company right now that I just I've talked to. Yeah, that's using cloudwan and and they basically have. They have brownfield and greenfield and they like taking brownfield and coming into greenfield is not so easy in cloud.

Will: 9:03

Like you, you set these things and part of the problem is transit gateway is not super difficult to manage and it's something that the cloud teams have sort of taken under the umbrella in devops. It's highly automated. The networking team has a lot of control over the prefixes and how things are routed and they're partnering to make sure that everything is routing in the way that it should be. But it's highly automated and I'm also here from this same company, company or the person within this team that doing that in the same way with Cloud WAN. The cloud team is basically like OK, here you go, this is, this is. You know, we can't do it in the same way. So they're basically running two parallel environments.

Will: 9:40

But doesn't I mean? I thought, I thought that this mean just I have to go back and read the article. But you know, you have that intermediary transit gateway that you have. So I think it would allow you to get rid of some of your transit gateways, but you'd still have to have and I have to go back and read the whole thing, because maybe I don't understand the architecture as well as I think I do but I don't think this enables you to actually eliminate all of your transit gateways.

Tim: 10:05

I think you could only do that if you put everything in connected to CloudWin, like you would have to connect your entire all of it, right, like then, otherwise you have to have something.

Will: 10:13

Yeah, and to your point, Tim, I mean CloudWin is essentially federating your transit gateway architecture.

Tim: 10:19

Yeah, the question I think still out there and the answer I'm hearing is not really is that is CloudWan. The point of the point of any managed service is to make it easier than doing it yourself, right? That's literally the point of a managed service. Does what CloudWan offers? Is that easier than just federating transit gateways? I think that's the question that still needs to be answered. I mean, this is a good they're they're adding more and more features to CloudWan, but are they making it fundamentally simpler? I don't know right, I guess we'll see.

Chris: 10:53

Yeah, that is a good point. Yeah, I mean, even in the article it links to another migration.

Tim: 10:55

You know from AWS.

Chris: 10:56

Transit Gateway to CloudWan.

Chris: 10:57

best practices and you can have just a quick skim of that article and see how complex it is. Right, you need to map all these TGW route tables to your CloudWinds segments and control all of that back and forth. So yeah, that's fair, I think to your point. Yeah, there's probably a lot of customers in that lull state in migrating between the two that end up staying there forever and either backing it out or maintaining two architectures because IT just makes sense like that most of the time. But yeah, that's a fair point.

Tim: 11:27

Reminds me of a little bit like from a security perspective, where you implement ICE and then just leave it in monitoring mode forever.

Chris: 11:34

Yeah, or you implement ACI and just leave it in network central.

Will: 11:36

We've never done that before.

Chris: 11:37

Why All right. So one other announcement that came out from AWS recently on I believe it was on the 26th of November PrivateLink actually now supports cross-region connectivity, which is, you know, I'm sure for customers that have worked around this, as we were discussing before we hit record today customers that have engineered around this this is probably a huge announcement At the end of the day. I think it really just kind of changes where you need placement of services, like your load balancers for these services that you're offering through PrivateLink. But, yeah, that's pretty cool capability and assuming that the cost is not extremely prohibitive which, having a look at the pricing page, it looks like it's not too bad With doing cross-region services, obviously you need to look at it on a per-region basis, but PrivateLink is a very common service consumed by AWS customers and service providers even in that space as well, so cool to see this one come in. How are you guys seeing this one affecting the field out there?

Will: 12:40

I think it would eliminate the need or the necessity for cross-region peering. Even if you're like one of these security teams, it's like no internet, you know. It would essentially eliminate the internet, direct internet exposure or attack surface or however they want to view that Sure. So less public internet, less cross-region peering. In certain circumstances, a more simplified architecture maybe.

Tim: 13:05

Yeah, I think the simplified architecture is probably the big win here, meaning that previously, since you couldn't go cross-region, you were essentially, if you were a service provider, you were setting up some version of your service in every region and then doing a private link offering. Or you're telling your customers hey, here's where we have service offerings, go build your connector in those regions, right? So this is like a opens up, the choice that I see this and I I think of like, okay, I'm a provider and and I'm providing something to the marketplace not the AWS marketplace, but like the private, the, the I forget what they call it. It's not the private link marketplace. You know what I'm talking about, though, where you go search for private link services offered in AWS, and this allows them to essentially widen the net. I am curious what the cross-region charges are, and it's a good point also on that Will, with the cross-region peering, like VPC peering and stuff. That's a cost you could essentially transfer over, I guess, depending on how you built your architecture ahead of time.

Will: 14:08

If I'm thinking about it, though, if I already have that there, then I probably wouldn't. Yeah, if it works, don't break it.

Tim: 14:13

If it's not broken, don't fix it. Maybe, yeah. If it's not broken, don't fix it. Maybe yeah. I think this puts a lot of pressure on the providers to start supporting it, because the people consuming PrivateLink probably aren't the ones that are going to be driving this architecture change. From a cross-region perspective.

Chris: 14:33

Yeah, I wonder how it plays into this as well, thinking of the aspect of if you are a service provider and you're offering a cross-region service like this, who pays to send it across region as well?

Will: 14:43

The customer, I'm sure.

Chris: 14:46

I mean, but that depends on the architecture right, how the private link service is constructed, whether or not you're the consumer or the service provider right, which in some scenarios customers do both ways right, maybe they have. I've seen customers do things like Snowflake integrations that require one way inbound and one way outbound right, so that could get pretty complex. I don't know how they would do that.

Will: 15:10

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, because I mean most of these providers in the middle are going to have an upcharge for value and simplicity in in a way, but they also can do things that make it, where the customer has to do less things, true. So maybe it balances out, maybe it doesn't. Usually, I would say it probably doesn't again a matter of it.

Tim: 15:29

Does the managed service save enough money in other ways to make it worth the up charge of using it?

Tim: 15:36

yep yep, uh, so I'll take this next one. So we had we just as we're recording this, we had some MS Ignite. Microsoft Ignite was just last week, so there were some Azure AI announcements. I'm looking at an article from Forbes and, well, I don't know how to say. I think Will you and I were talking about a little bit before the we hit record and we both kind of came to the same conclusion that these five separate announcements are really just kind of Microsoft shuffling the deck and and reissuing cards on the uh dealing with the name and the reshuffle is Microsoft is so good at doing like with.

Will: 16:17

How many times can you rename Office 365, microsoft 365, this I mean even like Visual Studio, like how many Microsoft DevOps? It's just so confusing at this point. So many names.

Tim: 16:31

Pick something and stick with it.

Will: 16:32

Let's do that.

Tim: 16:35

And don't try to issue it like it's a brand new service that you're bringing out. So the big one out of MS Ignite is the Azure AI Foundry, what they're calling their unified development platform. So it's AI Studio. Literally, they just changed the name of AI Studio to Azure AI Foundry. So this is the idea of their unified platform, I guess, where they're going to shuffle all of the requisite managed services or AI services under. So it's kind of like that's the umbrella product. Again, this already existed as Azure AI Studio to some degree. I don't, it doesn't. I mean they're doing things like integration with GitHub and Visual Studio, and I didn't use AI Studio before. So I don't. I don't know if that's actually a new offer, but my understanding is it's mostly just a rename.

Will: 17:18

I mean to kind of flip around what I just said a minute ago. And those are good points, tim, but if you think about it too, like Microsoft's kind of a I don't want to say trailblazer Okay, they invested in OpenAI, they've been on the forefront of AI. Let's just say that they beat AWS to the punch, like they've been doing things. They've got a lot of different products and it's an incentive for them to make all these different things as easy to consume as possible. That way, customers don't pull their hair out and they also sell these services easier. So maybe this renaming and rebranding it's actually kind of nice, you know, on the flip side, because a lot of companies don't rename and rebrand. And you have this disjointed. You know products and solutions across all these different areas and you're like what, how in the world? Okay, let's get the. You know some consultants in here to help us out here. So it's like it's a good thing.

Tim: 18:07

It's like trying to figure out okay, this is the name of the service, does it begin with AWS or Amazon, right? So it's a very good point, right, in terms of refusing to rebrand and reshuffle. So, yeah, I mean it is a rebrand and a reshuffle, but with usability in mind. So I mean like, for example, the second one they mentioned was Azure AI agent service. Again, this is a capability for making AI agents. It's part of Azure Foundry. This is AI agent focused. So I think it's interesting that we're seeing more and more agents. Kind of it makes sense, but we're seeing more and more agent based development from an AI perspective, kind of the whole autonomous, like give it a set of instructions and package it, almost like Docker style. Like give it a set of instructions, package it up and that be your interface or start going doing workloads.

Tim: 19:01

It mentions here that, specifically, they've got more than just OpenAI, right. So it's got Meta, mistral and Cohere, which I had not heard a lot about up until now. So Cohere's a Canadian company with their own LLM the reason I know this one is because I was working with Andrew Brown on some stuff and they have a really good developer API for their LLM. So you don't have to like it's not just chatbot, right? So you can actually use API calls and it can output stuff in JSON and stuff like that. It's pretty cool.

Chris: 19:29

My favorite thing about these autonomous agents was that it mentioned that these agents can leverage knowledge from diverse sources, including Bing, thank God, our most trusted web search platform that we love to use, but can it use Bing incognito mode? That's something Tim is very familiar with.

Tim: 19:50

Naturally Okay. And then there's a rebrand or not rebrand, but a reshuffle under the AIA foundry of Copilot Studio. Specifically, it mentions that Copilot Studio is, of course, basically the SDK front end, or flavor, as it kind of always has been, you know, copilot to help you improve your development, right? So, and then the fourth one, just to round it out here AI Reports Now is interesting. Actually, I don't think this existed before. This is a new thing called Azure AI reports, a critical tool for enterprises seeking comprehensive insights and governance for their AI initiative. So this is basically like what is my AI doing? What is the data that's going into it and coming out of it? Quote-unquote, designed to support responsible AI development by offering granular visibility into model behavior, biases and performance metrics across different scenarios. That's. I don't think something like this. I haven't heard of anything like this existing outside of this thing they just announced. Is there one Like? Did I miss it? Not that.

Will: 20:58

I know of yeah me neither.

Tim: 20:59

Okay, just making sure. So, as your good point, microsoft, for better or worse, they latched on fast and they have kind of kept the ball rolling on a lot of this stuff, and I am curious to see this productization of something that really should be. It should just be something that all large language models and everything everybody supports and you just get it Like you need to know all of these things, like what is my AI doing, where's the data coming from, Where's it going, what's it doing? This should just be part and parcel, but this is the first product I'm aware of that actually is a product that does this. And then the last thing this is interesting Serverless GPU computing infrastructure evolution for AI is what they're calling.

Tim: 21:44

So Azure Container Apps is what they're calling it, and it's a quote unquote fully managed serverless container service that enables isn't that just Docker? But anyway, enables developers to build and deploy modern cloud native applications and microservice Okay, so Kubernetes actually. And I'm trying to understand, like, where's the AI piece of this? And the platform introduced serverless GPU support. This is where this is the new part. Serverless GPU support allows developers to access NVIDIA A100s and T4 GPUs without the infrastructure, so using a pay-per-second compute. So it's a managed. It's like serverless compute, right, it's like Lambda or something, except with GPUs. I am curious, from a networking perspective, how that works, and it's not part of this article, unfortunately.

Will: 22:31

I love it, man. If you're going to put VMs inside containers at this point, put everything inside the containers, right? You know it's crazy. You know it's yeah crazy.

Chris: 22:40

I mean, it really just sounds like they're trying to offload infrastructure management for the developers, right, just for the sake of focusing on building the AI, which it sounds great If it works yeah, if it works.

Tim: 22:52

Yeah, I mean it really. To me it feels like Lambda for GPUs. That's what it feels like Lambda for GPUs. That's what it feels like Lambda for GPUs.

Chris: 22:58

But that's the thing. We're already running into resource constraints across the board with all these things Especially in Europe. Yeah, Well, notice Tim, how it says currently available in West US 3 and Australia East.

Tim: 23:11

Oh yeah, you're right, it's the only place we have capacity or the GPUs, so please use those two.

Will: 23:19

You should use your community builder credits and just wipe them out all in one run.

Tim: 23:24

Yeah right, That'll take about five minutes.

Chris: 23:27

Yeah, easy peasy.

Tim: 23:29

Okay, and that's it for this article, rather, Okay.

Will: 23:33

So, folks, there is a battle, a war raging between a lot of things, but, in the context of this conversation, my privacy, like data privacy, user privacy and building open systems. So, basically, what we have here is our friendly new social media platform, blue Sky, in which is, you know, it's experiencing just massive adoption. I think you all talked about it. Maybe it was the last news episode.

Tim: 23:59

It was the last one, yeah.

Will: 24:01

Yeah, so massive adoption and basically they have an open API. So this got. Let's see this is was this the Verge or TechCrunch? Looks TechCrunch, yeah, so TechCrunch wrote about, you know, some of the challenges of having basically a completely open API to where, you know, anybody can basically scrape data for the purpose of like, training, whatever. And the reason I thought this was interesting is I remember I followed it very closely in the news when Twitter actually had an open API and they pivoted over. This is actually pre-Musk era. This is, I think it was a few years before Musk took the helm of that yeah, that they closed the.

Will: 24:37

API. Yeah, but there was a lot of you know. So Twitter allowed public scraping and so, like companies, researchers, ai, you know, trainers, all this stuff you know they're scraping this information and then you have like legal debates, lawsuits and things that ensue. Actually, another good example of this is it was Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Will: 24:57

Oh yeah, that is actually, I mean, I don't know if it's one for one, but it's kind of the same thing. They were scraping public data. They had some private stuff too. So like the, I think Facebook had like some surveys, like nothing major you know, but people are answering. I mean, if you answer a survey, you need to probably understand that that is going somewhere outside of your control, so but the same thing. And then I think Facebook got slapped with like a like a multi-billion dollar lawsuit from that. So that's why it's interesting to me. So blue sky, completely open API, and I wonder every day how the whole data privacy thing's going to work as they grow, because this is a thing that every platform that grows at this pace has to deal with. Well, how are they going to deal with it? How are they going to avoid lawsuits and how are they going to deal with it? How are they going to avoid lawsuits and how are they going to make money?

Will: 25:40

Like all those things Because I like Blue Sky it's kind of been refreshing, as of late, that the tech community is moving over. The conversations are great.

Tim: 25:48

So much better right now, kelsey.

Will: 25:49

Hightower, you know, packed up and moved over.

Chris: 25:52

It's only good until it gets ruined by money. Right, Exactly so.

Will: 25:54

Exactly so that and like lawsuits, I don't know how, because you have like internal like OK, Blue Sky is going to maybe file a lawsuit against such and such for using their data in a way that it wasn't intended to be used. But then you have it happen the other way as well sometimes. So as soon as there's like something to do with an election or something to do with the government, then you have all this outside stuff happen. So I just I think it's interesting news. I don't know what's going to happen or how it's going to be impacted, but right now we have this nice. We're like in the eye of the hurricane, Everything's nice and calm, yeah for the moment.

Will: 26:31

You know the conversation's great, but yeah, this is just one of those.

Chris: 26:34

If you start seeing these surveys pop up to like find out what dragon ball z character you are, don't fill it right yeah, question five what is your social security number?

Will: 26:46

you're goku oh yeah, speaking of you all had, I know you all discussed the ftc and the microsoft, you know lena khan and all that business. On the last one, but I think it was the FTC, if I remember correctly, with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the FTC is the one that came in and basically ate their lunch and, you know, threw down that. I think it was like five or ten billion dollar. Fine, they had to pay it was huge.

Will: 27:13

And like, yeah, meta can sort of say, here you go. You know we got deep pockets, but for the all, all the small companies in the world, that's a, it's major.

Tim: 27:22

Actually, you bring up a really good point, which is part of the problem, which is, you know, for any company with sufficiently deep pockets, these fines are just the cost of doing business, Cause they'll just it costs, it means nothing to them. You know, $5 billion, Okay, sure, we made probably $20 billion on doing it. So for us that's a rounding. You know, that's like a rounding error in the, in the profit margin.

Chris: 27:45

I mean, I'm assuming. I haven't tried to do it. I'm assuming on blue sky you can have a private profile, right? Okay, so does that get around any of this? I don't know.

Will: 28:04

I'm almost. Yeah, If you have a private profile unless you're willingly putting your information. I think the thing that got Facebook into trouble was the third party things that they had running, but it was also publicly scraped data as well, like people were publicly scraping profiles and doing like machine learning against profile pictures and stuff like that, which is you can see most of that stuff on any of these platforms when you search for things. I don't know. I don't know what the right answer is. Yeah.

Tim: 28:21

Well, yeah.

Will: 28:22

Mostly public, some private Right, I think.

Tim: 28:25

I was. I was listening to NPR before this episode. I don't sit there and listen to NPR. I was.

Tim: 28:29

I was going to the store, but I was two guys on there, one guy was for, basically, artists being able to have ownership over what gets publicly scraped from their stuff and all that. And the other one was saying like it's not possible and it blunts AI innovation. And there was man, what a big argument. It's, such a I don't know. I do identify with that meme. That was like you know, ai was supposed to make our lives easier by taking away the crappy menial stuff and leave us to do the art and the interesting things.

Chris: 29:09

So I don't know what the answer is either, man, so blue sky is good right now.

Tim: 29:12

That's basically the yeah, come over Water's fine and help us try to keep it that way, if you don't mind.

Chris: 29:18

Let's not let any billionaires buy it anytime soon. We'll be okay, all right. Last one. This one is at least it's quite comical to me. I don't know how it's going to be to the audience. So another announcement I think that was was this at Reignite yeah, it was yeah, Ignite.

Chris: 29:38

So Microsoft is planning to launch a purpose-built miniature PC this is an article from the Verge, by the way, that's based on its Windows 365 cloud service next year, so it's basically called the Windows 365 Link. It's a very small square-shaped box, might be similar to a different computer that you saw released earlier this year, coming in at a whopping $349 USD, and it basically acts as a thin client so that you can stream. You must connect to the cloud and stream a version of Windows 11. And, as exciting as that sounds, this is just kind of baffling to me, after their main competitor being Apple, launched a pretty powerhouse of a miniature PC earlier this year for only about $150 more than what this one costs, and that's a full-fledged personal computer under the hood. And that's a full-fledged personal computer under the hood. So them kind of coming into the game with this.

Chris: 30:42

I don't know if this is a reaction to that, but this is quite puzzling to me. The Chromebook already exists. Man, I don't know. There's got to be some deep innovation and integration. I don't need this to run Excel for me. You know what.

Will: 30:58

I mean, A good way to frame this conversation would be maybe to look back and count on our hands how many Microsoft endpoint offerings actually still exist, Looking at the OEM ecosystem and, of course, Windows and stuff. They're not manufacturing any hardware to run. At least I don't think so. I don't know. Maybe they are RIP the Windows phone.

Chris: 31:18

Yeah, the Windows phone that aged very ungracefully.

Will: 31:23

I don't know. They're not a hardware Apple. Their business model is hardware. They don't have a cloud.

Tim: 31:29

I mean, they do have the personal cloud, but they don't have a public cloud offering and their whole.

Will: 31:34

I mean I don't know how their annual revenue, how much of that goes back to iPhone and MacBook, but it's probably most of it. And then if they're getting into the streaming service game, but yeah, microsoft's tried many times to get into the hardware game and it's uh, I don't think it's been there, the surface seems to do well.

Chris: 31:52

Yeah, yeah, that's true, um, but like I can count on one hand how many successful items they've had in the last, they had a knife or an ipod, um what was that thing called.

Will: 32:02

I had one. I had one as well I had one as well.

Tim: 32:03

I actually liked it. I liked my zoom, actually, and then x, I guess Xbox.

Chris: 32:08

I don't know if they can count that. I guess they can count the most recent ones.

Tim: 32:11

No, they. I mean I've also gone on record saying that the Xbox kind of lost to the PlayStation, like they've said that the Xbox was not the I mean, yeah, they still have it.

Will: 32:23

It's still fine. It was gone for a long time and you could call it a success for sure.

Tim: 32:28

Yeah. So the only thing that this looks like to me is like we remade dummy terminals, essentially Thin Client. Right, thin Client is just a reimagining of the dummy terminal and it's the same all the way down here. Buy something really cheap that we can mass produce and give to all of your enterprise. To me this looks like an enterprise play you can replace instead of doing tech refreshes on your Dell hardware for your people. Hey, you've got connection to Azure. Just replace all the stuff with this and do your remote desktop essentially to Windows.

Chris: 33:06

I'm sure if you run a call center this probably looks great. You're like hell. Yeah, give me 2,000 of them, yeah.

Tim: 33:12

I think that's the target. It's definitely not you and me in the home. I don't think it's really intended to compete with a Mac Mini. I actually think it's a completely different market.

Will: 33:23

You should make everybody sure that, Tim, you should buy one and then do benchmark testing against your mac mini and open a youtube channel and educate all of us on this yeah, I'll be like hey man, I only get like I get like five uh fps on my black myth wukong or something.

Tim: 33:40

This thing is terrible the picture show.

Chris: 33:43

Yeah, yeah, see if you can run crisis on it. Yeah, I'm gonna.

Tim: 33:46

I going to benchmark it.

Chris: 33:48

All right With that. I think we've. I don't even know. I can't even see the timer on this one. I don't know how long we've gone.

Tim: 33:54

We've gone a little over 40 minutes.

Chris: 33:56

Oh, nice, beautiful, You're getting a real good bang for your buck, and that's why also like and subscribe to this podcast right here the club gambit um featuring uh will collins and yvonne sharp.

Will: 34:17

So yeah, that's a lucky bastard need I say more?

Chris: 34:22

um, but yeah, so with that we will. Uh, we will see you in a couple weeks and all three of us will be at reInvent, so if you will be there by the time you hear this, it's already Wednesday Find us, we're probably hungover and ready to go home.

Tim: 34:36

Not me, I can't be. Tim will have his talk.

Chris: 34:40

Yeah, that's true. Is your talk on Wednesday or Thursday?

Tim: 34:42

It's Wednesday 12 pm, mandalay Bay. You can see it on the session catalog on reInvent.

Chris: 34:50

Oh, it's in Mandalay. Yeah, it's in Mandalay. I'm sorry it's far away from the rest of the stuff.

Tim: 34:54

Yeah, I didn't get to pick right Because it's one of those quote-unquote sponsored breakouts or whatever you call it. Anyway, but yeah, please drop by, so it's not me and the people that got lost on the way to the bathroom.

Chris: 35:06

And I'll be on booth duty. If you want to stop by the Aviatrix booth, I'll be there. Will, where will you be? How can they find you?

Will: 35:11

I'll be at a booth part-time, as I'll be at the Alkira booth and I will probably be walking around engaging with the community, maybe recording some content and, yeah, out and about.

Chris: 35:22

A little content. Yep sounds good Shaking a lot of hands.

Will: 35:24

Exactly I'm going to go up to everybody and ask that Alexis does some really cool things, like we were at ONUG and she was walking around asking what was it? Oh, who wins Ethernet or InfiniBand? And she caught me off guard with that one. I just like started laughing. I'm like ah, but yeah, pretty good video out there.

Chris: 35:42

The wheels are turning in my head right now, so we'll see what we come up with next week. All right, thanks again for listening and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.

Tim: 35:53

Hi everyone. It's Tim and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite podcast catcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables2Clouds. You can also visit our website for all the show notes at Cables2Cloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.